One Midlife Crisis and a Speedo Read online

  Published by Zebra Press

  an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd

  Reg. No. 1966/003153/07

  The Estuaries No. 4, Oxbow Crescent, Century Avenue, Century City, 7441

  PO Box 1144, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa

  www.zebrapress.co.za

  First published 2014

  Publication © Zebra Press 2014

  Text © Darrel Bristow-Bovey 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owners.

  PUBLISHER: Marlene Fryer

  MANAGING EDITOR: Robert Plummer

  PROOFREADER: Bronwen Leak

  COVER DESIGNER: Gretchen van der Byl

  TYPESETTER: Monique van den Berg

  ISBN 978 1 77022 746 0 (print)

  ISBN 978 1 77022 747 7 (ePub)

  ISBN 978 1 77022 748 4 (PDF)

  To Keren Kilcoyne, without whom there would be no book, and in fact there would be nothing.

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. The Old Man and the Sea

  2. For Whom the Back Tolls

  3. Youth

  4. The Five Stages of Turning Forty

  You Know You’re Middle-Aged When

  5. Don Quixote

  6. Waiting to Inhale

  7. Lucky Gym

  8. Fall and Rise

  9. Water and Peace

  10. Hard Times

  11. Reservoir Dog

  12. Juice

  13. You Only Live Twice

  Epilogue: The Sun Also Rises

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  I’m about to make an enormous mistake.

  This isn’t a thought I’ve had very often. More usually I’m thinking, “Have I just made an enormous mistake?” or especially, “I have just made an enormous mistake!”

  This stopping ankle-deep in the cold, salty water of a mistake is a new feeling, but it’s just as well, because this might be a real mistake, one of the ones that count.

  I’ve made many mistakes in my time. I’ve ended up with bad knees and a sore heart and shoes that cost too much and make me look like a Sicilian art dealer. I’ve made mistakes that have cost me time and love and more dignity than I have to spare. I’ve made mistakes in conversation with people I’ve wanted to impress that still cause me to hug my knees in the night and hum till I can’t hear my memories any more. It sometimes feels that everything I’ve ever said or done or worn has been a mistake of one kind or another and even the good things are just mistakes that turned out well.

  But this doesn’t feel like one of those. This feels like the kind of mistake that can’t be made right, that will end with me inhaling cold green lungfuls of water and in three days’ time my body will be found in the reeds of some downstream village, sparking legends that last for decades about the pale sea creature that came floating in one day all doughy and limp like a person-shaped piece of pie pastry not yet cooked.

  This must be how Jacob Zuma or Tony Abbott sometimes feel: one minute everything’s sunny and fine, and then the next a terrible clarity strikes and you’re looking around, wondering: What am I doing here in front of all these people? And where are my trousers?

  Because actually that ankle-deep cold salty water isn’t a metaphor – my feet are cold and wet and above them are my horrible bare hairy legs.

  I used to quite like my legs. Forty years ago on TV there was a pantyhose advert featuring a pair of legs walking down a street in high heels while someone sang “Ain’t she sweet?” My father told me, “You know, they always use men’s legs in pantyhose adverts.” I’m not sure he intended it to be aspirational, but ever since then I’ve had in the back of my mind that if things don’t work out I could take a job as a pantyhose leg model. Hemlines may come and go but sheer hosiery will always be with us, and with gams like these I’ll never starve.

  But now I realise I’ve been kidding myself. In fact they’re less like legs, more like a pair of weird pale carrots, the knobbly, skinny kind whose parents are ashamed of them so they’re kept in a dark cupboard and beaten if they make a noise when the neighbours come to visit. How can they be so scrawny when the rest of me is so not scrawny? Is … is that daylight I see? My god, is that a thigh gap?

  But the legs aren’t even the worst part.

  Above the legs … above the legs I’m wearing a Speedo.

  A Speedo.

  What kind of man wears a Speedo? Unmarried uncles, that’s who, and Europeans, and scoutmasters on holiday. David Hasselhoff. And now me.

  I dislike everything about a Speedo. I recoil from its look the way I’d recoil from a sweaty stranger emerging from the woods holding something wrapped in a handkerchief, saying, “Do you want to see what I have in here?” But even more I dislike what they say. Look at me, they say, I am so small yet see how easily I hold all your manhood.

  And yet here I am, in public, all Speedoed up. On my head is a rubber cap like my Aunty Rose wears in the shower, and goggles that make me look like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, or Jeff Goldblum even when he isn’t in The Fly, and I’m standing on the edge of Europe and a long way away is Asia.

  And the idea is that I’ll dive into this water, where it’s cold and there are probably eels that feel like seaweed so when they brush against my ankles I won’t kick them off until it’s too late, and I’m supposed to swim and swim and try not be pulled downstream by a current moving as fast as the traffic in a Cape Town slow lane, or twice as fast as the traffic in a Cape Town fast lane, and swim and swim till I get to the other side.

  And this is the truth: I can’t do it.

