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.

I can feel the love wrapped round my neck

Firsts are the stuff of childhood, obviously. As I age, though they come thinner and slower, still they come, and I notice them a lot more than ever I did when they were the stuff of life.

We are driving into Johannesburg. I have never entered Johannesburg for the first time on any trip like this before, I have always flown in. I did fly into Johannesburg, just over two months ago, but I flew straight out against to Durban to begin the tour, my feet never touching the outside of OR Thambo International.

Two months ago. That's, like, two months. Two of them, for crying out loud.

Now, Mama, my Littlest Aunt and I have been on the road about eight hours. We are about to drive to my cousin's house but currently we are in a bit of the city we do not recognise and after eight hours on the road we are calmed considerably by the gentle ministrations of Tracey's satnav. It would be a whole other ending of wrong turnings and stress and extra hours of snappy panic without it. All hail satellite technology, plastics and microchips in general, and this particular stanav in particular.

The thee of us got on the road this morning, slightly later than intended because we were staying in a fabulous place. Nieu Bethesda is a tiny settlement located, roughly speaking, somewhere between Oudtshoorn and Johannesburg. Mum, Auntie and I have overnighted in the loveliest of little cottages and in the morning we visit the very famous Owl House and Camel Yard. We buy gifts in gift shops and look at the second hand bookshop. I rue the chance we have lost to do the show here, for despite a population of only 1,000 souls, 900 of those living in the township nearby, there is a theatre and the woman in the bookshop tells me that they love to go to the theatre. I'm not surprised: this place is bijou in the extreme, no sealed roads and only in existence because the local farmers not that many decades ago needed somewhere to build a church so that they didn't have to go all the way to Oudtshoorn to worship. Any entertainment whatsoever must be welcome, even if it is a woman doing a show about her own sister's murder.

Seven of us, plus my tiny roommate, had celebrated my birthday in a very idiosyncratic self-catering place, run by a German couple, in Oudtshoorn. Their living quarters, their kitchen, the contents of their fridge mingled with ours as Martin eeeeeked out the story of their being here. Buying the farm without ever having seen Oudtshoorn, previously never having lived in South Africa, never having run a farm, they gave up having a manager for the farm and started, in their late fifties, to learn to be farmers. He speaks no English at all, or Afrikaans, or Xhosa. He speaks German. They are welcoming and solicitous and interesting and.... individual.

On these few days' holiday to celebrate my inexorable age journey I had a trip to the caves, some ostrich visiting, eating out, eating in, a spectacular electric storm with angry rain and blood-curdling sound effects, a power cut which lasted and lasted, tickling a cheetah, lying by the pool, finishing the antibiotics for my infected ear and enjoying Precious the boa constrictor round my neck, amongst many other fabulous activities. I am loved, I can tell. I could tell before, but, well, a boa constrictor! Round my actual NECK!!! It is as wonderful as I hoped it would be when I did that (very poor, as usual - I am no researcher, no academic) project on snakes when I was eight.

Only a couple of days after my abrupt ageing, it had been, suddenly, time to say goodbye to my tiny roommate and his fathers. It's tough. I've been with them for two months and Mark is.... was, after all, Kate's best friend. There is something about the nature of our relationship which incorporates her without us speaking about her that much. I am lucky to have a brother whom I love and loves me. On top of this I have these extra brothers who have had me in their home for two months: count them. That's love, or at least amazing tolerance.

And I am aware that the heartbreak I'm trying to metabolise about that man is inextricably linked to Cape Town. In spite of all the wonder of the place, every metre I get away takes me from what now feels like a terribly embarrassing mistake, or at least that seems to be the current coping strategy adopted by my psyche. So it is partially with alacrity that I put everything to do with the city behind me. I cannot imagine never going back, but neither can imagine ever being able to face it again.

