Make or Break

The next morning, I watched the sunrise from bed again then jumped in the shower and got an Uber to Jimmy’s (I’d given Trust the next few days off), arriving just in time for a Diego protein pancake stack. Diego informed me, after gushing over the multi-coloured lilies I’d bought him (‘my favourite, sweet girl! How did you know?!’), that 8 a.m. was not an hour Jimmy saw often, so I got comfy on a stool and gratefully accepted a coffee. I was pouring pure maple syrup over my pancakes and telling a fascinated Diego and a confounded Pamela how my mother, in the interests of digestive health analysis, liked to weigh herself before and after a poo, when a man who looked like an older, more respectable Jimmy arrived in the kitchen. He was wearing tailored trousers, a slick belt, a crisp white shirt and had freshly washed hair. He looked like he belonged on the cover of GQ, whereas Diego, in phone-box-red leggings and a tight turquoise tank, belonged in a Richard Simmons video.

‘Hello,’ he said with a twinkly smile. ‘So you’re the English girl who looks like Kate Beckett that Jimmy’s been talking about.’ He extended an oft-moisturised hand. ‘I’m Ian, Jimmy’s brother.’

He was very similar to Jimmy, just older and with less of an up-all-night-let’s-see-where-the-day-takes-us air than his younger sibling. He had a calm, even face: earnest, but interestingly so. He looked like he should be reading the breakfast news and that his favourite parts were the stories about dogs who skateboarded or a man whose home-grown squash resembled something suggestive.

‘How are you finding Cape Town?’ he asked. It was everybody’s favourite question. It was said with a look of eagerness, keen to see if you loved it as much as they did.

‘I love it so far,’ I said, and Ian nodded like I’d passed a test.

Diego poured coffee while Ian opened cupboards, checked his phone and filled Flora and Lucy’s bowls, at the same time as making enquiries about my Cape Town plans and checking that Jimmy was treating me well. At the sound of her food being plopped into her designer bowl, Lucy fell sideways off the sofa and panted and snotted her way across the room. She made it to a foot before the bowl then sat down and wheezed, looking forlornly at the food that was so close yet so far.

‘Where’s Flora?’ I asked, picking up Lucy and setting her down in front of her meal of chicken risotto.

‘That dog!’ Diego said, ladling fruit salad into a Tupperware container. ‘She thinks she’s Jimmy’s girlfriend. It’s icky. She goes to work with him and guards him from all the girls he brings home.’

Ian gave Diego a sharp look from behind the refrigerator door. Pamela, tending to some bubbling vegetable stock, glanced in my direction.

‘Not that he brings home that many,’ Ian said, placing a container of quinoa next to the fruit salad box. He gave me a compassionate smile that creased the lines around his eyes attractively.

‘Oh, we’re not like that,’ I said, waving my hand and sliding back onto my stool in front of the pancakes. ‘He’s just showing me around while my boyfriend is away.’

I thought I caught a look from Diego, but then he turned to put more healthy snacks in little Tupperware containers and add them to Ian’s growing pile. I watched as Diego explained the health benefits of each and every box, then they checked their evening arrangements: somebody was coming over for dinner and was bringing their new partner who was a pescatarian. They argued tenderly over who would pick up the fish, each trying to take ownership of the job so the other wouldn’t be put out. They were incredibly sweet together.

‘I’d love to stay and chat some more but I have a meeting,’ Ian said, looking at his watch. ‘Will you have dinner with us one evening?’

‘I’d love to,’ I said.

‘Oh, and can you find out what book he’s reading?’ Ian said, watching Diego put the Tupperware containers in an insulated bag. ‘Not the decoy, I found that already.’

‘Decoy?’

Diego rolled his eyes while filling Ian’s thermos with coffee.

‘About two years ago, I spent the whole weekend on the sofa reading a book I just had to get to the end of. The Girl on the Train. You know it?’

I nodded. Who didn’t.

‘Well, Jimmy had ants in his scruffy pants that day.’ Ian rolled his eyes. ‘I don’t know why; he was new here and didn’t know anyone, I guess. He was frustrated I wouldn’t go surfing with him, or drink coffee with him or play Trivial Pursuit with him—’

‘A big baby, that boy,’ Diego said in a matronly yet fond manner.

‘He stomped downstairs and didn’t come back for a few hours. Then just as I was probably a quarter from finishing he pranced into the room and blurted out the ending.’

‘Agh! I thought they were going to kill each other!’ Diego said, throwing his meaty arms to the heavens, making Pamela chuckle. ‘Then Ian did it to him, and Jimmy back again and now they have hidden books and decoy books and write the endings on bathroom mirrors! I don’t know what to do with the pair of them!’