  For twenty years my swimming technique was like my sexual technique: three or four frenzied strokes then a lot of gasping and sleeping. One year ago I couldn’t swim more than three laps without stopping and crying and clinging to the wall like a Humpty Dumpty who has just skipped ahead and read the second line of the poem.

  And it’s not as though I’ve discovered some late-flowering gift in my middle years. I know that Toni Morrison and George Eliot only started writing novels when they were each over forty and Grandma Moses picked up a paintbrush for the first time in her seventies and Colonel Sanders was already sixty-five when he found his way to the crispy chicken-fryer. I cheered when George Foreman won the world heavyweight boxing title at forty-six. But I also know that the only thing all those people have in common is that not one of them has a single thing in common with me.

  I’m not athletic. I’m so perfectly designed by nature to spread out on the couch, I should be made of crochet. I’m scared of water and I’m scared of the deep and I’m convinced that deep water will be the death of me. I can’t swim for the two hours it will take me to cross to Asia; I don’t even stay in the bath that long. People drown on long swims. Their hearts stop or they cramp or they panic and swallow water. I don’t want to put negative thoughts in my head (people have been trying to fill my head with positive thoughts lately, as though they’re somehow more buoyant), but experience suggests I might be a panicker. I’ll be all alone out there with an ocean on each side, and if the wind picks up and brings the waves I won’t even be able to see the land.

  These are my darkest fears and I’m in the middle of them and I’ve done it to myself, because here I am in Turkey with a Speedo that started off too small but is rapidly becoming too big, standing on the lapping shore of the biggest mistake of my life and the Dardanelles in front of me. How did this happen? I must be old enough to know better.

  But I’m here preci
sely because I am old enough to know better.

  I’m here because I recently hit middle age.

  1

  The Old Man and the Sea

  The Soaring Eagle Spur, Cape Town International Airport

  10 a.m.

  Two years earlier.

  “Are you sure you’re not having a midlife crisis?” said my partner.

  I paused with a chip halfway to my mouth.

  “Why would you say that?” I said in a strangled voice.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she said. “Lots of people have a midlife crisis. At a certain age.”

  “I’m too young to have a midlife crisis!” I yelled, or I think I yelled. My partner isn’t someone to be yelled at in an airport restaurant and she was still there, so maybe I only said it and the yelling part was in my head.

  I call her “my partner” because some time ago she asked me why I called her my girlfriend.

  “Aren’t you my girlfriend?” I asked.

  “Are we fourteen?” she replied.

  Personally, I think calling her my partner makes us sound like we’re about to go on a crime spree or open a coffee shop together, but okay.

  “Daphne’s having a midlife crisis,” my partner said, “and she’s the same age as you.”

  Daphne’s a lawyer who recently flew to Bali to live in a hut near the sea and write a fantasy novel. Her husband and kids and her friends see this behaviour as a midlife crisis, but I’ve met her husband and kids. Apart from the fantasy novel, I think she’s being quite sensible.

  (I should probably mention that Daphne is not her real name. I don’t think Daphne is anyone’s real name, other than one of the kids in Scooby-Doo. It’s not easy, coming up with names. If you use a name that belongs to someone you know, everyone thinks you’re talking about them, but the older you get, the more people you know with names. These are some of the problems you don’t anticipate when you sit down to write a book.)

  “Forget Daphne,” I said. “I’m still young. I’ve got years to go before I’m middle-aged.”

  She looked at me.

  “Right?” I said.

  This was not the airport conversation I wanted to be having. I’ve had high expectations of airport conversations, ever since the teenaged me got all gussied up one Saturday night to watch Casablanca on TV with his mom. That sentence should tell you all you need to know about my youthful romantic career, but let me add that afterwards I started imitating Humphrey Bogart in the hope of becoming more attractive to girls. It isn’t entirely surprising that this strategy did not find traction with the women of Durban; I’m only grateful I wasn’t punched more often by random strangers. You’d have to be the Dalai Lama not to wish physical harm on a chain-smoking sixteen-year-old in a fedora and trench coat, talking as though his molars were glued together, calling people “shweetheart”.

  But I never quite shook the conviction that the main reason for airports, and at least one of the reasons for having a girlfriend, was so you could stand there with one of you leaving, bodies taut with feeling, talking in low voices about things that matter.

  I’ve had plenty of airport conversations since then, but they never really worked out that way. Maybe it’s because Humphrey Bogart had a misty wartime airstrip to work with, and I had the Soaring Eagle Spur. Also, Bogie was sending Ingrid Bergman to go win the war against the Nazis, and I was mainly saying, “Call me when you get there” and “Will you miss me?” and “But you’ll miss me, right?”

  I did once break up with someone at the airport, or rather she broke up with me. I stood there stoic as Bogart and watched her walk away, and I made sure I shed no tear. Then I went into Cosmic Candy and bought a big bag of sour worms.

  But this should have been a good airport conversation, because for once I really was flying off to do something adventurous. I didn’t want to debate how old I’m getting; I wanted to squint bravely into the distance and say that if anything should happen to me, we’d always have Sea Point.

  “I’m not saying you’re middle-aged …” she said.

  “That’s an ugly word to come from such a beautiful mouth, shweetheart.”

