There are so many things going through Gail’s head at this point in time. By the sea, part natural, part supernatural, it spits driftwood out in the shape of a log, so much life, so much life, so much life.
The river runs through it, asking for the taking. Gail falls, blue, she sleeps the sleep of the dead. The dead do not struggle against all the odds, on their terms to live, they sanction the most beautiful part of their lives, and what was not celebrated in life, was celebrated in death, and in the water, Gail is like a fish. Her father is not a tall man, a cheating man with women on the side, a man’s man, he is fading away into autumn, branches are growing out of him, his fingers are an offering to God, sucking up all the clay, and the rain. All Gail wants to do is drain the paradise of the morning, she thinks she’s in love, but he’s older than she is. Her father, he does not smoke anymore. There’s a sadness to the day. Gail swims laps bravely. In her thirties, she swims laps bravely, and when she gets out of the pool, her father towel-dries her hair. The smell of the rain covers her like a wedding veil, and the earth is like a shroud.
Gail takes a warm bath when she gets home. Her father reads one of her fashion magazines looking at the women in lingerie, and bikini tops, and bottoms. She removes all the articles of clothing that she is wearing, lights up a cigarette, sits on the edge of the bath in the nude, and smokes her heart out. She puts her hand in to test the water. Lukewarm. Just right. She slips into the water, mapping her feet out, watching her pink toes. She forgot to put the bath oil in, and the Epsom salts for her sore muscles. She reads poetry in the bath. New Inscapes. She reads about Alan Paton’s reformatory boy, and cries, and cries. Her breasts are too small, she sometimes feels she’s too short, and all she wants to do is marry this older man, but he already has a wife, and a daughter, and a high-profile career. She thinks she can be the devoted mistress. Quiet, and unseen. Fit to be lover, physical body, dolphin belly, her psyche belonging to the married man, only to him. Gail is pink from her bath.
The feeling of the sexual impulse was so far removed from Gail. All she wanted was for the older man to take her into his arms. To have a child with him. For hm to make love to her, to go for long walks with her by the sea, her sea, the sea of her childhood. The sea inspires madness in her, something vast, something remote, something complicated like loneliness, and fear and anxiety. Gail feels the fear most days. She can’t get away from it. She paints her toenails red, listens to rock music blaring from her radio in the room, makes her hair all fluffy. In the eyes of her older man, she wonders if she is sexy. If she is sexy Lolita. She wonders at the gestures Betty Blue makes in that French film, wonders at her sadness. For it seems to Gail that all French women, although they are really beautiful, they are also sad creatures always meeting up with men, giving themselves body, soul, and spirt to them, and then, then the men just let them go.
The men just let them go mad, run around in bisexual relationships, make love to them in front of mirrors in the moonlight. The women end up in a hospital, or an asylum, and the children end up in an orphanage in the rural countryside somewhere, looked after by nuns. That’s all sex is, a fold in life, a reminder of a wave that transforms you, vibrations that test you, and gauge how you feel, sparking a kind of short-lived romance in you. There’s a hint of youth, of beauty in Gail’s face but instead of this making her happy, it makes her feel depressed. She knows she won’t have youth on her side forever, and beauty never lasts anyway. Women get cold, more cruel, aloof, and indifferent to the attentions of men, the sexual impulse. Women get old, older, and their beauty dies. There’s the aroma of lamb curry wafting out of the kitchen. Gail is reading Mikateko Mbambo’s poems now.A girl who goes to Pretoria University.
She’s from Zimbabwe, but this is nether here, nor there for Gail. The poems leave her breathless. The poems are like evening blossoms, blossoms of women in the daylight. Gail goes all quiet. The curry burns at the bottom of the pot. She is supposed to watching the curry, so that it doesn’t burn at the bottom of the pot. The poems are like the gathering of the elders, the matriarchs, and patriarchs of a village, and they’ve all come there for a feast. The sangoma is also there to bless the feast. In Mikateko’s poetry there’s a kind of undergrowth of memory there that exists with the children playing at this feast, becoming conscientized to the world of the adults around them, the kissing games of the older generation of kids, and the adults see the future (as Gail sees her future, and the future of these poems traveling across the world like sunlight, and nerves).They’re like amoeba-slime in the adrenaline of a male-world.