Johannesburg, on the other hand, looms large and lovely over the whole trip. This is a bit odd as it is where Kate and my now dead South African Aunt lived, it is the place I have been coming to since I was seven. I resist the idea but there is no denying that it is one of the places I call home, though these days it is irrevocably marked by loss, nausea and fear. Not the usual Joburg fears of carjacking and brutal burglary, though. My more prosaic fear of simply unravelling emotionally stalks me hard and close in Joburg, although on previous visits I have outrun it. But then maybe that is partially what home is for me. I've never properly understood the relaxed comfort which the idea of home seems to bring some of my acquaintance. Maybe one of the reasons I am drawn to doing things that scare me is that home is not a place of safety. Why stay home, full of fear, when one could be out there experiencing the real thing?

But I'm not into the real fears, things that might bring me genuine misery, which is why I am very happy when I realise the three of us are nearing Linden in the northern suburbs of Joburg, the end of our journey, at least for now; the safety of my cousin's place and the promise of some good times to come with my South African family. And the Joburg shows. The location of the heartbreak, all the great new - and old - friends, each Cape Town show, the lovely moments with my tiny roommate, are behind me and what is left is the here and the now and the whatever comes next.

Why can't *I* have a wife?

I remember travelling to Spain, at the beginning of 1995, when I lived there. I got as cheap a flight as I could, which meant that it was at a very ungoldy hour in the morning when I had to get up off my brother's floor in north London, get the first tube and make the journey through the dawn dark across town to Gatwick.

I remember driving myself to school, in the summer of 1989, while my mother was away on holiday for two weeks. She had left some food for me, but I was definitely alone in the house - Mum had gone on holiday with her cousins to Italy in the days before mobiles or the interweb.

I remember getting on the train alone, saying goodbye to Kate, leaving her on the platform in Manchester, where I'd gone to stay with her at university for the first time. I was 14.

*******************************************************************************
There is nothing like leaving alone. Nothing. It can be devastating or exciting, anticipatory or tearful, but it is always exhilarating. That luxurious feeling of alone when you are indeed by yourself, but you have a gorgeous lattice-work of friends and family somewhere in the world, keen to know about you, loving, familiar, your invisible shadow. There are other alones that are not fun or cool or things I want to know about: a fully, vertiginous aloneness where there is no one who will offer me a mattress for the night or lend me a fiver. No siree. I've read about those alones, had them described to me, but I do not need to experience them.

I am about to leave Cape Town alone. Martin and Jacques help me get my stuff to the car. I've been packing for days, I've kind of been packing forever. I'm always in and out of one bag or another. I love packing to leave, even when I don't want to leave, I love the packing. I think it's probably got something to do with owning too much stuff: packing to leave, the kind of packing where you know you can get the stuff in your suitcase/rucksack/handbag because that's how the stuff got here in the first place, makes me relax. Not the packing to go. I hate initial packing to leave home as much as the next person who always carries too much stuff and has to take multiple bras, even for a couple of days away. Packing to go is one of the few things that makes sense of the Christian idea of purgatory, of hell, of the very devil himself. He's imaginary most of the time, but Lucifer is sitting on the end of my bed tossing paperwork and tights at me when I'm packing to go.

As someone who always has too much stuff I feel great when I can get things in a bag, everything I have that needs to go in the bag goes in the bag. This is not true of any other part of my life: draws are overflowing, cupboard doors are forced shut, things spill off.... other things which teeter on the edge of furniture I have half painted/sanded/mended, and land in great drifts by the things which fell there seven weeks before.

I'm as happy as a sandboy packing to leave. Marvelous. And we've had a top fairwell do. Luckily the last few days in Cape Town are so busy, so eventful, so interesting that I find myself suddenly at a play reading and then suddenly leaving the play reading and suddenly preparing the flat and then people are arriving, talking, meeting. My mum and my aunt are here. I've been thinking about these Cape Town people meeting them both, especially as they appear in the play, for a while. Luckily Martin and Jacques have been very good at getting things ready for the party too. I find myself horribly wanting as a hostess, not through lack of wanting to make people feel happy, at their ease. But I fear I am so much not at my ease that I have no sense of proportion and find myself frozen with worry that I'm not cutting the celery into the right shaped pieces, that my gin and tonics are too tonicy (making me stingy) or too ginny (making me something far worse), that there's too much potato and not enough salad cream.... in the cheesecake. Every decision I make is surely wrong.

