Rebirth.

And in a sweep, Sophiatown was gone.

The jazz clubs, the shebeens, the Odin theatre with its live performers; the bulldozers came and flattened those dreamlands to the ground. Cardboard cutouts burnt in braziers; the legends had fallen.

The once vibrant community had been replaced with Triomf; very clean, very quiet, and very white.

Samson Ngozwana had to relocate not only his house but his business as well. That would not be easy though, as finding offices which would accomodate a black law firm would be somewhat of a challenge, and then there was the issue of rent.

The bespectacled Afrikaans man squinted at him through horn-rimmed glasses. His hair was brylcreemed with a deliberate side-parting, and his safari suit was perfectly pressed. The top of a comb peeked out over the top of his pocket. "Very sorry," he repeated, accenting his r's. "The paperwork has not come through as yet".

Samson sat alone in his office, his desk an oasis of order amidst the boxes piled around him. The amber liquid in his glass spilled over onto his hand as he swirled it round. The only sound in the room was the occasional clink of ice against glass. He sighed, the soft sound a tangible expression of the hopelessness he could not describe. Then, a deep deliberate intake of breath which was more than physical, for it heralded a change.

His mind filled with the visions of a pale pink lace evening dress and Mary neatly folding it in tissue paper, before she packed it away. He saw her easy smile and the growing swell of her belly. He saw a baby, he couldn't decide if he wanted a boy or a girl, and then he saw Mary, her eyes turned to glass with tears. He couldn't provide for his family, he was not a man.

He put his glass down on the desk, then picked up the half-full bottle of brandy and in one smooth motion he put it to his lips, drinking deeply. He winced, the fire in his throat and gut making him feel alive, yet numb.

"Fire" he thought.
"Yes"

Samson was no more.

Amongst the ashes of Ngozwana and Partners, Shakes was born.

He was not the phoenix rising, beautiful and triumphant, but a foul Frankenstein's monster fashioned from graverobbers' booty.

Mary gave birth wearing widow's black. She had railed against God for his cruelty, having taken Samson away when He did. But her bitterness soon wisped away, when after an evening of angry importunate supplication, she found a basket filled with more money than she could count on the front stoep.

What's in a name?

"That's not my real name", she sobbed, her voice muffled by her hands and fragile balls of soggy tissue paper.

Raymar knew all about names. His was cobbled together from remnants of his parents'. Raymond and Mareldia. Neither one nor the other, his was not a whole name, it would never be. But yet it told the tale of his childhood. He had never felt like he belonged, Raymar with his patchwork name, living in a country filled with people struggling for their identity. He was a chimera, a mosaic, a jigsaw puzzle with pieces from different boxes.

There were perks of course. He received presents for Christmas and new clothes for Eid. His mother made great koeksisters and tomato bredie, and he had only half the guilt his Catholic father had.

"There are things about me you don't know", she whimpered into Raymar's shirt as he held her close to comfort her.
Raymar could not tell her about his dreams, the ones which, every night, usurped his sleep. He could not tell her about his art, his work, and the satisfaction he got from doing it well. He could not tell her about his bloody past, his bloody past.

"But you don't understand", she continued, while Raymar tried to show her that he did understand and that it didn't matter, that she was safe, and that this was a new beginning.

Muniko. The name had infected him, wormed its way into his brain and swelled, taking up space which should have been used for common sense. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but Raymar had been snagged by a thorn.

A taste for Thai

She sat on the low bed with her knees drawn up to her chin. She stared down her nose at him, with a glare accentuated by cleopatra-kohl.
Her neck, dripping with gold and excess skin, shook as she pointed to the girls who stood in the centre of the room. Their heads were bowed almost reverently. "Take your pick, but don't take your time about it."

Shakes took off his fedora and straightened the band before he placed it on the vacant seat beside him. The low light reflected off his gold tooth, his broad smile sweeter than the sickly smell of patchouli incense that wafted through the room. "Miss Feeder. I think there has been a misunderstanding," he said slowly. He stood up, using his cane as leverage. He cut quite a dashing figure in those days, with his bespoke pinstriped suit and his ruby pinky ring. The influence of American films and jazz music on township tsotsi fashion was clear. The cane had started off as a prop, a way of keeping his hands occupied while disguising the tremors. By the time his condition was obvious and the nickname stuck, he needed it to maintain balance. "My colleague and I have not come to sample the merchandise, but to present the compliments of my employer. He would like to congratulate you on your new business venture and extend his hand in friendship."

