Last Train to Retreat Read online

  Lena’s sneakers made no sound as she came down the stairs. The Makarapa man was holding the railings with Sarai pinned between his arms.

  ‘Excuse me sir, this is one of my girls. Can I help?’ Lena tried to stop her voice from trembling.

  Sarai looked shocked, the man irritated. He appeared more ridiculous than fearsome in his head gear but he was big and he was drunk. His accent wasn’t Xhosa, more like Ibo or Lingala. More and more Nigerians and Congolese had come into Cape Town in the past few years. Lena saw them at the station deck market. This one had the money to buy a ticket to the game, a black leather jacket, and shiny shoes to match.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ he mumbled, his huge green glasses at an angle, ‘Well, I was just asking …’

  ‘Sir, our girls aren’t into that but I suppose we could make an exception for you as a valued customer.’ The man produced a sickly smile. Sarai looked at Lena in horror. ‘But it’ll be one thousand five hundred, special request you see …’

  ‘No way, I get it in Congo for fifty! Whaddya think I am – a millionaire?’ The smile had gone. His eyes glinted in the pale light.

  ‘See that house over there?’ Lena pointed to a roof sticking out above High Level Road, ‘I just have to enter a code and a bouncer will be here chop-chop.’ She took out her mobile and flicked it open. The man looked at Lena not sure if she was bluffing, raised his arm threateningly then stumbled up the stairs.

  Shaking, Lena sat down on the grass. Sarai’s voice seemed to come from afar, barely disturbing the still air, ‘Why, why you are doing this? What you want?’ Her eyes appeared unnaturally green in the light, her cheeks fever pink.

  Lena held out her hand to the cowering figure. ‘Sarai, come with me, there’ll be no more of this, you’ll be free. There’s no time, please …’ One of Sarai’s stockings was laddered, her mascara was streaky, her long hair dishevelled. And still she was beautiful.

  ‘Well, well,’ a high-pitched voice came from the top of the stairs, ‘Slaat my dood met ‘n pap snoek, a dyke putting in a trot!’ Rapid-fire words in Kapie-taal, the sing-song language of the Cape Coloureds – Afrikaans with English and some Xhosa mixed in.

  Even before she turned around Lena knew who it was. She had prayed it wouldn’t come to this. ‘Nuh, and what’s wrong with that?’ she said, ‘money is money. I need two hours – girls take longer, you know.’ She flashed a grin at the pimp. ‘And I want it at my place – just up the road.’

  Cupido swaggered down the steps and brought his face close to hers. ‘Aha, is that so?’

  Not a big man, she noticed, but he freaked her out with his bad breath, twisted features and dead eyes. He dressed fancily – white shoes with black toe caps, pink trousers that were too tight, light blue polar-necked top and a navy coat unbuttoned.

  Cupido jerked a chin in Sarai’s direction and winked at Lena. ‘Die kind is ‘n poenspoes, wiet djy?’ The girl was shaven and Lena would like it, he said. Sarai, not understanding a word, backed up against the railing looking for an escape.

  His tone changed, ‘You take me for a fool? You talk nwata, you got no money and you’re no gatta because we pay them to stay away. So who are you, hey? This is my patch!’ He was blocking their way to the staircase. Sickly blue lamps, the bang of an exuberant exhaust, and Cupido’s high voice, ‘Ek gaat djou witbiene maak. I’m gonna fuck you up seven hundred different ways so they’ll pick up only the pieces!’

  He went for Lena. Her hand slid down to her jeans, unclipped the knife and opened it with her thumb in one movement. Cupido’s hands were already around her throat. Blindly she thrust the knife into him the blade scraping bone as it went in below the ribcage. Cupido looked down, mesmerised at the sight of his blue top turning red beneath his clutching fingers. ‘You bitch,’ he said.

  Lena jerked out the blade shouting, ‘Run, Sarai! To the station, you hear me, the station! Go Sarai!’

  The girl did not hesitate this time, bounced from the railing as if it was suddenly alive with current. She ran up the stairs, sobbing, Lena on her heels.

  Two

  After two years in his flat Zane Hendricks still loved getting mail, even those with windows that he knew contained bills. He was able to pay what he owed and more importantly, the address was a constant reminder that he had crossed the line from the Flats to Wynberg. Sure, it wasn’t Upper Wynberg, it was a one-bedroom apartment near the station, but it was a first step. One day, he promised himself, it would be a two-storey house with a big garden on the slopes of Constantia Berg.

