Duade was delighted that she came to work with me. He kept winking at me when she wasn’t looking and giving me thumbs-ups behind her back, and then later, when he saw how good she was at drawing—while I was busy putting some scrawls on the sign so it’d say MAINTENANCE instead of MAINTINANCE—he sidled over and told me to marry her, no queshtion. The first time I moved out of Phil’s place, back when I was still fresh in Cape Town, I lived in a house with some people in Pinelands for a while, and one of them was this girl with dread-locks who played guitar and wrote her own songs. But besides her, even though I’d always wanted to, I’d never really hung out much with artists. Closest I got was selling them drugs. But you just had to watch Charlotte there at the carousel and you knew that’s what she was—she was an artist. She was wearing dungarees and she sat on her haunches in the long grass, you could see the dew creeping up the denim, all the way over her knees, but she had her sketch pad in her lap and her eyes just went between that and the model horse in front of her— Staring at it like the rest of the world was on mute, and the horse was singing just to her—the softest, most beautiful song.
