me, but also to tell me how hard things are, how after eight years he cannot get ahead. There is an implied solicitation in this sharing, a transferral of onus. I ask for a table for three. Phillip disappears. Toilet, his brother says. Fiona, our waitress, shows us to a booth with a red vinyl banquette. I offer to buy drinks. Coke, says Wellington, but when Fiona returns he changes the order to a Hunters Dry (for him) and Amstel (for Phillip, who has to settle for a substitute order of Windhoek). Pretoria Boys is playing KES on the television. Rugby. The real game is happening about two or three kilometres from where we are seated. Phillip asks who is paying for the beer? Me, I say. He keeps repeating himself, like he is nervous, or drunk, or mentally handicapped. Even his brother winces.
“She’s 65,” Wellington says, shaking his head when Phillip asks my mother’s age again.
There is no coherence to what we speak about, no narrative arc that goes from A to B to C.
“I love life,” he says. “I want to be somebody. But I am being held back.”
He repeats this constantly. “I love you,” he adds.
He has a girlfriend, he says. She is large.
“Over 100kg,” his brother says.
I point to a full-bodied woman walking past in tight tracksuit pants.
“Bigger,” his brother estimates.
“How many children do you have?” Phillip asks.
None.
“Why?” His laughter is an indictment. He has two, his son named Stanley, in memory of his older brother who “passed away”. He asks Wellington a question in his native Shona.
“TB,” translates Wellington.
Phillip tells me about his ambitions: he wants to be a truck driver, but he
needs a Code 14 license. If he had R1500, he says, he could “organise one”. “Why doesn’t your employer sponsor you?” I ask.
“They are afraid I will run away afterwards.”
Why doesn’t he get a license legally, I press him.
Because it costs three or four times the price of an illegal one. But, he emphasises, he already knows how to drive a truck. Although only a loader, he sometimes drives the large truck he works on when the driver wants to sleep. “I want to be somebody. But I am being held back.”
I ask about his South African passport; he once told me that he had one.
No, he responds, he has an asylum permit. “Ass-lum,” he pronounces the word.
Our conversation comes full circle. I have to go, I say. He wants a lift to Sunnyside. I stop outside a church closed off from the street by palisade fencing, give him a heavy jacket that once belonged to my grandfather, two fleece sweaters and a black jersey I bought in Treviso, Italy. Leftovers. He accepts them without thanks, asks if I have a plastic bag. He enquires after the phone. Will I send it to him? He also asks for money.
“You’re bleeding me dry,” I say, handing Phillip the last 70 rand in my wallet.
This morning Phillip called four or five times, starting at 9:20.