A flashback and an old friend

My mother sews, beautifully. She made all of our clothes as children, much to our chagrin as teenagers, when all I longed for was just one item of clothing with a label (the ingratitude of adolescents!) She still sews for us if we are specific about what we want, years of experience having taught her that.

It was with a pair of pants in mind that I found myself, reminiscent of my childhood, in a material shop with my mother this morning. She can spend hours, possibly days, in those places so I had prepared myself mentally for some people-watching while she ambled about touching, stretching, experienced-seamstressing the hundreds of rolls of material.

My father drove us to the edge of the city where the enormous, warehouse-like material shop lives, two buildings down from the lap-dancing place where young Eastern European beauties trade their ware (apparently) and my mother and I went into the Aladdin-like cave (the fabric place, not the lap-dancing one.) As expected, my mother went into her Material Hunter mode and I sat quietly watching people.

The thing is, though, I had this funny feeling from when we walked in. You know that feeling when you meet someone and you feel like you know them, but you don't know where from? I looked at my mother's fellow hunters - the elderly sisters dressed in clothes too young for them, trying to find the perfect blue chiffon to go over the pale violet satin they'd chosen; the movie-type blonde wanting metres and metres of white fabric for a set; the gentle Xhosa lady going through the cordurouy for the perfect colour for children's dungarees (with my mother, momentarily distracted by possible fabrics for dungarees for the fabulous twin grandsons) - nope, none of them seemed familiar (other than my mother, of course.)

Then I suddenly got flashbacks of dark, smokey corners, flashing lights and loud music and I realised that behind me, where there were now shelves and shelves of buttons and zips, there used to be a bar and there, on that huge floor covered in rows of material was a dancefloor and up there, where the material shop owner stood talking on a cellphone, surveying the room, was the DJ box.

This here material shop used to be a club, it was the building that was the familiar person I'd been feeling, having been there once, in it's previous life as a nightclub, before it had retired into the more sedate phase of fabrics. I sat thinking of the night, the people I'd been with, that time of my life.

It's always nice to bump into an old friend, isn't it?

Stars and questions answered

The lovely Mud over at Not Enough Mud gave me an award thing which I don't know how to put here but I feel terribly proud of, in a gold-star-on-forehead-at-nursery-school kind of way, which is why I must brag mention it here. It also came with one of those fill in things about yourself things. Having been struck down by a desire not to talk about the rather dark swirlings in my head, it came at a very opportune time. Thank you Mud.

1. Which do you prefer city or country?
Definitely country, although I live in The City Beneath the Mountain. I love big skies, where you can breathe in large gulps-full of country air.

2. Do you feel old?
If you count 9-year old (boy) old, maybe.

3. What was your most embarrassing moment and can you share it?
Hmmm, there are so many. Nope, don’t think I can share, but thanks for asking.

4. What was the best thing you ever did at school?
Slide down the banisters at high speed. It was a definite no-no at our prim All Girls School. I NEVER walked down the stairs.

5. Who do you most aspire to be like?
Tinkerbell. She can fly. And grant wishes. And has that lovely sparkley light around her all the time when she’s flitting about.

6. Do you think you are ambitious?
Not really. I would like to be able to fly though, if that counts (see above.)

7. If you didn’t do what you are doing now what would you like to have done?
Travelled the world writing stories about people I meet in small towns in the middle of nowhere with big skies.

8. What would be your most perfect meal?
Spagetti bolognaise (my mum’s.)

9. Have you ever broken the law?
I’m just going to say yes. And leave it at that.

9. What songs would be in your Top 3?
Oh, that’s a tough one, I have a Top 100. Three of them are:
They Might be Giants – Birdhouse in your soul
The Shins – New Slang
Snow Patrol – Set fire to the third bar

Anything else you'd like to know?

Flickering ballerinas

It’s a wonderful fire, made from aromatic wood that crackles like storybook fires should. The flames flicker and dance, orange ballerinas, warm and welcoming. I am entranced. I need to move away though, before it sucks me in completely and I fall into it and burn to ash.

I back away slowly, not looking behind me, the heat lessening. I bump into something, a bed, lose my balance, and fall onto it. It is warm, inviting, all in the purest, whitest linen, a feather duvet so light it feels as though it might flap its wings at any moment and fly away. I snuggle into it and it wraps itself around me, a cocoon of safety. I know I must get up from this too, it is wrapping itself tighter, smothering me. I push up, away and it lets go suddenly, propelling me into the fire.

I am suddenly covered in a layer of thick bark, impenetrable, over my whole body. My foot lands in the crackling fire and catches alight. I move away again, this time frightened. There is only the fire or the bed. I dive under the bed, into the corner. It is dark. I fold in on myself, my tears flow, dousing my foot, leaving just a smouldering ember, glowing beautiful orange in my huddled corner.

The cycle of life

He was a real boy. There were five of us cousins on my mother’s side – four girls, and him. My sister and he were the eldest, and there was always some kind of ‘sibling/cousin-rivalry’ between them. Then there was me and the middle girl, close in age, we got on well. And then the baby cousin. She is six years younger – poor thing, we taunted her terribly as children! Basically, my sister and the boy clashed whenever we got together. He, admittedly, did turn into a bit of a spoilt rich boy teenager and went through a particularly annoying stage.

