Moxyland - Lauren Beukes [64]
'You mean, your meal-ticket.'
'Same thing. So, how are we going to build on your first success? What's next? You said something about street kids and their pitiful possessions? Oh, Kendra. Don't cry.' He is more impatient than sympathetic.
'I'm not crying,' but denying it only makes my face slip more.
'You're being way too sensitive. You shouldn't take it personally.'
'It's my work, Jonathan.' I'm desperately aware of people in the restaurant looking. Naledi Nxumalo leans in to the rugby player with the exact gossipy gleam in her eyes that's her trademark in Bright City.
'And your work is very, very good, baby.'
'I feel hung out in limbo. I want to sledgehammer my cameras. I want to set the film stock alight.'
'Not a bad idea for a performance piece. Okay, I'm sorry. Don't look like that. I'm sorry.'
'I wish you would take me seriously.'
'Kendra,' he says, taking my hands across the table. 'This is the best thing that could have happened to you, career-wise. You couldn't have planned it.'
There is something in his voice, a wink, a pride that tips me off.
And I realise something that's been simmering in the back of my brain since I first saw the newscasts.
'The security footage had audio.'
Jonathan grins. 'Don't be so naïve, my darling, of course it did. We had it specially installed.'
I drop my fork with a clatter and shove the chair back from the table so that Naledi Nxumalo and the rugby captain and half a dozen others perk up with interest.
'Don't be so dramatic.' Why is it that half of what he says to me always starts with 'Don't'?
'Come on Kendra, there aren't even any press here. It's a wasted effort. Sit down, please.' And despite my best intentions to defy him, I do.
'You're a rational animal, Kendra. You know what this means for you as an artist.'
In my head, I am fashioning scathing putdowns, like I wouldn't expect someone who never graduated from photographing fashion shoots – even if it is for the likes of Vanity Fair – to be capable of comprehending artistic integrity, but somehow these don't make it out of my mouth. Because I am afraid. That he's right. That without him, I am a nonentity. Girl in limbo. Ghost girl.
Jonathan orders me another one, unasked for, which I know the waiter will have to run down to the corner café to get, and I realise this is the end of something. Maybe not limbo so much as the falling space, like the moment after you've thrown yourself backwards off the boat, your hand on your regulator to stop it jerking free, but before you hit the water. Poised between.
Tomorrow I will spend the day apartment hunting. I will find a place to stay, no matter how much of a hovel, that is mine. As in, nothing to do with Jonathan. In the evening, I will take the underway down to Replica. Maybe hook up with Damian and Vix. Make new friends. I still have Toby's comp.
That e-vite suddenly feels like a passport to somewhere other than here. And maybe tomorrow, everything will be different.
Lerato
So here we are, three mismatched women holding a meaningless memorial to three people I don't remember. It's bad enough I have to endure my sisters – Zama looking positively plump and matronly in a white kaftan and Xhosastyled headscarf, her attempt to dress up nice for the ancestors; Sipho in jeans and an orange t-shirt, with a shaven head that makes her look like a chemo survivor – but the gale-force wind is something else. We have to lean into it to get to the edge of the cliff overlooking Cape Point, and the herbs Sipho throws into the air get whipped straight back at us. There is a small cluster of foreign tourists who have braved the baboons and the wind to get up here, and who are utterly charmed by the proceedings, cameras clicking.
The reason