Moxyland

Lerato

So here we are, three mismatched women holding a meaningless memorial to three people I don’t remember. It’s bad enough I have to endure my sisters – Zama looking positively plump and matronly in a white kaftan and Xhosastyled headscarf, her attempt to dress up nice for the ancestors; Sipho in jeans and an orange t-shirt, with a shaven head that makes her look like a chemo survivor – but the gale-force wind is something else. We have to lean into it to get to the edge of the cliff overlooking Cape Point, and the herbs Sipho throws into the air get whipped straight back at us. There is a small cluster of foreign tourists who have braved the baboons and the wind to get up here, and who are utterly charmed by the proceedings, cameras clicking.

The reason we’re doing it here, at the craggy tip of the peninsula, rather than somewhere less exposed to the southeaster (like Clifton corporate, say) is because Sipho says we have to throw our prayers out to the wind and sea to carry them to our loved ones. It would be touching, if it weren’t so Hallmark, if we hadn’t done it all before. As remembrance rituals go, it’s an empty gesture, Sipho chanting some Buddhist shit and tossing around more bits of crushed leaf, just adding to the flotsam already whirling in the wind.

‘If we were following tradition, we would kill a goat,’ says Zama sagely, as if she hasn’t offered some variation on this insight every year. This makes me lose my patience.

‘As if we would get a licence to kill a goat in public. As if our Buddhist vegan over here would stand for it. But okay, Zama, assuming we could get that all worked out, then we could all have a big party, just like tradition specifies, eat our goat, drink mqombothi which you would have brewed up as the eldest, and each of us would get a bit of bloody sinew and hide tied onto our wrists to dry out. Because nothing says thanks to your ancestors like a bracelet made of smelly goat’s flesh.’

Zama is pissed. ‘I think it sucks that you don’t have any respect for your culture.’

‘I think it sucks that you’re deluding yourself that you have some deep spiritual connection, like you didn’t just read it on Wikipedia. There’s a difference between tradition and culture, Zama. The only fucking culture we got was growing up in a corporate skills school.’

Fighting instantly reduces us to being nine and six all over again, with Sipho trying to play peacekeeper in the middle, spinning her hippie crap about the moment and how we’re ruining it.

‘Please guys. Look!’ Sipho pulls a bundle of red elastic bands from her pocket.

‘Stealing stationery from the monks again?’

‘Lerato!’ Zama snaps, scandalised, as if she doesn’t agree with my diagnosis that Sipho’s a nutjob.

‘No, look. It’s not goat. But it’s something.’

Zama’s eyes go all glassy. ‘This is really… Did you bring this along specially?’

‘No. It was what you were saying.’ She is so sweet, so much a naïf, you can’t really be mean to her. I wonder if she’d be tougher, smarter, if she wasn’t always trying to balance us out.

I snap the elastic onto Zama’s wrist, stretching it out, so that it’ll hurt on the rebound. ‘Uh, yeah, but isn’t this more Kabbalah than Buddhist? Now there’s a tradition.’

They both glare at me.

Family are the people who irritate you the most and the most effortlessly. If it were anyone else, I wouldn’t give a damn and it bugs me a lot that I let them get to me, Zama’s more-spiritual-than-you bullshit and Sipho’s little-girl-lost act. Not for the first time, I swear this is the last time. That I’m not coming out here again. I will stop returning phone calls and emails. I will cut conversations short. I will forget birthdays and not be able to make anniversaries. I will let this drift, like continents, slowly, imperceptibly. Or fuck it, just put one between us. My exit plan is my faux-goat red elastic, my backdoor embedded in the adboards, sending me secrets worth money to the right eye. If Stefan doesn’t come through, it’s all I have to hang onto.

We sit in awkward silence inside the restaurant, protected from the wind but not the uncrossable distances between us. The only part of family ‘tradition’ we get right is the getting drunk, so that when I get home, I pass out and miss everything.