Spinning in infinity

Saturday 13 April

The day for driving back to Jozi dawns beautiful and dewy and the horses are looking ace, and I realise that the plughole effect is kicking in: things are changing, there is too much to do in too little time, I don't know which way's up, I can't get any purchase anywhere, I am hurtling around, spinning in infinity (with thanks to Paul Simon). There is going to be the tarmacced silence of the car and then a whirl, a hurtle, a race to the end, aware that I'll be failing people, not doing things, forgetting things while desperately trying to remember them, and trying to forget things because remembering them will cost me too much. We don't really want to leave, we want to investigate this area. We are about an hour from Durban and I long to drive down there, so long is it since I arrived - a whole three months - and so fleeting was my distracted visit to that city, which I remember from my first time here, when I was seven. It is a slower, more gentle place that Joburg. I love Joburg, but Joburg means leaving and Durban means arriving.

And yet we are still attempting to live, we are still making contact with those we meet, arguably my favourite thing to do with Bartelt. For example, we just pop in to pay the guy who runs the B&B with is wife, and of course he is most interesting. We have many points of contact and we have many points of difference, and we spend ages talking about so many things that I wonder why I can't bundle up all the great people I meet, day in day out, and have them in some kind of library, so I can get to know them properly, select them from the shelf, use their wisdom, steal their stories.

But we must not be distracted by jewels like this chap, we have to head north. To this end, another great breakfast ensues and then we have to face the terrible moment when Bartelt says goodbye to his favourite cafe of all time. I know it's okay because we'll be at his next favourite cafe of all time somewhere else soon, but for now his grief is real: he knows he will never feel like this again about a cafe.

This particular favourite cafe of all time is situated by a disused quarry which is eerily beautiful and, as it's not actually raining today, I get some nice shots of it. He gets some nice shots of it too. We get the same nice shots and, as ever, his are better because he has a better camera and, ultimately, because he loves a bit of photoshop. Me? I'm too impatient to bother with that - and technically inept, and lacking in visual skill......, so I just stick them on Facebook so my mother that I'm still alive.... or at least was alive at time of posting.

I'm aware how much more my mother worries about mine and my brother's welfare since my sister's murder than she did before, and I understand that. I have to strike some kind of balance between not sending her wild with anxiety and living my life - luckily she endorses my attempts. And I know how dangerous South Africa's roads are. They are very dangerous, and although driving gives one a very powerful illusion of control, most of what happens on the road is the random blow-out or the unpredictable behaviour of others. Mum does not know we are driving back today, or at least that we are driving back at this time, and I hope to text her later to let her know we've arrived without her having a day's worry about whether we are alive or dead or simply lying in a ditch waiting for death or help.

By some excellent conflagration of lucks -and Bartelt's ability to find his way - we manage to find our hitchhiker's accommodation and then we're speeding out of town. Somehow, for me, the journey back feels far longer than the time it took to drive down. Admittedly, 6 hours is a long time for a Brit to be in a car, but I have only recently driven down here and then there was the epic journey from Cape Town to Johannesburg. Maybe it's too long in the car with my own thoughts, that could be it. My own blinking thoughts and doubts and the knowledge that this time next week, for the first time since 14 January, I will be waking up in Blighty. Not necessarily a bad thing, but a thing nonetheless and I'm starting to question if I have achieved all that I could here, and, inevitably, the answer is no: no I certainly have not and it's because I'm such a misery and so defeatist.

I am, then, delighted to have Jozi interrupt my thoughts at last, and after we have dropped off our passenger we go to the shop to stock Martin up on food. It's getting dark and we manage to persuade an off licence to sell us some wine as we head to Martin's place where we become involved in a bit of a party. Obviously I am going back to my friends' place, but for a while I am caught up in the jollity of Martin's gorgeous sofasurfing place. The three people who join us have been drinking and there is some political debate, into which my teeth sink in a state of delight.  There's also a history of big in-fighting in this group, which gradually reveals itself to us. It'll be sad for Bartelt to leave tomorrow as he has become good mates with the guy whose place it is. I do think Martin will come back to Jo'burg, he'll see this guy again, but who knows how and how knows when.

I get back to Peta and Daniel's place and watch a bit of telly, am fed beers by Daniel and I eat. I'm leaving these guys tomorrow as well and I'll miss them, especially because I've got to know Daniel a bit and I'd like to know him more. And because I've reignited my friendship with Peta and it's as easy as ever it was, enriched, I think, by what we've both been through during the decade since we first met. I mean, I know I'll be back to Jozi sometime.... I mean, I will, won't I....?

Fear and loathing in my head: doing what you like, saying what you think

Friday 12 April

Day two in the perfect breakfastariam means that we are both very happy and relaxed.... except for me. I am not relaxed and only mildly content: we are about to do a lecture to a group of students. We are up against a rather successful and well-known theatrical practitioner who will be doing his thang in the theatre auditorium; we will be in a much smaller lecture theatre..... thank the gods in whom I do not believe, all of them.

I have been bothering Bartelt for some kind of structure for our lecture, for which I constructed a title with Anna our wonderful producer, while Bartelt was in Namibia seven weeks - and a lifetime - ago. He basically titters and refuses to discuss even the idea of discussing what we might say, or even the structure of what we might say, in advance. He is infuriating. He cares not about my nerves or my need to prepare, he does not want to, it would be foolhardy for him to do so: he will work off the cuff and the energy of the room and the people therein. And so I am awake and tense, as if I have not revised for my exams because I hung out with my brilliant mate who did not *need* to revise for his exams. It's a bit like my recurring dream of realising that today is the day a show I did not know I was in goes up, that I have not learnt my lines, and I have to step out into the blinding light and fail in front of an audience, letting down friends and colleagues alike.

Argh.

I have to play a part which we play all the time in our lives: the part of the person who knows what they are doing. And I am, today, the person who gives lectures to young people about making campaigning theatre, or autobiographical theatre, or whatever it was Anna and I agreed.

Some students come to our lecture theatre, quite a few, predominantly girls. And I start talking. Luckily, I am a consummate talker. And Barty talks to. And the students laugh, because we're funny, okay? And then they ask questions which we attempt to answer.... as if we're in any position to answer any questions. We can't even answer the everyday questions, like what will your next show be, how we are going to pay the bills next month, which continent does Bartelt want to live on? Somehow though the questions they ask, about death, acting, writing, are easier than those.

Afterwards several girls gather around me and I give my barnstorming speech: I tell them not to waste their time worrying if they or their work are good enough, I say that's one of the reasons men still run the world, I tell them I have been enormously privileged and have spent far too much time wondering if I ought do this or that, Just Blinking Do It, I say: do not waste what my generation have wasted, what the next generation are currently wasting, just do it*.

They like me. Of course they do: they don't know me. One asks if it's okay to write an assignment on me. I hold back my disbelief and say of course she can, and that she does not have to ask my permission to do so. She asks if she an send it to me. I say of course she can, I'd be delighted, at which moment I realise the acting that began the lecture has totally vanished and I'm just little old me talking to little old her and feeling so flattered I am almost certainly floating a few centimetres above the ground.

Finishing up the day is sad, saying goodbye is hard, driving out of the school past the friendliest gate staff ever is ridiculous. We have arranged to meet some of the other performers in the pub, the meeting room of choice amongst so many actors, and we have a gas. Our hitchhiker is there, our hitchhiker who had the previous day told me he'd not come to our show because he couldn't be bothered to get out of bed. And I kind of admire him - I hadn't even asked him if he'd seen it, he'd just volunteered the information. I am so aware, as an actor, that I need all the contacts I can get I regularly go to shows I suspect I won't like just to see whom I might meet or whose work I might encounter. And not only am I impressed by the fact that he didn't come, but it's quite something that he goes on to tell me that he didn't come because he couldn't be bothered. He didn't have to tell me, but he did. I suspect that in the pub that night, while we were getting along very nicely with the others there, he was liking me and Barty less and less.... though I could be wrong.

And he is almost certainly right to do so. Sometimes people just don't like us, especially as a double-act, and I think they've got a massively valid point. Sometimes I don't like us much either, sometimes especially Barty but mostly especially me.