  From where he sat he could see the kitchen clock. It was 9.45 am, Saturday. He looked out of the window, the north-westerly and the rain had stopped – good for his trip but he’d take his rainproof top anyway. He put a spare shirt, a small towel, and two protein bars into his rucksack and brought his mountain bike in from the bedroom – repair kit under the saddle, pump and water bottle in place, enough pressure in the tyres. He put on his sneakers and tucked the bottom of his jeans into his socks. His white Billabong sweat top, dark glasses and helmet were next. The last thing he did before wheeling the bike from the flat was to take the uncooked Shoprite chicken from the fridge and squeeze it into the rucksack.

  From his block he freewheeled down Court Road past the cemetery and the law courts, turning left into Church Street. When he reached Main Road he stuck to the pavement because riding in this narrow, busy arterial was risky. Besides, he loved to ramp the kerbs, it made his trip less boring through the many suburbs – Plumstead, Steurhof, Dieprivier, Heathfield, and Lavender Hill. He often dreamt of riding through forests when all he could hear was the wind, pine cones crunching beneath his wheels, and butterfly wings fluttering, and where getting lost didn’t matter. One day he’d make it but he’d keep his old Gary Fisher with its dated V-brakes and hard ride because it was the first thing in his life that had given him a taste of freedom. He treasured his bike. Previous owners had made only two concessions: a wider, softer saddle and bar ends to vary the grip. The odometer and speedometer had long since stopped working. What mattered to Zane was that he had wheels, albeit only two, and twenty-seven gears.

  He took a left into Concert Boulevard, passed Retreat station crossing the track soon after. How many times had he crossed the line? And every time it jarred because he didn’t want to go back. It was a world he was trying to cut off but couldn’t because his flesh and blood was still there, an umbilical cord stretching ten kilometres from his flat to his parents’ place. One day he’d take the train to Retreat – to fetch his father and mother and sister and their few belongings and bring them to the other side. It would be his last train to Retreat.

  •

  Even within Lavender Hill, lines divided people based on what they could afford. Zane rode through the best part consisting of tiny plots with dinky, lookalike houses packed like snoek in a crate. He passed a dilapidated square posing as a shopping centre, the police station, his old school – all held bad memories.

  Zane’s parents lived in the next best part of Lavender Hill which was on the east side of Prince George Drive. As always the metre-high message on a wall beside the road irked him: ‘Welcome to Lavender Hill, where people are moved by love, happiness, and diversity’. Only people with stars in their eyes could dream up such a line, he thought. Love and happiness existed only in movies. As for diversity, there was virtually none in a population made up mostly of hotnots or brown people like him who had been forcibly removed from District Six fifty years earlier and dumped on this flat, sandy expanse. Here, where the wind howled and all that grew were the population and the poverty, blocks of flats had been built for them by the apartheid government – rectangular, bare brick buildings, three or four storeys high, external staircases, no grass, flowers, or trees between buildings, only sagging washing lines and rows of rubbish bins, and engorged flies. These were the ‘courts’ – Daisy Court, Aster Court, Robin Court, and Darwin Court where his parents still lived, also known as the skurwe flats which made Zane cringe because in Afrikaan
s skurf meant ‘rough’, ‘ugly’, ‘dirty’. The only thing worse than the courts were the shacks in Lavender Hill made of discarded corrugated iron, wood, and plastic sheeting. Stones on the roofs helped a little when the South-Easterly blew but nothing could keep out the cold and rain in winter.

  As he neared Darwin Court he thought of the saying, if you were born in Lavender Hill chances were good you’d die there. Alcohol, Mandrax, tik, dagga, a blade or a bullet from a gang – any of these could get you. There were other, less dramatic ways of dying, like the homeless not waking up after a freezing night outside, HIV-aids taking you away quietly, or plain despair. And if you were lucky enough to escape these, circumstances would trap you until you died of old age.

  •

  His father, Edmund, his mother, Gloria, and his sister, Chantal, were waiting for him and the chicken as they usually did on Saturdays.

  ‘Aweh jy, hoesit?’ Chantal greeted him, her brown eyes shining.

  ‘Gee my ‘n drukkie, Sussie!’ Zane gave her a hug. Her long auburn hair smelled of shampoo.

