Tribe, page 4
It was a year of classics, weirdos and new-agers. Back when the White Stripes were still in love with one another and played “Jolene”. Roger Waters was classic and Rod Stewart actually sang ….
The sun was still shining when Nelly Furtado came out wearing a tracksuit, her hair falling casually into her eyes. And everyone loved her cos she was like the unthreatening girl you had a crush on in high school, and when she put the mike out to the audience they sang for her because she was like a bird, didn’t know where her soul was, didn’t know where her home was. It wasn’t the E, it was her. The crowd smiled and she smiled and it was all happy, happy, happy. Of course there was drinking and drugs. The stuff about clamping down and policing the audience was bullshit. It was a music festival.
A shiver runs through Hannes. The bush gets chilly at night, but that’s not it.
By 2002 Olivia was trying to get pregnant and Tselane was clean. Pierre was really into his surfing, and Benjy was into whatever Olivia wanted. As a tribe they’d stopped doing drugs. But that night they’d decided to have a blow-out, for old time’s sake. Hannes and Jude had gone to score. “Jude, mate, you’ve got your friend from South Africa today.” The dealer smiled knowingly, they bought a couple of grams of coke and a handful of Ecstasy, they were already halfway down the road when Jude mumbled something about leaving a jumper behind and ran back. He returned empty handed saying the jumper must be at home after all.
Hannes has repeated the dealer’s words over and over in his mind. At the time, he’d dismissed his suspicions. Jude was the most honest man he’d ever known, and scatty. He could have been confused about a jumper; he could have told the dealer about his friend from South Africa, nobody got high alone, surely?
But now, with solitude, and the passing of all these years, Hannes has had time to torment himself and replay it all. Of course Jude went back to buy heroin, as was his habit. If he had been a true friend, Hannes would have known. He should never have gotten high with Jude. It was his fault and everyone got punished for it.
But Hannes was selfish, it was his blow-out time, away from home. London was where he outsourced sexually, where he took the biggest risks, binged big. He assumed it was the same with Jude, that he only used when Hannes was in town.
They should have talked more amongst themselves. Hannes should have talked to Benjy and to Pierre, his own fucking brother. But they don’t talk, men. And it seems with age they talk less. He’s learned men don’t bond over the words; they bond over the silences.
A week ago he was in Joburg. Hannes hates being in Joburg. Foreigners who’ve spent too much time in Cape Town always get to Joburg and bitch, “This is Africa, this is cool, why didn’t you tell me about this?” Hannes always says, “Ja, wait till you’ve had the barrel of a gun held at your temple then tell me how fucking cool Joburg is.” But he’s still got friends there, the die-hards who’ll never leave. Periodically he visits them. This last time he was in a bar and he overheard a bunch of guys having a conversation. The one said, “Last week I was jacked in my Beemer. They threw me in the boot, drove me to Soweto, left me on the side of the road for two hours till a policeman found me, fuck hey, I thought I was a goner.” The friend the guy was with called for another round, saying, “Shit, boet, what a bummer.” Watching this conversation, Hannes had thought lovingly of Olivia and Tselane. How they used to discuss everything. How they influenced the whole tribe. There weren’t secrets, except, except for the important ones. He wishes he’d talked to Tselane about the drugs and Jude, wishes he’d talked to any of them. Surely they were more evolved than a bloke in a bar in Joburg?
Maybe he never displayed the photograph in the frame because he would have smashed it. It stood a better chance against the African sun than it did against his anger.
His finger lingers on the image of himself and Jude. They were properly out of it, but happy. It’s not an image he wants to lose, and the thing is, memories like that, they get distorted, lost. Sometimes when he hears the songs, aspects of the memory come flooding back and he feels glimmers, not so much of the high but of the friendship, the freedom and the other stuff he can never put a word to.
It was already getting dark on the Pyramid stage when Faithless got up, a true Glastonbury moment. Flags came out and hands went up for them. They were so real, so fierce, they had insomnia. And then the temperature dropped and it went all yellow. Coldplay came on and that was the moment of a lifetime. Not a transforming moment because nothing moved. On the contrary, the earth stood quite still. It was as if the gods of the ages aligned for the four and a half minutes of that one song. The band was illuminated, lasers flashed and everyone in the audience flickered. Didn’t matter where you were standing, where you’d camped, the stars shone with the same radiance and the band performed with divinity. It was all yellow … BenjyOliviaPierreHannesTselaneJude. They danced as a single being, not the kids they’d been six years before at Ibiza, but evolved, mature people, muddling through life into adulthood. Different shit, different highs, but still dancing as one entity that loved intensely.
