Life and Times of Michael K Page 18

  By this time, what with the running and the explaining, I would have begun to gasp for breath, and it is even possible that you might have begun drawing away from me. ‘And now, last topic, your garden,’ I would have panted. ‘Let me tell you the meaning of the sacred and alluring garden that blooms in the heart of the desert and produces the food of life. The garden for which you are presently heading is nowhere and everywhere except in the camps. It is another name for the only place where you belong, Michaels, where you do not feel homeless. It is off every map, no road leads to it that is merely a road, and only you know the way.’

  Would I be imagining it, or would it be true that at this point you would begin to throw your most urgent energies into running, so that it would be clear to the meanest observer that you were running to escape the man shouting at your back, the man in blue who must seem to be persecutor, madman, bloodhound, policeman? Would it be surprising if the children, having trotted after us for the sake of entertainment, were now to begin to take your part and harry me from all sides, darting at me, throwing sticks and stones, so that I would have to stop and beat them away while shouting my last words to you as you plunged far ahead into the deepest wattle thickets, running more strongly now than one would ever expect from someone who did not eat—‘Am I right?’ I would shout. ‘Have I understood you? If I am right, hold up your right hand; if I am wrong, hold up your left!’

  WEAK AT THE knees after his long walk, screwing up his eyes against the brilliant morning light, Michael K sat on a bench beside the miniature golf course on the Sea Point esplanade, facing the sea, resting, gathering his strength. The air was still. He could hear the slap of waves on the rocks below and the hiss of retreating water. A dog stopped to sniff his feet, then peed against the bench. A trio of girls in shorts and singlets passed, running elbow to elbow, murmuring together, leaving a sweet smell in their wake. From Beach Road came the tinkle of an ice-cream vendor’s bell, first approaching, then receding. At peace, on familiar ground, grateful for the warmth of the day, K sighed and slowly let his head sag sideways. Whether he slept or not he did not know; but when he opened his eyes he was well enough again to go on.

  More of the windows along Beach Road than he remembered seemed to be boarded shut, particularly at street level. The same cars were parked in the same places, though rustier now; a hulk, stripped of its wheels and burnt out, lay overturned on its side against the sea-wall. He passed along the promenade, conscious of being naked inside the blue overalls, conscious that of all the strollers he was the only one not wearing shoes. But if eyes flickered toward him at all, it was toward his face, not his feet.

  He came to a stretch of scorched grass where amid broken glass and charred garbage new points of green were already beginning to shoot. A small boy clambered up the blackened bars of a play apparatus, his soles and palms sooty. K picked his way across the lawn, crossed the road, and passed out of sunlight into the gloom of the unlit entrance hall of the Côte d’Azur, where along a wall in looping black spraypaint he read JOEY RULES. Choosing a place across the passageway from the door with the monitory death’s-head where his mother had once lived, he settled down, squatting on his heels against the wall, thinking: It is all right, people will take me for a beggar. He remembered the beret he had lost, that he might have put beside him for alms, to complete the picture.

  For hours he waited. No one came. He chose not to get up and try the door, since he did not know what he would do once it opened. In mid-afternoon, when his bones had begun to grow cold, he left the building again and went down to the beach. On the white sand under the warm sun he fell asleep.

  He awoke thirsty and confused, sweating inside the overalls. He found a public toilet on the beach, but the taps were not working. The lavatory pans were full of sand; driftsand lay against the far wall a foot deep.

  As K stood at the basin thinking what to do next, he saw in the mirror three people enter behind him. One was a woman in a tight white dress wearing a platinum-blonde wig and carrying a pair of silver high-heeled shoes. The other two were men. The taller of them came straight up to K and took him by the arm. ‘I hope you are finished your business here,’ he said, ‘because this place is booked.’ He steered K out into the dazzling white light of the beach. ‘Plenty of other places to go,’ he said, and gave him a slap, or perhaps a light push. K sat down on the sand. The tall man took up position beside the toilet door, keeping an eye on him. He had a check cap, which he wore cocked to one side.

