In Love’s Elusive Embrace

Chapter 5: The Norwood Bridge

Yonga’s parents were unbearable unwelcoming to the idea of intimacy between two men. Their comments when After Nine played on SABC 1 unambiguously told Yonga that. Which was why he had to lie whenever Luntu visited him at his house and called him his “friend from school” — if only to be with his guy. Luntu’s mother, however, flipped that coin. She welcomed Yonga affectionately. She didn’t seem to mind whatever was going on between the boys. Although, one day, all stern and staring him right in the eye, she said, ‘If you ever break my son’s heart, I will castrate you with a blunt knife and stuff your little balls in your mouth. Do you understand me?’ Yonga nodded vigorously, understanding.

It was only natural then — to the both of them, to Yonga and her — that she was the one who broke the news to him.

She called him on the following Sunday morning. Yonga had to know, and, more importantly, find out from her than anybody else. Chances were that he would only know during the long December holidays, one way or another, from friends — his and Luntu’s. (That was if, of course, he wouldn’t show up at their house after Luntu’s phone went unanswered, every time he called him.) She couldn’t bear that thought — the thought of him finding out like that. She had to be the one to tell him.

‘Mnt’ anam,’ she said. ‘There is some bad news I need to tell you,’ she said as soon as Yonga answered the phone. The other line was quiet. Could he have detected from her tone that “bad” really meant “the most terrible”? ‘There has been an accident.’ She paused. Yonga could hear her breathing heavily, almost as if gasping for air. ‘Luntu has passed on.’

‘Ma?!’ he didn’t mean for it to sound like that; it came out like a cry, wild, raspy, yet so low that he may have whispered it.

‘They say a truck hit them — all four of them: Luntu, his brother, two of his brother’s friends. None of them survived.’ She paused again. Yonga could hear her scratching her throat, her breath low and heavy. Her voice sounded alien; he himself unable to contain the tears, his voice swallowed up in the lump that closed up his throat. He continued pressing the phone to his ear, his head light as if emptied of all its contents. ‘A pothole on the road, at the beginning of the Norwood Bridge, caused the accident, as I understand. They were driving back here, home, when the accident happened.’ She stopped suddenly, waiting for him to respond, perhaps; or she was done altogether, reached the end of her strength. But hearing Yonga’s clipped responses, his voice so low, stifled, choking, she imagined from swallowed tears, she herself cried fresh tears.

She grieved for the dead and the living. For her sons, and for Yonga. She had loved him like one of her own. The only children she ever knew were boys, sons. Luntu and his brother. And then there was Yonga.

That phone call happened some five years ago. (He can’t remember the last time he spoke to her these past few years.)

Memory. Keep. Erase. Remember. How long? Five years. So short in its longness.

Since he’d come to university in 2009, Yonga had to negotiate with himself when it came to considering a deeper level of intimacy with someone: that is, whatever was a level more than just a one-night-stand or a regular fuck. Things have to change, he said to himself, I can’t go on like this. It was not a question of moving on rather than one of making peace, then. Finding a way to move on, learning to dance to a new song. He’s been trying to find and simultaneously live the answer to these questions. But one thing became clear to him: it is tricky business getting over a first love. He had not been aware, at the time, that there was never such a thing as forgetting.

A first love that was brutally snatched by the dark angel of death. Probably the most beautiful thing he had ever had. No, not thing, and perhaps not the most beautiful, and certainly not his to own. The most complete person he had ever known, dripping with beauty, riddled with imperfections, human. He had something unexplainable about him. Something that captured Yonga from the day they first saw each other. And when they were together, something Yonga could never get enough of. That thing that always made him smile and laugh and stroke his heart all warm and mushy. And when Yonga was angry or upset, Luntu would sieve out the anger with humour; Yonga would feel ridiculous for being angry in the first place, laugh at himself. That was the thing about Luntu. Something about him said he knew how to live, how not to take himself too seriously and risk having life pass him by. One of those people who might say things like “live in the moment”.