Heart strings, part one.

My phone made the sound of a harp.

My Darling, he wrote, I'll be home soon!

After months of phone calls every day,

of faraway hearts and postcard love...

The garden was bursting into bloom, the floor was swept.

It was time.

The plane from Qatar was late, I paced up and I paced down. 

But then there he was, as always, larger than life.

And home we sped, on a sunday winter's night, to the fire in the grate, to the lamb in the oven. To laughter and clinking glasses. To wisps of lace from

my favourite shop in Paris...

Sometimes the world can be monochrome for days on end.

Then, in an instant, it bursts into full colour.

Later we fell asleep.

There was music.

And the scent of skin.

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.

The Pyramid Scheme.

As I write this, I think of what someone said to me today: there is no "I" in team. Well... I disagree. But it's because of the nature of this particular film we're working on. There is so little respect, there are giant egos at work and with that, the abuse of power.

And then I think of what my honey said to me over the phone: "die kak kom van bo af", meaning the shit comes from the top.

Absolutely.

The director is giving the designer a shovel-full of it, so he snaps at me. I want to yelp with the injustice of it all, so I end up snapping at the swing gang. The difference perhaps being that I love those guys. So I apologize. The driver says to me: It's okay Lil, I understand. You know when I get home and my little daughter is noisy, I row with her and I tell her to sit still for just one moment!

That's when it all came crashing down on top of me.

The consequences of everything we do. And say.

I don't want to be a part of this pyramid of shit.

 I had a sweet respite last Saturday, when I went to do a booking with our friend the collector. There were no other customers and it was just like the old days: we sat down with a small, strong cup of coffee and had a bit of a gossip. The weather blew and crashed outside. He told me about his take on fame - that he understands why stars are so difficult.
"If you don't distance yourself and make a stand, people will walk right over you"

I guess. It must be hard to stay nice when you're in a position of power. But what if you weren't even nice to start with?
 

Worry and sleepless nights... white noise helps sometimes - I put on a loop of waves crashing on a beach somewhere and it lulls me for a while.
 

Alas, I will never be this guy, sleeping on the job, on a noisy city street:

Everywhere, the little cars.
They make me smile.
  

How I miss that long-legged man.
He has been away for so long.

The Dark Stream.

Eugene Marais, youngest child, mystic number thirteen. 1871-1936

South African history thrills me. A kindred spirit recommended The Dark Stream some months ago and I was lucky enough to find a copy at Kwagga Books in Kalk Bay. I'm only halfway through, but I look forward to reading another installment every night. I love Leon Rousseau's turn of phrase. Of E.M.'s father Jan, he has this to say: "He was a rather pathetic King Lear, Transvaal style."

Like most South Africans with an interest in literature, I knew a few things about Eugene Marais, namely that he was a poet (we read a large body of his work at school), he was a journalist, a doctor, a naturalist and a lawyer. A morphine addict who eventually committed suicide.  Fewer may know that he was educated in English, not Afrikaans. He was a hypnotist, a psycho-analyst. He could interpret dreams and he charmed many women. When he returned from his sojourn in London, he wore gold Kruger Rands for buttons and shoes with long pointed toes.

It's hard to imagine exactly what South Africa must have been like back then. This book makes it so much more real. The things people were dealing with: the Boer War, women and children dying by their thousands in the camps. Corruption in the government. People were traveling great distances, going to foreign countries by ship, undertaking expeditions into the unmapped wild. They were writing letters. They were filled with superstition. They were struck down by malaria, by childhood diseases and by childbirth itself.

"...the most perfect female in body and mind, that God ever planted in South Africa." E.M.'s soft-eyed beauty Aletta Beyers from Natal. She died eight days after giving birth to their son, after barely two years of marriage.

Too heavy to take with me on the plane, this book, but I'll happily keep it on my bookshelf for years to come, right there next to Deneys Reitz's Commando.