And years pass by Gail in minutes, and she thinks of the solitariness of the lone figure of the female sangoma at this feast, and there’s blessing too. Blessing in these poems. Afterwards, she washes her hair in the kitchen sink, shaves her legs. It feels as if she is getting her period. The poems are filled with longing, and belonging, the glory days of her youth, of no doubt, Mikateko’s youth too. Gail feels very much the innocent. Gail thinks that all poets have lived, and loved. Gail thinks she hasn’t lived at all. In her bedroom, she’s like a typhoon, in the mornings she wakes up, feels ugly because her older man, (that her father knows about), hasn’t called her. It feels as if he’s forgotten all about her. She checks her emails, but there’s no message from him, and it feels as if she’s on her way out of his life for good. She has poetry in her life, to save her from falling from grace, and the poems are like a gun going off.
The wind sighs outside mid-afternoon, Gail puts on a jersey. Her mother is a florist, and works all day until her fingers are numb to the bone, and she feels like death on her feet. She comes home after five in the afternoon, braving peak traffic in her family sedan. It is cold, getting colder still, the sun disappears in the sky, becoming a thing of the past, and a thing of the future. Gail makes tea, takes her gingko biloba, and feeds the tomcats. Inside, after that swim, her stomach muscles feel like a drum. She scrubs the sweet potatoes under the tap in the kitchen sink, until the water runs beautifully clear. Puts them in the oven, because that is the way her mother ate them ever since she was a little girl on the farm in Ladysmith. The earth is black after the rain. The sea is green after the rain, Gail remembers that. The sea is like the sun, old. Gail is quiet, and slow in the afternoon.She’s tired. The bath in the middle of the day had made her tired, but at the root of it all, she was a hungry reader.
She thinks she’ll find the way home in her lover’s arms, but she knows she won’t. She jumps a little too far, swears her love to him, she sees starlight, and wonder in his eyes, but that’s all there is. That’s all that she sees. She swears to her father, that her lover is attentive, and romantic, but it’s a half-truth. She feels low. The only thing that she trusts these days is the poetry, and Bessie Head’s Maru, Athol Fugard slipping into word-kill, and her heartbeat pulsates every time she reads The Road to Mecca, and she thinks of how handsome Gavin Hood was on the stage when he won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film. She dreams about Johannesburg, her winters there, her aunt’s house freezing even though they lit a fire in the fireplace. They’d roast marshmallows, Gail remembered her snobbish cousins. Too beautiful, too desirable for their own good. They married young, in their twenties.
They had their babies in their twenties. Gail had never been engaged, never had a serious boyfriend, never received wedding, or engagement, or promise ring. In the water, she was platypus. The poems were like brushstrokes to her, opened her up to vulnerability, and intimacy, and the shame of apartheid. The dreams young men had in those days, and the girlsthat wanted to become women, and wives that were deeply unloved, had men for husbands who sought female partners, not just a wife to be kept at home to cook, and clean, barefoot, and pregnant, mopping the kitchen floor. Gail didn’t really understand apartheid. She didn’t remember it. What was wrong anyway with interracial relationships, Gail felt that she had to apologise for it. As if apartheid had been all her fault. Zuma had spoken about social cohesion. But what did that mean anyway to black people who were the majority stakeholders in South Africa. It stung her. Apartheid shamed her.
It shamed her, how people in the location went without basic necessities, and lived in shacks with tin roofs, and Gail could feel her warm bed, and breakfast, and roasted marshmallows in a fireplace in Coronationville, Johannesburg, swimming towards her, black arms reaching out to her.
Rubbing one of the tomcat’s belly, she picked hm up, and kissed his ears, and cuddled him, but she knew that life for black people was filled with shocking despair, traumatic incident, after traumatic incident, and hardship. The pain they felt was like a fire in their belly, their mother tongue.
After all, they had been forced to speak English, to speak broken English at best, to learn English-proper like machines, factory workers, women working on an assembly line, and all she could see was their post-apartheid inferiority, and her earth, and sky, and sea’s superiority complex.
