Stories

Five by Three

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Five by Three

The part about the island.

There was a phone box upslope from the youth hostel. It stood out on the hillside, a dab of red against the greens and greys. It was the same colour as my bike panniers, waxy red and waterproof, that had carried everything I needed over the last weeks, through the wind and rain.

That was a good feeling. Striking camp, slotting the panniers back on the bike, being on your way. And so was rolling on and off the ferries ahead of the cars.

You watched an island approach, like this one with its terracotta cliffs and a rock pillar rising from the waves. The shoreline slowly resolved: a boatyard, a hotel on the pier, a distillery. White and grey pebbledash houses with laundry lines outside, clothes snapping in the wind.

The ferry bumped against the tyres of the pier, the ramp clunked down. The line of wet tarmac stretched out ahead, glowing when some light came through the clouds. Just a single lane with some passing places for cars, but there were none. This island was wilder and emptier than the others.

So I didn’t expect the phone box to be in use, but I could see someone, two people, through the glass slats.

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Barbarian Phase

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Barbarian Phase

A surfing half-life.

Wasafiri, June 2021. Short edit for Life supplement, Business Day, 27 August 2019. Locals only version below, and also published on Wavescape. Image of Sunset reef by Sean Thompson Surfography.

Thirty-six is no longer young, promising, or even emerging. It’s one year too late to be a member of the Youth League and twenty years too late to start surfing, especially in the wild and freezing waters off Cape Town.

All that lost time weighs on us, Alex and me, as we watch teenagers or outright children paddle onto some heaving Atlantic swell, make the drop, carve some shapes along the purling, blue-green wall and then kick out like it was the easiest thing in the world.

‘Poets,’ he would say, beard in hand, as we watched from a car park in the depths of winter, when the swells come in, ‘There are poets among us.’

Alex and I both have beards that are beginning to go silver, but I am average height and skinny while he is tall and rangy, muscular. We are both only children, sort of, both loners who like having someone to play with, now and then. We both have outlandish surnames that nobody can spell or pronounce.

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A Cold Country Where the Sun Shines

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A Cold Country Where the Sun Shines

From Firepool: Experiences in an Abnormal World.

Minor Literatures, 28 January 2020.

Your father drove you to the trailhead in the small white bakkie. The Tsitsikamma forest pressed up close to the highway, a lush green tunnel. Then it fell away as you sped across the rivers far below, twists of silver flashing in the sun.

The Opel, which your father always referred to as ‘the light delivery vehicle’, was a little corroded from the salt air. After dropping you he would head onwards to Port Elizabeth and get that seen to, also his computer since viruses were slowing down the hard drive, because the locals weren’t up to scratch, workshy hippie types, lackadaisical, had you noticed that since getting back, and by the way would you mind pulling into the next service station for breakfast? It did a good deal.

‘I’m going to be your waitron this morning. Can I tell you about our special offers?’

‘Thank you, but I think we know what we want. Mega breakfast over here, salad burger there, and two coffees.’

‘And for the coffees? Regular, large, or—’

‘Mega.’

You had long ago given up suggesting organic farm stalls set back in the blue gums and embraced your father’s sudden enthusiasm for roadside Megadeals. Coming after decades in which he had barely touched fast food of any kind, it seemed – along with the forays into local radio and his attempt to memorise the full name of every person he met in the whole bay area – a perplexing but heartening thing.

The 1-Stop’s take on the concept of a salad burger was literal: just wilted lettuce and a smear of mayonnaise between two lobes of damp white roll. Your father looked deeply shocked, as if he had been let down on home turf.

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A History of Adverse Reactions

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A History of Adverse Reactions

From Firepool: Experiences in an Abnormal World.

‘Oh – you’re the one who wrote the Dictionary.’

I often get this, when I run into someone who went to my school, or his parents.

Yes, I wrote the Dictionary. I have copy in front of me now, not the original but a reissue. It is a photocopied A5 booklet that was put together by a well-meaning teacher, long after I had left the all-boys boarding school where I lived through my body’s 13th to 18th years. This was 1992 to 1997 in world-historical time, so an era of major political and hormonal transitions.

During my final year, I conscripted a team of juniors and sent them out with notepads into the various boarding houses like 19th-century anthropologists, telling them to bring back exotic words and help me type them up. Perhaps because of the school’s physical isolation in the foothills of the Drakensberg (I speculate in the Foreword), ‘a very large and colourful body of indigenous terms has developed amongst its pupils’. In my last week at Milton College, I printed off a few hundred copies on the sly and sold them. The reissue was produced (I was told) when the one remaining original in the school library fell to bits through being consulted so often.

It is a highly embarrassing document.[1] Not just because the revised edition includes a picture of me (with centre parting) on the cover and several of my schoolboy poems. The Dictionary, which I have only mustered the courage to revisit in preparation for writing this piece, is a deep core drill into a world of shame, anxiety, embarrassment – with generous servings of sexism, homophobia and bigotry. Adolescence, in other words, but adolescence in a particular place, and at a particular time. And the fact that everyone can’t see how embarrassing it is makes the whole thing more embarrassing still. The only time I have raised the matter myself was when I ran into one of my assistants, years after school.

‘You mean 1001 words for homosexual?’ he said.

I let the subject drop. But now I am writing this to fill in everything between the entries that I so confidently recorded, thinking of myself only as the disinterested observer, when I was in it up to my neck.

Mainly, though, I want to write about skin.

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