*Of course, I still do not manage innumerable things: I am racked by guilt and self-loathing and doubt about my creative voice, my right to even show my writing to someone else, let alone put it on in front of anyone else, but I'm not going to mention that to these pearls, forming as they are, and full of potential.

A day-long lesson in humility

11 April 2013
Bartelt is, in general, far more experienced* than am I. However, we are both very experienced when it comes to conferences: he is used to being a guest performer and speaker and I am used to handing out the badges, pointing to the toilets, explaining it's just one goody bag each to people who earn at least four times what I do. Between us we really do have all the bases covered.
As has been the case all over South Africa, and over both of us hangs the fact that we are now days away from leaving though we try not to mention it, we make friends here in Hilton, real friends: people we engage with on facebook almost right away! One of them is Sheryl, who works for Hilton, the school at which the event is being held. She has two great kids who are volunteering here and we all laugh together, and talk, obviously. Sheryl is clearly very good at her job whilst remaining open and lovely. We also make friends with one of the teachers - she teaches drama to lots of teenage boys and I suggest the idea of Black Watch to her as something her students might find engaging - I mention it's one of the best pieces of theatre I have seen in my life. We exchange ideas and get excited about life in general and theatre in particular - Joclyn's energy is just infectious. I wish she'd been my drama teacher when I was at school. In fact, I wish my school had taught drama... but that's another over-privileged moan for another over-privileged day.
As well as the marvelous people, we have also benefitted from seeing great work here in RSA and this conference is no exception. There is a performance of a show about all that is sex when you're a teenager which gets a massive reaction from the audience. It is dealing with subject matter which moves the students and they show it. It's a great piece of educational theatre with the emphasis on entertainment and on patronising no one: lots of these students will already have endured situations the performers know nothing about - that's the case in the UK, but it's so much more certain here. And there is another show about the lives of an old couple, a mask show, so different, and great.
Over lunch we are approached by students and teachers and we sit and eat with the other creatives who are here to work with and speak to the students. In fact, I have lunch with, amongst others, Sihle Xaba who, I quickly realise, is a very famous man. I could probably have lunch with Meryl Streep or Brad Pitt and not realise I was with someone famous, so utterly rubbish am I. The great thing, though, about being surrounded by students who are fans of his, is that they make it utterly clear how very fabulous he is.
And that evening I start to see why he is so adored: we get to see a screening of the excellent Otelo Burning in which he stars. Set in a township in the turbulent 1980s we follow a group of teenagers through a story that is more than real. The students who surround us are too young to remember the necklacing that took place, or the inter-tribal violence... they don't even remember Pass Books. Martin and I do though. And it's curious, to me, that there I was, a teenager myself, on the other side of the world. And because of my South African family, though maybe I'd've been engaged anyway, I watched avidly the development of many horrors in 1980s South Africa. In some curious ways it feels like my story too. Of course I realise that's ridiculous, that I was a very distant bystander, able to dip in and dip out of the goings on as I slept safe in my bed in a village where there is still no street lighting, (because people don't want it not because there is no electricity). And yet these teenagers know little of this history. Not only does it fall into that Bermuda triangle of just before they were born - too early to be history, too late for them to  know about it - but there is also a desire amongst many young South Africans not to dwell on Apartheid. They are not their parents, they are not the struggle, they are the new South Africa. The danger in this is, of course, that if we do not understand our antecedents we cannot understand ourselves, that we risk making the same mistakes and laying blame in the wrong places.
But that's not to pretend that I think I have the right to judge the way they are being  South Africans, being themselves. I see why the desire just to move on is so strong, and so it is heartening to hear so many questions for Sihle at the end, of all kinds - technical, historial, about his own celebrity life. Some actors are great at playing humility, but I swear this is no act - the man's feet are clearly rooted to South African soil and he remains un-pumped-up by the screaming of teenage girls. And Martin and I, driving away, off to find some supper, yet again, cannot believe how lucky we are. It is as if we have been party to a private conversation in a private home - we have been allowed to sit and look and listen to this on-going debate about who these young folk are, who they will be, and what they do and do not consider important. We've heard responses from artists and seen their work standing there for itself.
And in a country where many people do not have clean water and sanitation we are going home to electric blankets: we are more privileged than I can describe.
*Older

Performing to the most important audience

11 April 2013
I have passed through the euphoria of the successful Bartelt breakfast and beholding the gorgeous teenagers while high as a kite on morning coffee, into the Valley Of Considerable Fear.
At the back of a big auditorium, the crop of swaying teenagers laid out before me, we are watching a dance performance. I am loving it. I am glad I'm not sitting next to Bartelt who, being an ex-dancer and choreographer who worked for a period of time with Pina Bausch, would undoubtedly have an opinion. I mean, he has an opinion about *everything* but he *really* has an opinion about dance.
The inestimable Ingrid Wilde is making a speech, it is she who has brought us here, but it's not only that which makes us like her. She seems to also be a case of utterly great, and she certainly is as she respectfully stamps her authority on this event - and the 15-year-old audience - as it gets under way. She only produces nine regional Schools Festivals for the Grahamstown Foundation, as well as the national festival: whatever.
Very soon I am walking down a side-aisle, smiling at the students, who are wriggling and talking and laughing and not noticing me at all. OH.... this is terrifying. These kids are about to be bored out of their minds by my story of death and misery and grief. It's going to be awkward for every living soul in this room, so awkward that I'm sure even people not in the room are going to feel awkward and have no idea where the feeling is coming from: it'll be viral. The whole of Kwa-Zulu Natal will be in the grips of an Awkward Storm which no living weather specialist will be able to diagnose. This is an occasion for which the current usage and popularity of the word awkward has, indeed, been invented.
These are not unfamiliar feelings and, like childbirth and death itself, the only thing to do is just get on with it regardless of how I'm feeling. Unlike childbirth and death itself, though, the auditorium lights dim and I am blinded by the powerful stage lights. There is nothing left for me but to declare, for the 21st and final time on our South African tour, "A year or so after my sister was killed a friend of hers came to stay with me in London, and we went out, we went out drinking." And we're off.
Now, Bartelt and I think we have written a very funny show, make no mistake. The fact that no audience has yet appreciated all of our jokes is irrelevant - the gags have taken it in turn to be appreciated, which much more classy, obviously. And yet.
It is today that we have finally met our match: *this* audience gets us. They laugh like drains at the refrigerated gag, and so many others, that I keep having to stop for the laughter to die down. Not only is their shock at the content of the show palpable, but it is audible: everything comes out of their mouths and we all have a hoot together, tears together, some truthful journey together. I have done a bit of stand-up and have sampled the smallest of intoxications when a room above a pub full of folk laughs at your jokes, but has nothing on this. This is an 350-teenagers-full auditorium, laughing at our jokes and at my delivery. I go off-script a bit, impro-ing around like I'm not supposed to, but I am feeling the closest to a superstar I'm ever likely to feel and it's absolutely fine by me: this need never stop.
At the end the applause is sustained and touching, and silence for the dedication to our five dead journalists all the more moving, as I feel these powerful creatures of tomorrow, taking in the facts, ruminating on them, realising what I have just said: that today's performance is dedicated to the following people who died like Kate in 2005 on account of their jobs:
Julio Hemando Palacios Sánchez, radio journalist,
Colombia Hussam Sarsam, tv journalist,
Iraq Elmar Huseynov, journalist,
Azerbaijan Ahmed Jabbar Hashim, journalist, Iraq
Marlene Garcia-Esperat, journalist, Philippines
and to their families.
(Please do view the full list of dedications from the entire life of the show.)
I can feel them take in the fact that these people died to get the news out to us all, to them.
In the break which follows Bartelt and I are mobbed by students and teachers, the conversation free-flowing and fun. Some of the children want pictures with me. How easy it would be to mistake this attention for being directed at me. I am incidental, the conduit through which things pass: the work is the thing, the journalists, alive and dead, are the point, these children are what count.
We take ourselves outside for a walk and a wander and take lots of photos of the extraordinary campus under the threatening sky. Alone, Bartelt and I agree the show was wonderful. We are pleased we can now relax and enjoy the rest of what the KZN Schools Festival has to offer us. Oh, there's the small matter of the lecture we're giving tomorrow morning, obviously, but Bartelt doesn't do preparation for that kind of thing - of course he doesn't. He feels the room on the day - of course he does. I get worried and wonder what on earth will happen: of course *I* do. But for now we can just sit back and enjoy the shows.

