Make or Break

‘Well, do your clients put their hands on the small of your back?’ I asked Annabelle as I moved Pete’s phone from one ear to the other so I could steady myself against the inside of the van door.

I’d called her as soon as Trust had crossed the car park and bumped over some barricades to catch up with the white Discovery, but an official-ish looking guy had leapt out of nowhere shouting in another language, shaking his radio and pointing to the squat concrete barricades with irate astonishment. Eventually, with a dismissive wave of his arm, Trust swung out of the car park leaving the man looking official-ish yet ineffectual, but the Discovery was long gone.

‘One guy put his hand on my tit,’ Annabelle replied down the phone. ‘But he’s no longer my client.’

‘Is he now the father of your next illegitimate child?’

‘Oh, ha ha. I’d be insulted if I could be arsed,’ Annabelle said. ‘But I can’t.’ She paused to tell Hunter to stop throwing his swimming goggles around then came back on the line. ‘She’s most likely a client. Dad’s old-school, he probably guides all female clients by the small of the back. It’s hardly going to be anything sinister. It’s Dad, for god’s sake. He wouldn’t be able to navigate the logistics of an affair, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

It was what I was thinking. But I didn’t say as much. She was right. Dad was ill-equipped to manage an affair. He was charmingly forgetful, endearingly vague and so calm that he could, and would, fall asleep anywhere. He’d once gone to see an airport chapel (him being curious as he’d never even known they were there), sat down in a pew in the darkened chamber and promptly fallen asleep for five hours. He ended up missing his flight home and his own birthday BBQ went on without him.

‘Goats!’ Pete pointed at a herd of untethered goats eating dusty grass a few feet from the edge of the craziest motorway I’d ever been on. And that included the A303 on the way to Glastonbury.

Vehicles that would’ve looked at home in a scrapyard wove left and right or sped up and slowed down, as unpredictable as bees on lavender. People cut in front of us or swerved towards us, but none of it seemed to faze Trust, who zipped in and out and from lane to lane like he was trying to replicate Julie Andrews’ dance routine on the top of that Sound Of Music alp.

‘Are those houses?’ Pete stared out of the window at thousands of structures that appeared to be nothing more than rusty bits of corrugated iron leant up against each other in the shape of a shed. ‘Do people live in those?’

‘It was different from client-touching,’ I replied to Annabelle, while Trust said that yes, many, many people did indeed live in the tin shacks. ‘I can’t explain. They seemed more intimate.’ I turned to Pete, who was gaping out of the window. ‘Didn’t they? Pete?’

‘What’s that?’ he said, unable to tear his eyes away from a group of children playing football at the side of the eight-lane motorway. Rubbish lay in huge piles beyond them. ‘That kid’s in nappies!’

I looked out of Pete’s side of the van at a group of children chasing after a raggedy ball. No adult was present and no barrier was there to stop the children, including toddlers, running in front of a precariously loaded bus traversing the two lanes beside us. Or the speeding car that looked like it had been on its last wheels in 1982. A pick-up truck passed us with scruffily clad African men crouched together in the open-backed trailer; their threadbare clothing flapped violently and their eyes were tiny slits against the wind and dust. A thickset white man sat in the spacious cab, his windows up and his air con mostly likely on.

‘And wouldn’t he have told us if he was flying somewhere else?’ I continued.

‘He doesn’t always tell us, Jess. His clients change their minds all the time, you know that.’

‘It still feels like something weird is going on.’

Annabelle made a dismissive noise at the back of her throat. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’re just prone to amateur dramatics.’

I sniffed my offence. There was nothing amateur about them.

Annabelle asked Hunter to help Katie with her water wings then came back on the line. ‘Remember Les Mis?’ she said, her voice muffled like she was trying to hold the phone between her chin and her shoulder. ‘And the time with the beetroot and red velvet cake? Or those times you thought all of us were dead from thrombosis?’

I scoffed, annoyed that my past unfounded worries were being brought in to dilute the current concern. Les Mis was a legitimate panic. Mum and Dad had gone to the theatre with the neighbours and left Annabelle and me at home alone without a babysitter for the first time. They said they’d be back at 11-ish and at 11.17 p.m. I’d commenced phoning the hospitals and every friend in their phone book, convinced they’d been in a car accident. It turned out they were next door having several nightcaps and could see me through the windows on the phone in my nightie and just thought I’d snuck out of bed to ring the Santa hotline again. Beetroot juice and red velvet cake was a combination that had me booking in for an unnecessary (and extremely uncomfortable) colonoscopy, and thrombosis is a very real concern.

