Tribe, page 18
“I’ve played it back, you were the only one there, conscious, in the room. Afterwards, decisions were made in a hurry and things were wrong. Maybe everyone needed to take the steps. I was lucky, I got the rules. We were all at the same party, we all needed closure. We’re different people, but we have the same love, maybe we can pick up again,” Tselane says.
Ben feels an ache so ancient that at first he can’t locate its origin. He realises that if he doesn’t cry it’ll become unbearable. We say “real men cry” but when it happens, when real men really do cry, it’s an unsettling sight; the sound displaces people. Tonight, Ben and Hannes’s tears are soothing.
Olivia puts her arms around her husband. “My darling, you’ve been too brave. It’s not fair that life has demanded such bravery.”
“Hannes,” Tselane asks, “what the fuck does ‘dronkverdriet’ mean?”
“Oh, it’s like drunk with crying.”
“Or crying with drink,” Pierre puts in. “My mother was famous for getting dronkverdriet and my father was famous for getting ‘skreeverdriet’. He’d get full of booze and yell, but there’s no actual saying for that – funny, hey?”
We believe we’re honest with children; parenting manuals instruct us to be open and aware of them because we’re not Victorian. But until the moment an ashen Balthazar jumps onto his mother’s lap, not one person, not even the waiters, has remembered the two boys sitting pristinely at the children’s table. “Mum, ith the crying germ catchy, are we all going to get it?” Balthazar looks at the faces round the table as though the bubonic plague has set in. He touches his father’s face, confirming the tears are real.
Olivia holds her little boy tight. “Darling, grown-ups make a mess. Some days the only thing keeping us on the straight and narrow is having you people around. I believe that might be why God invented you, to make sure we behave.”
“But why’s Dad crying?” Simon asks.
“Because he mitheth hith friendth,” Balthazar says.
“But he’s with his friends,” Simon points out.
“Theeing hith friendth remindth him of how much he did mith them.”
Simon looks at his father. “Then you’re right, Mum, you do make a mess if you have to see your friends to know you miss them. When our house is four Tube stops away from theirs, then even Dad needs some common sense knocked into him.”
“The important thing to know, boys,” Ben says firmly, getting to his feet, “is that grown-ups get sad. Sometimes we cry and sometimes we feel happy, but we can always look after you. And that’s why I’m taking you to bed.”
The nightly “Ahhh, Dad, we’re not tired” ensues, but it’s half-hearted this evening and the two boys accompany Ben up the path without further protest.
On his way back to the dining room a few minutes later, he pauses in the doorway when he hears Katrina say, “He’s perfect.” She is talking to Tselane. He waits.
“Who?” Tselane asks.
“Olivia’s husband. Mr Right. When I look at their family I see how I want it to be one day. Not for another hundred years, but one day.”
Ben hovers quietly at the door, fascinated to know where this conversation will go.
“If there’s one thing Ben is, it’s Mr Right,” Olivia confirms. “My mother always says, ‘He’s so right it’s a miracle he’s not a fascist.’”
At the other end of the table Zac is talking loudly. “Hannes still crashes other people’s lives,” he says. “Look.” He appears to be showing them a video on his phone. “This is in the Maldives, Hannes-ing with a family of fat Australians …” Zac holds the phone up, and Ben can just make out the image – a group of people looking flabbergasted as Hannes sits mindfully unaware amongst them. “And this. This is Hannes with a Mexican family in Bali …” Another photograph of Hannes, sitting on the grass, surrounded by a bemused family who are eating Big Macs and drinking Coke. Once again Hannes sits in the middle of them, this time cross-legged and smiling like a Buddha. Ben walks to his place beside Olivia at the table. She takes his hand and holds it in hers.
Tselane reaches out and grabs the phone. “Hannes, have you done this without me?”
“I started on Clifton a couple of years ago,” Hannes confesses. “When we’re away and I need to meditate, I pick the most unlikely group of people, sit amongst them and meditate.”
They all laugh as the phone goes round the table.
“Doesn’t it drive people nuts? Don’t they ask what you’re doing?” Tselane asks.
