Slipping

  I slide into the row, intent on ignoring her, when Noluthando rolls up—the last person I wanted to see after the drama last weekend.

  “Sekwa, ’sup sweetcakes?” my sometime girlfriend says. “You’ve been keeping a low profile.” She throws herself into the seat beside me.

  “Hey,” I say, annoyed. “Can’t you see—?”

  But apparently she can’t. Because she sits down right on top of the girl.

  “Crap,” the girl says and pops like a bubble, leaving a smoky shimmer in the air behind her.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Noluthando says, tucking her arms across her chest like a police barricade. “I mean, I know things went a little south on Friday . . .”

  “A little south” is her euphemism for getting wasted, having a screaming argument with the bartender over whether he gave her two full shots of Jack or not, projectiling a liquid dinner all over the windscreen when I was driving her home (which means my car will probably reek of cheap bourbon forever) and then grabbing the steering wheel on the highway, pretending it was Grand Theft Auto. Luckily we didn’t hit any pedestrians for extra points. But that’s not the reason I’m looking at Nolly like that. I’m not even looking at her. I’m looking at the space where the girl was.

  The girl is waiting for me on the stairs, sitting hunched, staring at the scuffed silver toes of her spray-painted Doc Martens as if they could reveal the meaning of life, or maybe a scrolling news bar, à la CNN.

  “Finally,” she says, scrambling to her feet. “I thought you’d come look for me at least.”

  “Clearly I didn’t need to,” I say. I’m not even freaked. Much. It’s weird how people can adjust to anything. One moment you’re going about your normal life. The next you’re talking to dead girls.

  “Who was that woman?” she says, bouncing alongside me. “Your energy was all tangled up. Like you’d been having se-eeeex,” she sing-songs.

  “You jealous?”

  “Mmmf,” the girl says, noncommittal. “If I was, I could just, you know, eat her heart or something.”

  She sees my face.

  “Kidding!” she says. “Unless, you know, you really wanted me to.”

  I give her a look.

  “So, don’t you want to know how I died?” the girl asks.

  “Not particularly.”

  “Come on. Ask me. You know you want to.”

  “All right. Fine. How did you die?”

  She gets a little crease between her eyebrows, which are over-plucked. It makes her look even more little girl under the makeup.

  “I committed suicide. Over a boy.” She points to a high window in the Tugwell Hall res. “I jumped out of that window. I would have lived, probably, only the oleander tree that used to be there broke my fall and a branch snapped right through me and my blood ran down the branches and clotted in the leaves and mingled with the poison sap, ruby dark against the white bark.”

  “Really?”

  “No. But wouldn’t that have been romantic?”

  “I don’t have to listen to this.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry,” the ghost girl says. “It was consumption.” She coughs, delicately tragic, like Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge.

  “You know that’s TB, right? Millions of people have it. Coughing up, what do they call it, sputum? It’s this bloody phlegmy stuff that clogs up your lungs like custard.”

  “Gross.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I thought. Busted.” She has the grace to look guilty for all of 2.3 seconds.

  “Don’t you have somewhere to go?” I say, dropping the hint like a dump truck of sand.

  She shrugs. “No.”

  “Wow, your room is really messy,” she says with admiration, excavating a book from the landfill of papers and sketches and a take-away pizza box. It’s the one on Frank Gehry. Now thirty-seven days overdue. I know because the university library sends regular curt reminders to my inbox.

  “Can you—just put that down. Don’t touch anything.”

  “Is this real?” She turns the book to show me a picture of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum with its swells of hard angles, more structured than the abstract swirls of the new Guggenheim, but still damn cool. “Like a real building? It looks like he just crumpled up a bunch of tinfoil and built that.”

  “Even the strangest concoctions of our imaginations have to do with humanist values,” I say, quoting his interview from the New York Times. I only know this because it was an essay topic. Discuss.

  “What does that even mean?” the girl says.

