MOLESKINS AND QUARTS AT MOON ROY’S

“YOU are the fixer in this town,” said Conchita as she smiled me into absolute submission.

Throw up a middle-aged man and he will crawl back from the brink of cardiac arrest. Her outstretched hand caressed my fingers in the gentlest of handshakes.

The other hand swept her purple highlights towards the studded left earlobe. “Ooh I love your accent,” she gurgled as she scratched the spelling of my name with an avocado Lamy fountain in her scarlet Moleskin notebook. Conchita was the producer with an international film crew looking for the “other side of the South African story”.

I had absolutely no idea what she meant. My mind sauntered to endless mojitos in the Lighthouse

Bar at the Oyster Box, while I showed her porpoises flipping across the Indian Ocean.

“The folks at the Beeb reckon you know everybody and everything that moves.” She was now laying it on thick by taking me back to a passing encounter with the BBC. “How will your people be voting on May 8?”

Like any good journalist worth their ink, she cut right to the point. “Do you think that Mr Ramaphosa will clinch it?” She was like a bucking horse with questions.

“Chatsworth is charmed by Mr Ramaphosa and the hope for a better future that he brings,” I replied in my most precise soundbyte. “What about Mr Buthelezi, is he trusted, is it a coincidence that both he and Mr Malema have brought their manifesto rallies to Chatsworth?”

She droned on. Malema to Lekota and even the spirit of the long-gone Amichand Rajbansi.

“Where do you pass your time?” That was my gap and I launched into it: “I grew up a poor township boy who owes everything in my life to free access to the public library.”

The crew hopped in the rented black Vito and headed to the Woodhurst library.

The cameraman cut to the battered Encyclopedia Britannica. Next came the shelves with volumes of Dickens, Naipaul and Achebe.

The librarian straightened his tie in the 35 degree heat but the crew walked right past. “I think we need a drink,” Conchita pleaded. Where better than Moon Roy’s, where a quart of lager was the price of a bubblegum in London. Next stop was the famous Sol Namara Hotel. Being a Wednesday, Bangladesh Market was closed but it was good for a cut away shot. “That’s a wrap guys,” she hollered. They packed up and, with that, went my fantasy of a drink with a pretty woman at the Lighthouse.