Sofa, So Good, Sort of
|
|
THE OTTOMAN AND HIS LIEUTENANT
The ottoman in our lounge marked us as a family on the rise. We were the family that could afford a piece of furniture which served no particular purpose. Everyone else had rickety wooden stools which rocked under weight, sun-beaten plastic garden chairs with scratches, and ugly sectional leather pieces they bought on lay-bye at extortionate interest rates which took months—sometimes years—to pay off from Ellerines, Beares, Lewis, and that one uncle in the furniture business.
But we had a lovely ottoman my father paid for in cash, a low, grey, almost-chair, not-quite-table thing. It didn’t match any of the other pieces in the lounge but I think that was the point. Our family had reached that sought-for stage of life where nothing had to match. We were, finally, a family with options. We were not constricted by our choices. We lived with them like equal neighbours, not in fear of them.
My father could walk into a shop and ask about a lovely sky blue two-seater my mother liked or a coffee-brown wingback armchair he fancied and when the price was given to him he didn’t flinch or ask when the shop closed, lying that he’d come back later with money. He was the kind of man for whom stores would open a bit longer even if all he was doing was browsing. The grey flecks in his hair made the sales people take him seriously—black men with just a bit of white in or on them are quite commanding. To polish off his imperious demeanour he had a broad-shouldered walk with a measured pace. When he walked it looked like time itself yielded the right of way to him. My mother said it was one of the things which drew her to him. “He walks like his destination rushes to meet him,” she said.
When I went with him to the furniture store, this big, wide warehouse the aisles seemed to part for him, bringing us to the lounge furniture section manned by a man named Darrell. He greeted my father politely. My father greeted him as well and swept past him towards the suites and sets.
My father’s soft and severely formal English spoke of a strict upbringing in the equatorial tropics, up where the sapeurs flooded the dirty, trash-strewn streets with their riotous and outrageous costumes, strutting down smelly alleys to crowded markets and bars, clad in the most ostentatious jackets, trousers, ties, and socks. Coupled with his deep voice and the francophone lilt that would be the legacy of Leopold’s ghost, my father’s English made cashiers and tellers stand up straight when he asked them a question. It made floor managers in department stores skittish, unsure of his station in life in relation to theirs. Was he a Big Man? Could he somehow change the trajectory of their lives for the worst if they displeased him? Was he able to have someone fired if they didn’t know whether a particular trouser size was available or when the avocados would be available again? My father’s voice was the waiter’s bane. They could never tell whether he was asking a question or compelling them to do something. It was the “no” he added to the end of questions. It seemed to suggest the possibility of a contrary opinion while simultaneously ruling out such a notion. Even I could never tell if he was vexed by something I did. For example, I’m not sure whether he was displeased by my choice to quit soccer and swat tennis balls in the middle of high school. “This is the sport you have chosen, no?” he said. I hesitantly said yes. He took me to choose my racquets the next day. To this day I’m not sure he approves of what I studied at university.
—“Literature? You are sure it is what you want, no?”
—“Err, yes?” No. Wait, what?
My father had that effect on people. The only one who ever seemed to know what he was saying was my mother.
Darrell, the sales person in the furniture section, seemed to know how to handle clients like my father. He hung back, kept quiet, let him sit down in the sofas, watched him stretch his legs and lean back. My father moved from set to set, never saying anything. I shadowed him, following this man full of choices and decisions and tastes I couldn’t fathom. At the last lounge set my father spied the ottoman.
He looked at it curiously and then he sat on it. His back was straight as a mast and his hands were on the knees of his dark blue trousers. He sat like that for a minute or so in silence. Darrell stood nearby. I kept sentinel watch over the scene. My father hated interruptions when he was deep in thought, like when he was reading his newspapers or his French classics in his study, or listening to Chopin. He once said silence was golden but every other precious metal or gemstone screamed and that’s what made them cheap. Gold, he said, never had to explain what it was because everyone knew its essence, its longevity, and its power.
I was determined to be a golden child. I watched my father sit on his grey throne surrounded by his auric silence. Then he made a deep sound in his chest, like a purr, which meant he approved. Later, I’d hear that sound whenever he scanned my flawless report card, or whenever I climbed into the car with a trophy or a medal or a certificate. He’d make the same sound at my graduation many years later.
My father asked Darrell for the ottoman’s price. Darrell said it was not an individual piece, it was part of the lounge set.
“No, I only want this one,” my father said.
“Sir?”
“I only want this one, no? How much will it be, Mr Darrell?”
Darrell did the right thing and excused himself to fetch the manager. My father continued sitting on the ottoman. He beckoned me to sit in the grey two-seater across him. When the manager arrived he was friendly and smooth. He tried to butter up my father but barely made it past the crust of his enquiries.
“The price of the other items in the set can be calculated, no? Then I would like to know the price of this one. It is the one I want. You can add a markup for the inconvenience,” my father said. He remained seated, hands on his knees, with the manager standing in front of him and Darrell just off to the side. The manager looked at the ottoman for a bit and then he quoted a price, tentatively, looking at my father to see if he was near or far from the money. My father looked at him impassively and said he would pay the price plus fifty-percent for the trouble. The manager was silent for a while. Darrell coughed.
“Are you sure you don’t want something else for that amount of money, sir?” the manager asked. “Something more, err, substantial?”
“This is what I want, no?”
The manager looked to Darrell and then to me but I couldn’t offer any help. I was doing my best to keep earning those seen-but-not-heard points.
“Err, yes. Of course, sir,” the manager said.
“Splendid,” my father said. He stood up and from the manager’s expression I could tell he was surprised by the sudden height of the man, how he went from sitting to standing tall in one blink-and-miss-it movement. My father extended his hand and the manager shook it with what must have been a hastily spoon-beaten mix of respect and fear. “And you will make sure Mr Darrell will get the commission, no?” My father held on to the manager’s hand as he shook it slowly.
“Yes, of course,” the manager replied.
“Thank you, sir,” my father said. He released the manager.
At the payment counter my father enquired about the precise time of delivery, a time many people wouldn’t be given. Most people would be told “sometime today or maybe tomorrow.” But the manager, who insisted on ringing up the purchase himself said, “We’ll be at the house at two o’clock this afternoon, sir.” It was a Saturday. The shop would’ve been closed for an hour by then.
The first time Aunt Margaret, my mother’s sister, saw the ottoman she asked what it was. “Is it for putting your feet up?”
“No,” my mother replied. “He would be angry if you did that.”
“Is it a table of some sort?” My mother said it was an ottoman. “A what?”
“It’s for sitting on,” I piped up. “Daddy got it.”
Aunt Margaret looked at the ottoman dubiously. Wider and longer than a coffee table but not long enough to lie on; lower than a stool but not as comfortable, no backing for support, and the upholstery material looked quite expensive. She shrugged in the way she did when she came to our house and encountered some new trapping of modernity she couldn’t fathom. “Rich people things,” she said.
She said the same thing about the two forks and two knives thing which was confusing even for me—“Rich people things!”— and the pictures on the walls which were not of distant and close relatives celebrating weddings, christenings, and graduations. There were some paint splatters in black frames, some photographs of a bleak, desert landscape, and some rare woodcut prints. “So this is what they call art,” she said when my mother gave her a tour of our new house, “rich people things.”
Looking at the ottoman, Aunt Margaret did what people without money do when they encounter something outside of their financial comprehension. She steered well clear of it like it was a dangerous animal crouching in the lounge, liable to spring up and savage her.
The ottoman sat like a jewel in our living room empire of custom-made or eccentrically chosen furniture, like a marquee conquest of some sort. Of all the furnishings in the room, I think my father liked it best, even more than his armchair which enveloped him like a science fiction villain.
Maybe he liked the ottoman’s colour or its shape. I could never tell. But he loved to sit on it, with his back straighter than straight and his hands on his knees. One day I asked him why he liked it so much and he gave me the same look he gave me when my mathematics average fell into the shameful percentages he called la parfum de la moyenne. He said, “You would not understand. You have never been home.”
