Double Negative (22 page)
Authors: Ivan Vladislavic
Tags: #Contemporary, #Contemporary Fiction, #literary fiction, #South Africa, #apartheid, #Johannesburg, #photography, #memory, #past, #history, #art, #racial tension, #social inequality, #gated community, #activism, #public/private, #reality, #politics, #the city, #psycho-geography, #University of Johannesburg Creative Writing Prize, #David Goldblatt, #double exposure, #college dropout, #1980s, #Bez Valley, #suburbs, #letters, #André Brink, #South African Sunday Times fiction prize
Sucking in my belly, I went on. The outdoor-living shop had pitched a tent near their door and scattered some cotton-wool snow. There were racks of fleece-lined jackets, windcheaters and thermal vests, and tables full of equipment for extreme sports, adventure tourism, urban exploration and rural survival, like deodorized socks and rubber shoes for wading through streams. For a moment, the long gleaming corridor lined with cosmetic counters and knick-knack booths gave me the impression that I was in duty free, waiting for a flight, and I was overcome by jet
lag.
The massage chairs were in the Court of the Sun King, arranged on the many wavy arms of a sunburst in mosaic tiles. Not a minute too soon. Most inviting was a green-leather chair facing the corridor that led to Exit 3. Although there are no exits at the mall, to be honest, only entrances. You can cash up, they say, but you can never leave. I sank into the chair's soft and yielding embrace and shut my
eyes.
The Eagles were touring again, I'd seen them on television. They still had their hair and their teeth, as far as I could tell, but they were having back trouble like the rest of us, they had to sit down through the whole concert. It didn't seem right.
A human presence fell over me as lightly as a shadow. When I opened my eyes a salesman stood there. He had a bit of beard on his chin like a strip of Velcro. âChronic medical conditions?' he asked.
I stalled for a moment. Should I disclose my hypertension? Was it any of his business?
âVaricose veins, high blood pressure, fallen arches, slipped disks,' he prompted.
âNo.'
âTaking any medication?'
This time I was ready:
âNo.'
He threw the switch.
The chair stirred to life beneath me as if there was someone trapped in its spongy interior, someone trying to get out, I thought for a horrified moment, and then more worryingly, someone trying to pull me in. Kneecaps pressed into my legs, knuckles ground against my wrists. I was reminded of the playground and how children like to pummel one another, making their presence felt on one another's flesh. This is a mistake, I thought, I should get up now and go about my business. But the chair was an expert. It worked me over. The will in my muscles dissolved, the marrow of my resolve turned to water, the last hard fact was knocked out of me like a tooth. Whereupon the prisoner in the chair stopped struggling. The corridor stretched away into the distance like a canal. People were walking there on their reflections and I saw them waving as I
sank.
Every day for a fortnight, I'd searched for my profile on Janie's blog. I learned to fold a dinner jacket so that it doesn't crease in a suitcase, to splint a broken arm with a rolled newspaper and keep aphids off rosebushes without using pesticides. No sign of
me.
âFor God's sake,
ask
,' Leora said. âGive her a ring. Tell her the exhibition is coming up and she'd better get a move
on.'
While I was still weighing the options, my mother left a message on my cellphone to say she'd seen the article in the
News
. My son the artist! Why didn't you tell me? She'd taken the paper to her bridge game and everyone agreed it made me seem very clever.
I was in the middle of a job, so I called Leora at home. She'd missed the piece too
â
who has time to read anything properly?
â
but she fetched yesterday's
News
off the stack under the sink and skimmed through it for
me.
âIt's like a bit of experimental fiction,' she said. âIt's in a dozen pieces with headings like “Motion Pictures” and “Stills” and there's a quote from some Frenchman and a paragraph in italics. She says you're a man of your time: disaffected without being disengaged. That part's in red. Do you get
it?'
Yes. History has played a flame over me. I've come unstuck, but I'm joined to the world by a few gluey strands of saliva.
âThere's a lot more,' Leora said. âI'll put it aside and you can read it this evening.'
