Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [73]
K and Mapenga hugged, thumping each other violently on the back. It looked like the meeting of two gladiators. “Fucking bastard!” yelled Mapenga.
“You mad asshole!”
“This bastard,” yelled Mapenga, clasping K around the neck in the crook of his elbow, “he tried to kill fucking Father Christmas one year! This one is the maddest bastard I know.”
“He deserved it,” said K. “The guy had no manners.”
“You can’t scribble Father Christmas,” said Mapenga, “just because he doesn’t have manners.”
“His kid called my wife a bitch,” explained K, “so I punched him.”
“And stuffed his beard down his throat,” laughed Mapenga.
K said, “I don’t fight anymore.”
“Bullshit.”
“I promise you. I swear it’s the truth. I haven’t hit someone for a year. Longer maybe.”
“Really?” Mapenga stared at K, his mouth open. “Then what the fuck do you do with yourself all day now?”
K laughed.
“Who’s this?” said Mapenga turning to me.
I was introduced.
“Do you like to fish?”
“Not really,” I admitted.
“Good, you can come and stay on my island then,” said Mapenga to K. “She can cook and we’ll go fishing. Shit, that will be lekker. You’ll come?”
K nodded.
And Mapenga laughed with delight, a surprising noise, like a chicken getting chased around a farmyard.
We packed up a duffel of clothes and some food and Mapenga drove us around the lake to where his boat was tied up. We climbed into the boat and chugged off across the lake to Mapenga’s island. The lake is incongruous because it is new (not yet thirty years old) and so it looks as if it is still trying to be land. The tops of kopjes surge from the water, as if gasping for air, and the fingering limbs of dead trees poke eerily up from the watery depths. Storms are known to produce violently bad-tempered waves on this lake, which is also famous for its aggressive crocodiles. The combination has proved to be the end of plenty of fishermen.
“Last year,” Mapenga told us, slowing the boat down to a crawl and shouting to be heard above the engine and the wind and the water, “there were some South Africans fishing on the lake and they went out even though there was a storm brewing and, sure enough, their boat got swamped.” Mapenga indicated a place farther into the lake. “They were right out there, in the middle. So two of them swam for a tree, but the third guy didn’t make it and he drowned. By the time we found the two ous, like baboons clinging to the tree, the drowned guy was gone. And the guys in the tree said they didn’t know where he had gone. I said to them, ‘Get in the boat. But I’m just telling you miserable fuckers right now that this is the first and last time you will ever ride in my boat and I should probably leave you in that fucking tree until the vultures come because you deserve to die a shit death.’ ”
Mapenga turned to K. “What kind of prick lets their mate drown and then, on top of that, loses the fucking body?”
K shook his head.
“Anyway, the drowned bloke, ja? Well, his widow sends a message. She says she needs his body for burial. So I go to Tete—I fucking drive three hours there and back—and I phone her and I say, ‘There is no body.’
“ ‘What do you mean?’
“ ‘He was eaten.’
“And she throws her toys out the playpen. No, she needs the body to get the guy’s life insurance. Please won’t I try to find it. Then she says, ‘He had a nice watch. You can keep the watch if you find him.’
“So I think, What the fuck. Might as well try, and I go out there for days and days and finally—kudala, lapa side—I find a little bit of skop floating in the water and a tiny bit of the ou’s backbone, but nothing else. No fucking watch. So I put this lot in a cooler and I go to Maputo to put it on the plane back to South Africa and I explain to the immigration guy the long story, and he looks in his fucking book and he tells me, ‘No, the dead man’s visa has expired. He cannot fly.’ ”
Mapenga starts laughing, his high chicken laugh. “Man! So I say to the guy, ‘That’s okay. I’ll just leave this cold box here until you can get him another visa,’ and I put down