I said, “But, Daddy, this is home.”
And he said, simply, dismissing me, “That is why you would not understand.”
DADDY’S ARMCHAIR
In my house, when I was growing up, you could sit anywhere except Daddy’s armchair. You could park your butt in the five-seater or the other armchairs. You could even sit on the coffee table if you wanted to but my mother would give you a stern look that would make you move your bottom off the square of sturdy oak and welded metal. You could sit at the dining room table when you were busy with homework but when it was time to eat you had to remove your books so the surface could be decorated with Malagasy print mats and plates without chips or cracks and cutlery that reflected the light. If you really, really, really wanted you could even sit on the floor, but you had to do it when my mother was not around—if she saw you she gave you an even sterner look because you’d be shaming their struggles and diligent provision of their children’s needs.
You couldn’t sit in Daddy’s armchair. Not when he was around because that was just plain disrespectful, and not even when he was away because that’d be akin to pronouncing yourself heir to some supposedly vacant throne. I did it once when I was little and my mother bustled into the lounge and shooed me out of it. “Your father isn’t dead,” she said by way of explanation.
Even when he was away my father’s aura hovered around the house, ensuring rooms remained neat and arranged and his study stayed locked and private. You could feel his presence in the house when he was on the other side of the world, in New York, in Rio de Janeiro, in Sydney, or in Manila conducting his pharmaceutical procurement lectures. The smell of him lingered in the house. I am certain my mother sprayed some of his cologne in the house’s rooms whenever he was away, like it was a holy fragrance that would ward off evil and keep the forces of distance and separation at bay until he returned to us and to her. I teased my mother about that when I was much older, when I could finally say something smart about the world. I said, once, when I walked into the house—my father was away in one of those —tan countries in Asia on some conference—that she had a hard time “decolognising her mind.” She laughed and said, “You idiot. What do you know of such things?”
If my father was away and guests came to visit us, my mother graciously welcomed them with hugs, double-cheek kisses, and trays of juice and snacks. She ushered them into the living room where they’d take their seats. All of them avoided sitting in Daddy’s armchair. Even if seating was running low, no one would sit in it. I remember thinking that the armchair was endowed with mystic powers only my father could harness. Maybe the seat permitted him to look far into the future; perhaps it was a conduit for some hidden power only he could harness. I imagined there would come a day when my father would relinquish the seat to me like Jean-Luc Picard while he went away to dispense wisdom about ethical and sustainable medicinal purchasing processes. For a while, I’d be in charge of steering our family to frontier worlds far beyond this one.
Nobody sat in Daddy’s armchair except Trevor.
We were supposed to work on a science project building scale models of the planets. Before we could vanish to the privacy of my room, my mother insisted, as she always did when any of us brought our friends over, on detaining us in the lounge for a prying conversation. I had, for my part, done my best to explain his backstory to her so the questioning wouldn’t have to be longer than necessary.
“He’s at my school. His father is a businessman—no, I don’t know what kind of business—and his mother is a lawyer. Trevor’s a cool guy. He’s white,” I said by way of summary.
I hoped that would satisfy her before Trevor arrived but I really couldn’t be sure. The scope, depth, or duration of the maternal inquisitions was known only to one person: my mother. Once, Franco, one of my friends, answered questions about his parents’ occupations, where his grandparents came from, what his older sisters were studying at university—“Medical microbiology? That sounds interesting. Tell me, do they find it challenging to be in such a male-dominated field? Oh, you haven’t asked them. Well, that is a pity, isn’t it?”—and what he wanted to study after high school for an hour. After those sixty minutes of excruciating inquiry Franco kept his visits to my house to the barest minimum.
Trevor had heard of my mother’s interrogation sessions and, to be honest, he wasn’t really keen to come over but his parents were going through a divorce and his house was a war zone with either parent using anything within sight as ammunition against the other: the family’s flagging finances; Trevor’s younger sister and her bipolar disorder; Trevor’s poor report; the school trips that were cancelled because either parent refused to pay for them, stating it was the other’s responsibility, and then using Trevor’s subsequent disappointment at not being included in trips as evidence of the other parent’s disregard for his happiness. Even Trevor’s friends who looked like they were the offspring of a happy and ongoing marriage were hors d’oeuvres for drama. I went over to his place once and his mother asked me how long my parents had been together and I, not knowing the lay of the land—this was in the early days, when the news of the divorce hadn’t yet done the rounds—said they’d been together since I was born. Their marriage was a couple of years older than the republic of our relocation. Thinking I was being asked to provide testimony of my parents’ love for each other I said, “They’ve been through every thin and now they’re getting fat together in the thick of things.”
What did Trevor’s mom say?
“That’s very sweet, dear. Your father stayed true even where others wavered. There’s a joke for you. Trevor’s father and I are going to fizzle out without so much as a struggle. That’s got to be some kind of irony, right? You understand what I mean, right?”
We decided my house was a better place to finish our project after that.
As soon as we entered my house my mother swooped down on Trevor and pulled him into one of her bosom-mashing hugs. She walked him to the lounge and told him to take a seat. She’d be back with some drinks. She shouted to my father in his study that I had a guest. My mother called me into the kitchen and asked what Trevor wanted to drink and I said juice and when I came back into the lounge I was carrying a tray with some orange juice and a glass for him. My father was coming out of the study at the same time and my mother was behind me.
Trevor was sitting in my father’s chair.
In Daddy’s armchair!
My mother exclaimed sharply and I could feel my father focus his terrible attention on Trevor. My father crossed the lounge quickly. Trevor stood up to shake hands with him.
“You are Trevor, no?”
“Yes, sir.”
The two of them unclasped hands. My father ushered him into a seat but Trevor missed the cue and sat back down in my father’s chair.
(“Again?” he really did that again?” Franco was shocked. “Yo, that white nigga was tripping, man.”)
My mother breathed so loudly I was scared her adenoids would have to be checked out. I made Morse code eyes at Trevor--Get! Out! Of! The! Seat!—but he didn’t seem to understand my meaning. My father remained standing and looked down at Trevor.
“You are in my seat,” he said curtly.
There was no “no” at the end.
Trevor looked at the seat, then at the three of us standing, me still with the tray, eyes pleading, and did some MatheMagic. He shot right out of Daddy’s armchair. My father sat down. I put the tray on the coffee table. My mother sat in the other armchair next to my father’s. I gestured to Trevor to sit with me on the five-seater.
Perhaps because of the impropriety my mother didn’t ask Trevor the usual game show questions which tested his general knowledge and, therefore, determined his place in my parents’ intellectual solar system. As far as they were concerned he was way out of their radiant benevolence, further than Charon, a rock of such insignificance to them they felt no need to lavish their curiosity upon him. “Well, we should let you get on with your project, no?” my father commanded.
“Err, yes, sir.”
When I closed the door to my bedroom I breathed out deeply. Later, at supper, I would have to answer questions. There’d be a long talk about white people and how they invaded spaces.
“Dude,” Trevor asked, “was it just me or was it hella weird down there?” He threw his backpack on my bed and followed it.
“Both.”
“But why?” he asked.
“My father’s not dead, Trev. If you sit in his chair, you kill him.” I opened my science file and turned to the worksheet with the size of the planets and the compositions of their atmospheres.
“Wait, I don’t get it,” Trevor said, “Didn’t your parents study in Europe and stuff?”
“Paris.”
“And they, like, travel and stuff. I mean, your dad gets a new passport every month.”
“So?”
“So how can they still believe things like that?”
“It’s hard to explain,” I said. “It’s just who they are.” He didn’t seem satisfied with the answer. “Look, Trev, you can be old school and new school at the same time. It doesn’t hurt me so I just let them have their strange ways.”
“Yeah, I get that. Even my parents slip into the plaas taal every once in a while when they’re stressed out. But mine don’t hang onto all that stuff.”
“Talk shit, Trev. Twenty bucks says your mother freaked the fuck out when Lezaan came over for supper. No ways the idea of kroeshare in her gene pool sat well with her.”
“Okay, she did a little. But then she got over it.”
