It’s 10.30 in the morning. The queue and the shadows are long. The sun is low and far away but it’s hot.
In front of us in the queue is a couple. His shorts are made of shweshwe. His T-shirt has a circle printed on the back with a sunset all in browns and yellows and a soaring eagle. It says ‘Follow The Sun’.
I’m following his partner’s shadow. She’s wearing a royal blue cap-sleeve jumpsuit that seems too pretty for voting day. Most people are in sweats. She is very tall and quite wide. Tall and wide enough to create some shade falling backwards that I can stand in.
Our neighbours at the flat, pensioners now, got to skip the queue though we arrived at the same time. When they came out, he gave Sam his hat and she gave me hers. They walked home, past the enormous road resurfacing machines parked by the field. The dippy, wobbly road had been getting a treatment all week, but since the day before voting, they’ve just sat there, stoking cynicism.
Not even the hat is helping for the heat. At least I didn’t put on a jacket like Sam did. The flat was cold when we left.
I’m reading The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels in the hot winter sun. The queue is slow but it’s moving.
I’m in this queue, but I’m not. I’m really in Egypt watching the painstaking removal of Ramses the Great at the Great Temple of Abu Simbel to avoid the whole thing being flooded during the building of the Aswan High Dam.
I look up now and again to remind myself that I’m among the people who live in my suburb and I should look at them.
One of the times I look up, I see a girl of about two coming out of the school where we’re all voting, holding her father’s hand and swinging her skirt with her other arm. She is wearing a short dress made of sparkles. I’m not sure if she’s swinging because she is trying to make the dress shimmer or because that’s just how two-year olds walk, but in the low-angled rays, the pink and purple sparkles turn to an almost uniform peach colour. The effect is mesmerising.
Later, I look behind me down the queue. I spot three other people reading books. I would give them The Nod but they’re in their own countries and don’t look up.
A handsome young Rhodesian Ridgeback comes to stand beside me, unleashed and panting in the heat.
When we get inside the old school building, the coolness is a brief relief until school-building coldness restores itself in your neck and memory.
At the front of the line, four pensioners are ushered in front of me. ‘Do you mind?’ the officer asks each time. I don’t mind.
One of the pensioners is a writer. Her byline picture – not that one sees it often anymore – was always at least twenty years younger than she was. I’ve seen her interact with people on Facebook and I’m not sure if it’s constitutional gruffness or dementia, but she always comes across as the rudest person in the room. She’s one of those people whose throw-away comments feel like a blowtorch was turned on you, even when you aren’t the unlucky recipient of her vitriol.
When the officer accompanying her says ‘Do you mind?’ to me, the writer turns to me and flashes a lipstick smile. ‘Old age,’ she says apologetically and shrugs her tiny shoulders.
I don’t mind.
I like voting.
I always wonder two things while I’m standing there in the sweet, calm queue where everyone is polite and friendly.
Is it a South African thing to get a little bit choked up and sentimental about voting because of what happened in 1994 when we all got to vote for the first time? (I was old enough – and white enough – to vote in 1989, but I didn’t.)
In South Africa, everyone who voted in 1994 has a memory. I have none. I was working in a newsroom and would have been driving around with a photographer taking pictures of queues all over Cape Town. I don’t remember the day, the photographer I was with, the driver (the newspaper still had drivers in those days), or where we went. I don’t remember filing my copy, what time I started, what time I finished, what I ate, who I spoke to. I don’t even remember what I wore, and often, for who knows what reason, I remember what I was wearing when big things happened. Where the hell did I vote in 1994? The school where I always vote is right beside the flat I lived in then, so it was probably here, but I have zero recollection. South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994 do not exist in my brain or in my body as a thing I experienced personally. I have a good narrative and sensory memory. But for this one thing, there is a blank, a lacuna, a hole, a nothing. It’s so strange.
Bear with me
I’m not a fan of opening a Substack letter and finding housekeeping things at the top. I know that these are important things the writer must share with their readers, but I just want to plunge into things. So I’ve decided to insert my housekeeping here, in the middle. Bear with me.
Thank you to the loyal Love Letter readers who renewed their paid subscriptions after my irritating admin issue spilled into your lives. It’s so nice (understatement) to know that you value my work enough to want to support it like this.
If you were a paid subscriber and didn’t get the memo on this one, you will have had a refund from me for the reasons I outline here. If you’d like to continue as a paid subscriber, you can upgrade again here.
And then, something nice, if you’re keen. Would any of you who are living in Cape Town be at all interested in a (free) one-hour guerrilla writing session with me in person? It’s my birthday at the end of this month, and I thought this might be a fun way to celebrate. Please email me or leave a comment below this is something you’d be keen to do on Sunday, 30 June. If there’s enough interest, I’ll work out the details and let you know.