  “But maybe you’re having some sort of crisis—”

  “Tcha!”

  “—of the kind that sometimes affects people in their middle years.”

  I forgot I was being Bogie. “Stop saying that! Maybe you’re having a midlife crisis!”

  “You’re going off to do what?” she said. “Swim with sharks?”

  “To dive with man-eating sharks,” I corrected her proudly. “In the open ocean.”

  “And you’re going with your equally almost-middle-aged friend?”

  “Seriously, I wish you would stop using that word.”

  “And this is on a list of things you want to do before you die?”

  “Number seven.”

  “But you’re only doing it now. Out of all the years you’ve been alive …”

  “It’s not that long.”

  “… you’re choosing to do it the month before you turn forty.”

  “I see where you’re going with this but you’re wrong. We’re not doing this for my birthday; we’re doing this because Clarence is getting married.”

  Clarence isn’t his real name. I don’t know anyone called Clarence, except Clarence Clemons, former saxophonist for the E Street Band.

  She looked at me for a long time.

  “All right,” she said.

  “All right?”

  “Fine. You’re not having a midlife crisis.”

  “Thank you!”

  “You’ve been behaving perfectly normally.”

  “Good.”

  “I’ll mind my own business.”

  “All right,” I said. “Now listen, if something should happen to me out there, I just want you to remember, we’ll always have …”

  “Oh look,” she said, “they’re calling your flight.”

  *

  The south coast of KwaZulu-Natal

  8 a.m.

  Everything would have been all right if only we’d never met Captain Spike, the one-eyed shark whisperer.

  I flew to Durban and met Clarence at the airport and we rented a car and drove south through the cane fields, listening to East Coast Radio.

  I don’t know what powerful grip the late eighties have on the good people who work there, but if you feel too much time has passed since last you heard a song by Patrick Swayze, East Coast Radio is the station for you. It’s like voodoo slavery. Who knows what peace Madonna might have found by now if a piece of her immortal soul wasn’t chained to East Coast Radio, singing “La Isla Bonita”? Someone needs to burn down the ECR studios just to set free the spirits of Terence Trent D’Arby and the Cutting Crew.

  But still, it wasn’t all bad, driving with the windows down and the smell of sugarcane and salt, just two young dudes blasting Phil Collins’ “Groovy Kind of Love”, lookin’ for adventure. Midlife crisis? Midlife crisis? Look at us now!

  The place we rented was high on a ridge, a little outside town, overlooking a brown river with an arched railway bridge. The woman who owned it had an Italian name and wore gold jewellery and so much mascara it looked like she’d been using prank binoculars.

  “Are you Italian?” I asked her.

  She told us there was a time the whole town was Italian. There were Italian bakeries and delis and churches consecrated to Italian saints. The streets were named after Italian families, and of all the families, hers was the most Italian. She took us to the edge of the bluff and pointed out the extent of their land. Across the river was a puff of white smoke.

  “That’s our steam train,” she said.

  “You own a steam train?”

  She shrugged.

  “So is your family in the sugarcane business?”

  “Pah!”

  She looked cagey. I knew what she must be thinking: Who is this handsome stranger, new to town and asking questions about the family?

  “We’r
e in the closure business,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said. “The closure business.”

  Later Clarence and I drove into town.

  “What’s the closure business?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” said Clarence. “You should have asked her.”

  “The closure business,” I said. “Tell me that doesn’t sound sinister. The closure business.”

  “So what?”

  “They’re Italians. Closure business. Closure business. Jeez, I hope that just means they’re undertakers.”

  “Mmm,” said Clarence. He was being unusually quiet. Even on the drive out from the airport he’d been holding back, as though waiting for me to say something. He hadn’t even joined in with Wang Chung on the radio, and Clarence likes to have fun tonight as much as anybody.

  “What’s the matter with you? You don’t want to know if we’re renting from the mob? There could be bodies under the lawn.”

  “I’m just thinking about the wedding,” he said.

  “Maybe that’s the closure business,” I said cheerfully. “Maybe they’re wedding planners.”

  Clarence looked at me without speaking. Lately people were doing a lot of looking at me without speaking.

  “What?” I said.

  “Are we ever going to talk about this?” he said.

  “Can we get some food first?”

  “You know that’s why we’re here, right?” he said. “Because I’m getting married.”

  “Is that why we’re here? I thought we’re here to dive with sharks.”

  He looked at me some more.

  *

  I’ve been friends with Clarence for a long time. We once hitchhiked to Grahamstown together to see girls who didn’t really want to see us. He taught me the internet and when I was learning to drive he let me practise on his car. For a while we had a standing dare to meet for a swim on 15 July every year, the cruel midwinter, but after a while we let it lapse with neither of us mentioning it again. He once decided that when he turned ninety he would jump into the core of a nuclear power station, and even though I don’t know if that’s possible and I have no beef with nuclear power, I promised to help him. For a very long time our friendship was elastic and break-proof, until I fell for the oldest trick of all. He broke it off with a girlfriend who had been making him unhappy, and then asked me what I thought about her.