Dada 131

‘Yes, your honour’ I said. One time I forgot with all the heat and confusion and called him your worship, then I slipped again and called him ‘your holiness’ and everyone laughed. It took a very long time because the presiding judge included the minutest detail, from the beach house to the car journey, the club, the music, the lights, and the time before the final incident. He dwelled a lot on those moments. The case was strung out like pearls upon a necklace and the details seemed to take for ever. He looked over his glasses at me. The whole time he was speaking, the journalists took notes. I could feel the little woman like a sparrow watching me with an intensity as sharp as Kim Song at my Dada’s wake. Shabela’s wife also looked me over as I answered each detail. And just like the necklace string of islands that danced their whole disparate frame of our identity, that nameless sea of faces, the jury each looked at me with their own separate sense of being. Then they turned one by one like a line of optical dancers back to the presiding judge, who coughed and leafed through his file and peered towards me after every phase of questioning whilst all the time fanning himself and occasionally sipping from his water.