‘He’ll call back,’ Annabelle continued, ‘you’ll go to the wedding, get a tan, visit some giraffes, and if Pete manages to locate his balls he might ask you to marry him, just like you’ve always wanted.’

Annabelle’s entire side of the conversation had been audible to both Pete and Trust, and at that last remark I got a chuckle from Trust and an eye-roll from Pete.

‘What?’ I mouthed, raising my eyebrows, playing the innocent. Pete shook his head and turned towards the window. ‘Can you just send Dad a text asking him to call you back? Pete’s phone only has eight per cent battery left.’

Annabelle tut-tutted but agreed and we hung up just as the motorway narrowed into a boulevard lined with palm trees. Table Mountain, enormous and block-like, loomed to our left and the ocean, shimmering like it’d been sprinkled with crushed diamonds, came into view on our right.

‘You see the zebra?’ Trust said, pointing over his shoulder to the left, making the van drift into the other lane. A BMW glided away from us and various other cars sped up or swerved to accommodate the manoeuvre.

Pete leant across me and peered out of the window as I scrolled through his contacts and found Dave’s number. We were approaching the city centre, yet there on a golden, grassy hill beside an urban metropolis, stood two zebra chewing the dry grass like a couple of eccentrically painted horses.

Dave answered in a sleepy voice. ‘Sup?’

‘Hi. Are you at work? I’m in Cape Town and I was wondering if you can look up a car number plate for me. Have you got a pen?’ I said.

‘You’re in Cape Town?’

‘Yes. Do you have a pen?’

‘Where’s Pete?’

‘In Cape Town too.’

‘Whoa, awesome.’ He coughed a raspy smoker’s morning kind of cough. ‘How long you there for?’

‘Two weeks. And yes, you can have your zombie marathon. You can have two full weeks of zombie marathons, now can you look up a number plate?’

Dave coughed again. ‘Like I’ve said many times before, Jess, it’s not CTU here. We don’t have access to the government, I can’t look up current hospital admissions and we certainly don’t have access to the South African version of the DMV.’

‘What about tracking a phone?’

‘Nope.’

‘Can you break into an email? Can you see where a passport is on some international database or something?’

‘Nope and nope.’

‘What do you have access to?’

‘I can listen in on 999 calls,’ he said in a weary voice. ‘But only ones I’ve dispatched from my server.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it.’

‘How boring.’

‘Tell me about it. So, what’s going on, Jess?’ he said in a patient yet knowing voice.

I filled him in on the Dad situation and Dave gently reminded me that I had the tendency to be a smidge psychotically, pathologically paranoid and got all, ‘Remember the time you started worrying about sink holes?’ and ‘I told you I couldn’t smell any toxic gas but who ended up paying a huge fine for calling out the National Grid emergency services for what ended up being an overripe banana?’ and I sighed and had to admit that perhaps the sleep deprivation and the sudden ripping away from Annabelle and the kids might have something to do with my heightened catastrophe radar. I hung up, handed the phone back to Pete and leant my weary head against his shoulder.

‘Have I got time to go back to the apartment?’ I said, checking my underarms. ‘I smell.’

Pete put his arm around me and kissed the top of my head. Trust grinned in the rear-view mirror.

‘You do smell,’ Pete said with a smile. ‘But no. The brunch started an hour ago and Priya said to take you straight there so you can do dress fittings and corsage . . . painting . . . or whatever.’

‘But what about Dad?’

‘You just have to charge your phone and wait for him to call back.’

‘But what if—’

‘Do you know what your mother would say right now?’

I eyed Pete suspiciously. Very rarely would he align himself with Mum’s mode of thinking. He was a black and white, go-to-the-GP-if-you’re-sick, watch-a-funny-movie-if-you’re-sad kind of person. Mum’s unconventional recommendations would fall on his selectively deaf ears.

‘What would she say?’

‘She’d say, “You shouldn’t worry about something you can’t control”.’

My shoulders relaxed. ‘She would.’

Pete continued with a rather cynical air about him. ‘Then she’d tell you that worrying causes ulcerated colons, and that gluten glugs the mind and makes you negative and “those electrolytes don’t work you know Pete, you need to try my hydrogen water. Dehydration can contribute to erectile dysfunction” and “Pete, you do eat an awful lot of bagels, how’s your mental health?” and—’

‘I get it,’ I said, pulling him back from the brink of my mother-induced madness. ‘I’ll stop worrying,’ I said, intending to do no such thing.