Making it up as I go along

Early April

Inveterately stylish as I undeniably am, I put on my full stage make-up over breakfast. Two-and-a-half years ago you'd've regularly found me putting it on in the very busy Pleasance Courtyard in Edinburgh, almost certainly in full view of some of my about-to-be-audience members.

I put my make-up on on the bus, the tube and in the pub. I'll put it on in meetings if I'm off to stand behind a table representing an organisation and I'm running between the two. I'll put it on bit-by-bit and frighten people during that phase where a woman removes all her features, smooths them out almost to vanishing, in order to re-apply them in, roughly, the same places as they were before the whole process began.

On the back of a bus once with my mother and my littlest aunt I started applying make-up and they both complained that it's not nice, that it is, basically, rude to apply my make-up in public. I was astonished. It's not like spitting or fishing your underwear out of your arse, it's not even like blowing your nose, surely? It's just a bit of titivation, but without the nail clippings, under-nail scrapings or follicle-loosenings which seem to be all the rage otherwise. Of course, I carried on.

And one of the reasons I carried on was that I want to subvert the strange idea we have of mystique in our culture: that somehow the bits about actually travelling around in a majority-liquid, ageing, oozing, flaking, gas-creating, blood-pumping, amazing body should be, by women, concealed. I like going out looking as I look - a woman of roughly my age with all bits you'd expect in an able-bodied woman, with no make-up on at all. And if I apply make-up I've no desire to pretend I haven't or to conceal how it's done. I mean, in my case it's often done cack-handedly with my fellow passengers running around picking up eyeshadows and rolling mascaras as they fly to all four corners of the carriage: I am not an oasis of womanly secrets which turn me into a full-on lady. In fact, I was taught my current make-up routine by a friend at drama school back in the days when you could still drink to the tube. We both had huge bottles of Budvar, I sat in a Piccadilly Line seat and she straddled me. The then proceeded to do the full make-up on me, explaining what she was up to as she went. It's more than ten years since I last saw her but I, and casting directors/first dates/members of the good British public owe Mariamne a debt of thanks.

Not to wear make-up is, for me, also a test of myself: how vain, how caught up in the male gaze, how fearful am I of how people will relate to me if I simply look as I look? How much ground have I lost today to capitalism's desire to unnerve me, in this instance, about my appearance enough to make me buy buy buy purported solutions? It's not always easy or straight-forward, but I'm buggered if I am going to be shameful about the way I look with no make-up - it's only my face - no one's got to eat off it or anything.

Breakfast is a success all round and we head for the school. 350 souls is the biggest audience I've ever performed the show to and we arrive during a squall of teenagers, milling, yelling, laughing: being wonderfully themselves, being the huge majority, owning the place. And I look at them, and I think why-oh-why-oh-why are they, almost certainly, already cursed with the idea that they should look like anyone or anything but themselves? They are full of life and potential and are fabulous to behold, as a group and as individuals. Bartelt and I find their energy infectious. What a privileged life we are leading, to be about to share our show with these gorgeous creatures of the future. Maybe it's the coffee Bartelt let me have for breakfast, but I cannot help but love them all as they push past me, a rolling boil of excitement, into the theatre building, barely noticing the middle-aged lady and her woolly-hatted companion.

Breakfasting with Barty

There is a very exciting part of my life concerning Martin M Bartelt. Is it hearing about his years working alongside Pina Bausch, I hear you cry? Or when he talks about touring his dance shows all over the world? ....Maybe. Yeah, well, no, no it's not. It's not that. By far the most exciting part of my time with Bartelt is finding myself on the cusp of breakfasting with him and wondering how on earth it will go.
There is no doubt we have both worked hard with this show, but I feel my still being on the planet, as well as the show itself, of course, to be a collaboration. From my family's acceptance that I was going to make it in the first place, to the endless hospitality we have been offered over the years, via free rehearsal spaces and that house in France where we did the major edit of the show back in 2009. Oh, that house in France. It was in the Frenchest of towns, small, but with two cafes and various independent stores. And French people largely ignoring us. And the town hall where there was a jumble sale....
Two cafes though, two. Possibly the world's most distressing dilemma: where should Barty breakfast? And I'm not even going to go into the fact that it's possible that neither of them will be in the sun at the requisite breakfasting hour.
Bartelt himself is a work of all-knowing, brilliantly idiotic, behaviours, travelling around in the body of a broken lizard with the mentality of a five-year-old or a zen master, depending on... well, mostly depending on the quality of any given day's breakfast. Get it wrong and he will suffer. And when I say he will suffer, I of course, mean I will suffer.
In this little French town we hit the cafe-elect, sometimes together, sometimes apart, both sleeping until we needed to, both working late to suit Bartelt's working hours. He is, after all, the one in constant pain who mostly cannot taste or smell anything, though he maintains he can tell the quality of coffee from its texture. I choose to believe this, it would be to my detriment not to. And he's the one who had had his heart valve replaced just two months previously. In fact, let's add some collaborators to that list of those who have got us here: Jacques and Jean who have nursed this creature, my collaborator, back to... existence, after his operation to replace his heart valve, and the bonus death-on-the-operating table that he got for free as part of the experience. He has a sophisticated heart monitor with him which has to be taken out, together with his heart and astonished body, for a walk of exactly the right kind every day. We talk work as we walk, and life, and about his poor, poor heart, so overwrought that the doctors wondered how he was alive at all. He is, my friends, an enigma wrapped up in a corpus unsound, engulfed every day by a tidal wave of irrational emotion concerning breakfast.
And so it is one day that we find ourselves breakfasting, sharing thoughts about how he is a connoisseur of the coffee with several sugars and the pain au chocolate and I am, essentially, a food disposal unit. I am desperately unrefined. He feeds my his croissant crumbs when he has finished doing his thang - I'm a sucker for Crispy Bits. Obviously I have already had my own croissant, or similar: not my usual breakfast choice, but when with Barty I find I often do as Barty does.
If this were a business consultation we would be bottoming out the problem of why breakfast affects him so much, and it seems to be that he feels that if it goes well, everything will go well, and if not, then not only will it be a bad day, but everything will be a disaster. And it is here, at this moment, outside this French cafe that we discover The Truth: a good chocolate croissant doth not make a good day and a bad cup of coffee doth not a day ruin. We laugh like drains. And we quote ourselves endlessly. I'm sure we exclude many people over the subsequent years and breakfasts with our clever cleverness, but, we have both to admit, we are tremendously funny.
Back in South Africa it is morning, early morning for Bartelt - anything before 9am being the early hours. Outside our room there are horses in the morning mist. It is cold and, what is more, it is time to leave for breakfast. Following breakfast we will have 350 schools students around us for two whole days: I don't know about Bartelt, but I am feeling for our poor chosen-cafe owners - they have no idea of the pressure on them, but they really are going to have to deliver.

Bartelt and me: the most unwanted

Thursday 11 April 2013

I find my way from my place to Martin's couch-surfing haven to to the house of the fellow we are driving to the Grahamstown Foundation KwaZulu-Natal Schools Festival all by myself without getting lost once. I'm hoping I've been rewired in the night, but I realise it's just a stroke of luck, like all those other strokes of luck, some good some bad. I have not had a knock on the head and unearthed the ability to find my way, so I should stop hoping that's the case as it will inevitably lead to my heading off, confidently, in the not too distant future towards a potentially far too distant point in the wrong direction.
What is even more remarkable is that I have already been for breakfast with a friend and colleague of Kate's - South Africans begin their day at leat an hour earlier than the average Brit. And likewise Brits who are in South Africa. This woman came to the show, I'm a big fan of her work, and it turns out she and Kate knew each other a long time. She's lovely to me.

