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Agency Blue
Alex Smith
Tafelberg
For my parents, Jay and Brian,
the dearest souls I know.
one
How Joe Blue, the miracle kid with
blue hands, started writing a comic about
a dead private investigator named Felix,
his deeply sad widow Elsa, his beautiful
daughter Kitty, an impossibly rude client
and other suspects in a rollicking mystery
about to unfold in Cape Town – all this
while listening to “Lonely Avenue” on his
MP3 player (a gift from the mobster pirate)
Joe Blue Siyengo ran his thumb over the snout of a snoring puppy, cleared his throat and read out from the latest issue of Love Africa magazine:
At the far end of our awesome Africa, in a mini-metropolis flanked by a mountain tall and flat, and a harbour full of ships and crimes, there’s a sixteen-year-old kid named Joe Blue Siyengo, who lives for the colours in his art box. This dreadlocked township prodigy works with brush pens from Japan. He labels each pen with a very specific colour name, and he keeps the pens tied up with elastic bands in colour-groups: eight shades of Edible Green, thirteen tones of Sky, six colours of Sun and ten of Earth …
Joe Blue pushed the magazine aside. “That’s me they’re talking about, monsters,” he said to the sleeping puppies, who were too busy chasing dream squirrels to respond.
That day Joe Blue’s sisters were at a 3D vampire movie and two puppies were asleep in his lap, and his own face stared up at him from the cover of the Love Africa magazine on his desk. And he should probably have felt happy or at least a bit proud about that, but lodged in the kid genius’s heart was an impossible sadness, the kind you feel when something bad happens to someone you love and you wish you could undo the bad, make it better, make it go away, but you can’t; you can only do what you can do to make a small offer of comfort.
Picking up a brush pen labelled Sky No. 15, Indigo Burn, Joe Blue wrote on the cover of a new artist’s notebook in his unique calligraphic style: Agency Blue / Dead Not Alone. Joe Blue outlined the letters of “Agency Blue” in black, and on the first page of the artist’s notebook, he wrote: For Kitty – I can’t say everything’s gonna be alright, but I can tell you you’re my best friend. I love you.
A phone called in his thoughts.
A story was beginning.
Joe needed to work. He pressed “mute” on the remote of a gargantuan flat-screen TV with surround sound, silencing the old musical Bugsy Malone. He’d watched the film so often he knew most of the dialogue by heart, as did his patron, Zachary Ellis. The film was about Chicago gangsters like Al Capone, but in Bugsy all the adults were acted by kids, including Jodie Foster, who was a teenager then. In the film she was called Tallulah. Joe took to calling his sister Tallulah, because she was stroppy and feisty just like the kid in the film. He loved the way those kids in Bugsy Malone knew everything; they were just as worldly and jaunty as Ellis. In fact, they were elegant.
In spite of being born in a shack and being struck by lightning, or maybe because he was born in a shack and was struck by lightning, Joe Blue had a great eye for elegance. That’s why he had an unlikely passion for old movies – his top two films of all time were Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Lawrence of Arabia – and a special fondness for suave adventures and neatly solved mysteries like the ones by Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming and Zane Grey.
That phone just wouldn’t stop ringing in Joe Blue’s imagination. Bugsy flickered on in silence, and those pups’ paws twitched faster and faster. The images of the story’s plot were growing in Joe Blue’s head, and to get himself in the mood for creating, he turned on Stephen Marley’s “Lonely Avenue”, and then he drew the first “R” of . .
RRRRING! RRRRING! “Agency Blue, mbote.” Beatrice Basoko answered the phone in Lingala, the language most used by Congolese refugees in Cape Town.
Joe Blue filled in the colour of Beatrice’s overall first: Sky No.6, Dusk Coral. Miss Basoko stood with a feather duster in one hand amid piles of boxes stuffed with documents and compromising photographs, listening to the caller. She gave her employer, Madame Elsa Bleu, and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Kitty Bleu, a distressed look. Joe Blue gave Miss Basoko’s skin the colour of Earth No.3, Good Black Earth.
Elsa and Kitty sat in an antique chair upholstered with damask, jute stuffing escaping from the armchair’s burst underparts. In the next room the TV murmured soap opera sounds. Kitty curled her long legs under her and rested her head on her mother’s shoulder. She was trying to pretend it was a normal day by re-reading Twilight (even though one of her best friends, a True Blood devotee, rolled her eyes whenever Kitty mentioned that “totally uncool vampire book”) because Twilight was full of longing and anticipation and the gorgeous aloof loner of a hero sparkled in the sun, and the good vampires triumphed and it made her happy. It was comforting.
Elsa had blocked the phone’s relentless ringing from her thoughts and was staring at a photograph of her husband, Felix Bleu. The picture had been taken on holiday at the Addo Elephant Park in a wilder part of “Paradise”. He always used to say, “Kitty, Cape Town is Paradise … in fact, South Africa is Paradise.”
Joe Blue glanced up from the sketch and at the graffiti on the wall over the TV: SA=Paradise? He’d done it in the stencil style of Banksy, one of his all-time favourite graff artists. TICKETY-TOCK-TICKETY-TOCK went an old mantle clock in the Agency Blue office. Time had run out for Felix Bleu. TICKETY-TOCK.
A peculiar detachment from body and thoughts had come over Elsa – it was as if she’d been administered a numbing injection to the heart. OUCH!
Kitty paused from reading to squeeze her mother’s hand. Joe Blue filled in Kitty’s dear lips the colour of Sky No.5, Evening Pink. Her lovely skin was Earth No.10, Macadamia Butter, and the damask chair was Edible Green No.3, Gem Squash Insides.
“Something’s wrong. It doesn’t make sense, mon ours bien-aimé,” said Kitty’s mother to the picture of the six-foot-four Frenchman. “After all we went through, I can’t believe you’d do this to yourself; they must be lying.” She’d fled the DRC with Felix when fighting broke out there in 1998. He was proportioned like a bear, a beloved bear. He had a gentle countenance and his skin was also Earth No.3, Good Black Earth. His name for Kitty was Tigress Queen. He said she had luteous eyes. That was the word he chose because he wanted Kitty to learn the best and most beautiful English words, not only the easy ones. He liked to read the dictionary and try out new English words and teach them to Kitty.
“What does it mean, Dad?” Kitty remembered asking.
“Luteous, Kitty, means yellow tinged with brown; like a tiger.” He had smiled, happy to have passed on a new word. “With your luteous eyes and fabulous afro do, you look nothing less than
