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- Story Listed as: Fiction For Adults
- Theme: Drama / Human Interest
- Subject: Friends / Friendship
- Published: 01/16/2013
Diamond Is Forever
I was roused by the ringing telephone. Fumbling in the gloom of my bedchamber, I located the ringing device.
“Byron?” came the disembodied voice, carrying an interrogative inflection.
“Er... who is this?” I asked a note of anxiety in my voice. The alarm clock, whose fluorescent digital display gave the dressing table a scarlet hue, flashed 2:33am. At that hour, it couldn’t have been good news.
“Evelyn”.
Silence. The silence of one anticipating recognition. I searched the reservoir of my memory for an Evelyn; blank.
“Eve from Bulawayo. Bayleaf’s—”
“Eve! How are you?” Recollection, finally.
“Sorry to wake you…” flatness of voice. “Bayleaf is dead”. No euphemisms.
Throwing aside the duvet, I sat bolt upright, my empty coffee mug, a memento from school, fell from my bed and crashed to the floor. An imprecation escaped my lips.
“What was that?” she asked.
“I dropped a coffee mug. Bayleaf is what!?
”
“Sorry about the mug”. She seemed more moved by the breakage of crockery than by Bayleaf’s death.
“What happened? When? How?” My mind was a whirlwind of questions.
“The long, unforgiving arm of the law finally caught up with him. Shootout with the police in Dzivarasekwa. Cops won”. Her voice was north-polar cold in transmitting the details of the death of a man I knew she loved.
“What was he doing in Dzivarasekwa? How?”
“Cops have more guns I suppose. Sorry I woke you. I’ll call again with funeral details”.
The telephone’s dial tone, buzzing in my ear, held more sentiment.
***
The Sunday Observer, in billboard size lettering, callously alliterated the death of my best friend:
‘GANGSTER GUMEDE GUNNED DOWN’
A triumphant police commissioner – probably absent at the moment when bullets crisscrossed the Dzivarasekwa night – seized the PR opportunity and stood frozen in the colour photograph, rifle in hand, while the bloodied and bullet-riddled body of my friend Bayleaf Gumede, lay at the cop’s booted feet. The background held the out-of-focus corpses of two other men, where the bulletproof-vested figures of lower ranked officers were caught in various poses. In his statement to the press, the commissioner, in his emotionless cop phraseology – "working in partnership with the South African police and immigration officials, we received a tip-off notifying us of the entry of the suspect, a known criminal... engaged a special assault unit whereupon my officers returned fire, neutralizing the suspect together with two associates, without causalities to the police. Suspect was pronounced dead on the scene" – spoke as if no life had been lost, no mother was weeping and no best friend had died.
I wondered how Diamond, Bayleaf, had moved from the boy I shared tinned Lucky Star pilchards with at boarding school to the infamous njiva, the country’s criminal export, the rumoured mastermind of bank heists in Botswana and car thief nonpareil.
I threw the paper aside in disgust and fell back onto my bed, a lump creeping steadily up my throat. I remembered his laughter, an inimitable laugh, which rang in my head. He laughed when he was happy and he laughed moments before launching an enraged attack on someone. Standing 5 foot tall, muscle-bound and curiously named ‘Bayleaf’ by his late father – a chef, whose fetish for spices and culinary herbs had gone unchecked – his name and diminutive stature invited derision, keeping him at the centre of many fistfights.
True to his Gemini star sign, there was more than one facet to him. A Diamond has many faces, he used to say. In our time at school, there was Diamond the pugnacious lad, whose bruised knuckles barely ever had time to heal. Then there was Bayleaf, the loyal, kind-hearted friend. I was afflicted with enuresis, into my mid teens. Wetting the bed at 15 was embarrassing. I felt that calling it "enuresis" lightened the shame. The hostel wash line, at St Josephs Boys High, constantly held the urine-blotched white sheets from my bed. Jeered by a swarm of mocking school boys, when I was discovered surreptitiously hanging stained bed linen, early one morning, he told everybody that the soiled sheets were his. By then, he had acquired the reputation for causing eyes to blacken and noses to bleed. “Keep laughing and I’ll pee all over your beds” he growled. The boo-boys fell silent and slunk away, fearful of him. And then, to avoid the need for hanging my sheets on the wash line, he purloined a hairdryer from his aunt. So whenever I’d had another of my nocturnal accidents, I blow-dried the bed and never again needed to hang my sheets outside.
Typical Jekyll and Hyde personality, he would go from the sensitive bloke who rescued me from the boo boys, to the bipedal beast that put three Churchill boys into an ambulance. Fittingly, the game which launched Bayleaf into school icon status was on home turf, against our arch nemesis Churchill Boys High, whom we detested for their Scotch-skirted bagpipe band (to us ‘kilt’ and ‘skirt’ were interchangeable) their bulldog mascot and, more truthfully, their proximity to Roosevelt Girls High, whose pupils were largely regarded as the most desirable in our teen aged eyes. The rivalry between our school, St Josephs (‘the Eagles’) and Churchill (‘the Bulldogs’) dated back several years. It was the scholar’s equivalent of the Middle Eastern conflict. We had found the enmity there and it remained long after we departed. Throughout high school, Bayleaf permitted himself one act of vanity; the claim of possessing a forehead harder than a diamond. Etched on the battering ram that was also his head, were scars and gashes – boot studs, scabby welts made by the coming together of his head with stray elbows and even double-fanged craters from the loosened upper incisors of opponents – whose numbers increased each rugby season. It was Eagles versus Bulldogs and Bayleaf was surrounded by four opponents. Isolated and with no immediate support, he was expected to kick the ball out. Instead, he lowered his head and charged like a buffalo, into the midriff of one opponent, leaving him winded, met the jaw of the second, who passed out upon impact, introduced his forehead to the temple of the third adversary, immobilizing him, before driving a firm open hand into the face of the fourth, who met the immovable winter-hardened ground, nose first. Moments after the shrill blast of the referee’s whistle signified “try scored”, the medic rushed onto the pitch, with first aid kit in hand, to face the awful dilemma of prioritizing between three very serious injuries. Chants of “DIAMOND! DIAMOND! DIAMOND!” rang out from the bleachers. The cognomen “Diamond” stuck, saving Bayleaf from any further herb-related ridicule from the boo-boys and, in point of fact, saving Bayleaf the inconvenience of beating them up.
