The Reactive E-Book

Masande Ntshanga

• Herausgeber: Jacaranda Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 252

Beschreibung

In a city that has lost its shimmer, Lindanathi and his two friends Ruan and Cecelia sell illegal pharmaceuticals while chasing their next high. Lindanathi, deeply troubled by his hand in his brother's death, has turned his back on his family, until a message from home reminds him of a promise he made years before. When a puzzling masked man enters their lives, Lindanathi is faced with a decision: continue his life in Cape Town, or return to his family and to all he has left behind. Rendered in lyrical, bright prose and set in a not-so-new South Africa, The Reactive is a poignant, life-affirming story about secrets, memories and the redemption that comes from facing what haunts us most.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR THE REACTIVE

“[The Reactive is] one of this year’s most startling novels.”

Mail & Guardian

“Electrifying... [Ntshanga] succeeds at exploring major themes—illness, family, and, most effectively, class—while keeping readers in suspense. Ntshanga’s promising debut is both moving and satisfyingly complex.” Kirkus Reviews

“In Ntshanga one finds an erudite writer of exceptional talent, a critical new voice in the contemporary post-apartheid literary scene.” Cape Times

“This is an author who knows how to creep into [the] cracks, and shine the light fiercely. It’s blinding and leaves you quite breathless.” Daily News

“With The Reactive, [Ntshanga] has created an immersive and powerful portrait of drug use, community, and health issues by exploring what it was like to be young, black, South African, and HIV positive in the early aughts.” Vice

“[T]he story that results from... dual past and present, rural and urban lives is intriguing and funny in its darkest moments.” GQ

“The Reactive is one of the most exciting debut novels I’ve read in years. A coming of age novel for one young man and, seemingly, for a generation. Somehow this book is funny as hell about the grimmest business and still tender to its people and to its place. Masande Ntshanga is a wildly talented writer. Get in on his brilliance now so you can claim you always knew he’d be great.” Victor LaValle, author of Big Machine

“One of [Ntshanga’s] best qualities as a writer is to de-familiarise aspects of South African existence, which through our habits of speaking and writing, have boiled down to bland indifference... The Reactive will probably remain, along with Imraan Coovadia’s High Low In-between and Jonny Steinberg’s Three Letter Plague, as a seminal work confronting [a] period in our country’s history.”

Sunday Independent

“Elegiac... an astoundingly brilliant novel, radiating with understanding and compassion. It fulfils William Faulkner’s injunction that ‘the poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man; it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.’” City Press

“Woozy, touching... a novel that delivers an unexpected love letter to Cape Town, painting it as a place of frustrated glory. The Reactive often teems with a beauty that seems to carry on in front of its glue-huffing wasters despite themselves.”

Marian Ryan, Slate

The Reactive

Masande Ntshanga

This edition published in Great Britain 2017 byJacaranda Books Art Music LtdUnit 304 Metal Box Factory30 Great Guildford Street,London SE1 0HSwww.jacarandabooksartmusic.co.uk

First published in Southern Africa 2014 by Umuzi,an imprint of Penguin Random House

Copyright © Masande Ntshanga 2014

The right of Masande Ntshanga to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This is a work of fiction and all characters and incidents described in this book are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-909762-59-6

eISBN: 978-1-909762-60-2

Cover Design: Rodney Dive

Printed and bound in the UK

by Jellyfish Solutions, Hampshire, SO32 2NW

“We need to look at the question that is posed,understandably I suppose: does HIV cause AIDS?”THABO MBEKI, FORMER PRESIDENT OF SOUTH AFRICA

“We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods.”FRANZ KAFKA

For us, the fearful

TEN YEARS AGO, I HELPED A HANDFUL OF MEN TAKE MY little brother’s life. I wasn’t there when it happened, but I told Luthando where to find them. Earlier that year, my brother and I had made a pact to combine our initiation ceremonies.

This was back in 1993.

