Make or Break

Unusually for me I was pretty quiet during breakfast. But then I’d had no sleep, was potentially breaking up with the man I’d been planning on proposing to and was sipping coffee on the balcony of a stunning house with two virtual strangers in questionable leggings. Fortunately, Jimmy talked enough for the three of us.

I learnt that Jimmy wasn’t good at keeping up with his laundry, hence him wearing Diego’s multi-coloured leggings that displayed far more anatomical detail than is strictly acceptable at the breakfast table. I learnt that Diego was the partner of Ian, Jimmy’s older brother. That Diego and Ian weren’t officially married but had been together for years and owned pets and the lovely house I was currently sitting in, so may as well have been, which is why Jimmy introduced him as his brother-in-law. I learnt that Jimmy had come to South Africa to check out Ian’s boyfriend, had gone travelling, spent all his money and now lived in their basement and worked at the doggy daycare centre/gallery/bar.

I learnt that Diego owned a gym down the road called SWEAT 2000. And that Jimmy’s older brother, Ian, was an engineer so worked ‘grown-up’ hours and couldn’t go to a yoga class then sit on his balcony overlooking a white sandy beach on a sunny Wednesday morning, having smoothie bowls and paleo granola in leggings so bright and tight they ought to be hanging in Katy Perry’s dressing room.

And from Diego I learnt that Jimmy was single because he was too fussy, that he needed to ‘get his life sorted’ and that he sang ‘How is Julia?’ instead of ‘Halleluiah’ till he was eleven. I also learnt that Jimmy adored his brother-in-law and, despite his ‘older-brother-ish’ jibes, his brother-in-law adored him.

After breakfast Jimmy and I stayed on the balcony listening to the activity on the beach below us with a second round of coffee.

‘So how was the wedding?’ Jimmy asked, tipping his head back in the hot morning sun.

I frowned before remembering I’d called him to ask about the exhibition. Which then reminded me I’d forgotten all about the little nest of meat-eating crickets that was my father’s potential affair with a South African wine estate owner who had a side job raising funds for the critically endangered Pickergill’s reed frog. I’d put a little more thought into that when I was home. After a nap.

‘It was beautiful,’ I said, remembering how happy my best friend had been that day. It felt like weeks ago.

‘Got any pictures?’

I gave him a weird look.

‘What?’ he said with a shrug. ‘I like weddings.’

I showed him a photo of Priya and me hugging in the late-afternoon sun, our cheeks flushed with wine and joy.

‘You know Priya Jensen?’ Jimmy sat up and took the phone. ‘Man, she is so hot!’

‘She is so lesbian.’

‘Lesbian?’ He handed back my phone then lay back and put his feet on the weathered antique coffee table. ‘Her wife hot?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’ I watched him wriggle into a comfortable position and close his eyes. ‘If tall blondes with button noses are your thing.’

Jimmy opened his eyes and gave me a look that said does a bear like non-GMO, free-range salmon?

‘Yeah, she’s hot too,’ I conceded.

‘Two hot lesbians . . .’ he said dreamily, shutting his eyes again.

‘You know, lesbians don’t generally like to have sex with men. That’s the whole point of being a lesbian. They live a penis-less life and are quite happy about it.’

‘Shh . . .’ Jimmy said. ‘You’re ruining my fantasy.’

‘I’m just saying, a newly married lesbian couple don’t generally sit around thinking, “Oh you know what will make tonight great, let’s have sex with a cute guy.” Do you sit around thinking about having a hot night with Ryan Gosling?’

Jimmy wrinkled his nose. ‘No.’ Then he opened his eyes and grinned. ‘Unless Eva joined us, then I’d do whatever with whoever.’

‘I’m sure they’d be delighted to know.’

‘I might tweet them,’ he said, shutting his eyes again, the effect of another fantasy playing at the edge of his lips. ‘And I just realised something.’

‘What?’

‘You called me cute.’

‘Well, you are,’ I said, not worried by what I’d said. I was merely stating an obvious fact. Jimmy, with his SA tan, surfer’s arms, grey eyes, mischievous grin and unkempt blondish hair was undoubtedly good-looking. And by his easy confidence I was pretty sure he knew it. I looked over at him and he was grinning. ‘Don’t get a big head about it. You just got born pretty – it’s no achievement on your part.’

