| I am at Joe's Medley Bar, the Music &
Pawn shop, diagonally across from the Old Station. There is sheet
music in the window. I buy something by the Beatles, a piece that
Richard Clayderman plays. We are in Game and I spend R30 for a triple
box of Clayderman's tunes. It's got the sheet music too, hand scored
by Toussaint and de Senneville, who wrote most of the pieces. Grandpa
says it's not real music, and up in his flat I ask him if I can put
it on again. The vinyl clear as a washed hand spins, the notes thrilling
me: Can I play that fast? Can I play that beautifully clear?
I'm nine or eight so I go by myself all the way walking into the centre of town. I'm in a hurry. I don't know if they know I've gone where I'm going so I'm rushing. I'm rushing all the way to the sheet music store, through the mangrove city. The smell of sweet air, the Indians, the hawkers with their bright apples. Salty rush adrenaline pumping through my head. I'm avoiding people, out in the clear, sunlit streets. Wide and white. I'm avoiding strangers, running like I'm clutching a handbag close to my body, afraid of being mugged, by the shadow-thing that's watching, following - they don't know I'm gone.
I take the beacon of the flat, the 19th floor where Gran and Grandpa live and Ma's snoozing, or she's out at the shops or the beach. The maroon balustrade, the ice rink, the smell of polished floors and wooden lift doors. I skip all the way down the 19 floors to see if I can beat the lift. At the CNA we buy Archie comics and read them in the anteroom, sea-sunlight stripping through the window, the waves out wide, the bay where the ships hello queuing for the port.
I lean out and this side 19 floors up it is quiet. I can lean out here safely, or maybe it's the sunlight or Grandpa's room behind me or both. The other side, the concrete corridor, I lean out over the cars ducking 19 floors down and get a fright. So I push myself to look over as many times as I can so things get better, but they never do. It's the cars, small as dinky town, and the steep flights all the way down.
Gran's had breast cancer so she's soft and frail like the sea breeze in her light blue blouse, always shedding. The last time she's at hospital her wig blows off across the road, and someone's sent to catch it. Gran dies and mom disappears for a week and dad goes down to the beach after her, and the only phone call I know is the story that they're walking on the beach, walking through the shadows and the waves on the beach.
but that's their beach, they're walking on, so i'll leave them to it, quiet waves and maybe mom crying
a wig rivers across a road, like ash, like a blouse of shedding skin or salt, like wave wave first, wave, then wave later.
Gran had diabetes so she was like a junkie with her injections in her leg everyday. sometimes grandpa would help her. she had her marie biscuits and her salt. and she baked biscuits for the beach, with warm tea in the flask very nice after waves, waves and more waves and salt on my skin and sun browning my face and afterwards i'd eat a loaf of sliced bread with jam, until, between the furniture and the walls and the high room, grow bored and go down for sweets or more comics, or, today, for the sheet music in the centre of town where the indians play dice or queue for movies
and i'm hotfooting, because it's raining or it's late with music under my arm
joe's music shop was quiet with musical instruments, dark pianos
and guitars and drums and in the back room was the sheet music and
i found something or other (joe the indian nodding when the bell
goes ping as i enter, quietly don't say a word just kid-quiet in
his own world of strangers and adults not have to say anything just
hotfooting it back past the mangoes, bananas, colourful litter smog
sidewalk queue
|
Alan Finlay is a poet living in Johannesburg
with his wife and two sons. He has published his poetry in
various journals and collections of his poems have been published
by Dye Hard Press (1994, 2003) and Botsotso Publishers (1998).
Amongst other projects, he most recently co-edited glass
jars among trees with Arja Salafranca. He is the current
editor of New Coin poetry journal (Institute for the
Study of English in Africa).
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