After dumping the refuse from her car in the black bin at her gate she weaves her way up the overgrown path, only to find a bergie passed out against her front door, blocking the entrance. She tries to drag him by the legs but he is a dead, reeking weight and she only manages to shift him an inch. In doing so, the tattered jacket he is wearing falls open to reveal a T-shirt. The wording is almost indecipherable with grime but she can just make out the white lettering on the black cotton. In bold print it says Look Busy – Jesus is Coming. It’s Timothy’s T-shirt. She looks again at the tramp, her heart in her throat. It isn’t Timothy, of course it isn’t. He is at his flat. She saw his silhouette and heard his cursing. He must have thrown the T-shirt out and this street walker picked it up while he was trawling and has worn it ever since. Marge would say it was a sign. But then Marge thinks everything is a sign.
Stella leans over the man, unlocks the door, and nearly stands on his face as she steps over him into the passage, slamming the door behind her. She slumps on to the floor and dissolves into drunken tears.
A screaming and cursing outside forces her up again and when she peers through the curtains of the sitting room she watches as two other bergies pull the guy to his feet and drag him back out to where their trolleys are parked on the sidewalk.
She has to relax. Her breath is shallow and she feels dizzy. In her bedroom she flops down on her unmade bed, feels for her CD player, stabs the play button, and closes her eyes.
Breathe in, I am a mountain. Breathe out, I am strong. Breathe in, I am a flower. Breathe out, I am fresh.
Why didn’t Timothy answer her knock?
Breathe in, I am space.
She should have knocked one more time.
Breathe out, I am free.
She should have shouted. What if it wasn’t him in there? What if he was dead?
Breathe in, clear your mind. You are space, you are a flower, you are a mountain, you are space . . .
Françoise
The bus pulls into Cape Town station in the cold blue of the early morning. Passengers stand up, dazed by the harsh interior light that floods the cabin as the doors hiss open. Tired and stiff from hours of sitting in a cramped space, they start to push forward down the aisle. Françoise shakes Dudu, who is still snoring next to her, a cloth over her eyes. She stirs. Françoise pulls the cloth away and Dudu opens her eyes a slit. Françoise shakes Dudu again, even though she is awake, this time harder. She is irritable with tiredness. As she reaches for her bag in the overhead rack, someone shoves her as they push past.
The south east wind hits her as she steps out of the bus; it blows grit and dirt off the street, whipping her bare legs. She clutches her skirt tightly with one hand, the other free for their bag. People are crushing to get their luggage first, so they can get to their final destinations.
A woman embraces a family member who has come to meet her. Joyous. They walk off, chattering, laughing. A husband claims his wife and young child. A boyfriend kisses his girlfriend, spinning her around as she climbs off the bus, fresh and in love, despite the twelve-hour journey. The driver is throwing suitcases and bags out on to the pavement. Françoise reaches for their woven plastic bag. The wind nearly whips it out of her hand. Dudu is punching numbers into her cellphone, unaware.
Nothing feels solid in this city, thinks Françoise. Françoise doesn’t feel solid. Everything is blown back and forth – the sea, the sand, her and Dudu.
“What?” Dudu looks up.
They have gone backwards. They have thrown the dice and landed on the snake’s mouth, been sucked down into its gut and shat back out, in the same place they left. They will have to start all over again.
“Am I not allowed to phone a friend? Pascal will come pick us up,” says Dudu.
“No,” says Françoise, “we’ll walk.”
“He owes me.”
“You stole a car,” Françoise reminds her as they join the throng of people walking down the road away from the bus terminal.
“I’m tired,” complains Dudu.
“And I don’t care,” says Françoise.
“Yes, you do,” says Dudu sulkily. They slide back into the language of their childhood. It will always be the same until they are old ladies with fading memories, this bickering of siblings.
Early morning commuters hurry past them. Taxis hurtle by, hooting. Once they have walked across the parade and under the bridge and into Main Road, Françoise starts to count the blocks. It’s a long walk. Dudu holds one handle of the plastic bag, Françoise the other; it bounces uncomfortably between them against their legs. Just ten more blocks until the Chinese shop on the main road, with the barred metal gate next to it that leads to a dark concrete stair case, at the top of which is their room, one of ten identical dingy holes along a grey concrete corridor.
Back then, before Lubumbashi, before the life drawing class and Timothy, they had arrived off a bus and walked this same route. Something was missing then in this city, she had thought as she stepped out into an overcast day. There was no throng of black faces, no bustle and smell of street cooking, no loud chatter of voices, no warmth and colour; as they made their way between the grey buildings no one stopped to greet them. Here was the mountain towering above them and the sea stretching out into nothingness in its beauty, but the warmth had left. In the camps people around her had died of cholera and malaria. Here she thought she might die of loneliness.
They had the name of someone’s cousin who lived in some flats in Woodstock, and an address. They had climbed the same concrete stairs.
They had started their life again for the sixth time in five years – once in Kashusha camp outside Bukavu, once in Tanzania in the sweltering malaria infested bush. Then Nairobi, then the camp in Moçambique and across the border – fifteen minutes to jump through the electric fence while it was switched off – and bribes all the way until there was nothing left.
But when they reached Johannesburg the room they stayed in had got too small for all of them. It was in a tower block in Hillbrow that had been condemned. Eventually they’d had to sleep in the passage, shutting their ears to the sounds of moaning, crying, the hysterical laughter of women as high as kites, the screams and abuse of the drug pushers and pimps. The family they had been travelling with got travel documents and flew off to a new life. When the man next door told them they could stay on only if they started peddling coke for him, Françoise had taken Dudu and they had got on the last bus south.
Now again, in another dingy room with a mattress on the floor, slowly they had started again.
“We can’t go further south.” Dudu had laughed when they got to Cape Town. “We have come to the end of Africa.”
Dudu had gone to school four blocks away and Françoise had gone out each morning in search of work. She had sold charcoal in Kashusha, she had braided people’s hair in Nairobi, she had cultivated patches of land to grow sweet potatoes in the camp in Moçambique and cleaned office blocks in Joburg. And now, after two weeks, she had found the job at the Spar. They were sorted, Dudu had told her. It wouldn’t be long until they were out of this shit hole. She had heard there was a nice house run by the Catholic Church for orphans like them from all over Africa. Nobody need ever know that they had parents, that their father was alive and well and living with their stepmother in Belgium.
She had not said goodbye to her father