Homing (19 page)

So it is that every evening after work, at six sharp, I take my promenade along the sea wall near my flat. I clip along at a steady pace: a little more than a walk, a little less than a jog. My fists are bunched before my chest; I thrust them forward and back, kicking my feet one-two one-two, my elbows winging to the sides. Yes, I am one of those speed-walkers. I know it’s undignified, but it’s the only way to get up any kind of sweat without actually running. I have the gear: special lightweight sweatpants, athletic socks, sweat-wicking tops in the latest high-tech fabrics. (No vests; I really am too old for that.) Once a year I buy a new pair of Nikes or New Balances, a virtuous treat.

On my outward journey, the sea lies to my left, grey or blue or silver. Fifteen minutes at a swift stride from my flat down the steep street, to the sea wall and along the path to the traffic lights opposite the garage and café. Here I pause to stretch on the strip of lawn, before continuing another fifteen minutes along the promenade as far as the public telephones. Then I wheel around and go back in the other direction, one-two one-two, with the sea on my right, half an hour, pausing only to cross at the lights to the café for the day’s
Argus
. I roll the newspaper tightly and hold it baton-like in one hand for the rest of the route home (only unsatisfactory on the weekends, when the editions are too fat for comfort). I always take with me just enough change in the special zip-up pocket in my top – plus twenty cents, because sometimes they put up the price without warning – and my house key. No wallet or cellphone; although the promenade is busy and safe at that time, you can never be too careful. And I like to stay light.

The thing about walking along a sea wall is that your options are limited: you can only go forward or back. You can’t head off to the side without falling into the sea, or ploughing across the lawn through the children’s swings and roundabouts and into the traffic. The lack of choice is soothing, and I’m quite content to follow my established route, each time the same. It is a beautiful walk, especially on still evenings when the sea is flat and the sky clear, or lightly flecked with peachy clouds. The water glows and swirls like cognac. Everyone I meet, coming or going, is gilded on either the left or right sides of their faces with pink or saffron, and they all seem serene and calm and somehow meditative in the generous light. I know I do.

People comment on that: my serenity. But often I am not calm inside, not at all, especially not in the boiling light of those late evenings. It is a dramatic coastline, and there are often grand effects: towering clouds, beating waves, gleams on the rocks where Darwin, they say, once stood and pondered geological time and the ancient congress of molten stone.

But it is not these that affect me so. It is purely the light coming over the sea, a brilliant luminosity not encountered from any other vantage point in the city. It cuts me with a kind of ecstasy – as if I’m on the verge of revelation, one I’m powerless to halt. I have been brought almost to tears, some evenings on the promenade.

There is a particular moment, when the sky goes coral pink and the breaking surf is chalk-blue, almost fluorescent in the fading light. And then each incoming swell feels as if it is rolling over my body, just under the skin, from the soles of my feet all the way to my fingernails, rolling out over the quick, making me want to reach out my fingers and touch. Although I am a controlled man, I am not immune to these things.

Controlled, that’s another word I’ve heard people – my workmates – use to describe me. I’m a senior copywriter, moderately good at my job; good at controlling words, certainly. Words for pictures of sunsets, often with cars or couples in front of them. But I grope after language to describe the feelings I experience on my evening walks, the light in the air and on the sea. This pleases me: that some things remain beyond my grasp. That they cannot be rendered down.

Perhaps this is why I have no ambition. I’ve held the same position at the same agency for fifteen years and have no desire for anything greater, for a managerial position, even as the new hires are promoted around me. Such things, I know, could never fulfil my more obscure longings. I’m happy to run in place.

There are always a lot of people moving up and down the promenade: smooth-skinned models looping along in Rollerblades too heavy for their frail ankles; the old woman who sits on the same bench every evening to feed the pigeons; cheerful ladies in tracksuits, trying to shift a kilogram or two; resolute athletes with corded thighs. Dog-walkers and drug-dealers and beggars, and lovers in each other’s arms as they watch the sun go down. Some of them I have seen every other evening for the past three years, which is how long I’ve been taking my promenade now. Others are new. Recently I’ve started to feel I recognise individual seagulls along the route, although this is surely my imagination.

