Produced as part of a thesis (MACW) at Rhodes University. Published in Tyini.
In the kitchen. I am cleaning coffee rinds out of a cup and my brother is in town; lies horizontal on the couch, something flat on his stomach and something loud in his tears. My mother is here visiting too; she is out doing whatever it is that mother’s do when they doubt the quality of their daughter’s lives. I pour the remainder of the coffee down the drain-hole, stick my fingers into the translucence of glass, and scoop, handful by handful, tiny grains of brown, feeling the miniscule hard against my fingers, under my nails. I have my hands under the tap, rubbing the one against the other when it happens. Slight. Almost imperceptible, as though I am not supposed to know that it is happening. The house shifts. Quick. Quiet. An involuntary twitch.
They are here, my mother and brother, because men with knives insist on allowing themselves into my home. To create the kind of protective spell that only blood kin can create. To split open their veins in order to seal mine. The men keep coming and keep coming. Their knives sharpened against the stone of my anxieties. I am new here and mostly alone. And this town is small and it does the things that small towns do, operating on an impenetrable internal logic. A logic that either drags one along, or drowns them. It lends itself to loneliness in its smallness, it’s antiquated colonial way. Lonely is my default disposition. And so, I find ways to be comfortable here at the intersection of loneliness and loneliness. Here, people either startle when you greet them or demand the perfunctories and platitudes. The intimacies are forced and far apart. You are either a stranger or a monument. There is no in between.
The first man. I have folded myself onto a couch and the moon is swollen. I can see it just outside the window. It has lowered itself so that I may reach for it and place it, a grapefruit, in my pocket, on a plate, in a bowl for preservation. He happens at around 7 in the evening. This is what I say in the police report. I was alone at home on the couch when the door swung open and let the night in, and a man in a black hoodie pulled low over the crown of his head, and a knife.
He seems unsure, like perhaps he stumbled home drunk with the day and thought he was opening the door to his own apartment. Like I am not supposed to be here. Like I broke into his abode, replaced his furniture with mine, his self with me. He sticks his head in first. Looks around, unsure. He does not see me there, mahogany and leather like the couch until he commits, steps fully in and I begin to materialize.
The first man is not the most original thief. He watches too many movies and says the things like they say the things on the screen. He pulls a knife out of the waist of his pants and points it at me, an accusation, an implication in steel.
Don’tMoveDontMakeASoundShutTheFuckUpDoNotMoveIfYouScreamIWillKillYouWhereIsTheMoneyGiveMeYourMoneyImGoingToFuckingKillYou. There are oceans in my ears.
He tells me stand up so I stand but he pushes me back down again and so I sit. “I said don’t fucking move.” this not the time to argue for the finer points of communication and clarity. What I want to know is, does he want me to stand up or to not move. Do I stand and then remain that way, frozen in that position? Like he said he would spray me a million times but he has a knife in his hand. Will he puncture me aerosol-like, leave me perforated and porous. Is there another weapon that will spray, maybe bullets, maybe pepper-gas. He has a knife. It is not a knife. It a homemade blade rough and battered and he has wrapped tape around the one end of it to form a handle. It is not a knife. It is a knife.
Together we search through my things to help him find what he is looking for. His phone. His laptops. His furniture. His money. His life that I have usurped. He pushes me towards my bedroom and I am embarrassed. Bed unmade. Underwear on floor. Clothes, books, loose sheets of paper strewn between the tangled blankets. I see the underwear already on the floor. I see the bed open. My underwear is already on the floor and my bed lies gaping. So I push him. I push and I run. I push passed him and I run. I run out the door and into night. It reaches out an arm and trips me and I slip on some mud. I fall into mud and I hear him behind me. I hear him behind me and I swim myself up. I run to the main house and bang on the door. I bang on the door and no-one is home. No-one is home because I live alone. I live alone because lonely is my disposition. Is he still behind me?
