Mine by S.A Partridge

Author:S.A Partridge [Partridge, S.A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780798176835
Publisher: Human & Rousseau
Published: 2017-12-06T10:32:48+00:00

FIN WANTS TO get away from everything. We disappear as soon as the sun is bright enough to wake up the rest of the house.

We take a taxi to Rhodes Memorial, and the higher the crammed minibus climbs, the more it feels like we’re running away. Trees fill the view from the tiny windows, with gaps of sunlight peeking through.

When the door of the taxi slides open, we squeeze past the other passengers and jump out into the tarred parking lot, laughing for no reason.

He pulls me into a hug, replacing the smell of pine needles with the smell of Fin.

“What now?” I ask, even though I’m perfectly happy just standing there with him.

“Come with me,” he says.

We walk towards a huge stone monument and enter a large circular area. I don’t know who Rhodes was, except that his statue was removed from the university. I was very young the last time we visited the Memorial with my class. We pass his massive statue and the lions that guard the steps, and walk over the wide stone floor to the very edge.

The whole of Cape Town is spread out before us. A crescent of silver ocean shimmers on the left. The wind plays with my hair, and I pull my ponytail over my shoulder.

“It’s pretty here, but we should have asked the taxi to just keep going.”

“It doesn’t matter where we go as long as I’m with you,” he says.

We sit on the stone wall, our legs hanging over the edge. Tourists come and go to take peace-sign selfies or pictures of the view. We ignore them and carry on pretending we’re all alone up here at the edge of the world.

Fin detangles the earphone cords of his MP3 player and passes one to me. “I’m going to play you something powerful,” he says.

“Your stuff?” I ask.

“Nah. It’s another local outfit called Dookoom, Isaac Mutant’s grime project.”

“What the hell is grime?”

“Just listen.”

I immediately start moving my head to the hip-hop beat. It’s similar to the backtracks Dark Father uses, except this music is darker. Angrier. I can’t stop moving, but Fin is as still as the verdigris lions behind us.

“Why have you gone so serious all of a sudden?” I ask.

He frowns. “It’s hard to say. I wish I could make music like this. There’s truth in it. Politics. History. My songs seem so … stupid in comparison. I’m not writing about anything relevant.”

“But it’s your music. It’s what important to you.”

“I guess.”

From up here, the city looks like an ant farm, everyone small and insignificant. After a while the tourists slip away, leaving just us, the wind, the view and the raw lyrics of “The Worst Thing” piercing our ears. Fin is right – this music is powerful. The raw lyrics open up all the old wounds of our country’s horrible past and leave them exposed. Slavery. Apartheid. The pain that remains. Everything that’s been left unresolved.

I never really think about the past much, but there’s a lot of anger in this country.

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