  There were bathers dotted over the little beach but no one in the water save a woman standing in the shallow surf, her skirt tucked up, her legs sturdily apart, swinging a baby by its arms, left and right, so that its toes skimmed the waves. The baby screamed in terror and glee.

  ‘That one is my sister,’ remarked the man at the door, indicating the woman in the water. ‘The one in there’—he pointed over his shoulder—‘is also my sister. Plenty of sisters I have. A big family.’

  K’s head was beginning to throb. Longing for a hat of his own, or a cap, he closed his eyes.

  The other man emerged from the toilet and hurried up the steps to the esplanade without a word.

  The rim of the sun touched the surface of the empty sea. K thought: I will give myself time till the sand cools, then I will think of somewhere else to go.

  The tall stranger stood over him poking him in the ribs with the toe of his shoe. Behind him were his two sisters, one with the child tied on her back, the other bareheaded now, carrying both wig and shoes. The probing toe found the slit in the side of the overalls and pushed it open, revealing a patch of K’s bare thigh. ‘Look, this man is naked!’ called out the stranger, turning to his two women, laughing. ‘A naked man! When did you last eat, man?’ He prodded K in the ribs. ‘Come, let us give this man something to wake him up!’

  From a bag the sister with the baby took a bottle of wine wrapped in brown paper. K sat up and drank.

  ‘So where are you from, man?’ said the stranger. ‘Do you work for these people?’ He pointed a long finger at the overalls, at the gold lettering on the pocket.

  K was about to reply when without warning his stomach contracted and the wine came up in a neat golden stream that sank at once into the sand. He closed his eyes while the world spun.

  ‘Hey!’ said the stranger, and laughed, and patted K on the back. ‘That is called drinking on an empty stomach! Let me tell you, when I saw you I said to myself, “That man is definitely undernourished! That man definitely needs a square meal inside him!”’ He helped K to his feet. ‘Come with us, Mister Treefeller, and we will give you something so that you will not be so thin!’

  Together they walked along the esplanade till they found an empty bus shelter. From the bag the stranger produced a new loaf of bread and a can of condensed milk. From his hip pocket came a slim black object which he held up before K’s eyes. He did something and the object transformed itself into a knife. With a whistle of astonishment he displayed the glinting blade to all, then laughed and laughed, slapping his knee, pointing at K. The baby, peering wide-eyed over its mother’s shoulder, began to laugh too, beating the air with a fist.

  The stranger recovered himself and cut a thick slice of bread, which he decorated with loops and swirls of condensed milk and presented to K. With everyone watching, K ate.

  They passed an alley with a dripping tap. K broke away to drink. He drank as if he would never stop. The water seemed to pass straight through his body: he had to retire to the end of the alley and squat over a drain, and after that felt so dizzy that he took a long time to find the arms of the overalls.

  They left the residential area behind and began to climb the lower slopes of Signal Hill. K, at the tail of the group, stopped to catch his breath. The sister with the baby stopped too. ‘Heavy!’ she remarked, indicating the baby, and smiled. K offered to carry her bag, but she refused. ‘It’s nothing, I’m used to it,’ she said.

  They passed through a hole in the fence that marked the bound
ary of the forest reserve. The stranger and the other sister were ahead of them on a track that zigzagged up the hill; below them the lights of Sea Point began to wink; sea and sky glowed crimson on the horizon.

  They halted under a clump of pines. The sister in white disappeared into the gloom. In a few minutes she came back wearing jeans and carrying two bulging plastic packets. The other sister opened her blouse and offered her breast to the baby; K did not know which way to look. The man spread a blanket, lit a candle and stuck it in a can. Then he set out their supper: the loaf of bread, the condensed milk, a whole polony sausage (‘Gold!’ he said, wagging the sausage in K’s direction. ‘For this you pay gold!’), three bananas. He screwed the cap off the bottle of wine and passed it over. K took a mouthful and returned it. ‘Have you got any water?’ he asked.

  The man shook his head. ‘Wine we have got, milk we have got, two kinds of milk’—casually he indicated the woman with the baby—‘but water, no, my friend, I regret there is no water in this place. Tomorrow, I promise. Tomorrow will be a new day. Tomorrow you will have everything you need to make a new man of you.’

