Last Train to Retreat Read Online Free

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 long 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