Love Tastes Like Strawberries. Rosamund Haden

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СКАЧАТЬ to find Dudu in Lubumbashi.

      Françoise couldn’t explain to Timothy why she can never leave Dudu. She cannot tell him, not yet. He would try to fix it, and this was something nobody could fix except herself, Françoise, born in an avocado tree. That’s what Dudu, aged eight, told her friends in the yard of The Sacred Heart under the tall trees heavy with fruit.

      She told them, “My sister was born up that tree, that’s why she loves avocados – it was the first thing she ate. Watch out for my sister, she is very clever,” she would say, tapping her skull, with a menacing look on her small chubby face as the children gathered around her in a huddle, “so leave her alone.”

      Dudu still tells people to watch out for her sister, only now Dudu is seventeen – too young to drive legally, but too old to let it stop her. And Françoise is twenty-one.

      Against all odds Françoise found Dudu in Lubumbashi. She had taken one broken-down car, taxi and bus at a time. After the car was sold and the bribes were paid, they had taken the money that was left and crossed the border. Dudu was lucky; she had found herself a protector in Lubumbashi when Jean-Paul left her. She promised Dieu Donne that if he came south to Cape Town they would hook up again. Pas de problème! No problem! She made lots of promises with the best intentions.

      Every day, at least once, Françoise feels the constriction that Dudu places on her life. But every day she also wonders what she would do without Dudu. She is the purpose around which she has built her life since she was fourteen and they crossed that first border into a foreign country. Without Dudu everything would fall apart.

      The bus speeds along the dead straight road through the flat semi-desert scrubland of the Karoo.

      “In my country there are a thousand hills, green and sparkling after the rain,” she had told Timothy. “If you iron out the country it would be four times the size. It’s an old Rwandan joke.”

      Here in the Karoo the flat, scrubby plains are broken only by strange conical hills lit by the pale light of the moon. Across these wide open stretches the dinosaurs roamed in prehistory. Françoise had read it in a National Geographic magazine. She had found a small pile of these magazines in their room above the Chinese shop on the Main Road in Woodstock. The room Dudu calls the hellhole. When she asked the woman living next door who the magazines belonged to, she just shrugged.

      “There was another lady living there before you. Maybe they belonged to her. Maybe someone at the church gave them to her. Que sait? Who knows?”

      Françoise read all the Geographics after work, cover to cover. When she came to the edition on Africa’s Great Lakes in the Rift Valley, the gorillas in the Ruwenzori mountains and Mount Karisimbi, the volcano of her grandmother’s stories, she saw the pictures had been cut out and just the captions left. She closed the magazine quickly, put it to one side and moved on to the next edition.

      She paged through and got lost in the pictures and words. In their humid, stuffy, dark room above the Chinese shop she let the sand in from the Sahara. She stepped into a palace in the desert in India with a still pool at its centre, gliding birds and water lilies. She braced herself as she crossed the ice of the Antarctic. And underwater she ran her fingertips along the rough scales of strange fish.

      Geographical and biological facts – the world of nature, of plants and animals – were safe. But people – only they knew the truth of what lay in their hearts. This was survival, and it was one of the first things she learned.

      Dudu preferred tabloid magazines. She slid them into her bag in the waiting rooms she visited to do just that. “You’re weird, Françoise, reading that stuff. No wonder you don’t have a boyfriend,” she would say as Françoise lost herself in other territories and Dudu admired the before and after shots of a model who had gone under the knife.

      Ivor Woodall died at his home in Observatory, Cape Town, on Wednesday, 25 September, aged 42.

      Françoise stops and stares at the invitation to his exhibition that is placed alongside the obituary. There is a portrait of herself staring into space, and underneath in the sloping ornate writing of a wedding or funeral card – Exhibition, 9 October, Oval Gallery.

      Her heart pounds as she stares at her face, at her naked shoulders, her hair smoothed back from her high forehead, her eyes as she stared at the wall in front of her. She reads the words again in case she has mistaken something, but the words remain the same. Then she hears Dudu’s voice and feels her breath warm on her shoulder. Dudu never misses a trick.

      “What’s that?” she asks, leaning over.

      “Nothing,” Françoise says and tries to cover the page with her hand before she turns to face her sister.

      “Nothing?” Dudu leans closer, scrutinising the oily newsprint. Françoise’s arms feel like iced water. “What is it?” asks Dudu, like one of those children in Mao’s red army who burn books and have no qualms about setting fire to people too. Dudu snatches the paper and is reading through the oil and grease. “Mr Ivor Woodall is dead,” she says and then her face lights up with realisation.

      Françoise turns her head away from her sister and stares out of the bus window at the land whizzing by and up at the moon hanging, a giant pale ball, in a canopy of stars. It’s beautiful out there, and solitary. If the bus stopped now she could just walk out into the darkness and keep walking. She had done that before. She wonders how long she would last, with no food, water or money.

      “I didn’t do it,” whispers Dudu. “How could I? I was in Lubumbashi.”

      “With Mr Woodall’s car.”

      “It doesn’t even say how he died. Why would I want him dead?”

      “An exhibition of Ivor’s work will be held at . . .” Dudu reads over Françoise’s shoulder. “It is you.” She taps a glittery pink nail on the portrait of Françoise. “You were the model,” says Dudu accusingly.

      “Mr Woodall is dead, yapfuye!” repeats Françoise.

      “Who wrote this – the freak?”

      Françoise takes Dudu’s cellphone and dials Timothy’s number.

      The person you are calling is unavailable. Please try again later.

      She looks back at Dudu. Her sister holds her gaze – unblinking.

      Stella

      Stella crosses the courtyard of Timothy’s block of flats at the top of Long Street. She knocks urgently on the door of No 5. In the fountain behind her a sunbird dips its beak and showers the water lilies with its beating wings.

      She undoes the elastic band that holds her dark hair back and combs it with her fingers. It is thick and tangled. She can feel her pale skin burning in the intense midday sun. Her clothes are damp with sweat. She has not made “the right fashion choice” for the season, according to Verve magazine, where she works. That morning her boss pointed out the oily stain spread out like a continent on the back of her skirt. Her feet are swelling in her leather boots. Her long-sleeved shirt is sticking to her skin.

      In her hand she clutches the invitation to Ivor’s exhibition. She had found it in her letter box that morning. No stamp on the envelope meant one thing. It had been hand delivered. Yet she had never told Ivor where she lived.

      She knocks again on Timothy’s door. СКАЧАТЬ