Make or Break

‘They’re quite . . .’ Jimmy glanced at me. ‘Vagina-ry.’

‘Yeah . . .’ I said, suddenly aware I was in a darkened storage room looking at erotic etchings, which my father may or may not have drawn, with a near stranger. I replaced the framed sketch I was examining on the floor against the wall. ‘They’re no Georgia O’Keeffe, though.’

‘Who?’ Jimmy asked, putting down the one he was scrutinising a little too closely.

‘She painted extreme close-ups of flowers that were, supposedly, “representative of the female genitalia”,’ I said in my art history teacher’s voice.

Jimmy locked the storage room door behind us with a reflective look on his face. We crossed the small exhibition space looking at the current artist’s work – sepia photographs of decaying buildings.

‘There’s a South African artist, Reshma Chhiba, who made a walk-in vagina,’ Jimmy said, shutting the gallery door behind us as we exited into the restaurant. ‘It was set up in an old women’s prison and it screamed and laughed at you as you walked through it.’

I screwed up my nose. ‘I don’t think I know you well enough to have a conversation that includes my dad and walk-in vaginas.’

‘Who do you know well enough to have that conversation?’

‘Good point.’ I climbed up on a bar stool while Jimmy went behind the bar. ‘Did you go and see the screaming vagina?’

‘Noooo,’ Jimmy shuddered. ‘Too frightened.’

I laughed.

Jimmy opened a bar fridge and began checking the stock off a printed list. ‘So, do you think those drawings are your dad’s?’

‘No,’ I said, shuddering at the memory of one I’d seen titled ‘Her’ that was ultra-intimate and ultra-bulbous. ‘He used to like to paint, just landscapes and sunsets and stuff. I can’t really imagine him doing anything that . . . clitoral.’

Again Jimmy shuddered.

‘But if he’s here having an affair with a South African ex-model-now-arms-dealer then perhaps I don’t know him as well as I thought I did.’

Jimmy raised his eyebrows. ‘I didn’t think it would be your dad. Frankie said the artist’s a local.’

‘It was a long shot.’ I drew a figure eight on the bar top with my fingertip thinking about Dad somewhere in Africa (possibly pretending he was in Scotland), Pete on the top of some Cederberg rocks (pretending he wasn’t a primary school PE junior teaching assistant from Streatham) and Priya: loved-up and on her honeymoon. I felt Jimmy watching me.

‘You want a margarita?’ he said.

‘You aren’t open yet.’ I frowned. ‘Won’t you get in trouble?’

‘It’s OK if it’s for medicinal purposes.’ He produced a tequila bottle.

‘And what ailment does tequila fix?’

‘Irritable bowel.’

The next morning I came to much like Dracula but worse-looking. My tongue was so tacky I almost had to lever it off the roof of my mouth with a shoehorn. My eyelids were weighty and immovable, like the slammed-shut iron doors in the Titanic’s boiler room. I made viewing slits by pulling my eye sockets down with my fingertips. The resulting hazy sight had me clutching the covers to my, thankfully clothed, chest and shuffling to a semi-sitting position, my head pulsing and screaming like the shrill ‘wee-ooo, wee-ooo wee-ooo’ of a failing nuclear reactor.

‘You took advantage!’ I rasped through alcohol-ravaged vocal cords.

I was wearing a baggy T-shirt (not mine) and knickers (mercifully mine but unmercifully back to front). I’d clearly been sexually interactive.

Jimmy rolled onto his back, the covers falling across his bare chest. ‘No.’ He yawned and rubbed at his eyes with curled-up fists. ‘No, I didn’t “take” advantage. You were giving it away freely. Thrusting it, in fact. I had to fight you off.’

That didn’t sound like me at all. ‘Liar!’ I said, thinking sinister thoughts. ‘You probably got that waiter to put something in my drink!’

‘You mean Toler?’ Jimmy said, hoisting himself to the same semi-sitting/half-slumped position as me. ‘Yeah, you thrust your advantage at him too. He was horrified. Thinks boobs are disgusting jiggly things.’

I returned his mirthful look with one of revulsion.

‘I don’t, though.’ He grinned. ‘I love ’em. But I didn’t think it was appropriate to accept your admittedly kind of gross and sloppy advances, considering you have a boyfriend and all.’

Pete! I needed to check my phone.

‘Can you face the other way please?’ I said, scanning Jimmy’s bedroom for my clothes and bag.

My back-to-front undies were uncomfortable in the extreme. Certain areas were being separated and flossed. Had I put them on that way? Had Jimmy re-dressed me after I’d shoved my advantage all over him? A cold wave of embarrassment shot down the back of my neck. This was so unlike me. I had a boyfriend! I had standards! I had a knicker situation that needed rectifying!