God, how I wish I had a wife. We should all have a wife. Lots of my mates, even now, in 2013, have lovely, old-fashioned wives, who produce drinks, souffles, children, while my mates get to chat to guests and shelf-wrangle. Why can't I have that? Oh, yeah, it's because I can't have anyone: nobody wants me. Yep, yep, I remember now, there's  no need to go on about it.

Martin and Jacques make it look like a party and the guests make it a party and I treat it like a party, so it's  party. And it's so hard to say goodbye that one guest comes the next morning to wish us bon voyage, birthday gift for the impending day in hand. She was a friend of Kate's. It is unexpectedly difficult to let go of all this, never mind we're off for a few days' holiday, never mind I'll be in wonderful company, never mind we have some shows to look forward to in Jo'burg, I just don't want to say goodbye. As the opportunity that is Cape Town finally closes down on me I want it more than anything else I can think of, more, even, than that darn man.

I hug Martin and Jacques on the street, even though I'll be seeing them later, and I drive out of the Mother City. I'm picking up Mum and My Littlest Auntie on the way, but for now I am alone, beautifully alone, as if this were my natural state, and, with all the farewells done - for now, fleetingly - I can pretend that Kate is beside me and that we are off on one of our adventures.

If I'm looking right at you why am I missing you?

March 2013
People  have a drink and they say things they don't mean, do things they'll regret. It's part of being human. And enthusiastic. And, often, English - you don't want to speak your mind, best say yes for now, and get out the door.
So I was at that lecture, having had too much wines, too many wine... drunk too much and someone called Zavick is saying we should take the show to his studio - he's an artist. Yeaaaah! Let's do that!!!! That will be great. Yessssssss.
And then it's the next day and a man I don't know is trying to friend me up on facebook. Who the hell is... he's the artist from last night. Okay. Fine.
A few days later I'm walking over to Gardens where his studio is to have a look round. He really is an artist and he really does have a big studio, with other artists renting space and a fabulous thing called toilet cubicalism going on (see the attached photo). We talk about the show, about the art he makes, about his recent clear-out which has helped him get back to the art he wants to make. My gut fills with the thought of my stuff-bound flat, lots of that stuff being my sister's belongings, some of it still in boxes, and my terrible, miserable inertia, my inability to get rid of things or even move them, look at them... the way I hide from them, which is not easy as they surround me, day in, day out....
While I've been lost in thought, Zavick has made some tea is looking at possible dates on his wall planner, he's got started on making an event page on facebook.  He has the energy of a five year old. He doesn't seem even to have developed the ennui of a nine year old yet, he's in very bright toddlerdom; he has much more energy than my roommate, who's not yet eight months. I wonder whether I've ever met a person of his age with this much energy. I guess that he is, depressingly, about my age. It's depressing and impressive. He is also very dyslexic and so I take over for a bit at the computer, writing whatever copy we agree on, and we agree quickly, just getting on with it. We are both excited about the show coming to Studio41. I'm not sure what Martin will think.... but he's on holiday in Namibia, very short on mobile phone coverage let alone interweb, and I decide we'll do the show whatever and Martin will think whatever he thinks, but he'll get on with it too. I'm pretty sure he'll like Zavick.
In general Cape Town is starting to spin around me, gently at first, but with increasing urgency as I approach the date when I will be sucked out of the plughole and hurled back onto the road towards Johannesburg. It affects my sense of proportion and already pretty poor ability to make decisions. My mother and aunt will arrive before we leave, we'll do the Studio41 gig, we'll have a little gathering at the flat for a few of the fabulous people we've met on our time here. And then we'll leave.
