Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [27]
“No,” I said.
K was speaking with a preaching voice, a voice that was supposed to reach into the dark, cool corners of a church. “We were all lost after the war,” he told me. “I reckon those of us who stopped dopping and sucking cabbage, we started to feel . . . shit! I mean, we actually started to think about what had happened to us because—you know—we had sobered up. How come we aren’t dead? Where are we? Why are we here? What are we doing? We went from this incredible structure, this incredible focus and sense of purpose . . . You were either in, or out. Alive or dead. And then it was over and . . . All of a sardine, we had to figure it out by ourselves and what we found is that nothing seemed to matter about the outside world. It was all pointless. How much can it matter what kind of car you drive? How can it matter what you eat, I mean as long as you have enough to eat? How much can it matter what you wear? When you get down to it, what can matter more than being alive? But then what? You’re alive and then . . . what?”
All around us the rinsed air and sky and world seemed endlessly black, as if you could plunge into it in any direction and fall forever. A nightjar exploded up from in front of the headlights and seemed to hang there for an age before dipping into the night. By now, we had turned off the mud-rutted road that leads from Sole to Malidadi and onto the high gravel spine of driveway that leads through the mopane pan to Mum and Dad’s camp. Only a few days ago an army of bullfrogs had frolicked and seethed here. Now the shallow lake rippled out on either side of the track, vast and anonymous and almost silent.
“What do you see when you look in the mirror?” K asked suddenly. “Do you see yourself ?”
“Yes.”
“But yourself isn’t a thing. How can you see something that isn’t there? You are just meat and bones. That’s what you should see. Flesh and blood, that’s all. And all flesh and blood is . . . Do you want to know what flesh and blood is?” K waited. “You and me and every other person on this earth—we’re all just a bloody corpse waiting to happen. I don’t care how good-looking you think you are. How successful you believe you are. Your body is still just a corpse-in-waiting.”
By now we were back at the fish camp. I could see the pale yellow light of bare bulb that swung from the kitchen roof from under the arch. I could see Mum’s bed, through the window of her room, shrouded with a mosquito net. The signature tune of the BBC World Service sang jauntily out to us. K kept the engine running and his face glowed green in the reflected light from the dashboard. The engine ticked in the heat.
I took a deep breath. “This corpse-in-waiting could do with a drink,” I said.
K said, “Man, I’m sorry. I’d have stopped at Harry’s Bar if I’d known you were so desperate.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m fine, really. Thank you for . . . everything.”
K stared straight ahead. “It was my pleasure,” he said stiffly.
And then, as I was turning to open the car door, K suddenly launched across the cab and planted a hot kiss on my cheek. “Good-bye,” he said. And before I had properly closed the door, he was driving away.
The Leftovers
Bobo
AFTER I MET K , there were odd chunks of time when I did not think of him at all. And then there were vast stretches of nights when I woke so full of him that I wondered if I had dreamed him into life by accident. My accident. My fault. It was as if the hot Sole soil had met the unaccustomed flush of that extraordinary rain and out of the violence of this encounter, K had been hallucinated into life as my idea. He had been grafted into reality in the hothouse of my imagination. K the idea. Which is so much worse than K the real person from whom I could walk away.
K was a fantasy or a nightmare. He was an act of God. Or of Evil. Or of both. K was shell-shocked. K was explosive. K was given to us as a solution, or as a punishment. Depending on whose side you were on. The world was