Layover

The crew van smells of floor polish and somebody’s biltong, and Thandi is asleep against the window with her cap in her lap by the time we hit the N2.

I let her sleep. She flew the last leg, a bumpy descent into Cape Town with the south-easter shaking the whole wing, and she flew it better than I would have at her age. She’s thirty-three and my first officer for the month, and she is the only person at the airline who has ever asked me straight out where I go on Monday nights.

I look out of the window instead. Table Mountain is standing there in the late sun with the tablecloth of cloud just beginning to fall over the edge, and I do what I always do when I see it. I check my watch.

Five forty-one. Wheels down was five-oh-six. Hotel by six, if the traffic gives us a break. Rest starts when we get to the room, and the van collects us at four forty-five in the morning for a seven-oh-five departure back to Johannesburg. That leaves about ten hours, and a captain who wants to be legal and awake for an early rotation needs six of them lying flat. I’ve done this sum so many times that it works itself out in my head, like a rosary.

So I have a window. Three hours, maybe a little more.

“You’re counting again,” Thandi says, without opening her eyes.

“I’m not.”

“You are. Your lips move.” She sits up and rubs her face. “Tell me about the friend.”

“What friend?”

“The one you see on layovers. The one with the cooking.” She smiles at the roof of the van. “The cabin crew have a theory about the friend.”

“What’s the theory?”

“That she’s a widow with a vineyard in Stellenbosch.”

“It’s a he,” I say.

I don’t know why I say it. It just comes out, the way a hand lets go of something when it’s been holding on too long. Thandi opens her eyes and turns her head and looks at me for a few seconds with no expression at all, which is a thing she learned in the cockpit.

“Okay,” she says.

“He’s a chef. He has a restaurant in town that’s closed on Mondays. He’s fifty-four.” I watch the traffic. “I’m not going to say anything else. I’m a straight man, Thandi. I was married to Annelie for twenty-two years and I loved her and I still do. This is a different thing, and I don’t have a name for it, and I haven’t needed one.”

“Okay,” she says again. Then, more gently: “Is he kind to you?”

I think about that all the way up Sea Point Main Road.

“Yes,” I say. “He’s very kind.”

She nods and puts her cap back on, and that’s the end of it.

---

The check-in line at the Bantry Sands is short, which is the only mercy of a Monday. I like this hotel, a tall white thing on the seafront with a lobby that smells of lemon polish. The woman at the desk knows the crew. She slides me a key card in a paper sleeve and says “Six-fourteen, Captain, sea side, like you asked,” and I thank her and carry my bag to the lift with my cap under my arm.

Six-fourteen. The room is small and clean, and when I pull back the curtain the whole Atlantic is lying there in the evening light, silver and enormous, with a container ship parked on the horizon like a toy. I open the window. The air that comes in is cold and salty and smells like the one week of my childhood I spent at Hermanus.

I text two words. 614. Now.

Then I take off my uniform properly, because the shirt has to survive tomorrow, epaulettes in the drawer and the jacket on its hanger. I stand there in my undershirt and trousers, forty-nine years old, and I’ve done this exact thing eleven times in the last seven months and still feel it in my hands.

I keep my wedding ring on. It’s a plain gold band that has gone thin with twenty-two years of hands, and four years after the funeral I still turn it with my thumb when I’m nervous. Pieter has never asked me to take it off. The first night, when it clicked against his shoulder blade, he said it sounded like somebody knocking politely, and that she was welcome to come in.

There’s a knock at the door. Two taps, a pause, one tap. It’s our knock. I never agreed to it, it just happened.

I open the door.

Pieter takes up most of the doorway, a good head taller than me and twice as wide, and he’s holding a Woolworths bag in one big hand and a foil-covered dish in the other, and he’s wearing the same dumb grin he always has when he sees me, as though I’m the one doing him a favour.

“Johan,” he says.

“Pieter.”

“You look tired, my skat.”

“I flew two sectors in a south-easter.” I take the dish from him because I can’t help it. “I’m allowed.”

“Ja, you’re allowed. Come.” He sets the bag on the desk and steps in and shuts the door behind him with his heel, and then he puts both arms around me and picks me clean off the carpet. I let him. I put my face in his neck. His silver beard scratches my ear and his stomach is warm against mine through the grey jersey. He smells like onions and woodsmoke, with the bergamot soap underneath, and I think, as I do every time, finally.

“Bobotie,” he says, into my hair. “I made it this morning. It’s still warm. You’ll eat first.”

“I’ve got a window.”

