Cruel Crazy Beautiful World Read Online Free Page B

The way he lost himself so deep in a novel he’d not feel mosquitoes stinging him or the cat rubbing her fur against the soles of his feet.
    As Jabulani runs on through a dark savannah under a winking sliver of moon, he thinks: Bob Marley had held out such high hopes for this free Zimbabwe. And now Zimbabwe’s gone to the dogs.
    One time he has to sidestep a black cow shifting out of shadow.
    A monkey-thorn draws a red thread across his forehead.
    He hears shots in the distance. The farmers are out hunting.
    The shots recall how, years ago, a band of renegade war veterans under a man they called Hitler had yahooed through his town in a pickup. They had shot their totemic AK-47s at an invulnerable sun, cut a blue sky to ribbons with their panga blades. They had flipped the corpse of a woman from the flatbed of that pickup. Her head had jounced rubberly in the dust. A breast had been pangaed off.
    That image spurs him to run harder.

5
    H ERMANUS. BEFORE SUNUP.
    A bird pecking at his refection yanks me out of a dream of the painting of the severed zebra’s head that hangs over my folks’ bed. In my dream a drop of paint fell from the canvas and landed on my mother’s forehead to form a vermilion bindi . Then a gecko slid over her wan skin and sipped at the spot of blood. The sound of his echoing call was the sound of stones being tapped under water till it morphed into the sound of a beak pecking at glass.
    I smack cold water over my face. I avoid the stranger in the mirror and look instead at my mother’s watercolour of the seagull.
    I gulp silty water from the tap.
    This is the time she’d wordlessly put a cup of black coffee and yesterday’s Cape Times next to my bed. She’d draw the curtain and slide the window up. She’d let her palm linger on my forehead, as if she feared a fever. She’d wordlessly pick up my concertinaed jeans from the floor and hang them over a chair. Through the window I’d hear turtle-doves singing their bobbing-headed Jewish chants, and the muezzin cajoling Malays to the mosque.
    I yearn for the bitterness of my mother’s coffee and for a gone boyhood of being sandy and sunburnt, of spicy samosas and sweet tea.
    Now through this window I discern white foam sparking over dark rocks. The wind is cold and sea-tangy.
    As I put on my Nikes and a fraying rugby jersey, I study the fantasy figures I have pencilled on the walls of my cell: mermaid angels, dog sharks, impala-headed girls, a sphinx. Figures borrowed from my mother’s mind.
    A few Xhosa girls line up with jerrycans and drums at a tap in a churchyard. They tap water for free. They giggle and gabble a scattering of clicks and pips like record needles snaring on scratches or grasshoppers snapping their wings in the air. They teasingly call baleka baleka after me and this puts vim into my step.
    Waves crescendo against a heedless laager of rocks. I see a dead cormorant caught in a rock cleft. I free it and fling it out to sea where kelp bobs like seal heads in the surf. I imagine fish picking at the dead bird and crabs squabbling over the bones.
    I follow the cliff path to the old harbour.
    A hobo lies under a flipped-over fishing boat.
    His bastard dog – half border, half other – tilts his head up and snarls his fangs at me.
    The hobo’s eyelids peel to reveal eyes red as raw sores. A milky tear travels along a deep crow’s-foot in his windburnt skin. He murmurs to the dog.
    The dog hides his teeth and wags his tail. I hold out my hand and he licks it.
    The hobo oozes a weird wisdom from under the earflaps of his hunting hat, as if he’s figured out the riddle of human pain. His bird-like face recalls Samuel Beckett.
    – Your dog’s beautiful. He or she?
    – Bitch.
    – Aha. She has beautiful fur.
    – Skunk colours.
    – Half border, hey?
    – Any fool can tell.
    – And boxer?
    – Rhodesian.
    – Aha. Had her long?
    – How do you measure such a thing?
    – Hey, I just wanted to say she’s beautiful.
    – How do you