member and leader of the African Kids’ Comic Club (the AKCC for short). “Kitty, I need to see you. I’ve called an emergency meeting of the AKCC and Grace’s brought a prime stash of First Girl.”
“I can’t c—”
“You must. We’re all here and waiting for you at La Petite Tarte.”
The thought of the French patronne’s laughing insistence that deserts were not an indulgence but a necessity, and of her hot-chocolate house filled with exotic scents of tea, cakes, sweet and savoury croissants and other patisseries cheered Kitty. La Petite Tarte was her dad’s favourite café in Cape Town and it was the weekly meeting spot of the AKCC because it had the best hot chocolate and French toast in the city.
“You’ve got to get out, Kitty. You’ve got to eat. I have something important I need to show you.”
SQUEAL! An unoiled sash window on the Georgian building diagonally opposite opened.
A woman in a nightgown stood at the window.
That woman is beautiful, but not as lovely as my mom, Kitty thought.
When she was not mourning, Elsa was a mathematician, a lecturer in statistics, a specialist in the “difference in dimensionalities of parameter spaces”, and she sidelined in French literature to ease the tedium of those explications of one-way ANOVAs and quadratic form. But for now that brilliant woman was so stunned and sad, she just sat in a chair staring at a wall, saying nothing except to ask for more coffee and another buttermilk rusk.
“Alright.” SIGH! “I’ll come for a short time.” Joe Blue decided to make Kitty’s eyes wide and worried. He took special care with those eyes. He adored Kitty; she was his first true love.
two
What happened when Joe Blue’s reggae
playlist ticked over to “Not Until” as he drew
Cape Town and Kitty’s eccentric friends Tallulah,
Grace and Angel, who had received
a very odd postcard which turned out to
be a clue in the grand adventure
PSSSST! “Hey, Kitty …”
On the way out of the office, Kitty, camcorder in hand as usual, was spotted by Citron van der Bijl. Kitty tried to pretend she hadn’t heard her.
Three apartments were crammed into the upper floor of number sixty-four Church Street, a building in the old heart of Cape Town which Joe Blue always coloured in Sun No.5, Sun On Wheat. It stood between a Kurdish restaurant and an antique shop. On the ground floor, behind a metal gate and a cluster of forest ferns, delicious monsters and other leafy plants, was an entrance hall with a marble checkerboard-pattern floor which housed a hat shop, La Chapelline. The building and a few others in the street were still the property of the Central Methodist Church.
The smallest apartment on the upper floor consisted of only one room and a shower cubicle and was occupied by the office of Agency Blue. To the left, and accessible from the office through an interleading door, was the three-roomed apartment which was home to Felix, Elsa and Kitty. To the right of Agency Blue lived Professor Loïc van der Bijl and his granddaughter, Citron.
A life history for Loïc bubbled up in Joe Blue’s imagination, and though he thought it all, he didn’t draw it all into his comic. That was the difficult part of being a comic artist and a writer – choosing what to put in and what to leave out. In the end, more got left out than put in, but Joe Blue relished imagining worlds and people, and making up back stories was part of the fun.
Loïc, an Afrikaans geologist and physicist, had once worked for a mining corporation in the DRC. Now the old white man was master of a reggae universe called Child of a King. He dealt in reggae CDs and ran a small shop out of his apartment. He was the person who vouched for Kitty’s dad Felix when Felix was still an illegal immigrant and was trying to rent an apartment in Church Street.
PSSSST! “Kitty, I’ve been wondering,” said the kid who sat perched on the balustrade outside her granddad’s apartment. “Was Felix’s body all blown up after he died? Was he blue?” Hidden beneath Citron’s quizzical expression was a smile that tweaked at the corners of her small lips stained Sky No.11, Blue Before Dark, by a berry-flavoured lollipop.
“Jeez, Citron, have you got zero EQ?” As far as Kitty knew, the kid was no more than ten, but whenever Kitty saw her, Citron was engrossed in books on advanced science or works of literary fiction that a person three times her age might struggle to comprehend. “You can’t ask—”
CREEAK! The door to the van der Bijl’s apartment opened a sliver and Loïc peered out. He confronted the emptiness outside his door with a furtive grimace as if expecting hostile presences in that dim wooden passage. Kitty greeted him to dodge any further discussion of Citron’s insensitive question. Loïc cleared his throat and dabbed sweat from his cheeks with a hanky shaded Edible Green No.4, Green Pepper.
“Mad Professor. ‘Dub Me Crazy’,” he said of the track just started up inside his shop, which had been closed for the past few days. He laughed for a while, then stopped when his lungs seized. Breathing with asthmatic difficulty, he said, “Kitty, where’s Elsa? There is something I need to—”
Knowing that van der Bijl was also one of Felix’s clients and dreading that she might hear another request for information, Kitty interrupted him. “I’m so sorry, Professor, I’m in a terrible hurry. I’ll be back very soon. I’ll speak to my mother, and we – I mean she – can schedule a meeting for tomorrow and in the meantime I’ll – I mean she’ll – go through your file.”
The professor cocked his head and blinked, curious. Before he could say more, Kitty hastened down the stairs. She’d pressed the “on” button and filmed the moving tips of her cowboy boots filled in with Sky No.4, Violet Before Moonrise, as if they contained toes other than her own. Usually they did; they were her mother’s boots. Kitty liked wearing them, though. They made her feel older and more powerful. The stairs ended, the pointed shoes moved from wood to marbled floor.
TIP-CLIP-TIP-CLIP-TIP-CLIP-PLASH THUD! “Oh, la la!” said a woman’s voice.
In the entrance hall Kitty and her camera had collided with a bunch of moving flowers. Behind the bunch was Mrs Gumede, once an opera singer and now the owner of the hat shop.
Mrs Gumede was carrying a stone vase of white lilies. After skirting around Kitty, Mrs Gumede set the arrangement on a column at the entrance to her shop. Kitty had not seen her since Felix’s death.
“Haven’t seen your mother all week,” Mrs Gumede said. She tried to dodge the relentless lens of Kitty’s camcorder as it zoomed in on her lips. It was true, Elsa had not left the upper floor of number sixty-four since Chief Detective Dupeer of the Caledon Square Police Station had delivered the grim news. She had not even attended the service for Felix’s cremation. Kitty had to keep the urn with her dad’s ashes in her bedroom because when her mother first saw it, she broke down in a fit of screaming. After a doctor had come to tranquillise her, Elsa had instructed Kitty: “Keep those ashes out of my sight. Ashes are of no use to me: I want my husband alive, not in a jar.”
