The Beekeeper's Cottage.

 

A strange and charming little house
beneath giant oak trees.

The door was open and I walked in, standing for a moment to get accustomed to the half light. Packed full of old beehive frames, the intense fragrance of honey. Dessicated bees crunching underfoot.

We transformed it for a few days into an 1840's German tavern. Both beekeepers were amazed by the process and often popped in to chat. A hard profession, they said, to be a beekeeper.

But they were of such an even keel, with their twinkly blue eyes and grey hair, that I felt calmer after speaking to them.
 

It's been a project of ups and downs and dubious politics. I have become aware, more than ever before, of the different energy we each possess, and how powerful it is.

I'm feeling depleted. There are big decisions to be made. But all I want to do for now is lie in bed and read a book.

Bossieskraal.

It has been many years since I stayed in a house next to the sea. A house with no key, a house with an outhouse. Where, if you need water, you take a bucket to the well.
A house with no plug points, no electrical hum.

When last did you walk on a beach for a day, without seeing another soul?

We walked the marshes and he found this clue:

Around the bend, there they were, those flamingos.

By the end of the day I had handfuls of feathers.

There is samphire, I think. And the husks of hundreds of small, bone-coloured crabs.

A house settles gently into decay. The cement contains not just sand, but shells and pieces of purple coral.

In the mornings, you open the kitchen door, and they are there, waiting for breakfast.

A place that can wipe away fear.

The city has made me so cautious.

Triage.

On our breaks, at the breakfast table, we talk about leaving the film industry, of what we'd do. Many of us dream of other things. But there are moments and there are people... they happen when you least expect it and make it all worthwhile.

The other morning just before daybreak, I got a lift with the props people on the back of a Land Cruiser. Sitting there in the crisp, cold air between the muskets and the hides and the arrows and the quivers. Up the winding mountain road, horses galloping ahead of us and horses behind. There's a row of pine trees where the lane is very narrow, so you brush against them and the smell stays with you. It brings back memories of good things.

Or waiting for the rain to let up and someone plays a song. We're stamping our feet anyway, because it's cold, so we end up dancing and laughing for a while, in a small tipi, on a mountain, at seven in the morning.  Thando...

At night I dream I'm being followed.

But, four more sets to go and then some time off.

A road trip. Open spaces, clouds and sheep.

Karoo my love.

Going Cuckoo.

Those flamingos, those mud-stirrers, those jokers. I expected to go there and find them gone, all of them, overnight. But they have left in dribs and drabs, the final few lingering like party guests who just won't go home. Bittereinders we say in Afrikaans.

Now we drive along a different road.
A mountainside on a farm. The gravel road meanders past ancient manor houses, horses, sawmills, trees all red and copper. The tractor drivers wave hello.
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss croon please read the letter that I wrote.
I wrote it in my sleep.
And these words from Edith Templeton I can't forget: He will awake, will read, will write lengthy letters, and will pace the avenues amidst the drifting leaves.
There's no time for that and I miss it. Fourteen hour work days, small snatches of sleep inky with Indian life. The neighbor's blasted cuckoo clock follows me even while I'm awake.

Our Cherokee adviser could have stepped from an old Edward Curtis photograph.

Except he wears jeans, a black jacket with a scarlet lining and blue tinted spectacles.
He stares at the horizon a lot and tells us stories about warriors weaving hummingbird feathers into the manes of their mustangs.
Hummingbird has speed.
He says: Even your money comes from trees.
He says: I heard it on the moccasin express.
He looks around and asks if we have questions. He turns to me with eyes wide and says: Cuckoo!

Glamorous it ain't.  At the front door of my friend last night, she says only half in jest: I'd invite you in... but you're too dirty!

There's a storm a-brewing with gale force winds and lashing rain.
 The extras are in purgatory...

Autumn.

Within days, the weather has turned.

Every morning I see with relief that the flamingos are still here. Their feathers have faded to a pale, pale pink. Yesterday, I saw two herons in the morning mist... CAN playing on the radio: She brings the Rain.

 

Two weeks ago, my mother fell off a step ladder and broke her wrist. In her efforts to save me from worrying, I only heard about it while she was waiting to go into surgery. Sleepless nights.
 

I went to fetch her from the clinic and we stopped by her place of work - a frail care facility. I met a man in his nineties who has emphysema. He is bedridden, but so gracious, with a twinkle in his eye. A lady in her nineties - sprightly, reading in the sun. Then, as we sat down for a cup of tea, a bearded man came racing down the hill in an electric wheelchair. Raised eyebrows from me to my mother: "Oh, he's Italian."