“So she said.” I fetched the box of models from the cupboard. I handed him Mars. I’d work on Neptune.
“They don’t actually believe your dad’s going to die because I sat in the chair, right?” I kept quiet. “Do they?”
“You know,” I replied, “I actually don’t know.”
“But why?” he asked. “Why would they choose to believe that?”
“Because it probably reminds them of home.”
“Isn’t this your home, bro?”
“That’s tricky to answer, Trev.”
THE LOVESEAT
The theatre lights have just been turned off when my girlfriend and I walk in. We’re just in time. The trailers are about to start. I hate missing the trailers. My girlfriend knows how much I hate that so she fretted the whole time when we stood in the popcorn queue waiting to be served. If we missed the trailers or, worse, missed the start of the film, it would be her fault. I didn’t reply to her when she sent me the text message saying she had to drop her mother off at the shops twenty minutes before the film started. When she rushed up the stairs to the cinema floor, apologising for arriving late, she tried to hug and kiss me but I turned away and said, “Let’s just get the popcorn.”
We look for our seats.
J…I…H…
“G—this is us,” I whisper.
1…2…3…4…5…6…
“We’re seven.”
Our seat is taken. A small child in the row behind us whispers to his mother that he can’t see the screen.
“You’re in our seat,” I say.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yes, you are. This is G7.”
“Are you sure?”
I take out my phone and turn on the flashlight. I show them the tickets. The man turns to his partner and then back to me. “Do you mind if we sit here?” he asks. “You can have the seats next to us.”
The first trailer is playing: a period drama—the kind of thing my girlfriend used to like before she met me.
“It’s okay,” my girlfriend says. She puts a hand on my shoulder. The pressure asks if it is okay to move on. The pressure hopes we’ll move on. I shrug off her hand.
“You’re in our seat,” I say.
“Come on, man, there’re so many empty seats in the cinema—”
—“Mommy, I can’t see!”
—“Sorry to disturb, but the film’s going to start soon and if you don’t mind—”
“—then you can take any of the empty seats,” I say. “Or you can take the seats you paid for. But you can’t have our seat.”
The next trailer: a nameless animation with a forgettable plot line. Disney is trying to cash in on everyone’s desire for the good old days.
“Come on, our drinks are already out.”
—“Mommy!”
—“Excuse me, could you just—”
“Then take your drinks and your popcorn and move on to the next seat,” I say. “I really don’t mind sitting next to you. I just don’t want to sit on top of you.”
—“Mommy, can you tell them to—”
—“Really now, my son can’t—”
“Jeez, buddy, it’s just a seat. We’re all watching the same film.”
“Listen, ma’am, your son will see the screen as soon as I’m seated, thank you.” I look at the couple in our seats pointedly.
The last trailer is playing: a spy thriller I’ve already seen thanks to high-definition leaks and fast bandwidth.
“Let’s just sit somewhere else,” my girlfriend says.
“No,” I say. “I want our seat.”
The cinema screen is dark. The aisle lights are dimmed. A familiar drumming and trumpeting heralds the start of the film.
“Let’s just move,” the man’s partner says. “I don’t understand why these people—”
“Which people?”
“Just drop it,” my girlfriend pleads.
“No, I want to know which people she’s referring to.”
The man and his partner take their drinks and their popcorn and shuffle down the aisle to a safe distance.
“Thank you,” I say. The man answers with a familiar swear word. “You too, buddy!”
The film’s title floats onto the screen and then fades into the darkness. My girlfriend and I sit down and place our drinks in the cupholders.
“Was that really necessary?” she asks.
I turn in my seat. “Ma’am, tell your child not to kick my seat. Thank you.” I turn back to my girlfriend. “Of course it was worth it. This is the only loveseat in the whole cinema.”
The film starts playing.
I reach for her hand and hold it. It is limp. After a couple of seconds she returns the pressure, slightly.
THE STROKE THAT BROKE THE CAMELBACK
Her hands grip the backing, her knees are spread apart on the cushions, and her back is bent like a flexicurve. The black vines of ink snake from the inside of her left hip and around to the middle of her lower back in intricate swirls and whorls of tribe unknown. I used to tease her about them in our early exchanges. I might’ve used the word “cliché” to describe them more than once. Now, in this position, they ripple, fold, and mesmerise like tiger stripes passing through the undergrowth. Earlier, when she sat on my lap my hands caressed the puckered skin left by the needlework under her dress. I called them sexy as she breathed into my mouth and pulled on my lower lip. My fingers felt the edges of her panties’ elastic, gently, like an enquiring digit testing a scab to see if it is ready to come off.
I hold the back of her neck with my left hand and use my right to keep her waist in position. She has new ink on her neck, a quote from Camus. Dead centre between her shoulder blades is the tattoo I hate the most, the one I called the fault in her stars when we first met: a stylised scorpion in a smooth black ring which holds her worldview in its pincers.
Scorpios are resourceful. True. “Who goes to the movies without a big handbag?” she asked. “How do you sneak your own food in?”
Scorpios are sensual. So, so true. “We have to try this new massage oil. It’s got a herb oil that’s an aphrodisiac.” (Like I ever needed help to get going when she was around.)
Scorpios are stubborn. Only facts here. “Just say you were wrong and I was right,” she said after an argument that flamed and smouldered for days.
Scorpios are not compatible with Geminis. Hmm. Perhaps.
But here she is.
Again.
When her neck becomes too sweaty I place both hands on her waist for better purchase, gripping until I feel the pelvic bones. I plant my feet, lean back, and thrust harder. I chance a look down at the perfect collision of our movements. I can feel the pinch of pleasure at my tip, running away from me and into her. It’s just a few inches out of reach. I strain to touch it, feeling for it further and deeper within her. The chair rocks on its back legs. My search for the elusive sensation flushes out its quarry. She shivers uncontrollably and lets out a wail that’s both lewd and forlorn. I rush to join her and hurl myself over the finish line. The camelback tips over and deposits us on the floor. I manage to angle myself to the side so my full weight does not collapse on her. She swears. Then she laughs, deep, throaty. I laugh too.
Slowly, we untangle ourselves from each other, taking deep breathes, our chests going up and down like bellows. She stands up first. I follow. We look at each other naked, from the toes all the way up. We don’t make eye contact. I right the sofa in one easy movement. It’s cheap, poorly constructed, prone to fall over when too much weight is placed on the backing. She reaches beneath the couch for her panties. Her shape as she bends one leg to put on her underwear, with her vertebrae poking through her smooth, shining skin, stirs deep memories of watching her as she dressed for work, with me still lying in the covers, reluctant to face the day. I once told her the sight of a woman dressing is more erotic than a woman undressing. The way everything is covered up, all the inches of skin vanishing behind their armour. It’s like watching a sunset slowly yield its empire to the territories of night, the last few slivers of sunlight are the saddest and the most hopeful. Perhaps tomorrow it will shine again.
As I squeeze into my jeans, adjusting my boxer shorts, she pulls down her halter neck summer dress, the final curtain fall. She squeezes her bra into her handbag and adjusts the dress over her breasts. The movement beneath the fabric, the curvature I know that lies beneath, makes me look away. She has another tattoo underneath her left breast, on her ribs: the Death of Rats. It was another jealousy trigger for me because its location made me think of a stranger being that close to her, touching her, putting his mark on her forever.
I put on my t-shirt and stretch. She sits back down on the couch. I join her.
We look at each other and laugh again. When we stop she rubs her face like she is performing tayammum, cleansing herself of the last hour of wistful recollection which led to the lusty resurrection of regret. She looks like she’s wiping the last two days of calls and carefully negotiated forgiveness from her mind, like she’s determined to erase her breach of the unilateral request for silence from the record of time. I try to smile kindly at her, hoping it doesn’t come across as smug.
She reaches into her bag and pulls out some hair ties. Her hair is whisked into a top knot. Then she fishes in her bag for her lip gloss and applies a light sheen. She takes a deep breath and says, “Well.”
