Couple on the beach

A middle-aged woman sits on the edge of the lagoon and watches a couple take photographs of each other. It is the beginning of a new year. It is low tide, and the waters of the lagoon have receded, leaving a vast expanse of wet beige sand. The couple stand in it with bare feet splayed, toes squelching into the coarse grains, taking photos with their expensive cameras. It is nearly the end of their holiday together, and they are using up their film before they leave Knysna. They make an odd couple, as they take photos. The woman is wearing a smart jacket on this summer evening, it is too smart for this seaside town, too smart for this season, and too warm, too. The middle-aged woman wonders why she wears it, when her feet are bare and her jeans rolled up to reveal pinkly white legs. She can’t be cold. Although there is a breeze blowing, it is not a cold night, the day was warm, and the heat remains trapped as the sun goes slowly down. Perhaps it is to cover her body, perhaps she has gained weight and wants to hide behind her big black jacket. The middle-aged woman smokes a cigarette as she sits on the cement boulder and watches the couple. She knows all about gaining weight and hiding behind big clothes. She has done it too. It is only now that she is older that she can afford to be freer, that she can wear anything and not be self-conscious and concerned that others, men, are looking at her, appraising her. She knows she is getting past the age of appraisal. She has read of the liberation that comes from middle-age ­– the loss of youth, menopause ­– she welcomes it. Her hair is still mainly auburn, but lately she has been seeing the flash of silver streaks in it. They dart in and out between the dark strands, as though playing hide and seek, daring to be found. The male part of the couple is tall and thin, as opposed to the female, who is shorter, slightly overweight, her gloriously auburn hair long and flying in the dusk’s breeze. He is skinny and awkward in his body, as awkward as the woman is in hers. He is uncomfortable in the casual T-shirt he’s wearing, and the middle-aged woman wonders why he wears it. Perhaps his partner, or whatever that girl is to him, asked him to wear it. The middle-aged woman has a feeling that he would be uncomfortable no matter what he wore. He is that kind of person, awkward in his body, in his life, hanging after this partner like a puppy dog eager to please her, compliant, pliant and soft, willing to do whatever it is that would make her like him, fall in love with him, something beyond this cold dismissive need of hers. But she won’t let him go yet, she needs him, although she does not like him. She needs him and that is her weakness, that’s what makes her hate him, and hate a part of herself too. The middle-aged woman can see this as she smokes into the pale blue dusk, and watches the lagoon recede from this couple. She watches the roar of the sea at the heads, as it foams and dashes, as though the seas were a caged wild animal wanting to get into this quiet piece of solitude, preferring the domestic peace of the lagoon to the endless, deep, unfathomable sea. Her boyfriend keeps wanting to take her on the sea, perhaps on a small yacht, time and time again she refuses. She is afraid of the sea. She smokes on the cement barricade, clutching the cigarette in her finger, looking at the beauty spot on her little finger that a man once found so attractive years ago, a dark mark on the fleshy folds of her baby finer. She watches couples take photos as the sky darkens and fish burns in a house nearby.

***

The couple don’t know where to go for supper. The woman is full from a sweet cinnamon pancake eaten late that afternoon. Her name is Ailsa. Her friend, her partner, her holiday companion, whose name is Mark, is hungry. Again. She doesn’t know where all the food goes, or how it disappears on him, leaving him skinny and perpetually hungry. Once home to the tiny cottage they are renting for the week she tries to stall him. They watch TV, she puts more makeup over the day’s makeup while he watches the news, she brushes her heavy hair again. It looks limp, it always sags in summer when it’s hot, there is not much she can do about it.

“Hell, I’m hungry,” Mark emphasises from the bedroom, where he lies sprawled in front of the TV. It is their last night in Knysna, he wants it to be special. Ailsa wants to get the hell out of here, go home as quickly as possible, be free from this friend who has shared her bed, her holiday, her life. She would like to go tonight, just ride straight through, back to Johannesburg, 16 hours straight, to be home, away from this man who is as tangled in her life as fish caught in a net û as tangled and as messy. “I’m still not hungry,” she calls from the bathroom. “Can’t we wait?” They wait, talk is desultory, they make plans for the next day, deciding what time they should get up, pack, leave.