We eat in a cafe near where Kate used to live, full of memories of those terrible two weeks after her murder, when we would come here, if we went anywhere. We talk about all sorts of things, I unburden myself of the same stories of frustration, fear and despair which thinking back on the extra pain the BBC put us through always brings me, and she listens, seemingly not surprised. When we come to say goodbye I want to tell her what it means to me that we have met and talked... but that would be ridiculous. It means a disproportionate amount to me: I am absurd. Why does it matter so much to me? If I told her she'd probably run a mile. We embrace, say goodbye and promise we will stay in touch. As I go to my car I am losing Kate again, I want to find her through this woman, through any woman, frankly, through any person, through an object or an experience, I don't care what and I don't care what I have to do to get it. I would give everything up to get her back. I am going down that rabbit hole again and I have to grip hard to the wheel of the hire car as I go in search of Bartelt in the hope of finding some space in my racing brain.
Bartelt and I, reunited, and our passenger are looking at at least five hours on the road. We do engage our passenger in some chat, but pretty soon he's asleep while we talk on. Bartelt listens patiently to my bizarre, wonderful, exciting, draining, precious start to the day. (Oh, but being with me requires endless patience.) Bartelt and I will probably talk forever about everything and never come to the end. I suppose that's one of the reasons we are so close - I have an endless curiosity about him, his life, how he functions, his fears, hopes, mistakes, doubts, ridiculous certainties (these are legion) and abject terrors (these are legion plus one). And, miraculously, he is endlessly interested in me, my badly formed opinions, built on my lamentable memory, my lamentable memory itself, my anger, my copious stories of loss and loneliness and self-pity, my friends, family, foes and extraordinary former bosses. And my lamentable memory. He laughs at my jokes, defends my behaviour and tells me I am, essentially, worth it. As I often say to him, thanks be to lady luck that we are not attracted to one another.... we would have been married and divorced a few times by now.
Given how well we get on we are rather mystified that the other is single..... well, it's that bit harder for Martin to meet a man than it is for me due to sheer numbers, but one of our regular conversations is how are we so unwantable? (I refer you to the accompanying photos for what is at least part of the answer, surely.)
It is autumn in South Africa, yes, but nothing can justify the stark closing in of the weather as we head south. By the time we reach our destination we have been through wind, rain, fog and, it looks like,.... Wales. Of course it looks like Wales. As I have mentioned before, in the end everything looks like Wales. I could have said it looked like Ecuador, but, in fact, lots of Ecuador simply looks like Wales and there's an end to it.
The school has a very friendlyly staffed gate at which we stop and then we are welcomed onto the hallowed turf.  It's quite a place - like a particular kind of public/private school in the UK with which I am familiar yet, like a dream, this one has been styled by a 17th century Dutch architect. It's a dream - it's so green and schooly and European, even down to the glass fronted wooden cabinets that house the sports teams, play castings, church reading rota. The sight of these cabinets brings me to a lurching halt. So much of my childhood was taken up by looking into them, scouring them for a particular set of dread information that I feel nauseous just looking at them: exam results, violin lesson rotas, excursion information. Excursions. Urgh.
We head off to find our contact and do our tech. Our travelling companion finds his team and quickly we are in a huge, fabulous theatre, doing our little tech. There seem to be a few stressed performers? directors? around, but we have a laugh with the lovely technician and then spend some time getting to know Ingrid who runs the Schools Festivals, all nine of them, for the Grahamstown Foundation. Then there's Sheryl, the person who runs the venue for the school, and Jocelyn, the English/drama teacher. Three mighty, excellent women, plus the volunteers - what joy - and we haven't even met the school students who are attending the Festival yet - we will do that tomorrow when Sometimes I Laugh Like My Sister completes is 2013 South African Tour by being the opening show at the Grahamstown Foundation KZN Schools Festival. On my non-existent life ambitions list I quickly write down opening a massive schools festival and cross it off, like you do when you complete the hoovering and find you'd never put it on your to-do list in the first place.
Bartelt and I are staying off campus, so we get some advice about where to eat in the very small town and go to find our B&B and it looks as good as it does on the website: a free-standing building, beautifully fitted out, with a wall of books to boot. We spend some time in bed because we are COLD. It is freezing. Bartelt, my pet lizard, is not coping well with this sudden change in his fortunes. The heat relieves the constant pain he is in and this damp cold does not bode well. Our hosts have given us some wine, so we have a bit, take pictures of ourselves with the festival programme and then head for a restaurant which is strangely Czech or Polish or similar. The food is great, the welcome is warm and they slap up a meal the like of which we believe a doctor would want for us. I am full of nervous anticipation as we slip into our electric-blanketed beds: tomorrow's audience will be 350-or-so 15-year-olds. What on earth will they make of it? And how can I possibly be nervous again, after 102 shows? I reflect on the fact that I am, maybe, more nervous about the place we think we have found for breakfast in the morning: what if Bartelt doesn't like it? What with the terrible weather, tomorrow's breakfast could make or break these last few days. I turn my light out and dream fitfully of vengeful fried bread humanoids.

Several lashings of transport roulette

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.

I hope it's working, I hope you're impressed

Very early April

When I started working as a light entertainment agent's assistant I discovered I had an embarrassing problem. And it continued on into the time when I became an agent, and basically, yea, verily, into my present life: I have a shocking memory. Obviously I cannot remember whether I've written about this before.... so I'll do so now just in case and then probably again in a few blogs' time. Repeat until fade.

The discovery went like this: I would go out to reception and recognise someone waiting there. I would then get up on my tip toes and lean over the reception desk in order to have as private as possible a conversation with Norma, the receptionist, and I would ask her whether the person was a friend/colleague/drinking buddy/sexual conquest* of mine or if they were famous. Norma, thank the universe, was an expert in my drinking buddies and family members, so would be able to say 'Corrie', 'News At Ten' or 'it's your mother'.

There were so many things about being an agent which brought home to me how little I ever wanted to have any kind profile or celebrity, far too many to name here, but one of them was that terrible feeling of someone looking at me as if they know me and my having to respond as if they do, just in case they do, because I have too poor a memory to be able to work out whether they are Peter, my plumber of fifteen years, or Beyonce (she's a singer-songwriter-megastar). I have too few fingers and toes to be able to enumerate the number of times I have grinned broadly at someone, as I gambol towards them confidently, been on the verge of saying hello while they look back, 87% friendly, 13% unsure, and just as I'm about to say something I realise they're off the Fast Show or similar, and I have to convert the word I was about to utter into one of the noises that goes with the end of a cold whilst trying not to look as if I was about to break my stride. This manoeuvre should really be on my CV: I am genius at it.

And so there I am at the beginning of the last POPArt show milling amongst the audience before they are seated, which is actually the beginning of the show (see what we did there?) and I spot someone I know. Or do I? She is very familiar, a slim, attractive, dark-haired woman with lovely eyes. Have I slept with her?** Is she a friend of Kate's? Why isn't Norma here for me to ask? If she were here she'd whisper, 'no, she's a famous broadcast journalist'. Our eyes meet. She smiles at me. Does she know me, have we met? And suddenly we are talking to one another and embracing as if we are old friends and I know who she is: she is a correspondent for the BBC whose work I have followed for years.... basically I'm simply a fan: we have never met before. I feel about her and her work maybe how you feel about Nigel Slater or Kate Moss or One Direction. Unless you hate them, then I feel the opposite feeling.

I have met so many of my heroes through Kate, or rather through Kate's absence, and we present ourselves to one another, raw side out, for me the loss so fresh I want to cry. For them? Who knows.

She has come here today with the journalist for whom Paulina now works part-time... and with Paulina herself. Paulina is looking good. It is lovely to have her here, this most important of Kate's mates, who comforted my sister through so many difficult times, kept her company when she was so alone, the person who kept the house running when Kate died as we dribbled around, incapable, one of the strong team of women insistent on washing up during the period of the funeral, the obvious and perfect choice for the end of the show. I forget how short she is - she's shorter than my mother. She tells me this is her first trip to see a play. That's pretty hardcore: the first show she is seeing in her life is a show about the effect of the murder of her good friend had on that friend's sister. I tell her it's not like all theatre, that people have said it's different. I wonder whether she is nervous. She is not nervous. Of course she's not. This woman, who can withstand the hurricane of injustice, who can laugh as she tells the story of her life and break my heart.... of course she's not nervous.