I knew this would happen and that it would happen like this: I'll've been here two months and some of the weeks have dragged out... not necessarily unpleasantly, but languorously, as if they were going to last forever. I've known all along that they would not, and they knew it too. We have both known that time would speed up and I'd be stuffing experiences and people and sights and sounds and hopes into the vanishing hours like the burglar does into his bag in a nice Cape Town flat, fear of missing out on something great bearing down on us both; knowing that even if we do come back, the flat will not be the same as it is today. Today provides only today's experiences.
I've endured the heartbreak and confusion it threw me into, I'm starting to rise, vulture-like, from the ashes of my hope, ready to feed on the carrion of the next car crash in my life.  Feeling this raw confusion I wander the city seeing all kinds of work in the huge festival that is Infecting the City. Once a year the city is overrun with art, lots of it performance art, but also visual art. Frustratingly I miss shows or can't find venues, but I also see lots of things, some by mistake, bump into people I know, get a black eye helping someone up onto a wall - it's like any other visit to the theatre. I even get to see an UK director I know who has made one of the pieces - small performing world. It's not like any festival I've been to before and is all the more marvelous for it.
The night before the Studio41 show, four new tyres down, Jacques and Martin arrive back in Cape Town, with tales of the desert, some stones they've lifted and a pile of washing. For me the performance is yet another great experience. Zavick has brought some great people together and a few of my mates come, and it's like no other show I've done. I have to be careful not to touch the audience, so close are they, but also not to destroy the art behind my back. I spend more time sitting down that usual.
Afterwards, yet again, I meet such interesting people people who have suffered, people what feel so strongly about theatre, art, South Africa. Even though my mother and aunt land tomorrow for a three-week holiday, including a few days off for me, even though I am longing for Johannesburg, my first love, even though I want to leave this place which has broken my heart, I can feel the regret, I am missing Cape Town already. I'm still here and I'm missing it. Why can't I just be here and enjoy it and deal with the change when I leave? What is wrong with me? Naturally over-acquainted with grief, that's my diagnosis, too ready to anticipate it. My musicality, my skills as a show-off and my feelings of loss when simply contemplating something I love, let alone someone: these were all bequeathed to me by my father, the last one because he was too full of life  himself to live past 42, or at least that's how he fills my memories.
People gather in the flat on the Thursday evening, our last night in Cape Town. Mark and Ikeraam and my tiny roommate have already left for our holidayette, and so I am hosting a bit of a do in their flat. These are very nice people, I wonder why I ever wanted to leave: the sun sets and every new position it takes makes yet another preternaturally beautiful scene out of the city spread before and below us. One friend who attends has not been to this building since she tried to blow it up in the 1990s, another tells her that it's good to meet her, that she was out on the street protesting to get her released from prison.
Well, at least I'm not leaving South Africa.

The trouble with lemurs

Tuesday 11 February

"The trouble with lemurs is the same as the trouble with meerkats: they make very poor pets because they mark the house and their owners." Wikipedia

I am aware that I arrived at Mark and Ikeraam's place on 18 January, to fizzy wine, fabulous supper and a Cape Town sunset to simultaneously break my heart and make me believe all is possible.

But I worry.

I worry that by, or before, 22 March, our scheduled date for the beginning of the drive to Jo'burg, they will be so irritated by me, my stuff, by our romantic suppers for three, by my choice of foreign language DVDs, my dull cooking, my lack of cooking (in most UK homes I'd be okay because I'm up for the washing up, but here we have Staff, so even if I do the washing up I'm ingratiating myself with her, and not with the chaps, which is not to say I'm not for trying to charm Staff....), my every-so-often managing to be caught in a state of tears due to my broken heart, the strangeness of my working schedule, my inability to turn the lights off at night without turning all the lights on first - well, actually, that's their architect's fault - and legion other smaller and larger annoyances about ME will make them want to throw me off this, the 12th floor.