*
“Did you feel that?” I turn to my brother, my hands still baptising themselves under a warm flow. Brother is still flat on the couch with something flat on his chest flickering light onto his face, something loud in his ears. He does not hear me. I walk to him, pull the buds out his ears and ask him, “didn’t you just feel the house move?” “The house? Moving?” He is puzzled, pretends to be. “Maybe it was just you moving and you didn’t know you were doing it.” Because what kind person would not know what their body is doing. He does these things, uses cruel logic to douse emotion. To extricate himself by way of explanation. Houses do not move. People do. When my mom pulls into the driveway, I am outside in the garden, picking stones and stuffing them into my pockets, anchoring myself down. To feel myself move.
Smaller stones I sew them into the hems of things. In the inner seams of jackets, in the blue denim crotch of a pair of jeans. I stuff some rounder grey stones in the upturned hems of trousers, and they shift when I walk. They rub against each, a comforting grating sound, an ankle shaker. Some I press into the grooves under my brogues and sneakers and every time I walk I tap dance. I lift myself light in the air to tease gravity and feel the stones pull my back to the earth with a clap and a clack. The larger ones - I wash them in salt-water, coil them in thin wire and chicken mesh and attached them to strips of leather to wear around my neck, my wrists. When I tie my hair into a high whorled bun on the top of my head, I slip a single stone in the folds of braid and hair. I have a stone I slip under my tongue when my words threaten to escape. It is almost perfectly round, a marbled warp of white, pink and grey. In my mouth it is always cool and it tastes like powder, like chalk. I flip it to the top of my tongue and press it into my pallet until it begins to hurt. When I spit it out, a cold indent of its size remains. To feel myself speak. I have a pumice stone I found on the beach in Hamburg, and I use it to scrape my feet raw. I scrub until it hurts to walk. I scrub until flakes of skin float on my bath water, and then I scrape at myself some more. In between my fingers they feel like jewels. Once I tried to push a crystal of Rose Quartz into my vagina, but got scared and just rubbed it over the folds instead.
I am trying to explain to Brother that living on the frontier of Settler County means that you must make nice with its ghosts. “No-one here was buried,” I say pointing towards the mountain with tall trees. “They won’t let us forget that they’re here. That we are here, living in the first wounds of colonization. That we are infected with time and we are pus and blood and the putrid yellow of its plasma. The ghosts are alive and we are dead. Everyone is dead here.” I am sick and we all are and he does not understand me, lying flat with something on his chest and noise in his ears.
There is a man on the roof of the house across from us. He wears: an oversized brown hoodie, big brown pants and an orange t-shirt. He walks gingerly on the mercury ribbons of roofing, tip-toes to the end and pivots; rooftop ballet. He lowers himself off the edge, one leg first swaying like an enchanted cobra, looking for footing. He finds a ledge, brings the other leg down and slides, belly flat against the edge. He stands on the landing for a few, looks around, jumps down, disappears.
“Do you know what I mean? About the restlessness? This is why there are so many churches here.”
“And buildings with inverted crucifixes on them.” He finds this funny.
When the man appears again he is on the silver of another house. Just standing there held down by black gum boots. An argent upsurge laps at his boots, shimmering in the sunlight like a quiet tide. He looks around, swings his head wild, holds him hands at his waist akimbo. He repeats his steps. Finds a place on the edge. Again the swaying of enchanted legs, the lowering like a pulley. The disappearance.
