The Eternal Audience of One Read online

  “Um, okay, the first one,” said Sophie, “is a type of pasta!”

  Spaghetti, macaroni, fettuccine, linguine, tagliatelle, and penne – her team vomited every type of pasta they knew. With the timer winding down, and defeat inevitable, Sophie’s team had resorted to throwing in the names of famous Italian soccer players just for laughs. “Baggio! Inzaghi! Maldini! Del Pierro! Buffon!” At the end of Sophie’s round, Séraphin had picked up her card to confront the enemy that had bedevilled his intellect. His eyes glazed over as he looked at Sophie.

  “Puccini’s not a type of pasta,” he said. “He’s a composer. How do you not know that?” The room erupted in laughter.

  “It’s Italian, has a double c, and ends in i”, Sophie replied. “Why it isn’t a pasta is the real question.”

  “Ignore him, Sophie. Séra’s a sore know-it-all. He’s just pissed off his winning streak is about to go home with us,” said Bianca, one of Séraphin’s friends. Sure enough, Bianca’s team went on to win it, finishing the game with a clue even Sophie could have given: “White dude who discovered shit people were living on already – Americans love him!”

  Séraphin had departed for his apartment soon after, leaving Sophie to the affectionate ministrations of less discerning suitors.

  Arriving at the shop he nodded to the bored security guard at the entrance, crossing into a semi-cool interior which smelled of bread and vinegary, oily chips. A queue snaked its way behind the shop’s deli counter where day-old sandwiches, tattered pieces of fried hake, and passionless potato salads stood under the cold light of a bain-marie. In the juice aisle the price tags made him wince. They bore the crossed out numbers of the previous day’s prices and announced, smugly, the new levy on goods one could have bought for less had one but had the proper sense to shop earlier. Placing juice cartons in his push-cart, he wheeled it into the biscuit aisle, browsing the shelves, feeling peckish. Another cart from the opposite direction approached his and slowed down.

  “Séra?”

  He looked up. His face heated.

  “Jasmyn.”

  She smiled lushly and moved towards him, standing on her toes to throw her arms around his neck. Her breasts glazed his pectoral muscles despite his best attempts to suck in his chest to avoid the momentary kiss of their bodies as she hugged him. Surprised by the forwardness of her greeting, he still had one hand on his trolley. The other was caught in a furious debate about where to rest on the no man’s land expanse of exposed olive-coloured skin between her neck and her lower back, curving down into a petite and rounded bottom.

  “Upper back,” said a voice. “Safe space.”

  “Only if you want to wind up in the friendzone, nigga,” said a second.

  “Lower back then?”

  “I say you grab the booty,” the other replied. “For control!”

  Séraphin settled for an awkward pat-pat in the middle of her back. “Hi.”

  She wore a light citrusy perfume and even with the hesitant Morse code of his back-pat he could feel the warm heat of her skin. Jasmyn pulled away and looked up at him. “Long time,” she said.

  “Yeah, it’s been a minute,” he replied. “Keeping well?”

  “I’m trying to. Work, rent, life—the usual shit.” Her shoulders shrugged.

  Séraphin watched how their roundedness lifted, the shadows of her collarbones showing themselves underneath the light film of skin. He squeezed politeness out of his mouth. “I hope it’s going well then.”

  “For now. But I’m still holding out for my best life.”

  “Isn’t everyone?” Séraphin hoped the question would keep the conversation going.

  “True that,” Jasmyn replied. “What’ve you been up to? I haven’t seen you in forever.”

  “I’m in Cape Town. Final year of law. Then” – he paused, lifting his hand to encompass the vastness which lay beyond graduation, beyond the length of the biscuit aisle – “life.”

  “Cool. Gonna move back when you’re done? You never liked this place.”

  “Maybe. We’ll see.”

  “I hope something works out then.” A smile hovered on Jasmyn’s lips. “Anyway, you’re massive now. I don’t think you were this tall the last time I saw you.” She let her eyes take him in. “You look good.” The good was stretched out, like a too-small scoop of peanut butter on a too-large slice of bread.

  “Dude, she’s checking you out,” said one of the voices.

  “Totally,” said the other.

