Gagged

Rene Lötter

I'm sitting outside International Arrivals waiting for your midnight flight.
After pacing the floor itching to leave from early that morning, I'm now fetching you from the pick-and-go.
I'm hoping to act fashionably late, fearing I might seem like an incontinent maltese the minute you walk into view.

And now, everybody, except you, is coming out that door.
It's raining - and I'm getting whiplash every time the sliding doors open.
Every time they open, they disgorge a happy person being devoured by smiling mouths. Not you.
So I swing my neck around and try the nonchalantly-playing-with-cellphone pose.

I dreamt of that phone last night.

It's a recurring dream I've had ever since we met.
I phone you to tell you something urgently, I'm not sure what. Then the phone pad keeps disappearing. And as soon as I've managed to pin in your number, the mouthpiece disappears.
It's a Kafkaesque black-and-white small-screen dream, in which I then run to a telephone booth and try and reach you.
Every time I pick up the sinister-looking handpiece it changes into something else, a gimmick toyshop clown phone ...

Time is running out and there's something I must tell you, but I'm not sure what it is.

Suddenly you walk out the terminal, stop, and barely look around.

You first light a half wet cigarette, briefly meet my eyes, open the door. Then you swing long black coat, long wet hair, onto the seat.
I turn the ignition. "How was your flight?"
And turn up the volume.
If I was a painter I would have painted us in a car full of music talking on behalf of us.
While we have duct tape on our mouths like hostages.

And those are the memories I have of us that winter.

Every time I mow my summer lawn and turn the corner round this tree, I walk the same angry path.
Every time I look at the untidy edges, I wonder if there ever was a chance for us.
Oh, there's always a chance, they say.

A chance for the Palestinians and the Jews to start talking, a chance for the Catholic church to say let's use condoms.

I know now what I wanted to tell you, or ask you.
But I guess now is too late and I'll never know.
So I mow and cut until my fury recedes, bit by bit, row by tidy row. And then I put everything in the rubbish bin.

But only a little while later, looking out the window, I see tall grass waving wildly in the wind.

A garden path hacked open just days ago, spitefully overgrown again.

Rene Lötter is a producer and television writer based in Cape Town. She comes from the Stellenbosch Journalism school. In her free time she drinks wine and gets a kick out of translating Breytenbach into English - "unplugged". Those are yet to be published... She is a serial monogamist and regards herself as the leading, world authority on long distance, long-term dysfunctional relationships!

LitNet: 14 January 2005

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