In the final school term, Diamond filched, as a souvenir, a sword used in the stage production of ‘Dick Turpin’. For reasons of safety, the swords used on the set were blunt on both edges and rubber tipped. Not content with his sword in its original state, Diamond unlawfully gained entry into the school metal-workshop, where he sharpened the rapier, beneath the rotating wheel of a grinder and emerged with the once innocuous stage prop winking with menace, when its blade caught the sun.
Weeks later, surveying the hostel grounds, from upstairs, Diamond’s eye fell upon the superintendent’s pair of Dobermans, conjoined in canine coupling, back to back, behind the old Vauxhall, in the superintendent’s fenced-off garden. Opening his trunk, he retrieved the sword, bounded down the stairs, taking four steps at a time, sprinted down the driveway, flung open the superintendent’s gate and, beneath the loose-jawed gaze of schoolboys watching from windows, raised the sword and brought it whistling down onto the pink outgrowth, by which the animals were amorously linked, severing the appendage in one clean stroke. The dog, Aphrodite, as any male – whether beast or human – can comprehend, let out a pained yawl and arrowed through the open gate and, wailing still, ran onto the main road, where two compassionless BF Goodrich tyres flattened it into a pancake of blood and fur. Meanwhile, more from the shock of being interrupted mid-rapture than from physical pain, the bitch, Hermes, still with severed appendage protruding from her posterior, took cover beneath the antiquated Vauxhall.
Mrs Isaacs, the superintendent’s wife – the star in many schoolboys’ fantasies – interrupted by the commotion from her shower, emerged through the kitchen door dripping wet in a shower cap and a bath towel wrapped around her. Seeing the blood spatter, she was gripped with fear, frantically calling out the Hellenic names of both dogs – “Hermes! Aphrodite!” Hearing the whimpered response of Hermes, Mrs Isaacs went on all fours, peering into the semidarkness beneath the car. The frantic slapping of her ample, tennis player’s thigh and calling out – “here girl, here girl!” – failed to draw the obdurate mutt from its hiding place. Concluding that the situation required bolder and more decisive action, Mrs Isaacs dived beneath the car, seized a paw, at which point the needle-sharp fangs of the canine clamped round her wrist. Screaming, she released the dog, belly-crawled backwards; snagging her shower cap and bath towel on the chassis and rose, with her curly biracial hair resembling Albert Einstein’s coiffure. Clasping her lacerated hand, she froze, upon belatedly realizing she had the audience of fifteen-plus, unblinking, open-mouthed schoolboys. Bashfully, she smoothed down her wild hair and flashed a smile. It then struck her, suddenly, that the dishevelment of her hair was a minor inconvenience, in comparison to the bigger matter of her state of undress. Cupping panic-stricken hands over bosom and crossing knees, in a ridiculous attempt at self concealment, eyes darted from car to kitchen door as she frenetically weighed the options available; dash inside the house, duck inside the car, or return to the underside of the automobile and negotiate with a foul-tempered canine.
Meanwhile, competition for viewing spaces escalated, among frenzied, hormonal boys wishing to see the object of their collective wet dreams, quite literally, in the flesh. Open palms could be seen urgently wiping away condensation, as teenaged exhalations steamed up the windows.
Secretly wishing for the superhero powers of invisibility, her eyeballs swivelled first to the door, calculating the distance, relative to her top speed, then to the bottom of the car and to the car door. Pale, sun-starved breasts shook violently, amid clenched-jaw curses – “Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!” – as she wrestled with the car door, which, after years beneath the elements, refused to budge. Flustered hands ran through Einstein hair, as she pondered, momentarily, the advisability of attempting the door handles on the other side of the car but abandoned the idea, upon realizing the proximity of the windows of the ground floor dormitory, where the pustule-dotted foreheads of boys were imprinted on steamed up window panes. Switching to option two – the retrieval of her towel – she dived beneath the car, with her spine arched, granting the ever-swelling audience a full view of her raised buttocks. The grateful teenaged eyes watching from foggy windows would never have blinked, even if, at that moment a sandstorm had erupted. Then came a gravelly snarl and the sound of the snapping of teeth, followed by a woman’s anguished scream. With blood gushing from the stump of her right pinkie, she rose and sprinted – breasts slapping against her chin – towards the closed kitchen door. A further scream of distress escaped her lips, upon discovering that the dead-bolted door had locked. At the windows, competitive elbows dug into the ribs of schoolmates. Just then Diamond, who had prudently disappeared from the scene of his crime, reappeared with a hostel-issue counterpane slung over his shoulder. Expecting the worst, Mrs Isaacs, screamed and, adopting a comical Kung-fu pose, uttered impotent threats, “Stay away! I know Karate!”
Muttering words of assurance – “it’s okay, let me help you” – he inched nearer before enveloping her beneath the blanket. A collective groan of disappointment – akin to that heard in sports bars, when electricity is cut in the midst of a cup final – was heard from the dormitory windows. Un-knotting his necktie, Diamond’s kind, sensitive twin took Mrs Le Roux’s dainty hand and swathed it in the improvised bandage. Reading the movement of her lips – “thank you” – we watched Diamond, with gymnastic display of chivalry, leap onto a steel rubbish bin and worm his way through the open kitchen window, before opening the door from inside. A chorus of wolf whistles ensued, as Diamond was seen, framed in the doorway, standing on tiptoe, to accept the grateful embrace of Mrs Isaacs.