I raise the issue one day:
"I've had offers to stay with other people... you know... while I'm here."
"Oh."
"How, you know, would that be? Maybe I should."
"Well, itt's up to you."
"Well, I was thinking it was more, you know, up to you guys."
"If you do go, don't go for long."

No more information than I had before, possibly, even slightly less, given a rather heightened sense of paranoia and broken-heartedness and, well, I have no idea what else in the mix.

I stay put.

Before Martin and Jacques return from Namibia, I have my lecture to deliver. My lecture about journalist safety at City Varsity. That lecture I agreed to on that sunny afternoon, writing happily with Vanessa, feeling pretty much invincible. Yeah, that one. I write it down and everything - a radical break with my usual routine of... not writing things down properly. I do put in some sections where I am going to riff, or do bits of the show, but basically I trawl my brain, the death and danger stats on the CPJ (Committee to Protect Journalists) website, rifle through my passionately-held beliefs about press freedom and the state we are all in, and and and....

And.... who knows what they thought of the lecture. I kept remembering to look at my notes and I covered most of that stuff, about how journalism has changed and the risks that there are and not to be bullied into going anywhere, but to remain ambitions - don't let anyone take that either; that journalists are bound to be at risk, terrible things will happen, which doesn't met we ought not to let people go if they want to, unless we really ought not to let them go; that risk assessments are there for the protection of the employer; that broadcasters, papers etc are not necessarily your friend after you're dead and they may try to close down official lines of enquiry, may threaten your family with legal action, as the BBC did to us.

But that was all so serious and I know listeners need some light relief, so next we play guess the five most dangerous countries for journalists since 1992. It takes ages, they're way off-beam. Mali is in the news, and that's one of the guesses; I make a joke about it not being there yet, but, you know, just wait.

They get Iraq, but they don't get the others:

1. Iraq
2. Philippines
3. Algeria
4. Russia
5. Pakistan

Mostly they've never heard of Algeria, so it being in the top five is a double-whammy. We are having so much fun, we look at the next five and yes, I make a joke about Kate's country of death not making it into the top five and how frustrating that is for a high-achiever like me. We find India surprising:

6. Somalia
7. Columbia
8. Syria
9. India
10.Mexico

Some of these folk will go on to be music journalists, the majority not to be journalists at all, I'm sure, if my experience of further education is anything to go by. I wonder about my relevance here. Who knows whether there is any point to me at all, this lecture or, you know, on the planet at all.

But I feel vindicated. It turns out I know some stuff, I really have become a journalist safety expertine (a small expert). It's not my career, I tell them at the outset, it's more of a hobby. I tell them that journalists and their managers have told me, have told my family, that we are not allowed to comment because we are not journalists. At the time, years ago, I was too damaged, too nauseous, too afraid to say a word. These days I'd point out to them that a journalist is someone who gathers and then disseminates information: there is no club, you don't need a certificate; I'd tell them to get over themselves.

I'd tell them that the trouble with me is that I have been touched by the meerkat of murder, by the knowledge and experience of the hell my sister went through because her employers failed to stop her thinking she had to go to Somalia to keep her job, and that it has marked my home (still full of boxes of Kate's stuff) and my psyche and my tenuous future. I have been visited by the lemur of learning and I feel duty-bound to pass it on. Because it's not about me, it's about incredible people all over the world risking their lives to get the story out: if I can't get that story out, then what am I?