She stands up. I stand up too. She makes her way to the door. I follow her, barefoot, the cold tiles beneath echo the mood change in my flat. When I open the door for her she says, “Don’t call me again.”
I look at her, at the hoop in her tragus she talked about getting for months, the Thailand-bronzed skin on her slender neck, and her fiery, brown eyes alight with a fire.
“I’m not the one who called,” I say.
She walks out and stands in the hallway, searching for her car keys in her bag. She finds them somewhere near the bottom. “Next time don’t answer,” she says.
I sigh and say I won’t.
“Please,” she says, “don’t.”
CHESTERFIELD SLEEP
My friend and his wife let me crash on their couch while I looked for a new place. I let my girlfriend keep the old place. She was losing a lot in losing me. It would’ve been too cruel to evict her too. My friend and his wife didn’t pry with their questions. They didn’t ask me what the plan was. They didn’t insist on action. Instead they opened their bijou apartment which also housed their fledgeling marriage to me. The Chesterfield their parents gave them wasn’t the most comfortable of beds but it certainly was the most expensive I’d ever slept on. My friend said he was always around if I wanted to talk but I think he was secretly pleased I didn't.
On some days I lay on the Chesterfield in silence with my arm covering my face, and when they found me like that they tiptoed past me, trying to stir their tea or coffee without hitting the sides of their mugs. Sometimes, I cloaked myself in melancholy just to see what new ways they’d come up with to play the good and understanding hosts.
My friend’s wife was phenomenal in the kitchen. She cooked without carbs and liked the same shows I did. When we sat down for supper my friend was always a step or two behind in the pop culture ping pong. He used to do the washing up before I moved in; I displaced him from his duty. While I ran some hot water into the kitchen sink and got started on the plates he watched news on the television. His wife joined him on the couch where they talked about the ongoings of their days in quiet voices. I tried my best not to intrude at such times. When I was done washing up I walked out onto the balcony to give them their space.
I offered to chip in with the rent but they waved my money away. “It’s no good to us,” my friend said. “Anyway, we’re the ones who should be paying for your presence. Remember us when you’re famous.”
I bought them expensive groceries, the organic stuff. One night, at supper, while eating giant turkey drumsticks with a spinach, spring onion, carrot, and red pepper stir-fry I’d made my friend’s wife said I’d always been good at choosing birds. I flinched and she said sorry. I said it was okay even though it wasn’t.
I was actually a little thankful for her remark. It showed me it was time to leave. Proximity breeds callousness and my prolonged duration had upset their routines. I hadn't been staying with them for long but the strain I placed upon their marriage was palpable. My presence cut short their marital gossip time, when couples should be together talking about everyone else, finding assurance in lying that they’re not like other couples. They muffled and subdued their lovemaking out of respect for me lying loveless on their couch. I saw how they debated which film to watch, carefully choosing short ones so they could let me sleep. They included me in their plans. Shopping trips, long walks, their pilates classes, and going to see their respective in-laws. I tagged along sometimes. Other times I told them to go on without me. I used the time alone to look for a new place. When they returned home I told them about my progress or failure and they said there was no rush for me to move out.
When I found my place I took them out for supper at a nice restaurant, the kind that came with a waiting list stretching back to the day I was born even though it had only been around for a couple of months. When the waiter came with the bill my friend tried to pay. I told him no. “Your money’s no good to me, man,” I said.
When we arrived back at their place we toasted my last night on their couch. He said, once more, that I really didn’t have to rush moving. They loved having me around. Plus, who’d keep the apartment clean now that I’d be leaving?
I told them it was time I moved out. I needed my own space. I needed to get back to my things hiding in storage. They offered to help me move and I told them I’d let them know if I need help.
The next morning I asked another friend for his bakkie and made the move by myself.
My new place was worth less than I was paying for it. There were no distinct borders between the lounge and the bedroom. The agent said the apartment was “dynamic” which, apparently, was what all the young people were looking for these days. “Flexible spaces for flexible lifestyles,” she said. (But anchored in rigid rental contracts: first of each month first thing and a deposit as large as a dowry.) The bathroom and the kitchen had their own individualised spaces and the balcony didn’t face the right direction to see the sunsets. I signed the lease papers anyway because I needed a start. It wasn’t a grand start, but it was something.
Moving into my apartment wasn’t hard since I didn’t have much to move. I’d like to say I was a minimalist but minimalism meant being rich enough to go without. I simply went without. I carried my single bed and my my writing desk up in the elevator on separate trips. When I carried my bookshelf through the corridor I met a Cameroonian who insisted on helping me.
“My brother,” he said, “you’re strong, but two together are stronger.” Before he left he said if I needed help of any kind I should just knock on his door.
I unpacked my books, my board games, my widescreen monitor, my console with its controllers and games, slowly, trying to find the best place for everything. I reverently put my mother’s guinea fowl painting on the shelf above my books. In time I’d buy a coffee table and another bookshelf.
My friend and his wife asked for a picture of my place. They said a friend of theirs was selling a camelback that’d look good in the lounge. Maybe, my friend said, when the place was fully furnished I could have a housewarming party. I said I’d think about it even though I hate having people over. There would be no housewarming party.
While I was busy rearranging my books in the shelves my father called me to ask how the move was going. I told him my place suited my needs, that the lounge needed a decent couch. He said he wanted to get rid of the five-seater at home. I could have it. I asked him why. He said he wanted to move things around like the vases and get some new pieces for the walls.
“There are not that many people living in the house anymore,” he added matter-of-factly.
My throat tightened and then I relaxed. The unspoken loss passed.
I was learning.
We were all learning. Even him. He was adjusting to the changes, willing to move with time instead of fighting it. I told him I’d take the five-seater.
I asked how he was doing.
He said, “Sofa, so good. Sort of.”
A joke my mother made when we first moved to the new house in the new neighbourhood, when she realised permanency was going to part of our lives. No more flight, no more fleeing—a new home, a new hope.
She insisted on getting new furniture. They could afford it. My parents had looked at each other. They could afford new furniture. A shiny fridge with a water and ice dispenser, a slick gas stove, kitchenware in all colours of the rainbow. They could even afford private school fees.
When the five-seater was delivered she lay on it. My father asked her how they were doing and with a smile she looked up at him said, “Sofa, so good.” Then she laughed and said, “Sort of.”
Hearing him echo her made me laugh-cry. I told him, gently, that I needed to finish making my place habitable. He said he’d call later. Before he hung up he said, “You also want the ottoman, no?” I nearly dropped the phone. “Your mother hated it. I’m getting rid of it. It’s yours if you want it. Let me know when you want to come and get it.”
JOHN MUAFANGEJO
It’s a few minutes to midnight. I’m sitting at my writing desk, flicking through my diary, looking for a particular page. I find it. The words are written in big, black, block letters. I put a thick border around them and then I go over the letters again, making them bolder and blacker, the texture of the page changing as my pen adds new layers of ink.
I look at the desideratum of the present, of the past, of the future. The words from the linocut print I keep on my phone: Hope and optimism in spite of present difficulties.
I say it once—the hope.
I sent the words to my girlfriend earlier when she asked if we could work again. I decided we would.
I say it twice—as a prayer.
John Muafangejo’s words for the New Country. My mother’s favourite words from her favourite linocut print. She said maybe that is why we moved all the way here, just to find these words.
Then I say it a third time, loudly—the anthem.
The spell is cast.
It is midnight.
My phone buzzes with messages.
--My nigga! Happy birthday!”
--Thirty? Jesus, you’re fucking old.
—Happy birthday, boy. See you tomorrow. L*** you.
Franco calls me. “Happy birthday, nigga,” he says. “Everything you gain now, you gain yourself. And everything you lose, you lose by yourself, too.”
“That’s some sage shit, Franco.”
He laughs. “So how do you feel, old man?”
“So far, so good.”
Sort of.
The ottoman in our lounge marked us as a family on the rise. We were the family that could afford a piece of furniture which served no particular purpose. Everyone else had rickety wooden stools which rocked under weight, sun-beaten plastic garden chairs with scratches, and ugly sectional leather pieces they bought on lay-bye at extortionate interest rates which took months—sometimes years—to pay off from Ellerines, Beares, Lewis, and that one uncle in the furniture business.
