Like it Matters (5 page)

And then one morning hauling myself off to the bathroom.

Finding my jeans, finding the pillbox in the change pocket.

Flushing everything in there down the toilet

And smiling, telling myself,
Give it one more chance, Ed.

One more chance to let you down.

And here’s proof.

Here’s proof you really tried.

T
HINKING ABOUT HER ALL THE TIME
made me see her everywhere.

On the street, on the beach, in cars going by, sitting in restaurants, even on
TV
once or twice—mostly they were young girls who just looked like her till I looked closer, though sometimes my heart went a bit crazy and leapt at anything that was even roughly her size or shape.

One afternoon I followed a boy for four blocks, getting closer and closer, surer and surer

Before he pulled down his hoodie and turned round and told me to los hom uit.

One morning I did the same thing to a woman who must’ve been sixty.

T
HERE WERE THREE DAYS TILL THE NEXT MEETING
—

I’d missed one because of bad nerves—

And I figured it’d probably help my confidence if I could tell her I’d found some kind of job since the last time she saw me. That’s normally the first thing people do. Well, normally they get religious first, but then they get jobs

And I knew what I needed—

Never mind how I was actually feeling—

What I needed was for her to believe I was strong.

I was doing it.

I was getting there.

So one morning, I was awake and thinking long before I heard the trains, and I got myself out of bed and spent a while in the bathroom and I made an effort to look alright, and then I made sure I ate some breakfast and then for about half an hour I sat with my dream book and I only wrote positive things in it. Then I went out in the weak sun and bought a
Voice of the Village
and a
Tattler
and some coffee, and I sat on a bench on Atlantic Road and started looking through all the classifieds.

If you count selling drugs and if you count working for my dad when I was sixteen, I’ve had eleven different jobs in my life. Finding them’s never really been the hard part. I’ve bartended, I’ve waited, I’ve signed people up outside a gym, I helped out an old lady in a library who cried when I left, for about two months all I did was wipe dew off second-hand cars in a lot in Kenilworth. I’ve worked at a crystal shop, I’ve worked at a kennel, I’ve taken tickets at a movie house, I’ve raked leaves out the driveway and into piles on the lawn outside a spa, and still, nothing’s ever been worse than selling Golden Products door to door with my dad. That was the first and I had to do it in the school holidays and—with the way stuff turned out for him and me—sometimes I worry that experience might’ve killed off my work ethic forever.

I tried three places that day.

A cool-looking bar right in the village, right in the heart there with the cobblestones and the gaslights, but they’d already found somebody. The library, but it turned out they were looking for someone who’d actually studied librarianship—apparently that’s a thing, it takes a couple of years and you have to do it at a university. A beauty place that was looking for someone to answer the phone and make bookings, but they told me they wanted a woman. They actually thought I was joking when I went in and asked.

And ja, sure, it was only three places—but I let it get to me that they all said no.

I felt betrayed, and what I did about it is I went back to the bar that couldn’t give me a job and I nearly, nearly went in—probably just to order a line of shots and bomb myself out that way.

But then across the road, at this new place that called itself The Juicery and that had a sign out front saying
MINDFUL BUCKWHEAT PANCAKES R32
, I saw a waiter with blond dreadlocks and fisherman pants walk out from the entrance and go set up an umbrella at a table on the street.

Bingo
.

It took a while—I had to order some really expensive coffee—but in the end the guy with the dreadlocks told me about his guy, Bruno, apparently he was the man around Muizenberg and everyone bought from him. He lived in a run-down hotel on the road out to St James—I couldn’t miss it—and I could tell the guys at the door that Carl sent me.

“Are you Carl?” I asked him.

“No. I’m Kris,” he said, and we shook hands.

I left the place and I went away down the street. I had my eyes on my feet but my feet were stepping surely. I didn’t feel any doubt in my mind, and I walked up to the bridge and I crossed Atlantic Road

Passing people but not really seeing them, I was already wondering what I’d go for if Bruno gave me a choice

And then all of a sudden there it was—

It felt like I’d bumped into the sight and it’d winded me—

This weird piece of industria in the middle of town, it looked like a junkyard but it had government buildings right nearby and flats rising up all around, high flats with balconies full of potted ferns and laundry

And what kind of junkyard had such awesome shit in it?

I saw an entire carousel, listing badly, so the horses on one side were kneeling on the ground, I saw little rocket ships for kids to sit inside, the kind that come alive when you put coins in, I saw pieces of track that must’ve been for a rollercoaster, I saw plastic sheets covering other strange shapes, they flapped in the breeze but they were tied and weighted down with bricks, I saw a pile of rusty bumper cars. And then I saw the sign, hanging in front of a little workshop in the back corner of the plot:

HELLUVA RIDES—FINEST RESTORATION AND MAINTINANCE

It was the kind of late autumn afternoon that’d make you swear that’s what the weather was like in heaven, always. Where the sun seems like a quality of the air and everything looks polished with amber, and I was looking at the place—it didn’t look like it belonged, it looked like where kids got taken in the Land of Broken Dreams—and I’ve always been drawn to places like that, who knows why, but I’ve always loved it when places are so sad they actually go beyond it, they sort of cross over to being noble.