“Never, not once have I been asked. I think they’re too embarrassed.”
“There was the drama in LA, you’ve just blocked it from your memory,” Zac reminds him, his eyes sparkling.
“O jirre, there was something creepy about that family.”
“Creepy about that family! And you’re not creepy?” Olivia says.
“No.” Hannes pulls a cigarette from behind his ear and lights it. “I’m just doing my morning meditation.”
“Me, too. I want to do it with you – look at this one!” Olivia points at a family where the entire family, mother, father and three children, are all gazing at screens, unaware of one another or the glorious ocean behind them. “Jesus,” Olivia gasps, “this woman is so thin she looks like she hasn’t eaten since the early nineties. The diamond on her finger is bigger than her ass!”
The laughter flickers past midnight and, finally, stumbling to their rooms, it’s unanimously agreed that there won’t be a morning game drive tomorrow.
Olivia falls onto the perfectly turned down bed. “God I love a good hotel, we should sell the house and live in a hotel.”
Ben falls reluctantly to sleep, thinking uncomfortably about the piercing of Katrina’s eyes, and Jude, who was more distant today, as though something was ebbing away from him. Yesterday’s visceral joy today seemed to drift into the dust along with the setting sun.
TSELANE AND JUDE
The Egyptian cotton sheets hold Tselane when she climbs into the bed. For a moment she feels safe within their crispness but then, realising it’s a false sense of security, she’s overwhelmed by claustrophobia and kicks herself free.
“The last few days have been so sudden, down and up, if I was my own patient I’d think I was having mood swings, but I think I’m sort of okay,” Jude says. “We could think, we should think, about the possibility of having more than just us.”
Tselane stares at him for the longest time. “Before we got here you were in a suicidal depression, the first day was a sort of reprieve, now you’re happy. You still believe in happy, don’t you? It’s not a chemical disorder. Depression is a disorder. It’s passed and you’re Jude again, my Jude. And we could, you’d be a wonderful father!”
She kisses him on the messy bed.
KATRINA
Katrina crumples up the annoying poem she wrote this morning.
Did I always live in the shadows, of your wit, and your cruelty, and your magnetism?
Was it always so dark where I lived?
That you couldn’t even see me hearing the clever, nasty things you said.
Irritated, she looks at her reflection in the mirror. Someone ancient gazes back at her. Since childhood she’s known she doesn’t possess her own face; she wears something older, more disconcerting than herself. She looks into the blackness of her eyes and sees Hannes’s mother. Failing to recall a complete person, she clutches at glimpses. Gathering a picture of her grandmother feels like putting together pieces of a broken mirror. Katrina laughs nastily at herself. You’re not an individual, you’re the fragmented memories of a crazy old woman! Like a child doing a puzzle, she laboriously gathers pieces of broken memories: Ouma on a horse galloping through the winelands, hair flying behind her like a wild gypsy. Ouma walking into a ballroom, diamonds sparkling around her neck. Ouma sitting sedately at the pool while Oupa rages into the wind. Some of the memories are images collected from black and white photographs with crinkled borders. In all of them Ouma is beautiful, and always, insane.
“Beware, my girl,” Ouma used to say. “Beware of brittle people, they break like glass, and when glass breaks it cuts.” Unlike Hannes’s father’s family, who swirl with madness and wine, Katrina’s mother’s family have no edges.
She holds the Edwardian sewing scissors inherited from Ouma, they must have belonged to a great-grandmother, a needlepointing Boer’s wife. Lifting her sleeve, Katrina shudders at her own needlework, the criss-crosses hidden inside her arms. There’s nothing wrong with cutting; everyone does it. Summer’s a bitch and a week ago she made an oath to herself that she’d stop doing it. But still, it beats what these people were doing at her age; at least cutting can’t alter the chemistry of your brain or make you desert your family.
There’s cutting or fucking and she’s stuck in the room, so the latter isn’t much of an option. She looks back at the mirror and says, “Fuck, I hate the bush …”
BLOODY BIKRAM: DAY THREE – THURSDAY
LILLIE
Lillie’s tried hot yoga; a friend in New York dragged her to a class. Describing the friend’s approach to yoga to Pierre, Lillie specifically uses the word “addict”.
