I walked up the steps and rang Victoria’s doorbell.
She opened and hugged me. I put my arms around her body and could feel her ribs through the thin T-shirt, her thin flesh. I could smell the soapy clean deodorant scent. She seemed to favour subtle perfumes to scent her body. As she stepped away from me, she kept her hands extended: they were still wrapped in the purple gloves and felt smooth between my fingers. She smiled.
‘Why is that article on the gate?’ I asked her.
‘It’s just so – well you should be anyway, all the time – but it’s just so that people are careful, and lock, and that sort of thing,’ she said while closing the door and pulling the security latch into place.
‘Would you like?’ She pointed toward the green leather couch in the corner of her shoebox-shaped yellow lounge. I was feeling much more relaxed than on my first visit. The first time I’d been so preoccupied with hiding my feet that I’d barely taken in the surroundings. I noticed now that there were a number of large, framed pictures hanging on her walls. One of a naked black man, solid build, leaning against a stripper’s pole, another of a young girl in a business suit, holding a cellphone in her hand.
I sat down.
There was incense burning in the room, I saw the packet resting on the windowsill, it was opium-scented, and so I guessed – although I did not know for certain – the room now smelt like an opium den. I stood up and looked out the window, and was able to see the narrow side road where I’d parked my car. Some workers were making their way down the street, dressed in blue overalls and shouting loudly in a language I didn’t understand.
I sat down again, and she came in with a large brown envelope in her hands and a bottle of wine tucked under her armpit.
‘I’ll just quickly get the glasses,’ she said, then scampered out the room after dumping the contents of her hands next to a fruit bowl in the centre of the glass table in the centre of her lounge.
‘Would you like to see them – the photos, that is?’ she asked as she came back in with a glass in either hand.
‘Yes,’ I said.
She poured us each a glass of red wine, then sat down next to me on the couch, not close though, perhaps half a metre. I couldn’t smell her.
She took them out of the envelope and handed them to me.
‘They are small, well smaller than they will be when I blow the nice ones up. We can decide together.’
I flipped through them. There was Byron, holding his leather skins down against his legs as the wind blew up his skirt, and there was Byron running his fingers through his hair. But of course what I looked for was not Byron’s skins or his hair or his hands. Of course what I looked for was his feet. They were there, of course. I could not say that the size difference wasn’t noticeable, it was. But it was pleasing to the eye. The right was larger, the left smaller, but it looked somehow as if the feet belonged to two separate stages of development, as if the right belonged to the present, and the left to the past: to Byron the child. It looked as if the size difference was a deliberate artistic decision, instead of a subject deformity. She hadn’t violated the sacred, prenuptial understanding: the foot was there, and fine, and normal.
So we spoke, and she told me about the project, and how her father owned an art gallery, and how she was going to have her own exhibition with a collection of photographs, some of me, and some of the subjects on the wall – she pointed with her hand – and some that she had yet to take.
‘Do you like them?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
She shifted her weight slightly on the couch, and for the first time, I could see, beneath the thin material of her white T-shirt, that she wasn’t wearing a bra. To be sure, her breasts were not large, but now from the angle at which she was sitting, and something that the light was doing, I was able to see her pink nipples against the pale top. I felt as if I were being rude to watch, to stare, when I had not been invited; but then I noticed that she was turning herself toward me, inflating her chest slightly, directing my attention to the exact spot that I wished my attention to be directed toward. She was wriggling her butt cheeks slowly on the couch as she spoke, and she laughed a little, and one of the strands of brown hair fell forward, and she tucked it back with her purple-gloved hands.
‘I need the bathroom,’ she said, and left the room. It was obvious where this rendezvous of ours was headed. I wondered at which point she’d decided that I was to be her lover. Or perhaps she hadn’t decided this yet. Perhaps she never would. Maybe I’d gotten the wrong end of the stick. I considered leaving to save myself any embarrassment. But when she returned she sat an inch closer to me, and as her body sank into the couch I could smell the soap and water rising off her skin. And my heart sped up as her knees clapped together and she rested her hands on the end of her legs.
‘What is it that you do, at your work, that is?’
‘I translate Charlie’s poetry. From Xhosa to English. The guests are all foreigners. Ninety per cent.’
‘So they want to know what’s being said?’
‘Charlie is a praise poet. And I tell them, yes. What’s being said about them.’
‘Are they English people?’
‘Some. Germans. Lots of Germans. Also some French. Even Japanese sometimes. All sorts.’
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ she said, the way someone says, that’s nice if you tell them you’re a nursery school teacher. And as she spoke she pointed her right leg slightly toward me, causing the gap between her legs to widen ever so slightly. I imagined what I would be able to see if she weren’t wearing anything over her legs, if I were lying on my back, on the floor, and she made the same movement. I imagined what I would be able to see, and then I said, ‘I will be getting a promotion though. Sometime.’
‘Oh really?’ she said, with a hint of enthusiasm.
‘Deputy Manager, perhaps,’ I said, and went on to list the perks I’d receive. I’d be able to change out of the skins and into a suit, maybe get my own office, a phone contract paid for by Bhakhuba, a company car was in the pipelines, medical aid, insurance, retirement funds, UIF, bursaries to study further.
She shifted her buttocks a little closer now as I spoke, and kept the angle of her legs open to the same degree; there was a long and deliberate tear from the top of her jeans down to the knees, and the first part of it had been covered by a patch, and she wasn’t wearing any shoes, and her toenails weren’t painted, and she smiled now, and her teeth were slightly stained from the red wine, and there were traces of spittle on the corner of her lips, and these too were stained red, or mauve, or perhaps purple like her gloves, and then she opened her leg a little more, and moved her bare foot across the wooden floor toward the rug, and held my hand in hers and raised it to her face.
‘I like hands,’ she said ‘Hands are interesting.’
All the while I had not moved. But now it was my turn, and I placed my hand on the sewn-on patch on her jeans. It was perfectly positioned, as if placed as a guidance tool for first-time hands: any lower could have been platonic, any higher, overly familiar. So I placed my hand on the patch, and moved my head toward hers, and closed my eyes as my tongue slipped into her mouth and I tasted the red wine on her breath. Then she stood up, and stumbled slightly, and offered me her hand, and led me toward her bedroom, and with her free hand gave me a ‘come here’ wag with her purple finger, then smiled and giggled, and when in the room pulled herself toward me, held her breasts against my chest for a second, and said ‘Whisper Xhosa in my ear.’
My mind ran over routines, trying to remember what I said when the guests came and Charlie rattled off the poetry. The smell of fresh sheets and incense was strong in her room, and I placed my