Diamond, the afternoon’s hero, turned villain, when Mr Isaacs, enlightened by the anonymous handwritten testimony slipped beneath his office door, charged into the dormitory, wielding a metre-long cane, his neck lined with tendons and sleeves rolled up to reveal angry arms webbed with pulsing veins. It was absolute bedlam, as Diamond – discovered naked, ironically enough, while changing into his pyjamas – inspired by the superintendent’s thrashing cane, leapt from bed to bed, ruffling hospital corners and tripping over open school trunks. Such was Tyrone Isaacs’ fury that he abandoned the cultured diction acquired in the halls of Wits University, reverting to the Arcadia dialect of his discarded past and spitting a torrent of obscenities, as three colleagues restrained him.
The following morning, Mr Isaacs, through clenched teeth, demanded “the immediate expulsion of this psychopath”, pointing in the direction of Diamond, who stood with his arms and legs zebra-striped with whip marks and his head bowed penitently before the headmaster. However, the headmaster, an unflappable man, advised caution. He pointed out to Mr Isaacs that his punishment of Bayleaf had been excessive and that the school risked legal action and bad publicity, if the matter was handled rashly. Therefore, he approved expulsion only from the hostel.
Separated by geography, I saw little of Bayleaf, who remained in his hometown of Bulawayo, while I stayed in Banket, until my appointment to trainee copywriter, at Fuller and Associates, and his recruitment as clerk, at Dr Matheson’s surgery in Harare, set up our reunion. In a tale pregnant with irony, the greying veterinary surgeon, sworn lifesaver of sick dogs, had taken his chances on Diamond, torturer of copulating canines.
I saw plenty of Bayleaf, until he was dismissed for secretly operating a dog breeding business, supplying bullterrier studs from the veterinarian’s kennels for rescued pets, to the underground dog-fighting rings of the gritty districts of Sunningdale and St Martins. We watched movies, on the VCR, into the early hours of the morning, at my Baines Avenue bed-sitter. On nights when his inner demons vanquished him, he sought solutions to his many problems at the bottom of a beer bottle and would often come beating down my door, at the most ungodly hour, accompanied by different women of debatable virtue, whose synthetic screams of pleasure, kept me awake till sunrise. After managing only a few winks of sleep, I would awake to the horror of a harlot, dressed in my shirt, with her feet – blackened by years of pounding the dusty avenues of the red-light zone – firmly planted in my slippers, cheerily frying eggs and shielding her face from bacon-grease spatter with the sleeves of my shirt. Bayleaf, drained from the night’s exertions, would be hunched over the table, noisily slurping at the rim of a coffee mug, with my work assignment – now bearing ringed coffee mug stains – employed as an improvised coaster. After haggling over the fee in the bathroom – Bayleaf in whispers and his hired consort in a loud alcohol-and-cigarette-roughened voice – they would leave me to wash the piles of dishes and battle with the makeup and bacon-grease stains on my shirt.
In the week of my preferment to the position of senior copywriter, I learned of Bayleaf’s burgeoning criminal reputation. Within three years, true to his ambitious nature, his operations had gone regional, keeping awake the Zimbabwean police commissioner and simultaneously causing premature greying of the heads of the Botswana and South Africa police chiefs, whose shared ambition was his capture.
***
Bulawayo, on the day of Bayleaf’s internment, proved to be a city whose chilly air matched the frosty telephonic voice of Eve. At the chapel’s entrance, Diamond’s uncle swatted away the cassette recorders and microphones thrust into his mother’s chin by the scandal-sniffing paparazzi and a film crew, denied access, hovered like bees at the opening of a hive. I sat next to Bayleaf’s youngest sister, Coriander – also named from the spice rack – in the front row of the Church, from where I observed the arrival of six men, associates of Bayleaf no doubt, all clad in black leather trench coats. Dark glasses rested on the bridges of their scarred noses. The asymmetrical bulges in their coats suggested concealed hardware, necessary in their line of work. After the Church service, the same men arrived at Lalani Kuhle Cemetery, in a convoy of Gauteng Province registered black BMWs, whose tinted windows matched the drivers’ sunglasses.
As the coffin was lowered into the grave, Diamond’s mother was inconsolable in self-flagellant grief, crying out words that seemed to have been torn from my private journal: “I failed him. I should have been there when he needed me”.
Coriander sniffed and sobbed quietly, restraining her mother, who seemed to want to fling herself into the grave after her only son.
Conspicuous by her absence was Bayleaf’s older sister, Pepper, at one time a problem child, led astray by the 1980s punk movement, now the wife of an esteemed Supreme Court judge, who, for obvious reasons – “public confidence in the judiciary... associating with known criminals” – barred her from attending. To identify with the pearl-necklaced and Estee Lauder scented wives of bank CEOs, police commissioners and mining moguls, she had, ahead of her nuptials, changed her name to ‘Phillipa’, abandoning ‘Pepper’, which, she estimated, would have been sneezed at, among high society.
Seeing Eve, a veiled black fashion hat obscuring her face, a maternity dress outlining the swell of her parabolic belly, I suddenly recalled the midnight phone call from Bayleaf:
“Promise me you’ll make sure my first born will carry on my name, if something should happen–”, he slurred, in a voice that did not suggest sobriety.
“You’re drunk, go to sleep”, I interjected.
“Give me your word or I’ll keep calling all night!” he continued, urged on by Heinekin and Johnny Walker.
“I promise, now go to sleep”. I hung up.
***
The letter box said “Eden, 6 Adams Street”. The insurmountable wrought iron gates, set in an eight foot perimeter wall, parted to admit us into the landscaped garden, dotted with rustling palm trees and lush ferns. A water feature kept the tranquil environs filled with the soothing tinkle of water falling. A rendezvous with two unfriendly bullterriers awaited any intruder who might manage to scale the high wall and somehow negotiate the razor wire and electric fence. As we entered the voluminous vestibule, minimally decorated with a rug in the centre of its shimmering marbled floor, a telephone on a ball-and-claw table and a scattering of paintings that hung on the wood panelled wall, I wondered, privately, how many motorists had been flung, at gun point, from their cars to fund this opulence.
