Free Love on the Road 2015 by Sam Tranum Page B

in the breeze block cubicle next to the gutter. Talking first, his arching talk, her spilling answers, until the city was quiet and he climbed over her and a baptism took place, water coursing from the bowels of somewhere, cheap beer fraying at the back of their throats. She now thinks these episodes were helpless and theatrical. She has had better lovers on clean beds. Men who didn’t need an arena or the night’s clawing.
    She finds a hard rind in the soup and removes it from her mouth. Wele.
    ‘You know I hate wele in the soup.’
    He smiles. There was another game. She was Pig Meat. He was Bush Meat. She loved him because he had found what was common between them, he shone a light hard on her.
    ‘You know,’ he says. ‘I can’t believe I have you sitting here across from me. This is what I have always wanted.’
    Sitting before her, flanked by palms scoring the punch-blue sky and the powdery wall behind him, there is no evidence of the wheelchair. He is a free man sitting there, free to wander to the railing and light a cigarette, lean over the rail showing off his shapely rump and long thighs, turning back to peruse her at the table. His hair is pulled back in his legendary, scruffy ponytail. His beard has grown long. He looks like a man in one of his own documentaries.
    ‘So where shall I take you this afternoon? What would you like to see?’
    She hasn’t given any thought to what she would do here. She knows nothing about this country now. There is almost a week before them. Her throat tightens. He had called her only recently, eight months since the fall. Initially, he had been to the States for an operation. There had been a glimmer of hope, a keen doctor, cousin of a filmmaker friend. It hadn’t worked. The soup sits in her stomach, a queasy burning. She flushes her throat with beer.
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Are you tired?’
    ‘No, not at all.’
    Perhaps she had expected him to be more miserable, more of a recluse, even ashamed of what had happened to him. Perhaps she was ashamed. She wasn’t used to it yet.
    ‘I want you to have a good time here.’
    The young man drives them to the local beach. It is a trial to watch him parcelled into the car, the young man sweeping him from one seat to the other, one arm under his bottom, the other curved around his back. She watches him belt himself in. She sits in the back with a straw hat. She has changed into her swimming costume and now wears a sundress. Her arms feel flabby, her skin mottled. She is self-conscious. The dress is fairly long. She has brought flip-flops.
    In the car, as they drive, she wants to cry and he turns around and sees her. She places her cheek on his shoulder and he cups her other cheek with his hand, which is cool. There is a snatch of his old smell between his fingers, deep where the skin forks apart. Her tears finish and she pullsaway. He looks out the window. He has bundled his hair into a knitted cap.
    Though the car park is full, his driver heads directly to the sandy entrance to the beach. She sees the water glittering, waves crashing, hears reggae from massive speakers. Helpers rush to the vehicle, standing in a circle when the driver lifts out the wheelchair, pulls the arms apart, placing a printed cushion on the seat sling. She sits there, watching him scoop up her old lover, arrange his trousered legs. She gets out. The crowd of hawkers and ragamuffins jostles around her, hands extended with peeled oranges, cinnamon gum, nail clippers. Ahead, the young man has tilted the chair and pulls him as a donkey with a cart. She looks at him and he is laughing at her grim face, telling her to get a move on.
    They settle under a beach umbrella plugged into the sand outside one of the bars, a shack really. It is a busy afternoon but a table has somehow been freed for them. She senses he comes here a lot. With friends from the old days, not family members, the people he caroused with. Mostly men. She knows that the women who interested