  “It means he feels like his creativity is enough social responsibility. He doesn’t have to prove anything by building homeless shelters.”

  “So, I was wondering. That John Edward guy?” My mouth is half-full of sandwich—peanut butter and white bread with the mold cut off, because it’s the end of the month and my wallet is bare, never mind the cupboard.

  “Oh, he’s got it all right,” she says. “Serious talent.” She is sitting on a cleared section of desk next to the skeleton of my model-in-the-making for the new university sports center. I’ve restarted it and abandoned it six times already.

  “Because I read this thing about how it’s cold reading, you know, picking up cues from the audience and just throwing out random stuff, seeing if anyone bites. Apparently he’s not very good at it. Has these hardcore non-disclosure agreements because the filming takes five hours of guesswork.”

  “Nope. He’s the real deal.”

  “Oh.”

  “You seem bummed.”

  “Well, it’s just that nobody ever has anything really juicy to say about the afterlife. It’s just hi to Aunt Mathilda and look after DeShawn and your gran misses you.”

  “Maybe John Edwards just attracts really dull ghosts.”

  “Really?”

  “How would I know?” she snaps. “Have I ever been to America?”

  “It’s too serious. It’s boring,” the girl says, lying hanging upside down from the couch, her hair on the floor, her legs stretched up like exclamation marks. She’s watching me cut and glue the balsa wood onto the frame of the model, sitting on a carpet of newspaper because I can’t be bothered to clear the desk.

  “That’s the brief, numbskull. Have you seen the old sports center? It’s hideous. You have to start with the purpose of a thing and build on from there.”

  Actually, I’m proud of it—the clean modern lines, the glass, the eco-friendly features. It’s practical.

  “I still think it’s boring,” the girl says.

  “Good thing no one’s asking you.”

  “Good thing no one’s ever going to build that boring thing!”

  “Good thing ghost girls can’t be architects!”

  “Good thing ghost girls never wanted to be!”

  We’re both grinning.

  “You know, for a pesky emo dead girl, you’re okay.”

  “At least I’m never boring.”

  “But I promised!” Nolly yelps, turning from the freezer door and the bottle of vodka she’s stashing to chill for half an hour. “It’s Sarah’s going-away party. People don’t just go to London every day.”

  “Actually—” It’s like a rite of passage for young South Africans. Working holiday visa. Earn pounds. Blow them on cheap beer and backpacking around Spain.

  “You know what I mean! Don’t be a dick, Sekwa.”

  “Come on, Nolly, you know I have to work on this project. I’m way behind. It’s part of my year mark.”

  “That’s just pathetic. It’s Saturday night, you fucking loser.”

  “Don’t swear at me.”

  “Then don’t be such a spoilsport! It’s one night. How much difference is one night gonna make?”

  “She’s not even my friend, Nolly. I barely know her. I don’t think we’ve ever even had a conversation.”

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me!”

  “Can you close the freezer please? You’re letting the cold air out.”
r />   “Fuck!” She screams the word, reaches into the compartment, plucks out the frozen chicken and hurls it across the room at me. “Fuck you, you fucking fuck! You asshole!”

  The chicken misses my head. Not by much. It leaves a dent in the paint on the wall. Nolly has the presence of mind to take the vodka with her when she storms out.

  “That girl is crazy,” the ghost girl says, dabbing up shards of rapidly melting ice from the floor with a dish towel.

  “Look who’s talking,” I snap.

  Sunday night Nolly and I break up. Four and a half hours of arguing later, we’re back together. I don’t know how this works. Another fight like this and we’ll be engaged.

  The make-up sex is almost worth it, until I catch the ghost girl out of the corner of my eye, sitting on the desk, watching with her head cocked like a scruffy dark bird.

  “Baaaaaby, where are you going?” Nolly says, as I disentangle myself and lurch towards the bathroom, grabbing my t-shirt from the end of the bed.