  He turned to his mother. It was difficult to believe that the woman in the shapeless jersey and trousers, the socks and sandals, and the doek or headscarf could have given birth to the beauty that was his sister. His father wasn’t an oil painting either – faded Adidas tracksuit straining around his thighs and stomach, his veins wine-soaked, his hair all but gone. Over the years, the old photo of his young parents on the mantelpiece had made Zane realise just how much a hard life could change people. It made him determined to succeed.

  He kissed his mother and shook his father’s hand. ‘Ma, Pa, let me get the fire going.’ He took out the chicken.

  ‘Yoh, seun, dis ‘n kwaai hoender die!’ Gloria ran her hands reverently over the plump bird. In winter she heated up sop bompies, frozen soup in a plastic bag, or made bean curry, or bredie with vegetables, occasionally adding cheaper parts of the chicken, like wings, to the stew. Only when Zane came did they cook an entire chicken.

  ‘I’m lekka hungry,’ Eddie smacked his lips. Zane could see that his father had already sipped from the papsak, the foil bag in box wine.

  ‘Beats a Gatsby,’ Chantal said. ‘It’s all I smell at work – Viennas, egg, polony, slap chips in French loaves … arag!’ Zane smiled, one day he’d bring not chickens but whole fillets of beef.

  Zane walked through the ground floor flat to the small yard at the back, past the sign in the lounge, ‘Die weg na God, The way to God’, his Mother’s Day card from months ago on the mantelpiece, the cheap china, small TV set, blue and white linoleum floors, round cheese lights, and stuff lying around everywhere. People trapped in the wrong colour skin on a God-forsaken piece of earth, pushed aside by the White government and now by the supposedly ‘inclusive’ new Black government – a joke of a promised land to four million people. The Coloureds, who always saw the funny side of things and told it in their special way, ha, ha, thank God they could still laugh.

  Zane stopped at the structure in the yard that had once been his bedroom – poorly built by his father, holes in the roof that made him freeze in winter and bake in summer. For years Zane had been a ‘backyard dweller’, forced to stay with his parents, until he got his lucky break. He stared at the rubbish that had been thrown onto the roof from the flats above: dried-out chicken bones, a KFC box, a Tassies bottle, cigarette butts, and a used condom. Nothing had changed. Even the junk that his father was going to fix and sell was still inside the room.

  He lit the Weber that he had bought his parents. Soon fragile spirits and the aroma of grilled chicken would rise in unison. He also paid their rent of R400 per month, a fraction of his rent in Wynberg but he needed to save as much as he could to get them to the other side.

  •

  They sat in the small lounge afterwards watching Nigeria play Argentina in Johannesburg. They always watched TV after the chicken. There was nothing else to talk about. At least today there was the Word Cup. TV also helped because Eddie often became argumentative after drinking too much and it was best to say as little as possible for fear of setting him off.

  It didn’t stop Eddie today. His voice rose above the sound of the TV. ‘Ek wietie meer nie, Zane, you not talking Kapie-taal anymore, huh? Why’s that?’

  Zane knew that their language was something Coloureds were proud of, it made them what they were. ‘Gimme a break, Pa, it’s my work …’

  ‘Wat mompel jy soe binnemonds, skaam vi’ jou taal? Forgetting where you came from, hey, boy?’ Eddie felt uncomfortable with White English speakers or souties as he called them, limp-wristed liberals who did no more than tut-tut about the plight of the Coloureds. And the Afrikaners, whose blood, language, and religion the Coloureds had shared for centuries? Eddie had never forgiven them for systematically taking away their rights until none were left. The new Black government had changed that but what did a cross at the voting station mean when you were stuck in a place like this?

  ‘Ag, los tog die seun. Pa, leave him alone.’ In front of her parents Chantal also called Zane ‘boy’ but she wasn’t condescending, it was her way of taking his side.

  Zane tried again, ‘Where I work, Pa, Kapie-taal isn’t a good idea. It’s English or Afrikaans, nothing between. Mr Theron says in the communications business it’s what clients expect … not to mix the languages. It’s just good business …’

  ‘Ek gie fokkol om!’ Eddie’s face went blotchy. ‘It’s that job of yours. Ja, die pay is goet ma’ wat vi’ ‘n job is dit? Adverts, know what they are? A lot of noise and promises just like the blerrie politicians!’ It reminded Eddie of his pet gripe, ‘And when will we get our place back, huh? Nooit, I tell you!’ As a boy Eddie had lived in Eckhard Street in District Six. Over a period of fifteen years the apartheid government had extracted District Six from Cape Town’s smug white mouth like a bad brown molar, leaving an unsightly gap.

