Tribe, page 21
“What’s right got to do with me?”
“Who do you think will win?”
“I told you, I only back a winning man.”
He looks out at the court. Pierre will win; he’s got the Bikram junkie on his team. “Christ, Kat, you can’t fuck your uncle or your tormented godfather.”
She smiles. “Yes, but Dad and Ben will win. I’ll fuck Ben.”
Zac stares at her aghast, and then the old Zac, the pre-Hannes Zac, laughs and clanks his Coke can against hers. Zac can live vicariously through her. “You’re going to fuck him under the goddess’s nose?” He looks dubious. “They won’t win anyway, but all right, I challenge you to fuck a man from the winning team.” He points at Hannes. “Whatever happens, your dad’s mine and I don’t think Ben would actually think out the box, Olivia’s got him all tied up. He’s completely cunt struck.”
Lifting his racquet, Ben steals a glance at her, then he turns and serves with the energy of a twenty-year-old.
“You’d be surprised, Zacco, you’d be surprised.”
Katrina leans back into his shoulder to watch the game.
LILLIE
Lillie’s agitated fingers are quick to find Zac’s stash. She knows that for all Tselane’s drug tabooing, the only way to become a member of the gang is through these two women. And the only way to prove herself worthy of them, to get behind the glass, is by initiation. They’re testing her; she has to get stoned with them.
It could be the stillness around them, the sudden freedom of being away from husbands and children, but just one drag and they’re three girls cooked in the bush. Nothing exists beyond the love, the laughter and the words.
“Even now, when they’ve deserted me, I love words,” Olivia says.
“Manino, manino, manini,” Lillie sings.
“What does that mean?”
“Words, words, words … It’s a Swahili song. Apparently Zac sings it when he’s stoned. He lived with the Swahili people. Pierre knows the story.”
“Zac’s certainly got a story.”
“Would you write him?” Tselane looks at her friend enquiringly.
Melancholy washes over Olivia’s face. “These days it seems just writing my name is ambitious.”
“You said that last time.”
“I don’t have another book in me, T.”
“You’ve always got another book in you; it’s just taking longer than usual.”
The sun is beginning its slow decline. The colours in the bush are changing. Lillie says, “I never get over this sight. It puts me in my place, reminds me there’s a God up there and I’m a little person. It’s like, you know, humbling?”
“Oh, you’re joking.” Olivia stares at her, appalled. “You don’t get stoned, watch a sunset and go in for all that God claptrap, do you?”
“Shoot me, I’m American,” Lillie laughs.
“This is a gauche sunset, too much colour. That’s the thing about nature, it’s self-indulgent. As for God and nature combined, Lillie, you’re too clever to buy into that male ego myth, ‘Look at me, my plagues and my gauche orange sunsets.’ Never a simple Chanel stripe. English nature’s not quite so self-congratulatory. Our sunsets are subtle, that’s why T has always been such a novelty in London. She breaks on through to the other side, brings colour and God into every evening, don’t you, T?”
Tselane lays her head in the lap of her oldest friend and, smiling, says, “You’re a nutter, a beautiful, glorious nutter. I found us a new friend.” She glances at Lillie. “Thank me.”
Olivia looks at Lillie and smiles. “Yes, I believe you did, she’s a good man. Lillie, you’re a good man.”
“I’ve spent the last few years gawking at you girls. You’re like these goddesses poised behind glass. I’ve lived in fear and awe of you.”
Tselane laughs. “We’re just two crazy English birds.”
“Absolutely not. We’re goddesses who remain poised behind glass; we’re just inviting you behind with us, like Alice.”
“And Katrina, what d’you make of her?” Tselane asks.
“Who the fuck knows? I wanted to slap her obscured face. Then today I caught a glimpse of her eyes, and now I’m not entirely sure; there might be the possibility of a personality,” Olivia says.
“I think she’s intimidated by us, we should give her a break. She loves Zac so she is capable of love,” Tselane says
“What do you think, Lillie? She’s your husband’s niece,” Olivia says.
