Gumede covered her mouth with her hand and shook her head. Her countenance contrived a death-mask horror.
She must know, thought Kitty, wishing she hadn’t agreed to emerge from her safe haven. Kitty kept walking, hoping to glide by the inquisitive old harridan.
HISS! “Sso.” Two Mrs Gumedes uttering a sibilant “s” clutched crucifixes hanging from their necklaces, crossed themselves and shook their heads. “It is a terrible thing your father has done, Kitty. I am very sorry for you,” they said. One was flesh and smelled of musty bdellium, the other was glass, a reflection of Mrs Gumedes in a gilded mirror that stood against a wall. “I want to know everything,” they said in a whisper, as if it was all too sinful to say out loud. “How did it happen? Tell me.”
In the viewfinder, Kitty could see herself nodding in the mirror, and the self she saw was focusing on the self she saw to infinity and all of those selves were certain that there must be a mistake. What happened couldn’t have happened. It couldn’t be real, it couldn’t be. No, it was impossible.
Joe Blue knew how it felt to feel like Kitty felt, to wonder how on earth a thing that happened had happened and why. He knew how it felt to be confounded and perplexed by one of life’s bad turns, to think it must be impossible, surely. Surely?
His mom and dad had been killed in a taxi accident. His mom had been pregnant at the time; it would have been another girl, some doctor had said, and if it had been just a few weeks later, maybe that girl would have survived. It all took place on just another rainy day along the N2 to Khayelitsha, and it was just another accident like the many in the news that most people say shame and how horrible about, but in truth can’t spare a care over because they’re maxed to the limit with their own worries.
But Joe Blue couldn’t believe it: one day his parents were there telling stories, giving hugs, eating dinner, smiling, there, there to speak to about things of consequence and things of no consequence, and in the tiniest instant, on account of the smallest of mistakes, a bad decision, carelessness, on account of a driver being too much in a hurry, the next day his parents and his unborn sister were forever gone. Joe Blue often thought of that kid, hurried from this life; his sister, the angel.
Outside Kitty’s window, December was bereft of its summer. A few days before, the temperature had been close on forty degrees, and then the south-easter came up and after that winter seemed to have returned.
Joe Blue drew a confused heaven in colours of Sky No.10, Summer Noon, and Sky No.12, Dirty Cumulonimbus. Earlier there had been rain. Chairs and paving glistened with water drops the size of tears. It was rush hour at the market. Stalls with tables of oddments and antiques bustled with shoppers.
THWIPPP! A waiter from Café Mozart tossed starched gingham cloths over tables beneath umbrellas. Another put bunches of orange and pink silk tiger lilies into the rope fence that cordoned off the eatery from the street. Kitty shivered as she walked by a table piled with vintage summer dresses, shoes and clutch bags. The stall proprietor was busy with a customer and didn’t notice her, a relief; she had escaped another pair of sorrowful eyes telling her how awful the situation was.
CLINK-SUCK-MMMM. “That’s so good.”
It distressed Kitty to see a pair of lovers sharing a malva pudding with custard in the Africa Image café’s outside enclosure: her parents used to do that, and she realised they never would again. Umojah’s music floated from the café with striped walls (Sky No.5, Evening Pink; Edible Green No.6, Lime Skins; and Sun No.4, Sunset Orange), multi-printed Congolese table cloths and Zambia Lili coffee percolating. Jolly coloured strings of plastic bottle tops hung like bead curtains around the enclosure and fluttered in spasmodic breaths from the wind known as the Cape Doctor. The bright café with its flamingo caged in papier mâché was unbearably happy for Kitty, whose mood teetered between disbelief and devastation.
At the antiquarian book stall outside Bukhara, the Indian restaurant, she made the mistake of stopping to look, as was her usual habit, at the leather-bound poetry books with gilt-panelled spines and foxed endpapers. Browsing through these old books had been one of Felix’s cherished pastimes.
“Poor Elsa,” said the white mama tending the stall. She looked like Joe Blue’s art teacher at the University of Cape Town and was dressed in a sleeveless chiffon ball gown which showed her arms, plump enough to jiggle. The mama bustled between her table and that of the neighbouring silver-and-linen seller, and came to give Kitty a hug. “Poor, Kitty, I’m so sorry. It’s horrible. I just don’t understand. How did it happen?”
Instead of answering the question, Kitty held up her camcorder, superzoomed to the dried lipstick flesh of that woman’s mouth, and said: “Ask me again. I’m making a documentary called How Horrible.”
The manager at Café Mozart spotted Kitty too. She came running over and would have hugged Kitty if the camera hadn’t got in the way. “You’ll be okay, Kitty.” The manager at Café Mozart in the comic looked a lot like the real manager at Joe Blue’s Café Mozart where he often went to play cards with his patron, Ellis, his brother Ebenezer and his girlfriend. “Shame, Kitty,” the manager of Café Mozart said. “Tell me, what happened?”
Didn’t they realise that the last thing Kitty felt like doing was talk about it? People had been phoning and they all asked the same questions. At first she had wanted to talk about it to process what she couldn’t believe, but now her brain did not want to go through it all again. “Mrs Gumede was asking about it too.”
The manager of Café Mozart tried to look over the lens and at Kitty, but Kitty didn’t want to face her and held the camera higher, so the manager said on the screen: “Your dad was a prince of a man. Don’t you worry what that gossip with her head in the hats says.”
The bookstall mama nodded. “She’s a snoop, that woman. For five years Felix bought books from me and I know he was a good man.”
Kitty supposed that by now everyone at the market must know the circumstances of Felix’s death, no doubt due to Mrs Gumede’s big mouth. Floors and walls were thin in their Victorian apartment block. That’s why Kitty knew quite a bit about her dad’s business, and that’s why at night they used to fall asleep to the sound of reggae on the left and belly-dancing music on the right, and the smells of shish kebab and nan bread cooking in the restaurant in the next block. Mrs Gumede must have overheard the discussion with Detective Dupeer. On more than one occasion, Felix had remarked that he never conducted meetings at the Agency Blue office because he’d once caught Mrs Gumede eavesdropping.
“Here,” said the bookstall mama. She brought out a bag of chocolate brownies. “I made them to cheer you up.”
Kitty lowered the camera. “That was very sweet. Thanks.”
Kitty moved on from the bookseller. She turned left into Burg Street and walked, staring down at the camera’s screen, towards Greenmarket Square. In better times she’d relished strolling around the cobblestoned square between the drum-sellers and she’d always enjoyed the smells of the place too. But that day they were cloying and made her queasy: the market’s teak menagerie of carved elephants, rhinos, giraffes, leopards and hippos, the stink of Nugget – the boot polish used to shine them up – and the strawy reek of the appendages around worm-eaten tribal masks, musty kente cloth, frangipani incense and then samoosas and hotdogs with cheap ketchup and oily bunny-chow-filling – onions and stockfish and curry – being fried over a Cadac stove at a makeshift take-away stand. That day, the sheer life of it all was suffocating.
Joe Blue drew Kitty gasping in a cloud of wafting scents and sadness as she looked up at the Central Methodist Church. He made its High Victorian arches and spires especially jagged, almost claw-like