She stood with her hand hovering over the lid of a crystal decanter, in a living room that appeared to have been cut out of the Home Owner magazine and turned around to address me, “can I pour you a whisky?”
Without waiting for my response, she proceeded to pour and, with a chiming clink, dropped ice cubes into the thick-based glass, which she held at the end of an extended arm. Midday seemed too early for whisky but habitual politeness restrained me from declining the offer.
“Boy, girl or triplets?” I joked.
“I’m old fashioned. I’ll wait for the surprise on the day of birth”, she stretched her lips into the simulacrum of a smile. The glacier, it seemed, had melted a little.
“He made me promise to let you pick a name, some vow made between friends in the sandpit of their young adulthood”, she said, rolling her eyes in good-humoured condescension. “I’ll phone for a name, once she’s born”.
“She?” I asked.
“I’m kind of hoping for a girl”, her eyes dropped to the veins of a marble floor tile to avoid my gaze.
Though I had already intuited the answer, I asked, “Because you think a girl is less likely to emulate her father?”
She nodded.
Eve, who attended the girl’s school next door to ours, was three years Bayleaf’s junior and, in courting her, the romantic half of Diamond sent her an Old Spice scented note, together with a fig leaf – harvested serendipitously during a class trip to the Harare Botanical Gardens. Showing remarkable eloquence for a rugby player, he wrote in the letter:
“An Eve without Adam would be silly, an Adam and Eve without fig leaves, a reprehensible violation of history”.
To consummate their teen love affair, Diamond screen printed “Eve & Diamond”, separated by a red heart, on matching T-shirts. The Jacaranda trees separating our two schools carried the penknife tattoos declaring “DIAMOND & EVE FOREVER”.
He had provided for her, materially, but, because of his need for anonymity, had kept her hidden behind a high wall. While most of her contemporaries boasted sleepovers at boyfriends and concealed the bruises of lovemaking beneath turtleneck sweaters, she settled for monthly trysts at nondescript motels, booked under an alias. With flashing blue lights constantly in his rear view mirror he could not risk capture. Rather than her dream of wedded bliss, a house full of babies and a veranda with a pair of matching rocking chairs for their twilight years, he had given her an echoing palatial prison bereft of love and family, haughtily calling it ‘Eden’. Understandably, she felt a sense of abandonment and red hot anger towards Bayleaf which, now finally vented, melted the glacier, whose waters dripped onto my shoulder in sobs. I hugged her, offering no words of comfort. To speak would have been to claim to know how she felt, and I didn’t.
Humans employ whatever means they can in dealing with grief. Mrs Gumede, foiled by her daughter’s restraining arm, had attempted a suicidal leap into Diamond’s grave. Eve had hidden in an igloo, to escape the heartache, and I, rather than dealing with my loss, had receded down the corridor of memory, electing to hold onto my boyhood. When I emerged from my nostalgic reminiscence, I fled my pain, by observing the grief of the leading ladies of Bayleaf’s life; his mother, who drowned herself in self blame, Coriander, silent but crying an ocean, and Eve, the iceberg.
Moments before my taxi cab arrived, Eve walked me around the yard where two menservants knelt with gardening implements, wholly committed to the impossible task of beautifying an already flawless landscape. We small-talked at the pond, where a fountain gurgled its white waters. The tail of a koi fish broke the surface and a dragon fly's helicopter-shaped form zipped over the crystal-clear water, drawing my eye to a verdigris-covered copper coin on the pebble-strewn bed. I wondered, privately, if the coin had fallen from the hand of Eve. I speculated, further, what she had wished for: perhaps a cat’s nine lives for her departed love or maybe a bout of amnesia, to wipe out the past week from her memory.
As our chat took on a valedictory mood, Eve delivered her parting shot, “and just so we’re clear, the names ‘Cain’ and ‘Abel’ are out of the question!”
***
An independent web-based newspaper, conflicting the government-aligned Sunday Observer, reported that Diamond, in attempting to flee, head-butted past a rookie policeman, before being felled by a shotgun blast which broke his knee. While lying on the ground, immobilized, he opened fire at the cops, killing two officers and injuring another but was eventually shot in the chest and died instantly.
“Way to go Diamond”, I whispered. “You went down fighting”.
Seated in my study, I wheeled round in the swivel chair to answer the ringing telephone. A weary voice came through the ear piece, “Even in death, the bastard gets his way… it’s a boy”.
I remained silent, considering the implications. Finally, I spoke, “Mavambo”.
“Mavambo. New beginnings… I like it”. She hung up.
I reclined in the chair, surveying my handiwork. The cracks were barely visible; the magic of Henkel porcelain glue. By repairing the broken mug, I had kept my promise. Inked onto the cup’s underside, were the words, “our friendship is unbreakable – like diamonds”.
At the end of our final examination, jubilant sixth formers banged on furniture. Others, seeking immortality, with tongues hanging at the corners of mouths in absolute concentration, etched their names and years of attendance – ‘Dube was here 1986-1991’ – on desks, doors, any surface that yielded to the sharp end of a Swiss army knife or geometry compass. There were no hugs. Embracing between males was frowned upon, in the testosterone-filled, macho world of an all-boys academy. The exchange of keepsakes and autographs, scribbled – much to the horror of our parents – on the shirts worn on school closing day was customary. When I took one final glance at the buildings of St Joseph’s, I held in my hand the coffee mug, signed by Diamond.
By naming his son ‘Mavambo’, I had broken my vow. But I felt I had, by my skewed reasoning, atoned for the un-kept promise and saved the life that he and Eve had created. Names, like the utterances of clairvoyants, can be self-fulfilling prophecies. I reasoned that, without his father’s name, Mavambo could carve his own path in life. I had failed to save Bayleaf. I should have held out a hand, at the moment that he began to slide down the slippery slope, from which few return. I was preoccupied with living my own life, rising up the corporate food chain at Fuller & Associates, and too busy arguing, through my written copy and jingles, the merits of Sunbright soap and Zest Health Shake.
I tapped on the coffee mug, with my knuckles, to test the strength of the bond… it seemed harder than diamond.