Lillie, who rarely has a mean word to say, darts back, “I think she’s a little bitch and I wouldn’t trust her for a second.”
“Wooow, sister, where did that come from?” Tselane asks.
“I get vibes about people.” Lillie stands up, wipes the grass off her dress and puts her hands out to the other two women. They allow her to pull them to their feet and the three of them walk to the tennis court silhouetted by the sunset, three women, full of life in all its shabby, intricate detail. They’ve talked about everything, everything except the fact that they’ve spent the afternoon breaking the one absolute rule of the holiday.
BEN
The game fluctuates between casual and competitive. Ben wants to focus, needs to win, but can’t help himself from stealing glances at Katrina, who leans into Zac, flipping through the pile of magazines chaotically sprawled around her. She takes a glimpse at the game every so often, then goes back to reading and stretching her toned limbs. She seems entirely oblivious to Ben and the fact that he is winning.
It’s Hannes who notices the sunburn after their victory. “Bloody English, all that mosquito shit, but I bet you’ve got fuck-all sunblock?”
The left side of Katrina’s mouth curls into what could be interpreted as a smile. “I’ve got an aftersun with anti-mosquito.”
“That’s strange, since you never go in the sun,” Zac says.
“I bought it for the Maldives last December. My room’s right here, Ben. Come, you can use it.” Katrina’s room is tucked in on the other side of the forest behind the court. It’s not a huge forest, but it’s dense, and suddenly they’re through the darkness and in her room.
“Another glamorous room, this place is a sensation. Are you enjoying London? And the clubbing, and art school, must be exciting, living in Shoreditch and being at art school. Oh, the aftersun …” He can hear the agitated bullshit in his own banter and then, out of nowhere, he feels her hand in his pants.
Her voice is irritated but sexy. “Ben, sometimes people shouldn’t talk.”
There’s a moment of hesitation and then they’re scrambling at one another with such urgency it’s as if until now they’ve been forced apart by a cruel trick of life.
Access into this austere girl is almost too easy. The elastic waistband of her cotton shorts stretches effortlessly to accommodate him. Dropping his trousers to the ground, he slides her G-string to the side, urgently entering her. He has no desire to see her face, just to be inside her, so far inside that he might see inside her head, inhabit her.
KATRINA
Leaning up against a wooden chest, she looks down at the travertine floor below her feet. He’s rough, she imagines herself a whore in a motel in Las Vegas. She’s never done that, although in the five years she’s been having sex, Katrina’s had a lot of variety, most of it at the lodge. She had the German ranger doing his gap year, a rock star, and once she fucked a couple of newlyweds on honeymoon, both of them, in their suite. She’s drawn to inappropriate sex, brief and without foreplay. She can’t get enough, or get it right, because she doesn’t know what it is she wants. Zac reckons it’s a phase and it’ll pass soon, but she doubts that, since he hasn’t entirely gotten over his own perversions. If he had, he wouldn’t listen to the details of her subjugations with such twisted intrigue.
BEN
It’s over as suddenly as it began.
Beyond the wall of glass is a wooden deck, private swimming pool and shower. Seeing the shower, Ben scrambles to pull up his pants. Immediately, the shame kicks in and he creeps off to the bathroom to sort himself out. He wants to think that it came out of nowhere, the passion and sex, that it hit him from behind. But there’s so much of it that it wouldn’t do to go around blaming the other party. He must be sending out some sort of message, except it doesn’t make any sense, he’s not the type, he has friends who perv and flirt with young secretaries. It’s not him, yet here he is. Doting husbands don’t wipe cum off their penises after hurried sex with the teenage daughters of old friends. If he was advising a friend, he’d say, “Just keep to yourself, mate, be boring, let your wife dress you and when a beautiful woman enters a room look at your shoes, it’s not worth it.”
After flushing the tissue down the toilet he looks at himself in the mirror. Jesus, you’ve got to go out there and look at her now, he thinks. He comes out of the bathroom, clearing his throat. “What was that?” he asks, not really expecting an answer.
“I told you,” she says, naked but for the long-sleeved white T-shirt and G-string, “there are times when people shouldn’t talk.”