At the end of the number a woman walking past told them she did aura readings. “You folks, you’re all the same colour, you know that?”
“Yes, luv, and what colour is that?” Tselane laughed cynically.
“That’s the peculiar thing – it’s yellow.”
Olivia, always given to hokey-pokey theories, wanted to know more. “What does it mean, a yellow aura?”
The woman smiled. “Yellow’s the colour of effervescence, spontaneity, love and childlike freedom. It’s the colour of creativity. You’re quite something, aren’t you?”
They laughed.
“It’s also the colour of addiction and fear of abandonment. But I don’t know what colours you’d have as individuals. Are you individuals?”
“Have a drag, you’re wise beyond your years.” Jude passed the woman his joint.
She smoked and laughed with them. Glasto was like that, all sorts of weirdos and memories. After she left, a guy came up and took their picture for The Times. Olivia got the original.
Two days later, Jude was in hospital for the first time and it was all over, who woulda thunk it?
Hannes isn’t necessarily into Coldplay, but that song takes him back with a force. Some days, if he walks into a place and hears it, the memories are so painful he has to leave. But other days, when he’s watching animals making their way slowly to the dam, he’ll lie in the veld, listening to it over and over. Not a song in the world can bring him more joy, funny that. The truth, though, and something he’s never acknowledged, is that the song of his night wasn’t “Yellow”, it was “Insomnia”. But none of the others was into Faithless.
Carefully, Hannes puts the frame back into the box and closes it away in the drawer where it can’t trigger any more longing.
AFTER THE YELLOW
HANNES
After the festival they flew the short distance back to London, each of them with a hangover to sleep off. Pierre would sleep his off at St Martins Lane. Olivia and Benjy in their Notting Hill home, and Hannes planned to stay a few nights with Tselane and Jude. He always squatted with them when he was in London.
Hannes had a Boer constitution, he’d grown up in the wild, spent time in prison, he didn’t need much sleep. When Tselane was with him she found his energy infectious. The two of them kept ticking like Duracell, high on one another’s laughter. It was late when they got in and Jude went straight to bed, while Tselane and Hannes walked arm in arm down to the local Italian to get pizza in the hope that melted cheese would soak up their hangovers. Their real fix was people-spotting, voyeurism. If you didn’t know them, then you’d find it peculiar, but on those two it was funny. Once, they’d walked right up to a couple eating dinner in a restaurant, leaned into their faces so they could understand the discussion, and when the annoyed couple stopped talking, Tselane said, “Don’t mind us, we’re just fascinated by your conversation.”
Another time they spotted a crazy old goose, decided she was interesting, and followed her through London, to the grocery store where she had a chat with another crazy old goose, onto the Tube and to her station where she walked three blocks in the rain to her little house and tried to peek through her windows to see what books she read. Poor dear thought she was being robbed by a huge Afrikaans man and a small black girl. She called the police.
That night after Glastonbury, Tselane spotted a crowd of fat American tourists ordering many pizzas and copious amounts of Coca-Cola. Caricatures of caricatures. “Does God make ’em like that? Do they come out of the womb dressed in polyester crying ‘cola- cola’ instead of ‘mama-mama’?” she asked Hannes.
Tselane called the house and asked Jude to come down and see for himself, but he was tired. “Take pictures,” he implored. “You have so little time with Hannes, enjoy the last yellow evening.” So they took pictures. They loved being photographed, the Americans. There was a lot of laughter and eating. Hannes has never developed the photos, but he’s never thrown the film away either.
The waitress was slow at cashing up and bringing their change. It was way past midnight and she was tired. Didn’t care about the £3 tip.
The moment they walked through the front door, both of them felt the weight of guilt settle on them, a guilt that would dwell inside their bodies from then on, like an organ, next to a kidney or a lung. It froze them and they both stood, absolutely still, at the bottom of the staircase. Then the panic kicked in and set them both tearing up the stairs, Hannes three at a time.
