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  BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  A Memoir of Love and Madness (2009)

  Bubbles (2012)

  Published in 2015 by Umuzi

  an imprint of Penguin Random House South Africa (Pty) Ltd

  Company Reg No 1953/000441/07

  Estuaries No 4, Oxbow Crescent, Century Avenue, Century City, 7441, South Africa

  PO Box 1144, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa

  [email protected]

  www.randomstruik.co.za

  © 2015 Rahla Xenopoulos

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  First edition, first printing 2015

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 978-1-4152-0396-5 (Print)

  ISBN 978-1-4152-0666-9 (ePub)

  ISBN 978-1-4152-0667-6 (PDF)

  Cover design by Victoria Peter

  Text design by Fahiema Hallam

  Set in Adobe Garamond

  For Gidon, Samuel & Tallulah,

  my daily reminder that miracles occur.

  To Jason, my beginning, my middle, my everlasting.

  MARYLEBONE, MONDAY – JULY 2016

  It’s one of those glorious days when you forgive London anything, even winter.

  Tselane and her baby girl sit in a vortex of chaos, unaware of their stylish surroundings. She’d seen three people reading it on the Tube that morning, so it’s not surprising when she lifts her head and sees the book’s familiar cover. Saving Jude. It seems like everyone in London is obsessed with it.

  But when she observes the long fingers that are deliberately turning the pages of this copy, her body trembles with ancient recognition.

  Too much time has passed, too many songs sung in the wrong tune, too many people betrayed. Stories told about lives that should have remained private.

  She turns at the sound of her best friend’s voice. “Darling, can you forgive my tardiness? It’s been crazy with the boys and interviews and, oh you ordered, thank God.” Ignoring the fuss her arrival has made, Olivia kisses Tselane and scoops up the baby. “Careful, I can’t take my glasses off, my face is still a wreck.”

  “You’re insane. You didn’t need an eye lift.”

  “I might be insane but at least I don’t look my age. Are you madly excited? And all packed?” Olivia says, taking a sip of her tea.

  “Liv, you understand? I can’t live like this, without him.”

  “Oh my God, darling – there’s no question. You must go.”

  “But, will you be all right?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, T. I’ve got Alec watching silently over me, and Birdy, and the boys. And book sales. You’ll see, I’ll be there in winter. They have to forgive me, it can’t go on like this forever, you know.”

  Tselane wishes Olivia would, just for this hour, realise it isn’t necessary to pretend with one another.

  “He’s behind you, Liv, reading your book.”

  “Oh dear God, T, you are not going to let him leave. Do not let this moment go.”

  “It’s probably not even him.” She looks down at the laughing baby. “I have so much, more then I ever expected.”

  “You know your problem, Tselane Lourie?” Olivia says, standing up. “You don’t expect enough from life.” She turns around and walks to the man reading at the table behind them. “Excuse me,” Olivia says. “I wrote that book. I think you’ll find you’re in it. And you see that lady over there?” She points to Tselane. “She’s in it too.”

  LUST FOR LIFE

  JUDE

  Everyone is in love on MDMA, but this is where it peaks, the big blow-out, Ibiza, July 1997 … the hedonist’s holiday …

  Walking up from the beach, Jude hears a girl laughing. He puts down his guitar and stops to listen; the sound inhabits the island like an ancient myth. Such a laugh. Not like his mother who, when amused, emitted what sounded like a nervous hiccupping sound, then scanned the room, checking that no one thought she was being silly.

  He looks at the people catching the last of the day’s sun. Is he the only person being enchanted? Maybe the laughter is part of his trip. He walks towards the sound, like a child beguiled by a will-o’-the-wisp.

  She opens the door before he knocks. Everything about her is unlike what he’d imagined. Small yet confrontational, she sparkles. A transparent white halter-neck dress, slightly torn and shabby at the hem, hugs her body. Unlike the emaciated grunge girls on the island, her African skin has the luxury of flesh. She doesn’t step aside, but stands in the doorway, inviting him instead to study her as she studies him.