***

They eat dinner. They land up at the same place that sells the pancakes. This time Ailsa picks at a calamari salad, a salad that Mark will finish after she’s stopped pushing her fork around the bowl, eating when she’s not hungry. Only years later will she learn not to eat when she’s not hungry. It’s a simple thing, something she hasn’t learnt yet. The waiter serves them, beaming, bringing plates, taking away plates. Mark leans close to her, talking quietly. Ailsa thinks he does this deliberately, to make them look like a couple in the eyes of the world. She hates the way he does this, she doesn’t want anyone to know they’re together, she wants to shake him off like a bad smell. She leans back as though to tell the world that they are not really together. Mark makes small talk with him as well, and Ailsa simply cannot shut off her disgust. She looks away, distant, cringing. Mark’s stupid, meaningless conversation falls awkwardly into the music and hollow of the restaurant. The waiter, she thinks, appraises her, looks her up and down, wonders why she is with this man who makes stupid, unintelligent conversation, and drags her out to eat when she is not hungry. There is dessert for him. She is so tired, so very very tired, it’s early still and yet all she wants to go sleep. Mark again makes plans for the next morning. He talks on, Ailsa adds a little to the conversation, trying to find something new to say, but it is impossible. They have said the same things now, to each other, for days on end. It is exhausting being nice, not getting irritated. Ailsa hasn’t wanted to fight, not this time, now that everything has fallen back on only the two of them. There have been irritations, dishes unwashed, not enough time for herself, a feeling of frustration and helplessness at his own helplessness. She is his life, she knows that now, and because she is his life, she cannot shake him off. “I’m in love with you, Ailsa,” he had told her months before as they sat in a lounge in her parents’ home eating chocolate-covered nuts in front of a fire. “I fell in love with you. One day a few months ago I woke up and thought, ‘I’m in love with Ailsa!’ What do you think of that?”

Ailsa had sighed in the lounge, the bright lounge with glaring overhead lights and dim wall brackets, the flames crackling in the silence, the fire her father insisted on making every winter, hauling in logs and setting the stone fireplace blazing in the smart lounge. “I know,” she had said. “I’ve known for a long time now, the way you look at me. But I’m not ready, Mark. I’m not ready for a new relationship.” Mark had looked at her then, the hard sharp face dissolved into vulnerabilities, stripped bare of its usual arrogance. How could she hurt him? How could she hurt him the way she’d been hurt and cast aside by the man she’d fallen in love with and then cast aside as easily as they’d come together. A year later, and she was left nursing a bruised heart, eating chocolate-covered nuts bought by a man who said he was in love with her, who had never fallen in love before and now said he loved her. She needed him, she needed him for the friendship and for the soft pliancy of his weakness. As long as he was in love with her she could mould him or break him or twist his desires. She needed him because she needed people around her to stave off something unmentionable, and she needed, now, a man to say he loved her, and here he was, Mark, saying he loved her. And all she said was that she was not ready for another relationship. Years later she would have said, perhaps, that she could not love him, that he wasn’t her type ­– but on that night she could only suck chocolate off a nut and tell him she was sorry, and let him massage her feet for her.

***

He’d never even kissed a woman; the girl he’d asked to the matric dance hadn’t even come to the after party with him. He’d plucked up the courage many times after to ask women out, but invariably they said no. He didn’t know if it was because his stammer grew worse when he asked them out, or if it was because he was so skinny, or if it was the fact that he lived at home still, a man in his late twenties. His mother had told him to wait, she reminded him that his own father had only married in his thirties. There’s plenty of time, she’d say, when he tried to talk to her about it. She did not help. She brushed hair from his eyes in a gesture of tenderness, and cooked his favourite foods and complained to him about her unfeeling husband, but she did not help. He started noticing Ailsa after her break-up from James. They went, as friends, to movies and plays. They ate supper, as friends. This was even when she was still with James. He couldn’t believe it was that serious, if she could go out to supper with him one night, the next with James while still hoping that he, James, would fall in love with her. Sitting in the office they both worked in, she’d wonder aloud to him, asking if he thought James liked her, and then she’d describe James’ actions and words. Or, she asked, did Mark think she simply a friend to James? Mark had no answers. It was only long after she finally asked and found out the answer to her questions, and spent long times behind locked doors, emerging tear-eyed, clutching the Valiums the receptionist pressed into her hands and life. He first noticed her kindness and gentleness. Her soft shy way of talking and her fear of hurting anyone. He noticed the way she ate, delicately, with her small hands fisted around a spoon, or cupping a cappuccino, the way she wiped her mouth, the way she took care not to let the food spill, or catch in the corners of her mouth. He noticed this and thought she was a nice person. She took the time to listen to him, to go out with him. Here, at last, was a woman who did not run away, or make excuses that she was involved. She stayed and listened. They saw more movies, and one night, after drinks at a neighbourhood restaurant, he told her his greatest fear about having sex. He thought his penis was too small, and Ailsa stared into the darkness of the car, and said she’d only known one man, and his penis hadn’t been that big, and that it didn’t matter anyway. And that there was so much to sex than a large penis. “Besides, when it gets big it gets big enough!” she’d laughed into the inky morning as they sat in the car. She hadn’t yet asked him into the house, and later he was glad, would he had felt so free, so uninhibited in the house where her parents could have heard him? The next morning he phoned her and thanked her for their talk. It felt like a veil was lifting, like light was coming in through fog and murk. He felt grateful too, grateful for her kindness, for the fact that she listened to him. But he didn’t understand it. He fell in love, instead. That’s what he’d tell people years later, himself, another woman. That he had fallen in love with her soft gentle brown eyes, and the long lashes and the thick wavy auburn hair, and the beauty spot on her little finger. He stared across at her day after day in the open-plan office and walked with her to the shops at lunch time and got close enough to her to smell her sweat and perfume mingling in a heady mixture that made him dream and fantasise in his narrow lonely bed in his own parents’ house. And then he fell in love, simple as that. He could not tell her, although he tried. He found out what her feelings for James were, and found out she was still in love with him, she was obsessed by that love, that man whom Mark had met only once. Mark spoke about a woman he really liked, and she said tell me more, and he tried to hide it and eventually it came out. And she could not reciprocate his love for her as she ate his chocolate-covered nuts and let him take off her boots and knead her feet into submission. He kneaded and caressed and looked at her, wanting to kiss her and touch her breasts, he’d never touched breasts before, but had to make do with tepid coffee and the smooth curved muscles of her feet.