Heroin takes prisoners. People might tell you it doesn’t, but if you’ve seen someone you love survive a bad fix, then you know, it takes its prisoners. Sometimes there’s a part of you that wishes you hadn’t been around when the body was found, that it would’ve been better if you’d got there a moment too late, if a stranger had called emergency so you could arrive at the hospital or the coroner and find your loved one cleaned up at least.
The house had a synthetic smell, like foam mattresses burning. Jude’s body slumped in his own puke, which had spread across the bedroom floor. His breathing so shallow that at first they presumed he was dead. Then Hannes leaned in close to the blue lips and felt a faint labouring. “He’s alive, call emergency. I’ll get a bucket of cold water.”
Tselane trembled helplessly at the edge of the bed. Hannes held Jude’s mouth open, making sure that he didn’t choke, while she sang “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon”. Then she stopped and said, “In Pulp Fiction they acted like everything was chaos, but they knew what to do. They shot her up with adrenalin, remember? They had permanent markers. And a fridge full of adrenalin. I’ve got cold pizza and potted geraniums, what the fuck? Hannes, I can’t be in this movie.”
“Tselane! Hold him. I’m going upstairs to get the numbers off the fridge. This is real. You’ve got to make sure he doesn’t choke.”
In the years that followed, Tselane would pretend she’d forgotten Hannes had saved Jude’s life that night. But she hadn’t. Along with the guilt that came to live inside her, so did a deep sense of gratitude.
PIERRE
Pierre always stayed at St Martins Lane. He could pick up hot girls anywhere, but at St Martins they seemed easier, or hotter perhaps. When the phone rang, he looked over to the bedside table and saw that there were two phones on it. He’d picked up a girl in the lobby. He looked at her: glossy black hair, face still perfectly made up, not his type.
“Your phone’s ringing,” he mumbled.
The girl’s thick black lashes parted and she spoke in an unexpectedly common twang. “No, lorv, that must be yours.”
In an effort not to laugh, he rolled away from her and back towards the phones. Ja, his was persistently ringing. He answered.
Afterwards, he just wanted to get rid of the girl, get himself to the hospital; but then there was a heartbeat when he wanted her to go with him. A stranger he’d had sex with. It wasn’t because of how obviously beautiful she was or because they’d bonded during the sex, no, the sex he’d already forgotten. It was because of the way she called him “lorv”. For a minute he couldn’t remember where the hell he was. If it hadn’t been for her accent, he wouldn’t have known whether he was in Cape Town or London.
“I need to get to the hospital urgently, my friend is in trouble.”
He wanted to talk to her, to ask her, did she understand what was going on? Why would Jude have OD’d and on what? He’d seen Jude yesterday and everything was cool. For some reason he thought the girl might know the answers.
Instead, she took him down to get a cab. He didn’t like that about London, the cab culture. In Cape Town he would have got into his jeep and felt in control behind the wheel, but in London he was stuck behind a tired cabby who didn’t give a rat’s ass that his friend had OD’d.
As it happened, the cab driver got him to the hospital before Olivia and Benjy.
BEN
Olivia was always the hold-it-together-girl. Even when she was out of it, she held it together. But that night in 2002 it all came undone. She’d panicked, dashing from one end of the house to the other, up and down the narrow stairs. Tselane would need food from the fridge, a change of clothing from the cupboard, she’d be cold and need a warm blanket. Jesus, where were all the hot-water bottles in this house? Tselane would need good music, a book; Tselane was lost without a book. “Oh shit, Ben, do you think Tselane has her watch? Should we go past the house?”
“This is not about Tselane!” her husband bellowed down the passage as he jingled the car keys and wondered how his WASP wife had become his Jewish mother.
But still she fretted. What bag to pack, what cosmetics, the neroli oil, did they have neroli oil? Tselane needed neroli oil. Then Ben went into the bedroom, took out his Tumi bag and efficiently packed overnight supplies for his wife’s best friend, even though he knew that it was his own best friend who was in ICU. He packed everything his own wife would need in an emergency because that was the best he could do.
In the car he found a CD he thought might calm Olivia. He went through red traffic lights, something he’d never done in his life, something his mother had never done. He did all this, not for himself or his best friend. He did it for his wife, and for the good of the tribe. He did it because to stop his brain and consider that Jude’s life might be in danger was unthinkable.
