The Reactive by Masande Ntshanga Read Free Book Online Page B

man set on changing the nature of everything I’ve known here, and I don’t know where to walk to that’s flung far enough from his reach. Maybe I should accept this and no longer go on fighting him.
    Done with the session, Ruan, Cissie and I decide to go for a pizza. We take a taxi back to Claremont and walk into Café D’Capo on Main Road. They have this special there we can afford, and so we order two bottles of wine and polish them off over a large margherita.
    Then we order another bottle.
    During intervals, I look across the road to where I could buy airtime. Ruan says he knows a guy who lives in a flat in the same building as the café; that he can pat him down for a
bankie,
about three grams of cheese.
    We take the lift up. The guy holding the
bankie’s
called Arnold. He comes out in silk boxers, with tousled hair, a boom of down-tempo beats pounding out of his living room. Ruan hands him three five-tigers for the weed, and calls him an overpriced but reliable asshole. They share a forced, stilted laugh, and then we take the lift back down.
    We walk past Café D’Capo, waving guiltily at the waitress clearing our table. She looks twice our age, and has our soiled serviettes bunched in her hands. We cross the road and wait for a taxi at the corner of Cavendish Square, just across the road from the Nando’s. I decide against walking into the mall for airtime. I can get it later, I decide, maybe further along the way.
    What? Ruan says to us, after a while.
    We’ve been staring at him since we bought the weed from Arnold.
    Dude, I know him from a guy at work, he says.
    We grin. Cissie and I don’t say anything. We nod and look across the road.
    Then Cissie says, what do you think of guys like that, anyway? He probably has parents who own half of Cape Town.
    I shrug. Maybe I should send him my CV, I say.
    Then our taxi arrives. The
gaartjie
leaps out, hefting stacks of coins in a canvas sack, a white Sanlam moneybag that’s gone brown around the bottom stitching. He points us towards the taxi and we pile in before the door slides shut on its own.
    Inside the Hi-Ace, I take Ruan’s cellphone and SMS
Yes
in response to my uncle Vuyo’s message. Then, to sign it, I write Lindanathi and attach my number for him to reply to. I resist an urge to turn my phone off. If this is what he wants, then this is what he wants, I decide. I hand the phone back to Ruan.
    The three of us spend the next hour putting up posters along the main road, from Claremont to Salt River, all of them telling people how to buy my ARVs from me. Then we carry glue in Tupperware containers from Cissie’s fridge, jump the Mowbray train to the city and take a bus out to the West Coast. I take a look at the time on my phone and it’s only mid-afternoon. I guess this is what they mean when they call Cape Town the city of slumber. Time seems to speed up here, and then it stalls, and then it seems to speed up again before it stalls.
    We pass Paarden Eiland just as the sun begins to burn itself through the clouds. It throws down a harsh beam that bisects the bus and Cissie taps my shoulder and says I should turn around. She tells me to look at how we’re sitting on the right side of the light.
    Then we pass Milnerton, the ocean sparkling and still, covered in white spots flecked across its vast surface. It looks as if all the salt has been sucked up to the lid of the Atlantic. After that Blouberg, the destination we’ve chosen for our excursion today, lists into our bus-driver’s wind-screen.
    I open the notebook program on my cellphone. I have orders for Ronny, Lenard and Leonardo. I’ve got one for Millicent. I write down Ta Lloyd and add a question mark after his name. Then, after a moment, I also add Nandipha, his wife. This makes up the list of reactives we could still sell our pills to at Wynberg. Two previous clients, Gerald and Melanie, haven’t come to meetings for a year.
    In