Being Kari. Qarnita Loxton
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I should try to stay positive.
“At least you don’t have to sit in any traffic. Watch people pick their noses in the car next to you,” she said. “That would make anyone depressed.”
I grunted into my bowl of cream soda Oatees. She was right, though. If I’d had to watch others also deal with workday blues today I would have died. Well, okay, I probably would have just kept sitting and then screamed I don’t want to go! a little more in my head every time my car was forced to move a metre. But no traffic.
“And Owen will be there,” Di said, finally throwing Owen under the bus. She knew that was the silver lining that would get me out of her house. Owen would be there.
Owen is the main thing that’s great about my job. At first LSD thought it weird that I became tight with a guy who is not my husband or my boyfriend. Maybe they were right, but now they all know him and it’s LSDoK, so no one says anything about it any more. It’s not like I love him or anything, not in that way. It’s just so easy to be friends with Owen. Maybe it’s ’cause he is a man but he’s so low maintenance. We don’t have to WhatsApp a million times a day to stay friends. There’s no drama like with Lily. Much as I love Lily, we can wind each other up sometimes. With him, there’s No PMS Ever. I can’t imagine working with Lily or Shelley or even Di, but Owen and I never get on each other’s nerves. And that’s saying something, since it’s mostly just the two of us in the office all day, unless Julia comes to help out. Steve and the Joburg boys stay in Joburg where they like it, and where we like them.
My job isn’t my passion, like the magazines say work should be, but I don’t think I have a passion in any case. Doesn’t bother me though. I like work enough; there’s plenty that I can do, Owen to talk to, time left over to do UNISA assignments if I ever bring myself to register for those gazillion courses I still need. But even if I’d wanted to bail on work today, I couldn’t. Apart from all the effort Di would’ve wasted in getting me to look normal, there was a developer deadline that had suffered from my Valentine’s apocalypse. Owen would be knee deep.
“Yes, you’re right. I have to go.”
Crossing the road from Beach View Estate to Beach View Development took a minor miracle but I did it.
“Morning, Kari, glad to see you,” Owen said with the same everyday grin, handing over the files in the same everyday way. He made being at work simple. He was exactly as I knew he would be. There was no drama, no sympathy, no offer of coffee or a chat or a sandwich or an afternoon off. All normal. Not even fake normal. He expected me to get on with it. And I did. Just slower. Much, much slower.
By the afternoon I had finished only half of the developer sales paperwork Owen needed. He is the best salesman I’ve come across. He talks, but he lets the clients talk more. They talk about their lives and their wives and their children and their cars. They love him for listening. And when he says ridiculous sales stuff in a way that they know he is making fun of it, they laugh with him. But next thing they are listening and – hey presto! – there is a deal.
The things he says! “Eden is a prime location in Big Bay, Cape Town. It’s got smart offices and sexy restaurants all sweet together, with food shops, coffee shops, surfer shops and stunning apartments.” He even gets away with the mail-order ad voice when he says, “See the sea, a stone’s throw away! Yep, that’s Table Mountain! And Robben Island too.” His punchline? “Bring your dogs, your kids, your kites and your boards. In Eden you will never be bored!”
I’d die of embarrassment.
“Owen is just a sharp sales guy with the old trick of using your name every time he asks you to pass the salt.” That’s what Dirk says. Whatever. It works. And Owen is what makes it easy for me to stay at BVD. It was even easy to tell him that I wanted six weeks away from the office.
Forty days away from Eden on the Bay.
Forty days in Eden in Walmer Estate.
My plan was to finish the stuff for the developer deadline and then work by email. I could collect papers in the evening if I needed to. What wasn’t so easy was to answer the obvious questions.
“Jeez, Kari, I can sell it to Steve if I have to but how did that even happen?” Owen stretched back into his white leather office chair, lacing his hands behind his head and sticking his tan Tod-covered feet onto his desk. Never trust a man who loves Italian shoes that much – another Dirk-ism popped into my head, next to all the other thoughts about Dirk that wouldn’t go away. “Come, tell me, are you really moving back? I thought you and your family weren’t even talking.” Owen was in full Owen mode, unhurried and ready to listen. I learned again why Owen’s clients found it hard to ignore him and why Dirk underestimated him: a good listener is not always impressive, but many times they get you to do something twice as fast as a great talker can do.
How had it happened? Good question.
I tried to explain it to Owen, but in the end it was exactly like when I try to explain anything about my family to Dirk or LSD. Like trying to explain colour to a colour-blind person. It’s not a world they can see. Nothing about that life they would recognise.
I did try. I did try.
I told him how I’d helped, even how I’d helped to wash Ouma. That freaked him out, like it had first freaked me out when Ouma had explained it to me. He dropped his lean-back-let’s-talk look and rolled his chair closer, his feet firmly on the ground. “Really, that’s insane, Kari. And the times you weren’t helping with the washing story you were actually just sitting there in the same room as your mother? The whole night until the next morning? You must’ve been really out of it, not to even see her. And then when you two did see each other, it was just like normal?” WTF, he could’ve said if he was a girl, but he didn’t.
“Exactly like normal, like nothing ever happened. Well, obviously it wasn’t normal, but she just said, ‘Salaam, Karima,’ and kept holding my hand.”
It had been a relief. I figured it out while I was talking to Owen. It had been a relief just to be able to greet my mother, to sit quietly and to feel the loss of Ouma with someone who loved her as much as I did. To sit with someone who didn’t know about Dirk. We’d cried a little, not too much and not too loudly. We didn’t want to tear at Ouma’s soul with our tears like the old people believed loud tears did. There was no talk of the past ten years. I was just her daughter and she was my mother. That Valentine’s night of Ouma’s death there was nothing else left for each of us to be. It was a relief.
I saw Dirk’s message as I left the office.
12
06:00 PM Dirk: Hi, I wrote you a mail, please will you read it. You don’t have to reply. Love you x
I didn’t reply. And I didn’t rush to the email either, although it weighed immediately on me, my phone and my laptop. To read that mail I wanted to be somewhere where I could fling my laptop against the wall without anyone seeing. It was reason enough to force me to go home. I had avoided it for as long as I could, but I knew it was ridiculous to avoid an empty house. Plus, I could see that Di and her captain needed their love boat to themselves.
Going home wouldn’t sound like a hard thing to anyone else, but it wasn’t just my home. It was our home. Mine and Dirk’s. How had we got to the point where I had to make myself pull into the garage? I sat in the car for too long, staring out the window at the grey garage tiles, remembering how we’d joked about being allowed to tile the floor in the “grey of our choice”. The whole house had started off as a bit of a laugh. “Let’s take a look, maybe it’s time for suburbia?” Dirk had said, grinning as we stood staring, ice creams dripping, at the plot-and-plan posters stuck up in the windows at BVD at the Eden on the Bay Mall. Five years ago already. Estate Agent Owen (yes, the very same little “o” for Owen) had had his radar on and spotted us from inside his office. He’d talked us into going into Beach View Estate and he painted the scene in our minds as we stood on an empty corner plot. Such an amazing spot! A short walk after a day at the beach, friends, and a braai around our own pool. Away from the crowds. But close enough to beach