Free The Whale Caller by Zakes Mda Page B

sober. Well… almost sober… because she did take a secret sip of the methylated spirits that he uses for cleaning his tuxedo. She lies awake for a long time, listening to him pottering about in the kitchen, and wondering when he will sneak into bed. But he never does. He spends the night in a sleeping bag in the kitchen.
    The Whale Caller wakes up after midnight to see a light through the cracks of her door. He thinks that she has forgotten to switch off the light. He tiptoes to the bedroom and flicks off the switch near the door. As he tiptoes back to his sleeping bag he is stopped in his tracks by a shrill scream from the bedroom.
    “I wasn’t trying to do anything,” he assures her. “I was just switching off the light.”
    “Never do that again! Where is the fuckin’ switch?”
    He rushes back into the bedroom to switch on the light. And there she is, standing on the floor, naked, looking quite witless and bewildered.
    “Never ever do that again! I hate the dark! I do not sleep in the dark! I do not walk in the dark! I do not do anything in the dark, in case you are the kind of man who does it only in the dark! Do you understand me?”
    “I would not want to do anything with you in the dark,” he says defensively. “I was switching off the light because I thought you had forgotten to switch it off”
    “Just never switch the light off again, that’s all.”
    The Whale Caller apologises, and goes back to his sleeping bag.
    When Saluni finally wakes up in the morning the aches of the sheep dip are gone. But her body is racked by something worse than a hangover—the pain of sobriety. A long-forgotten feeling! Her clothes are on the chair next to the bed, all neatly ironed. After a quick wash in the plastic basin, and an application of makeup from her sequinned handbag, she wears her green taffeta dress and her black fishnet stockings and her red pencil-heel shoes and her fawn pure-wool coat. Her wild red hair is restrained in a black net. Once more her former state of elegance has been restored. With it the mouldy yet sweet smell.
    It strikes the Whale Caller that she has taken all the fuss over her in her stride, as if being pampered is her birthright. Not aword of gratitude. This does not bother him. It is just an observation for its own sake.
    She has been around for three weeks, and he has got used to her presence and to her haunting odour. She has become his shadow, except on Bored Twins days. Once in a while she makes herself useful by collecting seashells and arranging them on the wooden wall, sticking them on with glue as some form of decoration. Or by cooking an early morning millet meal porridge which they eat with milk for breakfast. She cooks only when she is hungry and he is too occupied with other things to cook at that time. At most times she just sits there for the whole day and expects to be fed and groomed and mollycoddled. He enjoys brushing and disentangling her red locks. Sometimes he braids them crudely. This activity always makes her body tingle.
    When she has been to the mansion and has brought back a bottle of wine, she spends the day following him doing his rounds with the whales, while she occasionally takes a sip from her bottle, and collects the seashells. She nurses the bottle: the Whale Caller has vowed that he will not buy her wine because he’d rather she stopped drinking.
    Occasionally she spends the night at the mansion and comes back the next day quite radiant and euphoric. On such days she never stops talking about the Bored Twins and their beauty and their singing and how they are such angels.
    “You are the one who always visits them,” says the Whale Caller. “Why don’t we ever see them coming here to see you?”
    “They can’t come to town on their own,” Saluni explains. “Their parents work all day long. Their mother doesn’t want them to come to town anyway, because she thinks someone will steal their voices. I go there to keep an eye on them because they