Two blocks from the house, there is a building in a shameful shade of blue, some kind of annex or steeple drilling up through the head of it. I take Brother there, better view of the phantasmagoria. On the inside a staircase snakes through the centre, spiralling over itself like a dizzying top, winding one landing on top of the next like twisting damaged vertebrae. We heave ourselves through its frayed nerves endings, spinning up, close to each other, the stairs so narrow, so steep that there is no room to stop. The guide, an older man of serious faces and jangling keys leads us out onto the roof, closing the door behind him. He sifts through his tambourine of keys, finds one, and opens the door to the steeple. The room drowns in light for a little. Tiny dust particles pirouette, suspended in air, trapped here. We step in, Brother and I. The man rustles, clashes and clangs, swings a peeling door closed. It is the dark of ancient winters. He clears his throat. He begins; “There are seven of these Victorian Camera Obscura’s in the world.” In his one hand he holds a thin wooden rod. He gestures with this wand, pointing above us, in front, behind him to the painted wooden wall. “What is happening here, right on top of our roof here, we’ve got a turret.” The wand pushes up. “The turret is having a mirror inside. The mirror is taking a picture, putting it through to a double lens convex and throwing it here, on top of this table, on this bowl.” He taps in front of him three times in the dark. There is a raised, circular platform in the centre of the room. An altar. On it, a white Perspex bowl. We have come to see the oracle. To diagnose the conditions of our souls. “This Camera Obscura has a 180-360 degree view of Grahamstown. This house, the man who used to live here, he was a watch maker, a jeweller, an astronomer.” The man moves in dark, the air makes room for him. He shuts a door somewhere, pulls on a string and a trap door on the celling of the building swings open. He drags on a green and white string, a pulley of sorts and there in the white hollow of the bowl, Grahamstown bent around its curves, sunken in the middle, parts of the image climbing up the rim to reach us. He points things out. An Afrikaans school built in 1954. A library. A red roof of some civic building. “We have three towers here, the clock tower, a flag pole, and the Camera Obscura. That is where we are.” To follow the images, we move around the altar, séance. He points out the Cathcart Arms Hotel (Known as eKatini to the savvy) the oldest in this town, built in 1845. “On the right here, this is the start of the township called Fingo village. This here,” he moves the stick, tapping it on the bowl, “is the township called eGazini. EGazini meaning bloodshed. This is where the white people fought amaxhosa in 1819. After the British defeated amaXhosa, Queen Victoria donated the land to Mfengu people. This is why they call it Fingo Village.” He pulls the string again. A new image materialises and we step to the right to face it. “There is a road here. Reverend Road. There is a history about this road. I’ll take you back up to 1976. Up to 1980. During the uprisings. This road, it was the only road to Port Elisabeth via Grahamstown to East London. No other way. If you were a white person in this time, you can’t go on this road otherwise you will get a nice gift of a crown to your head in the form of a red brick, a nice necklace of burning tire and delicious juice of petrol.” In the dark I cannot make out his features. The man sounds proud. He is smiling. He is speaking. “And here at the top, we have Makana Hill. Makana he was a leader. A king. A chief, a prophet of AmaXhosa. Before that battle of 1819, he came and stand on top of the hill with his 10 000 warriors to fight 4000 British soldiers. 4000 British soldiers all armed with guns. Makana and his 10000 men with spears and shields. And Makana said these words, when the battle was about to start ‘their bullets will turn to water.’ But the bullets stayed bullets and more than 4000 warriors died.” We continue to walk a circle around the altar, our bodies tracing its circumference. We walk, he points. A bloodshed here. A church. A bloodshed there. A church. The British. The Boers. The Blacks. A church. A bloodshed there. A bloodshed here. Another church.
*
At the house, I keep bumping into things. I walk into walls. Bruise my arms. Stub my toes
against the edges of the couch, hard against the angles of the table. It has moved, the house, just a little to the left. Nothing where it was. I reach to put my phone away and it drops on the floor. I squat to sit on the leather and slide to the parquet tiling. At the greying downturn where ceiling meets wall, thin cracks have begun to appear. They lightning down to meet. To bear silent witness. I choose one crack - the deepest one - and follow it as it zig-zags across the walls. Where it’s born, in an acute juncture of wall, wall and ceiling board it is deep, wide enough fit a sheet of paper and very dark. It thins and lightens in colour across the walls, skirting the top of a framed artwork. It drops as it enters the kitchen and streams out the kitchen door and stops outside just above the green rain-water tank. I try to climb on the tank but I slip. I bang on the walls. Nothing. Put my ear to them. Nothing. I lift the loosened floorboards and peer underneath. Nothing. I stand at the window, looking to be wrong and all the roofs of all the houses have moved a few degrees to the right. The man in brown and orange is back there again, dancing his dance on mercury. Again he repeats his steps. Again, disappearance. When I look again, a brown and orange cat soaks sun on the tin sheeting, passed out adjacent to two solar panels.