“We can’t do it again.”
She laughs at him. Not Olivia’s full laugh. Katrina’s laugh is as tight as her cunt, he muses, surprised at the coarseness of his thinking.
“Wouldn’t be so sure,” she says, handing him a tube of aftersun. “This has been your winning day.” She’s in her shorts and out the door before he can say jackrabbit. “Good shoes,” she calls back.
He can’t tell if she’s being sarcastic. “Thank you, Olivia picked them out …”
“No kidding?” Katrina puts her head back inside and waits for him to join her.
“Olivia’s got a lot of class.”
“Nobody’s ever going to dispute Olivia’s class.”
He feels a sense of resentment towards this teenage upstart walking specifically two steps ahead of him. She pulls an elastic band off her wrist, sweeping her hair into a ponytail. His mind flashes back to her body leaning against the wall, back arched in ecstasy, hair falling down. The way she shook it now, he wonders, does she know how he fought the urge to pull it. He hates himself.
“You’re beautiful, you know?” he says.
“That’s not what this is about.”
He jogs a couple of steps to keep up with her. “But you are, you’re spectacular.”
“Ben, I don’t have beauty issues, you don’t have to tell me I’m pretty and all that shit, okay? I have a mirror. It’s just not the most essential picture of my day.”
He smiles. “So why did you go for me and not one of the others?”
“You’ve got a violent streak.”
“That’s nonsense.”
Tilting her head, she gives him the smirk. “Look, Ben, I told you, there are times when people just shouldn’t talk.”
He looks at her and wonders if she really has the upper hand. He knows about women. For all her bravado, Katrina is lying. It’s a cliché, but beautiful women more than any other women need to be told they’re beautiful. He wonders what Olivia would tell him to do in a situation like this and imagines her mirth. “Drink a cup of shut-the-fuck-up.”
They walk in silence, back through the forest to the court.
HANNES
Looking back, he’ll feel like a fool. That was the day Ben and Olivia’s love story ended. But sitting out there in the sun, they were all finally happy.
Hannes will always blame himself because on some cellular level of his being he knew what was happening, but he’d felt a naïve relief because Katrina’s darkness represented the lost years, and if he could convince himself that the bleak girl they’d been holidaying with was just a temporary muddle, then it would be as though nothing had changed. And it had been. The whole day she had been open and friendly, dressed in white with flowers in her hair. It had been so long since he had seen his daughter’s face that he’d forgotten how young she was, how innocent. And he felt, for the first time in years, that there was a possibility he could catch the lightness in her spirit.
BEN
Lying is a human condition. We lie to keep the peace, and the peace after all is what keeps marriages together. We lie to keep our jobs and jobs feed our families; we lie to maintain friendships, we lie for noble causes. We teach our children to lie (“Don’t tell Birdy you wanted a Nerf gun. You’ll make her sad. Tell her you love the porcelain chicken.”)
Ben somehow lands on his feet in business because it’s believed that unlike other investors, he can be relied on to tell the truth. But then does he? The market’s pushed him into corners, and if he has had to lie to investors, well, his marriage has made lying all the more effortless. Being married to Olivia has required some mendacity. Even after the financial crisis, she believes they have pots of cash stashed away in the great mysterious somewhere. If she didn’t believe that, she’d die of fright. She fears not being beautiful, but her true terror is ageing. “If I ever look a day over thirty-two, it’s going to cost Ben big.” He knows it’s not a joke and he’s beginning to realise he can’t afford to keep her looking thirty-two. At forty she’s more beautiful than most women of twenty-two, but that’s not enough; she’ll never understand what a beautiful fifty-year-old she’ll make.
And Tselane, for all her in-your-face honesty, he knows that, like him, she is often compelled to lie. Sure, when Jude’s good he’s the safest place to fall, but when he’s in a depression, then what? Is she going to say, “Me? I’m fine, I have Olivia.” Of course she hasn’t always been fine. And he doesn’t believe Olivia is always there for her either. Olivia is always there for Olivia.