I had already decided not to. âJust one other thing and then I'll let you go: what does she say about the photographs?'
When I was a boy, my father invented a game for us to play in the car. Perhaps it was a way to amuse an easily bored only child or a ruse to get an overtired one to fall asleep. I had to lie down on the broad back seat of the Merc, so that I couldn't see the road ahead, and when we came to the end of the trip I had to guess where we were. Looking up, my view hemmed in by door pillars and bulging seat-backs, I saw streetlights and treetops, sometimes a robot or the roof of a building, coming and going in the windows. Using only these lofty clues, I tried to keep track of our route. Sometimes I already knew our final destination, which made it easier, as my dad might stray from the main roads to fool me but was unlikely to go in a completely different direction. Just as often I had no idea where we were going. My father, for his part, looked for short cuts and detours. If my mother was with us, it was her job to see that I didn't sneak a look over the horizon of the window ledge, although I was seldom tempted. I loved the challenge. As we drove towards some familiar place, like Rosenthal's where my father bought his golfing gear or my grandparents' house in Orange Grove, I had to set what I remembered of the route we usually took against the stops and turns of the car, making rather than following a map and matching it not to the world but to an internal landscape, a journey in memory, keeping it clear until he pulled up and said, âOkay, that's enough. Where are
we?'
In the beginning, he always bamboozled me. All it took was one unexpected turn down a street we normally drove past and he could throw me off the trail. Then with every subsequent stop or bend in the road, the map I was making in my mind grew less and less reliable. If I was lucky, some landmark like the turnip-top of a water tower or the pylon lights at a sports stadium would let me pick up the thread, but often it was lost for good. Finally, my father would pull over and ask me the all-important question. After I had given my answer, I would sit up, and then we laughed to see how wrong I was. Once, after we had dropped some letters in the box at the post office, he drove us in a circle, so that when I thought we were close to home, it turned out we were back where we started. And once or twice, with the car rocking like a river barge on its soft suspension, I did in fact fall asleep.
As time went by and I discovered more subtle clues than those unreeling like a strip of film through the frames of the windows, I got better at the game and started to win sometimes. I learned to read the bumps in the road, the rumble of tar under the wheels, the way the car jolted across railway lines or yawed through subways. At night, colours fell through the windows from neon lights and robots, the sky was dark and smoky over Alex, and near the garages along Louis Botha Avenue the air smelt of rubber. My father had to work harder to mislead me. He varied his speed so that I lost a sense of distance, and circled around blocks so that I lost direction. He became as involved in the game as I was and liked to lose as little. A few times we dallied so long my mother thought something had happened to us, and when we got home, in high spirits from the fun, she ticked me off for making my father play silly games, when he was the one who had started it
all.
A day came when I could not go wrong. It was a Friday evening. We had dropped Paulina at her bus stop, as she was going home for the weekend, and on the way back we stopped at a new fish-and-chip shop for takeaways. Usually my father would have been in a hurry to get home before the smell of the food got into the upholstery, but the unfamiliar territory drew us both into a game. I scrambled over the seat and stretched out in the back. We went down Louis Botha. Certainty settled over me like a blanket. I knew exactly where we were going. I had X-ray vision, I could see through the leather seats, where springs were coiled in fibre, I could see through the metal ribs of the door. Factory yards, shopfronts, garden fences and houses drifted by. My father turned off the main road earlier than he should have and wound through the crooked streets of Savoy. I saw the yellow-brick chimneys of the houses, the cars parked in driveways, the lights burning in windows. I had become a compass needle. Rather than trying to figure out where he was going, I was giving him directions, telling him when to slow down, where to turn, when to double
back.
At last we stopped. The air was thick with the homely smell of food, which the vinegar had not entirely soured. I could see a streetlight on a tall pole, the jigsaw undersides of oak leaves, pieces of sky between branches. My dad's voice reached me through the wall of the seat: âWhere are we now, my
boy?'
For the moment, I could not answer. I lay in the dark with the bitter knowledge that I had unlearned the art of getting
lost.
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Zoe Brasier