Ian laid a placating hand on Diego’s arm, took the offered bag of snacks and smiled in my direction. ‘The decoy book is an Ian Rankin, so if you can find out what the real one is I’ll be forever indebted.’ He squeezed my shoulder, made me promise to find a night to have dinner with them then turned to Diego, checked he really was happy to collect the kingklip fillets, discussed what sauce would best complement them, and then they walked to the front door deliberating over playlists.

An hour later I was sitting at the kitchen island sipping a second coffee and sharing my gossip from the music industry with Diego (he was desperate to know which famous singer requested a young man dressed as a lifeguard in his green room) when Jimmy’s voice preceded his arrival in the room.

‘I just did a fart in the shower and the heat cooked it nearly solid. I had to punch my way out. Man, it was gross,’ he said, then blinked as he entered the kitchen and saw Diego and me smirking and Pamela giving him a look of disgust.

For the first time since meeting him he looked mildly embarrassed.

‘Charming,’ I said, with a look of repulsion.

Diego chuckled.

Jimmy tightened the white towel around his waist and recovered his general composure. ‘Why are you here so early?’

‘The day is a-wasting, Jimmy boy,’ I said, sliding off the stool and guiding him away from the fridge by his bare shoulders. ‘Let’s get on with it!’

Jimmy threw a ‘what’s happening’ look at Diego, who raised his bulletproof coffee (black coffee with – ew, gross – butter and coconut oil in it) and said, ‘The lady wants to see Cape Town.’

‘So where are we going?’ I said ten minutes later as I followed Jimmy to the car.

‘An SA adventure,’ Jimmy opened his rear passenger door with an unhealthy-sounding screech of rust and age. He threw a mess of towels, swimmers, drink bottles, hats, sunscreen and bags onto the back seat and jumped in the front, slamming the car door with a metallic thud.

‘Will it make the journey?’ I said, trying to replace the cover to the speaker which fell to the floor when I shut my door. ‘I don’t want to have to push this heap around Africa.’

Jimmy leant across and felt my bicep. ‘You seem strong enough,’ he said and turned the key.

The car coughed and shuddered itself alive.

‘You touched my boob,’ I said, over a Foreigner song.

Jimmy grinned like a boy who’d put a whoopee cushion under Grandma’s dining chair. ‘I know!’

The sun beat down on us as we backed out of the driveway; the smell of salt air, hot grass and a spluttering exhaust pipe filled my nostrils. We drove down the steep hills from Ian and Diego’s place towards the sea and followed the road through ever-busy Camps Bay beach, then wound our way along the coast. Jimmy pointed out seals, colonies of gulls, diving groups and shark flags.

‘What in the name of Jesus and all his minions are shark flags?’ I said, craning to see the green flag flapping high on the cliff above us. It had an outline of a great white on it.

‘It’s a warning system,’ Jimmy said casually. ‘A white flag means a shark has been spotted, a red flag means high shark alert, black is bad spotting conditions—’

‘Spotting conditions?’

‘Yeah. They have people out looking for sharks.’

‘What an awful job!’ I shuddered. ‘So, what does a green flag mean? No sharks – you’re good to go in the water?’

‘No, it means the spotting conditions are good.’

‘That’s it?’ I balked. ‘Just good visibility? Good conditions for you to spot the shark and hopefully die of fright before the shark has a chance to crush and shred your entire body with its nineteen rows of serrated teeth and its 1.8 tons of bite force?’

Jimmy glanced away from the road to give me a strange look. ‘So, no surf lessons for you then?’

‘Not even a molecule of a toenail in that water.’

We didn’t talk as Jimmy navigated a precariously winding road. Crumbly steep cliffs went up on one side, with nets strung over the road to catch falling boulders, and a precipitous drop to the rocks and frothy surf below us on the other. The ocean went on and on, the sun beating down on it and turning the water various shades of sapphire and turquoise depending on how deep it was. I felt like I was on the edge of Africa, which, according to my little Google Map search, I kind of was. I pointed it out to Jimmy.

‘Yep,’ he said. ‘If you leapt off the cliff and swam straight out you’d hit Uruguay.’

I peered at the horizon. ‘Another time maybe.’

Once we were off the edge of Africa and traversing a mountainous range covered in low, brushy bushes, Jimmy turned up the volume and sang along, loud and proud, to his jammed 1980s CD. He knew every ‘oooh’, ‘aaahh’ and ‘hey baby’.

After a few songs he turned to me. ‘You’re mouthing all the words,’ he said. ‘Just sing it.’

