Chapter 29

All I could think about in the taxi was that story, the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion stings the frog and they both die because’ it is in his nature’. He can’t change who he is, no matter how much he tries and even if it destroys him.

It’s in my nature.

An hour later we stumbled into the bar and ordered another round of drinks. Clay got on the phone and told the usual crowd to meet as Bouijis in the next hour, we were going big tonight. But the second I wasn’t in his presence, in the loud, laughing chaos, my thoughts drifted to Riaan. At some stage I stumbled into the bathroom and almost knocked two woman over as they were coming out.

“Watch where you’re going,” The one said to me, looking very angry as she rubbed her elbow.

The other one gave me a dirty look and turned to her friend, “She’s so drunk,”

I thought I heard the other one say, “it’s so ugly” as they left. Normally I would have shouted some witty (or not so witty depending on how far gone I was) retort at them, go back to Clay and then proceed to rip them to shreds and laugh about what idiots inhabited this world. But this time I didn’t. Something about her words hit me. There was a truth in them, because I felt ugly.

I stumbled to the basin and held onto it to steady myself as the room spinned. For some reason I didn’t want to look at myself in the mirror, I think was afraid of what I might see. Or not see.

An hour later we were in the club. I should have been happy and having fun. I should have been on the dance floor with everyone else like I normally was, spraying Champagne and laughing. Drinking, dancing, screaming with laugher. But I wasn’t. I’d overheard someone talking about Poppy and how they couldn’t believe she’d slept with her father’s bodyguard, “how low is that” they’d said. I felt like telling them it wasn’t true. I felt like calling the paper and telling them it wasn’t true and then I felt like calling her to make sure she was okay and then I felt like a terrible, horrible person and then I felt guilty and then I called the waiter over and ordered more drinks.

“Fuck babe, what’s with the long face”, Clay was pulling me onto the dance floor.

I resisted and he actually looked genuinely offended.

“Please don’t tell me you’re thinking about that douche bag?”

“No, no” I covered, when actually I was thinking about him, in-between the thoughts about Poppy and other people that  Clay and I had hurt, “I think I’m just tired, or jet lagged or something,”

“You need Tequila then!” He screamed it at the top of his lungs, “Tequila. Ole”

The Tequila worked for about an hour and I joined the crowd on the dance floor where we got up to our usual tricks. People tended to move out of our way, the dance floor usually cleared pretty quickly when we were on it. It may have had something to do with all the stumbling and falling we usually did.

“I love your outfit,” One of our club friends screamed at me over the noise.

Clay burst in, “She stole it from a poor starving African child,” They both screeched with laugher, as if it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. In fact, they almost lost their balance they were laughing so much. I didn’t find it funny.

There was nothing funny about it at all.

“I didn’t,” I shouted angrily which made them both stop, swing around and stare at me.

“Jesus babe. Lighten up. Did you leave your sense of humor in Africa under a rock?”

I smiled and shook my head, “Just joking!” But I wasn’t joking. I threw my arms up in the air and twirled around and around and around until I felt dizzy.

The lights were throbbing and the base was so loud that it reverberated through the floor and my feet. But as the pace of the music quickened and the lights flashed faster and the base shook more and more, I suddenly found myself on my hands and knees. I wasn’t quite sure how I had landed up that way.

I felt Clay pull me off the dance floor laughing loudly, “Come. Enough of this place. Andrew is having a party, lets go.”

He pulled me out the club and the air was cold, it temporarily sobered me up and for a moment all I could think about was Riaan.

But ten minutes into Andrew’s party. Clay decided that the crowd was way revolting and that we should rather go somewhere else. Soon I was being dragged out again and we were stumbling down the road once more.

This was so familiar. This right here, stumbling down the road from club to club, party to party. Suddenly I felt exhausted.

“I’m tired Clay, I think I want to go home,”

“Nonsense. Everyone is meeting up at the Buda Bar just now,”

“I don’t know if I want to—“

“Babe, you’re not bailing on me now. Come.”

And off we went again into another club, drank another round of drinks and then another one and another one.

But I couldn’t drink enough to get rid of the feelings that were persistently nibbling at me. They were sitting uncomfortably in the pit of my stomach and the second I wasn’t distracted, they came creeping up again. I stood alone at a table watching Clay and everyone dancing. Something about it all suddenly looked so disguising. I wasn’t sure what. Pictures were flashing through my mind like a View-Master, one of those old retro kids toys,; the children at the school, to here in the club, to Riaan, the carving on the tree, back here to everyone drinking shooters and then to the faces of the kids when they’d gotten new stationary. It was as though I wasn’t in control of my thoughts and they were just rolling in randomly like tidal waves. They were making me sea sick.

And then I remembered something that Riaan had said to me, “Stop destroying yourself,” How ironic.