  Séraphin’s face felt exothermic. “Late surge in puberty,” he croaked. “You look good, too.” He avoided her direct gaze, casting his eyes to the neatly packed shelves.

  “Thanks.” Jasmyn flashed him a grin that sent a rivulet of sweat sailing down his back. “When do you leave for Cape Town?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “Soon.”

  “Is that disappointment I heard in her voice?” asked a voice.

  “Definitely disappointment,” replied the other.

  “Well,” Jasmyn continued, “let’s get coffee sometime and catch up, yeah?” She dictated her number to him and he called it after he had taken it down. “Cool, got it. Séraphin—with an é,” she said as she typed.

  “And Jasmyn – with a y,” he responded. They exchanged a look.

  “Well,” Jasmyn said, “I need to get home. Family party tonight. We ran out of some spices. Guess who’s doing the running around?”

  “I’m the juice boy. I gotta get home before my mom sends out the search and rescue.”

  At the mention of Séraphin’s mother Jasmyn’s smooth cheek turned the slightest shade of pink and her gaze flickered away. The shelves were subjected to an intense gaze, probably the only time the assortment of confectionery had ever been so appraised. Jasmyn made the first move, wheeling her cart away. “So, yeah, enjoy the party,” she said. “And Happy New Year in advance.”

  “You too.”

  They moved apart, slowly, with Séraphin’s back feeling sensitive with Jasmyn behind him. He walked straight to the pay-point and unloaded the juice cartons, fumbling and handing too many dollar bills to the cashier. After paying he exited the shop, his stride sprightly, his mind preoccupied, his cellphone itching with the number of one Jasmyn – with a y.

  III

  ONCE UPON A PRIVATE school enrolment charter there were two Jasmines: Jasmine with an i and Jasmyn with a y. Both were pretty and intelligent in the way of girls whose parents are moneyed. They glowed with the health of children raised without chores, and the poise of privilege dangled heavily from their neat ponytails and wholesome smiles. They were smart, kind, and helpful; they were prized teachers’ pets. To avoid being ostracised by their peers they were generous with the treasures of their neatly packed lunch boxes: chocolate bars were fragmented into tiny fractions and shared, while sandwiches with thick slices of pastrami were passed around for delicate nibbles.

  Jasmine van Zyl was fair skinned, with blonde pigtails, grey eyes, and a shy smile. She had a thick-set robustness to her frame inherited from her deep Afrikaner roots which stretched all the way back to the settling of Bloemfontein in colonial South Africa. Jasmyn Wolff was a cream-coloured girl, with soft hair that frizzed in the weather. Her eyes were light brown and had a bewitching life in them, ringed by a green halo if one looked closely. She was thin, all bones and curls. She was the product of an Owambo father in political exile in Moscow, and a white German mother from West Germany, also in Russia to learn the inner workings of the failing communist economy.

  When Namibia gained independence, airplanes began flying in all the men, women, and children who had lived abroad during the country’s armed struggle against South Africa’s choking apartheid embrace. Exiled families returned in droves, from Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Tanzania, Cuba, and Germany – doctors, engineers, architects, political scientists – all coming home to be part of the country’s bright and free future. Some came to lead. Some came to serve. Others came to steal. Jasmine’s father, who owned a l
ucrative construction company, met Jasmyn’s father, a just-returned political scientist, at a state dinner in the early days of the Namibian Republic.

  “Of course,” Jasmine’s father said, “such a young country cannot hope to get far without roads, hospitals, schools, and other concrete structures needed to drive the economy and bring in foreign investment.” He fronted a proposal to Jasmyn’s father: a partner was needed to deal with all of the handshaking and back-clapping that was required to wheel and deal with the new black leadership of the young democracy. Jasmyn’s father was reluctant to agree at first. Socialism was still strong in him – capitalism was the great and hungry enemy which made sister strive against sister, brother enslave brother. Jasmine’s father changed tactic. He offered Jasmyn’s father more than a title; he backed it up with equity. He sweetened the deal with promises of skills transfers and the integration of black faces into the construction company. It took some time but eventually Jasmyn’s father was sold.