LT was only seventeen then. He was broad of shoulder, but known as a wimp at Ngangelizwe High. My brother was good-looking in a funny way that never helped him any, and, like me, he was often called ibhari, or useless, by the older guys in the neighbourhood. LT was bad with girls, too; most of them had decided against us pretty early. I don’t know; maybe it’s strange that I remember that about him most of all. I suppose my brother was handed the lousy luck of every guy in our family except our dad, who’d thrown us into different wombs one year after the other. We had cousins like that, too, all of them dealt a similar hand. In the end, it was winter when Luthando went to the hills to set things straight for himself. He went up thinking I would follow behind him.

It was raining when the bakkie took him on its back and drove him up the dirt trail. Inside the camp, they put him in line with a set of boys he shared a classroom with. Then they took out their blades. Afterwards, they nursed him for a week, and he kicked and swore at them for another two. They called him The Screamer, they told us later, when we gathered to put him inside the earth. Maybe it was meant with tenderness, I thought, the kind of tenderness men could keep between themselves in the hills.

One morning, they said, my brother had failed to make the sounds they’d come to know him for. Luthando wasn’t due out for another two days. The sky had been an empty blue expanse, easy on their duties around eziko, and they’d missed his peculiar fussiness. When they walked into his hut, one after the other, they found a memory instead of the man they were out to make. That was my little brother, LT, dead at seventeen, and I’ve never forgotten it was me who put him there.

I never went back home after we buried him. This isn’t a story about me and my brother from the Transkei, about the Mda boys from eMthatha or the village of Qokolweni, where my grandmother’s bones lie polished and buried next to her Ma’s. Instead, I want to tell you about what happened to me in Cape Town after Luthando had taken his death. It’s where I went to school and tried to make something of myself. It’s also where I began to reconsider what my hands had made, and my telling of how it broke won’t take us very long.

I went to college two times in my life. I might as well begin with how things went for me there. I first attended the university in Rondebosch, just up the road from the main strip, and when I’d dropped out of my journalism degree I enrolled at the technikon in town, where I got my science diploma and my sickness. I had an equity scholarship—there had been plenty of those to go around for whoever looked the way I did, back then. I got through on mostly average grades, too, like most of the guys in my class. When the year came to an end, there was a bunch of us who’d file into the Fees Office again to fill out all the forms required of boys who shared my skin tone. It didn’t take much to go to school for free, in those days, or rather to trade on the pigment we were given to carry. I think I did all right, if you consider everything else, and I graduated with an upper-second-class pass in the end. I still have that diploma sitting somewhere in my flat in Observatory.

Now what else? In between university and Tech, I spent close to half a year at Bhut’ Vuyo’s place. Two weeks after dropping out of the university, I tried to go home, but I couldn’t set foot inside my mother’s house. The home I’d known since I was a child was barred to me. There could’ve been a tapestry of fire that flowed over each of our walls that day. In fact, thinking about it now, even that feels like an understatement.

My mother felt disgraced by my decision to leave the university and my bachelor’s degree behind me in Rondebosch. It was too soon, she complained, first over the phone and then again in person. For a few moments, she even refused to turn her face up towards me. Instead, Ma arranged for me to enter the home of a relative.

Bhut’ Vuyo was known as a great mechanic, a recovering alcoholic, and someone who’d been a doting stepfather to the little brother I’d helped to kill. He’d met my aunt, Sis’ Funeka, when Luthando was only ten years old, and before then, sticking his hands into rusting bonnets had taken Bhut’ Vuyo to Okinawa as a man of barely twenty. Pushed forward by the locomotive of a lucrative Toyota scholarship, he’d gone to the city of Kyoto at the age of twenty-four, before coming back and accepting too many drinks on the house in a tavern called Silver’s. That was in Bisho, during the decline of the homeland years, and they’d served him on a cloth-covered tray every morning after he’d taken his table. It was no more than a month, people said, before my uncle was undone. There were decades that would nearly fell him after that: Bhut’ Vuyo barely standing on his two feet around the neighbourhood, and Bhut’ Vuyo tottering on street corners next to the highway in Mdantsane. He was often seen with his toes busting out through the smiles on his black-and-blue gumboots, his head lolling as wispy as an old hornet’s nest over his shoulders.

