Slipping

  “Then you knew? From the beginning? This has been a setup for . . .”—his head reels—“. . . for eighteen months?”

  “No. The police, they only contact me now, while we are still in Mexico. It is terrible shock. We are very angry with you. And that’s why I fly out. To make sure you get what you deserve, cabrón.”

  I must use this opportunity to implore you to exercise the utmost indulgence to keep this matter extraordinarily confidential whatever your decision, as you stand as my only family today.

  “But I’ve seen photographs.” Of a boy strapped to a plastic board, his little face swollen up like a red and purple flower with a stamen of plastic tubes sprouting from his nose.

  “And I have seen papers that show you are going to pay us. Tax certificates. Letters from the bank. My husband has access to the children’s wards. We have a camera.” She shrugs.

  I want you to have it in mind that this transaction is 100% hitch free.

  “You’re saying you invented Gael? The surgery? But what about Dr. Edwards? Dr. Friedman?’

  “I say you are not the only one, Laryea. We make up Gael so you will feel sorry for us. So you will give us el dinero—the money—instead of someone else. But I will not tell this to your police or the judge. They will think Gael is real. That you defraud us, the poor parents of a broken little boy. They will not check. Mexico is so far away. And you will suffer for this. You will suffer mucho.”

  Write back as soon as possible any delay in your reply will give me room in sourcing another person for this same purpose. God bless you as you listing to the voice of Reasoning.

  Laryea has never felt any doubt. Never felt any guilt. But now, as the police cross the restaurant towards their table, guns held low at their sides, an SAPS badge held before them, opening a pathway between the tables like a magic key, he can see that he has lost his golden glow. His honey is tainted, has turned, in fact, to shit.

  And the forest is burning down around him.

  a is for algebra

  “It’s all equations,” she says. “It’s all explainable.” Like we could break down the whole universe into factors and exponents and multiples of x. Like there is no mystery to anything at all.

  “Okay, what about love?” I shoot back, irritated at her practicality.

  And she ripostes with: “Fine. xx + xy = xxx.”

  She has to explain the bit about chromosomes. This is her idea of a dirty joke. Later, I wonder if this was also her idea of a come-on.

  b is for braggadocio

  “Oh yeah?” she says, “Watch me.” She sets down her beer, walks right up to the beautiful DJ boy who is coaxing blurry noise from the turntables, leans over the decks and, to his surprise, simply pulls into him. Tsepho snorts in laughter or shock. “That chic is mal,” he says, saying it without the “k,” pinning her as hipster rather than baby bird. And I smile and shake my head in bemusement. But really, I think she’s out of hand. And I’m worried. Or angry. Or jealous.

  c is for cellulite

  She’s immediately on the defensive, as if I’ve bust her doing something far worse. “Oh come on. It’s precisely because it’s so shite that I read it. I mean, who cares that celebrities have sweat stains or who’s had liposuction or a boob job? It’s ridiculous.”

  She turns the magazine around on the table to show me a picture of a big brand-name star naked on his balcony, a black bar tactfully positioned over his tackle, like the prudish stars in the Scope magazines of old, which were somehow more obscene than the Jelly Tot pink nipples they concealed.

  “And yet, somehow,” she says, grinning, “perversely fascinating.”

  d is for dilute

  “We’ll catch up on the weekend, I promise.” But between work and DJ boy, I don’t see her for three weeks, apart from a quick coffee during her lunch break at the pretentious little place on Kloof, where the boys are more coiffed than the cappuccinos, and a caffeine fix requires a whole new lexicon. And then she is vaguely distant. Not in a malicious way. Not intentionally.

  e is for eject

  “More like reject!” she snickers into her Oreo milkshake. I am not-so-secretly relieved that the DJ has gone the way of the architect and the film student and the would-be waiter-model before him. But then she bursts into tears so unexpectedly that the Rasta hawking beaded geckos to the tourists at the next table starts and stares.

  “Hey,” I say, helpless. I move to put my arm around her, but it is too awkward across the table. “It’s okay.” Racking my brain to complete my analogy, “You can just fast forward to the next one.”

  “You’re such a freak,” she says, punching my arm, but smiling anyway.

  f is for friends

  “Can’t we just be . . .” she says, ever so gently pushing me away, smoothing her hands over her jeans. And I know it’s a nervous gesture, but I can’t help feeling like she is wiping me off.

  We have kissed before, fumbling on the dance floor of Evol at 3 a.m. two Friday nights ago, clashing teeth, her open mouth warm and sour from tequila. But we left in separate cars.

  “Yeah, sure,” I say. “No worries.”

  “Don’t be mad. It’s just . . .”

  But there is no “just” about it.

  g is for glue

  “Buy food, okay? I mean it!” The street kid with the yellow plastic water pistol takes the five-rand coin and says, “Ja, thanks my lady,” twirls the gun around his finger, cowboy-style, and immediately goes on to the next car, like he hasn’t already scored.

  “You know he’s not going to,” I say.

  “Yeah. Well,” she shrugs.

  h is for harlot

  “That’s not what I’m saying,” she says. “Camille’s cool. She’s great. I really like her. I just . . . didn’t think she was your type.”