Mother says we should pray. Mother says we should pray more. We are in the same house, in the same room and she texts me bible verses, routinely looking up from her phone to gauge my response. In one of her dreams I walk through the streets of Grahamstown naked covered only by a dizzying haze. She sends something from Ephesians. “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armour of God, so that you can take a stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers and the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”
There are bricks outside, a silent stack sitting behind the cars, behind the bins. One by one I bring them in, whisper to them and place them in corners, on cupboards, on carpets. A brick behind each door and at each “L” where wall greets wall. Bricks amongst shoes; sharp-tipped heels, stiletto boots, white-soled sneakers and fresh polished brogues and bricks. A brick in the fridge and in the freezer. In the drawers of the coffee table and under the couch. To weight the house down. Bricks. So it can feel itself moving.
*
The second man is actually two men or three or more. At 3am they open the gate and it’s the sound of metal giving way that rouses me. And then a door slams, my car door. And then another door, my front door shaking in its frame, vibrating with night and violence. It shakes like that and shakes like that, a hand on the other end adamant. Windows and doors take on new meanings. Their transparency is a threat. Windows are things that shatter and crack. Doors swing wide keeping nothing in, nothing out. Holding nothing but their ability to transmute into shards that cut, that spray, that perforate. I have no lines marked into my body. No roots rubbed into the splits of skin to protect.
The moon was full, or it was new. I scrawled my intentions on the back of a till slip and tucked them into my phone cover for safe-keeping.
Don’tMoveDontMakeASoundShutTheFuckUpDoNotMoveIfYouScreamIWillKillYouWhere IsTheMoneyGiveMeYourMoneyImGoingToFuckingKillYou
When the police arrive, finally, I’ve thrown a gown over my nakedness. They stand outside the door pantomiming their irritation for their own amusement. They provide reasons. The time of morning. The cold of winter. “We only have one van here. We can’t keep running to your house every time you think you hear something. You know you just pulled us out a real crime, to do what exactly? What do you want us to do?” The woman, she is squat, low to ground and wide at its axis. She punctuates her rant with yawns, rubs the crust of sleep from her eyes. “It’s not like you woke up with these men on top of you. Just be grateful and get some sleep.” Because I am angered into silence, I throw up in the back of my mouth and swallow it.
Above the couch where my brother lies flat - something flat on his chest, loud in his ears - is an artwork large on the wall and framed in black. It tells itself slant, the top right corner pointing higher than it should. I stand on the couch, try to re-order it, my brother saying things like “a little more on the left, a little more, a little more. Perfect.” But as soon as I move my hand away, it slides back down askance.
There are more cracks, millions of them, veining from under the brown wooden skirting. The braver ones grow up to meet the cracks tumbling down from the ceiling. There are cracks on the inside of the house and cracks on the outside. On the face of the building, looking towards the gate, a few centimetres of concrete foundation unveil themselves. On the other, tiny black ants scurry away, a row of ellipses and full stops.
*
I tell my mother that I’m afraid all the time. I grind my teeth into dust and grit and spit grains through a tight jaw when I wake up in the morning. Later, my phone vibrates. My mother sends this: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong, vigorous, and very courageous. Be not afraid, neither be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.”
She finds my bricks; in cupboards, on carpets, in corners. “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have and enjoy life, and have it in abundance (to the full, till it overflows).”
She doesn’t talk with her own tongue anymore. She speaks in the words of Joshua, of Mark, Paul and Job.
I cry early in the mornings, very late at night in the dark. I wake up and she’s placed a ripped piece of paper on my night stand. Her handwriting is clean, blue. The L’s are hard elbows and the o’s are perfect globes. “Lord, you are the God who saves me; day and night I cry out to you. May my prayer come before you; turn your ear to my cry.”