  The girl takes the hint and follows me in. I shut the door behind her, clutching the shirt over my groin.

  “Sex is pretty silly,” the girl says, like she’s been giving this a lot of thought.

  “What are you doing? Seriously. What the hell?”

  “I was curious.”

  “This is inappropriate on so many levels.”

  “It’s not my fault. There’s so much stuff I’ve missed out on.”

  “So you’re just gonna watch me have sex? No ways. Forget it. You’re just a kid.”

  She hunches her shoulders, like she really is a scrawny bird about to take flight, when Nolly’s voice calls from next door. “Sekwa? What are you doing in there? Giving yourself a pep talk? I can go easy on you, baby. Just come back to bed.”

  I lower my voice. “You’re being creepy and I want you to cut it out. Now.”

  Ghost girl glares at me. “Whatever. I’ll catch you later. When she’s gone.”

  The next day, I am hungover from an overdose of sex and emotion and lack of sleep and an unhealthy amount of vodka, which Nolly brought back with her, because after all that, she ditched the lame going-away party and went out with her friends. In other words, I’m not in the mood for communing with spirits, unless it’s more vodka.

  But the girl is waiting for me, playing with the neighbor’s ginger cat in the apartment’s scrubby communal garden. I walk right past her.

  “So, don’t you want to know how I really died?” she says, dropping in step beside me.

  “No.”

  “Come on.”

  “Nope.”

  “Please?”

  “Not a chance. Not even vaguely interested.”

  “I could tell you how you’re going to die.”

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  “You’re going to—”

  “Shut up. I mean it.”

  “You’re so un-fun.”

  “Well at least I’m not obvious.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, couldn’t you just—”

  “What? Leave you alone? Stop bugging you? Eat someone’s heart? I could you know. Just give me the word.” She bares her teeth like a little animal.

  “No! I was saying couldn’t you be a little less predictable? You know. The black make-up, the Docs, the whole gothic romance? It’s so hackneyed. It’s embarrassing.”

  She looks like I imagine someone does when you rip out their heart and take a giant bite of it in front of them. Her eyes turn bright and liquid and then she pops like a bubble.

  And I’m alone.

  Pancho Guedes authored over five hundred buildings in Mozambique and more on paper, fantastic architectural whimsies, partly inspired by the Surrealists and partly by African art, all of it fermented in his brain. The bastard offspring of his imagination are sci-fi rondavel curves woven into the stark angles of wood carvings and Cubism.

  He was intent on maintaining purity of vision for his students. He didn’t want them corrupted by European influences. When Malangatana asked to see his art books, he reportedly snapped, “These are not for you,” and squirreled them away.

  When the revolution came, he lost everything. He moved to Portugal. Went back to the drawing board.

  Most of his major works are designs only: storeys that were never built, stories that were never completed.

  Nolly has a car accident. I should have seen this coming. I’m her speed dial 2, so I’m the one Jaco, the witness, calls when he finally finds her phone lodged between the passenger seat and the gearshift among a confetti of broken glass.

  I’m the first on the scene after Jaco, who was on his way to the casino for a bit of a razzle, he says, after the tow-truck drivers and the paramedics, but before the cops, who have been dealing with an armed robbery in Observatory.

  “Has she been drinking?” is the first thing they ask. The tow-truck driver warned me about this, that her insurance might not cover her if she has.

  “No,” I lie. “I gave her a nip, to get her to calm down. Better than Rescue Remedy, right?” I hold up a bottle of Teacher’s that has been rolling around in my trunk since the last party we went to. It is almost empty.

  “Have you been drinking?” they demand to know.

  The hospital is schizo. This is not a good thing for a hospital to be. The historic thirties façade with its palm trees and turrets looks like a genteel resort asylum, maybe the kind of place Gatsby would have come to dry out.

  But the modern section screams of functional bureaucracy, a thoughtless graft by a careless surgeon who didn’t give a damn about the messy stitching or adding another arm to a patient who already had two.

