Clubbing in Cape Town

“This is a new sensation. Writing with pounding headache, writing till the pain goes away, writing not using a pen, writing with the all my fingers and all my heart.”

The drive to the gynae was not too harrowing – she just missed the turn twice and ended up being horribly late for her first ever appointment. Funny, being late is what prompted her to make the appointment in the first place.

Two nights ago she purchased a home pregnancy kit. She was on her way home from supper club, this once a week ritual that any person worth knowing in Cape Town has to attend, is rated by the quality of the starter, opening bottle and of course the guest list – which no one discusses before hand. It is considered bad taste. It’s just sort of accepted that they will be in your league. The best of them have special guests; the word celebrity is frowned upon. After all, those attending, the best of them anyway are quasi celebrities themselves. Gallery owners, film makers, actors, actresses (or temp staff – as we call them), art patrons, playboys, the odd looking business man in a suit and as sort of a once a month filler the over done beauty queens, or EC (eye candy) are some of the creatures that can found in this menagerie. They treat a new comer to the group as a cartoon piranha would a cartoon fish. The last thing on any bodies mind is the food. Many of the regulars stopped eating in the late nineties and survive on a liquid diet of chardonnay, vitamin shakes and Champaign. It is quite a thing. Quite a thing.

Gina belongs to one of the more established clubs. They meet every Tuesday either the Foreshore Flat or Tinto’s penthouse or the Sonnenberg’s estate in Wynberg. Sometimes Gina is the host but her place is best for summer nights because her patio is divine during that magical hour when dusk settles on the city like a smoky haze. She has always wanted to be proposed to at that hour – that is Gina’s witching hour. Everyone knows that Gina’s place in Melkbos although spectacular in summer is a little miserable in winter. Hardly a one to travel back and forth all the time, she has a little studio flat in the CBD where she crashes during the week and brings her boys to, especially if she wants to see if they are house trained. Her flat and her house are two totally separate spaces. You might never guess they are owned by the same person. Her house was inherited and would have been sufficient as a space for a single person but then the neighbor’s next door cottage went on the market and at the time Gina needed to invest. She made an offer to the little old lady. Mrs Haak had lost her husband the winter before and was starting to show signs of fast decline, both physically and mentally. Ah, that’s why one has kids Gina thought.

Gina had known the family for long, she made a reasonable offer and the childless Mrs Haak accepted. At 85 she was happy to go into soft pureed food, garish patterns and unthinkably ugly hairdo’s known as retirement. Her husband had left her a good package and thankfully her days would not end in poverty although being lonely is a kind of poverty. Gina promised to visit from time to time but alas, she never has and now the time between the promise of a visit and no visit at all has long gone past proper. Mrs Haak will die never seeing Gina again. Gina does not know how much this death will affect her. In fact she knows very little.

Melkbos is a strange little village. At the end of a long road, it seems to nowhere, the distance from Cape Town to there warrants a stay over. There are two roads in, one is better maintained than the other but the one Gina liked to travel on has trees lining both sides of the road. She imagines the drive into that tree lined road as her own personal drive way. There are stables on that road and she took her very first horse riding lesson on a tame white mare in one of those stables. Tonight she decided to purchase the home preggy kit and go home. To Melkbos, through her road lined with trees, past the fire station and little piles of wood they sell on the street, the third road left, heading towards the ocean. The Supper Club had been draining and she needed the comfort of space and roar of the ocean. She was late. Two weeks late.