“What do you mean, Lil? She was addicted to yoga, like she was very into it?”
“No, silly, you’re not understanding. She was an addict, like people are addicted to heroin. Phoebe was addicted to hot yoga.”
“I’m very into surfing, doesn’t mean I’m addicted.”
“You wake up every morning and catch a wave. Our holidays are, like, determined by the surf. If you don’t surf for a few days you get grumpy. You’re, like, passionate about surfing. But Phoebe had to do Bikram, like, every single day, and sometimes it was so bad she’d go round town, from one yoga studio to another, pretending that each class was the first one of the day. It got to a point where she was doing, like, four or five classes a day, every day. It wasn’t a healthy passion; it was an addiction.”
Pierre looks at his wife, a little bemused. “I’m just saying, I don’t believe human beings get addicted to yoga. Heroin, gambling, sex, but yoga … I don’t think so.”
“This isn’t ordinary yoga, it’s a cult.”
Pierre is amused. “So if I was in New York, what, five years ago, I could have gone to an AA meeting and seen a skinny girl stand up saying, “Hi, I’m Phoebe and I’m addicted to yoga …?”
“Oh God, Pierre,” Lillie laughs. “Sometimes everything is just a joke to you.”
“If it’s not a joke why are you laughing?”
“You’re funny. But it’s serious, not bad serious.” Transfixed by dust particles, she says, “You know who’s an addict? Ben. Ben is addicted to Olivia. Every time she walks into a room, his eyes, like, literally light up. He worships her.”
“Ja, it’s always been like that, but it doesn’t necessarily make him happy. It must be lonely adoring someone for fifteen years. I find him disconnected.”
“Yeah? Maybe you don’t adore me enough.” She glances at him.
“Ag, Lillie, man, you know what I’m talking about.”
“Yeah, I actually do. I’ve never thought about it before but I guess we love one another, equal and the same. At least Ben’s connected to his boys.”
He strokes her tummy. “I would never have guessed Ben would end up being the perfect dad. It was Jude. He was wild, but looking at us, you’d have thought, if we straighten out, it’ll be Jude. After me, of course.”
She smiles indulgently. “You’ll be a dad soon, I only went off the pill a couple of months ago. He said it would take a little while. D’you think they want a baby, Jude and Tselane?”
“Oh ja, I think by our age everyone’s decided either they want to reproduce or they definitely don’t. Some people are too selfish to share their lives, or they know they’re not with the right person. But Jude and Tselane, I’m telling you, they want babies. They’re afraid. It must be scary not knowing, like having cancer or knowing that next week you could be paralysed but you could be fine. Their lives are unpredictable. They’ve lived with this insecurity all these years. Maybe it’s selfish to bring a child into that? I don’t think it’s helped, isolating themselves. But Jude was an addict, a real addict, not a person who does sun salutations five times a day. Maybe if they’d had people around them … people need people.”
“Yeah, and some people don’t need anything, all they need is yoga!”
Pierre kisses her laughing mouth.
TSELANE
Jude went directly from drugs to Bikram. Long before the Bikram litigation scandal, Tselane believed Bikram was addictive, but she also believed it was good for Jude, even if completely out of character. Bikram is like extreme yoga. If you look around most Bikram classes, you’re bound to find, amongst the ripped and tattooed bodies dripping with sweat, at least a few ex-junkies. But she understands that this is something Jude wants to share with his friends, to show them what he has been using to make up for their absence over the past decade.
All night the staff has been heating the lodge’s gym with humidifiers and kettles. On her way there, she sees Katrina and Zac; they seem to be arguing about something so she doesn’t stop. Walking into the gym, Tselane is disorientated by a wave of heat and darkness. She is feeling nervous, but Jude’s voice is soothing.
ZAC
“I’m not doing it, it’s not my game,” Katrina says, kicking a stone.
“Don’t be absurd, Katrina, life’s not your game, but you can’t refrain from living it. Come on, you look cool and we’re doing the yoga thing with your godfather.” Zac tugs her towards the door.