On my mother's dressing table there is a line of photographs. I see my father in dreams, but it has been a long time since I saw his smile, like that, straight at the lens. Flanking him, my sister on her wedding day and a much younger me, holding a favourite cat, it's limbs akimbo.

One afternoon, as I was driving back from set at high speed, I had to brake unexpectedly and felt myself losing control of the pick-up. No life events flashed before my eyes, just my voice in my head, saying not yet, not yet. And then the voice of my father saying don't break hard, stab and stab.

With a sense of great longing, I drove over the Salt River and past the bus stop with the handmade sign: Madiba is God.

The days fly by: on set we are surrounded by horses, Comanche braves and 1840's settlers with cellphones, skydivers with flapping parachutes. At night it all jumbles up in my dreams. Easter with egg-hunting and the fragrance of lamb and herbs, and damson plums with insides like beets or kidneys or hearts.

Snake Country.

The other day in town, I passed a group of well-heeled people waiting for the bus. So unusual a sight that I looked around for the film crew. But the My Citi bus stops are popping up all over Cape Town, and the service seems to be doing well. It's a world away from the belching old Golden Arrow rattlers we took in our youth. On the West Coast road, the My Citi has a dedicated red bus lane, with a middleman of indigenous shrubs. It makes me want to try it out.

As much as I came to hate the N7 last year, so much do I love the West Coast road. It's a place where the motorists have manners - they give way if you're in a hurry. After saying thank you, I look back and see the slow, round-eyed blink of headlights in the rear view mirror - you're welcome.

I drive along this road many times a day, bluegrass in the cd player... how to grow a woman from the ground. It's perfect.

The flamingos make my heart skitter.
Further on, in the marshlands, there is a colony of pelicans. Then, down a very rutted lane, the village that we have been building for the past two months. 1840's, Texas. There is no running water and no electricity. There are snakes. Scorpions with tails fat as your thumb. We have learnt to shake things and to stomp, not walk. At dawn, we have a nature conservation man who does a slow sweep of the set, catching the unwanted and releasing them far, far away. The next day they are back.
It is hot as an oven.
The scenic painters blend right in.

Now that we have started shooting, the place has come alive. Horses and chickens, dragoons, settlers and noblemen. The Cholera-stricken, the haughty and the ornery...

It's a time of hard work, scant rest, sudden beauty.

The Needles.

The piped oriental ambient music never lets up and there is a strong smell of temple incense. It smells like burning leaves mixed with something else I can't place. This place is very strange to me, nothing matches and the entire house has wall-to-wall Prussian blue carpeting. It's as though this carpeting has been recycled from a different place. I walk down the hall to the bathroom and just before the doorway, off-centre, there is a raised patch of carpet, worn vaguely in the pattern of fish scales.

    The bathroom is like any suburban bathroom, but squeaky clean. It's very dark, so I switch on the fluorescent light, which hums at a mosquito-like pitch. There's a tiny handwritten sign asking please to switch off after visit. The bath is filled almost to the brim with cold, clean water. There is an infant's chair submerged in it. Under the basin, near the wall, there is a patch of very worn, almost threadbare carpet. It reminds me of the art installations I saw in Europe. The ones where you are too embarrassed to ask: "Please, what is the meaning of this?", because people are walking about and nodding their heads sagely.

    In the waiting room, I look down and see that my black jacket is covered in small white dog-hairs. Someone told me that the doctor and his family breed Jack Russell terriers. In between the short white hairs I see a long, coarse and wavy silver hair.
    Ida's turn. I ask if I may watch and am ushered along the passage into what must have been a bedroom in the house. In fact, it still looks like a less than affluent family bedroom. There's a pile of blankets and two beds, one already occupied by the still form of a man with his eyes closed. I don't see any needles protruding from him. He is snoring softly.