  “So who would be my type then? You?” I am not desperate, bitter, resentful.

  i is for intuition

  “It’s too hot to spoon,” I beg off. Camille throws back the sheets, a little too aggro, and gets up to light a cigarette. I won’t let her smoke in my bed. “It’s cliché,” I tell her. She sits in the open window, naked, and exhales out the side of her mouth.

  “You should tell her,” she says, flicking ash onto the windowsill on purpose, to piss me off, I’m suddenly, absolutely sure.

  “The neighbors will see you,” I say.

  It’s not a surprise that we break up within the week. I tell everyone it’s because she was too corporate, too Cosmo.

  j is for jetsetter

  “You’ll hate it. It sucks,” I tell her, totally assured even though I’ve never been to London myself. “Why do you think everyone comes back? It’s cold, it’s wet, and you’ll just end up in some shitty bar serving beer to a bunch of drunk Aussies and getting nostalgic for NikNaks.”

  “So come with me, then.” But she knows I can’t. Or won’t.

  k is for killjoy

  She holds up her phone at the Radiohead concert so I can hear Thom Yorke singing for thirty seconds (I work out that that half a minute cost her six quid). And I get an SMS (which she calls smiss—like a slurred, missed kiss) from the Tate Modern, where she’s been “attacked,” she says, by an upside-down piano. “Sorry, can’t talk now,” I text back. “Working on a campaign to raise money for AIDS orphans.” This is true, even if it is just another ad agency job. As if I could guilt her into coming home.

  l is for Letraset

  The postcards she sends me, old photographs of other people’s lives that she buys in Camden Market or second-hand bookstores in Notting Hill, have my name in bold black fonts meticulously traced and shaded to transfer the letters onto the paper. I didn’t know you could even still buy the stuff. I write her emails back. They are too cheerful, and full of details deliberately designed to make her homesick.

  m is for matrimony

  “It’s just for the visa,” she explains over the phone, sounding distracted. There is music pounding in the background like she is at a club, but it’s band p
ractice, she tells me.

  “Since when are you in a band?”

  “And he’s gay. So stop worrying, okay. It’s purely convenience.”

  Even the 7/7 bombs won’t bring her back.

  n is for neural

  The way the brain works, there’s no lapse between thought and action. You think about tapping your foot, twitching a finger, and you do. It’s instantaneous. You can’t catch the signals, exploding through your circuits, mid-thought. Like the moment you’ve sent an email, it’s too late. And maybe this is why I am sitting here, cramped in economy class, flipping through the in-flight magazine without taking any of it in, because how could I? And in the blackness below, somewhere, is the Sahara. An arid wasteland. Or maybe the Mediterranean.

  o is for occupational hazards

  “Shit!” Feedback screeches from her bass, perfectly articulated by the acoustics of the little Soho dive where Here Kitty Kitty! have their rehearsals. “Sorry!” she yelps and the drummer, Roger (pronounced Roh-zay—like the bloody thesaurus), steps up to help, finding it necessary to wrap his arms around her to adjust a knob. Roger is definitely not gay.

  p is for poacher

  “Look mate,” Thesaurus boy says, standing above the ominously stained green velveteen couch, on which I have been crashing these last eleven days in the house in Islington she shares with him and three other people whose names I never can keep straight, all Brians and Ryans. “Of course, it’s cool and all, but I was wondering how long exactly were you planning on staying?”

  “Oh yeah, sure,” I say, sitting up, “Just until I get some stuff sorted out.” Like selling your snide corpse to black-market organ dealers, I think, but don’t say.

  I know a lot of drummer jokes.

  q is for quarantine

  She catnaps on the tube on the way to meet her gay financier fiancé, Sean, to go over the paperwork of their little agreement. But I only wake her when we are already well past the Bond Street stop, almost out of the city, where the tunnels have opened up to trees and houses that are stacked like Legos. I have an idea that we will take boats out on a lake with the ducks, only to be caught, laughing, in the rain, or go hunting wombles on the common, or end up kissing illicitly in a vaulted marble alcove at the back of some dusty eight-hundred-year-old cathedral, while the tour continues without us. But she is grumpy from her nap and insists there is still time to head back. She leans her head against the window and doesn’t talk to me, sinking back into the dark rattle of the tunnels.

  r is for rewind

  Every song on the radio speaks to me personally. I know this is a bad sign.

  “I love you. Come home.” I should have said. A thousand times.

  I call her from the plane, swiping my credit card and by some miracle it goes through—the card and the call.

  “Hello?” she says.

  “Hi, it’s me. I love you. Come home.” But I am too aware of the people sitting next to me, the well-padded engineer who takes over the armrest, and the pale working-holiday visa holder going back to Durban to work on her tan, and how they are pretending not to listen to every word.

  “Hel-lo?”

  s is for shongololo

  There is a psychological test police profilers use to determine if you are a psychopath, apparently. It’s something like: you go to a funeral and meet a beautiful woman but she disappears before you can get her number. How do you arrange to see her again? The psycho’s answer is kill someone else she knows—so you can see her at the next funeral.