Swiftly we are into the after-show questions, hosted by one of the amazing women who run POPArt. The BBC correspondent asks me a great question - I am being very forthright about the BBC and I get to explain how I do not want the utter sanitization of journalism, that people will always have to risk and sometimes their numbers will come up, but how those decisions are made is important. I feel as if this BBC correspondent I do not know but respect massively has given me the chance to explain myself even better.... she feels like a friend***. I know the danger of letting that feeling in - she is not my friend, she is Kate's, but just for a few delicious minutes I enjoy the fantasy. And I point out to Bartelt that, unlike a few other journalists, she is not behaving as if we do not have the right to speak because we are not journalists ourselves.

Post-show I get a picture taken with Paulina. I can't believe we have less than two weeks left in the country. I do not want to think about leaving..... so I don't.

*Just trying to add some showbiz snazz to the image you have of me. Hope it's working, hope you're impressed.
** Obviously not, but I'm just trying to add some credibility to my sex-life. Hope it's working, hope you're impressed.
*** She is not my friend, but I'm just trying to make it look like someone like that would like me. Hope it's working, hope you're impressed.

You may as well ask whether Thomas Aquinas would have enjoyed the dodgems

There is a moment, during the 100th show, early on, where I hear the laughter of my seven-year-old cousin ring out when the rest of the audience remains silent. There is a moment, later on, where I can see and hear him shuffling around. Is he lying down? Could be. Both of these things is individually delightful to me.
You will find some actors blaming the audience for not getting a show, being too raucous, only laughing internally. I understand the emotional response, after all, we feel what we feel, but I do often wonder why people cannot check themselves, stop before they say anything destructive after a show. One of the frustrations, and certainly a major joy, of being an actor, is that it's pretty hard to tell how well you're doing. Yes, there are reviews, or if it's a funny show laughter feels good, or you can be delighted because you managed not to cause any kind of technical or business (business being, say, a complicated custard pie scene in a panto) disaster. But the reviewer's companion may have hated your performance or people might have felt tricked into laughing by all-jokes-and-no-substance theatre, or you got through the very complicated fight scene but nobody believes it was really a fight.
As for me, I do not pretend to understand much about what an audience feels. I've said it before, and, being me, I'll say it again, a lot: how on earth can an actor 'know' in the way that they seem to, that a show has gone a particular way? Let alone how their own part in it went? If you're playing Hamlet or Winne in Happy Days or Rebecca in Sometimes I Laugh Like My Sister I can see the temptation of believing that there is a direct correlation between your performance and what you feel about it, but it is only what you feel. It is allowed, but it does not give you any definitive information.
So, I might think that my littlest cousin's fidgeting can be interpreted, I might even be able to blame myself in some way, for encouraging such a young chap to see the show, for not making it clear he would not like it. But I decided long ago not to do that to myself and not to do it to my audiences. And time and again I am reminded that it is the right thing to do. They can react how they want and at the end of the night I walk away and get on with the (mostly more important) parts of my life. It is only acting: nobody dies... and if they do you really should think about a career change.
There is a carnival feel after this show for me - there are so many key characters in the audience and they seem to have enjoyed it, and, given that I am the only practicing actor in my extended family, I choose to believe them when they tell me they got through it okay, or anything above that, enjoyment-wise. My littlest cousin tells me he has questions and we agree that I'll answer them the next day, for me this is because we are cracking open the Cape bubbly we have carefully brought or, should I say, arduously not drunk during the weeks since we left Cape Town. We take a picture of the family group, my mother exudes relief and, maybe, pride - it's hard to tell with my mum, and Martin seems satisfied enough.
People are wont to ask me what Kate would think of the show. I want always to point out that there is only a show because she's dead, but I have to resist. I rarely think of what Kate would want or feel, she is so dead to me, though I often long so hard for her counsel, her encouragement, her shoulders, either one of them, that it freezes my tears, stops my breath, winds me like a statue at a busy station as the world rushes past. But looking at this night, full of my cousins and uncle and close friends I reflect that for once I have a sense that Kate would be pleased about this, though annoyed to miss out on it. For once, wondering what my sister would think about something, is not, to quote my inestimable brother, like pondering whether Thomas Aquinas would have enjoyed the dodgems.

100 Not Out

4 - 5 April
Look, it's an emotional show, I get that. But there is something about this run of four shows in Johannesburg that is, well, not exactly unprecedented, but quite something. We are having a drink after the opening night, we've done the Q&A, it seemed to go well - a friend of a director with whom I worked in London chaired it for us and it turns out that he's great. I need no reminding that this show is a collaboration of many people. my main collaborator, the co-creator of the show, martin m bartelt, it must be remembered, is the kind of chap who finds a pair of snazzy shoes at a venue and will try to persuade the artistic directors let him have them. maybe it's the stress of touring and all that emotion we encounter arising out of the show, we each let off steam in a different way...  but i've come to believe that it's really just who he is. that is who i'm touring with; a man who wants these extraordinary pointy shoes even though they are beyond painful to put on.
I am with Zadi, Mark, Mac, Martin, Jacques and lots of other folk, some who knew Kate some who didn't, having a drink, after the show in the bar next door, ou rnew home-from-home. Peta and Daniel, my friends and hosts, have come with friends of theirs. There is not nearly enough time to catch up with friends, but there is an urgency, a need. And the time flashes past and too soon we are in the car driving out of the centre of town, talking about the show, about the venue, about Johannesburg. The centre of town looks amazing in the dark. That's South Africa for you: incredible light, everywhere, all the time, except in the veld where it gets just that bit darker than you can imagine.
Martin and Jacques are couch surfing: staying with someone they didn't now until they turned up at his house. It sounds lovely. It is lovely. The place they're staying is great... and near a dentist, which is good news. There is something going on with Bartelt's teeth. A time will come, I think to myself, and it won't be too far away, when Bartelt will need to got to that dentist, he knows it and I know it too, but he is so accustomed to pain and illness, and so not-fond of their companions: medical professionals. Well, it's not that he doesn't like them, really, it's just that he has a very healthy, far more healthy than he himself is, mistrust of them. This mistrust is entirely based on his lamentable health and the reeling and confusion of the doctors who have to deal with him. Sometimes I'm not sure whether I feel worse for them or for him, and then I remember they're doctors and he is a very ill man and I know who is having the bad time.
The second show in Jozi is going to be attended by my uncle, two of my cousins, one of their husbands and three of their kids. The youngest member of my family to be seeing it tonight and I have a frank conversation about how bored he might become. Now, I've been bored in some of the most important theatres in the world, and I've wanted to walk out of the performances of some of the greatest actors, so I can offer him little comfort, but I do tell him he can do whatever he wants, bring something to do, go to sleep, have a drink. He is seven and has decided that he wants to come. I think it's a great age to see this show. Obviously, and in case by some odd chance it's escaped your knowledge, by the time I was seven my father was dead, and so I do not consider it too young for a show like this. It's an abstract piece of theatre, in the end, it's not full of shoot-em-up images and he can ask me whatever he likes the day after.
I'm more worried about my uncle. I'm not convinced that he really wants to come and I certainly don't want him coming out of duty - Kate lived in his house, spent a great deal of time with him for the near-decade she lived in Joburg, he's allowed to feel and do whatever he wants.  But then he goes and buys everyone's tickets and I feel more at ease.
My mother has seen three different incarnations of this show and she always laughs like a drain. She is excellent. She was very, very nervous when we first started doing it but more recently she has been at ease.... but not for tonight. Tonight she is worried, worried that our South African family won't enjoy it..... or worse than not enjoy it, hate it, find it distasteful.... or something even worse for which we cannot find a name between us. Luckily I am waaaaaay past the point of worrying about that much in advance. I only really start worrying about it when I'm on stage, alone, with no way of stopping and checking, at which I become accompanied by a shape-shifting homunculus whose opinion of me as a human being, an actor, a woman in a dress and make-up veers between low and unimaginably disgusted, depending..... depending on how many laugh I get, but not in any consistent way. I can hate myself even if there are gales of laughter and a perfect atmosphere of tragic delight. But of course, I am on stage dealing with that: mother is a passenger, waving goodbye as I head of university again, stuck in the passenger seat teaching me to drive again, seeing me head for my first day at primary school again - she has to suffer the curse of parentdom, which in her case is one of her daughters risking a one-woman show about the other daughter's murder. My mother's private, exquisite, unique hell.
And she is the key passenger, as I step out onto the stage, the lights coming up, the audience disappearing before my ever-surprised eyes, and I tell a room of folk, for the 100th time, that a year or so after my sister died, a friend of hers came to stay with me, and we went out drinking......