Now, my mother told me, having wrung himself dry, and maybe for good this time, Bhut’ Vuyo lived with his second wife in Du Noon. They had two small children and her older son from a previous marriage, all of them born with bright eyes and strong teeth and each glowing with the promise of long-lasting health. For her part, my aunt had passed away shortly after we’d buried her son. Sis’ Funeka had had a cancer eating away at her throat, and I suppose it had grown too impatient with the rigorous hold of her grief.

In the end, it had been a punishment for me to be sent to Du Noon, I had known that even then, but thinking of my little brother, of Luthando, I’d made myself accept the idea. And so I went to Du Noon like my mother wanted me to and ended up staying there for six months. I suppose some things happened when I was out there, too, and I drew close to those folks who’d taken me in. The subject of Luthando came up, as I thought it would, and in my gratitude to them, I made a promise to Bhut’ Vuyo and his household.

Now, close to eight years later, I receive a text message from my uncle that reminds me of the words we shared back then, and of the promise I made, on a night so long ago I can hardly put it together from memory.

FIRST PART

THIS MORNING, WHEN I OPENED MY EYES, I FOUND ANOTHER warm Saturday wrapping itself around the peninsula. Someone had left Cissie’s living-room window open again, the one on the east-facing wall, above the copy of Rothko’s No. 4 that she’d painted for the three of us last week. Standing there in front of the glass, I couldn’t tell you which one of us had left the window open, only that when I heard the wind blowing under the wooden sash again, I felt I was on my own here. There was a blanket of smog stretching itself thick over the rim of the metropolis, and everything looked inflated and exhausted all at once. I remembered all the different things inside this city, and how they changed the moment you got used to them. Then I remembered myself, too.

I closed the window after that, and soon my eyes followed.

Now it’s a little later. Outside, the sky seems geared up for another humid weekend over the city, another three days of trees at war with their roots, and of dirty window panes getting stripped clean by the late winter rain.

I take a shallow breath.

Then cough.

Where I am right now is Newlands. I’m over at Cecelia’s place, and I suppose the situation is easy enough to explain. It’s still a long stretch of time before I die, but only three short hours since I received the message from my uncle, and everything’s happening the way it usually does between me and my friends. Like always, the three of us—that’s me, Ruan and Cecelia—we wake up some time before noon and take two Ibuprofens each. Then we go back to sleep, wake up an hour later, and take another two from the 800-milligram pack. Then Cissie turns on the stove to cook up a batch of glue, and the three of us wander around mutely after that, digging the sleep out of our eyes and caroming off each other’s limbs. We drift through whatever passes for early afternoon here at Cissie’s place.

This morning, I find my skin mottled with goose-flesh. I’m standing with one foot on cold chipped tile and the other on wet concrete. I’m yawning, still wiping stray motes from my eyes, and in a way, I guess these motes might be tears, but that’s also me having my eyelids closed against that idea. That’s also me not wanting to find out.

Now I open them again.

I’m always the last to walk out of Cissie’s bathroom. Today, since the pedal on her flapper bin’s broken, I leave a string of dental floss floating inside the toilet bowl. I find Ruan watching her from the other end of the kitchen, lighting up incense sticks and placing them flat on the kitchen counter. He’s trying to cover up the smell of glue wafting from the oven.

Most of the walls are stained here, by the way, and the floors are cracked, too. This isn’t Cissie’s doing, only the nature of her building. It’s what makes it affordable for her to rent a flat in this area. Once, when I was sitting on my own on her couch, sober but I guess still half-asleep, I’d tried to count the cracks I could find in her floor-boards. They reminded me then of Sis’ Funeka’s smile in the days before we’d buried her, and, in a way, I guess they still do. My aunt refused to look at me after Luthando was gone, and though I never attended her funeral, I was told she mistook me for him on her hospital bed. I thought I was lucky, back then, to have escaped the insight of her dementia. Maybe she would’ve pointed me out as the one who’d killed him.