“They’re looking at us, she’s looking …”
In Katrina’s eyes Zac sees the fear he felt for many years. He lets go of her arm and says, “It passes, this dark shit passes. I know I don’t seem like much of an example but I was more fucked up than you. There was a time when I couldn’t get off the floor to catch the flight, at all. And I made it – late, drunk, but I’m here, and I’m happy. If you do this thing, the sweaty class, you can do crazy shit afterwards.” He hugs her and pulls her by the hand into the hot dimly lit studio, where condensed water is dripping off the mirrors.
OLIVIA
Olivia, unable to stop staring at Katrina and Zac, finds her mind racing. They can’t be, she thinks, and yet, they have an unatural intimacy, they’re so tactile. And Katrina is so possessive over him. Could this be a lover’s quarrel … She can’t possibly be fucking her stepfather? Surely not. She tries to get Tselane’s colluding attention but Tselane, of course, is fussing over Jude.
Standing firm on mats, the class begins breathing and swaying to the sound of Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach. In a room with a temperature of forty degrees, the human body’s cooling system goes into overdrive; respiratory rates soar as the body releases sweat in an attempt to cool down. Perceiving itself to be under threat, it goes into fight or flight mode, that’s when the endorphins kick in, numbing pain, physical and emotional … The high is pretty immediate.
Olivia can tell Tselane doesn’t get it. The heat is intense and claustrophobic. She is looking at her rakish husband with a bemused expression, while Jude gently twists and coaxes the others into positions.
PIERRE
Looking into the mirror at bodies contorting themselves into unlikely positions, Pierre thinks, This isn’t yoga’s ass, but that doesn’t stop him from diving in. He’s surprised his own body isn’t doing what he instructs it to do. Why is it effortless to balance on a board in an ocean but impossible in a concrete room?
“Find a fixed spot in the room to help you balance,” Jude instructs them.
His body weight precariously balanced on his right leg, left leg folded in on itself, Pierre’s gaze falls on a bottle of Evian water. It works. The right leg stops shaking, the left feels strong, and his mind shifts into a yogic state of Zen consciousness. He stares serenely at the familiar bottle with its pink and blue label, the stylish font promising the soft taste of the Swiss Alps.
Suddenly it occurs to him: What the fuck is Swiss mountain water doing in South Africa? It’s incongruous. This bottle must have flown 3 000 kilometres! What is its carbon footprint? There are probably some stupid criteria for the lodge to achieve its status. It needs marble bathrooms, Big Five game spotting and Evian water. Why can’t rich people drink local water? This bottle represents everything that’s wrong with the planet. Over-inflated prices and under-inflated values. Our global dysfunction creeps insidiously into everything, even here, in the bush; after all, if the lodge wasn’t luxurious and overpriced, people like Pierre wouldn’t come. Of course there’s a global recession, the world’s priorities are up its collective ass. And people like him perpetuate the problem; this isn’t news to him, he’s known it for years.
Sell the agency. As soon as he gets home, he has to sell. But what about his disconnected creatives? He can’t let them go. He’ll keep the agency, create an “African Autumn”, poison consumerism from within. His agency will become the first anti-advertising advertising agency. Instead of big bonuses they’ll win big awards, big thrills. They’ll only do campaigns with social conscience, fuck them all, McDonald’s, Monsanto and fuck Evian, it’s got no place in Africa.
Responding to Jude’s instructions, he feels his feet rooting deep into the earth, his fingers stretching towards the sky. More conviction and passion pulsing through his veins than he’s felt for years. This is the future. He’s seen it and it rocks. All his resources pooled to create a hacker’s wonderland. Anarchy from the inside.
And then, quite suddenly, Pierre falls over.
BEN
Ben cannot find a fixed spot in the room. His spot is a dynamic black form reflected in the mirror. “Youth,” as Olivia would say, and she’s right, there is a difference; of course Olivia is the most beautiful woman in the room, in the world. But Katrina is young.
Cursing himself, he searches the room for something else, but his gaze returns, compelled, every time, to fall on her. He wonders about himself. Are other men in this room having lurid thoughts about girls they’re not married to? It’s not right.