Adventurous by accident: clawing efficacy out of the rock face of existence

Early April

Sometimes in life, by sheer hard work and lashings of good luck, things work out. I'm no believer in fate, I take to task friends who say that we "make our own luck" and there is no meaning to be dragged from the chaos of life. Alright? But sometimes the bleeding stumps of our fingers claw out some efficacy or success or usefulness from the hard rockface of existence.

And so it was that we managed to 'navigate' our way to POPArt a couple of days before curtain-up. My previous abortive attempt proved slightly useful, I think, given that when I spotted a street sign or landmark mentioned in the instructions for finding the place, because they had been burned into the very gristle of my brain, I realised where we had to go, or at least that they were relevant. This is not to play down the contribution of the other crue members: my littlest aunt with her navigation skills and the near-silence of my mother (no mean feat, for either of us) who excellently announced, every so often, that she wished she could help.... but we all knew that keeping her counsel, and maybe mopping our sweating brows, was her only way of being teamly. Teamish?

The Maponeng Precinct is a controversial development in the heart of Johannesburg. It is a private venture aiming to bring culture, living space, commerce to what has been for a while now, a no-go area for many affluent South Africans. The controversy arises out of what is seen by some of the cleansing of the area of the local population who have lived and/or worked here through the very hard times. But on this, my first visit, I know little about any of that, and simply find myself exhilarated by the sight of Joburgers, sitting, at cafe tables, their lattes before them, soaking up the autumn sun, on the street. There are all kinds of people here, I realised, as we were given advice and help on parking the car half-on-half-off the pavement. People in chinos with laptops walked past. South Africans like the mall shopping experience, or at least that's what's mostly on offer, and this felt rather like an excellent dream of what might become of here. I let Hayleigh know we had arrived and we found the door to the theatre.

POPArt has been here three years, nearly three years. It's a classic fringe venue with all the energy, hope and challenges that can come with that. I press my nose up against the glass of the door. I explain to Mum and my littlest aunt that it's important for me, this moment of arrival at a venue where I'm going to do the show, nervousness, excitement and loads of disbelief. My mate Em likes to say that if you get the stage with a fella where you are taking your own - or each other's - clothes off, do not worry about how you look: the chap is mostly likely to be thinking: a woman is letting me see her naked! A woman is letting me see her naked! A woman is... etc. And so it is with me and theatres: Hayleigh arrives and shows us round, she is slightly apologetic about the modest lighting rig, but I'm just thinking, this theatre is going to let me perform our show here on my own! This theatre is going to let me perform our show here on my own! This theatre is going to let me... repeat to fade.

Hayleigh is the second member of the POPArt team I have met and she lives nearby, which surely means she gets to do things like opening up the theatre for actors and their random family members to have a look at it. She's as friendly and warm and full of energy as Orly, whom I met a few days ago. I am getting excited. I cannot wait for Martin to get here: he's going to love this little, black-box of a theatre, love it's urban, vibey setting (where we can look like anachronisms or site-specific art works amongst the trendsters, "And here we have late twentieth-century hippy, wilfully clueless about fashion, mostly concerned with comfort..."); he will adore the fact that it lies between two (count them!) restaurants. And he'll love these women. I am warming to them immediately.

Walking the stage - which doesn't take very long at all - puts a zing in my guts and I remember my terror at Artscape in Cape Town, the first time I had ever walked a stage and felt afraid, out of place, alone. This one feels just right and I cannot wait, cannot wait I tell you, to get on with the show.

It's less than 48 hours later that we are back, Martin, Jacques and I. I feel duty-bound to point out to you, dear reader, that we took ages to find the venue. Even though I've now driven the area extensively, and been to the venue, prepared exhaustively to get us here in order to impress Martin and Jacques, I still lead us astray, driving around in the fabulous sunshine, looking at the great buildings, me failing to remember (realise?) that the road we are looking for is very split in two, even with a map in my hand. Essentially we find ourselves, as is often the case, adventurous by accident. But we have masses of time built in and Shoki, the third member of the POPArt team, is also very late. We tech in the afternoon, giggling and chatting with this third lovely woman from the venue team. We find the magnificent toilets (there is a poster for the show in here, we have to get a picture of me with the poster in the toilets, obviously, as it's too, too good: a poster in the outside toilets), looking at the exhibition of shoes, hurling some food down our throats ready for showtime.

Eating in the restaurant next door I spy a group, including a friend, a colleague, of Kate's. She and I have been in contact - I've known she was coming. She's brought lots of people with her. I am transported to eight years ago, when Kate had just died and I first met Melanie. We embrace, I meet the people with her. I am touched.

But it is getting late, I must go and get ready. There is never enough time with people who come to the show. I spy Mark, my sister's best mate, one of my hosts in Cape Town - he's here on business for the night. He is with Zadi. We embrace. Zadi is a Burundian refugee who Kate was helping when she died; she was 39, he was 18. Even though I've sent him a copy of the play and already said it, I apologise for the fact that his story is one of the things that has been entirely expunged from the show. His story is so amazing, so harrowing, so important, that Martin and I felt we could not simply brush over it - so we could do it no justice at all - and so it went. Seeing him tonight, I feel guilty. He asks about Mum, my littlest aunt, my brother, I tell him he can see the two former tomorrow, if he comes here again, but I already know that he cannot be here tomorrow - he's flying to Angola on business, he will not get to see them.

But I must get on. It is time, after a good few weeks, to do this thing that I do, for what is, Martin has worked out, the 99th time.

