Being Kari. Qarnita Loxton
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study. I thought it was too big. I didn’t need my own study. I liked working in the middle of everything, usually at the kitchen table or in a coffee shop, with life going on around me. I knew he knew that. Did he want babies? At that point we still hadn’t talked about our future and I’d pushed the thought away even as Dirk listened just a little too hard when Owen talked about schools in the area. I wasn’t ready to talk babies. Sold! If Owen had first hooked Dirk with the extra rooms, he got us both with the 3D artist’s impression of the upstairs master bedroom. He zoomed in on his laptop, showing us the views it would have, not just of the sea, but also of Table Mountain and Robben Island (if you stuck your neck out on the balcony a bit). For a boy from Pretoria, it was exactly what Dirk needed to show that he had made it. For a girl from Cape Town floating between digs, it was the city at its best. It was the start of being grown up.
“Hell with it, let’s just do it!” Dirk said.
Giddy with excitement, we imagined life in the open-plan kitchen, hanging out in the living area with its stacking glass doors that would open onto a handkerchief-sized lawn where we could maybe put a tiny pool. It was the house of our dreams, our castle in the sky. I went along with the study story.
“Ideal that we can each have our own work space,” I said finally, nodding at a smiling Dirk.
Dirk was the one who upped the crazy. “What do you say, Kari? I know it might seem sudden to you but I’ve thought about us a lot. Shall we go for broke? Put ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ on the title deed?” His eyebrows had arched halfway up his forehead, as excited as if he were asking me whether I wanted a lifetime free pass on the Cobra, rather than just the standard one minute fifty seconds that the rollercoaster ride usually lasts. He knew I loved rollercoasters.
So right there on the corner plot, more or less in the garage spot where I was sitting, I agreed. We got married at Home Affairs. I was so in love I didn’t notice how horrible the Home Affairs office actually was. And I didn’t think about Mama and Dhanyal and Ouma. Or Dirk’s mother and his sister. I didn’t even think about Lily. It was just Dirk and me. Now I wish we had done it differently. Everyone needs someone to wish them luck before they get on a rollercoaster.
Building our house, getting married, made us feel as solid and real as the bricks in the walls, the grey tiles on the garage floor. Our house was the start of our life. I looked up Owen and got myself an admin assistant job. Dirk still had his job in the city but he also had his own study, suspiciously laid out in such a way that the desk could be replaced with a cot of any size. I put my things out on the kitchen table just like always. And before the extra room started demanding a baby from me, I put my shoes in there. I didn’t plan it, but there were rows and rows of them. We were happy. Happy enough.
A few days and a lifetime away from our home, today I had to force myself out of the car. Being home felt strange, like I was looking at someone else’s things, piecing together someone else’s life. I knew I was feeding someone else’s cat: Marsh slipped out the cat flap after a few crunches of the pellets I offered him. Dirk fed him tuna treats. Everything was tidy – the candles were put away, the cushions on the couch plumped up. I checked the fridge even though I’d stopped to eat at Di’s.
The cake sat there accusingly, still uneaten, next to leftovers I didn’t remember.
I tipped the cake into the bin.
Our master bed with the views felt the most strange.
“Come to the king’s bed!” Dirk would joke of the king-size extra-length bed he had commissioned for us when we moved in. He had left it neatly made, in the way that only he and Mildred could do it, the duvet smooth and flat as if it had been ironed. It filled the room, the bed. We’d decided the bed was so magnificent it didn’t need a headboard, just big white cushions against the blue-grey wall. Four tries it took for us to get that colour right, but it was worth it in the end. Now it matched the sky and the bits of sea showing through the sliding doors across the bed, the blue water slicing between the silver roofs of the houses with the proper sea views. With our wedding gift to ourselves of three stupidly expensive sets of white five-hundred-thread-count Egyptian linen, we ruled the world from that cotton cloud of a bed.
“King Dirk will make Queen Kari happy she came, I can promise her that” was Dirk’s punchline when he was feeling frisky. But as I climbed in, finally ready to read Dirk’s email, it didn’t feel so much like I was lying in our cloud. More like in the eye of a goddamned massive storm.
Sorry, sorry, I am sorry.
That was most of it. I skimmed over those bits. It didn’t help me to hear it or to read it. Didn’t matter how many ways he wrote it. Why? That’s what was burning a hole in my head. Not just mine.
Why?
I love you. So it’s not that. I spent this weekend taking a long hard look at myself.
Nearly forty, an amazing wife, a job that pays well, I’m fit and strong. Finally I am in a place where I don’t think I need my mother or a church to bless us. I wanted a family with you. Now I’ve stuffed everything up.
Why did I do it?
I’ve been stupid. Why did I decide to go out with Eva after work? You and I even laugh at how obvious she is, always going on about how I impress everyone at work. Why did I allow myself to get drunk enough to think it was all right to go back to her house? I must’ve known what would happen.
I don’t know why I did it. I was stupid.
Stupid is as stupid does. I swear it is the longest email Dirk du Toit has ever written to me in the five and three-quarter years we have known each other. I’m going to print it out. Maybe it will make more sense if I read it another day. Maybe seeing it on paper will make the whole thing feel more real, help figure out an answer. But here’s the part I definitely have no answer for:
I wish we could talk and figure out what comes next. I am booked on the two o’clock flight on Friday. I hope that is all right. Will you be home?
I thought about it. Clicked on the reply button and watched the cursor winking at me in its white box.
Come on, say something, it blinked.
A hundred blinks later I said nothing. Instead I closed the laptop gently without shutting it down, my eyes falling on pink stains that had to be from old rose petals left on the bedding. White sheets and rose petals, just like what those washer ladies had wrapped Ouma in.
Valentine’s Day will suck forever. The new ghosts of Valentine’s future were here, putting me to bed, alone in our castle in the sky.
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