But we had a lovely ottoman my father paid for in cash, a low, grey, almost-chair, not-quite-table thing. It didn’t match any of the other pieces in the lounge but I think that was the point. Our family had reached that sought-for stage of life where nothing had to match. We were, finally, a family with options. We were not constricted by our choices. We lived with them like equal neighbours, not in fear of them.
My father could walk into a shop and ask about a lovely sky blue two-seater my mother liked or a coffee-brown wingback armchair he fancied and when the price was given to him he didn’t flinch or ask when the shop closed, lying that he’d come back later with money. He was the kind of man for whom stores would open a bit longer even if all he was doing was browsing. The grey flecks in his hair made the sales people take him seriously—black men with just a bit of white in or on them are quite commanding. To polish off his imperious demeanour he had a broad-shouldered walk with a measured pace. When he walked it looked like time itself yielded the right of way to him. My mother said it was one of the things which drew her to him. “He walks like his destination rushes to meet him,” she said.
When I went with him to the furniture store, this big, wide warehouse the aisles seemed to part for him, bringing us to the lounge furniture section manned by a man named Darrell. He greeted my father politely. My father greeted him as well and swept past him towards the suites and sets.
My father’s soft and severely formal English spoke of a strict upbringing in the equatorial tropics, up where the sapeurs flooded the dirty, trash-strewn streets with their riotous and outrageous costumes, strutting down smelly alleys to crowded markets and bars, clad in the most ostentatious jackets, trousers, ties, and socks. Coupled with his deep voice and the francophone lilt that would be the legacy of Leopold’s ghost, my father’s English made cashiers and tellers stand up straight when he asked them a question. It made floor managers in department stores skittish, unsure of his station in life in relation to theirs. Was he a Big Man? Could he somehow change the trajectory of their lives for the worst if they displeased him? Was he able to have someone fired if they didn’t know whether a particular trouser size was available or when the avocados would be available again? My father’s voice was the waiter’s bane. They could never tell whether he was asking a question or compelling them to do something. It was the “no” he added to the end of questions. It seemed to suggest the possibility of a contrary opinion while simultaneously ruling out such a notion. Even I could never tell if he was vexed by something I did. For example, I’m not sure whether he was displeased by my choice to quit soccer and swat tennis balls in the middle of high school. “This is the sport you have chosen, no?” he said. I hesitantly said yes. He took me to choose my racquets the next day. To this day I’m not sure he approves of what I studied at university.
—“Literature? You are sure it is what you want, no?”
—“Err, yes?” No. Wait, what?
My father had that effect on people. The only one who ever seemed to know what he was saying was my mother.
Darrell, the sales person in the furniture section, seemed to know how to handle clients like my father. He hung back, kept quiet, let him sit down in the sofas, watched him stretch his legs and lean back. My father moved from set to set, never saying anything. I shadowed him, following this man full of choices and decisions and tastes I couldn’t fathom. At the last lounge set my father spied the ottoman.
He looked at it curiously and then he sat on it. His back was straight as a mast and his hands were on the knees of his dark blue trousers. He sat like that for a minute or so in silence. Darrell stood nearby. I kept sentinel watch over the scene. My father hated interruptions when he was deep in thought, like when he was reading his newspapers or his French classics in his study, or listening to Chopin. He once said silence was golden but every other precious metal or gemstone screamed and that’s what made them cheap. Gold, he said, never had to explain what it was because everyone knew its essence, its longevity, and its power.
I was determined to be a golden child. I watched my father sit on his grey throne surrounded by his auric silence. Then he made a deep sound in his chest, like a purr, which meant he approved. Later, I’d hear that sound whenever he scanned my flawless report card, or whenever I climbed into the car with a trophy or a medal or a certificate. He’d make the same sound at my graduation many years later.
My father asked Darrell for the ottoman’s price. Darrell said it was not an individual piece, it was part of the lounge set.
“No, I only want this one,” my father said.
“Sir?”
“I only want this one, no? How much will it be, Mr Darrell?”
Darrell did the right thing and excused himself to fetch the manager. My father continued sitting on the ottoman. He beckoned me to sit in the grey two-seater across him. When the manager arrived he was friendly and smooth. He tried to butter up my father but barely made it past the crust of his enquiries.
“The price of the other items in the set can be calculated, no? Then I would like to know the price of this one. It is the one I want. You can add a markup for the inconvenience,” my father said. He remained seated, hands on his knees, with the manager standing in front of him and Darrell just off to the side. The manager looked at the ottoman for a bit and then he quoted a price, tentatively, looking at my father to see if he was near or far from the money. My father looked at him impassively and said he would pay the price plus fifty-percent for the trouble. The manager was silent for a while. Darrell coughed.
“Are you sure you don’t want something else for that amount of money, sir?” the manager asked. “Something more, err, substantial?”
“This is what I want, no?”
The manager looked to Darrell and then to me but I couldn’t offer any help. I was doing my best to keep earning those seen-but-not-heard points.
“Err, yes. Of course, sir,” the manager said.
“Splendid,” my father said. He stood up and from the manager’s expression I could tell he was surprised by the sudden height of the man, how he went from sitting to standing tall in one blink-and-miss-it movement. My father extended his hand and the manager shook it with what must have been a hastily spoon-beaten mix of respect and fear. “And you will make sure Mr Darrell will get the commission, no?” My father held on to the manager’s hand as he shook it slowly.
“Yes, of course,” the manager replied.
“Thank you, sir,” my father said. He released the manager.
At the payment counter my father enquired about the precise time of delivery, a time many people wouldn’t be given. Most people would be told “sometime today or maybe tomorrow.” But the manager, who insisted on ringing up the purchase himself said, “We’ll be at the house at two o’clock this afternoon, sir.” It was a Saturday. The shop would’ve been closed for an hour by then.
The first time Aunt Margaret, my mother’s sister, saw the ottoman she asked what it was. “Is it for putting your feet up?”
“No,” my mother replied. “He would be angry if you did that.”
“Is it a table of some sort?” My mother said it was an ottoman. “A what?”
“It’s for sitting on,” I piped up. “Daddy got it.”
Aunt Margaret looked at the ottoman dubiously. Wider and longer than a coffee table but not long enough to lie on; lower than a stool but not as comfortable, no backing for support, and the upholstery material looked quite expensive. She shrugged in the way she did when she came to our house and encountered some new trapping of modernity she couldn’t fathom. “Rich people things,” she said.
She said the same thing about the two forks and two knives thing which was confusing even for me—“Rich people things!”— and the pictures on the walls which were not of distant and close relatives celebrating weddings, christenings, and graduations. There were some paint splatters in black frames, some photographs of a bleak, desert landscape, and some rare woodcut prints. “So this is what they call art,” she said when my mother gave her a tour of our new house, “rich people things.”
Looking at the ottoman, Aunt Margaret did what people without money do when they encounter something outside of their financial comprehension. She steered well clear of it like it was a dangerous animal crouching in the lounge, liable to spring up and savage her.
The ottoman sat like a jewel in our living room empire of custom-made or eccentrically chosen furniture, like a marquee conquest of some sort. Of all the furnishings in the room, I think my father liked it best, even more than his armchair which enveloped him like a science fiction villain.
Maybe he liked the ottoman’s colour or its shape. I could never tell. But he loved to sit on it, with his back straighter than straight and his hands on his knees. One day I asked him why he liked it so much and he gave me the same look he gave me when my mathematics average fell into the shameful percentages he called la parfum de la moyenne. He said, “You would not understand. You have never been home.”
I said, “But, Daddy, this is home.”
And he said, simply, dismissing me, “That is why you would not understand.”