  Lightheaded from the wine, gripping the earth every now and again to steady himself, K ate of the bread and condensed milk, even ate half a banana, but refused the sausage.

  The stranger spoke of life in Sea Point. ‘Do you think it is strange,’ he said, ‘that we are sleeping on the mountain like tramps? We are not tramps. We have food, we have money, we make a living. Do you know where we used to live? Tell Mister Treefeller where we lived.’

  ‘Normandie,’ said the sister in jeans.

  ‘Normandie, 1216 Normandie. Then we got tired of climbing steps and came here. This is our summer resort, where we come for picnics.’ He laughed. ‘And before that do you know where we lived? Tell him.’

  ‘Clippers,’ said the sister.

  ‘Clippers Unisex Hairdressers. So you see, it is easy to live in Sea Point if you know how. But now tell me, where do you come from? I have not seen you before.’

  K understood that it was his turn to speak. ‘I was three months in the camp at Kenilworth, till last night,’ he said. ‘I was a gardener once, for the Council. That was a long time ago. Then I had to leave and take my mother into the country, for her health. My mother used to work in Sea Point, she had a room here, we passed it on the way.’ A wave of sickness came up from his stomach; he struggled to control himself. ‘She died in Stellenbosch, on the way up-country,’ he said. The world swam, then became stable again. ‘I didn’t always get enough to eat,’ he went on. He was aware of the woman with the baby whispering to the man. The other woman had gone out of range of the wavering candlelight. It struck him that he had not seen the two sisters address each other. It struck him too that his story was paltry, not worth the telling, full of the same old gaps that he would never learn how to bridge. Or else he simply did not know how to tell a story, how to keep interest alive. The nausea passed but the sweat that had broken out on him was turning cold and he had begun to shiver. He closed his eyes.

  ‘I see you are sleepy!’ said the strange man, slapping him on the knee. ‘Time to go to bed! Tomorrow you will be a new man, you will see.’ He slapped K again, more lightly. ‘You are all right, my friend,’ he said.

  They made their bed on the pine needles. For themselves the others seemed to have bedclothes unfolded from their bags and packets. For K they had a sheet of heavy plastic in which they helped him wrap himself. Closed in the plastic, sweating and shivering, troubled by a ringing in his ears, K slept only fitfully. He was awake when in the middle of the night the man whose name he did not yet know knelt over him, blotting out his sight of the treetops and the stars. He thought: I must speak before it is too late, but did not. The strange hand brushed his throat and fumbled with the button of the breast pocket of the overalls. The packet of seed emerged so noisily that K was ashamed to pretend not to hear. So he groaned and stirred. For a moment the hand froze; then the man withdrew into the darkness.

  For the rest of the night K lay watching the moon through the branches as it crossed the sky. At daybreak he crawled out of the stiff plastic and went over to where the others lay. The man was sleeping close beside the woman with the baby. The baby itself was awake: fondling the buttons of its mother’s jersey, it regarded K with unafraid eyes.

  K shook the man by the shoulder. ‘Can I have my packet?’ he whispered, trying not to wake the others. The man grunted and turned away.

  A few yards distant K found the packet. Searching on hands and knees he recovered perhaps half of the scattered seeds. He buttoned them in his pocket, abandoning the rest, thinking: What a pity—in the shade of a pine tree nothing will grow. Then he picked his way down the zigzag track.

  He passed through the empty early-morning streets and went down to the beach. With the sun still behind the hill, the sand was cold to his touch. So he walked among the rocks peering into the tidal pools, where he saw snails and anemones living lives of their own. Tiring of that, he crossed Beach Road and spent an hour sitting against the wall before his mother’s old door, waiting for whoever might live there to emerge and be revealed. Then he returned to the beach and lay on the sand listening to the ringing mount in his ears, the sound of the blood running in his veins or the thoughts running through his head, he did not know which. He had the feeling that something inside him had let go or was letting go. What it was letting go of he did not yet know, but he also had a feeling that what he had previously thought of in himself as tough and rope-like was becoming soggy and fibrous, and the two feelings seemed to be connected.

