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Riding With a Rider I remember the year I turned seventeen as the year of stubborn seasons. Summer lasted well into autumn, and autumn annexed half of winter. It was hot in May and cold in November. The older folk in my township swore they had never seen anything like it. Winter nibbled on spring, and spring on summer. It was exactly thirteen days to the day that I gave up on my high school education. There was absolutely nothing for me in school. My reports were collections of F’s. I was a master mumbler in class. In mathematics I was far below average. Nothing in school made sense, and nothing had since grade one. By grade ten I knew it was not for me. A childish hope of someday understanding had carried me through the lower grades. By May that year, that hope ran out of steam. When I told my parents of my decision to drop out of school, my mother went into a rage that lasted two days. My father promised me a beating to end all beatings. I showed them my F’s. After her anger had subsided, Ma listened to my explanations, but it was clear she did not understand. Nothing in class made sense, I told her. I was in grade ten, yes, but the last concepts I had really understood were at grade seven level, and I was average at those. In class, my mind was there for the first five minutes—five minutes in which I focused intently. But for the next thirty-five minutes my thoughts would wander, lost into a maze of tangents. It was May, and the school soccer program had already been scrapped for the year because of a stabbing incident in the stands during an away game earlier in the year. The beautiful game was something I understood. I was a striker in the school team, and a gifted goal-getter. The soccer pitch was where I shone. It was going to be a long year, with me mumbling wrong answers in class and no soccer to redeem myself. The scrapping of the soccer program was not so much a reason I left school but rather a footnote. We all slept on it. Over the next few days, the house was thick with tension. My parents enlisted the help of relatives. Uncles and aunts lectured me over the phone. School is important. Education is the key to a bright future. You are crazy, you should not have done what you did. I was polite, answered “yes” to everything, but my thoughts drifted away. I wished I had super-powers and could shove my school reports into the receiver to let them see the F, G and H grades that meant I did not have the key to a bright future. My parents tried, they really did. Ma shouted, shook me, asked for more explanations; she tried to understand but could not—the same way I tried to understand in school but didn’t. She even cried. “I don’t know what I will do, Ma, but I am not going to school. You see my reports; there is not one subject I pass. I can’t do anything right in school. Every day I go there it’s like a part of me dies. Ma, you see my reports every year, there is nothing for me there,” I explained. “But in this world, you don’t just give up. You must keep trying,” she said. “I know, Ma.” My parents tried. My uncles and aunts tried. Days rolled on and their calls dried up. The tension in our house slowly lessened. “At least he was honest with us about his decision. We know where he is. At least he is not like the others who pretend like they are going to school when they are not,” I overheard Ma say to Dad. Thirteen days after I left school was my seventeenth birthday. I was sitting on the wall that doubles as a fence and chilling area to our house, waiting for Musa, when I realized that all the trees on our street had shed their leaves. The wall, roughly painted sky blue on the outside but bare on top and inside, encloses the house in a crooked, incomplete circle. Back then, our four-roomed house wore a coat of plaster as a prelude to painting. This had taken me a day to sand down, which made my body ache in places where I did not know muscles to exist. It was not all in vain, though; at night, with all the streetlights out, the house gave off a dull glow—as beach sand sometimes does. It was close to midnight and I was thirsty. Our house is meant to be the main feature of the ring on a cul-de-sac. Our blue wall takes up most of the space on the ring, which makes our house the last. The last on the road, the last to get plastered, the last to get a squeezing hug from the walls we call fences. The plastering on our house had been done in prolonged stages, starting with the walls in view—the front and one side. Construction of the wall took even longer. My father often fired builders, but to be fair to him most builders did not even bother to bring a spirit level. The work took years to complete, as something of greater importance always seemed to crop up—water and electricity bills, food, school uniforms and shoes. A shopping mall had been built on the outskirts of the township, while the builders’ sand grew grass and turned shrubby in our back yard. The paintwork on the wall was mine. It was a weird blue; I told Ma the paint had gone bad. The process of purchasing the gate to complete the crooked circle of the blue wall was also prolonged. My father had the idea of getting two dogs to guard the gap, but this went nowhere. We would feed the dogs during the day; at night, the gap was silent. Those strays disguised as pets were never there. Every week, Ma returned from the city with brochures and quotations for a gate. Months passed, and the money went on other things. Our house, which is slightly slanted, sits at the end of 2524 Close in M Section of Umlazi. To this day perhaps, ours is the only road in the hills of Umlazi that is close to being flat. Mama Mkhize’s Tavern stands at the entrance to 2524 Close. The gates to this oasis are forever open, the music always pumping. It is a refuge for all who prefer life lived nocturnally. I knew Musa would be late that evening, so I made my way there. The moon was plump and yellow, like a sun just risen, and it gave 2524 Close a brilliant bluish shine in the darkness. The midday and afternoon bustle was as distant as yesterday’s newspaper. As the night wore on, 2524 Close took on a crowded silence; the only signs of people passing were simple salutes and the minute amber circles of lighted cigarettes. A neighbor’s daughter kissed a man in the back seat of a car. Around midnight, the smell of marijuana is everywhere in the township. I gulped down a cloud of smoke that crossed my path. The rhythm of my steps made the moon slide and dance a little. Mama