Bom Boy Page 13

  The Magic of Air: The Principles of Plosive Aerophone Design.

  Something was digging into his bum and when he reached into the cushions, Leke pulled out what looked like a mini screwdriver.

  ‘Give that to me. I've been looking for that one. ‘Scuse the mess.’

  In the corner of the room there were two strange wooden carcasses surrounded by random off-cuts and wood filings.

  ‘I'm moving my workshop down the road, anyway,’ Tsotso answered to a question Leke hadn't asked.

  He shifted his weight on the thin cushion and the armature dug into his sitting bones, what was he doing there? He couldn't believe she had invited him into her house.

  Tsotso switched on the television and put the sound on silent. Something about the mechanical way she picked up and dropped the remote control made Leke think she did it all the time, like a ritual.

  ‘I like to have something with me in the room sometimes, you know? TV usually works but often I can't stand what it actually has to say. This is a compromise.’

  She was soft here, in the house. And yes, she was beautiful.

  ‘So. You'll have to excuse me I don't ever have visitors,’ she swung the glass in her hand towards the bedroom door as further explanation.

  ‘Is that your grandmother?’

  She nodded, ‘She raised me, I never knew my parents.’

  She said it so simply and her tone remained even. Leke realised he'd never actually said those words to anyone. It had always been a detail that felt like a blight on his life, an embarrassing disfigurement.

  He wanted to ask her where they went on Wednesdays and Fridays but that would be admitting his guilt. She'd want to know how he knew and it would be downhill from there.

  ‘And you?’ she raised her left eyebrow as she scanned him. What's your story? Let's start with your name. Leke. What kind of name is that?’

  ‘It's Lay-kay.’

  ‘Lay-kay It's strange. Sounds like lekker!’ she snorted and Leke smiled.

  They each studied the contents of their glasses.

  Leke asked, ‘Is she sick? Your grandmother?’

  ‘Dementia. Losing her mind day by day. One day she wants to play with the rabbits, the next day she thinks I'm her daughter and she's scolding me for something. Mostly she's with the rabbits though.’

  Leke frowned.

  ‘She had a hard life, this one. Her mother left home and never came back. She grew up with her father on a farm in Paarl. She has moments of lucidity when she talks to me about the five rabbits her father bought her on her fifth birthday. Fluffy black things. I think she misses them.’

  ‘I'm sorry.’

  ‘For what? Don't be stupid. There's nothing to apologise for. So,’ she put the empty glass down on the coffee table to emphasise the end of one conversation and the start of another. ‘You know everything about me now and all I know is your name sounds like lekker.’

  Something triggered in Leke's head and he suddenly realised what the strange smell was.

  ‘Are you drunk?’

  ‘We go to the concerts.’

  Leke thought she was ignoring his question.

  ‘I take her with me to the concerts. I hate to leave her overnight in Frail Care. I think she likes the music. It calms her.’

  ‘You go to concerts?’ Is that what they were doing?

  ‘Sure. As many as I can. Don't you?’

  Leke shook his head. She shrugged.

  ‘I get a special deal with the tickets. Cousin of mine works the box office.’

  Someone in a neighbouring flat slammed a door.

  Anyway,’ Tsotso continued, ‘sometimes on the way out we stop at the theatre pub. Milk for her – I know the barman – and a tot for me, you know?’ she winked. Anyway No concert today, I stopped over all the same. Just a tot. Or two. They also let me play the piano since I don't have my own… yet.’

  Leke sunk deeper into the couch, ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Stop saying that. Look, I think the visit's over. Thanks for your help. Stop following me around or I'll call the police okay?’

  They rose from their seats together, Tsotso wavered and Leke held his hand out to steady her.

  ‘Thanks thanks. I'm fine. See you at work. Don't fucking tell anybody anything. Bunch of gossips that place. Horny bastards!’

  Saturday 17th October 1992

  For Leke:

  I loved the thunderstorms that flashed through the campus. Sitting in the house it felt like we were in a capsule. My father explained to me that the thunder is just the sound of stone hitting the ground. Sango the God of the sky had thrown it down to earth. Had I done anything to anger Sango? my dad would ask and I would shake my head in earnest.

