The night of the party, she’d put up her hair, tucking a gardenia into the bun. Standing at the mirror, she’d imagined him pulling out the flower, gallantly handing it to her and watching as the sleek curtain of hair fell down her back. She laughed now at her romantic folly. He hadn’t bothered untying her hair. She had to untangle the mangled flower when she got home. There had been very little gallantry. He’d been surprised she was a virgin, and apologised. Afterwards, when the euphoria started to fizzle and the doubts set in, that was the worst part: the apology. Not the clumsy sex, briefly painful when he shoved himself into her. The apology was what hurt the most.
Then waiting for him to call, and realising that for him it hadn’t been about romance. He’d taken what she offered, imagining that she gave herself to many men. He’d asked her why, that night – a question he’d scream at her later, during the rocky years. She’d told him it was okay, that she loved him and would do anything for him. She’d never forget the way he smiled at her then, the arrogant smile of an attractive man used to being loved without having earned it. ‘Thank you, that was lekker,’ he’d said, ‘but we’re just friends, Qabila. I have a thing with Thandi.’ She’d looked at him without understanding, and brushed it away by saying, ‘I love you, Rashid. I really love you.’ Not yet pleading. That would come later.
She’d gone home feeling the pulls and twangs of sex in her body, and disbelief at his words. The force of her love was great, she’d thought. He just needed time for it to be real, to be something he believed in. He was using Thandi to avoid real intimacy with her. She could wait.
Now, she wanted to go back and hold the young woman she had been. To tell her that love is something that cannot be had by force of will. That you need someone looking back at you with the same intensity. She should have believed him. Instead, when she realised he wasn’t going to call, she called him. He wasn’t warm or shy or overawed by the greatness of the gift she’d given him. She wanted to plead with him but could not. Her mother would have heard. What would have happened if they’d had cellphones then? Would she have been ghosted, sent a rejection by sms? Or would he have found a private place to say, ‘thanks but no thanks’? He wouldn’t have come to her house. They wouldn’t have driven to Strandfontein beach again. Not gone to the make-out spot, where respectable men took the girls they fucked before going home to sit chastely in their living rooms with their respectable wives or girlfriends. If her father had been around, would she have been allowed to run outside when he hooted? She shook the thought off. Probably not. If her father hadn’t been the kind of man her mother had to leave to survive, would she even have wanted Rashid?
They used to talk about the university on the drive to Strandfontein. She’d listen as he complained. About his Head of Department’s power games, the machinations of the notoriously bad administration. Absorbing his discontent had made her feel like she was doing something important. There were days it felt as if they were having the same conversation, over and over; just the cast of characters changed. The right to complain to each other had become intimacy. Small talk masquerading as connection. As soon as they were parked amongst the other steamed-up cars, he’d look at her and tell her she was pretty, lean over and put the seat back before climbing over onto her.
She wondered what it would be like to have another man make love to her, be her lover. Rashid was all she knew. She’d grown to hate sex with him. The quickness, the instrumental nature of it. Like a chore to be performed, a body function in need of maintenance. They hadn’t had sex in years. Well, she hadn’t.
She wanted to go back there. To that place with its salty air, where she’d given herself up to the perfunctory handling of a man she’d manufactured. Nurturing her love and fidelity to a fantasy had left so little room for other possibilities. Whole lives she could not reclaim or even imagine. She took the exit and drove back to the past, hoping to find a path to a new future.
Out of the suburbs, she drove past apartheid-era government housing projects with their peeling walls and high rates of TB. Even with their cheap bricks seeping damp and spitting out racial hatred, these houses were still better than the little one-room homes that were built now. Whole families, parents and children and grandparents, in one tiny room. Outside communal toilets or a portable toilet inside to scent those crowded dwellings. It was as if post-apartheid planners thought black people really wanted shacks, after all. As if black people don’t care for privacy, or a separation between where they cook, eat, make love, sleep and shit.
She was on Vanguard Drive now, passing an informal settlement that had grown since she’d last been through here. The haphazardly shaped shacks hugged the hilly ground. Her people were architects and builders; they’d been recycling long before it became fashionable. The place was abuzz with people, sitting outside on crates, doing their laundry, living in public view. How did they keep anything on the inside? Driving through Mitchell’s Plain, where she grew up, she nearly took the turn to Zainab’s house. But she wasn’t ready to talk.
Her marriage was like the country. A sliding scale of failure. She had the grand house, but her home was less than the shacks: meaner, colder, less comfortable. She recycled kindness and warmth, like the poor who dig through the garbage of the rich for meagre comforts. She’d lived all these years on Rashid’s discards and treated them like the finest building materials, while needing a proper house with a proper foundation and rooms that shimmered with love and laughter.
What was she thinking? How did she get to be so self-indulgent? To treat the violence of inequality as a metaphor for her life. No matter how unhappy, she’d still choose her comfortable life.
She sighed. The salty air told her she was close to the beach now. She drove through Rocklands, past the three schools, and turned off into a side road hugged by sandy dunes covered in fynbos plants. On her left, the cold grey Indian Ocean rumbled and roiled. She followed the sandy road, passed the Pavilion and drove all the way to the parking area. There were few cars. It was the middle of the working day. She couldn’t see the occupants. Perhaps they were lovers, sneaking away for an illicit romp. Or, like her, chasing ghosts. Or hiding from the poverty of their lives.
The parking area was slightly elevated, with a mean-looking cinderblock toilet. Strandfontein Pavilion loomed on the left. This cold ocean was once a schizophrenic country’s idea of a funhouse for black beachgoers; now it was frequented by those who couldn’t afford to get to Clifton or Camps Bay, or who preferred not to feel less than the debris that collected on those white-claimed shores. Those for whom this beach was part of their past, who’d been lucky enough to transition into the new South Africa, rarely visited. She and Rashid certainly never came back here after they were married; never had to confront the toilet he fucked her in because he wanted to try upright sex.
The memories rolled over her. How good it felt to have his hands on her body. How powerful to see his eyes cloud over. The laughter when a hand or foot or leg caught against the door or the gears. How dirty she would feel later. The bargains with God she made. How exciting the lying was, and how shameful. We get trapped in the contradictions, she thought; the highs are the lows. What would it be like to love without them?
He was so angry when she told him she was pregnant. She stuck away his offer – to remove the proof of their sinfulness – in a deep dark place where her nightmares were buried. She was alone when she told her mother.
There’d been no one to hold her when her mother’s flinches and Zainab’s pursed mouth made her skin feel raw. Or after she sat in her father’s new house with his skittish new wife and he told her she was a whore, just like her mother. Or when she sat with eyes downcast, her parents on either side of her, in Rashid’s family’s Lansdowne living room as his mother asked him how he could’ve been so careless with someone from Mitchell’s Plain. It was one of the few times she was grateful for her father’s meanness.
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