She came home in the early evening. Alert eyes, observant. How had she got home? Took a taxi, she said, then walked a few blocks. On her cheeks again the dark-red blush (from the brisk walk, with excitement?), and fine droplets of water in her dense hair. He invited her to have supper with him, he’d made food, he said, she might as well. At first she seemed a bit undecided. But she let herself be persuaded. Together they sat in the steamed-up kitchen. He and the child with the slender brown wrists like Tamar in the Bible. (Child?) Cut off from the world, and secure, while sitting here. She ate. She was evidently hungry. He hadn’t given much thought before to what she actually lived on, because in the fridge there was hardly anything: now and again a tub of yoghurt, a little block of cheese, a container with cheap margarine. He asked her about her family on the West Coast. When she’d started taking photos. They drank wine and she talked more freely than before. She’d started taking photos at high school, university students had handed out small cameras to the kids as part of a project. She’d been crazy about it from the start. She’d photographed everything in sight. Mainly the people of the town. The cemetery. The landscape. Gradually she’d become more daring. Before leaving the town she’d made a series of self-portraits in weird contexts. She had lots of new ideas – the ideas just came. She was enjoying her course at the art school – it was challenging, and the little job she was doing on the side wasn’t too bad. She helped out two afternoons a week in a friend’s hairdressing salon. Did the clients’ nails and so on. (To his shame he’d never even asked what she did.) She’d been in the city for two years now, but this was her first year at art school. She’d worked hard to save up for it. Her skin was remarkably soft, flawless like that of a prepubescent girl. They didn’t talk about the guy who was threatening her, but it was there, as a given between them. He was sure that she also sensed it.
The next day he experienced a strange excitement. He was going to cook again that evening. Perhaps they could now have supper together more often. At least she’d be having a decent, nutritious meal every day.
He planned the menu in detail. He was stepping with a lighter tread; the students were less irksome than usual. Even the girl who wanted to work on satanism seemed less ridiculous. He was patient with her, even though she didn’t seem to be making much headway. Perhaps she could do something with the installation project after all. He was supportive. To such an extent that in an unguarded moment he found her staring at him fixedly, something she hadn’t done before. Perhaps she thought he was trying to seduce her – how could he know what was happening in that head. Perhaps she thought he was planning to tumble her on the leopard-skin rug that she wanted to use in her installation (based on a You photo of a ‘satanic pit’ that had been discovered in an abandoned mineshaft), commit indecent acts with her. Kids nowadays were probably warned at length against paedophiles.
That evening he made an aromatic chicken dish. Top drawer, he thought. Charelle joined him more readily. They drank wine and she talked even more freely than the previous evening. Was Charelle a family name? he enquired cautiously. No, she said, coloured people were fond of fancy names. It was a bit of a fashion, names like Lisché and Shinique and Izona. What kind of people were her parents? he asked. She shrugged. Simple small-town people. Conservative. Religious. And she? She just shrugged again. But she did believe in the devil? She just laughed, shook her head in denial. They talked about the art they liked. She was clearly eager to get to know as much as possible about contemporary art. (Unlike his blasé, torpid students at the art school.) She had a habit of lifting her eyebrows when talking animatedly about something. (Towards the end Isabel’s eyebrows were like two crossed swords – pale, like her hair.) He told her about Ilya Kabakov, whose work he was studying with renewed interest of late. (To his regret there had been none of it to be seen in New York.) She listened with interest; lively eyes. He asked her about her youth. Her father had at first worked at a crayfish factory in Klippiesbaai, she was born there, but later they moved to Veldenburg, where he was now working for a timber firm. She’d gone to school there, in the town. But she’d known from an early age that she wanted more from life. She wanted to be an art photographer. That was her purpose with her training. Had she made many friends in the city? No, she was a bit of a loner. And the man, the guy who was pestering her? He’d only arrived in Cape Town at the beginning of the year.
He cautioned himself not to get too familiar with her, to keep an appropriate distance. The next two evenings they ate together again. She showed him her portfolio. He was impressed. Surprising, that this girl, who’d grown up in a small West Coast village, with probably no proper high school education and very limited exposure to international art, could produce work that was so fresh. Like Cindy Sherman, she posed and photographed herself in all kinds of artificial situations. One of these self-portraits had been taken in a butchery, with metres of sausage wound round her naked body. (It shocked him, he had to admit.) He shouldn’t underestimate her – delicate wrists or not, she was daring, focused and ambitious. If she could persevere, she could, with her natural talent and ingenuity, go far.
Seven
Late summer turned to autumn. It rained. It gradually got cooler. Two days a week he was at the art school. The rest of the time he spent in his studio. It was not a space that he much liked, he was renting it temporarily, he’d have to start looking out for something else. He was working on figures that he carved from wood – simple, stylised figures, with strange heads: sometimes of animals, sometimes of humans. Sometimes standing, sometimes kneeling, with exaggerated genitals. Sometimes even with tails, grinning, with grimaces. It had been quite a few years since he’d last painted, only carving, and drawing. He was booked at his gallery for an exhibition the following year.
In the weeks after Charelle’s epileptic seizure Nick got into the habit of cooking supper for the two of them at least twice a week and often also over weekends. He quizzed her about the guy who’d threatened her. No, she said, he wasn’t stalking her any more. She hadn’t seen him for a long time. She didn’t know where he was hanging out nowadays. But with him she could never be sure – he had a weak character. What did she mean? he asked. No, it wouldn’t surprise her if he had criminal tendencies as well. She’d seen it coming from far away. Ever since school. Nick didn’t notice any more suspect motor cars in front of or in the vicinity of the house, and there was no repetition of the swearing incident.
It was quite a bit cooler by now, and he found the evenings with Charelle cosy in the warm, steamed-up kitchen. He started to look forward to these occasions. He took trouble over the food. He thought she was gradually getting to feel more at ease with him. He found her sharp, witty; the more comfortable she got with him, the more she dared – he teased her about the devil, and she teased back. He found her pretty. Uncommon, with the slender wrists and the dense, warm hair. Although she wasn’t his type, he found her sexy. She started cautiously questioning him about his life, about his work. He didn’t reveal much. A bit about Isabel. About the trip to New York. He told her what he was working on, but didn’t take her to his studio. Perhaps later. He was cautious. When she needed a book, he sometimes brought it from the art school for her. She told him about her childhood and about her schooldays. When she was ten, they’d moved to Veldenburg, her father had found a better job there. When she started taking photos at the age of fifteen, she wanted to document everything around her. She photographed the young people in the township, outside the town. She photographed things at random, like people’s back yards, and the food on their tables, everything that caught her eye. She liked taking photos in the cemetery of all the new graves being added every day. And of the pregnant girls standing with their arms around their friends (never a father in sight). And of the young mothers with their babies – the girls that she felt sorry for, because