  The incinerator smokestack vents black smoke into the sky above the prim turrets, the morass of medical waste miraculously transmogrified. Ashes to ashes.

  It takes me twenty minutes to find parking.

  Casualty is a mess of humanity. There is a line of people in various states of trauma, like they’re posing for illustrations for a medical dictionary.

  There is a woman ODing on the floor, her limbs stuttering reenactments of eighties dance moves while the nurses try halfheartedly to restrain her. There are two cops wedged on either side of a man with a fake leather jacket and a knife wound to his head. There is a pool of blood on the floor, bright red and frothy. I manage to stand in the edge of it. I don’t notice this until a nurse, too tired to be pissed off, points out the bloody crescent moon of sneaker prints I have tracked across the sickly mint of the linoleum. The nurse has hollows under her eyes so sunken they seem to be trying to swallow them whole.

  Nolly has already been whisked right in. Store this for future reference, kids, just like rocking up outside a club in a limo, making your entrance en ambulance will get you bumped straight to the front of the queue.

  “Well, look who it is,” the ghost girl says. I almost don’t recognize her. She is wearing a purple and chocolate pleated dress, all seventies retro, and a pinstripe fedora like she’s trying to bring sexy back.

  “This isn’t a good time,” I say.

  “Is there anything I can do?” the girl says.

  “I don’t know. Is there?”

  Maybe it comes out sharper than I intended.

  The X-rays come back. Nolly’s ribs are cracked, not broken, which is lucky, because they could have punctured her lungs. It’s hard to breathe blood. Her sternum has a hairline fracture, her heart is possibly bruised, but only a cardiologist can say, and they’re in short supply at three in the morning.

  Her left ankle is bust, her right arm broken in two places. Her face has split like a seam where the steering wheel leapt up to meet her mouth, like an over-eager lover moving in for the kiss and clashing teeth. Full frontal into a tree will do that.

  They won’t be able to determine if there is any damage to her brain until she regains consciousness.

  “But she was just talking to me,” I explain.

  The nurse shrugs. “Head injuries.”


  “Did you know?” I ask the girl, when we’re finally admitted through the double doors and into ICU, standing hushed beside Nolly’s bed like it’s Snow White’s glass coffin, or maybe Lenin’s, if we’re going by the puffiness of her poor swollen face.

  The girl doesn’t answer. Something occurs to me. “Did you do this?”

  I eventually find her huddled in a maintenance closet. Her tears spill down her cheeks and the end of her nose and then disengage with physics completely and float up towards the ceiling like condensation on a windscreen when you’re speeding in the rain.

  “Leave me alone.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You should be.”

  “At least I came looking.”

  “I guess,” she sniffs.

  “Neat trick,” I say, indicating the glassy beads of her tears drifting up over us and away into the air.

  “Thanks.” She wipes her nose with the back of her sleeve.

  “Can I join you?” I don’t wait for an answer, just plonk myself down beside her, ducking my head under a shelf laden with cardboard boxes of rubber gloves and swabs. I pull the door closed with the toe of my sneaker.

  “If someone finds you in here, they’ll think you’re a total freak,” she says.

  “Won’t be far off, then. But not nearly as much of a freak as you.”

  She smiles despite herself and punches my arm. “You’re the freak.”

  “No, you.”

  “You!”

  We sit quietly in the dark for a while.

  “So how did you die? Really?” I ask her.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Because it was really horrible? You can’t remember?”

  “You’ll think I’m lame.”

  “What, you mean you weren’t consumed in the terrible fire in the orphanage, refusing to leave little Becca’s side? You didn’t drown in a tragic yachting accident? Get run over trying to save a kitty in the middle of the road?”

  “You’re not funny.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “I fell off a bench.”

  “How high was this bench?”

  “Normal bench height. Two feet off the ground or whatever. I sort of missed when I sat down.”

  “You sort of missed?”