Diane Awerbuck Cabin Fever

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.The laughter began moving towards him in waves, uncertain at first and then building until they crashed around his ears.The AD was bent over so far that his baseball cap had fallen off.‘Haaa, white boy!’ Brenda was screaming.The heels of her stilettos bit into his ribs.She flailed at him with her right hand like a jockey.‘Run, whitey! Run!’Nicky, not knowing what else to do, obliged.Brenda was light – a tiny, veiny woman with the beak and talons of a bird of prey – and he had no trouble jogging her around the studio floor.As he ran she circled an imaginary lasso over her head, calling out ‘Yee-haaa!’ in her famous voice.Whenever she lifted her arms he could smell her flesh, a cloying, sweaty vanilla, spent adrenalin, and something else – the faint, dark excitement he recognised from the dog on the beach.It almost stopped him in his tracks, and he stumbled.She kicked at him impatiently.Someday Brenda would be really, truly late, for keeps.He would die, too.So would his mother, and everyone he knew.Manny might already be dead, though the news wouldn’t reach them until the army decided it was time.There was no coming back from The Border.But for now Nicky trotted, panting, around the studio, and sniffed at the live, pulsing woman on his back.I can’t believe it, he thought.I’m being ridden by Brenda Fassie.Like Eddie the Head, Nicky began to grin.Astronomy DomineTHE TWO OF THEM STUMBLED OUT INTO THE sandstone foyer after the show.All the way through it his arm had rested lightly across the back of her seat, touching, not touching, each hair a note in the chorus against her neck.Now their absence made her itch.She wanted to rub against him.It was impossible; all around them were ordinary people in shawls, drinking sherry under the bunting, hunting programmes and clothing and striped sweets.They were stunned by the stands and the sudden light.‘I want a T-shirt,’ he said.‘Let’s get the T-shirt, and then we can say we’ve done it.’They bustled and shoved with the others against the cloth-covered trestles; they held up garments to see if they liked their look; they added layers like embalmers in old Egypt when what they really wanted to do was remove them, strip by strip, until they were down to the very everything.They clung to those shirts.Somehow they provided safe passage through the landless bobbing in the foyer: they ferried the two outside and stranded them in the gardens.The girl and the boy dawdled.They had nothing to say while the insects hummed and bumbled dumbly against the glass of the theatre.The T-shirts they laid down on the paving beside them, and forgot.They could look everywhere but at each other; at the gas canisters for the restaurants that stood above ground, rough as rocket ships in moonlight; at the other people orbiting homeward; at the ushers dodging frantic as rabbits.All the busy heart of the Baxter lay cut open and exposed.He leaned close against the pillar, smoking.The building rose solid behind him, weird as a flying saucer in a forest.He puffed for an age on his cigarette, while stars threw themselves at the Earth.Its tip reddened and reduced, and inside him she knew that there must be clouds of smoke travelling his capillaries, whirling round liver and lights.She fingered his organs invisibly, the blood vessel lacework, the semen trees.She was in his orbit, silly with thin air.She blurted, ‘I haven’t been with anyone in three years.’‘What?’‘It’s been three years since I’ve had a boyfriend,’ she said, as if reversing the word order clarified the idea.They were silent, stunned with her celibacy.Forever is measured in skin cells and oxygen, the deep space of deprivation.The shirts hadn’t stirred.They lay on the paving stones, woven, empty, mute.She poked one with her shoe.She cleared her throat to hear a human sound in the dark.‘It’s a good idea, sometimes,’ she said.‘Chastity.Afterwards, you realise what you’ve been missing.’He looked at her and shook his head ambiguously, and the spaceship lights outside the Baxter picked out every hair on his scalp, silver and defined.She pictured holding that curly head with its electric hum, its circuits popping between her thighs.It unbalanced her: she swung into him by accident and they knocked hips in zero gravity.She wanted to touch the zippered bulge at his crotch but they hadn’t even kissed yet.He looked down at himself, at this impossible distance, the light years between her fingers and the fork of his jeans.He crossed and uncrossed his legs.To cover his erection he said, ‘I can’t wait.I’m going to wear my shirt now.’He dropped the cigarette finally on the path, where it rolled away, blistered brief as an asteroid, and blinked out.Tomorrow morning women with brooms would sweep it into a pan, a bag, a bin, thinking it simple space junk instead of the live burning thing it had been made in his mouth.He crossed his arms over his body to strip off the old shirt, the Vitruvian Man, the cosmonaut in the locker room, ready to soar out of her reach.He grinned at her, his hair a smug helmet around his skull.His mouth was very red, and all the playground injustice of nipple and fang rose inside her, the old unfairness, the sureness of place in Heaven and on Earth.‘I don’t care,’ she told him.‘I’m doing it too.’She peeled off the wool of her date shirt: she slipped out of her old skin.She stood dumb as an animal in front of him: she wanted him to see her with all her teeth and all her claws; in the moonlight her own breasts amazed her.Behind the glass walls of the theatre people were darting, dazzled by the lights after their broken hours in the dark.The actors walked among them in their day clothes, their faces plain with cold cream and delight.The girl and the boy stood semi-nude in the gardens and listened for other footsteps on the sandstone, for cracks to come between door frames, for walls to widen and spill light and noise in a flood.But nobody came back into the gardens where they stood, dizzy with the African lavender drifting up from the terrace below, its holiday feel and narcotic stink.She stretched the cotton down over her body and waited.He was gracious.He paused only briefly, so that his long brown hands were caught in the fabric, surprised.The Saturday feeling rose up in her again and she saw all of him in that instant – the hairs on his chest, defiant; the solid astronomical meat of his sides.I’m looking at a half-naked man, she thought, and I think I’m going to touch him.He lifted his arms slowly over his head again and pulled his new T-shirt over his chest.It wasn’t the plants she could smell with their reversed evening circuits, the blades of pubic grass, the exposed roots and the wandering oaks.It was him and all his satellites [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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