  Eddie jumped back to advertising, ‘And how safe is it, boy? Now a trade, a trade is something no one can ever take away …’

  ‘Eddie, Eddie,’ Gloria said, ‘it pays for our rent, the chickens, and the things he buys for us!’ She dabbed her nose with a Kleenex, delicately, a few pats at a time without sniffing. It had become a habit, an expensive one at that. Zane regularly had to buy Kleenex to stop her from using folded-up pieces of toilet paper.

  ‘Minute, Gloria! The boy’s stirvy … thinks he’s better than everyone else!’

  Zane stared at the TV saying nothing, reminding himself as he always did that it was the alcohol talking, not his father. Tomorrow Eddie and Gloria would go to church in their Sunday best and afterwards he’d start drinking and scream at her. He hadn’t changed since Zane was a boy, when he used to say, ‘you don’t have a clue, do you?’, ‘can’t you do anything right?’, ‘seems you just can’t do better’, ‘oh, that … that’s no big deal.’ Then Eddie still had a job, now he didn’t and he was only forty-eight. The dop system had got him years ago on a wine farm that paid their workers partly with low quality wine. Post-apartheid laws banned the practice but Eddie didn’t stop drinking – he simply bought his liquor which meant not enough was left for essentials. For years the family suffered with Gloria the only breadwinner. Ja, were it not for Gloria, Chantal and Zane, his father would be afbiene today – broke on the streets of Lavender Hill – or dead.

  When the time came to leave, Zane ignored his father’s hand – it was too much like a stranger’s – and gave him a hug instead. ‘Pa, now you look after yourself,’ he said softly. His father’s words would prey on him for days, it always happened after a visit to Darwin Court. But Zane would live with it because getting his parents out was more important.

  •

  Chantal walked with Zane while he pushed his bike. They passed the small general dealer flying the South African flag for the World Cup, and the car with the blackened, burnt-out front and the sticker that said ‘Jesus was here’.

  ‘How’s work?’ he asked. She was a seamstress in a clothes factory, sitting in a lo
ng row behind a machine for hours at a time, earning R700 a week.

  ‘Dreaming of my officer and gentleman … walking into that terrible building to take me away one day.’ She had seen Richard Gere and Debra Winger in a movie and never forgotten it. Zane told her she was more beautiful than Debra.

  ‘Someone will come, Sus, you’ll see … a dish like you!’ She was twenty-seven, two years older than Zane, waiting for Mr Right so that she could ‘marry up’ and get out of Lavender Hill. People couldn’t understand it, and some had expressed concern to Gloria that her daughter would end up an oujongnooi, a spinster. It had been his sister’s first serious relationship with Hannibal at nineteen that messed up subsequent liaisons but somehow it made her more beautiful over the years.

  Chantal stopped near the house where the men were sitting outside the door, caps every which way on their heads, eyes hard and restless, waiting for the night. Zane had ridden past them on the way in, avoiding their stares.

  Chantal shivered. ‘They weren’t there a month ago.’

  ‘What are people saying? Who are they?’ He took her hand.

  ‘No one is talking but Shaheed at the shop said he heard an explosion the other day, seemed to come from the house. He didn’t report it … too scared.’

  They both suspected what had caused it. Making crystal meth using volatile chemicals was dangerous but it was easy to make and the rewards were huge. It resulted in many a house and backyard becoming a tik ‘factory’. Entire families were smoking the heated crystals – from kids in their early teens to people in their sixties – fathers putting crystals, tubes, and lighters out on the table DIY style.

  ‘Try to avoid the house when you go to work, Chantal, and never make eye contact. Too risky, you’re too pretty.’

  She squeezed his hand and smiled wanly. ‘What if they’re Hannibal’s men?’ The thought of Hannibal so near to where Chantal lived was unwelcome. Hannibal was the reason why Zane was close to his sister and why they always looked out for each other. Zane said, ‘Don’t lose any sleep, Sus. If he was going to do anything, he would have long ago. Go back now … mooi loop, take care.’ He kissed her.