  He can’t tell for certain if she’s laughing with him, at him or simply at life. “So you’re the Jude?” She looks him over. “Right, well, come on in, you look like a bit of fun. They’ve been talking about you, incessantly …”

  “You’re not …” He looks at her.

  She laughs. “No, luv, I’m not ‘The Babe’. That’s Olivia. She’s blonde, beautiful and white. I’m Tselane, her friend.” He follows her hips down a passage. “The real Babe, Olivia, is inside with your mates.”

  The house smells of the ocean, and a pungent tuberose perfume. It smells of sex.

  Before he sees Benjy’s new girlfriend, ‘The Babe’, or any of his friends, before seeing anything beyond the laughing Tselane, Jude sees a coffee table in the centre of the lounge. It’s got a certain look. He had a theory in first year: if you wanted to analyse a girl, forget Freud, go to her home. Whatever you noticed first symbolised the essence of her character. If it was her music collection, she loved dancing. Books, she didn’t live in this world. Photos, she lived in the past. Bed, she loved to fuck. Once he went to a girl’s place, just one room in student digs, and there in the middle was a four-poster bed covered in pink linen – virgin! It had turned out to be true; she’d arrived at university virginity intact.

  And here, first thing he sees in Olivia “The Babe’s” Ibizan holiday villa is a Balinese coffee table. There must be a whole bunch of shit that happens on this table, stuff guys like Jude aren’t included in. Right now, it’s covered in crystals, ashtrays burning with joints, and bottles of Evian water. But Jude imagines it, on other evenings, through different phases, covered with piles of cocaine being snorted by models and rich men. He imagines Olivia dancing on top of it, surrounded by other Eurotrash admiring her as she strips down to a G-string. He wonders what she hides in the table’s two drawers – condoms, photographs of rock stars in compromising positions, old nail polish … this Uberbabe his friend has hooked up with. Benjy’s landed the “It Girl” and she’s crazy for him.

  Oh, she’d resisted at first. “I can’t fall in love with you, Benjamin Stone,” she’d said, sipping a mojito back in London.

  “Why not?” he’d laughed, knowing she would.

  “Because you have the attention span of a Sunday morning.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll be easy fun, but inevitably you’ll become Monday.”

  She’d been wrong; he’d prove himself as constant as eight days a week.

  Tselane pulls Jude by the hand, drawing him into the reality of the room.

  “Jude, broe, is that you?” says a man with a thick Afrikaans accent. Hannes comes into the room, not gently like Jude did, but like a force of nature, wearing nothing but a kikoi, his hair wet from the shower. He has a scar running across his muscled chest.

  “So good, we’re all here,” Jude says, his eyes smiling.

  “So good,” Hannes says, lighting a cigarette, which he holds between his thumb and forefinger.

  A mass of blonde hair on the floor turns, revealing the faces of Benjamin and Olivia. She is staggeringly beautiful. It’s not just the obviously high cheekbones or the green of her eyes – there’s warmth in her broad smile. Benjy jumps up off the cushion they were sprawled over. Unconsciously he runs his fingers through his hair, pushing it off his handsome face. “I didn’t think you’d come out to this Sodom with all its Gomorrah.”

  “It’s me, I found him,” announces Tselane in a playful voice that surprises Jude but doesn’t seem to surprise the others.

  Olivia cracks up. Grasping her friend’s hand, she says, “Did you, T? Did you pick him up off the street? Pull him out of the water?”

  He didn’t expect these girls to be funny. Now that she’s standing closer to him, he can smell Olivia’s sophisticated perfume and feel the reverberations of her laughter. Jude sees what really attracts Benjy to Olivia. This laughter. Both girls have great laughs; Olivia’s not as much as Tselane’s, but then, Olivia’s is accompanied by her astonishing beauty.

  “I’m so excited to finally meet you. And you have your guitar. Sit down. Ben tells me you serenaded him through childhood,” Olivia says, talking over any shyness he would normally have felt. “I’ll call Pierre off the beach.”