The vertiginous nature of yes

March 2013
1.
Vanessa and I are sitting outside a cafe, each in front of our laptop, working. Sometimes we are talking, but mostly we are writing. A woman comes along whom Vanessa knows. They've not seen each other in a while and it turns out she is the head of journalism at City Varsity, an educational establishment just down the road from here. A place where the man I fell for lectured on his specialist subject. My mind wanders to him as they talk. He has left town now, which is good... but sometimes my mind trots over to him like a forgetful old dog, hoping to have a good lean against someone it has forgotten died years ago.
I vere back into the conversation as this woman asks who I am and what I'm up to. She says she's heard of the show, but that she couldn't make it. I say not to worry, and, as I mostly do, mean it. I say it might have been interesting for her students, that we're always looking for places to perform it, people who might want to see it. She asks me if I'll do a lecture on journalist safety for her journalism students. I say yes. She heads off. Within the hour she has emailed me and we have agreed a date and time for my lecture.
Hahahahahaha! I'm going to be doing a lecture on journalist safety.
Oh.
2.
Tracey takes me to a lecture by a very eminent African academic. The place is heaving - we get there early to get good seats, and this is a town where you don't arrive on time as a point of principal. During the lecture I take lots of notes... but I struggle to understand what he was talking about - not the finer detail but, you know, what he's talking about at all. By halfway through I had concluded that I am still a ghastly academic, that age has not withered my massive ignorance. He's taking questions and I want to ask Tracey if she has some colouring with her, or a book with pictures. I am such a disappointment.
There were, though, drinks afterwards and I inevitably bump into folk who'd seen the show. Cape Town is a small place. Well, no, it's more complicated than that, but let's say that the pools in which I find myself pleasantly eddying are very small, especially, I guess, if you are used to the enormo-city that is London and its absurdly big, beautiful and bounteous arts scene there.
There are also snacks, which was good, as I am probably having more wine than is right and proper.
A point comes where Tracey introduces me to two men, one of whom seems to be called Zavick. Obviously that can't be right, but I can't for the life of me work out what his name really is. He's an artist. The two chaps and I talk about the lecture a bit, by this stage the wine has loosened my ability to be bold and brazen about my cluelessness. The other chap is a doctor who has practiced in the UK. I do a great deal of communication skills training, including with doctors, and he and I have a ball discussing various matters surrounding communication in the UK and here. Tracey is eddying around the reception - she knows everyone - and then 'Zavick' is suggesting I do the show at his studio, cards are exchanged, farewells are hugged and Tracey drops me home.
In the morning someone called Zavick has befriended me on facebook. Zavick....? Zavick! And he messages me to say that he means business, I need to come over to see the studio, to make a date for the show.
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And there you have it. I bump into people, they ask us to do the show, they ask me to do a lecture. These are the things that happen in a small place when you're the kind of person who gets talking to people. Or maybe it's because I'm 5'4". Who can say? I just know that when people say I am brave or adventurous, I understand that, deep down, all I am doing is stumbling from one preposterous even to another, or, better put, putting one foot in front of the last just as the previous one does not seem to be holding my weight anymore. It's a question of saying yes or plummeting to the floor. Mostly I have a sense of running away from the tidal wave, out of the burning building, rowing away from the sinking liner.
I have no idea how we will do the show in Studio41, but I go there and see it, I understand that Zavick means business, and so we will.
I cannot imagine putting a lecture together, but I cannot shy away. It is my duty to do the lecture: I have been forced, kicking and screaming into a better understanding than most of journalist safety and if someone wants me to tell their students what I have learnt then, quite frankly, it's not about what I think or feel any more. It is about talking about the dangers, telling the stories of those who have died, of those who live now in fear to those who are yet to start out. It's not about whether I feel qualified to talk about any of this, whether it makes me uncomfortable, it's about speaking out for journalists who need our protection and I have to get over myself and do the right thing.

Chewing on the wheelbarrow

February into March 2013

One night getting in from a performance after my flatmates have gone to bed, I am challenged by one of the preternaturally humanoid cats who also share the flat. She shoots out one end of the sofa, I approach the other, she shoots out that end, almost simultaneously, skidding across the wooden floor, Cato-like in her vigilance.

