Cruel Crazy Beautiful World Read Free Page B

Mugabe just over the border, and where Zuma (Mbeki’s second fiddle) is somehow above the law. There are murmurs in the papers of dodgy arms deals and pocketed money. Yet they can’t catch Zuma out. He’s as elusive as a chameleon that shuffles his camo colours at whim.
    My old man, however, revels in this loophole-riddled time.
    The Benz halts in front of the scuba-diving shop on the seafront road.
    The sea scatters foam like white feathers of shot birds.
    Along the rocks an old man furtively knifes mussels out of cracks.
    A gummy-eyed old hobo herds his reeking, bagged world on a hospital gurney. The gurney’s wheels squeal like cornered rats.
    – You happen to have a fag? Or a bob or two? Either will do.
    Zero fishes a packet of Camels out of the pocket of his half-mast Dockers. He finds a balled ten-rand note in his pocket. He fingers out two smokes.
    The hobo tucks one behind his ear and puts the other between his cracked lips. He fattens out the note, holds it up to squint at the watermark like some wary dealer, then folds it and tucks it behind his hat band.
    Zero rummages in the Benz’s cubbyhole for an old Bic lighter and hands it to the hobo.
    His fag catches fire, then fades to a glow.
    – Ta for the fire.
    Now the hobo studies the orange Bic lighter lying in his red-lined, dirt-rimed hand.
    – It’s yours, chirps Zero.
    The hobo nods ta, and thumbs down the gas to sniff at it.
    Zero fetches a can of oil out of the boot. Then he kills that ratty squealing of the gurney.
    That’s the thing with my old man. Just when you peg him as an asshole, he off-foots you.
    Over the roof of the shop a great white shark gapes its jaw at a dummy in a wetsuit in a diving cage.
    Half of Zero’s left calf is gone from the time a shark took him while he was diving for crayfish. He had gone on diving for years after to prove to his mates that he was no moffie . Nowadays others dive for him ... for the sacks of crayfish traded in alleyways behind pubs. Another of his sideline capers: purveyor of pirated shellfish.
    We lug my guitar and a kit bag (full of bunged-in Levis and rugby jerseys) and banana boxes (full of studied novels with unlined spines, curiously devoid of pencil marks and coffee stains) and Johnnie Walker boxes (full of Zero’s trading goods ) up a flight of whining steps.
    On the landing, while I fiddle with the key, he randomly picks up a book from one of the boxes.
    – How the hell can you read a book and not crack the spine? It’s unnatural.
    Again I find this ironic, coming from the man who leaves no spoor. I merely shrug as he flicks through the book.
    In fact I never annotated my textbooks at university. I never inked my name on the flyleaf. I never took notes in lectures. I just tuned in and remembered. I have that kind of mind. I remember things.
    – You think you’re higher than your old man now you’ve read all your books, hey?
    He drops the book.
    – I tell you, life is too short for highfalutin books with long words.
    The door swings open. Light filters through a salt-filmed window into the spartan flat. A smell of dust and flat beer and old record sleeves flows out.
    A sagging bed stands on paint-flecked floorboards. A half-blind mirror hovers over a basin. A rickety bentwood chair lurks under a graffitied desk. A blade fan drops a dirty string. A bare bulb dotted with fly shit dangles at the end of a wire.
    I flick the switch and the bulb flares, illuminating flecks of mosquito blood on the walls.
    Zero tugs the string of the fan. The blades sigh into a blur.
    Through the window I see the new harbour a mile away, across the bay.
    On a random nail I hang a watercolour my mother once did of a seagull in Kalk Bay harbour. I found the painting folded up in a book long after she burnt the others. Long after she put a diamond ring and all her milky opals in a drawer for good.
    Over time my mother traded the company of men for her front-yard gnomes. She loves her gnomes for wanting nothing from her