Karen Feeder did not blink. Her face took on an expression which would not have looked out of place on someone who had just stepped in dogshit. She grunted, swallowing phlegm, then nodded towards the door at the far end of the room. The girls filed out, barely making a sound.

"Muniko!" she screeched. The tacky bead curtain covering the doorway on Raymar's right parted to admit a petite figure stooped over a tray. As she turned, Muniko's hair fell from her face, revealing her grey-green eyes. Aromas of galangal and basil wafted from the bowls on the tray towards him. In that moment, Raymar Driver died, and was reborn.


The spell was broken by the sound of Karen spitting out the fragrant broth, followed by the back of her hand making brief but significant contact with Muniko's cheek. "Useless, even in the kitchen!", she squawked.

As Shakes parted the bead curtain with his cane and tipped his hat towards nobody in particular, Raymar hesitated for what felt like the first time in his life. It was the softness of her face and the economy of her movements which gave him pause, but those eyes, that look of defiance on Muniko's face, that was what drove him to act.

As Raymar held his hand forcefully on the back of her head, Karen Feeder drowned in the bowl of soup she had refused moments before. Spluttering and struggling, she splashed some of the contents onto him before she finally stopped moving. Her kohl left smokey swirls in the soup and dirty tracks on her cheeks. In death, as in life, her picture was crass and inelegant.

He licked his hand clean before offering it to Muniko. As he lead her through the door, Raymar Driver realised that he could be developing a taste for Thai.

Chinese Modesty

She knew her way around ingredients, and her herb-garden had a well-trodden path. He enjoyed watching her cook, appreciated the artistry behind her knife skills. There were no recipe books here, no measuring cups or scales. Just Muniko and her catalogue of smells, colours and flavours.

The rollers in her hair were held in place by a scarf which seemed to have been chosen at random in the dark. Her blue checked overall had lost buttons over many years of use, and clothes pegs now took their place. She balanced a cigarette on her lower lip and squinted against the smoke and the fumes from the burner. She punctuated her sentences with expletives and every time she waved her arms she flashed a bit of coarse, damp armpit hair. To Raymar, she was a fallen angel captured in the silhouette of a silver harvest moon.

"No mutton for me today" he said.
"You could have phoned, you good-for-nothing fuck!" came the prompt reply.

He zoned out as she started to work, a dervish of blue checked polyester and steel. In a ceramic bowl, she wisked an egg, and added to it freshly grated coconut along with its milk. She added a spoonful of reddish paste which looked like it contained chilli seeds. This was followed by mussels, prawns, a few basil leaves and a bruised lemongrass stalk. The bowl was placed in a bamboo steamer perched over a wok of bubbling water.

"You don't appreciate me, you think you can just walk in here when you like" she spat.

He was transfixed by the length of the ash she managed to balance on the end of her clove cigarette. The crackling of the burning tobacco was an accompaniment to the scherzo of her stirring spoons.

"You don't even have a car to take me out"

He watched as a droplet of perspiration swelled in her neck and then trickled down her cleavage.

"I don't even know what work you do"

He breathed in slowly, trying to separate her smell from that of the spices and herbs in the kitchen. The noisome met the cooking incense in silent clash, but it was the lemongrass that took victory.

She glared at him, then suddenly spun round and grabbed the bowl from the steamer and plonked it unceremoniously in front of him, along with a bowl of fragrant jasmine rice. Yes, she was very good at creating something from nothing.

With a grimace which could with some stretch of the imagination be construed as a smile, just enough to give a glimpse of a gold tooth, she nodded to him, then the bowl.

"Eat. The salt is probably less, neh?"

2B

Ma-Stokvel should have known better. The shebeen business was a profitable one, but you had to know whom not to cross swords with.