  My favourite story was about Esu who went to two friends who had just sworn they would never fight or disagree. Esu made a man walk in between the friends. The man wore an outfit where half was red and half was white. One of the friends said, ‘Did you see that man who just walked past?’ The other friend asked, ‘The one wearing the red outfit?’ ‘No it was white.’ And so the friends fought, they disagreed, each disgusted that the other could lie so. They parted ways.

  ‘Dotun, stop it! You'll give him nightmares,’ my mother would complain but in too-soft a voice to mean business.

  My father would wave her off, winking at me.

  I did have nightmares. Sango and Obatala would fight. Oduduwa would eat lunch then vomit and out would pour three new Orishas. My dreams mixed up the stories. Oya would cut off my ear and try and feed it to my mother. Moremi, bitter from losing a son for the prosperity of Ife, would steal me from my mother's arms and take me away to the forest, she wouldn't speak, she'd just hiss and then right before I opened my eyes she'd say: you’re mine.

  I know that when my father died – his okada hit by a truck – I was nine. I was catapulted into a life that had been waiting for me just beyond the bushes. It grabbed me from the life I loved and thrust on me a new kind of existence. The curse had eaten up my cousins, aunts and uncles and now it was making a feast of my father.

  My mother and I returned to Cape Town. When she fell ill I wasn't surprised – the darkness was closing in. She was tough, though, and she fought off the disease for a decade before finally surrendering, the sleep of death a relief after the hassle of living.

  I was a young man by then, intelligent with a future but life felt hollow Only the stories my father had woven around me as a boy coloured my dreams. My father and mother became characters in this sleeping world. We played and swam and laughed.

  It wasn't comfort because I'd always wake up but it was sweet distraction. Like a soft kiss to assuage the pain of parting.

  Tuesday 30th October 2012

  ‘So, how can I help you, Austin?’ her words formed around the pen she held in the corner of her mouth.

  He kept his gaze in front of the homeopath's hands that rested on the desk. He shrugged. When Leke spoke, she took the pen out of her mouth and scribbled in her notebook.

  ‘I have an eye problem. A reading issue. Sometimes I get a headache from trying to focus. I thought… maybe it's a temperature?’

  Jane used to check his temperature. Not with a thermometer but with the backs of her hands. Leke watched Dr Meyers write down a few words. He could smell her perfume, rose, her cheeks were pink and she had on green eye-shadow. Jane would have been about this age had she lived. When the doctor crossed her legs something jingled – maybe she had bells on her skirt. There was a stack of large grey hardback books to one side of her desk and a terracotta mug filled with unsharpened pencils.

  ‘So you get this headache from reading? Do you read a lot, Austin?’

  ‘No no, it's not from reading anything. It's reading something specific’

  ‘Ah! On your desktop? Have you adjusted it appropriately? Most people use it incorrectly?’ she raised her grey bushy eyebrows.

  ‘No, it's not the desktop.’

  ‘Okay Well, how long have you had this headache?’

&
nbsp; ‘I've always had it but it's suddenly gotten worse.’

  ‘Is it continuous?’

  ‘Comes and goes. When I'm reading I said.’

  ‘Ah! Alright, I want to ask you a few questions.’

  ‘What kind of questions?’

  ‘Questions about you and your history. Are you familiar with homoeopathy?’

  Leke shook his head.

  ‘At the end of our consultation I'll prepare a remedy for you. But I'll treat the whole of you – not just your headache. Oftentimes conventional medicine treats the symptoms but doesn't consider the cause. I'm not only going to treat the symptom, your headache, but I want to know about you. How you think, how you live. All of those factors could influence what kind of treatment would make a difference. Make sense?’ she peered at him with dark eyes.

  Sixty, Leke thought guessing her age. She wore a blue beret, crooked to the side of her head, strands of grey kept falling out and she tucked them back in.