‘Good. Because Priya’s paid for these flights and she deserves to have an amazing wedding with her best friend beside her, bottling up all her feelings.’ Pete gave a playful smile, knowing that my family, under Mum’s self-help-book, organic-pillow-slips and om-your-pain-away leadership, don’t do ‘bottling up our feelings’.

We rounded a bend and the docks came into sight. A few miles off the shore lay a flat, white island, like a pancake floating on the top of the ocean. Traffic began to slow as we curved around high-rises pinging sunlight in our eyes and the city opened up in front of us. It didn’t seem very big. More like a large, sunny town.

‘How many people live in Cape Town?’ Pete asked.

Outside his window children in tattered clothing and bare feet moved through the traffic, begging.

‘Depends on how you count,’ Trust replied.

‘Riiight,’ Pete said, giving me an amused look. ‘How do you count?’

Trust chuckled. ‘Fairly,’ he said, making a quick lane change.

We left the boulevard and moved into a more urban area. People milled about on the sunny pavements. Priya had said Cape Town was a bubble in comparison to the rest of South Africa. Sure, crime was still there but for the most part everyone went about their daily lives the way we do in England. Just with more sun and cheaper plastic surgery. You still had to be careful, but perhaps no more than you did in certain parts of Hackney after dusk. We turned onto a road that followed the coastline while Trust chatted about how nice Priya was and how she never vomited in his van after a night out like the other actress. The sea was to our right, vast and shimmery. People bobbed about in kayaks not too far from the shore. Were they not aware South African waters were like an all-you-can-eat buffet for great whites? There was no way I was going to put even a toe in that water. It’d be like offering up a canapé. I’d be sticking to the nice chlorinated swimming pools thank you very much. I turned to look out of the other window at the lively pavement. Most people seemed to be in some kind of exercise attire. Packs of male cyclists in their weird cycle shoes and unforgiving lycra sat at outdoor café tables, their bikes in glinting metal stacks beside them.

Trust turned in his seat and grinned at our gawping faces. ‘England like this?’

I laughed while watching a group of women in sherbet shades of tight activewear cross the road holding yoga mats and green juices, their arms bare and toned, their ponytails swinging down their backs. ‘Not at all.’

I’d never seen so many slim, tanned women with perky boobs. I tracked Pete’s gaze but it was focused on a park with an outdoor gym where muscled men were doing one-arm chin-ups and hanging ab crunches. One guy was doing handstand press-ups on top of the monkey bars.

‘Every day these men are doing this,’ Trust said, gesturing towards the beefy gymnasts. ‘Very strong.’

‘Very,’ I said in an overly appreciative voice.

Pete gave me an under-appreciative look. We rounded a corner and a crescent-shaped white sand beach came into view. The sea, turquoise at the shoreline, deepened to a sapphire blue further out.

‘Wow,’ Pete breathed.

‘This Camps Bay,’ Trust said.

Boulders at either end of the beach were vast and smooth like the ones in pictures of the Seychelles. Some were the size of cars, others the size of studio flats. Busy cafés with outdoor tables lined one side of the street and the sea stretched out for miles and miles on the other. Breaking waves frothed themselves onto the shore, palm trees did their palm tree thing (which is instantly to make people feel good) and behind it all the craggy cliffs of some mountain range I’d have to look up the name of loomed dramatically. We inched along the beachfront watching men take surfboards off their roof racks, their wetsuits undone to their waists, showing off muscled, tanned torsos. Well I was, anyway. Pete’s head was whipping around taking in all the people in their various states of ‘sport’. They crossed the road in tiny, tiny outfits; they walked along the footpath in tiny, tiny outfits, or played with dogs in tiny, tiny outfits (the people, not the dogs). The sandy shore was swarming with couples playing beach tennis, groups playing volleyball and boys in their twenties throwing rugby balls or Frisbees, or hacky sacks. Pete observed the activity like a restrained puppy. I had the sudden realisation that Cape Town was going to be like a theme park for him. I wanted to sort out the Dad matter and then let my sports-mad boyfriend loose on the African outdoors. As Trust swung a left and drove up a steep winding road, Pete’s phone beeped with a text from Annabelle.

Call me.