Unfortunately Ma-Stokvel did not know what tact was, or even if she did, it was certainly not something she would bother with. The word itself was too small for her. She'd stretch it until the strings pulled free. "Hai, that Bra Mikes. He's an ugly one hey? Looks like a tokoloshe! Ja, those cherries just after his money, I tell you. Why else would they bed that Papa Smurf, eh?" Ma-Stokvel would share these extravagant vilifications with any patron who was too drunk to vacate his seat. Unfortunately, one of these patrons was Shakes, who happened to be Bra Mikes' right hand man, and as luck would have it, his eyes and ears.

Years at the business-end of a beer bottle meant that Shakes' aim was off, but he was respected as a fixer. As long as he took care of things, he could spend his cash any way he wanted, even if that meant pissing it against the zinc wall of some shebeen. Which is where he met Raymar.

The way Shakes saw it, Ma-Stokvel would serve as an example to anyone else who tried to undercut Bra Mikes. Not only was Ma-Stokvel very vocal about the men she considered unbeddable, she considered herself something of a location heroine, speaking out vociferously against the tsotsies who dealt in all things nefarious close to her shebeen. The fact that her own blend of skokiaan - better known as brain blitz by her regulars- should carry a health warning and pictures of fried liver, was not her concern. Her insulting Mikes' masculinity was just a convenient excuse for Bra Mikes to obliterate her completely.


Raymar got out of the taxi at the same stop that she did, but did not take as long. She oozed between the passengers, puffing and sweating until she emerged from the vehicle with a near-orgasmic "Yoooh!"
Her bright yellow smock shirt bobbed like a buoy in the crowd, easy to follow until she ducked into one of the many alleys which made up the rabbit-warren which was Soweto.

He did not like guns, he preferred to get in close, so he could see what he was doing, so he could smell the fear and the death. Killing was an art to him, and doing it from a distance was like looking at a Titian through a telescope. No pencil-sketch pre-planning either. Just confident, broad brushstrokes.

As he plunged the pencil into her eye-socket, forcing it home with the flat of his hand, the last thing she saw was the absence of emotion on his face. There was no ghost in this machine. He stepped over her body in one fluid motion, cat-like, walked purposefully through an alley and then back onto the dusty road. On the other sidewalk, sheep were milling in a makeshift enclosure while one of their mates bled into a gutter. A sheep's head was roasting nearby, a delicacy named "Smiley" by the locals because of the way the lips pulled back from the teeth in an obscene grimace as the muscles in it's jaw cooked.

Raymar stood by the roadside, his finger pointing upwards, indicating to passing taxi drivers that he was heading for the busy city centre. He calmly got into the minibus taxi, just another commuter going about his business.

"The pen may be mightier than the sword", he thought. "But a good pencil would do in a pinch"

Deadlines

Raymar looked around from the passenger seat next to the taxi-driver's, and didn't like what he saw. The two obese women in the back seat were spilling chips all over the floor, and spat bits of batter and fish while cackling like hags over a cardboard carton of cheap wine. Even though the taxi's stereo was loosening gobbets of phlegm from his bronchi, he was sure he could hear their feet sticking velcro-like to the remnants of a previous ill-advised automotive binge.
"Hey wena, put that on a bit louder sweerie. It's my favourite song," said the monstrosity in yellow. Her shirt was the same colour as the bits of fish batter stuck to it. Raymar wondered what she would do if he turned around and just said, "Fuck no."
But today was no day to be a cowboy.
She would soon learn that, like him, sometimes you had to put your foot down firmly. It was his last shift and he wanted to get home as soon as soon as he had done the job.

You see, for a cartoonist, making a hit was as easy as erasing a bad sketch.

Pencil Sketch

Raymar Driver was tired. Not just a physical fatigue, but a sense of helplessness, an ennui that filled his eyes and the fluid in his joints.
It was the seventieth application.The seventieth sincere apology, but gracious refusal of his services.

"We wish you all the best for the future"
What a joke. They didn't. They just wished he'd go elsewhere, with his inappropriate skills, either just under- or over-qualified for the job.
A cartoonist with jokes no one ever got. Too sharp for the local newspapers and a pencil that wasn't quite sharpened enough for work on the digitised big reads.
"What were they on about?" he thought. "I mean battered baby jokes are funny. A bit niche maybe, but funny."