  After each question she put her palms together and rested her cheek against her hands, cocking her head sideways as she listened to his responses. She then wrote in her book in some kind of shorthand and asked the next question.

  ‘What are you most afraid of?’

  ‘Like how?’

  ‘Another way of looking at that is what do you avoid?’

  ‘People.’

  What do you mean? All people? Just some people?’

  Tsotso's face sparked in his mind. ‘I don't know.’

  ‘Are you scared of people, or of what the people could do?’

  Leke shrugged.

  Dr Meyers cleared her throat and changed to a different line of questioning.

  ‘What do you strive for, Austin? In life?’

  Leke shrugged.

  ‘What I mean is what are you always working towards? What do you struggle with?’

  ‘I… I don't know.’ This was going nowhere.

  ‘It's possible the reason you can't read is that, instinctively, you don't want to. Some kind of self-defence mechanism. Your body's primordial reaction to a perceived threat, what's the nature of the material you’re struggling with?’

  ‘Nothing significant.’

  Dr Meyers didn't check his temperature or measure his pulse. She scribbled on her pink notepad and consulted a black volume on the shelf behind her desk. At the end of the appointment she gave Leke a bottle of white pills and a stack of powders, folded into twenty pieces of paper, bound together with a rubber band.

  Leke felt that the appointment had been a waste of time. The questions had irritated – he'd lied in answering most of them. What business was it really of hers? He was scared of people. Not in the usual way. He was scared of what happened between people. Better not to get involved.

  Leke stayed sitting in Red outside the garage door. A familiar car pulled up in front of the Rhododendron's gate and Esmeralda, the old woman's niece, went up the walk. The door opened and she entered into darkness.

  ‘Love is shit!’ he looked at his reflection in the rear-view mirror and spoke to an absent Dr Meyers. ‘Love is useless. It has no real power.’

  At ten years old, loving Jane, but unable to will her to live, the much celebrated and denigrated concept was a disappointment.

  ‘Useless,’ he repeated, leaving Red outside, pulled up on the pavement. Loving a car instead had not worked either. Yes it lived on, continuously revived by mechanics and technology, but so what? It did not love back.

  Saturday 6th October 2002

  ‘Get me some water please, darling,’ Jane said pushing Leke out of the bed.

  He returned with the glass. Jane was staring unmoving, at the ceiling. Leke laid his hand on her cheek and her eye twitched and startled him. He put his ear to her mouth and a hush came out, small breaths. Strained.

  ‘Mommy?’

  ‘Help me,’ she raised herself in the bed and Leke tilted the glass to her lifeless lips.

  Most of the liquid poured down her neck. Leke sat next to her on the bed.

  ‘Should I call Dr Mdu?’

  Several months before, Marcus had taken Leke aside and explained to him, for the first time that Jane was dying. He'd shown him where he kept the number of the oncologist and said to call if ever anything happened while he was away.

  ‘No,’ Jane said, but somehow Leke knew he should. He stayed sitting.

  ‘Should I call the doctor?’ he asked after several moments passed.

  ‘It's okay, Leke. I'm just tired. I need to sleep. Come,’ they lay down together, Leke making sure he lay on the wet part of the bed. They stayed silent for what felt like hours. Leke could tell she was collecting her strength for something. He moved his ear closer to her mouth so she wouldn't have to strain her voice.

  ‘Marcus loves you. Take care of him, okay? He needs you,’ she was still for a while. ‘Dear God,’ she said in a voice Leke had never heard before.

  Marcus had headed home from George the second he received the call from Lightness who had discovered Leke coiled around the stiff body. Arrangements were made and not many words passed between father and son.

  “He needs you,” Jane had said of Marcus. But, to Leke, that seemed untrue. In fact, Jane was wrong. He was not needed.

  After the funeral Marcus had left to go off to another conference. He hadn't said goodbye. Ten-year-old Leke had grown up overnight, he resolved to retreat into his own world. He knew he couldn't stay there forever but he'd stay for as long as possible and return as often as he could.