Mkhize sells beer in cans, quarts and by the crate, weed in plastic coin bags and Mandrax pills in singles and even packets. She is a dynamo of a woman, and there are rumors she is related to people for whom killing comes easily. “My nephew, the one in Joburg, took his BMW to these things, what do you call them...agents? Six thousand rands, I tell you, just to have the engine fixed.” My two Amstels were in her right hand, four loose cigarettes and change in her left. She looked like she was about to give me a hug. Gold snaked around her neck in different layers, shining on her fingers and dancing on both wrists. Her arms were thin but muscular. I always felt things move inside me when I saw her; maybe it was the Diesel jeans she wore, which made her look like a teenager in full bloom. It was unfair that she had inherited the name of her business, for she was only in her late thirties, a fact I vehemently denied until I serviced her car and saw her driver’s license. I had thought she was younger. “Sipho, I can see you are still worried about last week. Don’t. You understood what I was telling you, so relax. I told you I understood, and it was just the liquor talking anyway.” To her list of attributes, I must add tact, for what happened “last week” was me crossing a boundary. It had been five days after I’d dropped the “school bomb” on my parents. The smoke from that explosion still lingered in my house, but I had woken up to a good day. I’d fitted brake pads to eighteen taxis at R50 per car. Bulging pockets drove sleep away that night. I felt ten feet tall, and bought a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black from Mama Mkhize. It was a slow night, when even the twentyfour-hour taverns closed. Mama Mkhize clutched a bundle of keys as I poured my first triple. Courteous, she invited me into the house, and I was surprised by what transpired. “Johnnie is my favorite too. Mind if I join? I’ll give you a taste of my hand. I have Appletiser, soda water, tonic water and just water. What do you use?” My choice of dash for the whiskey triple did not matter. The taste of her hand—light. Lots of soda water, a film of Appletiser. Easy on the senses. “I could drink all night if I dashed like you. Light, but it goes down well,” I said. We drank and laughed. There was a cozy touch to the way we chilled. She made chicken livers as a snack. With each shot, her eyes slanted. She allowed me to get close. I was about to plant a kiss. “Please leave,” she said in a tone strong enough to knock sense into me. Yet I swear her eyes giggled through the whole thing. The following day, I was at her door with an apology that she accepted with no lecture attached. Since then, I had only stolen glances at her; eye-to-eye contact made me blush. “Yes, the agents are expensive, but they have professionals and machines that measure the tiniest of details.” My attempt at bringing a natural, quick end to our conversation failed dismally. “Nonsense, Sipho. He should have given the car to you. You know when you rev them, the windows of this house tremble.” Mama Mkhize was a natural exaggerator. Maybe she had to be. She dealt with drunks all day and sometimes all night. I took my beers, smokes and change. My eyes bowed to her direct stare. Her straight face with giggling eyes. “Maybe next time he’ll come to me. I will charge less than half of what he paid.” I headed home. I preferred solitude by the blue wall to solitude among drunks. Musa’s car was parked by the blue wall, doors ajar, when I got home. The colors—white on blue—had my mind retrieving a snapshot of summer skies over my granny’s house at Amanzimtoti. The engine of the BMW 325is was humming. Beer in one hand, Musa was urinating into the concrete channel that drains 2524 Close. I knew Musa from the shantytown that occupied my back-yard view. When I was seven years old, the shacks pasted on the hill mushroomed to form a functional neighborhood. A stream separated our M Section from them. When we were kids, our parents warned us about the shacks and the crooks who roamed there. I nodded my head but did not keep away because there was a shop there that had the sweetest, cheapest sherbets. They loved me at that tuck shop. The granny who owned it always pinched my cheeks and called me her son-in-law. For every suburb there is a township, so for each section in the township a shantytown—add a ghetto to a ghetto. Fully functional, with such things as committees and such. The shantytown even had a name, Power, after the electricity plant that buzzed day and night at the top of the slope. It was impossible not to mix with the children of Power because we shared a dusty patch by the stream that we used as a soccer pitch. I was eight years old when I first saw Musa, and I cheered in unison with the crowd for this boy who—though only ten years old—ran circles around the older boys. Musa was the king of football tricks. In twenty-cent games, he always put on a show. In my mind, when I think of our childhood soccer-playing days, I can’t keep out this vision of a stickman running, the ball glued to his feet, dancing over tackles in a cloud of dust. We also shared a school with the children from Power. In grade four I shared a desk with Musa, which is when he became my friend. I made the school’s soccer team because of him. On a football pitch, Musa passed the ball to death. What I lacked in showmanship, I compensated for with speed, blessed with pace and strong lungs. Everywhere on the pitch Musa’s passes found me, through the eye of the needle, across a sea of legs. I would point to the spot and Musa would put it there. In high school we were in separate classes, so we only hung together after school. When friends change, they get bored of chilling with you. Musa started to hang with the shoplifters—birds of the same feather, I reckoned. On days when he forced himself to pass by my house, our talk was no longer the same. I’d yap about engines and soccer while he rapped about the spoils of shoplifting—things to sell and money to collect. Musa hung with the shoplifters, who in turn hung with the car thieves, all dressed up swank and bragging about which of the two cliques made cash quicker. Although the signs had been there for a long time, it still came as a surprise when Musa dropped out of school in grade nine. He left for the City of Gold with only the clothes on his back. His return from Joburg—dressed fresh in Versace, in a car considered the holy grail of BMWs in the township—was drenched in a glorious “I have made it” glow.