***

On their last night on holiday, away from Knysna, they find themselves booked into a grim, one-star hotel in a small town in the Karoo. It is clean, but plain. There are no lamps and the beds are two singles pushed apart. The bathroom is white and clinical, the curtains threadbare. The mattresses are lumpy and once more, Ailsa’s supper sits hard and rocky in her stomach. Again, she ate when she wasn’t hungry. A half a day riding in the car, the sun beating down, trying to get sleep, feeling exhaustion snatching her, trying to get away from the situation, the holiday, the man driving the big car through the sun-baked Karoo desert, the endless miles of scrubby, shrimp-like plants, crouching over the dry earth. They ate supper at an American steakhouse, the only restaurant open in town on a Saturday night. A Chinese restaurant was closed, and a grand elegant hotel that Mark wanted to go was expensive and had a set meal. Anger had hovered in the air, Mark had said he simply wanted their last night to be special. “I’m not going to spend all that money on a three course meal that I’m not hungry enough to eat!” she had retorted. “Okay,” he’d replied, but conversation died in the steakhouse. Still, after eating and coming back and undressing and washing face and brushing teeth and getting into their single beds, she lets him come into hers, and he is hard, as always, and she lets him have sex with her. Again, it is unsatisfactory, he comes too quickly, there is no joy for her. He tries to find her secret spot, and sometimes he gets it, but never for long enough. He always misses the mark, and she grows tired of his fumblings, and that is that. The bed is too narrow. He lies against her for a while, his hard bony body offering little comfort, sinking away into the sheet and the pillows, there is always an elbow he doesn’t know what to do with. He does not know how to hold her, or to run his hands around her soft hips and soft belly, to trace her scars with love. Ailsa lies there and thinks this man is as cold as the one before. But, she doesn’t love this one. He moans as he comes and she shuts off, his pleasure sounds an irritation in the dark room. He comes outside of her (she doesn’t want to get pregnant), and goes to the bathroom to clean himself up, turning on the hard white light. She watches, naked, limp penis dangling, body angular and bent as an old man’s. She hates him then, she tries to love him as he cleans her up, and hates him. She lies there passive in the white light streaming from the bathroom, and he cleans her between the legs, smoothing the white sperm away from her stomach into the wet toilet paper, and she doesn’t even mind that he sees her naked, the imperfect body, the swelling of it, the scars, the unfeminine-like trail of dark hair. She doesn’t mind, she doesn’t care. “That’s probably the last time we’ll do it,” he says matter of factly as he drifts off. He knows, he knows that was it, she’s told him she is not in love with him. He knows that when the holiday is over she will finally find the strength in her to call a halt to this, that they will not have sex and she will not try to control her temper with him, or hide her irritation. The sex had started a few days earlier, the night before the new year. Early in the morning before the next year she had forced him into her. “Are you ready?” she’d whispered. Yes, no, yes, no. “I suppose I have to do it.” He’d drunk champagne after they’d done it. They’d been saving it for the new year, but he opened the bottle and toasted the event. He couldn’t believe he’d done it, kept exclaiming over it, blue eyes big, mouth agape, sitting up in bed with a wineglass while she lay there, thinking, Get off it! It was a relief finally, even though he was quick, and she wanted something slower, something more. She almost called him James, then didn’t call him anything at all, his name behind the other one, a name she had to grope for in her head. She felt triumphant, she’d completed the cycle, stolen his virginity, forced him through that final border, showed him love and sex and kissing and lying in bed together. She’d broken her own barrier too, remembering sex a year earlier, the cold, silent night, the man who slipped off into his own single bed, the pimple that sprouted the morning after on her breast. Big and fat and white and filled with pus. She had squeezed it in the mirror, it spattered against her fingers, against the silver metal, as she clutched a towel around her, the day after she wasn’t a virgin anymore. There was no blood that morning, simply yellow, oily pus that leaked out of her.