*
“Have you heard of umkhokha?” Friends are concerned. Family is afraid. They ask about this sudden closeness with violence, this pattern of men with knives as though I am doing something to court it. They call to check if my doors are locked, if my windows are latched. They text for updates, for possible clues and suggestions. The slaughtering of something white, it’s blood for mine. Submergence in sea water. Holy Water sprayed on the outer perimeter and gate. Mounds of salt in the corner. Frankincense and imphepho burning at the window. Wild Garlic in my bath water that breaks my skin into rashes.
“Umkhokha?”
“What I mean is, has anyone in your family ever had the experience of being robbed, of being killed in a robbery?”
There is uncle. Stabbed footsteps from his house, the unintelligible story writ in blood from the gatepost to the street. A 30cm incision from below his third rib bone pouring down. The men in my family have strange ways of dying and the setting rarely ever changes. Always almost home but never quite. Always a shebeen a stumble away. In the street, alone, no-one to catch the final wheezing, to give that breath a direction, a way home.
He explains that umkhokha is like recurring family incident. A trauma that plays itself in sets and loops, travelling by genome and bloodstream. “You have to do a ceremony yokuvala umkhokha, you have to close the loop.”
*
The third man was three men or four or more. They came back because they keep coming back, because they still do not have what they want.
We buried my uncle. We did not see him. No-one touched his body or mouthed breath into his ashen lips. No-one brought a wet cloth to his brow and wiped the sticky remnants of life off it. Who called him by his names? Who crossed his arms over his chest? Who combed the grey out his hair?
Again the gate skipping on its tracks, a banshee squeal of metal dragging metal. A slamming of doors. A rattling of doors. A conflation of meanings; windows and doors and my underwear on the floor. Next time I will kill them and wash my feet in their blood.
Don’tMoveDontMakeASoundShutTheFuckUpDoNotMoveIfYouScreamIWillKillYouWhere IsTheMoneyGiveMeYourMoneyImGoingToFuckingKillYou
My uncle was buried, but we didn’t bury him. And that’s a problem, my friend explains. “You don’t bury a person with their body unwashed cause inxeba alipholi and the wounds call other wounds.”
Loops are repetitions. The over and over again of over and over againness. The starting back at start. The elliptical explorations always retuning to self, starting not at 1 but at zero. At nothingness. In the void. You have to close the loop or risk getting lost in it.
*
Mother unloads groceries in the kitchen. It seems as though everyday she is in the kitchen unpacking plastic bags, shifting things around in the fridge, in the cupboard. She washes the windows, muttering to herself, commanding God. She mops the floor spreading grace and mercy across the floor in soapy suds. She pours praise onto the tops of tables and dries them off with worship. Her eyes are dimmer these days, she presses her fingers into the flesh around them, pushing prints into the thinning skin. In the kitchen she is a tap, she is a knife, she is the tiles on the walls. She peels herself off the walls, lifting her brown off the cupboard doors and walks to the plastic bags gathered on the counter. She upturns a sack of oranges into a fruit bowl, the paper bag crumpling under its hollowness. She grabs a skirt of bananas and heads towards the fridge. She opens the door, makes to put the fleshy fruit in its buzzing belly, and stops, confused for a second, like maybe they don’t belong there. And then it happens again. This time the house shudders hard. A lone orange escapes from the bowl, spilling off the grey counter-top and rolls into the corner by the door. The other oranges follow and the huddle there behind the wood for some hope of safety, some protection to be found. My brother runs into the kitchen and she is still standing there, her hand on the door, bananas in the other. “What the hell was that?” he screams. She tells him to calm down, her grip still firm on the handle, blood screaming away from her knuckles. The curtains lean on their rings and slide down the length of the rod, bunching up to dress the end of the wall in frills. The bookshelf crashes into the table. The cupboard doors flap open and a waterfall of glasses, cups, plates comes chiming down. The house is tilting off the ground gentle. The other roofs seem to be receding slowly, their metallic laminate shimmer from further and further away, so that the grooves in the metal become waves, and the waves become ripples and the ripples whirl in the sun until they are just light. The man on the roof stands there, transfixed. He lifts his right hand to his brow and squints and as we get higher, he gets smaller and smaller until all he is a furry smudge, a brown and orange cat raising its whiskers to the sky.