Getting better
I asked on Facebook last week what comforting things people did for themselves when they were sick that a carer did for them when they’d been sick as a child. Lots of little stories – many of them featuring Vick’s Vaporub, which I discovered has been around for 130 years – emerged. This one, from Claire-Luella Denham-Dyson was my favourite:
Granny was excellent at this, very business-like. You were installed in HER bed (a queen) and given some kind of drink (flat coke for upset tummies, for example). The hot blanket was switched onto ROAST. Television in the day was allowed because you were "poorly" (in fact, several indulgent activities were allowed, and perhaps even encouraged by Granny. She would say "She's poorly" with this mock look of victimhood and then smile naughtily). Soup was made and ladled and bought to you on a tray. If you had a blocked nose (which I still loathe to this day) she would rub Vicks on your back and chest and feet... She always had all the right medicines in a white bathroom cabinet, and was a big fan of mercurochrome. It was fabulous. She really knew how to care for a person.
My mom is still very good at this, but her way is very different. I often remember complaining of an ailment and then being taken, alongside my brother (because he was also sick, obviously) to the room with all the books in it. She would pull out a giant white book with pictures of flowers and herbs on it (I now have this book) and then consult with us. Was the cough loose, or dry? Did the pain radiate, or stay in one place? Does it pulsate, or is it dull, and achy? Pain and illness had never known such variety as I experienced them through this encyclopedia of homeopathic remedies and examinations of self and feeling. I think about it often when I am asked to describe illness/pain or hear it in others. I think it nurtured a whole interoceptive awareness in me. She also had all the medicines - we had little powerful drops, tiny white balls that dissolved under your tongue ("don't chew them!") and a range of other solutions for sickness and ache. This included, at times, some hands-on-body healing, perhaps a little crystal clearing, and maybe even some softly spoken spells with her palm on your forehead. I always felt better.
One of the best ways my dad cared for us was to become deeply committed to feeding us fruit - cut up, diverse, peeled, fruit platters. Artistic fruit platters. Carefully arranged. And on a conveyer belt.
I do many of those things for myself, now, with love... with a bath included and any essential oils, especially eucalyptus for the nose.
Whatever Claire-Luella experienced at school, or later in life, or in relationships, or at work, you get the feeling that they must carry a deep certainty about their inherent worth that will steer them straight most of the time.
My friend Dawn Garish, a prolific writer, a poet and a medical doctor, wrote this poem last year that touched me and which I asked her permission to use.
I always think of illness as a certain kind of story, and Dawn captures that here:
The Consulting Room
what we bring:
the encumbrance of the body with its weighted spaces
the body’s volume, its flabs and backups
the bomb of the flesh, its distress flares
with rampant blooms of delinquent cells
the stink and leak and soak
the mysterious liver, with its dark acrid ink
the exhausted horse of the beaten heart
the rubbish bin of the distended belly
the body as faithful dog, or extreme machine
the reluctant child, the terrorist, the caged beast
two smoky bellows, the chug and growl of gut
the sweet taboos of penis and anus
the silenced vagina, silenced
the glands releasing their secrets, the blood salt
the national flags of skin, all itch and burn
world turmoil condensed and funnelled
into the skull, the body vault
what we want:
the elixir and tonic, the weightlessness of flight
or support of root, movement clear as water or wind
warm ember of the palm held as a poultice
against a headache, the hurt flank, the panic
relief from the blind cyclical scrimmage
a sanctity that fills the intact and serene body
a reliquary for the sacred, the explicit lyric woven
and distilled into exquisite music, a new holding story
the physical forged from a different kind of image
Dawn is also the CEO of Life Righting Collective (‘We teach life righting through life writing’ is their tagline). Writing and healing are closely connected for her.
Eyes here
If you need to know what to watch next, Sam and I have enjoyed these three limited series enormously:
‘A Man In Full’ – Jeff Daniels is so hatable in this role as a egomaniac. The series is based on a book by Tom Wolfe, so it has all the Tom Wolfe elements we know from Vanity of the Bonfires.
‘Ripley’ – Beautifully shot in black and white and Andrew Scott is chillingly good as the urbane conman.
‘Eric’ – watch this for dirty Eighties New York, watch it for Benedict Cumberbatch having an imaginary fist fight with a furry monster, watch it for McKinley Belcher, watch it for remembering the early days of AIDS. Watch it for the music.
I would love to join you for that writing session please!
Thanks for a lovely letter - and Dawn’s poem - I can’t think of a good-enough word for it which doesn’t sound soppy or over-used.
Thank you, again. Just what I needed as a late afternoon pick-me-up. I’d love to do Guerrilla writing with you on your birthday — 🙏🏼💫🙏🏼
And oh my goodness — Dawn’s poem is beyond spectacular. (Is the elderly journalist you saw perhaps Ly-Si? The description fits 😅)