I felt like I was getting some kind of message and I made a deal with myself.

I was only allowed to go find Bruno after I’d tried to get a job at Helluva Rides.

I followed the fence round to the back of the plot. On the door to the workshop there was a painted sign that said
THE GENIUS IS
… and then hanging underneath it, a big card saying
IN
!. All of a sudden I wished I’d had a beer earlier, or I had a cigarette right then, anything to stop my hands shaking so much

And I wondered about heading home and coming back the next morning but I knew how that’d go—

So I just knocked on the door, before I could think myself out of it.

When it opened a tall guy was standing there, in white takkies and a tracksuit made out of parachute material. Dark blue, with green chevrons on it. Definitely a school tracksuit. He had a square face and short hair with a square fringe, low ears, chipped teeth in a slack mouth, small eyes and they blinked a lot when he talked.

“Ja, can I help you?” he said.

“Maybe. I really dig the yard out there.”

“Oh thanksh, man. I do my besht, you know?”

“Ja, well, it looks great. Do you run the whole thing by yourself?”

“Ja, it’sh jusht me. Jusht me here.”

“Could you use any help?”

“Like what?”

“I mean, is there any way I could maybe work here with you?” I said—

And you should have seen the look on the dude’s face. Uncomprehending joy. Like he’d just won a lounge suite on a game show.

He said, “Come in, come in,” and he stood to the side and waved me through the door. It was dark in there, the whole place lit by a bare bulb swinging from the ceiling and a desk lamp over in the corner of the room, standing on a trestle table. There was a book lying in the light pooled under the desk lamp.

He went and sat down at the table and told me to make myself comfortable. I looked around but there wasn’t another chair. I leaned up against a big machine.

He found an exam pad on the desk and then he scratched around and found a pen as well. “Oh, I’m Duade,” he said, then leaned forward and shook my hand. For some reason, I think he wrote his name down on the pad. “What’sh your name?”

“Ed,” I told him.

“Ed …?”

“Bennett.”

“How do I shpell that?”

I told him, and he wrote it down. “What’re you reading there?” I said.

“No, I’m writing.”

“But the book there on the table, what is it?”

It was a Harry Potter.

Duade asked me a bunch of questions—some normal stuff, like my age and if I had a car and if I was married, but then also some weird ones, like my star sign, my blood type, who I voted for, how many times a week on average I went to church. Then I think he ran out of ideas and there was a long lull and to fill it I said, “Do
you
have a car?”

He said, “Not anymore, hey. Do you?”

“Uh, no. I think you asked me that already.”

He turned back a page on the exam pad and read for a while, then said, “Hey, I did. Good shtuff.”

Then Duade put the pen down and pushed the exam pad away across the desk. “But that’sh all boring things,” he said. “Tell me about yourshelf.”

“I’m pretty sure that’d be another boring thing,” I said. He didn’t laugh. He just kept looking at me, that open-mouthed, blinking smile fixed on his face. “What do you want to know?” I said.

“Tell me about your family.”

“No ways.”

“Okay, tell me about your firsht job.”

“I want
this
to be my first job,” I told him. “And I don’t really care even if you can’t pay me that much. Just get me some paints and let me paint the carousel or something, please.”

And I knew that’d probably do it, but just to be sure—

Even though, already, I felt like I didn’t really want the thing I was about to win—

A reluctant serpent under a sick flower, I stood up and brought my hands in front of me and stared a little down at my shoes and I said, “Duade, this will really help me, please. Please help me.”

The old train station had scaffolding all over it—it looked caged in and a bit sinister, the clock like a huge unblinking eye—and all the buildings on my side of the road were unlighted and they were set back from the pavement and tall grass grew behind the low, broken walls. One of the places was missing a door and I could see someone had a fire going inside—thick smoke in the firelight, paraffin smell drifting out onto the street. A bit further down, a young couple were setting up camp for the night on a dry porch. Her back was to me but I could see she was holding something heavy and I remember thinking,
God, I hope that isn’t a kid
.

A few hundred more metres down the road I saw the hotel. That guy at the juice place, Carl or Kris or whatever, he was right—you couldn’t miss it. It had a big piece of wall missing where the moon was shining through, and just in general, the way the walls looked shored up by a raft of seedy yellow light on the bottom floor, you just
knew
, it was obvious, it might as well’ve had a neon sign on the roof flashing
DRUGS! DRUGS! DRUGS!

I turned in through a rusty gate, up a little path and a wide, cracked staircase. The place had a big stoep and it was covered in bright light, like security light, giving everything sharp shadows and pluming my breath as soon as it came out my mouth. There was a barred gate in a wooden doorway and I went up to it and rang the bell. Inside smelled like bugs and wet carpets.

I heard some floorboards creak and then two big guys appeared in the hallway. One of them had a piece of paper in his hand. Both of them were dressed in coats and scarves and beanies.

“List?” one of them called.

“I’m just looking for Bruno.”

They came up to the gate.

“He’s not here. On the list?”

“Uh, maybe,” I said. “My name’s Carl.”