He approached the ward thinking only of the relief that seeing his friends would bring. He thought how reassuring Jude’s father Arnold would be. How blessed they were that Arnold was a psychiatrist. Ben looked on the bright side. He would not for one second bring himself to imagine his childhood friend – the Jude he’d vacationed with, learned how to ride a bike and smoked his first joint with – dying. Walking down the hospital corridor, Ben did not imagine Jude lying with an oxygen mask on his face in a hospital bed. That was inconceivable.
After seeing one another, and seeing Jude, Ben watched them react to the crisis, not as a group, but as individuals. They made phone calls cancelling flights and cancelling meetings, cancelling their lives as they knew them. Talking to doctors, to Arnold and to Birdy. Moving away from one another. As if their bodies knew that if they turned outwards they could stall the crisis, deny its existence.
After a few moments, as if realising this response would have repercussions, Olivia sat with her friend by the bed, leaving the others. But Pierre talked to his pa on the farm, Hannes to his wife and daughter Katrina in Cape Town, and Ben talked to Birdy. And then, suddenly, the chatter emptied out. Arnold and Tselane needed a moment alone with Jude, so the others found themselves together, four people drinking undrinkable coffee from polystyrene cups and staring into one another’s guilty eyes. “What have we done?” asked Pierre. And they cried, the first of many tears to be shed over Jude.
It shouldn’t be thought, just because Ben was a gentleman and refrained from invasive emotional outbursts, that he didn’t know what was going on.
DAYS OF DARKNESS AND CHICKEN SOUP
OLIVIA
And then came the days of darkness and chicken soup. That was how Olivia would remember them for the rest of her life. There were only a few, but for Olivia they felt like forever.
Pierre and Hannes stayed on in London. Everyone came together but they also went their separate ways, as if that was what was expected of them. It was the beginning of the diffusion. Pierre and Hannes moved into Ben and Olivia’s place, but Olivia wasn’t there; she moved into Tselane and Jude’s little place in Marylebone. And Jude wasn’t really there at all, certainly not consciously.
Olivia would always remember the smell of decay emanating from Jude’s room, which she avoided as one would the room of an incontinent aunt. No matter how much incense Tselane burned or how much Fracas Olivia wore, the smell of death pervaded the house.
After nights spent dreaming, sometimes of Ben, so alive, and sometimes of Jude being driven away in a coffin, Olivia woke every morning and made Tselane breakfast. Failing to ingest anything herself, Olivia grew thinner. The smell in the house made her want to gag at the sight of food. Her only relief was the daily walk Arnold insisted she and Tselane take. Suspended from life, without responsibility or husbands, they reminisced about school and old boyfriends. About stuff the tribe had done which now felt crazy and unattainable.
Every evening Birdy drove over and delivered a fresh pot of chicken soup. The soup of Benjamin’s forefathers. Ladling it out, Olivia thought, This is the soup they schlepped over from the shtetl. The same soup Birdy must have been fed as a child when she was sick, and the soup she delivered to Jude’s house when his mother was dying. It’s the soup Birdy fed the boys when they wrote exams and watched TV in winter.
Arnold was there every evening. The three of them would sit around the old Chinese table in the kitchen, Tselane knitting, Olivia tracing the grain in the wood, her mind elsewhere. She wondered what the others were up to. Was Ben thinking about her? Were they talking about her? Probably not, probably they were talking about the fucking football. But they must, the three of them – Hannes, Pierre and Ben – be aware of her, in her home amongst her possessions. It must be strange staying there without her. She thought longingly about her books, shoes and handbags, about her stupid brilliant sisters who would handle this more skilfully than she was doing. Then she’d smile and her mind would wander back to the conversation, which was always the same: what was to be done with dear Jude? How had this happened to dear Jude? Who knew? Jude and heroin. All it took was one bad fix. She knew that all the reminiscing was because the worst thing was coming to pass. The core of the gang was rotting and Tselane would detach. Olivia grew accustomed to the click-clack of Tselane’s agitated knitting needles. At night Olivia lay in the uncomfortable bed, clutching a pillow and longing for her husband, while Tselane wandered through the house like a ghost, singing “Thula Sizwe”. Who knew what the words meant?