© Jerá
Diamond Is Forever(Jerá)
Diamond Is Forever
I was roused by the ringing telephone. Fumbling in the gloom of my bedchamber, I located the ringing device.
“Byron?” came the disembodied voice, carrying an interrogative inflection.
“Er... who is this?” I asked a note of anxiety in my voice. The alarm clock, whose fluorescent digital display gave the dressing table a scarlet hue, flashed 2:33am. At that hour, it couldn’t have been good news.
“Evelyn”.
Silence. The silence of one anticipating recognition. I searched the reservoir of my memory for an Evelyn; blank.
“Eve from Bulawayo. Bayleaf’s—”
“Eve! How are you?” Recollection, finally.
“Sorry to wake you…” flatness of voice. “Bayleaf is dead”. No euphemisms.
Throwing aside the duvet, I sat bolt upright, my empty coffee mug, a memento from school, fell from my bed and crashed to the floor. An imprecation escaped my lips.
“What was that?” she asked.
“I dropped a coffee mug. Bayleaf is what!?
”
“Sorry about the mug”. She seemed more moved by the breakage of crockery than by Bayleaf’s death.
“What happened? When? How?” My mind was a whirlwind of questions.
“The long, unforgiving arm of the law finally caught up with him. Shootout with the police in Dzivarasekwa. Cops won”. Her voice was north-polar cold in transmitting the details of the death of a man I knew she loved.
“What was he doing in Dzivarasekwa? How?”
“Cops have more guns I suppose. Sorry I woke you. I’ll call again with funeral details”.
The telephone’s dial tone, buzzing in my ear, held more sentiment.
***
The Sunday Observer, in billboard size lettering, callously alliterated the death of my best friend:
‘GANGSTER GUMEDE GUNNED DOWN’
A triumphant police commissioner – probably absent at the moment when bullets crisscrossed the Dzivarasekwa night – seized the PR opportunity and stood frozen in the colour photograph, rifle in hand, while the bloodied and bullet-riddled body of my friend Bayleaf Gumede, lay at the cop’s booted feet. The background held the out-of-focus corpses of two other men, where the bulletproof-vested figures of lower ranked officers were caught in various poses. In his statement to the press, the commissioner, in his emotionless cop phraseology – "working in partnership with the South African police and immigration officials, we received a tip-off notifying us of the entry of the suspect, a known criminal... engaged a special assault unit whereupon my officers returned fire, neutralizing the suspect together with two associates, without causalities to the police. Suspect was pronounced dead on the scene" – spoke as if no life had been lost, no mother was weeping and no best friend had died.
I wondered how Diamond, Bayleaf, had moved from the boy I shared tinned Lucky Star pilchards with at boarding school to the infamous njiva, the country’s criminal export, the rumoured mastermind of bank heists in Botswana and car thief nonpareil.
I threw the paper aside in disgust and fell back onto my bed, a lump creeping steadily up my throat. I remembered his laughter, an inimitable laugh, which rang in my head. He laughed when he was happy and he laughed moments before launching an enraged attack on someone. Standing 5 foot tall, muscle-bound and curiously named ‘Bayleaf’ by his late father – a chef, whose fetish for spices and culinary herbs had gone unchecked – his name and diminutive stature invited derision, keeping him at the centre of many fistfights.
True to his Gemini star sign, there was more than one facet to him. A Diamond has many faces, he used to say. In our time at school, there was Diamond the pugnacious lad, whose bruised knuckles barely ever had time to heal. Then there was Bayleaf, the loyal, kind-hearted friend. I was afflicted with enuresis, into my mid teens. Wetting the bed at 15 was embarrassing. I felt that calling it "enuresis" lightened the shame. The hostel wash line, at St Josephs Boys High, constantly held the urine-blotched white sheets from my bed. Jeered by a swarm of mocking school boys, when I was discovered surreptitiously hanging stained bed linen, early one morning, he told everybody that the soiled sheets were his. By then, he had acquired the reputation for causing eyes to blacken and noses to bleed. “Keep laughing and I’ll pee all over your beds” he growled. The boo-boys fell silent and slunk away, fearful of him. And then, to avoid the need for hanging my sheets on the wash line, he purloined a hairdryer from his aunt. So whenever I’d had another of my nocturnal accidents, I blow-dried the bed and never again needed to hang my sheets outside.
Typical Jekyll and Hyde personality, he would go from the sensitive bloke who rescued me from the boo boys, to the bipedal beast that put three Churchill boys into an ambulance. Fittingly, the game which launched Bayleaf into school icon status was on home turf, against our arch nemesis Churchill Boys High, whom we detested for their Scotch-skirted bagpipe band (to us ‘kilt’ and ‘skirt’ were interchangeable) their bulldog mascot and, more truthfully, their proximity to Roosevelt Girls High, whose pupils were largely regarded as the most desirable in our teen aged eyes. The rivalry between our school, St Josephs (‘the Eagles’) and Churchill (‘the Bulldogs’) dated back several years. It was the scholar’s equivalent of the Middle Eastern conflict. We had found the enmity there and it remained long after we departed. Throughout high school, Bayleaf permitted himself one act of vanity; the claim of possessing a forehead harder than a diamond. Etched on the battering ram that was also his head, were scars and gashes – boot studs, scabby welts made by the coming together of his head with stray elbows and even double-fanged craters from the loosened upper incisors of opponents – whose numbers increased each rugby season. It was Eagles versus Bulldogs and Bayleaf was surrounded by four opponents. Isolated and with no immediate support, he was expected to kick the ball out. Instead, he lowered his head and charged like a buffalo, into the midriff of one opponent, leaving him winded, met the jaw of the second, who passed out upon impact, introduced his forehead to the temple of the third adversary, immobilizing him, before driving a firm open hand into the face of the fourth, who met the immovable winter-hardened ground, nose first. Moments after the shrill blast of the referee’s whistle signified “try scored”, the medic rushed onto the pitch, with first aid kit in hand, to face the awful dilemma of prioritizing between three very serious injuries. Chants of “DIAMOND! DIAMOND! DIAMOND!” rang out from the bleachers. The cognomen “Diamond” stuck, saving Bayleaf from any further herb-related ridicule from the boo-boys and, in point of fact, saving Bayleaf the inconvenience of beating them up.