‘Nooooo,’ I shook my head. ‘I can’t sing. At all. None of my family can. We’re tuneless, cloth-eared, musically impoverished beings.’

‘So?’ Jimmy laughed. ‘Nobody should feel too self-conscious to sing Def Leppard in the car. It’s one of life’s simple and free pleasures. Do it!’ He winked then sang, throwing in an effortless harmony, a look of unassuming happiness across his face as he hit the steering wheel in time to the drumbeat.

I watched him as the chorus approached. With Jimmy’s nod of reassurance and the salty wind whipping my hair around, I joined in, spectacularly out of tune but, as instructed, nice and loud and definitely carefree.

I screeched the chorus in fluctuating tones of off-key, sounding like an opiate-abusing dolphin recovering from a stroke. Jimmy stopped singing and watched me, his mouth half open. I immediately ceased my carefree vocals.

‘Hey!’ I glowered at him with embarrassed irritation. ‘You said . . .!’

His features quivered, trying to contain his escaping laughter. ‘No, keep going. You’re doing great,’ he said, attempting a look of encouragement, his eyes watering.

Tentatively I started again with Jimmy looking sideways at me.

‘I might just turn it up a bit though . . .’ he said with false casualness. He swivelled the volume knob to max, then grinned.

We drove through places with names I couldn’t pronounce: Noordhoek, Kommetjie and Fish Hoek, and some I could: Cape Point, Simons Town and Kalk Bay, all the while listening to a backing track of Poison, Bon Jovi and Joan Jett. We saw ostriches and zebra and big scary birds. At one point we had to slow down to allow a troop (another collective noun google) of baboons to cross the road. Some mothers carried babies on their backs that were so cute I wound down my window to see if any of them wanted to hold my hand, or give me a cuddle, or come and live with me and eat cut-up banana from a bowl at the kitchen table and be my best friend forever, and was swiftly told to wind it back up because baboons know humans have food and aren’t afraid to get vicious to get some.

‘Respect,’ I said solemnly, making Jimmy laugh.

At a place called Boulders Beach Jimmy pulled into a car park and said we needed to stretch our legs.

‘No, you can’t touch or cuddle or take any of them home,’ Jimmy said as we arrived on the white sand beach and I gasped in delight.

Huge smooth boulders sheltered the tiny beach, making the aqua water millpond still, and in among the families playing on the icing-sugar sand were penguins. Hundreds and hundreds of little black and white penguins, no taller than my knee.

‘Oh my god!’ I squealed, as a couple of them waddled past me, entered the water and paddled around some kids wearing water wings.

Everywhere I looked humans and penguins were enjoying the beach together. Humans picnicked, and next to them penguins sat; humans swam, and next to them penguins floated; humans stood at the edge of the water watching their children, and penguins stood at the edge of the water watching whatever they were watching. It was the strangest sight I’d ever seen. We stayed for about an hour observing the penguins waddle along the beach, paddle in the shallows and bask on the rocks with zero fear of humans. Sadly there were rangers stopping me touching, cuddling and smuggling a couple home.

Once back in the car we followed yet another coastal road beside the wild ocean and got out at a loud and busy white sand surf beach. I bought us a couple of ice creams from a man hefting a cool box from one collection of sunbathers to the next, and we sat on the sand and watched surfers catch wave after terrifying wave.

‘So how long have you and your boyfriend been together?’ Jimmy asked once he’d given his sticky fingers a thorough licking.

‘Six years,’ I said.

‘That’s quite a long time.’

‘We took a three-month break at one point to “see how it felt”,’ I said. ‘It was Pete’s idea. He thought we were too young to be together for such a long time or something.’

‘But you got back together, obviously.’

‘Yep. Pete thought I’d freak out about being apart but I ended up having a thing with a guy from work.’ I grinned. ‘And another couple of guys.’

‘Reprehensible!’ Jimmy said, affecting disgust.

‘Pete did too but he doesn’t know I know,’ I said. ‘When we got back together we promised not to tell each other about anyone else we’d dated but Pete’s friend had been telling me everything the whole time. He’d slept with a girl from his gym, went on a few dates with a girl who turned out to be completely psycho and got an unsolicited blowjob from his friend’s slaggy cousin from Manchester. When he woke up the next morning he found out he hadn’t been the only guy in the flat who’d had a surprise horny visitor that night.’ I giggled. ‘I think he was horrified. We got back together a week later.’

Jimmy laughed.

‘What about you?’ I said.

‘Girlfriends?’

‘Yeah.’