DADDY’S ARMCHAIR
In my house, when I was growing up, you could sit anywhere except Daddy’s armchair. You could park your butt in the five-seater or the other armchairs. You could even sit on the coffee table if you wanted to but my mother would give you a stern look that would make you move your bottom off the square of sturdy oak and welded metal. You could sit at the dining room table when you were busy with homework but when it was time to eat you had to remove your books so the surface could be decorated with Malagasy print mats and plates without chips or cracks and cutlery that reflected the light. If you really, really, really wanted you could even sit on the floor, but you had to do it when my mother was not around—if she saw you she gave you an even sterner look because you’d be shaming their struggles and diligent provision of their children’s needs.
You couldn’t sit in Daddy’s armchair. Not when he was around because that was just plain disrespectful, and not even when he was away because that’d be akin to pronouncing yourself heir to some supposedly vacant throne. I did it once when I was little and my mother bustled into the lounge and shooed me out of it. “Your father isn’t dead,” she said by way of explanation.
Even when he was away my father’s aura hovered around the house, ensuring rooms remained neat and arranged and his study stayed locked and private. You could feel his presence in the house when he was on the other side of the world, in New York, in Rio de Janeiro, in Sydney, or in Manila conducting his pharmaceutical procurement lectures. The smell of him lingered in the house. I am certain my mother sprayed some of his cologne in the house’s rooms whenever he was away, like it was a holy fragrance that would ward off evil and keep the forces of distance and separation at bay until he returned to us and to her. I teased my mother about that when I was much older, when I could finally say something smart about the world. I said, once, when I walked into the house—my father was away in one of those —tan countries in Asia on some conference—that she had a hard time “decolognising her mind.” She laughed and said, “You idiot. What do you know of such things?”
If my father was away and guests came to visit us, my mother graciously welcomed them with hugs, double-cheek kisses, and trays of juice and snacks. She ushered them into the living room where they’d take their seats. All of them avoided sitting in Daddy’s armchair. Even if seating was running low, no one would sit in it. I remember thinking that the armchair was endowed with mystic powers only my father could harness. Maybe the seat permitted him to look far into the future; perhaps it was a conduit for some hidden power only he could harness. I imagined there would come a day when my father would relinquish the seat to me like Jean-Luc Picard while he went away to dispense wisdom about ethical and sustainable medicinal purchasing processes. For a while, I’d be in charge of steering our family to frontier worlds far beyond this one.
Nobody sat in Daddy’s armchair except Trevor.
We were supposed to work on a science project building scale models of the planets. Before we could vanish to the privacy of my room, my mother insisted, as she always did when any of us brought our friends over, on detaining us in the lounge for a prying conversation. I had, for my part, done my best to explain his backstory to her so the questioning wouldn’t have to be longer than necessary.
“He’s at my school. His father is a businessman—no, I don’t know what kind of business—and his mother is a lawyer. Trevor’s a cool guy. He’s white,” I said by way of summary.
I hoped that would satisfy her before Trevor arrived but I really couldn’t be sure. The scope, depth, or duration of the maternal inquisitions was known only to one person: my mother. Once, Franco, one of my friends, answered questions about his parents’ occupations, where his grandparents came from, what his older sisters were studying at university—“Medical microbiology? That sounds interesting. Tell me, do they find it challenging to be in such a male-dominated field? Oh, you haven’t asked them. Well, that is a pity, isn’t it?”—and what he wanted to study after high school for an hour. After those sixty minutes of excruciating inquiry Franco kept his visits to my house to the barest minimum.
Trevor had heard of my mother’s interrogation sessions and, to be honest, he wasn’t really keen to come over but his parents were going through a divorce and his house was a war zone with either parent using anything within sight as ammunition against the other: the family’s flagging finances; Trevor’s younger sister and her bipolar disorder; Trevor’s poor report; the school trips that were cancelled because either parent refused to pay for them, stating it was the other’s responsibility, and then using Trevor’s subsequent disappointment at not being included in trips as evidence of the other parent’s disregard for his happiness. Even Trevor’s friends who looked like they were the offspring of a happy and ongoing marriage were hors d’oeuvres for drama. I went over to his place once and his mother asked me how long my parents had been together and I, not knowing the lay of the land—this was in the early days, when the news of the divorce hadn’t yet done the rounds—said they’d been together since I was born. Their marriage was a couple of years older than the republic of our relocation. Thinking I was being asked to provide testimony of my parents’ love for each other I said, “They’ve been through every thin and now they’re getting fat together in the thick of things.”
What did Trevor’s mom say?
“That’s very sweet, dear. Your father stayed true even where others wavered. There’s a joke for you. Trevor’s father and I are going to fizzle out without so much as a struggle. That’s got to be some kind of irony, right? You understand what I mean, right?”
We decided my house was a better place to finish our project after that.
As soon as we entered my house my mother swooped down on Trevor and pulled him into one of her bosom-mashing hugs. She walked him to the lounge and told him to take a seat. She’d be back with some drinks. She shouted to my father in his study that I had a guest. My mother called me into the kitchen and asked what Trevor wanted to drink and I said juice and when I came back into the lounge I was carrying a tray with some orange juice and a glass for him. My father was coming out of the study at the same time and my mother was behind me.
Trevor was sitting in my father’s chair.
In Daddy’s armchair!
My mother exclaimed sharply and I could feel my father focus his terrible attention on Trevor. My father crossed the lounge quickly. Trevor stood up to shake hands with him.
“You are Trevor, no?”
“Yes, sir.”
The two of them unclasped hands. My father ushered him into a seat but Trevor missed the cue and sat back down in my father’s chair.
(“Again?” he really did that again?” Franco was shocked. “Yo, that white nigga was tripping, man.”)
My mother breathed so loudly I was scared her adenoids would have to be checked out. I made Morse code eyes at Trevor--Get! Out! Of! The! Seat!—but he didn’t seem to understand my meaning. My father remained standing and looked down at Trevor.
“You are in my seat,” he said curtly.
There was no “no” at the end.
Trevor looked at the seat, then at the three of us standing, me still with the tray, eyes pleading, and did some MatheMagic. He shot right out of Daddy’s armchair. My father sat down. I put the tray on the coffee table. My mother sat in the other armchair next to my father’s. I gestured to Trevor to sit with me on the five-seater.
Perhaps because of the impropriety my mother didn’t ask Trevor the usual game show questions which tested his general knowledge and, therefore, determined his place in my parents’ intellectual solar system. As far as they were concerned he was way out of their radiant benevolence, further than Charon, a rock of such insignificance to them they felt no need to lavish their curiosity upon him. “Well, we should let you get on with your project, no?” my father commanded.
“Err, yes, sir.”
When I closed the door to my bedroom I breathed out deeply. Later, at supper, I would have to answer questions. There’d be a long talk about white people and how they invaded spaces.
“Dude,” Trevor asked, “was it just me or was it hella weird down there?” He threw his backpack on my bed and followed it.
“Both.”
“But why?” he asked.
“My father’s not dead, Trev. If you sit in his chair, you kill him.” I opened my science file and turned to the worksheet with the size of the planets and the compositions of their atmospheres.
“Wait, I don’t get it,” Trevor said, “Didn’t your parents study in Europe and stuff?”
“Paris.”
“And they, like, travel and stuff. I mean, your dad gets a new passport every month.”
“So?”
“So how can they still believe things like that?”
“It’s hard to explain,” I said. “It’s just who they are.” He didn’t seem satisfied with the answer. “Look, Trev, you can be old school and new school at the same time. It doesn’t hurt me so I just let them have their strange ways.”
“Yeah, I get that. Even my parents slip into the plaas taal every once in a while when they’re stressed out. But mine don’t hang onto all that stuff.”
“Talk shit, Trev. Twenty bucks says your mother freaked the fuck out when Lezaan came over for supper. No ways the idea of kroeshare in her gene pool sat well with her.”
“Okay, she did a little. But then she got over it.”
“So she said.” I fetched the box of models from the cupboard. I handed him Mars. I’d work on Neptune.
“They don’t actually believe your dad’s going to die because I sat in the chair, right?” I kept quiet. “Do they?”
“You know,” I replied, “I actually don’t know.”
“But why?” he asked. “Why would they choose to believe that?”
“Because it probably reminds them of home.”
“Isn’t this your home, bro?”
