Sumeera Dawood Someone once wrote: “I write in order to discover what it is that I know”. Sumeera Dawood, once realising that she writes in order to discover that she knows nothing at all, decided to go through life as a certified explorer instead of a writer. Two university degrees and a bad case of inferiority later, she finds herself on the wrong side of Sane-ville, Cape Town — comforted only her fetish for earlobes and poetic sadness, and Woolies’ sugar dumplings.

Conversations with Daddy

Sumeera Dawood

Beige. Whatever possesses a person to paint a wall beige? Dull, dead, dusty beige. Remember when you painted my room a secret shade of pink?

“But Daddy, my room’s white!” I had said exhasperated.

You guided my gaze to the stark-white ceiling and then pointed out the difference between the two seemingly the same shades. Funny, you kept on doing that — pointing out difference to me. You replaced my terribly arrogant looks of disdain for beggars with compassionate street-smartness. You threw my puritanical notions, my puritanical way of seeing, out the proverbial window. But now, finding myself enclosed in these beige walls — these overpoweringly dead walls — I need you to point out difference to me yet again. Get back here and come do your job properly!

You wouldn’t approve of me now. The most precious, the most important difference of them all, has elusively slipped from my oiled fingertips. He’s at checkpoint number two; his perfectly shaven cheeks, his perfectly manicured fingertips, his perfectly trimmed ear hairs, all munching away at the chicken flesh of my neck. Too perfect, I had thought on sight. Perfection left no real mark on me. I preferred that which was messy and dirty, and flawed in as many ways as possible. Jack, remember him Daddy?, was as flawed as they come. An ex-druggie, ex-drunkard, ex-abused and abandoned child, an ex-compulsive roamer. But he sure had the most tender earlobes. And that was that. I had made up my mind in an instant. I would get him addicted to me, lick all his wounds close and in short, pacify him. Oh, how vain and naïve I had been. He had ended up pacifying me, by slyly stealing all the molten and fury and spit from my fire. Indeed I had liked all his excesses — until I myself had become one. Is that what makes Life so, so livable, the bitter- sweetness of it all… excuse me for one moment, it’s time for my cameo appearance.

“Mmm, mmm that’s sooo good!”

He smiles and thinks that that’s his cue to move on to checkpoint number three. He had been a bit restless, probably bored with what little I’ve put out before him. I realise that this — all of this — had been a mistake, yet I dutifully continue with that which I’ve started. He had initially tugged at my heartstrings, in the same way that that salt- ‘n- peppered man at the boarding lounge had, all curled with a book on a single seat. Secret inner smiles. How beautiful they were. Yet the moment he layed the softest, softest butterfly kiss on my lips, I switched off. My system surged into panic mode; somewhere a red light surely flashed. My mouth mechanically moved along with his though, encouraging, teasing and now totally disinterested.

Someone had once told me that sex and silence always went together. Sex and silence. The question of those words remained etched on my brain. I toppled over him, straddling him as I would a horse (then again, how would I know to straddle a horse when I have never ridden one before? I guess I should just close my eyes and imagine that I was a cowboy in one of those Westerns you always used to watch). I looked down at him from my point of invincibility; from this zenith I was on top of the world, really I was! How pathetic and weak he now looked, surely not the sickeningly perfect man he had posed to be before. His desperation was plastered with sweat all about his body; the sweat holding his body captive. I smiled, widened my eyes and pressed my lips together for my prettiest pout ever, as I dwindled my breasts ever — so — slightly against his chest. What a bitch I was, heh? Sex and silence never would be able to go together for me, rather the opposite. This wasn’t about him either, this distorted face beneath me. “Love” he had said sincerely. Sincerely for he was unaware of the hollowness and the perforation of words themselves. Jack was the same too. Too easily words — like spiked fish — slid down his stream of saliva and pricked my skin raw. They pricked me, pricked simply because of the velocity with which they flew out of his mouth. I had stood there — frozen in my epiphanic moment — weeping for my loss. The loss of my loss: the loss of a love that I had not possessed in the first place. Your   &bnsp; &bnsp; &nbs;, for there was no word given to it, was earned. You hugged me with all the   &bnsp; &bnsp; &nbs; that you felt. I would think, surely this is what it’s all about, being hugged as if it was my last breath you were trying to gently, compassionately squeeze out.

He was squeezing my buttocks now, so hardly you would swear they were thick-skinned watermelons he was trying to crack open. Violently, I yanked his fleshy swollen lip with my teeth. Hoping that the pain of that would distract his hands. Punishing him for being so pathetic and weak. Hoping that he would do the same to me. Hurt me, even if it was just a little bit. For it was only then, when encountered with sheer physical pain (everything else I could handle), that I could be. Really be. Be the fearful eight-year old that I truly was. I could break, crumble, totally disintegrate, and it would be okay.

And finally cry.

I neither cry for you Daddy, nor for Jack. I remember being called in to hospital early that morning. Your operation was probably just going ahead earlier that what was planned. Amazing, I always assumed that I was a marshmallow, but here my “pillars of strength” were crumbling before my eyes. I had but stood. Dead. You layed in that stainless steel basin, allowing your all your warmth to permeate into its metal, leaving you with none of your own. Giving even then. Dead. What did it mean anyway? You looked the same to me anyway: your toes looked the same, your fingers, your eyelids, your hair, that stupid, thinned out Nazi moustache…all the same. I recall peeping in on you sleeping one evening, anxious to pick up on the rise and fall of your chest, the parting of your lips, the feel of your faint, tired breath on my cheek. The fear — the frenzy of it all. But now, I had merely stood. Amongst all the wailing and moaning (it was pathetic, really!), I had stood. We had to wait for the others, having arrived hastily in our compact Conquest. To take you home. So I had waited in an empty room looking out of Groote Schuur’s majestic windows, amazed at the nothingness that I felt. Nothing. I had summoned my tears (it was the proper thing to do after all), but they stubbornly refused. So I had but stood.

I moved around on him, swirling my hips, throwing my arms at his body, cascading my hair everywhere. Transfixed by paralysis no longer. There was a kind of freedom to be had by this. A dirty, salty, serene freedom. This is where I dealt with it all. This is how. Why can’t I do it on my own, you ask Daddy? ‘Coz I cant! I just cannot. I need help. I’m strong enough to say that now. I don’t want to be dull. Dusty. And dead — a beige wall. You showed me difference; I want to rejoice in all the areas of grey that I can. Don’t judge me.

boontoe

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