The fag-end of a Cape Town summer is a bad-tempered swelter. The heat is frayed, its December esprit evaporated with the ice-cream and tourists. What remains is an exhausted, impatient shimmer of cracking tar and acres of council-planted kindling. The sea is a dirty green and blotched with sharks scuffing past one another as their dorsal fins blister and peel in the sun. The Scandinavian backpackers in Long Street have dirty toenails and the thousand-yard stares of people casting off from reality, slowly forgetting Oslo, careers and mortgages as cheap dagga and suffocating nights in grubby hostels pick at the hinges of their consciousness.
On Sunday I took a slow boat through the choked backwaters of that sluggish, steaming, backward city. There was no sound save the occasional screech of a Maltese poodle being caught in an automatic garage door. The captain began firing the forward 10-pounder into the treeline. We thought we saw shapes capering in the primordial undergrowth, perhaps ADT guards interrupted halfway through their midmorning Gatsby. The tar was black and oily, a river of molasses leading us deeper into the white heart of the Newlands.
Some tributaries were entirely blocked. The drums beat on, bringing reports from the north that a groups of cyclists, acolytes of the masochistic Velocipede Brotherhood, were pushing on into the jaws of the Southeaster, the wind keeping them on the spot like 35 000 hamsters in pink spandex hurtling towards oblivion on the great exercise wheel of testicular doom. Later we passed a huddle of the feral dachshunds that haunted these parts, squabbling over the remains of a rider who had wandered from the pack. We saw a shoe, a fingerless glove, a tibia. The dogs snarled and tried to give chase, but their legs were too short and their bellies dragged on the pavement.
Newlands Cricket Ground (or as it is now called, Shariah Park Newlands, or something equally incongruous and prescriptive) is a terribly sad place in mid-March. The divots gaily ploughed by international kneecaps a month ago have baked hard into tiny saucer-sized salt pans, and the awnings of the Railway Stand flap wanly, like the sails of a typhoid-ravaged schooner becalmed in the Sargasso.
All of which went unnoticed by the Wellhungovers and the Cape Town Big Boys XI as they squared up, 12 against 13, for a social thrash in front of 25 000 empty, echoing seats. Miles away, at least two Capetonian columnists fought nappy-rash on Suikerbossie and swore at every rider who struggled past them with a cheery word about the difficulties of writing something funny about the Argus. But some of us pick our ordeals with more discretion and, marking out a run-up at the Kelvin Grove end, as tumbleweed rolled in from extra cover, one couldn’t help smirking in a self-satisfied way.
But two hours at fine leg, with dust drifting into fine dunes around one’s shins, tends to shift smiles to the other side of one’s face (the lee side, the side not having flakes of irradiated skin blown off it by the gale).
Fortunately there are always those less fortunate than ourselves to observe, who give us perspective on our own misery. And up in the deserted darkness of the President’s Pavilion sat the official scorer in her lonely hutch, haemorrhaging away a Sunday she will never get back, so that we might know that the current run rate was 1,23 per over, and that Muggins’s two runs had been scored backward of square (both deflections off his chin) and had been 32 minutes in the making. Her little pale face bobbed in the window far away as she desperately tried to hear the bowler’s name in the wind.
‘Huuuur!” the skipper seemed to be bellowing, impatiently gesturing at his seamer, as if she had somehow managed to misidentify Shane Warne. ‘Huuuur!”
‘Herbert?” she yelled back, her voice cracking.
‘No! Mnyuuuur!”
‘His name is Ginuuur!” screamed extra cover, to speed up the process.
‘Geniel?” She felt her larynx rupture.
Rolled eyes, despairing hands thrown into the air. The captain began a long-suffering trudge towards the stands, and climbed, hands on knees, to her cubby hole.
‘The bowler is Smith. Okay? Smith. Would you like me to spell that for you?”
We never found out her name. Like the angel she was, she disappeared into the ether as soon as the last wide had been re-bowled, the last leg-bye limped.
And we wretches dispersed into the gathering gloom.