“That’s tricky to answer, Trev.”
THE LOVESEAT
The theatre lights have just been turned off when my girlfriend and I walk in. We’re just in time. The trailers are about to start. I hate missing the trailers. My girlfriend knows how much I hate that so she fretted the whole time when we stood in the popcorn queue waiting to be served. If we missed the trailers or, worse, missed the start of the film, it would be her fault. I didn’t reply to her when she sent me the text message saying she had to drop her mother off at the shops twenty minutes before the film started. When she rushed up the stairs to the cinema floor, apologising for arriving late, she tried to hug and kiss me but I turned away and said, “Let’s just get the popcorn.”
We look for our seats.
J…I…H…
“G—this is us,” I whisper.
1…2…3…4…5…6…
“We’re seven.”
Our seat is taken. A small child in the row behind us whispers to his mother that he can’t see the screen.
“You’re in our seat,” I say.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yes, you are. This is G7.”
“Are you sure?”
I take out my phone and turn on the flashlight. I show them the tickets. The man turns to his partner and then back to me. “Do you mind if we sit here?” he asks. “You can have the seats next to us.”
The first trailer is playing: a period drama—the kind of thing my girlfriend used to like before she met me.
“It’s okay,” my girlfriend says. She puts a hand on my shoulder. The pressure asks if it is okay to move on. The pressure hopes we’ll move on. I shrug off her hand.
“You’re in our seat,” I say.
“Come on, man, there’re so many empty seats in the cinema—”
—“Mommy, I can’t see!”
—“Sorry to disturb, but the film’s going to start soon and if you don’t mind—”
“—then you can take any of the empty seats,” I say. “Or you can take the seats you paid for. But you can’t have our seat.”
The next trailer: a nameless animation with a forgettable plot line. Disney is trying to cash in on everyone’s desire for the good old days.
“Come on, our drinks are already out.”
—“Mommy!”
—“Excuse me, could you just—”
“Then take your drinks and your popcorn and move on to the next seat,” I say. “I really don’t mind sitting next to you. I just don’t want to sit on top of you.”
—“Mommy, can you tell them to—”
—“Really now, my son can’t—”
“Jeez, buddy, it’s just a seat. We’re all watching the same film.”
“Listen, ma’am, your son will see the screen as soon as I’m seated, thank you.” I look at the couple in our seats pointedly.
The last trailer is playing: a spy thriller I’ve already seen thanks to high-definition leaks and fast bandwidth.
“Let’s just sit somewhere else,” my girlfriend says.
“No,” I say. “I want our seat.”
The cinema screen is dark. The aisle lights are dimmed. A familiar drumming and trumpeting heralds the start of the film.
“Let’s just move,” the man’s partner says. “I don’t understand why these people—”
“Which people?”
“Just drop it,” my girlfriend pleads.
“No, I want to know which people she’s referring to.”
The man and his partner take their drinks and their popcorn and shuffle down the aisle to a safe distance.
“Thank you,” I say. The man answers with a familiar swear word. “You too, buddy!”
The film’s title floats onto the screen and then fades into the darkness. My girlfriend and I sit down and place our drinks in the cupholders.
“Was that really necessary?” she asks.
I turn in my seat. “Ma’am, tell your child not to kick my seat. Thank you.” I turn back to my girlfriend. “Of course it was worth it. This is the only loveseat in the whole cinema.”
The film starts playing.
I reach for her hand and hold it. It is limp. After a couple of seconds she returns the pressure, slightly.
THE STROKE THAT BROKE THE CAMELBACK
Her hands grip the backing, her knees are spread apart on the cushions, and her back is bent like a flexicurve. The black vines of ink snake from the inside of her left hip and around to the middle of her lower back in intricate swirls and whorls of tribe unknown. I used to tease her about them in our early exchanges. I might’ve used the word “cliché” to describe them more than once. Now, in this position, they ripple, fold, and mesmerise like tiger stripes passing through the undergrowth. Earlier, when she sat on my lap my hands caressed the puckered skin left by the needlework under her dress. I called them sexy as she breathed into my mouth and pulled on my lower lip. My fingers felt the edges of her panties’ elastic, gently, like an enquiring digit testing a scab to see if it is ready to come off.
I hold the back of her neck with my left hand and use my right to keep her waist in position. She has new ink on her neck, a quote from Camus. Dead centre between her shoulder blades is the tattoo I hate the most, the one I called the fault in her stars when we first met: a stylised scorpion in a smooth black ring which holds her worldview in its pincers.
Scorpios are resourceful. True. “Who goes to the movies without a big handbag?” she asked. “How do you sneak your own food in?”
Scorpios are sensual. So, so true. “We have to try this new massage oil. It’s got a herb oil that’s an aphrodisiac.” (Like I ever needed help to get going when she was around.)
Scorpios are stubborn. Only facts here. “Just say you were wrong and I was right,” she said after an argument that flamed and smouldered for days.
Scorpios are not compatible with Geminis. Hmm. Perhaps.
But here she is.
Again.
When her neck becomes too sweaty I place both hands on her waist for better purchase, gripping until I feel the pelvic bones. I plant my feet, lean back, and thrust harder. I chance a look down at the perfect collision of our movements. I can feel the pinch of pleasure at my tip, running away from me and into her. It’s just a few inches out of reach. I strain to touch it, feeling for it further and deeper within her. The chair rocks on its back legs. My search for the elusive sensation flushes out its quarry. She shivers uncontrollably and lets out a wail that’s both lewd and forlorn. I rush to join her and hurl myself over the finish line. The camelback tips over and deposits us on the floor. I manage to angle myself to the side so my full weight does not collapse on her. She swears. Then she laughs, deep, throaty. I laugh too.
Slowly, we untangle ourselves from each other, taking deep breathes, our chests going up and down like bellows. She stands up first. I follow. We look at each other naked, from the toes all the way up. We don’t make eye contact. I right the sofa in one easy movement. It’s cheap, poorly constructed, prone to fall over when too much weight is placed on the backing. She reaches beneath the couch for her panties. Her shape as she bends one leg to put on her underwear, with her vertebrae poking through her smooth, shining skin, stirs deep memories of watching her as she dressed for work, with me still lying in the covers, reluctant to face the day. I once told her the sight of a woman dressing is more erotic than a woman undressing. The way everything is covered up, all the inches of skin vanishing behind their armour. It’s like watching a sunset slowly yield its empire to the territories of night, the last few slivers of sunlight are the saddest and the most hopeful. Perhaps tomorrow it will shine again.
As I squeeze into my jeans, adjusting my boxer shorts, she pulls down her halter neck summer dress, the final curtain fall. She squeezes her bra into her handbag and adjusts the dress over her breasts. The movement beneath the fabric, the curvature I know that lies beneath, makes me look away. She has another tattoo underneath her left breast, on her ribs: the Death of Rats. It was another jealousy trigger for me because its location made me think of a stranger being that close to her, touching her, putting his mark on her forever.
I put on my t-shirt and stretch. She sits back down on the couch. I join her.
We look at each other and laugh again. When we stop she rubs her face like she is performing tayammum, cleansing herself of the last hour of wistful recollection which led to the lusty resurrection of regret. She looks like she’s wiping the last two days of calls and carefully negotiated forgiveness from her mind, like she’s determined to erase her breach of the unilateral request for silence from the record of time. I try to smile kindly at her, hoping it doesn’t come across as smug.
She reaches into her bag and pulls out some hair ties. Her hair is whisked into a top knot. Then she fishes in her bag for her lip gloss and applies a light sheen. She takes a deep breath and says, “Well.”
She stands up. I stand up too. She makes her way to the door. I follow her, barefoot, the cold tiles beneath echo the mood change in my flat. When I open the door for her she says, “Don’t call me again.”
I look at her, at the hoop in her tragus she talked about getting for months, the Thailand-bronzed skin on her slender neck, and her fiery, brown eyes alight with a fire.
“I’m not the one who called,” I say.
She walks out and stands in the hallway, searching for her car keys in her bag. She finds them somewhere near the bottom. “Next time don’t answer,” she says.