Jimmy laughed. ‘Cheers,’ he said chinking his coffee mug against mine. ‘You’re a real charmer.’

A little later, after he’d quizzed me about Pete and I’d shut up like a clam near a shucking knife, Jimmy looked at his watch and said he had to be at a writing class, but he could drop me back at my apartment on the way. We walked through the house that Ian had designed himself, and which screamed casual beachside elegance. It clung to the side of a cliff and had many levels which all looked out through floor-to-ceiling glass at Clifton Beach, a white sand paradise with frothy surf and beautiful beachgoers. The kitchen was clearly the heart of Diego and Ian’s life and housed a huge marble island surrounded by eight designer stools. An extra-long dining table in untreated wood sat below two giant antler chandeliers. Weathered leather chairs for eighteen surrounded the table and conjured up images of Vikings with tankards of mead. Two long white sofas, covered in plush cushions in all shades of vanilla, cream and white, and two armchairs surrounded a deep fireplace. Everything in South Africa was supersized. LA on steroids. They didn’t just have mountains, they had behemoths with flat tops; they didn’t just have flora and fauna, they had bushes with three-inch spikes (I’d nearly had an accidental nose piercing at the winery picnic with Pete the day before), elephants, rhinoceros and a two-step snake. They didn’t have floor-to-ceiling windows, they had triple-height glass walls in houses overlooking oceans that weren’t just blue but cerulean, with waves that didn’t just crash on the beach but could boom over the sea wall and wash away a Fiat. I followed Jimmy past a large utility room where an African lady of about fifty stood sorting through washing.

‘Morning, Pamela!’ Jimmy said, bouncing into the laundry and giving her a hug from behind.

She tutted and batted him away with a smile. He introduced me and then we carried on walking along window-filled hallways and down wide-spaced stairs.

‘If you have a housekeeper who does laundry why are you wearing those monstrosities?’ I said, pointing at the leggings.

Jimmy laughed. ‘I’m thirty-one years old. I don’t want someone picking my dirty clothes off the floor. If I can’t get them to the laundry room I deserve to suffer this humiliation.’

‘That’s very mature of you.’

‘I’m training myself for full adulthood,’ he said, then flung open some heavy double doors. ‘This is my room.’

Light flooded a room the size of my flat three times over. One whole wall was glass with, yet again, another view of the ocean. A California King bed dressed with fluffy white linen (unmade) was to one side and to the other, surrounding a plush rug, sat a keyboard, drum set, two guitars, a bunch of sound equipment and a massive xylophone.

Jimmy pointed to a green shaggy fake fur sofa against an exposed brick wall. ‘That’s Oscar the Couch,’ he said and cracked up.

The snowy-white bichon frise I’d seen at the bar stood up from a silk floor cushion and trotted over to Jimmy.

‘And this is Flora,’ Jimmy said, picking up the ball of fluff and talking in nonsensical lovey-dovey language.

My upper lip curled. ‘Get a room.’

‘This is our room,’ Jimmy said, without removing his face from Flora’s curly coat. ‘Feel free to leave if you can’t handle witnessing true love.’

I giggled and crossed the room.

‘What’s that all about?’ I said, pointing to a calendar that was still on December, hanging on the wall above a messy desk. The calendar had a photo of Jimmy looking startled while coming out of the bathroom, a tiny towel evidently only just managing to cover his bits by the time the camera clicked.

‘That,’ Jimmy said, taking the calendar down and handing it to me, ‘is a little Christmas tradition my brother and I have.’

I flicked through the pages. Each month showed a different photo of Jimmy in a state of surprise or annoyance. Or nakedness.

‘Nice,’ I said when I came to a picture of him, totally nude, sitting in a very dark room with his brow creased in annoyance and his mouth in the middle of saying ‘FUUUUUCK’. He had one hand trying to shield his manly area and the other outstretched as if to stay STOP.

‘We sneak up on each other and take photos,’ Jimmy said. ‘The aim of the game is to catch each other in an unflattering state and at Christmas we give each other a calendar of all the pictures. The ultimate goal is to get a “poo shot”.’ Jimmy pointed to the toilet picture. ‘Ian won last year with that one.’