We didn’t see them often, probably once a year because they lived far away, up north in The Desert Country, on a beautiful, vast game farm, in a castle (I kid you not.) I loved it there. My uncle was not welcome here on the tip of Africa during the nasty Apartheid years because he had been outspoken during his university years here, so we had to visit them there mostly.

So we grew up together, apart. Joined by genes, separated by distance. As one does, we grew apart, but whenever we got together it was like no time had passed. He grew out of his adolescent arrogance, stayed on the farm and became a well-respected game ranger (he could see animals where you’d swear there were none) and married a wonderful, young American girl and they had two baby boys. They visited us with the two little ones here in the City Beneath the Mountain about five years ago, staying with my parents.

It was my birthday, and I was having a party in my garage. My mother was insistent that I invite them, I was reticent – they didn’t know my sister was gay (or so I thought), I was worried they’d be judgemental of the gay people there. Eventually I gave up aruguing with my mother (as one does, it’s pointless) and said they could come, with a fluttery nervous feeling in my tummy.

Halfway through the evening I looked across my garden to see him, beer in hand, arm around one of my favourite gay boy friends, swapping e-mail addresses, as he invited him to stay on the farm up in The Desert Country, anytime. A while later I saw him and my sister talking animatedly, laughing together like old friends. I realised at that moment that I had read him so wrong for so long. Wonderful boy.

I am eternally grateful that I gave in to my mother's insistence. Yet another occassion where she was right, despite my teenage tendencies to try and deny it.

Him and his lovely wife proceeded to produce another two beautiful boys, bringing their happy little brood to four. When the baby was four months old, he was killed in a car accident, leaving his wife and four boys under six. There are no words to describe the devastation of it.

His funeral, attended by hundreds, was testament to how wonderful he really was, and he was buried on the farm, down by the dam, where he had fished throughout his life, a peaceful place looked over by the enormous blue African sky.

That was two years ago, almost to the day and this morning I was greeted with a mail from my Aunt to say that my youngest cousin, his sister, (she who we taunted) gave birth on Saturday morning to her second child (the first is a girl) – a little boy, who is named after him. I cried big, fat tears – raw sadness (still) mixed with unadulterated joy.

I guess that’s what they call the cycle of life?

Dark places

As we stepped through the door from the fresh, icy winter air outside, it hit me, almost forcing me back into the street. It trickled down the stairs, invisibly thick and gloopy. I tried to turn away but it was too late, up the stairs we went, my lungs filling with it, almost choking me. At the top of the stairs, through the gloomy blue light, it hit me at full force. An air of desperation, not of the quiet type, but of the loud, in-your-face, shouty type.

On the dancefloor some people moved self-conciously to the crappy music – monotonously belting out a techno-beat – watching to see if anybody was looking. At the bar, three pretty girls drank shot after shot of children’s-coloured-too-sweet-shots, presumably in an attempt to convince themselves (unnecessarily) of their beauty, looking around, mascaraed eyelashes fluttering, lipsticked lips pouting, waiting to be picked up.

In the corner, a table of egos sat, talking too loudly, too fast, while they wiped their noses free of traces of white powder, a boring conversation made marginally more interesting, but only to the participants, their eyes bright, on the outside, the induced-shininess hiding a blankness behind it.

I felt my soul being sucked out of me by the desperation. I kept waiting for a pack of wild dogs to come out of the bathroom or from behind the bar, ripping a small animal apart, blood spurting. It was at that point I realised I needed to get out of that meat market, and quickly.

Do you think I’ve got too old for the clubbing scene?

Pedro Almodovar

I love him. Well, I guess not really him, but his films (I might love him, too, if I met him, but I can't be sure.) I went to see Broken Embraces today. Fabulous. Just what I needed to let me look through those bars of the cage I spoke about earlier. Escapism. There's nothing like a dark cinema, the smell of popcorn, the carpetted walls, a bunch of quirky Spaniards on screen, to get you away from the dark passages in your own head.

It's the perfect mix of drama, romance, tragedy and dark humour that he somehow always manages to get. And the colours! There is one scene with tomatoes, beautifully plump ones that you can just imagine grew wildly in somebody's gorgeously unlandscaped Spanish garden. Penelope Cruz splashes a plump tear on one which could be such a schmaltzy scene, but it's not.

I cried and cried, and smiled, and was entranced.

Who doesn't love the movies?

Trapped

It's the cage that gets her. The bars are too close together. The shell around her, inside the cage, isn't good either. She's building it up to a point that she is struggling to breathe. She keeps feeling herself gulping, but still not getting enough in, it's making her dizzy. It causes her to want to creep into a corner and dissolve. Then she'd just be a puddle, in a shell, in a cage.

She sits amongst them all, hears them talking, but it's like background noise, a TV warbling away to itself in another room. Somehow she manages to respond sufficiently to any interactions that nobody notices her distraction. Her mind is swarming.

She doesn't want to be asked those questions. She knows the answers, she knows the advice, it is what she would say too, but she doesn't want to hear it, not now. Instead she has another drink, toasts to another thing, laughs with them, knowing what she's doing, spiralling. Her laugh is hollow.