Zara's Safari

Chapter 29

All I could think about in the taxi was that story, the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion stings the frog and they both die because’ it is in his nature’. He can’t change who he is, no matter how much he tries and even if it destroys him.

It’s in my nature.

An hour later we stumbled into the bar and ordered another round of drinks. Clay got on the phone and told the usual crowd to meet as Bouijis in the next hour, we were going big tonight. But the second I wasn’t in his presence, in the loud, laughing chaos, my thoughts drifted to Riaan. At some stage I stumbled into the bathroom and almost knocked two woman over as they were coming out.

“Watch where you’re going,” The one said to me, looking very angry as she rubbed her elbow.

The other one gave me a dirty look and turned to her friend, “She’s so drunk,”

I thought I heard the other one say, “it’s so ugly” as they left. Normally I would have shouted some witty (or not so witty depending on how far gone I was) retort at them, go back to Clay and then proceed to rip them to shreds and laugh about what idiots inhabited this world. But this time I didn’t. Something about her words hit me. There was a truth in them, because I felt ugly.

I stumbled to the basin and held onto it to steady myself as the room spinned. For some reason I didn’t want to look at myself in the mirror, I think was afraid of what I might see. Or not see.

An hour later we were in the club. I should have been happy and having fun. I should have been on the dance floor with everyone else like I normally was, spraying Champagne and laughing. Drinking, dancing, screaming with laugher. But I wasn’t. I’d overheard someone talking about Poppy and how they couldn’t believe she’d slept with her father’s bodyguard, “how low is that” they’d said. I felt like telling them it wasn’t true. I felt like calling the paper and telling them it wasn’t true and then I felt like calling her to make sure she was okay and then I felt like a terrible, horrible person and then I felt guilty and then I called the waiter over and ordered more drinks.

“Fuck babe, what’s with the long face”, Clay was pulling me onto the dance floor.

I resisted and he actually looked genuinely offended.

“Please don’t tell me you’re thinking about that douche bag?”

“No, no” I covered, when actually I was thinking about him, in-between the thoughts about Poppy and other people that  Clay and I had hurt, “I think I’m just tired, or jet lagged or something,”

“You need Tequila then!” He screamed it at the top of his lungs, “Tequila. Ole”

The Tequila worked for about an hour and I joined the crowd on the dance floor where we got up to our usual tricks. People tended to move out of our way, the dance floor usually cleared pretty quickly when we were on it. It may have had something to do with all the stumbling and falling we usually did.

“I love your outfit,” One of our club friends screamed at me over the noise.

Clay burst in, “She stole it from a poor starving African child,” They both screeched with laugher, as if it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. In fact, they almost lost their balance they were laughing so much. I didn’t find it funny.

There was nothing funny about it at all.

“I didn’t,” I shouted angrily which made them both stop, swing around and stare at me.