LITMIR.BIZ

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Thomas. He hasn’t yet deleted either the name or number, but neither of these will work now. The tears come fast in salty thickness. It feels clumsy and awkward to cry. At midnight he rises and goes to the small bathroom. After he’s cut his braids off and covered his head with shaving foam he takes the razor from the shelf above the basin and places the blade against the hairline at the top of his broad forehead. It is cold against his skin. Inch by inch he moves the sharpened edge across the wide arc of his head. When his head is smooth and clean he looks at his eyes in the mirror. The new baldness makes his neck thick, it gives him a toughness not known before. He is a different person now. He knows it without needing the mirror’s reflection to tell him so. He gathers the braids from the floor and for a moment thinks he will vomit as a small sea of nausea washes him out from the inside.

      He collects his notebook and a pen from his bedroom and heaves on a jacket as a barrier against the cold. With a heart that speaks with a longing for the past, he steps out into the night to find words in the moon.

      CHAPTER 4

      The roar of the engine fills Rachel’s head, hollow bubbles of pressure popping in her ears. The plane hurtles through clouds with no supporting ropes or lines attached. It could drop like a stone from the sky.

      ‘Chicken mayonnaise or beef and chilli?’ the flight attendant asks. Beside the cellophane that holds the food, a boxed juice stands with a straw on the side, and beside that, a half-sized chocolate bar with the logo of the airline emblazoned on the wrapper.

      ‘I’ll have a fruit meal, please,’ Rachel says. The flight attendant sporting a mask of make-up shakes her head and tells her that she should have ordered the fruit and vegetarian meals when she made her booking. The woman turns to the next customer and Rachel touches her arm to get her attention again.

      ‘Could I just have the juice, then?’

      ‘I can’t open a whole meal box for one juice,’ the woman says. ‘You’ll have to wait for the drinks cart.’

      ‘I’ll take a whole meal box then.’

      She hands Rachel a box of beef and chilli and pushes the trolley further forward in the aisle.

      Rachel focuses her eyes on the sky to keep her stomach in place. She opens the box in her lap and takes out the juice. She didn’t recognise how thirsty she is, how little has been in her stomach of late. She drinks in deep gulps. The man beside her smiles and leans into her space. She tilts her head towards the window and tries to sink into the seat. His breath smells of layers of peppermint and garlic and stale cigarette smoke.

      ‘If you’re not going to have your roll, I will,’ he says.

      ‘Help yourself,’ she answers without looking at him. She hands him the box with the roll and the chocolate.

      ‘You live in Joburg?’ he asks.

      ‘Durban.’

      ‘Okay. Business then?’

      She tries to keep from breathing in too hard. The rankness of his breath overwhelms her. His arm touches her elbow and she moves it off the armrest, to her side. ‘No.’ Her eyes smart, and she blinks. ‘I’m not working … at the moment.’

      ‘Okay, so you’re wealthy. Or maybe you don’t buy all this women’s empowerment stuff.’

      ‘My brother died.’

      ‘Oh my god, I’m sorry.’

      He unwraps the food and chews slowly. She hopes that he wants only her food and not her conversation, and she turns back to the window to face the clouds that rise like giant mountains. She thinks that to put yourself through life is like putting a hand through a cloud – that there is nothing solid to hold on to.

      The man swallows. ‘My sister died five years ago,’ he says. ‘It’s something that … I think it never goes away.’

      She turns back to him and examines his small eyes. For the first time he seems to have blood beneath his skin. There is life there, behind the façade.

      ‘What doesn’t?’

      ‘I could say pain, but it’s not that. It’s … the emptiness. The nothing.’

      ‘How did she die?’

      ‘She was shot in a robbery. She worked in a shop, in a suburban mall. It was a hold-up, for the cash register. She was caught in the crossfire. Unfortunate.’ He shrugs. ‘She died on the scene. On the floor. Imagine that.’ He picks at crumbs on his lap with his fingers. ‘Your work can actually kill you.’

      ‘Thomas’s car was found burnt out. There was no body but … we have to presume they took him somewhere, killed him and buried the body. It’s easier to just accept it that way.’

      ‘Well,’ the man proffers as he squashes the box in his sausage fingers and places it on the small tray table in front of him. ‘There’s always hope. Maybe he’ll come back. If there’s no body yet.’

      ‘Not much hope in this country.’

      ‘Not much in any country.’

      ‘We’re having a funeral for him anyway.’

      The man leans back, closes his eyes. ‘There’s not much sense in it that I can see.’

      ‘What, in a funeral?’

      ‘No. In what happened to him. When death comes, it makes everything else in this life pretty senseless.’

      The aircraft lands and Rachel watches the wing flaps do their work. She waits for the roar of the engine to subside in her ears. She blinks and hears the announcer’s voice. Although she can’t make out the words she knows what they contain and her body jolts with the connection of the wheels to solid ground. She puts her head back. She and this man beside her are together and close for this moment, side by side; for the first and only time in their lives they are not strangers. When the plane ceases to move the seatbelt lights switch off. Eventually the aircraft is almost empty of people, and Rachel stands. The man beside her puts a hand on her shoulder. ‘You know what they say,’ he says.

      ‘What do they say?’

      ‘The only way out is through.’ He moves on ahead of her up the aisle. People fill the spaces between them. Soon he is gone from her sight.

      ‘Lift, lady? C’mon, I can take you anywhere!’

      ‘No thanks.’

      The taxi driver retreats to the door of his cab. His smile fades and she averts her eyes to avoid the needy pleas of the drivers haunting the airport doors.

      A green car pulls up alongside the curb. The door is flung open and a woman, thin and angular, steps out from the driver’s side. Her dark waist-length hair flies backwards as she moves around the car. ‘Maya,’ Rachel says.

      When they finally let go of each other, Maya snaps open the boot of the car and heaves the long suitcase into it. As the vehicle manoeuvres out of the brightly lit airport, Maya leans across Rachel’s lap and pulls at the latch of the cubbyhole. Her bony fingers fold around a pack of cigarettes and a blue lighter. With a practised hand she withdraws a cigarette from the pack and lights it, then places the box and lighter in Rachel’s lap. ‘Have one if you want,’ she says.

      ‘I haven’t smoked in years. I’ll be sick.’

      ‘Whoever thought I’d be smoking again.’

      ‘If there was ever a reason to start, this must be it,’ Rachel says. ‘Can’t think of a better one.’

      A truck veers out of the next lane without warning and swerves in front of them. Maya hits her foot hard on the brake and hoots and gives a middle finger to the driver as she pulls out and passes him again. She leans forward with her cigarette dangling from her lips and places both hands on the wheel, concentrating on the lights of the traffic that penetrate the darkness. Her face glistens behind hair that hangs as a curtain half-drawn. Rachel sees

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