you see that your mother? She can never mind her own business,” she whispered to her sleeping godson. “Likes to pretend she’s a white woman, calling you ‘Jeremy’ instead of your real name. Sellout. Please ask her if she got permission from your Igbo father who named you himself before she started calling you fwehn-fwehn. Let her answer that one first.”
Connie laughed once more. “Leave my house, oh, rubbish girl!”
After Vee left, she made straight for home. A quiet evening with a full belly was what she now craved, preferably in a dark room where she could zone out uninterrupted.
She wasn’t surprised at running into Joshua Allen on the street. Her reaction to seeing him was the surprise; she’d almost forgotten how uplifting it was to see another friendly face who knew her unfriendly past. Over the four years she’d known him, his exterior hadn’t changed at all. Height and build perfect for swimming or track, but wasted on a joker who refused to take any sport seriously for long. Dark, sloe-shaped eyes that carried his finest of smiles. That infuriating shit-eating grin when he could be bothered. Today typified the Allen ambiance, materialising in the form of a soggy pile of crap next to a nameless beautiful woman.
Oh my God, he’s thirty, Vee thought suddenly. About five weeks ago. Time was growing him up. It was depressing to think that their lives had been, and would keep on, careening down chaotic paths, while in many ways they were as prepared for it as children. Broken dolls all of them. Joshua had first come to Cape Town on a quest for the Holy Grail, the unattainable ideal of a complete family. She’d come to follow her heart. Fat lot of good the pursuit had done either of them. Their faith in the picture-perfect was now irreparably injured.
His mother was an African-American history professor who had fallen for a Hindu anti-apartheid activist exiled in the USA. Together they’d had a son. When the democratic tide turned against the apartheid regime, the exiles began to trickle home. His old man returned, married respectably within the Indian community and time withered the American connection. Joshua was six when his father returned to South Africa for good.
Armed with a predisposition for closure, Joshua had boarded a plane in his early twenties. He’d had no expectations of a happy reunion, and hadn’t gotten one. The final slap in the face came when an uninterested family on the African continent refused to acknowledge his existence and a loving one in America kindly told him to bury the past for peace of mind. Older and wiser, he’d now relocated to South Africa because he was drawn to it and wanted to stop finding excuses to visit. He would never admit it, but Vee knew he still drew secret pleasure from the proximity to his father. Playing the hovering nightmare, the illegitimate pin itching to burst the well-constructed bubble of his father’s life, appealed to Joshua’s devilish side.
Vee idled the engine at a red traffic light, battling a fresh rush of dejection. The feelings of sadness and anger brought about by Joshua Allen’s reappearance came from the memory of how she’d come into her current predicament. If she was being completely unfair – and driving alone in her own car on a cold winter evening allowed her to do whatever the hell she wanted – then she could say that in a roundabout way it was all Joshua Allen’s fault. He was friends with Titus Wreh, and Titus Wreh had broken her heart into a million pieces. Had Joshua not been living in South Africa, maybe neither she nor Titus would have decided to leave New York, which had spelled the beginning of the end of their relationship.
Fine, it was a stretch and even she knew it. Titus had been looking for a new job and a change of scene – mainly to leave the United States. Dealing with New York City and family business can make a person jaded; Titus had had his fill and wanted to break out on his own. A Liberian-American hybrid, Titus talked of “going home”, although since he had lived three-quarters of his life in the US, Vee wondered which home he meant and if he fully appreciated what it consisted of. She was near the end of her degree, the world was her oyster and Vee hadn’t minded either way. She’d landed a temporary position with an independent news agency to complement Titus’s new job with Deloitte and they’d packed their bags.
Months later, she was engaged and seeing out the final weeks of her contract. She hadn’t thought about lining up a more permanent position or even if she wanted one after she was married, that is, if she really wanted to be married at all. It turned out she hadn’t thought about a lot of things, and life had a way of making hard choices on your behalf. Stretched to the limit by freelancing and planning a wedding, she passed out in extreme pain one sunny afternoon and woke up post-surgery minus a foetus and a chunk of an ovary.
The emergency procedure had been performed to remedy an ectopic pregnancy she hadn’t been aware of. It had also uncovered an ovarian cyst, a complication. Under pressure, Titus, appointed next of kin, gave consent for the surgery after consultation with the doctors. He later interpreted her withdrawal from him to be anger, that she secretly blamed and despised him for making the decision on her behalf. After the trauma of the miscarriage and operation, she’d crumbled. Soon after, so did their relationship.
Her friends and relatives postulated depression, saying that all had been too huge a blow. The gossips accused her of wallowing in aimless self-pity and lacking the nerve to stop her life from crumbling around her ears. They were all very wrong and yet very right. Semi-conscious, she watched as an engagement ended and job offers dried up, and friends stopped plying her with platitudes and financial tide-overs. Eventually, self-preservation won out, and she hobbled back towards the light. A girl’s gotta eat.
“What am I ’sposed to say when I’m all choked up and you’re okay? I’m falling to piiieeeces yeah,” crooned Danny O’Donoghue of The Script, his heart breaking unevenly all over 5FM radio.
“I hear you, my friend,” Vee muttered, switching it off. Nearly everyone was stronger than they gave themselves credit for, but hardly anyone wanted to suffer through finding out exactly what they were made of. Based on past experience, she knew she could survive the blizzard of blows that had rained on both her personal and professional life in the past eighteen months. She’d been through worse. But had anyone told her she’d also have to soldier through the past six months of heartache and confusion without the man she thought was her life, she’d have laughed in their faces. Every hurt dug that much deeper into her flesh without Titus by her side.
Twenty-seven had been young. It had been the start of life in this country and had the nerve to still be dreamy, dumb and very young. Twenty-seven was only a hop, skip and jump from twenty-nine, but had involved far too much exertion. Falling down. Walking in the same spot. Blood, sweat and tears. Twenty-nine, when it rolled around in a month, would be wiser. And more bitter, lonely and sexually frustrated. Definitely poorer. Thirty and beyond was bound to be a roaring hussy with venereal disease.
The Toyota slid into the garage, and she slammed the door on exit, hoping to bring her dog running. It was a blessing to have a place all her own. The tiny household had begun with two occupants, and she’d gotten stuck with the smaller bedroom and on-street parking. Mia had been a great girl, with wild blonde hair and spiritual-guru leanings, but time had revealed her to be about ninety degrees short of a right angle. Never had Vee met another person less suited to the sane and standard rules of cohabitation. Every five minutes some new force channelled through Mia’s being, fuelling stranger and stranger antics. When she consigned herself to a strict sushi diet, acquired two snobby cats called Ginger and Wasabi and went around breathing soy sauce fumes at people all day, Vee had had enough.
Luckily, Mia was a peaceful soul who shunned confrontation. She noticed Vee’s energy pulsed with an edge of resentment, and to preserve the friendship had decided to move to Observatory. Now the big bedroom was all Vee’s, as were the small bedroom (study-library) and the parking space and the crooked tree in the tiny square of garden with the braai stand and the orange picket fence. The rent was all hers, too.
She removed two items from the postbox without bothering to look them over.