  The future was made. Jasmine’s father’s surname was removed from the company name to distance it from the taint of the recent past. He maintained the industry contacts and intellectual capital amassed over the years. Jasmyn’s father, with his political connections and dark complexion, roped in the lucrative government construction deals that flowed into the freshly liberated economy.

  The new construction company quickly became one of the brightest rays in the young republic, building roads, office complexes, hotels, and building the country’s dams and erecting power stations. Its cranes were a feature of the Namibian skyline as brick by brick, dollar by dollar, Windhoek grew. Their friendship, doubting at first, became genuine after the money came in and both men prospered. Their families holidayed together. Their daughters, born three months apart in the late eighties before the men knew each other, progressed through school together, surrounded by the best slices of Namibain upper crust life. After primary school, St. Luke’s Roman Catholic College, with its evergreen soccer field, its blue, grey, and white uniform, and its sterling academic reputation sounded the clarion call of the privileged and they answered.

  It was not long into their eighth grade that their fathers’ fortunes flagged. The lucrative deals from political connections dwindled. A fresh crop of young, hungry political cadres and comrades systematically culled the elderly businessmen out of boardroom meetings. The lucrative construction, mining, fishing, and agricultural contracts which were the lifeblood of companies such as Jasmine and Jasmyn’s fathers’ evaporated. The two men’s once bountiful plates were reduced to begging bowls. They sold their construction firm and took early retirement.

  Jasmine’s family, when not in Windhoek, retreated to their farm, where they ran a luxury lodge for shooters of big game. Their wealth still ran deep in shares and in properties stashed here and there. Jasmyn’s family, now thoroughly indoctrinated in the ways of the rich, fell from Icarus heights without a parachute. The debt-ridden luxury cars were repossesed and their heavily mortgaged mansions were sold to defray debts. The fall from prosperity to pauperism hit Jasmyn’s father hard. Drinking and absenteeism became full-time professions when his fortunes failed. Jasmyn’s mother became a single but married mother when Jasmyn’s younger brothers were born.

  By the end of the tenth grade Jasmine’s family still clutched onto their berth in the rolling, mansion-crusted hills of Ludwigsdorf. Jasmyn’s tumbled all the way across the windy city to their sombre house in Brahms Street, in Windhoek-West.

  For a time the girls’ friendship endured but the rift in class drove them apart. Their friendship faltered then flatlined. The girls knew they had to move on to new friendships as the world spun and their bodies were possessed by puberty.

  Jasmine was the first to blossom. The flowering of her womanhood added weight to her hips, her breasts ballooned, her thighs and buttocks became padded from the comfort only carbohydrates can supply. Her periods flowed with such power and pain they could keep her out of school for days at a time. Jasmine’s face was peppered with pimples, nomadic across the round expanse of her face. Her lips were thin, suggestions more than real anatomical features capable of holding a layer of lipstick. Her hair went from a spun-gold blonde to a dull yellow. To make things worse, her left eye became a bit lazy. It refused to do its fair share of work keeping her eyes open and attentive at all times. The result gave her the look of perpetual boredom. The predictability and callousness of children’s cruelty christened her Jasmine-With-The-Eye.

  While Jasmyn’s family slipped across the tracks adolescence, at least, remained kind to her. It bequeathed her a pair of smooth legs with toned muscles which, when seated on a school chair, gave leering boys an unhealthy chunk of thigh to feast upon. Jasmyn’s lips were locked in a luscious perpetual pout. Her small ears were adored. Her shapely nose was praised. Her petite waistline provided enough motivation for boys to study and gain promotion with her through the grades. Her breasts matched her grade average: C-cups that have A-plus ratings in memory even to this day. They bounced with healthy vigour in hockey matches and made netball practice sessions as popular as the first-team basketball matches against rival schools. Her posterior was the star of many short-lived, sticky rendezvous between sweaty boys’ palms and blood-hardened genitalia. She was aware of her sexuality. It confused male teachers and explained away incomplete homework. It threatened female teachers with the possibility of classroom rebellion if it even seemed as though they were picking on her just because she was unable correctly to balance chemical equations.