***

It had started earlier than this trip to Knysna though. It had been like a dance. After the night he said he loved her she’d agreed to go away with him. They both needed a holiday, he argued. Over a long weekend they ran away to the mountains in the east, a deserted chalet in the shadow of snowy peaks, the pale watery beginnings of summer present in the heat of the day, the mornings and nights capped with cold. She let him caress her, it started off as a massage, a drink, the pale afternoon light coming in as he picked off her clothes, his hands moving further, getting warmer. No sex, he was a virgin, a Christian, didn’t believe in sex before marriage. But there were two bodies naked, the sordid details of an unmade bed in the waning afternoon, the silence of exhaustion as they forced food into their mouths in the hotel restaurant later, hair hastily combed, clothes piled up, putting make-up on. “But I don’t want you to look pretty for other men!” And she rolled her eyes at him, choking on the cliché. Was he saying it to flatter her, or because he’d read it or heard it said? Or did he actually mean it? She put the makeup on, like she always did, and shoved the food in her mouth, conversation dead between them, the restaurant emptying. They tried it one morning, but they couldn’t get the condom on, they didn’t seem to know how, and she was dry and sore. He wasn’t ready. She wasn’t ready. She pulled away, then pulled towards him, craving love, affection, dancing around his own wants the way he danced around hers. At times she even thought she saw that old hardness and sarcasm she’d first glimpsed in him, that had made her recoil away from even friendship with him. She accused him, abused him. Told him it had to end, she wasn’t in love. And the touching would stop for a while, and then start up again. She was starving, famished, she sucked and sucked at his dry orange, wanting more, wanting something else, disgusted with herself, with her need to love and be loved. She was excising James’s ghost, this was the way she’d get rid of him: by having sex with another man she’d be over him. Once she’d sex with someone else she could get on with her life. She could forget James, forget Mark, be free to find someone new. “I can’t hurt you,” she told Mark as they lay together. “It doesn’t matter. You’ve already hurt me. I fell in love with you and you can’t reciprocate. So you have hurt me.” “I don’t want to be like James.” “It doesn’t matter.” James lay beside them, a ghost with presence and shadow and a history. Mark asked her all sort of questions about James, what he was like, the way he treated her, what she had loved about him, as though he could appropriate the other man’s abilities and qualities and thus make her fall in love with him. The dancing continued. She could not let him go, he came to fill up all the crevices of her life, till she knew she’d never be alone if she didn’t want to. He’d be there, as easy as an old armchair, she could phone him at any time, they’d see a movie, go to a play. There was no need to phone anyone else. The blanket grew tighter, it was secure, no need to risk being hurt with anyone else. One night, driving home with him, she stared at the black streets and heard him talk into the darkness, and again felt that frustration, and thought, maybe this is it. Maybe I must accept this. Maybe there won’t be anyone else. He is not a bad man, simply a boring, stupid man. The time passed. She pushed him away again. She wouldn’t let him touch her, it had to stop. He was simply getting hurt.

