Like Katherine

“Vicky. This is fucking crap. We don’t speak to spokespeople.”

“I always think that’s bit of a contradiction.” It doesn’t matter what I say at this stage.

“We need the fucking minister. All this arsehole will do is pass the buck and it’ll all be a fucking waste of time”.

Do we have to do this dance? Every day? For a moment, I am all resentment and resist taking up hold but then I relent and we move off round the floor.

“Shaun. It’ll be fine....”

“Where’s the fucking minister?”

“The minister’s on a plane to Ghana for the whole of the time we’re on the air.”

“What about the DG then?”

“He’s on the same plane.”

“For fuck’s sake. These people must have passports like phone directories.”

“Deon tried to get the minister all yesterday afternoon. She’s not talking even if she could. Which she can’t. But it’ll be fine. The spokesperson’s the one quoted in the Sundays, you can ask him all the difficult questions. You’ll give him rope and he’ll hang himself and you will be covered with glory because nobody does this like you do.”

“Well I hope they come crashing out of the sky in a ball of fucking flames.”

And we’re back to our seats, flushed but happy.

“Tea?”

He hands me a fresh mint teabag. Mrs Shaun Henry has recently decided that Mr Shaun Henry, radio star, man of the people, presenter of Cape News Radio’s morning show, has got to take better care of himself. She thinks this will be helped if he has herbal infusions rather than the six cups of black coffee that used to get him from 3.30am to 9am every weekday. I take the teabag and my own private jar of decaf off to the kitchen.

Four o’clock in the morning is always a bad time to be up. Even those heady evenings when dinner has led to late drinks, a walk through the city and to someone’s bed, by four your mouth and eyes are drying out and you’re both turning back into real people.

Getting up in order to be anywhere by four is unnatural and inhuman and tears strips off your sanity. Four is the time I have to be here to guide this radio show onto the air. The task begins with shepherding its volatile, corrosive and occasionally brilliant presenter through the daily maze of his elaborate preparations. At this stage, the to-do list includes ego propping, handholding, fact checking and, and I have ceased to fight it, tea-making.

Our show is the background, so we’re told, for nearly half a million Capetonian morning routines between the hours of six and nine. We are an alternative to the DJs that say ‘that was’ and ‘this is’ and ‘welcome to it’. We live in a city where some things are right but many things are wrong and someone needs to ask questions. That’s why we’re here. Well, it’s why Shaun is. He’s on a mission. He grew up in Mitchells Plain. When they hear the name, the city’s genteel southern suburbs think immediately of brown faces with toothless grins, tattooed drug lords and cheap lives. There was plenty of that growing up, Shaun tells us, slightly too often. We roll our eyes knowing that he now drives home in a different direction to a well-appointed, hacienda-style homestead on a thousand square meters with a lagoon pool and thatched lapa complete with bar. But, in the eighteen months I’ve been here, I’ve learnt that in South Africa, where you come from is a powerful thing. If someone doesn’t ask you, they’re wondering. When they know, they’re adding up the sum of what it means.

And me? It’s hardly my fight after all. An English girl with a home counties accent whose only cause, as one louchely pretentious BBC presenter I once worked with pointed out, is the constant search for the grand peut-etre. The short answer is that I abandoned London because I felt lagged, like a geyser. Nothing I touched there produced any sensation. I’m using the jagged edges of this half-hewn place to reach my nerves.

I return to our production nook with mugs. Shaun is hunched over his computer and somewhere inside it a script is taking shape. Yesterday my afternoon producer and I decided who should be interviewed to explain why the water supply in Noordhoek is still off, why our weepingly beautiful World Cup Stadium is nearly bankrupt and when the sixth run of Defending the Caveman will start at the Theatre on the Bay. The spokesperson for the housing minister will talk to us about why the new blocks of flats built on either side of the highway from the airport are, without anyone ever having lived in them, falling down. And perhaps someone who has lost their dog will find it because we are a live show and we can make these kinds of things happen.

“All right?”

“Yes. Does Carrie know that the SA Open draw happened yesterday?”

“I’m sure she does. I’ll check”.

Fucking golf. That’s another thing. The gangsta-boy is now addicted to golf. I make my way to the newsroom where our newsreader is scouring SAPA and Reuters. She’s never lived down the time she missed the fact that Helen Suzman had died in the night so she’s permanently anxious to avoid a repeat performance. Carrie the sports girl is also scanning websites.

“SA Open?”

“Got it”.

I return to the production office but Shaun has taken the Cape Times to the lavatory. It seems all is right with the world.