Instead, I’m here.

Hungover in Newlands, six foot two, bone-thin, soaked through and dripping pipe-rusted water all over Cissie’s threshold. In the kitchen, Cissie has the only dry towel in the flat wrapped around her waist. I look in from the door. Then cough loud enough to annoy her.

Really, I say, Cecelia, tell me this isn’t typical.

Standing by the stove, Cissie doesn’t answer me. Instead, she starts laughing. Or she scoffs, rather. Which is what Cecelia does these days. She scoffs.

I watch her take her time as she turns around, and when she’s done with that, with giving me and Ruan her performance, she throws me a tattered dishcloth to dry myself off with. Even though it’s stupid of me to catch it, that’s what I do, and before I can say anything in protest, she tells me to look at what she’s busy doing. I look up and Cecelia waves at me.

Dude, she says, can’t you see I’m being a breadwinner here? I’m the only one who pays the rent on time on the fourth floor of this damn building. Can’t you see that?

In response, I sigh. Then, since she’s right, I nod.

I dry my neck and behind my ears. In the bathroom again, I pull on a pair of shorts and find a dry shirt in the hamper. It belongs to her, but it used to be mine, so I put it on. I pat my hair with the dishcloth and hang it on the shower rail to dry. Then I walk around her and open the kitchen windows for air. I’m sure we all need that by now.

I unbolt each latch on the front door and step out onto the balcony. Leaning back against the railing, I breathe out and watch Cissie wiping her brow with a sigh. She gathers the brown goo in the pot with a small wooden spoon and lets it drip slowly into the pit of a yellow bowl. I stand there and she stands there. We stare at each other for a while.

I guess this is how everything moves today. It’s like riding on the back of a large, dying mammal. It matches the tepid warmth, and I close my eyes against it. I try not to think about Bhut’ Vuyo’s message. I try not to think about everything I’ve had to put away about Luthando, my dead brother, in the days that have grown out into years between us. Instead, I think about how it’s the weekend, again. It’s the weekend, and this is what the three of us do on days like today.

Sitting cross-legged in the living room, Ruan opens his laptop and starts up the printer on Cissie’s coffee table. He feeds paper into the machine and watches as the computer boots up with its usual noise. I suppose you could call this our operation, our way of making a little extra in this place, here in Cape Town, where we are.

To understand it better, you’d have to meet Cecelia.

Cissie’s our resident chemist here at West Ridge. She’s in charge of cooking the glue we use to hang up our posters; and in order to make it the way Cissie does, you need flour, brown sugar and a small amount of vinegar. You need to pour these into a bowl, add a cup of water and mix thoroughly, making sure to squash out all the lumps from the flour. Have the oven preheated at 180º, bring the bowl to a boil, keep stirring and build up the texture. During this entire process, what helps is to be as patient and attentive as Cecelia when she’s cooking a batch. Failing that, you can at least try to be halfway as demanding as she is, and halfway for Cissie, of course, means all the way for the rest of us.

I remember how I’d been out of a job for seven months, once. I was living off the last of my severance pay when Cecelia, who’d just showered and burnt her hand on her new but broken sandwich grill, came to sit next to me on her bed and asked me if I ever considered what would really happen to me the moment I died. That’s how things were back then, about two years ago, and I suppose they aren’t that different now. It was a warm night in October. The South-Easter had descended on Cape Town to dry-clean our skins, and Cecelia, with her hair dripping and the smell of Pick n Pay conditioner fuming off her scalp, left dark spots of moisture scattered across my Jobmail paper.

I told her then how I never thought about that, how thoughts like that wouldn’t have allowed me to do what I had done.

Cissie listened with her head tilted, and took a long time before she answered me and said okay. Then she leaned into my chest and closed her eyes to fall asleep, and with everything silent and her flat feeling like an old tomb around us, I bent down to touch her on the part of her finger that was dying. With her eyes still closed, Cissie raised her hand and stuck the burnt finger inside my mouth, and sliding it slowly over my tongue, told me to suck on the skin until it came back to life.