‘A few,’ he said. ‘None for a while. Maybe I should look up that girl from Manchester . . .’ He grinned and watched a surfer who’d caught a particularly huge wave and was riding it all the way in to the beach.

‘That’s my mate,’ Jimmy said, standing up and waving.

After a few minutes four good-looking guys, all tanned and salty and dripping, ran out of the surf, their boards under their arms, and joined us. There were a lot of boisterous ‘hey, my bru’s, then Jimmy introduced me.

‘Jess, this is Sam, Gus, André and Bryn,’ Jimmy said, and I immediately forgot who was who. ‘Guys, this is Jess.’

I got a host of damp, strong handshakes and I ignored the knowing looks they threw Jimmy’s way.

‘What are you doing here, mate?’ one of the guys asked Jimmy as we walked across the sand to the car park.

‘Thought I’d pick up lunch and show Jess the studio,’ Jimmy said, stopping at his car while the guys walked on, carrying their boards, their suits stripped down to their waists, showing off firm chests. ‘The usual?’

The guys gave thumbs up and disappeared.

‘Doesn’t anybody have a job in Cape Town?’ I asked Jimmy as we pulled out of the car park.

‘Those guys are artists. Creators, really. They own a studio together and take time off when they want to surf and see their kids and stuff. It’s a pretty sweet set-up.’

With a back seat full of fish and chips, we parked outside an old building painted mint green. After punching in a code on a pin pad Jimmy pushed open a barred security door and we climbed some concrete stairs and arrived in a place so weird and wonderful I loved it immediately. Music blared from speakers by a leather bar with a glass top that was a real fish tank. Perspex rococo-style mirrors hung on the walls with LED lights in their clear frames that changed from blue to yellow to pink to blue again. Skulls painted bronze, gold and neon yellow hung from the exposed beams on chains and held weeping lush plants. A ceiling light the size of a kids’ paddling pool hung low in the centre of the room and seemed to be made of hundreds of realistic-looking crows in various states of flight.

‘Hey!’ I said pointing at a sofa just like Oscar the Couch but in shaggy pink fur.

‘That’s how I met these guys,’ Jimmy said. ‘Diego commissioned Oscar the Couch as a Christmas present for Ian. When I came with him to pick it up I had to break it to Diego that it wasn’t exactly to Ian’s white-and-cream-coloured tastes.’

‘Aw, poor multi-coloured Diego,’ I said, walking past a table that held candles shaped like human bones, kewpie dolls and full-sized, old-fashioned liquor bottles.

‘Luckily I knew someone who would love it. Me!’ he grinned. ‘That was a great Christmas. I gave Diego a really cool pair of socks and a framed picture of me on the sofa.’

‘Let me guess, you were naked?’

‘Maybe,’ he laughed and walked towards the bar area. ‘Lunch!’ he hollered, and set about spreading the fish and chips across the top of a table-tennis table.

Sam, Gus, André and Bryn appeared from various parts of the warehouse-like space. All dressed and clean-smelling, their wet hair pushed off their tanned, smiling faces. Just as we were about to eat, André’s wife and baby turned up and they headed into a workroom with their food. Sam received a phone call and went and sat on a flocked black chair in the corner by the bar to chat and eat. The chair’s legs were black casts of human legs and its arms actual arms, with hands balled into fists. It was the kind of thing that would make you scream if you saw it in a darkened room. Or a lit room. Actually I was suppressing a scream right now.

‘So how do you guys know each other?’ Bryn said from a stool at the bar. He was the tallest of them all, with a messy crop of blond hair, a broad chest and a host of wrinkles from a life spent on the waves.

‘Jess turned up in my bed with her undies on back to front,’ Jimmy said with a wicked grin.

‘I did not!’ I threw a chip at Jimmy.

‘Lucky Jimmy,’ said Gus, laughing from his chair, which was a huge cube of wood painted glossy red; his lunch sat on a metallic side table shaped like a Hawaiian hula girl holding out a drinks tray.

After eating and chatting the guys went back to work while Jimmy showed me around a handful of rooms that led off from the open space. In one, Bryn and Gus were working on life-sized arms of Darth Vadar and Luke that would eventually be mounted on the wall like giant arm-shaped sconces. The lightsabers they held really lit up.

‘If you can think it we can make it,’ Sam said with a grin when I asked how he came up with the idea. ‘A guy in America ordered these for his kid’s bedroom.’

He pointed to the bust of a bison made out of white resin hanging high on the wall. Its horns were lava lamps, glowing a multitude of colours. ‘That’s Jimmy’s favourite,’ he said.

