There’s no more frank a form of advice than what you get from a total stranger. Lawrence and Themba only met an hour ago, but already Themba has some pertinent advice for his new acquaintanc
“Don’t fuck it up, bra! Do not fuck it up! If you want pussy, there’s all the pussy you need here. Don’t go break up with her just because you miss her. Fly over there once a year.”
The subject is long-distance relationships. Lawrence’s girlfriend is studying at Oxford. Oxford! Doing a PPE degree in politics, philosophy and economics.
Lawrie’s only now grasping the sheer pain and loss of not having his lady around. At the same time he’s grappling with the temptation of being on the Joburg social scene with no obvious lady on his arm and more loose freaky women eyeing him than he’d ever have though possible.
He’s suffering from guilt. He feels guilty that he feels attracted to these other women. And he dreads the possibility that he may break down and shag some of them while he’s in that long-distance relationship with his lady, Khensani.
Themba is all about the big picture. This lady is the best that Lawrence is ever going to have. She is on a path to greatness. So what if she’s going to be in the UK studying for a few years. You just head on over there and hang out for a bit every year. If you get horny here at home in SA, you just do what you need to do. You go to The Attic in Parkhurst, or you go drop a couple of grand on Patron at Latinova, you meet some girls, you offer one of them a lift home.
Don’t get too attached to nobody. Keep phoning her, man. Maybe propose to her. You want to be keeping that lady interested. Go over there and propose to her. Look at you, man! You’re miserable. You need to keep this thing alive. Don’t fuck it up, dog. It can be done. You can keep a long-distance relationship going for as long as you want, man.
Lawrence is not so sure. The lady’s only been away for three weeks and it’s tearing him apart. He can’t live like this. He can’t pine for this woman like this for another four years. He can’t do it. It’s going to kill him.
He needs his woman with him, not on the other side of the world. And that Khensani is focused on her career, on her goals, is throwing his tenuous career planning into starker contrast. When she was working at the nightclub, hostessing, freaking out as her departure date approached… When she was doing that, his job subbing on the newspaper looked positively careerist.
Now it’s looking a lot more like the flat, dead-end job it really is, while K has her whole future mapped out. When she comes back and slots into a position as a publishing company executive, all black and fabulous, he’s going to be looking pretty ordinary.
Does he even deserve her? Was this thing really ever destined to go the distance? Did they perhaps get together precisely because there was this built-in deadline, this pending departure? Maybe that’s the only thing that really brought them together, the knowledge that, like it or not, they were going to have to part after six months or so, when K headed off on her London adventure.
Then they’d stumbled in the final act, when they were supposed to have the tearful break-up. They just couldn’t do it, they’d sworn to somehow make it work. They’d stay in touch, do a lot of Skype… run the relationship like a video conference. Except that’s not really how Lawrence was raised.
If there’s one thing he was about, it was physical, relentless loving. He was a man of intense passion, a slave to his urges. And now his girl was gone.
“I’m having fuckin’ six wanks a day,” he shouted at Themba, just as there came a silent lull between songs. And still his urges weren’t keeping quiet. On the other side of the braai a lady with a long set of light-brown braids was rocking a pair of tight cotton shorts over a set of those sheer black leggings with the little rhinestone detail by the zipper at the ankle.
It was Lerato, from the same club where Khensani used to work. But fuck that. He just couldn’t see himself holding out for four years. And Mike had this bottle of Lagavulin that he was forcing on anybody who looked vaguely interested. Single malt, boet.
Lawrence’s phone rang. It was that same +44 number. Khensani from London. He excused himself. “Babe?”
Back at the braai, Themba prodded the marinated lamb and shook his head. “He just mustn’t fuck it up.”
And so, within Lawrence Davis, the battle raged. This faithfulness thing, was it going to work? And what was the point anyway?
The point, Themba Modise, mused, as he fielded his first phone call of the evening from his wife… The point. Ah, the point was to finish with all the bullshit and mindgames of the single scene, to find yourself the best woman you possibly could, so you could mellow out and concentrate on other stuff.
“Ja. We are about to start eating,” he told his wife. “I should be home in about an hour.”
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