Divine Julia turned 49 a week or so back and threw a small party at the dam on what may have been the last truly, fiercely blue day of summer.
People came from all nooks and crannies including the two of her four chillens who are still way too self-involved to have the faintest clue what a woman - O what a woman! - they have for a mother.
“Just wait,” I tell Julia at the times when they say unspeakably cruel teenager things to her, “One day - like when they’re 45, I think to myself - they’ll realise how amazing you are.”
Not sure it helps her right now.
About ten of us spent the morning cooking, eating breakfast and yakking in the sun; sipping icy Ponzgraz and leaping from the cliffs into glittering water.
There were some people I’d never met.
A slack, pasty, trembling person crouched in the shade of an umbrella.
“I’m a novelist,” he blurted.
His eyes quivered on Julia’s riveting, tanned, bikini’d body.
He claims to have been a recce.
My bullshit radar went off with a deafening, redlightflashing foghorn alarm.
I know what the carriage of a former elite soldier looks like. I recognise the force field that goes with such men.
I could be terribly wrong. But if I am, if he was a recce, then there's something badly squiffy-’n-twisted with this one. He wrote a book about his experiences, which won awards I'm told. In Afrikaans, thank merciful God, so I never have to read it.
I fled early, gripped by bile rising inexplicably in my throat.
Lame ducks and oddballs excluded, it was a good day.
Above all, to dearest Ul’s, one of very few who understand my native tongue in this surreal journey I’m on, may you have joy in abundance forever.
People came from all nooks and crannies including the two of her four chillens who are still way too self-involved to have the faintest clue what a woman - O what a woman! - they have for a mother.
“Just wait,” I tell Julia at the times when they say unspeakably cruel teenager things to her, “One day - like when they’re 45, I think to myself - they’ll realise how amazing you are.”
Not sure it helps her right now.
About ten of us spent the morning cooking, eating breakfast and yakking in the sun; sipping icy Ponzgraz and leaping from the cliffs into glittering water.
There were some people I’d never met.
A slack, pasty, trembling person crouched in the shade of an umbrella.
“I’m a novelist,” he blurted.
His eyes quivered on Julia’s riveting, tanned, bikini’d body.
He claims to have been a recce.
My bullshit radar went off with a deafening, redlightflashing foghorn alarm.
I know what the carriage of a former elite soldier looks like. I recognise the force field that goes with such men.
I could be terribly wrong. But if I am, if he was a recce, then there's something badly squiffy-’n-twisted with this one. He wrote a book about his experiences, which won awards I'm told. In Afrikaans, thank merciful God, so I never have to read it.
I fled early, gripped by bile rising inexplicably in my throat.
Lame ducks and oddballs excluded, it was a good day.
Above all, to dearest Ul’s, one of very few who understand my native tongue in this surreal journey I’m on, may you have joy in abundance forever.
1 comment:
My, My, My! Journo indeed. Loved it! I shall start a blog of my own and will hope you dont "speet" on it, inspirational.
Mx
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