    The doctor is a small man of indeterminate age with black hair in a bristle cut. He is dressed like a preppy university student - chinos with neat ironed creases down the front, loafers and a golf shirt. I hang back while Ida sits down on the bed and explains where her back aches. The doctor reaches into the cupboard next to me and removes several packages of sterile needles. He tells me that they are thinner than a human hair. He slips one out of the foil packet, holds it by the snug plastic tubing and taps it into Ida's neck, tapping, tapping, until it must have gone in two inches or more. He continues in this way, tapping eight needles into the back of Ida's head and neck, then asks her to lie down, on top of the needles. I stand frozen: Munch-like in a silent scream, eventually clasping my hand over my mouth. Three needles into each hand, sides of calves two, feet two. The last four he agitates quite vigorously and I feel myself sway. At the furthest edge of my right eye I see the carpet ripple, as though a rodent is scuttling on a pathway beneath it. I float down the passage and sink into a plush red chair in the waiting room. It takes a while for me to come back from inner space and then I realize that the Anthony Kiedis lookalike is trying to make eye-contact. I pointedly pick up a pamphlet about acupuncture, thinking bad thoughts about the baby and the bruise and the gun.

    The receptionist walks past us into the passage and an airy bit of artificial flower arrangement on the mantle wafts down in her wake. She is a diminutive Chinese girl with the feet of a seven-year-old. She blushes and this accentuates her bad case of acne. I look down again at the pamphlet in my hands and see the list of ailments alleviated by the needles. Point Four: SKIN. Acne, Psoriasis, Boils, Eczema, Hives. I wonder about the movie heroine and her pincushion body. I wonder about the receptionist's skin. Somehow I don't think I'll be coming back, even after reading Point One: NEUROLOGICAL. Fears & Anxiety.
(Excerpted from a story I wrote some years back, after visiting
Dr Lin's house in Plumstead.)

I've never been one for the needles. But yesterday I went to a chiropractor - a calm, clear-eyed man who explained things before he did them, also telling me exactly what to expect with each tweak. The pain was bearable - like the natural loosening of a milk tooth. I am intrigued. Afterward, I was so spaced out that I could barely count the notes in my wallet. Today I can bend in ways I haven't been able to for several months.

I will be back.

I know a Sugarman.

Photograph courtesy of a very tall man.

A performance by Rodriguez last week thoroughly warmed the cockles of my heart. By song number two, tears were rolling down my cheeks. Around us people young and old sang along. A man behind me yelled: you can do anything - we love you man!

Exactly.

Because, you see, it wasn't just an old man
singing his songs.

It was my eight-year-old self playing with the family hound, a grumpy daschund, outside my brother's bedroom window, listening to Cold Fact.

It was my eighteen-year-old self, leaving home, taping that vinyl record to take with me to university. On the other side of Moondance.

It was my nineteen-year-old self posing my boyfriend cross-legged in a hat and a purple vest, for Photography 101.
(He told me I looked fat
in my favourite cheesecloth dress)

It was countless parties and barbeques and trips
in a car.

It was hours of sulking on my bed.

It was wondering, wondering... is there someone who will understand me, is he listening too?

In this job I do, I have built up a network of people and many have become loved ones. I visited a couple yesterday, both in their late seventies. They own a small antique shop and often help me to find the things that I need. Now and then I am invited to their beautiful home - a large stone house next to the sea, with very high ceilings. It is filled with two lifetimes of collecting.

They have recently lost a good friend - a young artist. His self-portrait is on display in the living room and music spills through the house. Was it a huntsman or a player that made you pay the cost...

Rodriguez again. She has her own memories - we were driving to the coast and playing this song, we were laughing so much. And then she winks at me and says: oh that man - he has such a sexy voice - ahhhhh!

The noise in my head.

The whirring of a fan swallows the things that normally wake me in the night. The demented cuckoo clock next door, drunken stumblings in the road, gates slamming shut, the creaking and cracking of old roof timber... but also the good sounds - the gentle whinnying of the horses on the farm, the krr krr of the guinea fowl in their midnight roosts.

I've spent the past two days in a blizzard of paper, a snow squall of pictures, preparing for a presentation. Things were a lot rougher in 1840 than you would imagine.
There were cautions attached to this job and I tread carefully. Unable to sleep last night for worry, I tried my other sure thing. There's a house far away from here - in Shoreditch, London. Victorian terrace, mosaic tiles, black front door. I flatten my troubles one by one and post them through a brass letter slot in that glossy black door. (Some of them take refolding, reposting, more than once.)
 

Last night, without thinking, I turned the doorknob.

......

The troubles were words and they were all there, rendered larger than life in a font called Carnivalee Freakshow, designed by a guy called... Livin Hell.

With spiteful little highlights and towering spiky shadows.

Why is everything so much worse in the deep dark night?

  The night passed, the presentation was a breeze, the feared person not an ogre after all.

Perhaps the new parking machines at Canal Walk know of what they speak.

My Valentine.

My Valentine is a man

who stops traffic on a winding mountain pass

to guide a snake to safety.