Finally they’re all here together, in the middle of nowhere, and instead of seeing the truth about each other, deceptions are taking over, with seemingly no way out. He must lie to Olivia, and to everyone else.
Ben walks into the room and finds Olivia looking through old photos on the iPad. “Darling, where are the boys?”
“Oh, it seems like they’ve been gone forever, swimming or fishing, I don’t know, there are a million things to do here, it’s paradise for little boys,” she says, not lifting her head from the screen.
He resists the urge to sit next to her, put his arm around her and work out what’s going on in her tortured, magnificent mind. Instead he quickly undresses and steps into the shower outside, surprised at how okay, enjoyable even, it is to stand naked under the sky, his modesty, such as it is, protected by nothing but a few wooden sticks.
“What’s going on?” he calls to the bed.
She walks over and he sees her, in her pink satin vest and boxer shorts, every part of her anatomy perked up. He wouldn’t care if she let it all go; her breasts could fall to her knees and she’d still be beautiful. Olivia will always be beautiful, it’s who she is. Jesus, he thinks, what’s the matter with me? This is the woman you have an affair with. Olivia is the woman men fantasise about.
“Ben, I can’t lie to you,” she startles him. “I’m too old for deception. Please forgive me?”
Adrenalin courses through him as he scrubs his body. What? What can’t she lie about? All those men in London, God knows. If anyone’s had opportunities thrown at her. Men have always fallen for Olivia. It’s her thing, her addiction; if Olivia goes to a party and doesn’t get hit on, she panics. There’s always been a man or woman in love with her. He knows she worries about the day it’ll stop. But she’s never acted on it, just lived off whatever nutrition it feeds her ego. Ben has become complacent about Olivia’s admirers, but what if one of them has finally got to her?
“Now hold on, Olivia, what should I forgive you for?”
“I got stoned. It was ridiculous. While you were playing tennis, we got stoned.”
This is his opportunity, the time to come clean, she’s giving him a gap, but what will he say? Darling, I forgive you, if you forgive me. My dick accidently fell into Katrina’s vagina? It’s preposterous.
Instead he looks at her, standing anxiously before him. He can’t ever risk losing Olivia. No, a confession will not be forthcoming; he doesn’t feel guilt, not consciously anyway. What he feels is fear and anger. “Jesus, what were you thinking? You of all people! I thought Arnold said everyone had to be clean. Miss Bloody Sanctimonious, you haven’t touched anything all these years. Why now?”
“It was a crazy, fun thing to do, you needn’t be histrionic about it.” She smiles wickedly and he knows she doesn’t feel guilty and he can’t make her. Olivia does whatever she wants to do.
“I’m not histrionic, I’m perplexed!” he shouts to make himself heard above the running water.
“Well, fuck it if you can’t take a joke. We did a childish fun thing.”
“WE! Which we?”
“Tselane, Lillie and me, that we.”
“Are you saying that you and Lillie of the ‘she’s too square to be part of our gang’ and Tselane of ‘you may not talk to your best friend because you do drugs’ were getting off your faces while we were playing tennis?”
“You were bonding at the court, we were bonding at the pool. It was a pollyfilla kind of afternoon, for fuck’s sakes.”
The memory of Katrina’s G-string wedged to the side of her crotch flashes through his mind, making him angrier with his wife. He slams his fist into the stone wall of the shower. “Olivia, I’m warning you, don’t be the one to prove her right. We’re finally together, don’t fuck it up!”
His rage gives way to tears as she steps into the shower with him, wrapping her arms around his waist. She rests her head on his chest. “Poor Ben, don’t worry like this. Jude is well. We were being silly girls. You know Tselane, she leads a dull life, and after Jude has an episode like he just had she needs to de-stress, so we did something crazy. Life can go well without going according to plan. Lillie’s loopier than I thought she was. Even Katrina seems to be loosening up.”
The mention of Katrina disturbs his brief moment of intimacy and he draws his wife in closer, as if for protection. She kisses him. “Darling, we’re happy, relax.”
He looks into the greenness of her eyes. “And I love you, I will love you forever, Olivia Stone.”