“I know how long your window is. I can count too.” He sets me down and keeps his hands on my shoulders. “Fifteen minutes to eat. Then I’m going to look after you properly, and you’re going to let me.”

I could say a lot of things to that. I laugh instead.

We eat sitting on the bed with the dish between us and two forks, the spiced mince sweet and soft. The light on the sea goes on turning gold. Pieter tells me about a waiter who quit mid-service and a fish supplier who tried to sell him last Tuesday’s snoek as fresh, and I tell him about the wind. He listens the way he listens to everything, with his whole face. When he’s finished he puts the dish on the desk, comes back, sits next to me on the edge of the bed and takes my hand.

“I don’t need you to call it anything,” he says, quietly. “I told you that in March.”

“I know.”

“I just want you to arrive.”

“I know. I do.” I look at the carpet. “I’m straight, Pieter. I’m still that. I don’t know how else to say it.”

“You don’t have to.” He kisses my knuckles, once. “You’re whatever you say you are, Johan. I’m only glad you’re here.”

That is the whole conversation.

---

He kisses me properly then. It starts slow, a big warm mouth over mine, the beard rough on my chin, and I take hold of the front of his jersey and drag him closer. The bed dips under his weight. His tongue comes into my mouth and I make a noise I’m not going to explain to anybody. His hand slides up under my undershirt and over my stomach, spreading flat against my chest, and the heat of it goes through me like drink.

“Off,” he says. “I want you bare.”

I strip while he watches, folding everything onto the chair by habit, which makes him laugh, until I’m standing naked in front of the window with the sea behind me and my cock already half up and heavy. Pieter pulls his jersey over his head, silver fur across a broad chest and belly. He opens his trousers, and I stare, because I always do. He’s thick and uncut and heavy against his thigh, and my mouth waters.

“Come here,” he says.

I go. He turns me with his hands on my hips until the back of my knees are against the bed, and then he kneels on the carpet in front of me. I look down at that silver head between my thighs and my breath leaves me.

“Pieter—”

“Shh.”

He takes me into his mouth in one long slow slide, and the heat and wet of it turns my legs to rope. He hums against me, and the vibration goes right up my spine, and I grab his short thick hair and say his name to the ceiling. He sucks me with an unhurried, serious hunger, one hand cupping my balls, and when he pulls off to lick down the shaft he looks up at me, eyes crinkled, mouth shining.

“You taste like salt,” he says. “Like you’ve been standing in the wind all day.”

“I have. Oh God. Don’t stop.”

“I won’t stop. I’m just getting started.”

He takes me deep again and swallows around me, and I make a sound I will certainly be embarrassed about later. His big hand slides down behind my balls and presses, firm and slow, and I say “Fuck, ja, there,” and he chuckles around my cock.

He lets me go before I come. He knows my body better than I do. “Lie back,” he says. “On the bed. Pillow under you.”

I lie back. The sheets are cool and the window is breathing salt air over my skin. Pieter takes a tube from the Woolworths bag, and I hear the little click of the cap.

“Water-based,” he says. “As always.”

“I know.”

“Say if you want me to stop.”

“I’ll say.”

“Say if you want more.”

“Pieter.” I laugh helplessly. “I want more.”

His finger is slick and warm. He takes his time, one finger, two, his other hand stroking my thigh, and he doesn’t speak at all for a while, just watches my face. When he finds the place inside me that lights the whole room up, he leans down and kisses my belly, and I gasp his name.

“There, jy’s so lekker,” he mutters. “So open for me. Like that, Johan.”

“Hurry up,” I gasp. “I’ve got three hours.”

“You’ve got two and a half, and I’m not hurrying.”

“You bastard.”

“Ja.” He’s grinning. “Your bastard.”

By the time he slides the third finger in I’m making noises I couldn’t stop if the alarm went off, hard against my stomach and leaking. He wipes his hand on a towel and rolls a condom down himself, and for a moment he just sits on the edge of the bed with his thick cock jutting from the silver hair of his belly, breathing.

Then he does what I’ve been waiting for. He pulls me up by both arms, as easily as he’d lift a stock pot, and sets me on his lap.

I sit facing him with my knees either side of his hips, his feet planted on the carpet and his broad hands on my waist. We’re the same height this way, nose to nose. His eyes are the colour of strong tea.

“Like this,” he says. “I want to see you. I want to feel you breathe.”

“Yes.”

“Take your time.”

I reach down between us and hold him steady, hot and slick and heavy in my hand, and lower myself onto the head. It presses against me, patient and thick, and my whole body shivers. The first inch is always the hardest, a stretch and then a burn that eases into a wide, aching openness, and my fingers dig into his shoulders.