So I did that.

I didn’t mind doing it, either.

I watch her now as she opens and closes the oven door. Cissie removes another stray braid from her face and, cupping her left palm, waves away a wisp of smoke. One of the biggest problems she has with me, she says, is that I never pay enough attention to people. Every time I offer someone a shoulder to cry on, Cissie says, my biggest concern is the snot left drying on my shirt. I’ve told her how I think that’s good, how she’s phrased that.

I remember the first time she brought it up. It had just started raining outside, and she’d got up half-naked from the mattress we three sometimes shared. It was close to midnight and the room had cloaked itself in complete darkness. I waited a while, then joined her on the wooden floor. I guess neither of us was in a rush to get up again. We took our time, sitting in silence, and the first gray light fingered its way through the slits between her blinds.

Then, before getting up to shower, I guess having proved her point through silence, Cissie said I check the time a lot when people tell me their problems. In response, I told her I’d work on it. Then I looked at my wristwatch.

I guess I’m still working on it.

Even so, while I fail to live up to Cissie’s standards for human sympathy, I have a friend who’s even worse off than I am. His name is Ruan, and he loses no sleep over that sort of thing. I know this because I’ve asked him about it.

I mean really. You should hear Ruan speak.

He’s our resident printer here at West Ridge. To print out as much ink as he does, you need to buy a regular 60XL cartridge, then take it home and print until it reaches half its capacity. Then steam it open and loosen the blade above the chemical toner. Report this as a defect to the manufacturer, add an image for evidence, and print out their response to take back to the shop for a new pack. Most ink companies will corroborate your story like this by accident. Corporations lose nothing in providing customer care to a single claim from a foreign client. What helps, of course, is to know how to lie as often and as easily as Ruan does.

I watch him lean his head back on Cissie’s couch. He has a five-o’clock shadow that runs down half the length of his throat, and his Adam’s apple bobs up and down as the printer chugs, pulling in reams of paper ready for all the ink he’s defrauded from Cape Town’s shop assistants.

This makes us up as a total. You count these two and add me. We make up a team of three, and these days, if you want to know what passes for my social life, just take a look at them, at Ruan and Cecelia.

I know I haven’t said much about Ruan yet. For years now, and maybe even before that, Ruan and I have considered ourselves the closest thing we might ever get to kin. I guess that’s worked out for me in the end, and maybe for him, too, whenever it needs to. Getting to know him, what you learn first is never to believe anything he says, and what you learn second is that whenever he’s high, he’ll tell you that his first near-death experience was a download.

I’m not making that up.

Meet him and he’s probably coming down or high. The three of us don’t manage to stay in between for too long. Ruan will tell you that since he started feeding his plants with the new fertilizer he ordered online, the pigeons have been coming to his flat more than ever. If you listen to him, he’ll tell you how these birds travel all the way down from the Philippines and stop over at Maine before they circle back to his windowsill in Sea Point. When I first started to know him, Ruan and I spent a lot of time talking about these birds. He told me he was an asthmatic and introverted child, and that what he knew about bird migrations wasn’t from taking a lot of trips to the museum. He told me and Cissie how much these birds meant to him, and even though we didn’t understand, we believed him.

Then lastly, there’s me.

In case you’ve been wondering, I was also given a name. My parents got mine from a girl. My mother had a friend who almost went blind from working in a clothing factory in the seventies. They’d both been students at Lovedale College before my mother moved on to Fort Hare, and when they reunited again, years later, under the dome of an East London factory shop, the friend was mending clothes to put her daughter Lindanathi through school. I suppose that child, listless in a corner, wearing knee-length socks and wielding a bag full of textbooks, became a sign of hope for my mother. She convinced my father to give me the same name.

Lindanathi means “wait with us.” What I’m meant to be waiting for, or who I’m meant to be waiting with, I was never told.

It’s just what my name is.