  When Jasmine and Jasmyn passed each other at St. Luke’s, Jasmyn nodded politely to Jasmine out of respect for their former friendship. Jasmine did so out of the fearful deference preternaturally beautiful girls are given. Jasmine would yield the right of way in a corridor and squeeze slightly to the side in the break-time queue at the school’s tuck shop if Jasmyn was behind her to let her order first – always a carton of fruit juice and a granola bar. Jasmine would order two slabs of chocolate, a greasy chicken and mayonnaise sandwich, two cans of Coca-Cola, a handful of sweets, and feel ashamed.

  And so they existed, sundered by their separate family fortunes, many suburbs, and the graciousness and miserliness of puberty. The two girls had little in common as the progression of grades rolled by except their steadfastness in their quest to lose their virginity. Jasmine considered it a rite of passage that would confirm her womanhood. Jasmyn considered it a matter of time.

  Jasmyn is the first to misplace her virtue. It happens at the commencement of the eleventh grade. At a high school party in one of those common to posh neighbourhoods, where parents are fond of travelling abroad for business, leaving their teenage children at home with a warning not to throw parties, Jasmyn lets her boyfriend, Keaton – an older, twelfth-grade, boy from a rival high school – finally press his nagging advantage home. It is all over in under a minute. A swift bite of red pain which fades to an aching itch. There is no romance, no page-turning passion. The soundtrack of the whole cherry-bursting affair is the chorus of Joe Budden’s “Fire” from the lounge below, accompanied by the ecstatic shouting of teenagers drunk on cheap beer and vodka.

  Jasmyn and Keaton emerge from the master bedroom holding hands, trying to appear casual, failing to fool anyone. Keaton beams with all-conquering triumph. Jasmyn’s face is aglow from crossing a teenage Rubicon. The deflowering diffuses around the party. One of the Jasmines has finally given it up.

  “Which Jasmine? The one with the eye?”

  “No man! Who’d hit that? Obviously it was Jasmine-With-The-Y.”

  Keaton’s friends pull him into handshakes and hugs in the kitchen. Jasmyn sits on a couch in the living room with her posse, glowing, smiling with a private knowledge that both scares and engenders envy from her entourage of friends and hangers-on.

  Jasmine, also at the party, with her smaller group of friends, hears the whispered words of Jasmyn’s tryst, fanned into hyperbolic tales of hedonistic wantonness by a disapproving frenemy or a jealous ex-s
uitor – “I heard a friend joined in too!” – and feels an acute disappointment that even in this she had to yield the field to Jasmyn. She drinks from her plastic cup of bad beer and chats away with her friends in an ignored corner of the party, a cigarette doused with the saliva of novice smokers passing between them.

  In the ways of teenage relationships, Keaton and Jasmyn’s does not last. It does not end quickly either. It walks and limps, sometimes crawling, from the point of its mortal wounding to its final death throes like a bleeding Bollywood hero. The on-and-off breakup keeps St. Luke’s boys guessing whether the hitherto unreachable Jasmyn will enter her peers’ solar system. Every time she appears to have broken away from Keaton’s slick-haired, blue-eyed, philandering gravitational pull, a party is held and there they are, dotingly holding hands, kissing each other with a fierce passion only forgiveness, apologies, and promised loyalty can foster.

  Cellphone chats are constantly abuzz with gossip.

  ThrillOfTheJase—HairJordan: Are they or aren’t they together? I’m confused.

  HairJordan: Now they are. But they weren’t last week.

  ThrillOfTheJase: Their relationship is like a bad Bold And The Beautiful episode.

  HairJordan: And just like Ridge Forrester and Brooke Logan you know you’ll still be following the Jasmyn and Keaton saga so don’t diss that show.

  JohnNotTheBaptist—MadeYouLuke: This Keaton guy has so many chances with Jasmyn. How does he do it, man?

  MadeYouLuke: Bra, he’s white. Girls will forgive anything white guys do. Don’t try to pull those stunts when you’re black. You only get one chance.

  JohnNotTheBaptist: Ja, it’s true. Black guys are guilty until proven more guilty.

  MadeYouLuke: Messed up for everyone else, maybe. But not you, John, you’re always guilty.

  HannaStacia—Selma_Nella: She took him back.

  Selma_Nella: Told you she would.

  HannaStacia: Shame, she doesn’t know her first doesn’t have to be her last. Keaton is fine, but he isn’t thaaaat fine.