  Leke picked up his phone, pushed the button for phonebook and scrolled down to “Marcus”. Leaving the screen on he laid the phone down beside his bed and went to sleep.

  He dreamt that he was a bird flying through a forest. He was flying at a great speed and enjoying the wind as it smoothed down his feathers and the tips of the leaves as they brushed his breast.

  Suddenly a voice sounded out, ‘Why have you come here? The last time you came I asked you never to return.’

  It was a high-pitched voice and Leke immediately knew he was being addressed by an evil witch. He slowed his flight but stayed buoyant.

  ‘Answer me!’ she screeched. ‘I promised you death on your return and I will not go against my word.’

  ‘Do what you must my Queen. I had to come back.’

  ‘Had to? Stupid feathered creature, what do you mean “had to”?’

  ‘You see, when you banished me I too gave my word never to come back. But, I love the forest. I love the speed I can achieve here with the wind and I love the laughter I feel when the trees tickle my belly. I am happy only here, so I came back.’

  Saturday 3rd November 2012

  Leke retrieved the broom from beside the fridge and started sweeping, the dust puffed up angrily at the disturbance. After cleaning the floor he used an old rag to wipe the windows, but the water he'd dipped it in was insufficient, he merely succeeded in spreading the greasy dirt along the pane. He needed to go shopping.

  Leke found himself at the end of the aisle with his basket still empty. He'd already visited the Woolworths store and doubled his wardrobe by buying four items of clothing. He'd enjoyed squeezing into the small change rooms and studying himself, twitching at the unfamiliar feel of the fabrics on his body. He even bought a belt drawing the line at the pink-speckled tie the salesman dangled in front of him. Now at the supermarket, there seemed an endless series of options for cleaning dirt. He needed something heavy duty, he thought, leaning in to study the fine writing on the multi-coloured labels. His phone buzzed in his pocket.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Is this Mr. Peachey?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  I'm calling from Dr. Kleinsmith's rooms, the hellerworker, are you on your way, sir? We were expecting you fifteen minutes ago.’

  He'd forgotten.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. I'm sorry. I have to cancel, something's come up.’

  ‘We will need to invoice you, Mr. Peachey,’ her voice tightened.

&n
bsp; ‘Yes. Okay. I apologise.’

  ‘Do you want to re-schedule now?’

  ‘No. I'll call again. Thanks.’

  He picked a pink tub with capital red letters along its side – CHEMCLEAN – and two scrubbing brushes with steel bristles. Ammonia. On the way towards the check-out he wandered through the toiletries aisle, picked up a lace bag of potpourri, lavender and sage.

  Although night approached, a warm breeze accompanied Leke on his walk home. He enjoyed the rare, pleasant weather, spring had been slow in baring herself. Most of the days came chilled, a sluggard sun making grey mornings and faded out colours on petal flowers. It was an unusual feeling but he longed for the warmth of summer.

  When Leke rented the studio the Rhododendron had explained that she'd covered the garage asphalt in a fashionable screed. Over time this had cracked in places leaving lines scarring the surface, some wispy spider webs, others wide enough to lose a twenty cent coin in.

  Wondering how to fix the cracks, Leke went onto his knees and started scrubbing the floor. A dank smell filled the room, rotting flesh – something had died. He prepared himself to come upon it in his cleaning.

  Every few minutes he went to stand by the back door which he'd left open for fresh air.

  Should have bought yellow gloves, he cursed, studying the wet dirt that had gathered under his nails.

  He scrubbed the window pane noticing, with a sense of accomplishment, that the clean glass sparkled from the shine of the street lights outside.

  He used a stick to beat the mattress and began coughing as the dust rose off the worn fabric. He turned the mattress on its side and dragged it to the garden, continually hitting it until less and less dust came off.

  The underside of the mattress had been chewed away by moths and he made a mental note to save money for a new bed.

  At 1am Leke dropped onto the mattress, he fell into a dream where it was very quiet and everything was misty – he couldn't see his hands in front of him, and walked in a stilted march. Amidst the quiet his footsteps sounded out like thunder, heavy and so booming it frightened him.