The driver hunches over the steering wheel, peering through a hole wiped clean in the condensed breath clouding the glass.
I don’t notice the man standing on the shoulder of the highway until he bolts into the road and plants his feet into the concrete. I suck my teeth as the junk swerves to avoid him, but he just roars and raises a panga into the air.
Joe used to say that crazies have always walked this highway. Sometimes, while we sat on the grass counting cars, one of them would wander up to Saviour’s Pit Stop. The first time we saw a crazy, we’d just turned eight. Sindi was ahead, eleven blue to four red, when a gogo came walking up the road. She wore a floral-print summer dress and shaded her head with a tattered umbrella, silver spokes glinting. She had only one shoe. Her face was hidden behind a net of tangled grey hair, but when she got close, she swept it aside and gave us a smile and we saw she had a mouth full of white teeth and skin like a baby, smooth-smooth. Curious that someone could be young and old both, we followed her to the Pit Stop and hid behind the pumps. Joe bought a family-sized bucket from Chicken Licken next door and, while she told him her story, they shared out the drumsticks and wings: one for me, one for you. Her story was probably sad, because Joe cried. Joe had cried for so many people, his tears had carved ravines in his cheeks. When there were only bones left in the bottom of the bucket, Joe led her to the men’s room to freshen up, even though she was a lady. We waited for her to come out, until boredom made us brave enough to knock. Knock-knock. She never replied, who’s there? After her, there were others, some scary, some nice like that first gogo, but none ever came out when we knocked.
Joe made lots of money from selling illegal b-diesel and renting out zozo houses, but he wasn’t like the other fat cats. I only ever saw him in ragged denim cut-offs and freebie T-shirts, XXXL, with company logos splashed across the front. Mama said he must have wanted to be a head doctor because he never did anything but listen to people’s problems. Ben did all the real work at Saviour’s: man’s work, he called it. Sindi thought that was funny because Ben was soft, like a baby angel. He had round cheeks and full lips and always wore a black beret tilted at an angle, like the auntie that hawked paintings of shacks for big bucks on the side of the road. Ben said the crazies were harmless, just lost souls looking for the way home. “They are not going to hurt you, little sisters,” he told us. “Trust me, I know things.”
Ben knew things because he was from Nigeria, which is high up in Africa and therefore closer to heaven. “I’ve got God’s ear, little sisters,” he liked to say, tugging on an earlobe.
I wonder what he’d think of this junk-chasing crazy. He’s naked except for bits of rag he’s tied around his waist like a skirt. A black cape flaps out behind him as he runs down the highway, slicing the panga from side to side like he’s trying to cut the sky into pieces. This one thinks he’s a superhero.
The junk passes us by, backfiring greasy b-diesel farts that smell of fried chicken and remind me again of Joe. The crazy comes barrelling after, eyeballs popping like boiled eggs. Up close I see his superhero cape is an animal pelt. From the brown paws knotted at his throat, I figure it once belonged to a Rottweiler. And the rags aren’t rags but a collection of dead things hanging from a belt. I spy the skin of a cat and a pair of severed pigeon wings.
The boom of backfire wakes Sindi. She bolts upright and hits her head on the bent windscreen frame. For one heart-stopping moment I imagine her skin hanging from the crazy’s belt, but she crouches down as he passes, clutching her head. He doesn’t even glance her way.
We sit against the salmon-pink boundary wall of the townhouse complex, watching the crazy chase a green electric up the highway. Electrics are slower than junks so maybe he’ll catch it.
The electric fades into the distance and he stands on a white line, back straight, panga down, watching. His breath forms miniature cumulus clouds in the cold air. I wonder what sort of legend God has sealed into him that makes him chase cars he can’t catch and skin creatures he can.
Joe Saviour once told me that every life has a legend. Before the soul comes down to earth, God seals a story inside it. To know your purpose, you need to unravel the mystery of that legend. He says it’s a sad thing that most people only think about that mystery once they’ve walked to the end of the road.
Our story began on the dawn of a fresh new era. That’s what the headline of the newspaper article said, the one Mama kept folded into the cover of her ID book: The Dawn of a Fresh New Era. It was D-Day, the last day of the petrol-car amnesty, when everyone was meant to change to electric. We only learned that in history class when we were ten, though. Until then, I thought we were the dawn they meant, and I told anyone who teased us that we were so special our birth made headlines.
I’ve always had a big mouth. Mama said I came into the world squawking like one of Gogo Nkosi’s hens with a stuck egg. I made such a fuss, no one noticed Mama’s labour pains hadn’t stopped; thirteen minutes later, when my sisi followed, the nurse had to lunge across the room to catch her.
Two wrinkled doll-size gogos, exactly the same right down to our toes – but my sisi entered the room without a sound. Quieter than a mouse: she didn’t even squeak.
For long, Sindi spoke to no one but me. Then we went to school and the teacher forced her. Even so, it was only me she spoke to straight. To anyone else, she had to spit out words like gum chewed so long it stuck to her teeth.
Mama named us the wrong way around, what with me being a bigmouth and Sindisiwe a stutterer. Maybe, like most people, she had a hard time telling us apart, even though we were tagged Nxumalo baby 1 and Nxumalo baby 2. I know because, along with the headline, she kept our plastic hospital bracelets.
But that, like the petrol car, is history.
I step away from the wall like a piece of its shadow. Winter has seeped into Sindi’s lungs. She sits, catching her breath in the sun, while I drift off to suss out the townhouse complex.
The complex is like lots of places on the south side of the city. Loops of barbed wire gleam down at me from the top of the eight-foot stop-nonsense, but there are no guards or cameras. Security with more bark than bite. All a thief needs is a foot up and a blanket.
I stand at the gate and stare through the bars at the houses beyond. An intercom, ten buttons equals ten houses, controls who gets in. The houses are all the same, five on the left mirrored by five on the right with a brick-paved road between them. I wonder if the people that live there were ever like me; if I might’ve turned out like them, given a half-chance. Maybe I would’ve married, walked down the aisle with a boy who knew the proper names of clouds, like Dumisile. Sindi might have married his brother. We would live in a place like this, locked up safe behind a gate. Maybe here, with a view of the highway. We’d be next-door neighbours in twin houses. And the cars parked in our garages would be proper electrics, not b-diesel junks. One red, one blue.
When I return, Sindi is staring at the rush-hour traffic. A piece of glass, probably from the windscreen of the wreck she slept in, is lodged in her hair. As I reach out to remove it, she turns her head. The glass catches the sun. I’m struck by how alive it looks, compared to her eyes. My fingers hover, ready to pluck it out; then I change my mind and leave it there.
Sitting side by side, we watch the traffic. Sometimes I forget why we walk this road, and I tell myself it’s because we’re looking for the beginning. Not of the concrete highway – it’s not called the Ring Road for nothing – but for the beginning of the rush hour. Each day, we’re at a different place when the cars slow down and sit, bumper-to-bumper, inching-inching. But I’ve never seen it, that first vehicle that blocks the lane and becomes the head of a multicoloured car snake, five lanes wide, unwinding along the highway forever.
Each day I look, believing my
