On the first of December I moved out, packed up my life and stashed it in various places in and around the Cape peninsula. There are bits of me in ceilings, at the top of garages, in other people’s flats. My travel bug has not been satisfied. Cellini Euroline was reinstated as my official Travel Companion, so I tied her up and gagged her, threw her in the boot of my car and quietly left Cape Town. No big goodbyes, no big deal. I slipped away like a shiny eel, out through the tunnel and passed Worcester, wine farms and horses, townships and trains. Out to Barrydale, a small town in a Karoo valley that’s surrounded by big blue mountains and Pierneef clouds.
My room is perched on top of an art gallery; one room, a basin for washing up. At the back an old ball and claw bath. A winding staircase laps down to the ground like a lazy tongue, and so I am Rapunzel although I have no hair. Downstairs my landlord, a metal worker, puts the final touches on the door hinges he’s been brooding over. Blue light flashes through his studios’ windows and when it does, the lights in my apartment flicker down, then up again.
Clouds roll in late afternoon to deliver a short but violent shower of rain. A hammer maims a sheet of metal below. Dogs bark. The traffic on the R62 surges past. Out one window lies a grey cemetery; beyond that houses, dogs. Out the other, endless blue sky broken in pieces by mountains, sometimes mist. Next door a couple of men are digging a grave. They’ve been at it for three days now. When night falls their employer pulls up in his car and leaves the headlights on so they can see. He sits on the bonnet drinking a quart of beer while I watch from behind a curtain in my tower. His legs dangle in front of the headlights, throwing strange shadows on the ground.
Two nights ago I woke up to scratching and flapping, a bat in my room. I chased it, we wrestled, I lost. The next morning I woke to find Bat Baby hanging upside down next to the window like a strange doorknob or light switch, deep in beautiful sleep. We gently detached it and put it out the window. I walked outside to check on it; it just lay there, entangled in the bush like a dead thing, but when I checked again an hour later, it had disappeared.
This morning it was the banging of baboons on my roof. They come after sunrise; you hear them barking in the hills, then closer, closer. In two weeks I’ve had three encounters with them. They pull at people’s doors, break in and ransack their houses. One day I walk back home and find them in the middle of town, chasing down the main road with food in their mouths as people stare and drop their groceries.
It’s the week before Christmas. I have no TV, no radio. Consequently I have taken to reading, poetry mostly: Eugene Marais, Leonard Cohen, Pablo Neruda. At night I dream of old lovers, people I used to know, and I wake up aching. I concoct wild fantasies in which I am the heroine and I get the man. I am not unhappy. I’m just nowhere.
One of my oldest friends lives in town. We went to school together, to varsity together, but he moved here five years ago and since then our time spent have been short encounters involving sushi and wine in the Waterfront. He makes chandeliers out of recycled material, he makes things with beads, he paints. He’s a sculptor. For Christmas he helped make a huge Christmas tree in the main street of Barrydale.. There was a marching band, dancers, flashing Christmas lights. I thought about the lights in New York, the shop fronts my cousin and I had gone to see at Macy’s last year this time; the bustling crowds, the subway, the cold. A year has passed.
I love it! Alice the nomad...
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