Читать книгу Love Tastes Like Strawberries - Rosamund Haden - Страница 8

Stella crosses the courtyard of Timothy’s block of flats at the top of Long Street. She knocks urgently on the door of No 5. In the fountain behind her a sunbird dips its beak and showers the water lilies with its beating wings.

She undoes the elastic band that holds her dark hair back and combs it with her fingers. It is thick and tangled. She can feel her pale skin burning in the intense midday sun. Her clothes are damp with sweat. She has not made “the right fashion choice” for the season, according to Verve magazine, where she works. That morning her boss pointed out the oily stain spread out like a continent on the back of her skirt. Her feet are swelling in her leather boots. Her long-sleeved shirt is sticking to her skin.

In her hand she clutches the invitation to Ivor’s exhibition. She had found it in her letter box that morning. No stamp on the envelope meant one thing. It had been hand delivered. Yet she had never told Ivor where she lived.

She knocks again on Timothy’s door. He is always at home at this time on a Friday. It is part of his routine. He has many routines with countless parts.

“I’m OC,” he had told her the first time they met at a book launch. She had just nodded and looked past him, planning her escape. He had made her nervous, the way he looked at her so intensely. Later he told her that he was trying to focus after glugging down half a bottle of free wine.

“I’m anxious,” she explained. “Very. I have anticipatory anxiety.” She hadn’t meant to tell him that. “Too much information, way too soon,” Marge, her colleague, was always telling her. “You need to keep something back. You don’t want to frighten them off.”

“It’s endearing, though, Stella. It makes you, you,” Timothy had assured her later, when they were both drunk. “You’re like Chicken Little – he always thought the sky was going to fall on his head.”

“Slap chips, that’s what you need to soak up the wine,” he told her as she walked unsteadily around the parking lot, trying to find her car after the launch. It was still and warm in the dark. He had offered to see her safely home. They had ended up sitting on the parking lot railing smoking a joint. Her head was spinning when he drove her back to her house.

She had eaten half a platter of snacks at the launch before Timothy arrived. Some photographer from the papers had caught her stuffing a cup cake into her face – that’s when she’d heard Timothy laugh behind her, and she had turned around to see him staring at her, a wine glass in his hand.

After he had pulled up outside her house in Woodstock he had waited until she was safely inside before he drove off. She liked that. The next day he had picked her up in the morning and taken her back to her car.

They had become friends, going to movies and having drinks when he didn’t have a girlfriend, or wasn’t trying to seduce the Japanese waitress who worked at his local bar. He had a massive pile of Japanese anime in his flat.

Stella hasn’t seen Timothy since Françoise disappeared. He had told her that he didn’t want to see anyone after that.

“Don’t be so dramatic, Timothy. She’ll come back. And if she doesn’t you will have to move on.” Stella had been irritated by his moroseness.

“You don’t understand how it feels to lose someone . . .” He stopped abruptly. “I’m sorry. I . . .” But it was too late, it was there hanging between them.

On a scale of one to ten, his love was one to her ten – a molehill to her mountain.

After ten days Timothy had sent her twenty emails saying he was sorry. She had ignored them all. Then he had disappeared. He hadn’t answered her calls for weeks. The people at the bookshop where he worked part time hadn’t seen or heard from him.

Now, standing at his doorway, she sees a light go on in the kitchen. She moves closer and peers through the window. A hand opens the top window a slit. The smell of cooking is released: garlic, ginger, lemon grass, coconut milk. He’s making Thai fish curry. It’s his Friday dish. On Monday he will grill haloumi cheese and eat it with seared rocket leaves and roasted seeds. On Tuesday he makes miso soup with tofu and seaweed. On Saturday, lasagne is on his menu. She tries to visit on Saturdays.

She can hear music, the lazy smoky jazz of Pharoah Sanders. Music that Timothy used to take each week to Ivor’s life drawing classes, but which Ivor never played. He preferred opera; heavy and dramatic music that he could sing or conduct along to with his paintbrush in one hand and a glass of red wine in the other. She shouts his name, but the music is too loud, or he’s ignoring her. She can feel someone’s eyes on her back, watching.

Although it is late afternoon it is still hot and humid in the city. Up on Table Mountain the clouds are massing. Summer storms are becoming more frequent in Cape Town. There are more still humid days with no wind. Climate change, Timothy had told her. “This,” he had gestured, pointing to the city basin, “will all be under water. We will have to move to your house on the edge of the Karoo.” Stella still can’t think of it as her house. It is her mother’s house. She doesn’t know if she wants to share it with anyone.

Stella loves electric storms – the charge that injects life back into the faded streets is tangible. The leaves drip wet and luminous in the early evening; the smell of the steaming tar rises after the downpour.

Once, when it had rained, she had stood in the middle of the garden of her communal house, the rain plastering her hair to her skull.

“You’re crazy, Stella,” her housemate’s tone had been derogatory and envious at the same time.

The music stops for a few seconds. In that time she hears Timothy whistling as he moves about the kitchen; the clattering of pots, a “shit”, the smell of burning, a tap running.

She looks at the invitation to Ivor’s exhibition again. Ivor must have found out where she worked and got her address. They weren’t meant to give numbers or addresses out. But Stacy on the switchboard was a sucker for charm and Ivor had lots of that. Still, it freaked her out. That’s why she was here. To ask Timothy if he had also had an invitation delivered by hand. At least then they could be freaked out together.

Why, when she had been “banned” from Ivor’s life drawing classes, had he sent her an invitation? Did it mean that he had forgiven her for the “forbidden” thing that she had done? Had he not done something far worse? She had never seen anyone so ashen as Ivor the day he had opened the door and refused to let her come inside.

