the dense green scrub. In her last valiant attempt, she cruises (by chance, she claims) past Strandloper, an offensive walled-off row of town houses, with a blinding white reflection from the sun on the high walls. Three strands of electric fence top the wall and a sign warns intruders (in three languages) of the danger of electrocution if they even dare to think of breaking in. She nods at the walls; you shake your head; she drives her Mercedes impetuously down a narrow gully of a street towards the sea. She turns down into a dirt road to the left, named Seaview Street, the sign almost completely screened by palm trees. The lane is strewn with dry palm fronds and rotting leaves; a deep ditch of dried red mud runs down the middle of what must have once been a driveway. She takes delight in roaring her car over the bumps and roots, as if to say: see—this is not what you would want to rent.
The property is surrounded—as all others are, nothing unusual here, apparently—by a high electric barbed-wire fence. She stops at the gates, looks around and then unlocks it.
‘Most attacks occur at the entrances of the security gates,’ she says.
‘Most people seem to live pretty much like prisoners in their own houses,’ you reply.
Parrot-blue eyelids, laden with heavy black mascara, blink at you. ‘In Australia you don’t have high security walls around your houses?’
It is of course not a question: it is an answer to a question. She sighs. ‘Like in the old days. I bet you don’t even have a key to your house.’
But your fears of being in a high security prison are soon allayed. Once inside the grounds, the perimeter fence is swallowed up by greenery. The drive opens out into a wide expanse of green lawn which fronts a bad copy of the photo in the estate agency. The cottage, it seems, is sinking in the mud of a recent flood. The walls are red up to the windows, and the roof is strewn with fallen branches and leaves from the overhanging trees. A line of brown and green mould circles the house at shin level. She parks in front of the veranda door. Two large birds fly off in alarm from a paw-paw tree’s yellow fruit. She drums her fingernails on the steering wheel. Surely her client will now acquiesce, shudder and return to Strandloper with all due haste? Instead, you step out of the car and onto the red polished veranda.
‘Wait!’
You turn to see a blur of grey fur dash past your feet, followed by a long tail. Then more blurs, more tails. They leap from the veranda wall onto the trees and swing through the branches. One bounces on and off the bonnet of the car, bounds into a tree and disappears. You watch the passage of a troop—ten, twelve—through the treetops.
One last one leaps on the roof of the car and clutches the aerial. You stare at its human face.
‘Cute.’
‘Vervet monkeys are not cute. Damn pests. Shoo! Shoo!’ She claps her hands and waves her arms at the monkey, but instead of bolting, it bares its yellow teeth and red gums. Then it swings up into the trees, and the branches shimmer as it catches up with its troop.
‘You can’t leave anything outside. They’ll steal whatever they can lay their thieving little paws on. And never leave windows open.’
You turn to the cottage.
Sure, it is mean, its windows covered with gauze netting. Cracks spider down the walls; the front door is overgrown with a fierce creeper that is reluctant to yield as Mrs Steyn pushes through into the dark entrance hall.
‘Electricity needs to be turned on. But Dr Turner … ?’
‘Timothy.’
‘There’s no phone line or TV connection. No internet connection. You’ll have to ask the telephone company to …’
‘I don’t need a phone. Or TV. Or the internet. I came here to get away from all that.’
‘Oh, really?’ She yanks up a blind at the far end of the room, and grey light streams through a high window.
‘I can’t believe the mess.’ She bends to overturn a box and a large cockroach scurries into a crack in the skirting board.
She knows you won’t like it. But you do like it. Not because you are perverse, and want to break her will—well, perhaps there is a slight element of that too—but it has something. It feels good. Exactly the kind of place you had in mind when you imagined this trip. And—most importantly—you can hear the crash of the sea. You force open a door onto a back veranda and breathe in the briny air.
Amazing, you think, how different a self you can be with different people. The stutter, the grey invisibility has gone, and you are a solid presence before Mrs Steyn. Something about her you like, but there is also something about her that nauseates you. Most of all, you are solid and real. You like yourself in this role.
With a flick of her wrist, Mrs Steyn indicates the back wall of a three-storey house that obscures any view of the ocean. ‘I wasn’t planning to rent this out, and as you can see I haven’t rented it out for a while.’ She catches you running your hands down a yellow surfboard propped up in the corner. It is dented, chewed off at the end, and granuled brown from all the wax. ‘Oh, I’ll have that removed …’
‘No.’ You hold it up to get its feel. ‘I might like to try it out, if that’s okay.’
Mrs Steyn presses her lips tightly together. ‘The sea around here is dangerous, Dr Turner. No one swims here. There are sharks … there have been shark attacks.’
‘Leave it here anyway. I like it. Ambience …’
She marches into the kitchen and peels a ‘Surf Wax’ sticker off the window with angry nails while you tour the rest of the cottage, stumbling over boxes, pulling up blinds.
‘I’ll take it for four thousand.’
‘I said six thousand.’
‘Look at the condition of it!’ You tap a broken window pane and the remaining triangle of glass shatters on the veranda outside. Oops. ‘Four thousand.’
‘Call it five and it’s yours.’
‘Month to month lease.’
‘Are all Aussies as hard-nosed as you?’
You smile. ‘Yes, or no, I can’t win that one.’
‘You won’t need a deposit, as your job will stand as surety. Our office doubles as the building society. The university will transfer your salary through us, so you need to open an account on your way back. And give us your mobile phone number too, won’t you?’
‘I don’t have a mobile.’
The silence on the way back to the mall is horrible, as if she is waiting for you to confess that you do have a mobile phone after all, or that you will relent and plead to be taken to Strandloper post-haste. But you hold your ground.
* * *
Dear M,
They say the depth of the pain is measured by how many kilometres away you have to travel to stop feeling it. I am now 9,837 kilometres away from you. They also say that you only will stop feeling pain when you stop writing to the person who causes it. I must stop talking to you in my head. I must stop seeing everything through your eyes. Stop doing everything