In the final school term, Diamond filched, as a souvenir, a sword used in the stage production of ‘Dick Turpin’. For reasons of safety, the swords used on the set were blunt on both edges and rubber tipped. Not content with his sword in its original state, Diamond unlawfully gained entry into the school metal-workshop, where he sharpened the rapier, beneath the rotating wheel of a grinder and emerged with the once innocuous stage prop winking with menace, when its blade caught the sun.
Weeks later, surveying the hostel grounds, from upstairs, Diamond’s eye fell upon the superintendent’s pair of Dobermans, conjoined in canine coupling, back to back, behind the old Vauxhall, in the superintendent’s fenced-off garden. Opening his trunk, he retrieved the sword, bounded down the stairs, taking four steps at a time, sprinted down the driveway, flung open the superintendent’s gate and, beneath the loose-jawed gaze of schoolboys watching from windows, raised the sword and brought it whistling down onto the pink outgrowth, by which the animals were amorously linked, severing the appendage in one clean stroke. The dog, Aphrodite, as any male – whether beast or human – can comprehend, let out a pained yawl and arrowed through the open gate and, wailing still, ran onto the main road, where two compassionless BF Goodrich tyres flattened it into a pancake of blood and fur. Meanwhile, more from the shock of being interrupted mid-rapture than from physical pain, the bitch, Hermes, still with severed appendage protruding from her posterior, took cover beneath the antiquated Vauxhall.
Mrs Isaacs, the superintendent’s wife – the star in many schoolboys’ fantasies – interrupted by the commotion from her shower, emerged through the kitchen door dripping wet in a shower cap and a bath towel wrapped around her. Seeing the blood spatter, she was gripped with fear, frantically calling out the Hellenic names of both dogs – “Hermes! Aphrodite!” Hearing the whimpered response of Hermes, Mrs Isaacs went on all fours, peering into the semidarkness beneath the car. The frantic slapping of her ample, tennis player’s thigh and calling out – “here girl, here girl!” – failed to draw the obdurate mutt from its hiding place. Concluding that the situation required bolder and more decisive action, Mrs Isaacs dived beneath the car, seized a paw, at which point the needle-sharp fangs of the canine clamped round her wrist. Screaming, she released the dog, belly-crawled backwards; snagging her shower cap and bath towel on the chassis and rose, with her curly biracial hair resembling Albert Einstein’s coiffure. Clasping her lacerated hand, she froze, upon belatedly realizing she had the audience of fifteen-plus, unblinking, open-mouthed schoolboys. Bashfully, she smoothed down her wild hair and flashed a smile. It then struck her, suddenly, that the dishevelment of her hair was a minor inconvenience, in comparison to the bigger matter of her state of undress. Cupping panic-stricken hands over bosom and crossing knees, in a ridiculous attempt at self concealment, eyes darted from car to kitchen door as she frenetically weighed the options available; dash inside the house, duck inside the car, or return to the underside of the automobile and negotiate with a foul-tempered canine.
Meanwhile, competition for viewing spaces escalated, among frenzied, hormonal boys wishing to see the object of their collective wet dreams, quite literally, in the flesh. Open palms could be seen urgently wiping away condensation, as teenaged exhalations steamed up the windows.
Secretly wishing for the superhero powers of invisibility, her eyeballs swivelled first to the door, calculating the distance, relative to her top speed, then to the bottom of the car and to the car door. Pale, sun-starved breasts shook violently, amid clenched-jaw curses – “Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!” – as she wrestled with the car door, which, after years beneath the elements, refused to budge. Flustered hands ran through Einstein hair, as she pondered, momentarily, the advisability of attempting the door handles on the other side of the car but abandoned the idea, upon realizing the proximity of the windows of the ground floor dormitory, where the pustule-dotted foreheads of boys were imprinted on steamed up window panes. Switching to option two – the retrieval of her towel – she dived beneath the car, with her spine arched, granting the ever-swelling audience a full view of her raised buttocks. The grateful teenaged eyes watching from foggy windows would never have blinked, even if, at that moment a sandstorm had erupted. Then came a gravelly snarl and the sound of the snapping of teeth, followed by a woman’s anguished scream. With blood gushing from the stump of her right pinkie, she rose and sprinted – breasts slapping against her chin – towards the closed kitchen door. A further scream of distress escaped her lips, upon discovering that the dead-bolted door had locked. At the windows, competitive elbows dug into the ribs of schoolmates. Just then Diamond, who had prudently disappeared from the scene of his crime, reappeared with a hostel-issue counterpane slung over his shoulder. Expecting the worst, Mrs Isaacs, screamed and, adopting a comical Kung-fu pose, uttered impotent threats, “Stay away! I know Karate!”
Muttering words of assurance – “it’s okay, let me help you” – he inched nearer before enveloping her beneath the blanket. A collective groan of disappointment – akin to that heard in sports bars, when electricity is cut in the midst of a cup final – was heard from the dormitory windows. Un-knotting his necktie, Diamond’s kind, sensitive twin took Mrs Le Roux’s dainty hand and swathed it in the improvised bandage. Reading the movement of her lips – “thank you” – we watched Diamond, with gymnastic display of chivalry, leap onto a steel rubbish bin and worm his way through the open kitchen window, before opening the door from inside. A chorus of wolf whistles ensued, as Diamond was seen, framed in the doorway, standing on tiptoe, to accept the grateful embrace of Mrs Isaacs.
