and water rising off her skin. And my heart sped up as her knees clapped together and she rested her hands on the end of her legs.
‘What is it that you do, at your work, that is?’
‘I translate Charlie’s poetry. From Xhosa to English. The guests are all foreigners. Ninety per cent.’
‘So they want to know what’s being said?’
‘Charlie is a praise poet. And I tell them, yes. What’s being said about them.’
‘Are they English people?’
‘Some. Germans. Lots of Germans. Also some French. Even Japanese sometimes. All sorts.’
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ she said, the way someone says, that’s nice if you tell them you’re a nursery school teacher. And as she spoke she pointed her right leg slightly toward me, causing the gap between her legs to widen ever so slightly. I imagined what I would be able to see if she weren’t wearing anything over her legs, if I were lying on my back, on the floor, and she made the same movement. I imagined what I would be able to see, and then I said, ‘I will be getting a promotion though. Sometime.’
‘Oh really?’ she said, with a hint of enthusiasm.
‘Deputy Manager, perhaps,’ I said, and went on to list the perks I’d receive. I’d be able to change out of the skins and into a suit, maybe get my own office, a phone contract paid for by Bhakhuba, a company car was in the pipelines, medical aid, insurance, retirement funds, UIF, bursaries to study further.
She shifted her buttocks a little closer now as I spoke, and kept the angle of her legs open to the same degree; there was a long and deliberate tear from the top of her jeans down to the knees, and the first part of it had been covered by a patch, and she wasn’t wearing any shoes, and her toenails weren’t painted, and she smiled now, and her teeth were slightly stained from the red wine, and there were traces of spittle on the corner of her lips, and these too were stained red, or mauve, or perhaps purple like her gloves, and then she opened her leg a little more, and moved her bare foot across the wooden floor toward the rug, and held my hand in hers and raised it to her face.
‘I like hands,’ she said ‘Hands are interesting.’
All the while I had not moved. But now it was my turn, and I placed my hand on the sewn-on patch on her jeans. It was perfectly positioned, as if placed as a guidance tool for first-time hands: any lower could have been platonic, any higher, overly familiar. So I placed my hand on the patch, and moved my head toward hers, and closed my eyes as my tongue slipped into her mouth and I tasted the red wine on her breath. Then she stood up, and stumbled slightly, and offered me her hand, and led me toward her bedroom, and with her free hand gave me a ‘come here’ wag with her purple finger, then smiled and giggled, and when in the room pulled herself toward me, held her breasts against my chest for a second, and said ‘Whisper Xhosa in my ear.’
My mind ran over routines, trying to remember what I said when the guests came and Charlie rattled off the poetry. The smell of fresh sheets and incense was strong in her room, and I placed my hand on her hip and tried to think of something to say, but in the end all I got was some guttural groans and hopelessly inaccurate clicks. I kept on going as she guided me toward her small bed in the corner of the room, where she pushed some pillows aside and drew me toward her as we both fell down. I ran my hand up the inside of her top and took her small breasts in my hands, and ran the fingers along the flesh from top to bottom, touching the nipples, then retracting. But she was wasting no time trying to get my jeans undone, and I didn’t want to stop her, and kept mumbling half-baked Xhosa into her ear, then shifting my own hand down toward her jeans, and struggling with the buttons, and then a zip, and then a clip, and I found the underwear, and tried to pull the jeans down, but for some reason couldn’t get them past her buttocks, and now she’d managed to get her hand into my pants and taken hold of my penis, but kept grabbing my pubic hairs, it was too sore for me to relax and enjoy it. My hand kept going, I felt pubes, then went further down, and fingered her pubic bone, and managed to get my fingers, finally, to the entrance of her private hole, and played with the flesh as romantically as I could, while still trying to remember some Xhosa phrases. Her pants were stuck and she was unable to open her legs any further, unable to do what I’d imagined her doing, unable; and she kept tugging at me, hurting me, and in the end we both sort of gave up, and sat up, and I carried on telling her about the potential benefits of my fabricated promotion.
‘Why don’t we get you some nice shoes, Byron?’ Victoria asked me one evening.
We were sitting in front of her television watching a documentary about spiders, and eating popcorn. She’d oversalted the popcorn, and my mouth was already dry from getting stoned. A strong breeze blew almost every evening, and so I was able to smoke out of her bathroom window. I’d wash my mouth out and splash water in my eyes.
‘Why shoes?’ I asked.
‘Because. Well, because we’ve bought you all sorts of other nice things in the last while. So let’s get some shoes too.’
I’d decided to lie to her, and tell her that I’d received the promotion at work. And so, in order to look like a manager, I’d had to start spending like one. The little savings my father had left me when he emigrated had transformed into expensive cocktails – I avoided two-for-one specials, just to enhance the image – and fancy clothes.
‘I don’t know about that,’ I said, and left the room.
I went back to her bathroom. The underside of her freestanding bathtub was overrun with cobwebs. It was the only place in her house that had been neglected, and so I assumed she never looked underneath it. I hid my bankie of weed and Rizzla there and pretended to have diarrhoea as an excuse for constantly returning to the bathroom. I sat on the toilet and rolled myself another joint. I was still stoned from the last one.
The little bathroom window was covered by a lacy curtain with a strange elastic lining which made it difficult to hold open. But I forced the windowpane outwards, and stuck my head outside. The wind was still blowing hard. The building directly behind hers was a single storey, and so from her window I was able to see the flickering lights surrounding the black ocean. The sound of traffic was drowned out by the howling of the wind.
I dropped the roach in the toilet and flushed it away, then sprayed the bathroom with strawberry-and-cream-scented toilet spray.
The following morning, while Victoria was cooking breakfast I went back to the bathroom and got stoned again. But the kitchen window had been open and the wind blowing flat against the building, so all my smoke had blown straight up her nose.
‘You feeling better now?’ she asked me.
‘Why?’
‘Byron. God, you’re such a … Byron!’
We’d only been seeing each other for about ten days, but whenever she knew I was stoned, she started treating me like a ten-year-old child. And for some reason, I’d play right into her scheme and start acting like a fucking moron. A fair number of people had commented on the fact that marijuana and me did not gel too well. It made me a little slow at the best of times. But around her I’d turn into a gibbering fool. I’d become self-conscious, feel like each move was being watched. To avoid total paranoia, I became very quiet and completely withdrawn.
‘We’re taking your car, Byron. Or are you too stoned to drive?’
‘No. No I’m not.’
I sat on her