***

On the last day of their holiday she is happy. She points her camera at the flat Free State farms and bubbly storm clouds and takes pictures of the sun radiating out as it dips and dives in yet another dusk. They have coffee in a restaurant attached to a highway garage. Mark watches as she laughs and gets enthusiastic. He smiles with her, the tensions of the last few days dissolved. He is tired, but he is happy. He wishes she could have been as happy a few days ago, back in Knysna. He does not want to go back. He goes back to work the next day, she won’t be there. He’ll miss her in bed at night, the warmth, the miraculous warmth of another body, and her smell, that sweet smell that lingers in her hair, on his hands, he cannot get enough; or her buttery feel as he slides his hands along her hips, her stomach, doing as she asks him. It is all overwhelming as he puts his hands lightly on her, barely touching her. Only when she protests does he cup her stomach or her breasts, trying to give her what she wants, what he cannot give. It feels like going back into darkness, although he feels changed. She flirts with the waiter in the restaurant. She is twenty-five, the waiter is a teenager. She feels older, finally like an adult, leaves a tip, spoons ice-cream into her mouth and tells him she’s going to diet when they get back. ‘I like you the way you are!’ he protests. I’m not doing this for you, she thinks. He watches her flirt, eat ice-cream, take pictures. It is like watching something fly away from you, like watching bubbles dissolve in the sunlight, like candyfloss melting on your tongue. A vague sweetness remains, a thick rough fur left on your teeth. The sun goes down, you try to capture a sunset, the clouds come out blurred, an arm pokes out the corner of a photograph, fat and white. There is one perfect photo, with the light radiating out from the clouds, and the clouds spill out into the frame. One perfect moment, before it all disappears.

***

A middle-aged woman watches as a couple take pictures of each other. She has lived here for many years, It is quiet and she can paint in peace and every few years she has boyfriends. Her paintings sell well enough for her to make a living. When the tide goes out, she goes down to the lagoon, smokes on the cement barrier, or walks on the sand, trousers rolled up, feet splayed in the coarse sand, the way she did on her first trip here years and years and years ago. She had a dog when she first moved here, used to take him for walks but he died. And she has simply continued the ritual of her evening walks. It’s a habit, a break from the day’s work, a walk in the fading light, harsh lamps don’t give her paintings the same look, she prefers to paint by daylight. She has a boyfriend waiting in her house. He is younger than her, this season’s lover. He lives far away, in a big city. He is a good lover, but now, so is she. She has finally learned to be loved, the men she knows know how to find her spot and take their time. She has sex, she has lovers, she has a canvas opened wide against the window that faces one of the hills of brown and green vegetation. There, in the landscape and gentle lights, she paints the hard angular paints that shout anger and despair and hard modern living. Sometimes her daughter comes to visit. She expects her mother to paint soft gentle flowers and landscapes, to mirror this land she lives in. But she doesn’t. She paints from long ago, when she was young, and she remembers what that feels like. She paints young people – angry young people who don’t know where they’re going, who are still finding themselves, who wear hard bright colours and stare out of the canvas with hard accusatory looks. Her latest painting though is different. Unlike the others it is a soft gentle painting done in pastel blues and pinks and light whitish colours. A couple takes photographs of each other on a beach. There is a tall skinny man who holds a camera taking photographs of a short woman with auburn hair blowing in the wind, smiling uncertainly into the orb of his lens. They wear old-fashioned clothes, jeans that flare at the ankles, tie-dyed shirts, it is a long time ago. Somehow, though, the lines are jagged, the man stands too far away, the woman is too uncertain. There’s a sense of unease in the picture, of disturbed lives. Sitting on the a cement platform a middle-aged woman edges into the distance, smoking cigarettes, watching the past unfolding before her. The middle-aged woman wears a red top, it too is jarring, like a flash of blood. It is all intermingled as Ailsa puts the final touches to her latest painting, making the red of the top harder, more violent, more bloody. The past doesn’t fade, it may lie sleeping and then it comes seeping out through the cracks in your life – in a painting, a piece of music, a movie that reminds you and perhaps, makes you cry, makes you go back through the tunnel of memories and time. Till you stand in the vortex, watching a younger self, wishing you could give advice, tell her where not to go, where she went wrong, how, if she leaves half an hour earlier, or attends a certain dinner she refused to once, she would meet a certain man, not this one, not that one in the kitchen, simmering ratatouille. But it’s all impossible, to reach back as she reaches forward, asking, always asking questions of her older self, at twenty, at thirty, now at fifty, she tries to peer at herself of sixty, seventy. It never works. The future woman walks away, face in shadow, body turned away, refusing to answer questions: “Live your own life!” she would be saying if she could talk. Instead you’re left with the present, even as it dissolves rapidly into the past, memories swirling away. Ailsa sighs, catches a piece of her auburn hair, pulls out a silver strand and holds it to the light, fascinated as always by the luminosity of her white hairs, the absence of pigment and the way sun shines right through.


(Published in New Contrast, Opbrud (Denmark) and Post-traumatic (Botsotso). Winner of the 1999 Sanlam Award for unpublished fiction)