The spoils of the echoing dead

Easter Sunday and thereafter
It's a beautiful day, of course, Easter Sunday. The family brunches, spectacularly, in the garden, the boys hurtle about, I sit like the non-child I have somehow become. And, far more importantly than my family and a beautiful day and great food, I have made an arrangement for someone to pick up the darn posters from me and take them to  POPArt: the venue which we are playing here in Johannesburg.
Even for this to work there has been some back and forth and re-arranging. Of course there has: the venue is run by three young women all needing to make a living and pursue their creative careers and run a fringe venue. I have absolutely no illusions about the sheer time-consuming thankless slog this can be most of the time. On top of that, Orly who, it turns out, lives near to my cousin's place, has a small child. Personally I can't fathom how she can manage that too, but as we greet each other in that very traditionally Joburg way - though the grating of the gating which closes off my cousin's place from the street, I spy a fella in the car. Well, that certainly helps - to have someone else involved in bringing up your child. He smiles at me - he's clearly fabulous.
Orly is very friendly and I tell her that I plan to make the trip to see the theatre tomorrow, in company this time. I've told her about my harrowing trip the day before to find the place. She laughs and says that it's a good idea to have someone to navigate as it's not that easy the first time. This makes me feel the slitheriest of scintillas better about the whole debacle, though deep down I know it's my fault that I cannot find my way.
The show opens again on Thursday and amidst all the things I need to do I cannot resist visiting old haunts, old friends, with my mother and my littlest aunt. Our tastes are embarrassingly similar: we want to go where their sister went, to see her friends.
Jane was 21 when she married a Dutchman who lived in South Africa. She lived nearly forty years in the country and she was well-loved. Jane may be gone, but we want to reconnect to her life and her people. She made wedding dresses for a living, as does my littlest aunt, and we go to her local fabric shop, still there like it surely has been forever. We go to Jane's favourite local cafe and meet her best friend and her daughter who is about my age whom I first met when we were seven. It is so natural to see them and yet so odd that Jane isn't here. It is hurling a typical Joburg afternoon electric rainstorm outside and I'm basically chilly and damp. I remember meeting these people more than thirty years ago. And here we all still are, yet depleted.
We visit another friend of Jane's where we talk politics and the past, present and future. That extraordinary optimism-laced-fear or pessimism-laced-hope or horror-laced-excitement or joy-laced-grief which seems to be the lietmotif of the discourse of so many of my South African friends, old and new. We talk about Jane. We talk about Kate.
This particular friend of Jane's gave my brother and I small gifts when Kate died,  helpful gifts. Mine is a series of painted blocks strung together. One one side of each is an angel. On the other side is the legend "And all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well." This friend is a Christian and I suppose that might be what she believes... in fact, I think it is what she believes. The angels and their message hang above my kitchen sink reminding me that I was born an optimist and it has been well and truly beaten out of me because I am weak and ungrateful.
And we see Paulina. If you've seen Sometimes I Laugh Like My Sister you'll remember her - she was my sister's very dear friend, her housekeeper, and she is the last moment of the show. We pick her up to take her out to lunch. It's another strangely rainy, cold day and we go to Moyo's at Zoo Lake, near to where she and my sister used to live. I get lost on the way, and we stop to look at the map, finally working out how to get to the shops in Park View where we are meeting Paulina. I'm driving and I apologise to Mum and my littlest aunt, explaining that I was trying not to go down Kate's road. "We know that," they both reply. There we all are, talking about everything but, yet thinking the same thing.
Paulina seems not to have aged and has not lost her infectious laugh. She's had a tough time since we last saw her, having to give up a job and move house. Moving house has involved moving into a shack in a different township. At first, she says, she was mortified at the idea of living in a shack. It is very small, smaller than her old place and, well, it's a shack and there are rats everywhere. She tells us that one day it began raining and it turned out her roof was leaky. As despair was about to grab her, a neighbour came round with some plastic sheeting which saved the day. She tells us she is very happy where she is living, that the people are lovely, that she's far happier than she thught she would be. It's so good to see her, to hear her opinions on the political future of South Africa. She says that whatever happens, the rewards of post-apartheid South Africa are not for her, that she and most of her generation will have to forego things so that future generations can benefit. She does not sound resigned, she sounds accepting. Maybe that's me romanticising or trying to make myself feel more comfortable about my massive western advantages, but she states it as if resistance is futile and I'm sure she's right on all counts.
I think of the story most Europeans know of South Africa, of Mandela and wine and rugby and gun crime and I think of Paulina's amazing life and massive good grace. And I know I cannot even begin to explain the place, but that it's got me good and proper this time. In my head I blame Jane and her Dutch husband, I blame Kate and her over-arching ambition, but mostly I blame Paulina and all the other Paulinas who open their hearts to me and demonstrate their eye-watering good will, their love-in-action.

Consummately driving in all the wrong directions

Easter weekend, still: March/April 2013

Of course one of the problems of being on tour and being on holiday at the same time is that everyone around me is on holiday while I really do need to be getting on with some work. Part of this work is getting flyers printed and the posters to the venue.

My maternal grandmother was an artist, a painter, watercolourist, oiler, pastel maker, portraitist - for a living. Two of my aunts have made clothes for a living. My mother can draw, her doodles by the phone, in the days when the phone was fixed, were of the faces and the dancers from her mind. Turns out Mother's mind is full of beautiful stuff no matter the brickbats life throws at her. And the drawings were good, so good you could tell what they were - please bear that in mind. My sister qualified as a civil engineer, a fabulous draughtsperson, and my brother can draw, though he doesn't. (More of my brother's legion talent another time, sometimes it's too much even for me to dwell on). Me? I have to leave an explanation under an image of a stick person. I understand the theory - you don't grow up with these people around you and not understand the technical requirements - but I cannot make anything look like whatever it's supposed to be. Worse than that, I cannot even pull something out of my imagination and make it look like anything others might understand or even simply recognise.

And I've got to make sure the flyers and posters look okay. I mean, we have a great designer, but while Martin is out of contact, I need to sign them off. For anyone who can make something look nice - not only can I not draw but I cannot tidy anything up - this sounds like a doddle. But I'm rubbish. On top of the not being able to draw or make anything look good, I regularly leave the house looking as if my arch enemy from the comic-book version of my life has dressed me.

As if that weren't enough I also have to get the posters to the venue, which means driving into central Johannesburg. On the Saturday afternoon I leave the family in the garden and head off for what the satnav tells me will be a one-hour-or-so round trip. I've communicated with Hayleigh, one of the women who runs the venue and she will be at PopArt to meet me. Perfect. It's yet another beautiful Johannesburg day: it really is the best climate in the world, and I am driving, talk and tunes on the radio, heading for central Joburg for the first time in..... about fifteen years.

As my new best friend tells me which way to turn, on a part of the journey I actually know - the first bit - I reflect on the last time I was in central Joburg, long after it had become something of a no-go area for middle-class white folk from the northern suburbs, before it became an utter no-no for the likes of me. I had been heading to Durban with my friend Caroline just after graduating and my South African aunt had dropped us at the coach station. She had been very jumpy, the jumpiest I had ever seen her, and she kind of threw us and our luggage out onto the street and hurtled off in her dust of terror. It was... out of character.
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Which is odd, and had been at the time, because the centre of Joburg is fabulous... if you like cities, and I love cities. I like urban and shiny and mixed and big and grotty and unpredictable... but not this unpredictable. The satnav keeps losing its connection to the satellite, or at least I think that's what keeps happening: big oceans of grey and silent and asking me to wait while I become increasingly nauseous. It's the same nauseous I experience whenever I get lost, which is often, irritated at myself for not preparing well enough, as if more preparation would help - I know it would not - but I cannot help feeling it might, that one day I will be able to find my way. I won't, I know that, but still. And I resent Martin, and where the hell is he? And why should I be dealing with this alone? And why did some man in Cape Town seem to like me and all of a sudden not? And why was Kate killed? I would not be in this predicament if she were alive. I cannot believe my aunt is still dead - she could have navigated for me. Massive, unrelated emotions start to overwhelm me as the toddler inside unleashes her fear and fury. None of which helps me get any clearer about the rather mystical one-way system. I know that. Why can I not keep a stopper in this and just have a good rage later?

The beginning of the sunset is incredible. There are huge reflective buildings in the CBD and they are all around me. And people are out and about. I am reminded of... Harare? Bulawayo? Durban? Nothing as big and shiny as Joburg, but something metropolitan and African and hot and from my past, from happier days, all at once great and terrible to experience. As well as the phallic shinies there is massive urban decay, gatherings of folk who look like drug addicts or muggers or both. Every so often the satnav springs into action, only to leave me in the lurch at the vital moment, like and internet datee who loves to text but won't quite commit to the date of a date. I need to stop to read the map - I keep getting onto the road where the theatre is but not finding theatre, as in those fearful, frustrating dreams. Then I lose it entirely emotionally, spinning out towards the unknown, panic grabbing and shaking me. No tears, just panic. The story of Johannesburg, the one you are constantly told about violence, is something I assiduously ignore and I am furious with myself that I am now so afraid. Kate would not have been this afraid: she was so much braver than I. Damn her and her stupid bravery.

I do stop, I look at my map. The dark is moving in. I am aware that I look exactly what I am: a lost foreigner, or worse, a tourist. Not wanting to stop for too long, I pull out, starting to worry that my driving is less than it should be, if I'm not shot for my car and laptop then I'll kill someone inadvertently, driving into the sun, looking at street names, mowing them down, a casual, inconsequential obstacle to and in my panic. It's at least half an hour before I officially invite defeat into the passenger seat and start to read the runes for indications of how to get home. Quickly I find myself on the new multicoloured Mandela bridge speeding out of town towards more familiar territory.