  Covered in sand, Hannes’s brother Pierre comes in. His accent isn’t as guttural as Hannes’s, but different as they are, they share a rawness, an Afrikaans honesty, that Jude’s always appreciated. Pierre’s body is more sinewy than Hannes’s, his movements more measured. They’
re both sexy, but women have always thought Pierre is less encumbered, less of a risk. Without bothering to shower, Pierre sits down.

  Jude’s been at Oxford in a tunnel of studying, cum laude-ing his degree in psychiatry. Pierre and Benjy are riding the same wave, surfing the net, building digital empires; Pierre in Cape Town, Benjy in London. But Pierre will sell out before it crashes.

  Café del Mar plays on the stereo, the sliding doors are open and waves break outside. The ease of youth and privilege fills the room.

  “So, boet, what have you got to show for yourself?” Hannes asks Jude.

  Smiling, Jude pulls a plastic bag containing a white rock out his pocket. “Gram of the finest MDMA on the island. Any of you care to crush it?”

  The confident Olivia becomes slightly undone as, stretching her tanned arm to reach for the rock, she notices Jude gazing at her intently, and then, as if he has the answer to some mystery none of them knew existed, he tilts his head and smiles crookedly. In that smile she feels for some reason that all the world is changing because she knows this strange, beautiful man has seen all her flaws and yet he loves her for them. Unnerved, she places the rock on the table, preparing to grind it down with one of her crystals. Laughing at herself, she says, “Have to keep the energy cool, it’s a rose quartz, attracts love …”

  Tselane falls into her friend’s lap, laughing. “You’re such a phony, Liv, I love you.”

  They all watch as the smooth pink crystal grinds the rock into a fine powder and Jude hopes that in his eyes he has conveyed what he’s thinking, that it’s okay, he sees and likes her. It would be impossible not to be taken with these girls.

  He pours the powder into a two-litre Evian bottle of water and carefully swishes it round with admirable expertise. “Anybody want the traces?”

  Olivia leans forward, licking her finger, which she trails through the remains of powder, then rubs on her gums. Gagging, she looks at Benjy. “Tastes like hell, but we’re going to heaven tonight.”

  Hannes does the same thing. “Jissis, boet, this must be good stuff!” He puts his arm around Jude.

  None of them knows that Jude is already tripping. But that’s Jude, on the outside looking in, on the inside looking out.

  They knock back shots of the noxious mixture. Rolling a joint, Jude watches Pierre watching Olivia. He likes her, but he’d never go for her. She’s one of those girls who exist in a world of such supreme cooldom that you can’t make out their personality. They live a deception of designer jeans that dance down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass.

  Tselane changes the music to Iggy Pop. Lust for Life. She and Olivia dance. There’s something erotic about their easy intimacy. Jude looks at Tselane, remembering what Benjy had told him about Olivia and how she had a best friend, a black girl who was brought to London as a child, exiled from South Africa. How they’d grown up together, were inseparable. He becomes transfixed, the way her hips move; he’s never seen a woman dance like this, African. And yet completely unlike Hannes and Pierre. Apart from her exotic name, there’s nothing South African about her.

  The first wave of euphoria washes over and through the six people in the room as a deep bond develops between them.

  And here’s the thing. If you were looking down at them from the Ibizan sky, you would know: they can do anything, be whoever it is they choose to be. This is just the beginning of the trip, the night, their friendship, of their entire lives.

  Laughing and touching one another, they walk out the door. Benjamin grabs a pair of ’70s sunglasses; white frames with dark lenses. He places them on Olivia’s face; she looks like Woodstock, 1969. Pierre looks at her and says, “Different drugs. When I met you in London, you were on coke, the ME drug. Now you’re on E, the US drug.”

  Outside, it’s the summer of love all over again. People are popping pills called white doves, cars have smiley stickers, and strangers embrace. Boys sport green Afros and girls in fake fur bikinis dance in the street. This generation is going to get it right; they’ve got better drugs.