‘THAT’S YOU DOING A POO?!’ I screeched, only then realising he was sitting on a toilet. ‘Gross!’ I shoved the calendar back at him.

Jimmy sniggered, flicked to the correct month and rehung it. He stood back, appraising the January photo. He was in the shower and could only be seen from the waist up. His eyes were stretched wide and his mouth open in shock.

‘That’s when Ian flicked the shower to ice cold,’ Jimmy said, tapping the picture and turning to me with a severe expression. ‘Diego took the photo while Ian did the tap. It’s against the rules to use an assistant so officially that one doesn’t count.’

I laughed in the face of his seriousness.

Jimmy glanced at his watch. ‘Shit! I gotta shower. Be five minutes.’

I flopped on Oscar the Couch and in exactly five minutes Jimmy emerged in a cloud of steam and began rummaging in a pile of clothes on the floor of his wardrobe, a towel wrapped round his waist.

‘Can you play all these?’ I indicated to the instruments, averting my eyes from his muscled torso.

‘Yeah,’ he said, his voice muffled by the mountain of clothing he was nose deep in. ‘I’m classically trained on the piano but I get by on most instruments.’

‘I used to be able to play the theme tune to Magnum, P.I. on the xylophone. My old music teacher had a thing for big tashes.’ I stood and picked up the sticks. ‘Can’t remember what these are called though.’

‘That’s a marimba,’ Jimmy said, pulling a T-shirt over his head then crossing the room and taking the hitty things from me. ‘And these are mallets.’

He grabbed another two mallets and launched into a jovial little tune reminiscent of 1980s new wave music.

‘Wow!’ I said, impressed. ‘What’s that song?’

Jimmy shrugged but looked modestly delighted. ‘Something I wrote.’

‘Cool. If I could wake up one day and choose an instant talent it would be to read music and play any instrument.’ I frowned. ‘Or to make myself invisible. Or to never sweat. Or to be able to dance and not look like I’d been born with half my joints fused together and an itch I can’t reach. Or to . . .’

Jimmy was looking at me with a strange expression.

I cleared my throat. ‘That was amazing!’

He grinned, handed me the mallets, grabbed some shorts from the floor and ducked into the bathroom again.

Jimmy’s car was a battered green Mitsubishi hatchback with a 1980s power ballad CD stuck in the player.

‘So, do you know anyone in Cape Town?’ Jimmy said as we drove along the winding coastal road listening to Whitesnake, the sun glinting off anything and everything, making the city shine like a disco ball.

‘Just Priya and Laurel and they’re on their honeymoon.’

‘Priya and Laurel . . .’ Jimmy said, getting lesbian-dreamy again.

‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘You’re soiling their honeymoon with your hetero fantasy vibes.’

‘Hetero fantasy vibes?’

‘It’s a thing.’ I checked my phone. No text from Pete and no emails from Dad. ‘My dad might still be here somewhere, I guess. I haven’t heard from him yet.’

I’d told Jimmy about my concerns that Dad was here under dodgy circumstances, and he pointed out that there were a lot of mega-wealthy people in Cape Town and that half the clientele at the bar he worked at probably owned private islands. We pulled up at the security gates to the apartments and I directed Jimmy to the foot of our building.

‘Thanks for breakfast,’ I said, giving a small smile. ‘It’s kind of weird I came to your house and I don’t even know you.’ Now that I was back at the apartment complex without Pete, it made me realise I was alone for the next week.

‘No problem.’ He watched me for a moment. ‘Why don’t you come to the bar this afternoon?’

‘What for?’

‘If you come before five Sylvie won’t be in yet and I can sneak you into the exhibition space.’

‘Who’s Sylvie?’

‘The boss. That tiny smoking psycho you saw the other day.’

‘Oh, right. She seems scary.’

‘She is. Which is why I can’t get caught. So, come at five – we’ll go in, look around, then get out, OK?’

‘Really?’ I said, my spirits lifting.

He nodded. ‘If the exhibition is in two weeks then the paintings are probably already in the storage area. I don’t know what you think you’ll find but if it will put your mind at ease . . .’

‘It will, thank you!’

I slid out of the car, thanked him for breakfast again, got the lift to the sixth floor (Pete and his stair-stamping could get fucked), had a long shower then climbed into bed and had myself a four-hour, dreamless nap.