One evening, a young man comes past me, sweating and steaming in a cloud of musk. Although covered up in a tracksuit, his body is obviously muscular; not the smooth, inflated-looking muscles that you see on some of the gym boys, not well-fed recreational beef, but the hard, functional build of someone who works with his body for a living. Shorter than me, but strong. He jogs fast and purposefully.

I notice him again a few days later, and from then on he intersects regularly with my evening promenade, three times a week: Mondays, Wednesdays, Saturdays. I see him going only the one way. He must loop back, as I do; but his circuit is clearly far more expansive and demanding than my own. Time-wise, he is rigid. I always pass him on my outbound trip, and always, it seems, at exactly the same place: just opposite the traffic lights where I pause to do my stretches. He waits to cross the road there, bouncing on his toes, swivelling his torso aggressively left and right. Perhaps he’s heading for the gym.

Always dressed in bright, deep colours, I notice; he must have half a dozen different tracksuits, in pillar-box red, racing green, midnight blue. (These phrases come to me involuntarily.) He always wears the complete assemblage, matched top and pants, which is quite formal – never casual in a
T
-shirt. A white towel is looped around his neck and sometimes he grasps its ends as he waits at the traffic lights, pulling it against the back of his dark neck. A strong, almost cuboidal block of a jaw. I think he must be a boxer. Something in the way he moves, in the build. Or maybe it’s just the way he holds his fists, loosely clenched, that gives me this idea.

My certainty about his occupation grows. Who but a professional athlete would need to train so often and so hard, swathed in towel and sweat-dark tracksuit? His arms are bulkier than a long-distance runner’s would need to be, he is light on his feet with a dancing stride, and there’s a kind of sprightly aggression in his movements. Enormous hands, for his height. They make me self-conscious about my own flushed fists.

Two men, changeless, beating the same if opposite route; it is comforting. I’ve read about boxers’ battles to keep their weight at certain limits, and I imagine that we are caught in the same kind of stasis. Like me, he is fighting to keep his body where it is – although, to be sure, his standard is more exacting.

After a while we start to nod to each other, cautiously. To test my boxing theory, one day I put up my fists – not sure, really, what I intend. He balls his and twitches them towards his chin. No smile, though. It feels tenuous, the moment: me with fists raised, unsure if this is a playful act.

Up close, I see the imperfections – the damaged skin of his brows, the way the scarring seems to have resulted in the loss of eyebrows. I notice that his nose looks broken, his earlobes thick. (Are those cauliflower ears?) Despite this coarsening of the features, he has an appealing face, set in an expression of youthful resolution, lit on one side by the setting sun.

It becomes a jokey ritual, a greeting every time we pass. The lifted hands in imaginary gloves. At least, I think it’s a joke. It grows from there.

One evening, when we come face to face, he and I do that little step-step dance that happens when two people are walking straight into each other: both to the same side and then both back again. I smile. His fists come up and this time he pauses to spar with me. I flinch – and then I know I’m right: only a pro could direct such a sparkling combination of quick almost-touches to my ribs, my jaw, my nose. The huge fists lunge at me, snap back; so close, I feel a tickle of warm air on my face, and smell his sweat. I raise my hands to parry.

And after that it happens every time: each evening we do the little two-step dance, and spend a few moments trading phantom blows. A smile never crosses his face, as if the scars somehow prevent it. But at the end, just before he skips to the side and jogs on, he’ll give me a look and tip his chin up in brief and surely humorous acknowledgement.

A month passes, two. The woman who feeds the birds looks increasingly fragile, until I start to worry that she’ll be overpowered by the sturdy pigeons bickering around her; and then one day she is gone. Shortly thereafter, I see the pigeons have constructed another old woman in their midst. The couples part and reconfigure. But the boxer and I remain the same, locked in our pattern, running and standing still.

Other people loop in other cycles around us, stitching up the ends of their days with a quick up-and-down along the water’s edge. I think of ants, crawling in opposing circles; clockwise ants every now and then touching mouthparts with their anticlockwise comrades, passing cryptic messages. Some promenaders I will doubtless never meet, caught as we are in orbits that never intersect. But the boxer and I are in sync.