A year has passed since then and she has heard nothing from him until this.

She bangs on the door again. But she can’t see Timothy in the kitchen any more. The music he was playing has changed. She knows he has gone through to the patio, where he eats his dinner, but there is no access to it from the communal garden. Pharoah Sanders has been switched off. Stella would phone him, but she has run out of airtime and she can’t remember how to send a plz call me.

“You waiting for Mr Timothy?”

She turns around to see a small pinched-up woman dressed in an overall. She is smoking and is propped up by a mop. Stella has seen her before, lurking around and watching like some evil goblin. She is the superintendent of the block of flats.

“I once caught her staring in through my bathroom window. She said she was trying to get a mark off the glass,” Timothy had told her. Now the woman coughs and clears her throat of phlegm.

“He’s always at home on a Friday.” She has a thick accent. “He always cooks that curry on a Friday. Stinks the whole place up.”

She gives Stella the creeps; she won’t go away, just stands there watching as Stella bangs on the door again.

“He won’t answer it.” The super’s voice is smug. “He’s not taking visitors. Loner,” she adds. And, when Stella doesn’t move, “You can wait there all evening but he’s not coming out.”

Stella avoids looking at the woman as she walks past her, out of the gates to the flats, and back on to the street. She is at a loss as to what to do. She had come here with such purpose, never doubting that Timothy would let her in.

Defeated, Stella walks slowly back down the street towards her car. As she is unlocking the car door her cellphone rings. It’s Marge, who works in DTP at Verve.

“Waiting Room?” Marge asks, eager for an after-work drink. Stella isn’t in the mood to go with Marge to a bar, but she has no plans now. “Fridays are horrible for singles,” Marge tells her. “No sulking around at home listening to those breathing tapes of yours.”

“Let’s order more margaritas,” says Marge after they have been in the Waiting Room for half an hour, eyeing out the talent in the bar. Stella wanted to go home as soon as she arrived, but after two drinks she doesn’t want to go home – ever.

“It was exciting then – the life drawing class.”

“So take up another hobby.”

“It wasn’t a hobby.” Stella can’t explain.

“Well, nothing is going to happen if you do nothing,” Marge lights a cigarette and scans the room. It is filling up after work.

How to take your day look into night, thinks Stella drunkenly. They had done a feature on it for the magazine. You could unbutton your professional shirt, clip on earrings, lose the jacket. There was something else, but she couldn’t remember what it was . . .

“Why are you staring at that woman? Are you drunk, Stella?”

Stella frowns at Marge who is definitely drunk.

“I’m glad you came out and didn’t go home and read.” Marge rests her hand on Stella’s knee. It’s warm. “You’ll never meet anyone if you stay home and read.”

“Buddhists say do nothing. Still your ego, wait with an open heart,” says Stella uncertainly.

“You’ve been doing that I Ching again. It’s a load of shit. Ask it a question and it always says the same old shit . . . do not be entangled by inferior things.” Marge exhales and the smoke pours out through her nostrils. “Buddhists don’t have sex,” Marge says, blowing a huge smoke ring.

Stella feels ill. She has drunk one too many margaritas. “I just need to speak to someone from the life drawing class. Because of this.” She fishes in her bag and puts the invitation to Ivor’s exhibition on the table between them. Marge spills her drink on it. Then she picks it up and squints at it. “Who is it?”

“It’s Françoise. She modelled for Ivor.” Stella suddenly sees something she hasn’t seen before. But maybe it’s the drink.

Marge crushes her cigarette out.

Stella can’t remember how she found her way to her car. When she parks, the wheels of her Corsa scrape against the kerb. It’s windy and gritty and she feels green and ill. She takes the half-eaten pies, an empty cooldrink bottle, her book of messages to herself and a bunch of papers off the back seat. Her car is a crime scene, her housemate says in that superior, self-righteous way of his. They should cordon it off with tape. The A4 pages from work that she is clutching fly away in the wind. She just watches as they disappear, too drunk to try to retrieve them.

After dumping the refuse from her car in the black bin at her gate she weaves her way up the overgrown path, only to find a bergie passed out against her front door, blocking the entrance. She tries to drag him by the legs but he is a dead, reeking weight and she only manages to shift him an inch. In doing so, the tattered jacket he is wearing falls open to reveal a T-shirt. The wording is almost indecipherable with grime but she can just make out the white lettering on the black cotton. In bold print it says Look Busy – Jesus is Coming. It’s Timothy’s T-shirt. She looks again at the tramp, her heart in her throat. It isn’t Timothy, of course it isn’t. He is at his flat. She saw his silhouette and heard his cursing. He must have thrown the T-shirt out and this street walker picked it up while he was trawling and has worn it ever since. Marge would say it was a sign. But then Marge thinks everything is a sign.

Stella leans over the man, unlocks the door, and nearly stands on his face as she steps over him into the passage, slamming the door behind her. She slumps on to the floor and dissolves into drunken tears.

A screaming and cursing outside forces her up again and when she peers through the curtains of the sitting room she watches as two other bergies pull the guy to his feet and drag him back out to where their trolleys are parked on the sidewalk.

She has to relax. Her breath is shallow and she feels dizzy. In her bedroom she flops down on her unmade bed, feels for her CD player, stabs the play button, and closes her eyes.

Breathe in, I am a mountain. Breathe out, I am strong. Breathe in, I am a flower. Breathe out, I am fresh.

Why didn’t Timothy answer her knock?

Breathe in, I am space.

She should have knocked one more time.

Breathe out, I am free.

She should have shouted. What if it wasn’t him in there? What if he was dead?

Breathe in, clear your mind. You are space, you are a flower, you are a mountain, you are space . . .