Cruel Crazy Beautiful World Read Online Free PDF Page A

define beautiful ?
    – I’m sorry if I caught you in a sour mood.
    – I’m not sour. You sidestep questions.
    – Maybe we can shoot the breeze another time. I’ll buy you a coffee. How does that sound?
    He just snorts and turns his head away.
    I stand spurned on the harbour wall. A seagull marks time over my head.
    I run on along the path, following the shoreline, through a kind of limbo curiously devoid of all the caterwauling and mosque-calling of a Cape Town dawn. I run past the Marine Hotel, past Kwaaiwater, past Voëlklip and all the way out to a long lagoon beach that reels out forever. The beach is empty. One lone sculler plies the lagoon. A luminous balloon of a sun tints the sea perlemoen pink.
    At Voëlklip I stand on the rocks and scan a listlessly lilting sea for the telltale V of spray: a whale’s blow. No luck. Just a distant fishing boat. And the sun tugs free of her low mooring and floats ropelessly.
    I run on again. Just before I come to the tidal pool below the Marine Hotel, a hullabaloo of flocking seagulls draws my eyes to a sun-flared mirage on the path ahead.
    Seagulls, flapping like ticker tape in a berg wind, fuss and flock over a sylphlike girl holding half a loaf of white bread in her hand.
    My feet falter. The path pivots under me. Out at sea a southern right whale surfaces.
    Bread. Girl of skin and hair and bone. She’s no mirage.
    The sun skips off seagull feathers like stray sparks. Cocky sparrows land whistling on her sun-haloed head. Ratty dassies gaze beady eyes at her, then dart for the bread she scatters at her bare feet. Her light white dress dances a flirting flamenco in the wind. Sunlight filters through the filmy cloth to hint at her sinuous figure.
    Seeing me gawp lamely, she calms her dress with her hands. Then she laughs a string of pearls.
    I gasp a draft of air. White noise hazes through my gaffed head.
    She casts the last of the bread to the bickering gulls.
    A gecko-fingered, sweet-smelling frangipani drops white petals as she walks into a low-walled yard. Hibiscus flares a lurid red. Cannas spit fames of yellow and orange. A sunbird blurs from aloe flower to aloe flower: a dizzying, unearthly green.
    Hermanus is no longer a dim, far-flung town. It is the compass foot of a world shot in Fujifilm.
    I run on. My feet dance like an impala’s.

6
    S OMEWHERE SOUTH OF THE Limpopo.
    At first Jabulani thinks the crow-dark shadow under a far acacia is a rock. Then it shifts in a way rocks don’t.
    His feet shuffle to a halt in the dust. He squints into the low, shimmering sun to figure it out.
    He sees the telltale, inverted double V.
    His instinctive, heart-jolting thought is Hyena!
    But a hyena would have yipped his lust to the sky by now. This crouching animal eyes him coolly, biding his time.
    Fear shoots through Jabulani’s bones. Yet he stands dead still, casting his eyes about for stones.
    No stones. Just wiry grass and dark dust.
    He drops a shoulder to swing his rucksack free.
    The animal unfolds again. The outline’s too slick to be a ragged-skinned wild dog. It has to be a stray farm dog.
    Jabulani fiddles his pocketknife out of his rucksack, then takes one slow step backwards.
    The dog sniffs his brew of raw fear, smoky sweat and dry blood.
    If he turns on his heels now, the dog will go for him. He has to hold his gaze. His life hangs on it.
    The dog snarls his snaggle-toothed jaw at him.
    Jabulani’s plan is to hurl his rucksack skywards if the dog goes for him. The dog will shift focus to pivot his head after the decoy. Then Jabulani can sidestep and stab the dog in his neck.
    If the dog’s momentum plucks the knife from his hand, he’ll just have to go for the eyes with his tatty All Stars.
    Out of the corner of his eye, Jabulani sees another black form peel out of the dust. Another dog, he thinks.
    Then another. And another. Four demon dogs homing in on him from four compass points.
    Change of plan. He’ll have to fight with the knife. Swing wildly, instead