Читать книгу Love Tastes Like Strawberries - Rosamund Haden - Страница 9

The bus pulls into Cape Town station in the cold blue of the early morning. Passengers stand up, dazed by the harsh interior light that floods the cabin as the doors hiss open. Tired and stiff from hours of sitting in a cramped space, they start to push forward down the aisle. Françoise shakes Dudu, who is still snoring next to her, a cloth over her eyes. She stirs. Françoise pulls the cloth away and Dudu opens her eyes a slit. Françoise shakes Dudu again, even though she is awake, this time harder. She is irritable with tiredness. As she reaches for her bag in the overhead rack, someone shoves her as they push past.

The south east wind hits her as she steps out of the bus; it blows grit and dirt off the street, whipping her bare legs. She clutches her skirt tightly with one hand, the other free for their bag. People are crushing to get their luggage first, so they can get to their final destinations.

A woman embraces a family member who has come to meet her. Joyous. They walk off, chattering, laughing. A husband claims his wife and young child. A boyfriend kisses his girlfriend, spinning her around as she climbs off the bus, fresh and in love, despite the twelve-hour journey. The driver is throwing suitcases and bags out on to the pavement. Françoise reaches for their woven plastic bag. The wind nearly whips it out of her hand. Dudu is punching numbers into her cellphone, unaware.

Nothing feels solid in this city, thinks Françoise. Françoise doesn’t feel solid. Everything is blown back and forth – the sea, the sand, her and Dudu.

“What?” Dudu looks up.

They have gone backwards. They have thrown the dice and landed on the snake’s mouth, been sucked down into its gut and shat back out, in the same place they left. They will have to start all over again.

“Am I not allowed to phone a friend? Pascal will come pick us up,” says Dudu.

“No,” says Françoise, “we’ll walk.”

“He owes me.”

“You stole a car,” Françoise reminds her as they join the throng of people walking down the road away from the bus terminal.

“I’m tired,” complains Dudu.

“And I don’t care,” says Françoise.

“Yes, you do,” says Dudu sulkily. They slide back into the language of their childhood. It will always be the same until they are old ladies with fading memories, this bickering of siblings.

Early morning commuters hurry past them. Taxis hurtle by, hooting. Once they have walked across the parade and under the bridge and into Main Road, Françoise starts to count the blocks. It’s a long walk. Dudu holds one handle of the plastic bag, Françoise the other; it bounces uncomfortably between them against their legs. Just ten more blocks until the Chinese shop on the main road, with the barred metal gate next to it that leads to a dark concrete stair case, at the top of which is their room, one of ten identical dingy holes along a grey concrete corridor.

Back then, before Lubumbashi, before the life drawing class and Timothy, they had arrived off a bus and walked this same route. Something was missing then in this city, she had thought as she stepped out into an overcast day. There was no throng of black faces, no bustle and smell of street cooking, no loud chatter of voices, no warmth and colour; as they made their way between the grey buildings no one stopped to greet them. Here was the mountain towering above them and the sea stretching out into nothingness in its beauty, but the warmth had left. In the camps people around her had died of cholera and malaria. Here she thought she might die of loneliness.

They had the name of someone’s cousin who lived in some flats in Woodstock, and an address. They had climbed the same concrete stairs.

They had started their life again for the sixth time in five years – once in Kashusha camp outside Bukavu, once in Tanzania in the sweltering malaria infested bush. Then Nairobi, then the camp in Moçambique and across the border – fifteen minutes to jump through the electric fence while it was switched off – and bribes all the way until there was nothing left.

But when they reached Johannesburg the room they stayed in had got too small for all of them. It was in a tower block in Hillbrow that had been condemned. Eventually they’d had to sleep in the passage, shutting their ears to the sounds of moaning, crying, the hysterical laughter of women as high as kites, the screams and abuse of the drug pushers and pimps. The family they had been travelling with got travel documents and flew off to a new life. When the man next door told them they could stay on only if they started peddling coke for him, Françoise had taken Dudu and they had got on the last bus south.

Now again, in another dingy room with a mattress on the floor, slowly they had started again.

“We can’t go further south.” Dudu had laughed when they got to Cape Town. “We have come to the end of Africa.”

Dudu had gone to school four blocks away and Françoise had gone out each morning in search of work. She had sold charcoal in Kashusha, she had braided people’s hair in Nairobi, she had cultivated patches of land to grow sweet potatoes in the camp in Moçambique and cleaned office blocks in Joburg. And now, after two weeks, she had found the job at the Spar. They were sorted, Dudu had told her. It wouldn’t be long until they were out of this shit hole. She had heard there was a nice house run by the Catholic Church for orphans like them from all over Africa. Nobody need ever know that they had parents, that their father was alive and well and living with their stepmother in Belgium.

She had not said goodbye to her father or her grandmother – that was her greatest unspeakable sadness. Françoise and Dudu had fled their home three days before the president’s plane was shot down. Three days before madness was unleashed upon their world, they had fled from the madness in their stepmother’s heart, smaller in scale, but no less cruel.

“She would have killed us,” Dudu told Françoise. “What if she finds us?”

“She must never find us. She will never find us,” said Françoise.

Dudu got them on to a waiting list that was ten pages long for a room in the house. The Catholic nun who managed the house “really likes me,” Dudu had told Françoise. “I can be sweet,” she said, smiling that sweet, sweet smile.

Now they walk up the staircase and are met by shouting when they get to the second floor. The door to their room is open. There is a whole family inside, camped out and noisy in the dingy light. A woman is cooking on their two-plate stove. Françoise feels Dudu tense beside her. “Wait, Dudu,” she warns her and pulls her sister away and down the corridor to the next room.

The woman, from Congo, comes out wrapped in a cloth. She has been washing. She is apologetic but she shrugs. “There was nothing I could do. Nothing. They gave the room away.” A smell of bodies rises from the damp heat of the room behind her.

“But I paid,” says Françoise, “I paid.” She is close to tears now.

“They moved in. I couldn’t stop them. The man is crazy,” the woman says.

When Françoise turns around Dudu isn’t by her side any more. She hears her sister’s voice coming from inside their old room. When she looks in Dudu is standing close to the woman who is cooking on their two-plate stove. She is gripping her arm, her nails biting into her flesh, and speaking quickly in a low voice. A toddler is crying at the woman’s feet. There is sickness in the air. Françoise can’t hear what Dudu is saying.

By that night the family has moved out and Françoise and Dudu are trying to get rid of the smell of cooking, of them.

“What did you tell them?” asks Françoise but Dudu won’t say.

“I’m good, aren’t I? I can look after you. Stick with me.”

“Stop talking like that,” says Françoise, “like a TV show.”

Françoise goes down to the Chinese shop and buys airtime so that she can try Timothy’s phone again.

The person you are calling is unavailable. Please try again later.

The next morning Dudu gets their TV and radio back. In a strange change of heart she tells Françoise that she is going back to school and that she is going to be top of her class. Françoise is sceptical. Dudu has made lots of promises in her short life.

As they are leaving the woman from next door passes them in the corridor. “I forgot to tell you yesterday. A man came looking for you when you were away.” She is looking at Françoise.

“What did he look like?”

“He was white,” she says.