‘Sure,’ Jimmy said with an amused grin. He turned on his side and picked up his phone. ‘But I saw everything last night.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I said, my cheeks flaming. ‘I have a boyfriend, you know.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Jimmy said, but his delivery was dubious. ‘You told me all about it last night. You told everybody all about it last night.’

I ignored his ambiguous tone, checked he was facing in the other direction then quickly rearranged my knickers before sliding out from under the covers. My clothes were in a pile on the floor by Oscar the Couch. A memory flashed in my head of Jimmy at his keyboard singing REO Speedwagon’s ‘I’m Gonna Keep on Loving You’ and me dancing around the room. Had I done a strip tease? Oh, please make me not have done a strip tease.

‘You did a strip tease, you know,’ Jimmy said.

‘Shut up,’ I grumbled.

I tore off the oversized T-shirt and quickly threw on the bra, sleeveless blouse and jeans I’d been wearing the night before. They smelt like alcohol and made me gag. I looked up as I pulled my hair into a ponytail and saw that Jimmy had a clear view of me dressing in the reflection of a full-length mirror. He grinned.

‘I told you to look away!’

‘Not true,’ he shook his head. ‘You told me to face the other way. This,’ he waved at the wall with his perving mirror, ‘. . . is the other way.’

‘Oh. My. God.’ I said, snatching up my bag. I flopped on Oscar the Couch and scrolled through my phone while Jimmy tried to regale me with last night’s activities.

‘I shouldn’t have let you have the shots,’ he mused.

‘No, you shouldn’t have. I don’t usually drink spirits. I get hyper if I drink a lot.’

I’d sent Pete nineteen messages and he hadn’t replied to any of them. But he had said the Cederbergs were most likely out of range. I read through the messages with mounting dismay. They’d gotten increasingly indecipherable and desperate and culminated in one that called him a ‘Goal wannabe’ (I think I’d tried to type ‘Goat’) and Giselle a ‘rock-cock-collector with dumb plaits’.

‘Yes,’ Jimmy said, his eyes smiling. ‘Yes, you were definitely “hyper”.’

I uttered a weak groan.

‘I told you I was cutting you off,’ Jimmy continued, while getting out of bed and rummaging through the pile of clothes at the bottom of his wardrobe. ‘But you just went and downed drinks off other people’s tables.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I said, my dignity beginning to resemble a half-chewed prune.

Pete was going to get back into range and his phone would ping-ping-ping with garbled abuse. Giselle would sit next to him thinking, ‘No wonder he left that psycho behind.’

‘You told Sylvie you wanted to be just like her when you grew up. Except not short and not a smoker. And not scary.’ Jimmy pulled a pair of shorts over his boxers while I cringed. ‘You told Toler you wanted to be like him when you grew up. Except not gay. You told Frankie you wanted to be like her when you grew up. Except not gay. Which, by the way, she isn’t.’ He ran his hands through his mussed-up hair. ‘And you told me I needed to grow up.’

Frankie! I remembered meeting her and asking about the man who’d done the ‘pussy pictures’, as I’d taken to calling them last night. She’d said he was a friend of Sylvie’s neighbour and was currently in Mozambique with his family. So that drew a line under that.

‘And,’ Jimmy was still talking. ‘You dance like a honey badger.’

‘How do they dance?’ I said, looking up from my semi-abusive, fully desperate text messages with an air of hopelessness.

Jimmy did some kind of jolting jazz-hands movement, his hips shunting mechanically left and right and his gaze watching invisible fairies.

I narrowed my eyes. ‘I think that looks very cool.’

Jimmy plopped next to me on the furry sofa. ‘Do you remember anything about last night?’

I frowned. I remembered Jimmy making me margaritas before the restaurant opened. I remembered Sylvie arriving and having a husky-voiced rant at Jimmy about lady friends. I remembered Jimmy saying I wasn’t his lady friend and that I was there for the job trial. And I remembered how he then got me folding napkins, setting tables, putting in fresh bin liners and doing all his boring jobs to ‘throw Sylvie off the scent’. I remembered the restaurant eventually filling up and being captivated by the festive vibe of the place. Especially for a Wednesday night. The clientele (mostly over forty) were the somebodies or former somebodies of Cape Town. They sported even tans, thin limbs and plastic surgery gone those two procedures too far, where they all started looking like they were from a human subspecies. Homo-meltedo, perhaps. Everything about them was a tad off kilter, like looking at faces through a wet window. People were shown to their tables but as the evening progressed, the table became where you left your glittery clutch. Everybody was up visiting other people; chatting and air-kissing and calling each other ‘my angel’. I’d decided it must have been a way to show off the full length of your gym-honed body. Why waste all those hours you spent working out sitting at a table only being viewed from the cinched waist up?

