LITMIR.BIZ

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elbows. ‘You’re a minefield of useless information. I always wonder when the next explosion is going to get me.’

      ‘There’s no such thing as useless information,’ insisted Jans, refilling her glass. ‘You never know when it’ll come in handy. Who made the sad princess laugh?’

      ‘The bumpkin with the golden goose,’ replied Griet, still hiccuping. ‘Don’t you remember, the goose with a whole row of people stuck to it?’

      She remembered a Friday night, long ago, when she and George flirted in a pub. There was a guitarist playing the same songs over the same din: ‘Imagine’, ‘Streets of London’, ‘Where do You Go to, My Lovely?’. Maybe it was the same pub.

      The next morning they woke up in the same bed.

      She could hardly believe her eyes. She couldn’t explain how it had happened. She enjoyed his company, but she wasn’t sexually attracted to him. She was unusually impressed by his bookshelf. That was the only excuse she could come up with for her behaviour.

      ‘And now?’ she asked, quite at a loss. ‘What now?’

      ‘What do you suggest?’ he laughed, folding her in his arms. ‘Do you want to get married?’

      She laughed with him, touching his body in amazement. He was thinner than he seemed in his clothes, more defenceless. He had a slight paunch, narrow hips, long legs. And a penis as soft as down and warm as a chicken, stirring at the touch of her fingers. She wished she could play with it all day without having it grow hard in her hand, but there wasn’t a good fairy nearby to make her wish come true.

      Disappointed, she felt the chicken transform itself into a bantam cockerel. Why does a man always think he’s letting a woman down, she wondered – not for the first time – if his penis doesn’t leap to attention the moment she touches it?

      ‘I’m not going to fall in love with you,’ she warned him.

      ‘I’ve been in love with you for ages,’ he answered. But she thought he was teasing again.

      ‘Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you. I don’t want a steady relationship. I’m not ready yet …’

      ‘Hush,’ he’d said and kissed her so she couldn’t protest any further. ‘You’ll make me impotent if you don’t shut up.’

      Prophetic words, Griet thought, years later. She never became his muse. She married him and drove him to impotence.

      ‘You hold me too tight at night,’ she told him that first month. ‘I’m not used to it. I get too hot, it feels as though I’m suffocating.’

      ‘You’ll just have to get used to it,’ he laughed. ‘I can’t sleep empty-handed.’

      ‘You never hold me at night,’ she reproached him years later. ‘I may as well be sleeping alone.’

      ‘I can’t hold someone at night,’ he answered. ‘It makes me feel claustrophobic, I can’t breathe.’

      ‘I don’t want to be a man’s muse any more,’ she told Jans, who was becoming blurrier, as though she was looking at him through a camera lens that was being turned more and more out of focus. ‘I am looking for a man who is stupid enough not to get impotent if he becomes my muse. Or don’t you get male muses?’

      ‘Originally they were the Greek goddesses of the arts, but these days everything is so androgynous that the sex of muses probably doesn’t count for much any more.’ Sometimes she thought that Jans was only interested in mythology because most modern people regarded it as useless information. ‘And if he refuses to become a muse, you can always make him your Pegasus.’

      ‘Wasn’t Pegasus a horse?’

      ‘Exactly. The winged horse of the muses. Inspiration for the art of poetry. As in: I mount my Pegasus. Means I’m going to write a poem.’

      ‘I like that,’ laughed Griet and hiccuped louder than ever. ‘Let’s drink to Pegasus.’

      ‘To the bumpkin with the golden bird.’ Jans raised his glass in yet another toast. ‘May you find him soon.’

      4

      Goldilocks Loses Her Spectacles

      Once upon a time there was a colourful land that was regularly struck by disasters. There were long droughts during which thousands of animals perished; there were flash floods that washed thousands of houses away. There were earthquakes that destroyed historical villages like the Finger of God flattening pawns on a chessboard, and there were man-made laws that had the same effect. The difference between the natural catastrophes and the man-made disasters was that the people left churches and mosques and other religious buildings standing, like kings without subjects on the deserted chessboard.

      The worst disasters in the colourful land were always caused by people. There were mountains that spewed fire, not because a god decreed it should be so, but because careless people set the mountains alight. There was a dangerous hole in the air above the land through which the sun’s deadly rays shone down and burnt man and beast. The hole wasn’t made by a god either, but by people who were more concerned about holes in their clothes than a hole in heaven. What the people didn’t realise was that the angels watched them through the hole, like children lying on their stomachs, peeping through a crack in an attic floor. And the angels were so shocked by what they saw that their wings bristled on their backs.

      It was a country where black rhinos and black children perished by the thousand. Then one day the people grew concerned and collected millions of rand to save the rhinos. It was without doubt a strange land, the angels told each other, shaking their heads.

      ‘I’m writing a fairy tale,’ Griet told her therapist. ‘I actually wanted to write about my relationship. But I’m better with fairy tales.’

      Rhonda smiled encouragingly, a teacher watching a toddler forming her first letters with clumsy fingers. She must have had a trying day, reckoned Griet, because there was an unmistakable crease in her long cotton skirt. But her blouse was as snow-white as ever. Not even a grimy ring on the collar. Griet smoothed her own blouse self-consciously. It had also been clean this morning.

      ‘Do you want to tell me more?’

      ‘No,’ Griet said quickly and then added apologetically, ‘there isn’t really much more to tell. I’ve hardly begun. I don’t know how it’s going to end.’

      ‘Nuns startled by green ice from heavens’, she’d read this morning in the paper, one of those absurd little reports she always remembered better than the serious main stories. She obviously had a need for inexplicable phenomena, after seven years with a man who could explain everything logically, rationally and unemotionally. And any question he couldn’t answer, like what is the meaning of life, he could always evade with cynicism.

      A large piece of green ice, she read with increasing interest, had fallen out of the air through the window of a Roman Catholic convent. The nuns, frozen in terror, had stored the evidence in a fridge.

      Evidence for what? Griet wondered. A court case against the divine powers that had hurled the ice earthwards? And who would stand accused in the dock? The angels surely wouldn’t take out their disappointment in the human race on a group of nuns. No, Griet decided, the poor witches would probably get the blame again. And how could you hold it against them if they broke a few convent windows now and then? Everyone knew what the Roman Catholic Church had done to witches for centuries.

      ‘Have you seen George again?’

      ‘No.’ Griet glanced at the Mickey Mouse clock. Still almost a full hour to go. She might as well be honest. ‘I tried to see him. I drove past our house a couple of times … I mean his house … or past friends’ houses where he might be visiting. But I couldn’t pluck up the courage to go in. I’m afraid of what I might do to him.’

      ‘Are you still angry with him?’

      ‘I don’t

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