Even Poodles Can Fly A Collection of Essays, Including a Reflective Essay A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Creative Writing. Wesley Thompson 0217023E 1 Declaration I declare that this thesis is my own unaided work. It is submitted for the degree of Master of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. It has not been submitted before for any other degree or examination in any other university. _______________ Wesley Thompson 20 June 2019 2 Contents Coochie Coochie Coo | 4 I, the Monster | 9 Let’s Be Penguins Together | 19 Delinquency’s Soundtrack | 25 Windbag | 43 Strange Light | 53 Enchantless | 73 Little Professor | 77 The Dead Rat Under the Cap | 87 Ambitious, Will Travel | 102 The Misery of Cyan | 122 Introvert’s Response | 148 Domestic Love Boat | 151 The Furball Trinity | 164 Chain Reaction | 171 The Haze | 177 Reflective Essay: Even Poodles Can Fly | 200 Works Cited | 226 3 Coochie Coochie Coo In search of some of my early memories I: Go swimming There are swimming pools everywhere. We don’t have one at home but there are always pools at the parties my parents take me and my brother to at my mom’s friends in Johannesburg. My dad is drinking with the men but I bug him to come and swim and when he gets into the pool he turns into a sea pony. I jump on his back and put my arms around his neck. ‘Ready?’ he asks. He counts us down. I take a deep breath and we dive under the water. I hold on tight while we go from one side to the other. When my dad is tired of being a sea pony he gets out and goes back to drinking. There is always a shark in the water. It lives in the big green plastic box on the lawn and it comes out of the hole in the side of the pool where the pipes are. The deeper you go the darker the water gets and the more in danger you are of being eaten. If the shark ever catches you he will swallow you whole or cut you up piece by piece and put a white bib on and eat you in his dining room with a knife and fork with some salt and pepper and tomato sauce. 4 And all that will be left of you will be your armbands floating on the water above a cloud of blood. Go on holiday We are at my mom’s friend’s house in a pine town at the sea. My friend Clint* asks our friend Jo to show us her thingy. She says fine. We all know we are doing something bad so me and my brother and Clint and Jo go down the long driveway where it is quiet while the parents are sitting around the braai at the pool. Jo says she will only show it to us if we show her ours. We all chicken out except for Clint who pulls his pants down and starts jumping around and dancing and flapping his arms with his winky bouncing up and down and all around while he sings, ‘La la la la la.’ We laugh. Clint pulls his pants up and his face goes red. ‘Your turn,’ he says to Jo. She pulls her skirt down but it is only for a split second. My body feels hot inside all over. Clint says it is not fair because he showed it to her for long and did a dance and everything. Jo runs away. We go to Shark World and sit on the stands while a creep wearing gloves cuts a shark open with a knife and its guts spill onto a silver table and it smells really bad. * Some names have been changed throughout this collection of essays. 5 He reaches in and pulls more guts out. He says they find all sorts of things in there like shoes and hair brushes and bottles and naughty children. We make sandcastles at the beach. We sit while my dad builds racing cars around us in the sand. We are the drivers. My dad says I am Airton Senna. I am going to take off into the sea or crash into a wall at Imola. He buries us up to our necks and we all laugh for hours. Say ‘Coochie coochie coo’ Our teacher at nursery school gets us to draw things. I always draw animals because I love them. She says if we pick our noses and eat it we will be eaten from the inside out by worms. There is a boy who pees at the toilet with his pants all the way down around his ankles. He doesn’t know that you don’t have to pull your pants all the way down. Everyone laughs at him. Our teacher tells the class not to laugh. The boy is me. There is half a horse that we sit on in front of a picture of fields for our photos. A creepy man with bad teeth and long hair and a stinky breath tries to make me laugh but I don’t want to. 6 My mom comes over and wipes my cheeks and asks me nicely to smile and I do it for her. When I walk in Meyerton with her I only step on the pavement blocks with corners that touch otherwise I will slip through and fall and die. Pretty women smile at me and wink when they walk past. I try to wink back but I can’t. Both my eyes just close at the same time and the women laugh. Every time I see a cute animal I say, ‘Coochie coochie coo.’ I start saying it whenever I see fluffy animals I want to pet like puppies and kittens and baby penguins and panda bears and koalas and hairy beavers with teeth. Play with balloons My mom keeps throwing my colourful shoes away. She says they are old and smelly. I get angry and dig them out of the bin. My dad tells the best bedtime stories. In them there are knights and penguins and horses and children who fall asleep. When me and my brother ask him where he gets the stories from he says they are just nonsense stories. When my dad farts and I laugh he looks at me and says, ‘What? I kicked him out because he didn’t pay the rent.’ The room we all stay in has a very high roof made out of grass. When it rains the water drips through and there are tinking pots everywhere. At night the red dot of the TV turns into the eye of a monster that eats children. 7 Sometimes we stay at Nana and Pops and there are monsters on the ceiling and the walls. They change shape all the time and howl when the wind blows hard before it rains. When you finally fall asleep the tall clock that Pops built chimes and wakes you up and then you lie awake for hundreds of years. Me and my brother look in my dad’s toiletry bag and find little square packets with round things of all different colours inside. We take them to him and ask what they are. He looks cross and just says, ‘Balloons.’ We ask him if we can play with them. He says fine but only one each because they are very expensive balloons. 8 I, the Monster I, the Monster, am at my desk working on an edit when a text from my mother comes through to say that my grandmother isn’t doing well, she’s not going to make it, and already I feel nothing. ‘Let me know if you need me there,’ I reply. I soon forget about it and get lost in my work for a few hours until another text comes through to say that my grandmother is gone. I leave for the old-age home. Henley on Klip Retirement Village used to be a hotel. I have an early memory of the old place with its pool, the bar, and the green lawns leading down to the Klip: a picnic, the smell of beer on my father’s breath, a packet of Camels on a blanket, cool drink in plastic cups, Simba chips and cold meats on rolls, and ducks squabbling for scraps. The buildings are much the same now. Instead of hotel rooms there’s a frail- care unit. Go inside and you feel the life drain from you. Old people sit in wheelchairs in front of a television, spoon-fed soup by nurses, yellow muck dribbling down their chins and onto their bibs. Others sit together at tables saying nothing, staring into space. Everywhere, eyes follow you, asking for a piece of your youth. Just a little, they say, I could do so much more with it than you will ever do. I can’t help wondering if death is a great gift to these people, but then I remember that they are the lucky ones, with access to 24-hour emergency medical services and personal butlers. This is the life after life that they worked so hard for. There’s still a swimming pool, but only the ducks use it now. 9 The wing where my grandmother lived is quiet. My aunt is leaning against the wall in the passage. My uncle is there too, standing to one side.