Monday 8 April
A great deal of travelling hither and yon is about to occur: my mother and my littlest aunt leave for the UK tonight, Jacques for Switzerland tomorrow and the next day Martin and I will be driving to KwaZulu-Natal, well aware that our journey will be a whole lot more risky than any flight to anywhere from anywhere in the world. 13,802 people died on the Republic's roads in 2011, which is 31.9 per 1,000 of population. In the UK the rate is 2.75 per 1,000, in India it is 18.9. (Source: Wikipedia).
But before the exodusing begins, there is a performance to give. We have been invited by Warren to do the show for his University of Witwartersrand Drama for Life students. Shifting focus to the next show, my mind has filled once more of the wonderful Caroline and her Theatre Arts Admin Collective, for it was she who put us in contact with Warren. Imagining Caroline in her office in Cape Town, I see her face, her clothes, her passion, and I marvel at the sheer number of wonderful people I've met on this journey and how I'm going to miss them. I think again about Martin's friends who have come to the show in Joburg, including a couple who drove from Mozambique to see it, see Martin, then drove back. People are amazing.
Despite my profound efforts to mess it up, we finally find the right area of the enormous university... and after some serious fact-finding and stone-walling are given a parking space. The theatre is amazing - huge, beautiful, a joy to behold and Martin and I run around a bit, marking our territory (proverbially, I hasten to add) while Jacques, for the last time, sets up his camera. As it is with people with whom you have been spending a great deal of time, it is hard to believe that we will deposit him at the airport tomorrow and that will be that.
I have come to believe that this show can be done anywhere, or at least that Martin has given me permission and the ability to do it anywhere, yet when I'm on a large stage in a large auditorium, in fabulous full light, there is no denying that it feels different... easier to me. I feel supported by the context, it feels a more-relaxing-less-distracting watch and listen for the audience, and a large space feels like a great place to be, especially a stage where I can rumble around with my show full of characters, some of them appearing before me, some holed-up inside me.
A Q&A hosted by Warren follows, and there are more questions about the making of the show than usual. We talk about taboo, about technique, and this time, rather than my seeming like the magician, Martin is revered for his skills. This audience is constituted of practitioners and, hopefully, has no illusions about the wings this extraordinary director has given me. We sell a few of the final copies of the script - we will have sold the 40 we managed to get out here. We could have sold more.... but then I'd've had to dump some pants to get them into my rucksack and I'm fond of my pants.
All too soon it's over and we are packing away. We have one more gig left in RSA: just one. And before I know it I am taking Mama and my littlest aunt to the airport. That road that sweeps round the centre of Joburg, the buildings glinting, the terrible Jozi rushhour threatening to wind Mother up beyond her ability to remain cogent for fear of Missing The Flight. When the traffic moves I feel swept along by things, by events, by time itself. I am out of my real world for just a couple of weeks longer and I am starting, finally, to revel in the fact. Maybe a few months late, but at last I am hiding from who I am and what I feel, and all the broken washing machines, missed appointments, suddenly-collapsing-and-dying-of-a-brain-haemmorrhage-in-the-street family friends of my future fade into obscurity; I am here and now, personalityless, futureless, pointless, and it's wonderful.
Saying goodbye is oddly hard - we will all be back in the same hemisphere very soon. But it's this darn airport again - for all it has been done up and expanded over the years, I remember it well and feel as if I have a full cast of my past right behind me, dogging my steps. It is not that Christmas, 2002, when both my aunt and my sister were alive and I took Mum to the airport with my brother and sister and had to wave our tiny Mummy off on her own, which we did not enjoy at all, Tiny Mummy even less so. Things Have Changed and that is all there is to it. I can rail against it or I can just get on the Gautrain. We have abandoned the hire car. This bit of this is over. It is the beginning, or maybe even the middle, of the end. It will be the usual rush to the finish, as I remember all the people I've not seen, things I've not done, places I wanted to visit.
We did manage a trip to the Cradle Of Humankind with my uncle. It was fascinating. I am delighted to be reminded that we all come from here, this very part of this very continent. Maybe that's why I love this country so much. Or maybe I'm just the terrible sentimental, neurotic batbox I always fear I am. It was just Mother, Uncle and me and Uncle treated us to coffees. Coffees in the heat.
This Gautrain is, rightly, a matter of great pride to Joburgers. It travels from the airport to............... It is clean, efficient, safe and reassuringly expensive. I can get it to very close indeed to my friends' place and she picks me up. We talk about our days. It's even a bit normal, arriving at this shiny station in one of the most spangly parts of town, being met by a chum, going to her house. Does it feel like my life or am I pretending it feels like my life? Or am I becoming the itinerant person who only reconginses being on the move?
24 hours later we are back at the airport, having dropped off another hire car and another person. It's goodbye to Jacques. I insist on taking three-way selfies until I get a semi-decent one and then he vanishes through to departures. And here we are, Martin and me, the two of us, on tour again. We pick up a new hire car. We get unforgivably lost for quite a long time, all my fault for imagining I could make it back from the airport just because it's a route I've driven tens of times and I have written it down carefully. I drop him at his home and drive to mine: tomorrow we move on for the second to last time. Tomorrow we are heading to the Midlands.