  The sun was high in the sky. It had arrived there in the flicker of an eyelid. He had no recollection of the hours that must have passed. I have been asleep, he thought, but worse than asleep. I have been absent; but where? He was no longer alone on the beach. Two girls in bikinis were sunbathing a few paces from him with hats over their faces, and there were other people too. Hot and confused, he stumbled across to the public toilet. The taps were still dry. Slipping his arms out of the overalls, he sat on the bed of driftsand naked to the waist, trying to collect himself.

  He was still sitting there when the tall man entered with the one he thought of as the second of the sisters. He tried to get up and leave, but the man embraced him. ‘My friend Mister Treefeller!’ he said. ‘How happy I am to see you! Why did you leave us so early this morning? Didn’t I tell you this is going to be your big day? Look what I have brought you!’ From the pocket of his jacket he drew a half-jack of brandy. (How does he stay so neat, living on the mountain? K marvelled.) He guided K back on to the driftsand. ‘Tonight we are going to a party,’ he whispered. ‘There you will meet lots of people.’ He drank and passed the bottle. K took a mouthful. A languor spread from his heart, bringing a blessed numbness to his head. He lay back swimming in his own dizziness.

  There was whispering; then someone unbuttoned the last button of the overalls and slipped a cool hand in. K opened his eyes. It was the woman: she was kneeling beside him fondling his penis. He pushed her hand away and tried to struggle to his feet, but the man spoke. ‘Relax, my friend,’ he said, ‘this is Sea Point, this is the day when all good things happen. Relax and enjoy yourself. Help yourself to a drink.’ He settled the bottle in the sand beside K and was gone.

  ‘Who is your brother?’ asked K with a thick tongue. ‘What is his name?’

  ‘His name is December,’ said the woman. Did he hear her correctly? It was the first time she had spoken to him. ‘That is the name on his card. Tomorrow maybe he has a different name. A different card, a different name, for the police, so that they mix him up.’ She bent down and took his penis in her mouth. He wanted to push her off but his fingers recoiled from the stiff dead hair of the wig. So he relaxed, allowing himself to be lost in the spinning inside his head and in the faraway wet warmth.

  After a time in which he might even have slept, he did not know, she lay down next to him on the driftsand, still holding his sex in her hand. She wa
s younger than the silver wig made her seem. Her lips were still wet.

  ‘So is he really your brother?’ he mumbled, thinking of the man waiting outside.

  She smiled. Leaning on an elbow she kissed him full on the mouth, her tongue cleaving his lips. Vigorously she pulled on his penis.

  When it was over he felt that for the sake of both of them he ought to say something; but now all words had begun to escape him. The peace the brandy had brought seemed to be departing. He took a drink from the bottle and passed it to the girl.

  There were shapes looming over him. He opened his eyes and saw the girl, wearing her shoes now. Beside her stood the man, her brother. ‘Get some sleep, my friend,’ said the man in a voice that came from a great distance. ‘Tonight I will come back and fetch you for the party I promised, where there will be plenty to eat and where you will see how Sea Point lives.’

  K thought they had finally gone; but the man returned and bent over him to whisper last words in his ear. ‘It is difficult to be kind,’ he said, ‘to a person who wants nothing. You must not be afraid to say what you want, then you will get it. That is my advice to you, my thin friend.’ He gave K a pat on the shoulder.

  Alone at last, shivering with cold, his throat parched, the shame of the episode with the girl waiting like a shadow at the edge of his thoughts, K buttoned himself and emerged from the toilet on to a beach where the sun was going down and the girls in the bikinis were packing up to leave. Wading through the sand was harder than before; once he even lost his balance and toppled sideways. He heard the tinkle of the ice-cream man and tried to hurry after him before he remembered he had no money. For a moment his head cleared enough for him to realize that he was sick. He seemed to have no control over the temperature of his body. He was cold and hot at the same time, if that was possible. Then a haze fell over him again. At the foot of the steps, as he stood holding the rail, the two girls passed him, averting their gaze and, he suspected, holding their breath. He watched their backsides ascend the steps and surprised in himself an urge to dig his fingers into that soft flesh.