I sigh and say I won’t.
“Please,” she says, “don’t.”
CHESTERFIELD SLEEP
My friend and his wife let me crash on their couch while I looked for a new place. I let my girlfriend keep the old place. She was losing a lot in losing me. It would’ve been too cruel to evict her too. My friend and his wife didn’t pry with their questions. They didn’t ask me what the plan was. They didn’t insist on action. Instead they opened their bijou apartment which also housed their fledgeling marriage to me. The Chesterfield their parents gave them wasn’t the most comfortable of beds but it certainly was the most expensive I’d ever slept on. My friend said he was always around if I wanted to talk but I think he was secretly pleased I didn't.
On some days I lay on the Chesterfield in silence with my arm covering my face, and when they found me like that they tiptoed past me, trying to stir their tea or coffee without hitting the sides of their mugs. Sometimes, I cloaked myself in melancholy just to see what new ways they’d come up with to play the good and understanding hosts.
My friend’s wife was phenomenal in the kitchen. She cooked without carbs and liked the same shows I did. When we sat down for supper my friend was always a step or two behind in the pop culture ping pong. He used to do the washing up before I moved in; I displaced him from his duty. While I ran some hot water into the kitchen sink and got started on the plates he watched news on the television. His wife joined him on the couch where they talked about the ongoings of their days in quiet voices. I tried my best not to intrude at such times. When I was done washing up I walked out onto the balcony to give them their space.
I offered to chip in with the rent but they waved my money away. “It’s no good to us,” my friend said. “Anyway, we’re the ones who should be paying for your presence. Remember us when you’re famous.”
I bought them expensive groceries, the organic stuff. One night, at supper, while eating giant turkey drumsticks with a spinach, spring onion, carrot, and red pepper stir-fry I’d made my friend’s wife said I’d always been good at choosing birds. I flinched and she said sorry. I said it was okay even though it wasn’t.
I was actually a little thankful for her remark. It showed me it was time to leave. Proximity breeds callousness and my prolonged duration had upset their routines. I hadn't been staying with them for long but the strain I placed upon their marriage was palpable. My presence cut short their marital gossip time, when couples should be together talking about everyone else, finding assurance in lying that they’re not like other couples. They muffled and subdued their lovemaking out of respect for me lying loveless on their couch. I saw how they debated which film to watch, carefully choosing short ones so they could let me sleep. They included me in their plans. Shopping trips, long walks, their pilates classes, and going to see their respective in-laws. I tagged along sometimes. Other times I told them to go on without me. I used the time alone to look for a new place. When they returned home I told them about my progress or failure and they said there was no rush for me to move out.
When I found my place I took them out for supper at a nice restaurant, the kind that came with a waiting list stretching back to the day I was born even though it had only been around for a couple of months. When the waiter came with the bill my friend tried to pay. I told him no. “Your money’s no good to me, man,” I said.
When we arrived back at their place we toasted my last night on their couch. He said, once more, that I really didn’t have to rush moving. They loved having me around. Plus, who’d keep the apartment clean now that I’d be leaving?
I told them it was time I moved out. I needed my own space. I needed to get back to my things hiding in storage. They offered to help me move and I told them I’d let them know if I need help.
The next morning I asked another friend for his bakkie and made the move by myself.
My new place was worth less than I was paying for it. There were no distinct borders between the lounge and the bedroom. The agent said the apartment was “dynamic” which, apparently, was what all the young people were looking for these days. “Flexible spaces for flexible lifestyles,” she said. (But anchored in rigid rental contracts: first of each month first thing and a deposit as large as a dowry.) The bathroom and the kitchen had their own individualised spaces and the balcony didn’t face the right direction to see the sunsets. I signed the lease papers anyway because I needed a start. It wasn’t a grand start, but it was something.
Moving into my apartment wasn’t hard since I didn’t have much to move. I’d like to say I was a minimalist but minimalism meant being rich enough to go without. I simply went without. I carried my single bed and my my writing desk up in the elevator on separate trips. When I carried my bookshelf through the corridor I met a Cameroonian who insisted on helping me.
“My brother,” he said, “you’re strong, but two together are stronger.” Before he left he said if I needed help of any kind I should just knock on his door.
I unpacked my books, my board games, my widescreen monitor, my console with its controllers and games, slowly, trying to find the best place for everything. I reverently put my mother’s guinea fowl painting on the shelf above my books. In time I’d buy a coffee table and another bookshelf.
My friend and his wife asked for a picture of my place. They said a friend of theirs was selling a camelback that’d look good in the lounge. Maybe, my friend said, when the place was fully furnished I could have a housewarming party. I said I’d think about it even though I hate having people over. There would be no housewarming party.
While I was busy rearranging my books in the shelves my father called me to ask how the move was going. I told him my place suited my needs, that the lounge needed a decent couch. He said he wanted to get rid of the five-seater at home. I could have it. I asked him why. He said he wanted to move things around like the vases and get some new pieces for the walls.
“There are not that many people living in the house anymore,” he added matter-of-factly.
My throat tightened and then I relaxed. The unspoken loss passed.
I was learning.
We were all learning. Even him. He was adjusting to the changes, willing to move with time instead of fighting it. I told him I’d take the five-seater.
I asked how he was doing.
He said, “Sofa, so good. Sort of.”
A joke my mother made when we first moved to the new house in the new neighbourhood, when she realised permanency was going to part of our lives. No more flight, no more fleeing—a new home, a new hope.
She insisted on getting new furniture. They could afford it. My parents had looked at each other. They could afford new furniture. A shiny fridge with a water and ice dispenser, a slick gas stove, kitchenware in all colours of the rainbow. They could even afford private school fees.
When the five-seater was delivered she lay on it. My father asked her how they were doing and with a smile she looked up at him said, “Sofa, so good.” Then she laughed and said, “Sort of.”
Hearing him echo her made me laugh-cry. I told him, gently, that I needed to finish making my place habitable. He said he’d call later. Before he hung up he said, “You also want the ottoman, no?” I nearly dropped the phone. “Your mother hated it. I’m getting rid of it. It’s yours if you want it. Let me know when you want to come and get it.”
JOHN MUAFANGEJO
It’s a few minutes to midnight. I’m sitting at my writing desk, flicking through my diary, looking for a particular page. I find it. The words are written in big, black, block letters. I put a thick border around them and then I go over the letters again, making them bolder and blacker, the texture of the page changing as my pen adds new layers of ink.
I look at the desideratum of the present, of the past, of the future. The words from the linocut print I keep on my phone: Hope and optimism in spite of present difficulties.
I say it once—the hope.
I sent the words to my girlfriend earlier when she asked if we could work again. I decided we would.
I say it twice—as a prayer.
John Muafangejo’s words for the New Country. My mother’s favourite words from her favourite linocut print. She said maybe that is why we moved all the way here, just to find these words.
Then I say it a third time, loudly—the anthem.
The spell is cast.
It is midnight.
My phone buzzes with messages.
--My nigga! Happy birthday!”
--Thirty? Jesus, you’re fucking old.
—Happy birthday, boy. See you tomorrow. L*** you.
Franco calls me. “Happy birthday, nigga,” he says. “Everything you gain now, you gain yourself. And everything you lose, you lose by yourself, too.”
“That’s some sage shit, Franco.”
He laughs. “So how do you feel, old man?”
“So far, so good.”
Sort of.
Rémy Ngamije is a Rwandan-born Namibian novelist, columnist, essayist, short-story writer, and photographer. His debut novel The Eternal Audience Of One is available from Blackbird Books and Amazon. He also writes for brainwavez.org, a writing collective based in South Africa. He is the editor-in-chief of Doek!, Namibia's first literary magazine.
His short stories have appeared in Litro Magazine (UK), AFREADA (UK), The Johannesburg Review of Books (RSA), The Amistad (US), The Kalahari Review (BW), American Chordata (US), Doek! (Nam), and Azure (US). More of his writing can be read on his website: remythequill.com. He is also on Twitter and Instagram as @emythequill.