Arriving home I casually drop into the conversation that I have, actually, failed to deliver the posters. There's lots of looking at watches and asking where I've been. I am determined not to worry my mother, but I am also determined not to cry, not to rage, not to make the next half hour about my inadequacies and their attached fury. This has not been the end of the world. And from the wreckage of my crazy hour and a half I salvage dignity, magnanimity and another lovely evening with my beautiful family. This has been, finally, about my being able, in the end, to contain my emotions - about which no one is more surprised than me. And obvioulsy, but no less surprisingly, nobody has died, as my sister used to say, about fuss and nonsense in her daily work.

How I long for the distant tape recorder

March into April 2013

Martin and Jacques have been doing quit a bit of holidaying, making the most of being here in South Africa and enjoying their many-tyred trip to Namibia. For now they are.... somewhere else. I'm not even sure where they are. When Martin and I are together I can feel where he is and we are wont to communicate via facebook (his preferred method) even when simply on different floors of the same building or across the table from one another. But they are.... somewhere else in South Africa. Lord knows where - Martin is not one for having his phone on, or if it is on, having it with him, or if it is with him, bothering to answer it.

So I begin the Johannesburg part of the tour with Mother, my Littlest Aunt and lots of my South Africa family. In fact, our first full day in Joburg is Good Friday, followed by Easter Saturday, Easter Sunday and Easter Monday. I do no realise it at the beginning but we are about to get the chance to spend most of four full days with my cousins, their kids and my uncle. This has not happened since the 1970s . Food is prepared, eggs are painted, we all gather.

I have long known that I get far too fond of people far too quickly. I don't mean romantically, stuff things romantic... maybe it happens romantically (see earlier miserable blogs) but I mean all the other loves. I feel connected, I fear, to folk far too fast. And I have often felt that I love my South African cousins in an exaggerated fashion for people I have spent no more than fifteen bursts of time with over my years on the planet.

My South African aunt, Jane, who went and died on us nearly ten years ago now had three children just like my mother did, girl boy girl. My cousin Lou is my age. Well, she's a few month younger than me, months that become more and more important as I age, and she follows me far too slowly into these lengthening-shortening years. We had met a few times before, but when we were 13 my aunt Jane brought her to the UK to visit family. My mother, Jane, Lou and I went to London together, including Madam Tussaud's, spent time with my mother's cousins, travelled to The Channel Islands to see our grandparents, aunts and cousins there.

And it is there I fell for Lou. Lou was beautiful, and worldly in the ways that matter. Sure, I knew far more about global politics - this was the 1980s when a South African child of whatever stripe would find it hard to find out what was going on in their own country, let alone anywhere else in the world. But who cares about human rights abuses in Turkey or the Amazon rain forest when there are boys to know about, actual boys: 13 year-old-boys, 14-year-olds and - whilsper it quietly - 15-year-olds? Pointless, pointless education and political awareness! Interestingly - or not - I fear I still suffer from the same problems I had then: too much understanding of what it is men do in parliaments and not enough understanding of how they function in bars. 

Lou was the kind of 13-year-old girl who turned heads when she walked down the street (Just to let you know, I have yet to reach that stage of my life). And we bonded. This lovely, witty, learned woman-child wanted to be my friend. We talked and played and did sophisticated things, like listening to Phil Collins and Genesis on my grandmother's cassette recorder. Lou wore make up, for crying out loud, and it looked great. It occurs to me that it is only about now that I am genuinely ready to understand what Lou had to teach me about boys then, but it's too late. The moment has passed, zooming into history, several other me's ago I was there, but I cannot be redeemed now and I was just in no place to learn any of that stuff then. Like Alice in Wonderland with the small door and the shrinking potion: now that I have the key to the door I am way to big to pass through it.

I guess we complimented each other. Me with my gawkiness, still metaphorically - and often actually - up trees with so much to learn, but far more aware of - and able to articulate things about - the political world in general and the UK in particular, where we happened to find ourselves. And she with her suave ability to chat to anyone, look right, behave appropriately, explain Everything Else in the world.

We have spent quite a bit of time together over the years for people living on these two continents and my love for her has never waned, she is still rather magical to me. These days she is married with two children and all kinds of professional success behind and ahead of her. Over these Easter days we are together with her kids and her husband and everyone else and we just are. No desperate need to grab time together, as can so often be the case for me on my trips to Joburg. I start to realise I am going to be doing very little work over these four days, and despite being rather obsessed with achieving things, I begin to come round to the idea of hanging out with my fabulous family and start to feel it's time for the cassette recorder. 

In which I wonder at the significance of position in the family

It is Passover. I know about Passover, you're not brought up a Christian without knowing all about Passover. Well, I say that, but I am about to learn a thing or two about Passover and grains that swell, it turns out.

I made a friend at drama school and it was great to learn that she came from Johannesburg. At the time I didn't realise she lived about fifteen minutes' drive from my aunt's place. I have always had an open invitation to stay with her, but have never taken her up on it as I have family and other friends in Joburg. In the time since Kate died I have wanted to stay with her friends, spend time with them. But one of the terrible corollaries of loss for me is that although I have got access to some of Kate's mate's in a way probably impossible had she been alive, I have also found that many of those relationships were tremendously ephemeral. More ephemeral than I had wanted. Something about the desire to connect at the time of her murder to rediscover Kate, maybe to be with someone we'd heard so much about or to be with someone who was enduring something similar to our own pain.

Being a hoarder, being desperate to keep my sister, to find something, someone who would, basically, I suspect, be my sister, I had wanted to continue those relationships, but mostly they have fallen by the wayside, which in itself has caused me distress. I think this is my problem, not theirs, that they are just doing the right thing and what comes naturally, and I am misguided, needy, mistaken. Thinking about it, it all sounds rather..... well... barking. And I'm loathe to write about it really, but two months in and now confronted with Johannesburg I am feeling pretty.... peeled-back skin-wise and I have a desire to be honest. And so, I think I have been blinded by grief and fear, by a terrible knowledge that without my sister I am nothing. I always knew I was rather an insubstantial creature, but the severing and expunging of my other self, my better self, my sympathetic, loving, resilient sister, has left me over-keen to find or make life and love and understanding on the barren territory of surprise and loss and desire for the utterly gone.

Add to this the fact that some of Kate's mates are no longer in Johannesburg and my familial homes are full, I find myself with the chance to take up my friend on her open invitation.

She is full of apologies as I arrive, late into the evening for parents with a baby who is not fond of sleeping. She's sorry because it is Passover, and so there is very little food in the house, she says, food of the kind she clearly thinks is right for a guest. I do not know how to reassure her: I've come to stay for... up to a few weeks and just a bed and somewhere to wash is enormously generous. I admit, being far less knowledgeable about Passover than I'd thought, I didn't realise that there would be unusable crockery and many un-eatable swelling-grain-based foods in the house, but there is tea and there are matzos. And boiled eggs. And salad and fruit, mountains of fruit and, as I mentioned, tea. AND the warmest welcome. Actually, it looks like a pretty healthy diet, to me, this Passover diet, especially when you add the lovely people with whom I'm about to stay.

When I see her husband later, he looks me in the eye and tells me, essentially, that his home is my home and that I must simply treat this house as such, he'll have no standing on ceremony. He and I have only met twice before, both times pretty fleetingly, and as I go up to my room I do, indeed, feel at home. And I feel happy that my friend has married such a very lovely man, a man who put me at my ease and who is genuinely happy for me to drink his beer even tough he can't - it's Passover.

And yet there's an 'and yet' in the mix. Will I always live he life of this single woman, the interesting, perfectly pleasant (if you like that sort of thing), woman, with a good sense of humour, who will eat anything (anything I tell you! and love it) and be a houseguest in the homes of her friends, in their couples, maybe with their children in tow? Will I tramp around, never fixed, always looking for whatever it is that's missing?

It's Passover. And I think about the first born in my family, the oldest brother who died before he was born, and the oldest sister, who died as she was starting to live the life she'd hoped for. And I remember I can get very maudlin indeed if left to my own devices. Maybe I will always be itinerant, but if the homes I visit have matzos, or similar, and fruit and tea and boiled eggs and beer, maybe it won't be so bad.