I’m Nathi, and of the three of us, I’m the one who’s supposed to be dying. In order to do as much standing around as I do, you need to be one of the forty million human beings currently infected with the immunodeficiency virus. Then you need to stand at your friend’s computer and design a poster over his shoulder, one telling these people you’re here to help them. Then you need to provide them with your details—tell them you prefer email or SMS—and then start selling them your pills.

What helps, of course, is to try to forget about it as much as possible. Which is what I do.

Maybe it’s this whole slavery thing, Cissie says.

Leaning on her balcony, I try to press reply on my cellphone, but my fingers pause over the buttons. They feel like paper straws. I stare at the blinking cursor.

In the kitchen, Cissie stirs another ladle of water into the glue. This morning, her braids are rolled up in a neat ball at the top of her head, a new style the three of us have started to favour more and more for her. When she moves, a few of the strands loosen and fall like tassels across her chest, and she flicks them away from the stove in a single shake with her shoulders. Cissie has a way of making the smallest things obey her, and I guess that includes me and Ruan.

I put my cellphone away. These days, she’s always wearing a different pack of synthetic hair on her head. Sometimes the colour she chooses is black, at other times it’s a blue shade, and at other times it’s this colour I can’t even describe to you—like silver or aqua or teal or something. Ruan and I have seen her in the red and blonde ones a lot. Cissie wears them on her head all day and all of them, she says, are more flammable than a wick dipped in paraffin. She tells us to think of her as a human match, with a dormant fire ready to burst into flame between her brains, which is a nice way of telling people not to fuck with you. Or at least the nicest way I’ve heard.

I can feel my cellphone’s weight against my thigh. Leaning back on the railing, I push out three slow breaths for composure. Out on the balcony, the weather changes faces. Spring is stalling, still a month away, but the sun’s rays warm up my skin like geyser water. They throw dappled light across the empty corridor.

Ruan and I have been squatting here for the past few nights, somewhere between falling asleep and overdosing on Cissie’s couch. Cissie’s building, this unattractive cream-coloured six-story called West Ridge Heights, was converted from an old ground-level nursing home in the late eighties. It sits tucked away in Newlands, a docile suburb, just a few streets off the main road, and it’s one of the two holes Ruan and I have chosen to call our homes, this year. Or maybe just for the winter, if you want to take Ruan’s view of things.

In any case, this is where Cissie cooks her glue for us. You take a look and the building has the usual overgrown grass, the usual stained ceilings, and the usual dirty lino in its single-lift lobby. There’s a tile missing here and there, with a broken full-length mirror and plastic potted plants leaning back in most of its corners. There isn’t much security to speak of, and below, on the ground floor, there’s a young girl who plays by herself in a small courtyard, building cities with loose pieces of concrete from the broken water fountain. I always wave at her when Ruan and I come over to crash. Often, she just looks up and stares at me with vacant eyes. Then she runs back under the awning and disappears into places I can’t imagine from up here on the fourth. In between these encounters, I’ve learned her name is Ethelia.

Inside, I hear Cissie talking again.

I’m being serious, she says. Look, just think about this thing for a moment.

I try to.

I mean, it’s pretty much a habit for us, by now. What we’re doing is having one of our talks about what to do for Last Life. Last Life is the name we’ve come up with for what happens to me during my last year on the planet. Like always, we stayed up for most of the previous night with the question. We finished the wine first. Then we moved on to the bottle of benzene.

Ruan looks up and says, dude, explain this slavery thing to me. He gets up to take a thin book from the counter and flops himself down on a torn bean-bag. Then he starts reading the book—A Happy Death by Camus—from the back, his eyes training the sentences inward, as if the French author had written a Japanese manga.

Cissie just says her word again.

Slavery.

She raises her hand and waves the gooey ladle in a small circle above the bowl.

You know what I mean, she says. The three of us, we’re basically slaves.

From my side, I remain quiet. I just watch them like I sometimes do. I mean honestly. It’s Ruan who usually brings us all this pathos.