Diamond, the afternoon’s hero, turned villain, when Mr Isaacs, enlightened by the anonymous handwritten testimony slipped beneath his office door, charged into the dormitory, wielding a metre-long cane, his neck lined with tendons and sleeves rolled up to reveal angry arms webbed with pulsing veins. It was absolute bedlam, as Diamond – discovered naked, ironically enough, while changing into his pyjamas – inspired by the superintendent’s thrashing cane, leapt from bed to bed, ruffling hospital corners and tripping over open school trunks. Such was Tyrone Isaacs’ fury that he abandoned the cultured diction acquired in the halls of Wits University, reverting to the Arcadia dialect of his discarded past and spitting a torrent of obscenities, as three colleagues restrained him.
The following morning, Mr Isaacs, through clenched teeth, demanded “the immediate expulsion of this psychopath”, pointing in the direction of Diamond, who stood with his arms and legs zebra-striped with whip marks and his head bowed penitently before the headmaster. However, the headmaster, an unflappable man, advised caution. He pointed out to Mr Isaacs that his punishment of Bayleaf had been excessive and that the school risked legal action and bad publicity, if the matter was handled rashly. Therefore, he approved expulsion only from the hostel.
Separated by geography, I saw little of Bayleaf, who remained in his hometown of Bulawayo, while I stayed in Banket, until my appointment to trainee copywriter, at Fuller and Associates, and his recruitment as clerk, at Dr Matheson’s surgery in Harare, set up our reunion. In a tale pregnant with irony, the greying veterinary surgeon, sworn lifesaver of sick dogs, had taken his chances on Diamond, torturer of copulating canines.
I saw plenty of Bayleaf, until he was dismissed for secretly operating a dog breeding business, supplying bullterrier studs from the veterinarian’s kennels for rescued pets, to the underground dog-fighting rings of the gritty districts of Sunningdale and St Martins. We watched movies, on the VCR, into the early hours of the morning, at my Baines Avenue bed-sitter. On nights when his inner demons vanquished him, he sought solutions to his many problems at the bottom of a beer bottle and would often come beating down my door, at the most ungodly hour, accompanied by different women of debatable virtue, whose synthetic screams of pleasure, kept me awake till sunrise. After managing only a few winks of sleep, I would awake to the horror of a harlot, dressed in my shirt, with her feet – blackened by years of pounding the dusty avenues of the red-light zone – firmly planted in my slippers, cheerily frying eggs and shielding her face from bacon-grease spatter with the sleeves of my shirt. Bayleaf, drained from the night’s exertions, would be hunched over the table, noisily slurping at the rim of a coffee mug, with my work assignment – now bearing ringed coffee mug stains – employed as an improvised coaster. After haggling over the fee in the bathroom – Bayleaf in whispers and his hired consort in a loud alcohol-and-cigarette-roughened voice – they would leave me to wash the piles of dishes and battle with the makeup and bacon-grease stains on my shirt.
In the week of my preferment to the position of senior copywriter, I learned of Bayleaf’s burgeoning criminal reputation. Within three years, true to his ambitious nature, his operations had gone regional, keeping awake the Zimbabwean police commissioner and simultaneously causing premature greying of the heads of the Botswana and South Africa police chiefs, whose shared ambition was his capture.
***
Bulawayo, on the day of Bayleaf’s internment, proved to be a city whose chilly air matched the frosty telephonic voice of Eve. At the chapel’s entrance, Diamond’s uncle swatted away the cassette recorders and microphones thrust into his mother’s chin by the scandal-sniffing paparazzi and a film crew, denied access, hovered like bees at the opening of a hive. I sat next to Bayleaf’s youngest sister, Coriander – also named from the spice rack – in the front row of the Church, from where I observed the arrival of six men, associates of Bayleaf no doubt, all clad in black leather trench coats. Dark glasses rested on the bridges of their scarred noses. The asymmetrical bulges in their coats suggested concealed hardware, necessary in their line of work. After the Church service, the same men arrived at Lalani Kuhle Cemetery, in a convoy of Gauteng Province registered black BMWs, whose tinted windows matched the drivers’ sunglasses.
As the coffin was lowered into the grave, Diamond’s mother was inconsolable in self-flagellant grief, crying out words that seemed to have been torn from my private journal: “I failed him. I should have been there when he needed me”.
Coriander sniffed and sobbed quietly, restraining her mother, who seemed to want to fling herself into the grave after her only son.
Conspicuous by her absence was Bayleaf’s older sister, Pepper, at one time a problem child, led astray by the 1980s punk movement, now the wife of an esteemed Supreme Court judge, who, for obvious reasons – “public confidence in the judiciary... associating with known criminals” – barred her from attending. To identify with the pearl-necklaced and Estee Lauder scented wives of bank CEOs, police commissioners and mining moguls, she had, ahead of her nuptials, changed her name to ‘Phillipa’, abandoning ‘Pepper’, which, she estimated, would have been sneezed at, among high society.
Seeing Eve, a veiled black fashion hat obscuring her face, a maternity dress outlining the swell of her parabolic belly, I suddenly recalled the midnight phone call from Bayleaf:
“Promise me you’ll make sure my first born will carry on my name, if something should happen–”, he slurred, in a voice that did not suggest sobriety.
“You’re drunk, go to sleep”, I interjected.
“Give me your word or I’ll keep calling all night!” he continued, urged on by Heinekin and Johnny Walker.
“I promise, now go to sleep”. I hung up.
***
The letter box said “Eden, 6 Adams Street”. The insurmountable wrought iron gates, set in an eight foot perimeter wall, parted to admit us into the landscaped garden, dotted with rustling palm trees and lush ferns. A water feature kept the tranquil environs filled with the soothing tinkle of water falling. A rendezvous with two unfriendly bullterriers awaited any intruder who might manage to scale the high wall and somehow negotiate the razor wire and electric fence. As we entered the voluminous vestibule, minimally decorated with a rug in the centre of its shimmering marbled floor, a telephone on a ball-and-claw table and a scattering of paintings that hung on the wood panelled wall, I wondered, privately, how many motorists had been flung, at gun point, from their cars to fund this opulence.
She stood with her hand hovering over the lid of a crystal decanter, in a living room that appeared to have been cut out of the Home Owner magazine and turned around to address me, “can I pour you a whisky?”
