He escapes from the clinic. Weeks of complaining about his feet, aching, sore to walk on, walking around the rehab wincing. There were discussions, in the three years he’s been in rehab he has tried to run twice before – but now his feet are so sore. He walks barefoot around the rehab, wincing when anyone looks at him.
Quartz Street is cut in half by Highpoint. A husk of an apartment building atop a husk of a shopping centre, with a supermarket that is incredibly easy to shoplift from -if, like me, you are white. On the street above – Highpoint is in Hillbrow, just before the brow of the hill, on one side Quartz is a walkway, with stalls down the middle and hastily occupied and abandoned shops down the sides.
From the crisp cavern of the last of the stars I am woken with half a mug of semi warm sweet black tea. I can feel the warmth of the security hut lingering in this incursion of hands into my nest. There is a message for me on his phone – charging in the hut, I must come, he leaves shift in ten.
I don’t need to read Melinda Ferguson’s latest pity porn memoir “Swift” to know it’s shit. The promo interview headline in last week’s Business Day says it all. Look it up, I’m not going to give them the fucking clicks. And no, I didn’t bother to read the interview either.
He arrived back beaten. It was obvious the beating was fake. We had pooled our money and he had gone to buy from the dealer who sells stone. He was gone for four hours. I had already hustled more and smoked and was merely simmeringly pissed off. Tell me you smoked it all and it’s fine. He clung on to the story and I had no choice but to act like I believed him. For whatever reason he needed that freedom. Here, in the clutch of this transient community, you get aligned with acting like you believe and working with the remnants.
By the swimming pool park, at the far crossroads, looking at the street names, today’s using buddy says, “Who was Percy Osborne anyway?”
And I say, “Yeah and Matthews Meyiwa?”
“But,” shrugs Mickey Mouse, “Adrian must have been the most badass, no last name, like Tupac.”
She dies amongst the lush tall green grass and the trash of an unclaimed urban pathway winding cramped between two buildings, her last breath choking out bloody through split lips and sobs of, ”I didn’t take it, please, het nie gevang, he’ nie.” A theory had surfaced that she was there when the phone went missing and it gained life, became a surety. Her whole life for a phone theft theoretical.
Hands locked behind our heads we are sitting on the cold concrete floor in front of each others laps, our elbows on the knees of the person behind us, stale invective spits from the cops searching the curtains, the mattresses, every broken item in the room is broken, they search the door frame cracks for crack, cracks in everything – they tear the newspaper coverings on the broken windows letting the light in.
Notes
Phezula! and he’s running with the genius of bravado, snatched out of her hand as she sat in the minibus hurtling down through Hillbrow – decaying concrete, decaying daylight, toward Bree street rank. The taxi pauses for a minute and he lightening grabs through the window the cellphone she’s paying off, her whole life is on that phone, and he vanishes through the cars and alleys and filth. There isn’t even the time for anyone to scream Vimba.