‘It is,’ Jimmy said. ‘If I could afford their stuff that’d be my first piece.’

My phone rang and when I saw it was Pete calling I left the workroom and sat on a stool at the bar.

‘Hi,’ I said down the phone line.

‘Jess?’ Pete said through the noise of wind and bad reception. ‘Can you hear me?’

‘Yes, are you all right?’

‘I’m fine. I got your millions of abusive texts, though,’ he said, sounding superior. ‘And Giselle saw them, too.’

‘What’s she doing with your phone?’

‘She was taking a photo when they all came through and I asked her to read them to me.’

‘Texts between you and me are private!’ I hissed down the phone, glancing at Jimmy, who smiled and waved at me from the workroom.

‘She’s actually really nice and what you said about her was really mean.’

‘Well, I obviously didn’t think she’d be reading my texts, did I?!’

‘Look, I know I didn’t leave in the . . . circumstances but . . . and you . . .’

‘What? You’re breaking up.’

Crackles and wind came down the line.

‘Pete?’ I waited, but could only hear the wind, the crackle and snatches of Pete’s voice reprimanding me through the bad reception. Then the line went dead.

I went back to the workroom, where music blared and the guys worked and laughed and teased one another. They were like school friends doing woodwork class all day.

‘You all right?’ Jimmy said.

‘Yeah,’ I said, but it was obvious my mood had dipped after the phone call.

Jimmy watched me for a moment then grabbed my hand and dragged me across the warehouse. ‘I challenge you to a game of beer table tennis.’

‘What?’

He pulled two beer bottles from behind the bar, flicked off the lids by doing some kind of manoeuvre with the mouth of each bottle, thrust one in my hand, a paddle in the other and said, ‘Drink with one hand, play with the other. Try to win.’

I grinned. ‘You’re on.’

After an hour I was laughing and puffing and giggling, and Jimmy looked at the time and said we needed to go. We said goodbye to everyone, and just as we were leaving Gus ran up and handed me the bottom half of a skull that was painted gold and made out of some kind of resin.

‘To remember us by,’ he said. ‘It’s a chip bowl.’

Pete would hate it. I, on the other hand, couldn’t think of anything I loved more at that very instant. Except baby hedgehogs, because who doesn’t love them? Psychopaths. That’s who.

On the drive home I called Annabelle to tell her about the penguins and the baboons and the dead snake we saw on the road that Jimmy insisted on stopping next to so we could look at its guts and beer table tennis, and Annabelle made satisfying ‘I’m-so-jealous/that’s-gross/sounds-hilarious’ comments.

‘Did I tell you Mum phoned yesterday?’ she said.

‘How? I thought they weren’t allowed any contact.’

‘They aren’t. One of the other guests smuggled a phone in. She said she thought they were using food deprivation to play mind control games. And that she was getting a bit jumpy from all the gunshots.’

‘What gunshots?!’

Jimmy gave me a worried glance.

‘It turns out there’s a rifle range next door to the retreat.’

‘Well, that’s great council planning.’

‘Anyway, she was worried about that lady covering her radio show and wanted me to try and get the listener stats or something, then one of the guides found her and the phone got confiscated. I heard her call him a fascist before she got cut off.’

‘We need to get her out of there! What if she’s accidentally signed up to some cult and comes out thinking she’s had alien intervention or agrees to a mass suicide pact thinking it’s an environmental protest march?!’

‘Oh, I don’t think so . . .’ Annabelle said vaguely.

‘You don’t sound worried. Why aren’t you worried?’

‘She’ll be fine. She could do with some mind control. Be cool if she did make contact with aliens, though. Hey, I gotta go OK? Bye!’

‘Aliens?’ Jimmy said once I’d hung up and commenced chewing my fingernail.

‘Bit extreme?’

Jimmy bulged his eyes to indicate the affirmative.

I laughed. ‘I have a tendency to go straight to catastrophe mode.’

‘I’ve noticed.’

‘I can’t help myself. I always think everyone is dead if they don’t answer their phone. And most of the time, OK, all of the time, so far, people call back and say mundane, totally reasonable things like they were in the shower or in the queue at the supermarket, or in the toilet, or their phone was in their bag and they didn’t hear it. But you know what? The one day I don’t worry and think, ‘Oh they must just be busy, happily busy and happily alive’ will be the day somebody is dead. And who’ll be sorry then, huh?’

Jimmy’s eyes flicked from the road to me.

‘Well, a lot of people will be and it will be awful and very sad and life will never be the same again, but the point is, I worry to keep people alive! You’re welcome.’

Jimmy laughed, turned up Whitesnake and we sped towards the apartment.