Without waiting for my response, she proceeded to pour and, with a chiming clink, dropped ice cubes into the thick-based glass, which she held at the end of an extended arm. Midday seemed too early for whisky but habitual politeness restrained me from declining the offer.
“Boy, girl or triplets?” I joked.
“I’m old fashioned. I’ll wait for the surprise on the day of birth”, she stretched her lips into the simulacrum of a smile. The glacier, it seemed, had melted a little.
“He made me promise to let you pick a name, some vow made between friends in the sandpit of their young adulthood”, she said, rolling her eyes in good-humoured condescension. “I’ll phone for a name, once she’s born”.
“She?” I asked.
“I’m kind of hoping for a girl”, her eyes dropped to the veins of a marble floor tile to avoid my gaze.
Though I had already intuited the answer, I asked, “Because you think a girl is less likely to emulate her father?”
She nodded.
Eve, who attended the girl’s school next door to ours, was three years Bayleaf’s junior and, in courting her, the romantic half of Diamond sent her an Old Spice scented note, together with a fig leaf – harvested serendipitously during a class trip to the Harare Botanical Gardens. Showing remarkable eloquence for a rugby player, he wrote in the letter:
“An Eve without Adam would be silly, an Adam and Eve without fig leaves, a reprehensible violation of history”.
To consummate their teen love affair, Diamond screen printed “Eve & Diamond”, separated by a red heart, on matching T-shirts. The Jacaranda trees separating our two schools carried the penknife tattoos declaring “DIAMOND & EVE FOREVER”.
He had provided for her, materially, but, because of his need for anonymity, had kept her hidden behind a high wall. While most of her contemporaries boasted sleepovers at boyfriends and concealed the bruises of lovemaking beneath turtleneck sweaters, she settled for monthly trysts at nondescript motels, booked under an alias. With flashing blue lights constantly in his rear view mirror he could not risk capture. Rather than her dream of wedded bliss, a house full of babies and a veranda with a pair of matching rocking chairs for their twilight years, he had given her an echoing palatial prison bereft of love and family, haughtily calling it ‘Eden’. Understandably, she felt a sense of abandonment and red hot anger towards Bayleaf which, now finally vented, melted the glacier, whose waters dripped onto my shoulder in sobs. I hugged her, offering no words of comfort. To speak would have been to claim to know how she felt, and I didn’t.
Humans employ whatever means they can in dealing with grief. Mrs Gumede, foiled by her daughter’s restraining arm, had attempted a suicidal leap into Diamond’s grave. Eve had hidden in an igloo, to escape the heartache, and I, rather than dealing with my loss, had receded down the corridor of memory, electing to hold onto my boyhood. When I emerged from my nostalgic reminiscence, I fled my pain, by observing the grief of the leading ladies of Bayleaf’s life; his mother, who drowned herself in self blame, Coriander, silent but crying an ocean, and Eve, the iceberg.
Moments before my taxi cab arrived, Eve walked me around the yard where two menservants knelt with gardening implements, wholly committed to the impossible task of beautifying an already flawless landscape. We small-talked at the pond, where a fountain gurgled its white waters. The tail of a koi fish broke the surface and a dragon fly's helicopter-shaped form zipped over the crystal-clear water, drawing my eye to a verdigris-covered copper coin on the pebble-strewn bed. I wondered, privately, if the coin had fallen from the hand of Eve. I speculated, further, what she had wished for: perhaps a cat’s nine lives for her departed love or maybe a bout of amnesia, to wipe out the past week from her memory.
As our chat took on a valedictory mood, Eve delivered her parting shot, “and just so we’re clear, the names ‘Cain’ and ‘Abel’ are out of the question!”
***
An independent web-based newspaper, conflicting the government-aligned Sunday Observer, reported that Diamond, in attempting to flee, head-butted past a rookie policeman, before being felled by a shotgun blast which broke his knee. While lying on the ground, immobilized, he opened fire at the cops, killing two officers and injuring another but was eventually shot in the chest and died instantly.
“Way to go Diamond”, I whispered. “You went down fighting”.
Seated in my study, I wheeled round in the swivel chair to answer the ringing telephone. A weary voice came through the ear piece, “Even in death, the bastard gets his way… it’s a boy”.
I remained silent, considering the implications. Finally, I spoke, “Mavambo”.
“Mavambo. New beginnings… I like it”. She hung up.
I reclined in the chair, surveying my handiwork. The cracks were barely visible; the magic of Henkel porcelain glue. By repairing the broken mug, I had kept my promise. Inked onto the cup’s underside, were the words, “our friendship is unbreakable – like diamonds”.
At the end of our final examination, jubilant sixth formers banged on furniture. Others, seeking immortality, with tongues hanging at the corners of mouths in absolute concentration, etched their names and years of attendance – ‘Dube was here 1986-1991’ – on desks, doors, any surface that yielded to the sharp end of a Swiss army knife or geometry compass. There were no hugs. Embracing between males was frowned upon, in the testosterone-filled, macho world of an all-boys academy. The exchange of keepsakes and autographs, scribbled – much to the horror of our parents – on the shirts worn on school closing day was customary. When I took one final glance at the buildings of St Joseph’s, I held in my hand the coffee mug, signed by Diamond.
By naming his son ‘Mavambo’, I had broken my vow. But I felt I had, by my skewed reasoning, atoned for the un-kept promise and saved the life that he and Eve had created. Names, like the utterances of clairvoyants, can be self-fulfilling prophecies. I reasoned that, without his father’s name, Mavambo could carve his own path in life. I had failed to save Bayleaf. I should have held out a hand, at the moment that he began to slide down the slippery slope, from which few return. I was preoccupied with living my own life, rising up the corporate food chain at Fuller & Associates, and too busy arguing, through my written copy and jingles, the merits of Sunbright soap and Zest Health Shake.
I tapped on the coffee mug, with my knuckles, to test the strength of the bond… it seemed harder than diamond.
© Jerá
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