At nine o’clock we all breathe out for what feels like the first time in three hours. Shaun balls up pieces of paper and shoots them into the bin. Now the red light is off, he is beaming and my long lost friend. The housing ministry spokesperson turned out to be gratifyingly hot-headed and had clearly missed the mail about media training. He’d tied himself in knots when pressed on what his department was doing to fix the crumbling houses, claiming never to have made previous promises that Shaun could quote at him chapter and verse.

“Didn’t you say to me, only six months ago, that this project would be finished this year, that people would be in those homes?”

“I said that was our aim.”

“Your words were ‘I guarantee that people will be having Christmas in their own living rooms’. Are you denying you said that?”

We walk along the corridor and back to the production office. At a point we missed, the sun has come up. From the floor to ceiling windows we ignore a view that people travel thousands of miles to see. Our studios cling to the lower slopes of the cable car side of Table Mountain. From here, the mountain swings away from us in green shrub that goes up towards sheer grey walls. Today the sky above it is a pale gold and it has its famous cloud tablecloth hanging lightly over its central edge.

Back at my desk, I take my cell phone off silent and am relieved that there are no missed calls but as soon as I flick the button, it rings. I answer it as I get up and slide back the balcony door to go and smoke.

“Hello beautiful”.

My heart sinks.

“Hi.”

“How did it go? I heard the housing guy. He got quite woes with your man.”

“If that means annoyed, yes he did”. I’m not playing nicely and I’m not well slept enough to try.

“Right. Well. I just wanted to say hello. You want to come round tonight? And, before you say it, I know you have to be in bed by nine. Maybe we both should be in bed by eight, eh?”

“I don’t know, Carel. Can I call you later?”

It’s going to bed that had got me into this in the first place. I had left England behind and with it the sum total of my adult life, packed into boxes or unscrewed and restored to flat pack status and distributed around various attics and spare rooms. It didn’t amount to a great deal – books, lamps, cheap furniture, chipped kitchenware, unmatched wine glasses, stained cutlery and a few clip-framed posters. It also included an unsatisfactory boyfriend. Five thousand miles had made me realise just how unsatisfactory.

Cape Town was my clean sheet. A place to write myself any way I wanted. What I didn’t want was anyone in the cosy boyfriend slot. And then, one night six months after I got here, I had met Carel in some pretentious spot in the Cape Quarter. I was feeling thin and words were coming out in the right order. I wanted someone upon whom to focus the force of my fascinating otherness. Carel got in the way of the beam and was gratifyingly mesmerized. He was mildly Afrikaans and violently sexually attractive with soft, sandy hair, golden skin and the body of a swimmer – which he had been, he told me, in high school. I’d simply wanted to sleep with him.

“Come on, I haven’t seen you since Sunday.”

I suck ruinously on my cigarette. I have changed to an ultra light brand, which seems to have slightly less flavour than Cape Town’s pollution.

“No. I’ll only eat and drink things and want to stay up late.”

It had been a new wantonness I was rather proud of, part of my reinvention. But it was about sex not life. Weeknight fast food and television was not part of my plan. We had split up several times over the past year but kept falling back towards each other in a miserable clutter of mismatched attraction.

“I promise I’ll make you go to bed early and leave you to it.”

“No. I’m exhausted and I don’t know what time I’m going to get away from here.”

He breathes out through his nose. In the background I can hear male laughter. To continue to channel Carel’s rather austere but irresistible sexual energy my way, I’d had to allow him to think we had some kind of real future. I’d let myself be whipped round to his parents on only our second weekend, to create beetroot salad with his mother and look at his father’s roses. They had nudged one another approvingly. He works in an office with men whose women learned everything they needed to know about beetroot salad at an early age.

“Listen, I’ve got to go to the wash-up. They’re waiting for me. I’ll call you later.”

There is no reply. I press the red button, stub my cigarette into the earth of a grisly pot plant and slide the door back.

“Princess Victoria, you’re revolting.” Shaun is already standing by his desk, waiting to go and discuss his profitable morning with the rest of the team and to see if we can come up with a plan to do something similar tomorrow.

“Silence, colonized scum. I’ll have you thrown into the tower.”

We go and sit round a table and talk about prospects for the next day’s show.

The room hangs out over the sloping road outside. I’m looking through the window and watching the ‘up’ cable car pass the ‘down’ one, as they will every fifteen minutes until the light goes. In late spring, down at the tip of the continent, reaching towards the bottom of the earth, our evenings are long. They are one of the few things that remind me of being in England, one of the few things about it that I miss.