  The truth is people only come back from overseas for funerals or weddings. I am seriously thinking about faking my own death. I’ve already persuaded DJ boy to play at my wake. Sometimes I think I might have been faking my life.

  t is for tongue-tied

  “A break-up is a kind of death,” she says, her arms hugged around her knees on the rocks above Llandudno where it’s cold and windy and hardly a beach day, but she insisted. We have fallen back into cosy routine, like she has never been away, like our relationship is a theorem that will always be proved true.

  “And you were right,” she pulls a face, “about the rain.”

  “And the NikNaks,” I add, distracted, rubbing the rock where some asshole has spray-painted a black skull onto the uneven surface. I’m wondering if turps would get it off, because you can’t just paint over a rock like you would a wall, when she changes the equation completely by kissing me.

  u is for unbeliever

  She starts a new band, Remote Control Lover. I design her flyers—retro robots and rockets—and attend every gig and pretend I have to fight off her groupies. Sometimes I do. Her belongings start migrating into my flat, like buffalo across the plains, which makes me think about how they run off cliffs. Or is that lemmings? First her toothbrush and then her clothes and her books and a frayed poster of Barbarella, even though she’s never seen the movie. I know it’s serious when she starts putting up her photos next to my doodles on the refrigerator. All the pictures are flawed, with red eyes and bad cropping, although she insists, chasing me round the kitchen with a curry-flavored spoon, that she did it on purpose.

  v is for vacant

  “I just feel like you’re not always there, you know?” She takes my fingers, shaking them once, affectionate, for emphasis.

  “Like you’re not quite with me.” Like there is something missing from our equation. Of course I’m defensive, but how do I explain that it’s not going to last? That she’ll come to her senses, that this is not the way it’s supposed to be.

  That I know this with absolute certainty.

  w is for war crimes

  “Well, maybe you should stop projecting your fucking insecurities!” It is shock and awe without the awe. We say ugly things and swear, which we always swore not to. She is too flighty, too irresponsible. She should just grow up. I am too repressed, too uptight. I should open my eyes and smell the roses. Mixing dumbed-down metaphors, inarticulate with fury. She moves out with her books and Barbarella. I take her photos off the refrigerator and burn the Letraset postcards. Someone else starts doing Remote Control Lover’s flyers.

  solve for ex

  I write her letters and smisses and messages on the back of her new flyers (skulls and rainbows) to leave under her car wiper blades, but don’t send them, don’t leave them. I know she’d hang up, but I still bring up her number, speed dial 2 (1 is preassigned to voicemail), let my thumb hang suspended above the green call button. As if this is all it would take. As if this could be resolved with words.

  y is for yoked

  The grief is a fever dream, all sweat and damp, knotted sheets. I can’t sleep. I can’t breathe. There is a heaviness that drags down against my ribs, as if a cannonball has lodged in my chest, arrested mid-trajectory, and it is the lack of momentum that is killing me.

  z is for zero

  Which is nothing. An absence. What you have left when you take everything away. Or a starting point.

  Unathi was singing karaoke when the creature attacked Tokyo. Or rather, she was about to sing karaoke. Was, in fact, about to be the very first person in Shibuya’s Big Echo to break in the newly uploaded Britney’s fourth comeback anthem—a hip-hop cover of “Wannabe.”

  It was, admittedly, early in the day to be breaking out the microphone, but Unathi was on shore leave, and she and the rest of Saiko Squadron weren’t up early so much as still going from last night, lubricated on a slick of sake that ran from here to Tokohama.

  Unathi stepped up onto the table in their private booth, giving her madoda a flash of white briefs under her pleated miniskirt. When she was on duty as flight sergeant of the squadron, she kept strictly to her maroon and grey flight suit or the casual comfort of her military-issue tracksuit.

  In her private life, however, Unathi tended to be outrageous. Back in Johannesburg, before she’d been recruited to the most elite mecha squadron on the planet, she hung out in Newtown, where she’d been amakipkip to the max. Named for the cheap multicolored popcorn, the
neo-pantsula gangster-punk aesthetic had her pairing purple skintight jeans with eye-bleeding oranges and greens. A pair of leopard-print heels, together with her Mohawk, added five inches to her petite frame.

  Here in Tokyo, her newly adopted home, she tended towards Punk Lolita. And not some Harajuku-wannabe Lolipunk either. In civvies, she wore a schoolgirl skirt cut from an antique kimono that had survived the bombing of Hiroshima (according to the garment dealer), and she’d grown her hair out into little twists that were more combat-friendly than her Mohawk. But the highlight of her look was a pair of knee-high white patent combat boots made from the penis leather of a whale she had slaughtered herself.

  Now, standing on the karaoke booth table, the light of the disco ball glittered behind her head like a halo. As she raised the mic to her perfect, pierced lips, time shifted into glorious slow-mo.

  Or maybe that was just the impression of First Lieutenant Ryu Nakamura—a street fighter in his spare time—and in love with Flight Sergeant Unathi Mathabane like a plant is in love with photosynthesis.