It's about 10.30pm and my roommate is up. Cue drinking, eating, giggling and both of us practicing our standing. It may as well be 10am: the little fella is AWAKE. Quietly awake, but awake nonetheless. And he cannot understand why I won't play ball. Or Barney the Dinosaur (Barney is, apparently, a dinosaur from our imagination..... aargghh!!!) Or that great hair pulling game. Having got up at 6.45 today, before my miniature roommate, in order go to Home Affairs to extend my visa, (because we are extending the tour for a schools' festival!) I want to go to sleep.

And then he starts talking. Really talking, loud, insistent words designed to put me off my journey to bed. He is emphatic, insistent and so I continue with my ablutions, get my stuff off my bed, put on my jim-jams, and then settle him again, dummy, blanket, adoptive-love-teddy. I tell him it's time to go to sleep and, miraculously, he agrees - lights out and not a peep.

The flat, however, is not so accommodating: it makes all kinds of noise in the wind. It's like there are a number of very boisterous ghosts in the flat. The cats are responsible for quite a lot of movement and noise, eating lizards, chasing their own tails, springing unbidden from places I didn't know were there, but there is more to it than them. The wind can get very, very high here in Cape Town, but even when it's not that high the noises are frequent and bizarre. Luckily, though, the skill of sleeping through when my roommate wakes in the night, means that I have extended my already considerable sleeping skills and the wind can rearrange things - and it does - yet I will mostly sleep on through.

My roommate is growing fast, he can crawl forwards now, and says specific things, rather than just burbling. He's not speaking any language I speak, but I can tell he's saying things, proper things with proper meaning. My cousin's boy, Matt, spent lots of time with their Zulu domestic worker when he was very small. So, when he started talking scribble, before he could actually speak in a language anyone else could get, his scribble was Zulu. Ten years on he knows very little Zulu, studying it at school now he wishes he was as fluent in Zulu as he was in its nonsense counterpart.

By day, my roommate is tormented by the cats - they sit and stare at him as his unpredictable shuffle-trundle brings him purposefully closer to them. At the last minute they simply get up and move slightly further away, escaping the baby's grasp. Obviously this is a metaphor for life: you may want something, but it eludes you. Often it seem to elude you at the last minute, willfully, only to sit just a small distance away to observe you, emotionless. Frustration is what it's all about. Or maybe that's just me.

My roommate is, as I have mentioned, a gorgeous, easy baby. He may simply chew on his new wheelbarrow, but he also smiles and burbles, giggles and only complains a bit when he wants feeding/changing/more Barney. He nearly always gets a tour of the kitchen if he visits a restaurant and everyone remembers his name. I repeatedly tell his parents how lucky they are to have such a good baby. I should state clearly here that they seem great parents to me, but being a great parent will not necessarily bring you a good baby, and vice versa.

He is a classically South African baby, given up by his mother for adoption and now living with his gay parents. And his mum chose my friends to be his parents. The incredible constitution of South Africa means that a gay couple can adopt, indeed, a single gay friend of theirs has adopted. Of course, the fabulous constitution combined with the terrible amount of babies in need of families means gay people can adopt a perfect, beautiful, baby.

Not that the exemplary South African constitution means that there is no homophobia in South Africa, far from it, there is even a thing called corrective rape suffered predominantly by women, but I am sure, what with rape not being about sex and all that, that gay men suffer it too... which would be funny, obviously, were it not beyond ghastly. But where there is a constitution, there is hope, and I am committed to hoping that the extensive nature of these crimes will pass into South Africa's history, a strange, chilling glitch.

There have always been lots of black or coloured people looking after white kids in South Africa, but now, more and more, you see couples of all shades looking after coloured and black babies. There are so many different stories, you cannot guess what any given story is, so why bother? The story is that babies need families and grown-ups often want children. Mark says that people sometimes say to him what a wonderful thing they are doing for my roommate, but the truth is that they wanted to be parents and they are lucky to have him and they know it.