  Fuelled by serotonin as abundant as their beauty, they walk into the night. Jude walks three paces behind the others watching Pierre gazing innocuously at Olivia’s ass, while Benjy holds her casually by the arm. Hannes, with a lit spliff in his mouth, strides independently ahead, like Caliban free on the island.

  “Jude, boet, have a drag.” Hannes waits for Jude to catch up and hands the joint to him. He inhales deeply and watches the smoke send psychedelic patterns into the night. But then he hears her laughter and his eyes seek her out again, like Orpheus searching for Eurydice. Catching the buoyancy in her stride, he can tell she’s not from these parts, not from this world.

  Jumping on motorbikes, they ride the few blocks to Amnesia where the club waits for them, because they own the night. Whatever age, fad, city or drug, there’s always a cool crowd. People hover close by, hoping some of the coolness they emanate will stick, but it falls only on the most beautiful, on the chosen. Following Olivia, they glide past the queue of people waiting to get inside the door.

  “Pretty girl, old man, young man, man with a gun; the rules do not apply.” The blackboard Nazi blocking the entrance for regular people eagerly kisses Olivia and high-fives Benjamin. Pierre jumps over the rope at the doorway and they all go inside, laughing, leaving the regular people behind, envious, knowing they’ll never be a part of the gang, never sparkle iridescently.

  Sometimes in life there are moments when everything shifts. We assume it’s the obvious seminal moments. Making marriage vows, a parent’s coffin being lowered into the ground, first day at school. But usually, it’s the banal ones. Something we’re not even aware of until years later. We’re so engrossed in the minutiae of our lives that we don’t notice when a child stopped needing a goodnight story or a lover stopped spooning us in our sleep.

  The truth is that that night in July 1997, thousands of people were dancing inside a nightclub called Amnesia, each of them thinking they were going through a life-altering moment. Most of them were just cooked on bad drugs they’d regret the following day. E-ed out of their heads. But for those six people – Benjy, Olivia, Hannes, Pierre, Jude and Tselane – everything truly did change. And Jude knew it was happening. Jude knew that that night was the seminal trip.

  A green strobe flashes over the dance floor and love surges through the two thousand ravers. This here is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, but a brighter glow lingers on the gang of six. Their bodies are tauter, their brains tighter. They form a circle that people are drawn to and envy.

  A girl in an American-flag bikini pounds all fifty states of her crotch at Pierre, who smiles benignly. Men try with Olivia, but no one stands a chance. Jude doesn’t notice when people of both sexes hit on him. They’re hooked into one another’s trip. NO TRESPASSERS ALLOWED. Periodically they pass the bottle around, each taking another hit. Euphoria washes over Jude. He’s never experienced anything like this before. The club turns indigo, violet, yellow.

  Waves of people dance to a god in a box. “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life”.

  Hands charge triumphantly into the air.

  Green, burgundy, blue.

  The bass pumps through Jude’s body as the drug comes, knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door. Fleeting touches are filled with significance, emotions wander, thoughts stray, colours are iridescent. It’s the beginning of everything …

  A cute brunette tries to lure Hannes out of the circle, but Tselane dances him back into the pack, the tribe.

  Jude doesn’t hear the music; he hears Tselane’s heartbeat.

  The hot ice comes.

  Boys dance with topless girls.

  The foam comes.

  Strangers who speak different languages share secrets.

  Strobe lights flash, bodies appear every second beat.

  Good MDMA isn’t laced with speed.

  Everything appears in slow motion.

  Benjamin lights a joint and passes it to Jude who takes a drag. Jude touches Tselane’s bare shoulder and, stretching towards her face, exhales into her mouth. Their lips linger, not quite touching. He looks into the blackness of her eyes and from the hot nape of her neck inhales the smell of neroli and sweat … In the stillness of that smell he realises that it’s not the drug, it’s the girl. If there is such a thing as “the girl”, this is the one.