He’d told me not to destroy myself, but he had done it for me.

Fuck him.

I went to the bar to buy a drink and soon realized that I had no money in my wallet. I couldn’t figure out how, there’d been a lot, had I really spent that much tonight? I was about to pull out a credit card when I remembered that my father had cancelled them. I walked over to Clay,

“Babe I need some money,’

He stopped dancing and looked at me in shock, “Oh my God don’t tell me you lost your bag again,”

I shook my head, “No I don’t have any money,”

And then he was laughing again, did he ever take anything seriously?

“My dad cancelled my credit cards,” I finally said. That stopped the laughing dead in its tracks

“What?”

I nodded.

“So what are you going to do for money.”

“I shrugged, “I don’t know,”

“Oh my God babe, you’re poor. You might have to get a job. Or really steal clothes off African children,” And he was off laughing again but pulled some money out of his pocket and gave it to me.

Had he always been like this? I couldn’t work it out. There was something so off putting about him tonight.

And why wasn’t I having fun.

Maybe another drink would help?

But it didn’t. It only made it worse. We stumbled out of the club and down the road once more but something caught my attention. It was a luggage shop and in the window were my zebra skin bags. Everything just came flooding back at once and it almost knocked me off my feet. The tears came like a waterfall.

“What the fuck babe?” Clay was looking around nervously to see if anyone was looking. As if he was embarrassed? Why would he be embarrassed, we climbed on statues and fell off chairs, why would this make him look embarrassed?

“What’s wrong with you Zara? You’ve been acting weird all night?”

I couldn’t speak I was crying so much. And the more I cried, the more and more uncomfortable Clay looked like he was becoming.

“Babe, someone is going to see you and then they really will think you’ve lost it.”

“So what if someone sees,” I asked in-between sobs.

“So what? Have you seen yourself, your mascara is practically dripping on the floor, you look terrible. Its not a good look for you,”

He grabbed me by the arm, “Come, let’s go get another drink somewhere,”

“No,” I pulled my arm free, “No I’m tired.”

Clay started looking very put out, “Okay fine. Maybe you should just go home and get some sleep—“

“That’s not what I mean. I’m tired. Tired. I’m tired of this,” I put my back against the shop window, I wasn’t sure how much longer I was going to be able to stand.

“Of what?”

“What else do we do Clay? Other than this?”

“Um… we shop.”

“And what else?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,”

“We never talk. We drink, we party, we shop, we sleep during the day and we drink. When last did we actually have a real conversation?”

Clay was starting to look confused, “We just talked on the plane.”

“About what? We talk about what we are going to do, where we are going to go. We gossiped about people. Talked about what to drink and who we had sex with.”

“So isn’t that talking. I don’t understand what you’re trying to say?”

“NO. That’s not talking.”

Clay just started at me as if I was about to explode and he didn’t know what to do.

“I’m just feeling so confused. I think that being in Africa has changed me in some way and Riaan, I really really—“

Clay cut me off by taking out his phone and dialing a number,

“What're you doing?”

“I’m calling you a cab, I think you’ve lost it or something. Maybe you’ve picked up something in Africa, they have all that weird shit there, like whatever it’s called… ibola or whatever.”

“You don’t get it do you? I was just trying to talk to you. ” I shook my head and slumped down, my back slid down the window until I was sitting on the floor.

“You just don’t get it,” I repeated it again, feeling devastated at the realization that had just hit me through the face like a cold fish. We weren’t real friends at all. We were drinking buddies. Party friends.

“No, clearly I don’t” His tone was very offish and bitchy as hell. It was the same tone I’d heard him use many times before on people we knew, or people we used to be friends with.

“I have to meet everyone in ten minutes so…..” He looked at me with a strange look, “So I’m going to go and I’ll call you in the morning once you’ve sobered up or something. The taxi will be here in five.”

He started walking away,

“Hey Clay,” I called after him and he turned, “Did you know that this handbag,” I held it up, “Can feed a whole family for a year?”

The look that passed over his face was indescribable. “Seriously, I don’t know what’s gotten into you Zara. Maybe yo have gone mad.”

And he was gone.

I sat there by the road all by myself and tried to figure out what was going on.  Everything about tonight had felt wrong. The whole thing had felt ugly and poisonous in some way. Tainted.

And once again I found myself feeling lost and alone, story of my fucking life right? Except this time, no Riaan was going to come to my rescue. I wanted to talk to him so badly. But he didn’t want me either.

The taxi finally arrived and I climbed in.

“Where too?”

The question ripped through me. Where too? I wasn’t welcome at my house, Charles had made that clear. Clay didn’t really seem to want anything to do with my right now, and I didn’t seem welcome with Riaan.

I was completely alone and utterly unwelcome, and I had helped make myself that way.

It's in my nature.