Free Bitter Eden: A Novel by Tatamkhulu Afrika

know how long, I have dreamt an erotic dream that I am unable to recall, but that has left its sowing of sperm between my naked thighs – I, like most others, sleeping in the raw as the hot, dry summer drags on – and I hang my towel loosely about me and hurry to the ablution block where I wash off the sperm, being as shy of exposing my condition to Douglas as though I had spent the night with some whore.
    After a glum tea, I ask Douglas, ‘How’s my face?’ and he says, ‘Horrible,’ and I go out with a heavy heart to the tanning site, knowing there will be no tanning for me, but wanting to be there with an urgency I am reluctant to confront. Towel screening my face, I wait and time drags past me like a snake with a broken back and there is a leadenness in me as long as the snake, and I am starting to ask of myself what did I expect, when his shadow falls across me like the axing of my mood and I am ludicrously, honestly relieved.
    ‘I went running first,’ he says, not apologetically but merely as though it is a matter of some gravity that needs to be, at least, explained. But I am flowing with the current again and there is space for playing games. So I shrug my shoulders as though it is of no importance to me that he be early or late, or even not come at all, and he looks at me with a speculativeness that is as penetrating as it is calm.
    ‘I didn’t know we had a date,’ I say with a facetiousness I at once detest, and see that he is dressed in only a boxer’s shorts, and sweat is sheening him like a water, and the bare, demanding feet are gripping the earth with the tenacity of a tree.
    But, apart from the level stare, he does not react, simply says, ‘I must shower,’ and goes; then turns back, groping down the front of the shorts, and takes out a tightly folded square of cloth black as the shorts, and tosses it at me, it as wet with sweat as the hand. ‘Doesn’t fit me any more. Will you, though,’ and ducks in under a tap, shorts and all.
    I flap out what he has tossed and it is a replica of his shorts, clearly no longer his size and as clearly mine, and a tenderness as powerful as only tenderness is shakes me for an instant snatched from an Eden time. Then he’s back, scattering water like a hosed-down hound, no towel for the drying of him, the sun to be doing that as he flops down on his back beside me, legs scissoring at some ghostly bicycle of the mind.
    ‘Thanks for the shorts,’ I say, my tongue difficult from long disuse when it comes to acknowledging favours done, my spirit equally recoiling from the debasement inherent in kissing the giving hand. ‘But why me ? Why not to anyone else you happened to talk to in the shithouse or under the taps?’
    ‘You fishing?’ he asks, his tone lazy, but his eyes alert. ‘Maybe it’s just because it embarrasses me when you look like you do and people think you’re my mate. So do me a favour and don’t grumble. Or do you want me to go and lie somewhere else?’
    Again I shrug, a last of pride impelling me to the brink. ‘It’s up to you. I’m not your boss.’
    ‘Nor me yours,’ he snaps back. ‘So shove the shorts up your arse if you want!’ As quickly his anger dies. ‘But why are you sitting here like some old biddy under her shawl? You hurt your head?’
    For answer, drawing back now from the brink, I remove the towel.
    ‘Jesus!’ he yelps, pitiless with mirth. ‘ Have you been fried !’
    ‘Ja, go on! Laugh!’ I complain, but beginning now to also laugh. ‘The show I’m in is on next week and the producer’s having pups because of the way I look. I’m not supposed to be sitting out here at all.’
    All at once it is so quiet I can hear a gang of Italian sparrows bickering in the brewing site tree, and I dimly sense that I have said that which exposes me beyond recall.
    ‘Then why are you sitting here, Tom?’ and his voice is as triumphantly possessive of me as the gift of the shorts, and I draw the towel back over my head,