Sylvie would march diminutively through the throngs at various points in the evening, still in her generic catering apron, her grey hair in a casually flung-up banana clip, dramatically ripping up bills the waiters had delivered, ordering shots for the whole restaurant or screaming at Jimmy for playing a song she hated. The customers loved her and she clearly enjoyed being the (psychotic) centre of attention. I sat at the bar with Jimmy, who was evidently a favourite of the female and mostly gay male patrons. At one point in the evening, when I’d been making a zigzagged trip to the toilet through women so tall and thin they looked like they’d been digitally stretched, I passed a lady who I was sure said, ‘The first time Arnold Schwarzenegger fucked me was a complete surprise.’ Upon my return to my favoured barstool Jimmy assured me I’d heard correctly and that the woman, Heather (who was forty-seven but with mountains of plastic surgery that made her look forty-six and vaguely aquatic) fucked all the visiting celebrities she could ensnare and gave everybody a ‘blow-by-blow’ account after.

By the time food service was over and the real partying had begun I was stag-do-in-Benidorm-level drunk. The restaurant became more of a bar/nightclub, the dogs left the humans to their debauchery and Jimmy stepped out from behind the bar and took up residence at the piano, rocking tunes from the late 1980s and early 1990s that had the clientele rubbing their thin forms against each other. Heather ended up on the table giving us all a view of her comprehensively waxed areas. From what I could remember Jimmy was a fantastic singer and, with his shirtsleeves rolled up, his top buttons undone and his cheeky grin frequently flashing my way, I’d found him incredibly attractive. Which might explain the late-night strip tease in front of the Sesame Street sofa. I looked over at him, my cheeks roasting under his amused and unwavering gaze.

‘Nothing past when I fell off the stage while singing that Rodriguez song.’ I dropped my aching head into my hands. ‘I feel like a lobotomist has taken out my brain and given it to Michael Jordan who is bouncing it around a concrete basketball court in the Chicago prospects, and bits of gum and cigarette butts are lodging themselves in the grooves of my cortex.’

Jimmy looked at me, his eyebrows raised.

‘My head hurts.’

There was a knock at the door.

‘Come in!’ Jimmy said, giving me a consolatory pat on the back.

Diego walked in sporting a lycra ensemble so bright it caused blinking and potential seizures, assessed the messy room – me in last night’s clothing looking ashamed and ill, shirtless Jimmy looking calm and relaxed, and the empty beer bottles on the floor I’d only just noticed – and assumed a ‘business as usual’ expression.

‘Breakfast?’ he said, looking from Jimmy to me.

‘If you could ask anybody anything and not worry about causing offence or getting in trouble, what would you ask?’ Jimmy said, then spooned in a mouthful of Diego’s exceptionally delicious cinnamon and apple millet porridge.

We were sitting on the balcony around the same glass-topped table as the previous morning, Jimmy chatting ceaselessly and aimlessly. The South African sun glinted off every shiny surface, the surf pounded the beach and with each mouthful of porridge my hangover was seeping away.

‘I’d ask Kim Kardashian if it feels weird to sit on her arse,’ I said, pouring more home-made lemon and ginger tea. Diego and Ian’s lifestyle was a homage to the paleo way of living. Mother would definitely approve. Jimmy, it seemed, ate whatever came his way with no judgement. If somebody was offering, he was eating. ‘Like, when she sits down does it feel like she’s sitting on a mini inflated lilo, all wobbly and unstable, and when she wants to sleep on her back does she have to do it in the bridge position?’

Diego grinned.

‘Excellent,’ Jimmy said, nodding his affirmation. ‘I’d ask a policeman how often a fart wafts out when someone they’ve pulled over winds down their window.’

‘Gross,’ I said.

‘Everyone farts in the car.’

‘And what about you?’ I asked Diego once we’d deliberated over how often police fart-wafting might occur.

He pushed his empty porridge bowl to the side, picked up a small paring knife and began peeling a mango with practiced dexterity. ‘I’d ask what happened between you two last night.’ He raised a thick yet well-managed eyebrow.

‘Nothing,’ I said firmly.

‘She did a strip tease,’ Jimmy said at the same time.

‘Shut up!’

‘And woke with her knickers back to front.’

‘Jimmy!’

‘And it was a G-string.’

I punched him on the shoulder.

‘Nude coloured,’ Jimmy said, laughing while dodging my ineffectual punches. ‘With a tiny bow at the front.’

‘That certainly sounds like nothing happened,’ Diego said, devouring the mango. He glanced at his chunky watch. ‘Gotta go.’ He shoved his chair back and collected his dishes. ‘Can you take Flora and Lucy for a walk? I’ve got back-to-back classes today and Ian has gone to Pretoria for a conference.’

Jimmy nodded and turned to me. ‘Got plans?’