“Breathe,” he says. “Ja. Like that.”

“It’s a lot.”

“You can stop.”

“I don’t want to stop.” I sink a bit further, and he groans, low in his chest. “You fill me, Pieter, and I forget every time.”

“Every time.” He’s smiling against my cheek. “Good. I like when you forget.”

I take him in a little at a time, rocking, until I’m down on his thighs with the whole thick length of him inside me, and my forehead is pressed to his. For a while neither of us moves. His arms are wrapped around my back. I can feel his heartbeat in my own chest, slow and big, like a ship’s engine.

“Okay?” he asks.

“Perfect.” My voice is a rasp. “Move. Please.”

He doesn’t thrust. He lifts me instead, his hands under my thighs, and lets me slide down, and lifts me again. The rhythm is slow and rolling. Each time I sink I feel him against the place that makes my legs shake, and I hear myself saying things in my first language, short words, dirty ones, the kind I never say out loud to anyone.

“Jy’s my man,” Pieter says into my mouth. “My pragtige man. It feels so good in you. You’re hot like an oven.”

“Pieter. Fuck me properly. I’m not made of glass.”

“With pleasure.”

He tightens his grip and thrusts up into me, hard, and I cry out. The bed bangs against the wall. The sea breeze rattles the curtain. I’m bouncing in his lap now, riding him with both arms around his neck, my cock slapping between our bellies, slick with sweat and pre-come, rubbing on the wiry hair of his stomach each time I come down. He holds my face between his big hands and keeps his eyes on mine.

“Your clock,” he whispers. “You’ve got a clock.”

“I don’t care about the clock.”

“Liar.” He kisses me. “You always care about the clock. That’s why I love you.”

The word hangs there. I should flinch, I think, but I don’t. I put my forehead back against his and keep moving.

“I know,” I say. “I know you do.”

“You don’t have to say it back.”

“I’m going to say it eventually.” My voice shakes. “Just not tonight. Give me until December.”

“Take until December. I’m not going anywhere.”

I come first, or nearly. The heat is tight at the base of my spine, and every stroke pulls it tighter, and then I’m grinding in his lap with his cock buried in me and my belly dragging along his, and I hear myself cry out Pieter, Pieter, I’m going, and then it happens. I come without a hand on me, in long hot pulses between our bodies, painting his chest and my own stomach, shaking, my head thrown back. He holds me up, one arm locked around my waist, and groans my name.

“Ja, ja, my skat, let go. I’ve got you.”

The clench of me around him drags him over a second later. He shoves up deep and holds there, snarls through his teeth, and I feel his cock pulse inside me, again and again, the whole big body shaking beneath mine. He buries his face in my neck. We stay like that, gasping, sticky, wrapped around each other while the sea keeps up its low roar.

“Time?” I mumble, eventually.

He lifts his head, squints at the clock radio on the nightstand. “Eight fifty-two.”

“Good. I’ve got seven hours.”

“Seven hours and eight minutes.” He kisses my temple. “I counted too.”

---

I shower. He sits on the closed lid of the toilet and talks to me through the glass about his sister’s wedding in Paarl, and then he showers after me, and the room fills with the smell of his bergamot soap. At nine-thirty I put the phone on the desk and set the alarm for four. He kisses me in the doorway, soft and slow and thorough, and tucks the foil-covered dish into my minibar for the morning. I’m half-asleep in the bed by nine-fifty when I hear the door close, very quietly, and the tap of his footsteps down the hall.

I don’t hear the lift.

I sleep hard.

At four forty-five the van is idling at the kerb with its sliding door open, and Thandi is already inside with a flask of coffee and her cap on her knee. The Atlantic is the colour of a bruise, and the street lights are still on, and the whole city smells of salt and diesel, and of baking bread from a bakery I can’t see. I climb into the seat beside her and the door thuds shut.

She hands me the flask without a word. I drink. It’s strong and sweet.

“You smell like bergamot,” she says.

“It’s a new aftershave.”

“Mm.” She looks out of her window, and I can see her smile in the glass. “It suits you.”

At seven-oh-five we push back from the gate into a clean bright morning with a hard crosswind off the mountain, gusting twenty-eight, and I take the controls myself because I want to, because my hands are steady and my head is clear and the first flight of the day is always the one I trust. The tower clears us. The runway lies there ahead, a long pale strip with the sea beyond it. I push the thrust levers forward, and we roll, and the nose comes up into the wind.

Below us, on the left, the city slides away. Somewhere in it a man with a silver beard is putting a dish in the washing-up bowl. I let the aircraft climb, and I turn her north-east, toward home.