Breakfast

 

Breakfast

After John Steinbeck

Ferial Mohamed

 

It is the innocence of that time that stays with me. Why else hold onto a simple memory and draw it out, even long after it should be diluted. It is the feeling I recall, a feeling, not every detail so much, but how the sky opened that morning, the vibrations invisible in the crisped air, the way the waking rays flecked against my naked arms, blushed my cheeks a brownish-red, left me breathless.

Dawn had already showed itself and the morning was cool but bright. Delectable it was, in all the ways that morning and beauty purely is, enlivened by the promise of possibility which lays before it. A familiarity within a newness. The orange swarm which earlier drenched the horizontal plateau of Table Mountain had disappeared, smoking like the pipe of Van Hunks on the day he challenged the Devil and beat him. The Devil being naturally of course a sore loser. But this was not important on this day. Winning and losing. This morning when he strolled casually into our camp, his jeans scraping the edge of his boots, his chequered shirt, sleeveless, hanging loose. We were not accustomed to strangers and when I saw him I hardly thought that he might stay.

It was the summer month of December and we were renting a place near the sea, my father having brought us there from Pretoria for our end of year holiday. We were lodged in a rondawel, a little round hut with a thatched roof, geckos and the occasional scorpion falling from the wood, the hut divided semi-comfortably into three sleeping compartments and a small kitchenette where we kept some milk, and bread, and oil, a few groceries, and a pot that we could cook in. We bathed that summer in the communal shower and had to use the outhouse just a few metres from where we slept. The same shower the visitors from the caravan park used. I kept my flip-flops on when I washed and had by now grown accustomed to the cold water, but it was so hot in the night and my skin so sticky, it almost didn’t matter.

The days we spent at the beach, the nights we made a fire outside to braai and sat around the concrete table with its concrete benches playing klawerjas and five cards, drinking coffee from a metal flask and eating koesisters by the pool near the café, the only café within walking distance for many kilometres.

I was barely a young woman then, still a girl really, as I stood in the doorway of our hut in the morning mist, with my little brother squarely on my hip, while my mother fried fish fingers and eggs and chilli sausages in the kitchen right behind me. I could smell the toast and the butter dripping off it from the smoke emanating around us, when he made his way up the walkway towards me.  

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It was at the same moment that my father and twin brother came across the grassy patch that separated our lodging from the low white dunes that led to the beach on the opposite side. They were each wearing Wellington boots up to their knees, carrying a fishing rod and my father had a blue plastic bucket with freshly caught harders and crabs in it, having been out all night in a tent on the beach, rising early before the tide changed to get a good catch from the shore.  Their faces were unshaven, stubbly, their hair dishevelled. In the distance I could hear the wash of the sea they had now left behind as it intertwined with the coastline, and overhead gulls circled the crag where people had tossed leftover bits of fish and chips.

Around us neighbours, holidaymakers, were starting to wake up, the rustle of morning noise, children had started running about, and the day was beginning.

My father and brother came nearer. The stranger on the opposite side meeting their stride.

I hoistened my little brother higher on my hip as he half-lept from my arms and reached for our father to scoop him up, his eyes swollen from slumber and his voice unsoftened by distance to sleep.

Shameeg, my twin, intercepted our little brother’s reaching arms and took him from me. He and I had been born three minutes apart, but I afforded him none of the authority of an older sibling, a point of endless demand from him. Putting the plastic bucket down, he ruffled our little brother’s hair as the boy fidgeted with the line of the fishing rod and tried to peek at the dead fish, having been promised that he would get a sea monster if he was good.

“You lost son?” my father said to the stranger, his eyes meeting his at the entrance to our rondawel.

My father nodded his head towards the young man, possibly only a little older than Shameeg and I.

“Not lost Uncle, we just need some help back at our tent,” he said pointing backwards. “Our car won’t start, and we were hoping to go into town this morning.”

 “Did you catch anything?” my mother called out from behind us, the sizzle of butter and eggs still fragranting the air.

My father looked toward the stranger and offered a pat against his shoulder. “Come in and have breakfast, then we can sort you out. Where’s your tent,” he asked as he put his fishing gear against the rondawel wall and led the way in to greet my mother, pinching her gently on the sides of her waist, then handing her the pail with the morning’s catch.

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It did not take long to gut the fish and fry them in the pan with butter and lemons until the skin turned crisp and brown. We arranged our holiday (plastic) plates and mugs on the concrete table outside the rondawel, placing it gingerly on paper serviettes which I recall had balloons printed on them, and the words HAPPY BIRTHDAY emblazoned in the corners, the ones we had packed in from home, remnants of an old birthday party, and then we sat down on the concrete bench which ran in a circle around the table, the pan sizzling in the centre with fresh rolls wrapped in wax paper.

“Where you from?” my father asked as we ate.

“From upcountry.”

“Yous gonna stay ong? We still here another week.”

“2 more days,” he said, and as he spoke I looked up and his gaze was fixed on me. A sliver of a current frazzled me, like I had placed my wet hands on an electric switch, and I started, and had to look down fast, so that I did not feel too embarrassed and more importantly, before my father or brother could notice.

My little brother, with his compass for exacerbating the awkward, grabbed at a piece of bread from the table and flung it.

“Look at this child hey, feed the baboons, hey, where’s your manners?” my hit him on his hands too softly, and still he wailed.

“But you never know,” the young man said, “we might still decide to stay on a bit longer,” and the way I recall it, I almost think he smiled at me when he said it.

“Not a bad idea,” my brother said, “the fish are biting.”

“The locals here are sweeping up full nets.” my father said, “the ocean providing us with full bellies. Rizq,” and he lifted his eyes to the sky, where clouds hovered now in a slim, misty film.

“Eat, eat,” my mother said, “it’s a sin to leave leftovers.”

After we had our fill we cleared the table and the young man turned to thank my mother, I scurried into the kitchenette, busying myself with plates. I hovered there, over the sink, wiping my hands incessantly on my dress, checking the window to see if he was still there, listening to hear him say goodbye, but after a few moments he appeared in the tiny doorway, his mouth drawn into an awkward half-smile. I returned a mediocre grimace, and my father appeared unexpectedly behind him, “Orright, we can go now, I’m ready,” my father said, and he and my twin brother shuffled him out as he looked back towards me, away to his own camp, to where he had come from.

It was only later when I sat alone on the beach, reading Wuthering Heights, studying the quiet sea, that a warm feeling came over me as I recalled his arrival, his voice, his words, his gaze, his nervous smile, and I queried how perhaps, when Shameeg and my father came back from fishing, I could ask without betraying myself, about his whereabouts, and if they knew if he was coming back.