My days pass mildly; I have other routines. The promenade is not my only circular occupation. I sit on Sunday afternoons in the flat and read the newspaper. I go out to buy myself coffee and croissants. I go to work, where I produce copy about faster, stronger, younger. When I hear my own words on
TV
, I don’t remember ever writing them.

Sitting in my padded swivel chair before my computer station, hands poised to tap the keys, I am trapped in stillness. There is a strong desire to jump up and swing my arms, to dispel this immobility. But I stay where I am and the spasm passes. My colleagues at the other workstations do not notice this fleeting turmoil, do not see that I have paused in my typing to contemplate for a moment some grand gesture. I flex my hands, let them drop mildly back to the keyboard. My fingers renew their automatic labour.

Mondays, Wednesday, Saturdays. We never speak, but our greetings are progressively more familiar. In our small, intense interactions I notice things in great detail: the fact that his irises are black, fading from that dark centre to amber rims. A chipped tooth in his slightly open mouth.

Our sparring becomes elaborate. I think he might be teaching me to box. It’s all very controlled, but of course there is also a little thrill of fear. Huge fists in your face, what can you do but imagine those hands rubbing out your features, smearing your nose, forcing your teeth into your mouth? That’s never happened to me of course, but I can imagine the very specific sensations: nose-break pain, tooth-shatter pain, taste of blood. I do not know exactly what the mock-blows signify – violence or camaraderie. Each thrust has the potential to explode, is centimetres from rocketing into my face, from crushing my chest. I can imagine receiving such blows far more easily than I can see myself delivering them. I try to picture pushing my hand all the way, sticking it between the big fists to press against that jaw. Impossible.

Sometimes, trotting on after our shadow-play, I am trembling slightly, feeling the sting of invisible gloves on my body, the smack of fists. I think of the phrase
glass jaw
. Compared to his stony features, I am all crystal.

One Wednesday afternoon I stay home from work with a cold. I switch on the
TV
at some unusual hour, to catch the afternoon news:
SABC
2 or 3, which I would not normally watch. And I see him, I am sure it is him, under the bright lights of the ring, in shiny redand-white shorts, his knuckles encased in bulbous mitts like cartoon hands. His lips are distended by a gum guard, and he looks smaller with his top off, but I know him by his movements: the sideways skip and jump, fists flung out in that dancing rhythm. He and his opponent in blue are both little terrier-men – is it featherweight? – but they are pure wire-hard muscle, shiny brown with sweat. I don’t catch his name over the dinging bell, the shouts of the crowd; and anyway, the commentary is in another language.

I lean forward, face close to the screen. It only lasts a couple of rounds. The one small, hard man drills the other to the floor with sweat-spraying strokes. I feel each blow as a twitch in my upper arms. And then it is over: blue lies flat on his back, toes up and out; my boxer’s hands are raised above his head in victory. Blood streaming from his brow.

Only after the ads come on do I relax my hands and let myself lean backwards on the couch.

He is absent from the promenade for a week. When he reappears, I am warier of him, almost ducking away from his shadow-strokes, but he is too skilful to touch me. Often I think about speaking to him, but my mouth is dry, and he is exercising so hard, so earnestly; I don’t want to break his concentration.

I am not eloquent here, in this conversation of bodies. Still, I have come to depend on these playful altercations, these little knockabouts in which neither one of us falls to the ground.

Today, for the first time in months, my routine is broken. What is it that delays me? A foolish thing. A flutter of wings in my chest as I’m putting on my shoes, a kind of rushing. Something to startle a man of my age. I have to sit for a few moments, gathering myself. Only fifty-four. I have had no trouble before now. I eat well; my life does not have unusual stresses. I exercise.

As a result, I am ten minutes late in getting away. Maybe twelve. I don’t check the exact time of my leaving, nor do I feel the need to hurry especially, to catch up. I am rigid in my habits, but not to that degree. The heart flutter has upset me and I’m not thinking of anything else. I set out cautiously.