SUN, SEA AND ECSTASY

In The Second Exclusive Extract From Her Book, Decca Aitkenhead Heads
For The Opulent Bars Of Cape Town In Her Quest For The Perfect E

If we were supposed to be examining cultural constructs of happiness,
Cape Town was obviously an excellent case study. Would blacks and
whites in the new South Africa club together? In London this had
seemed like a terribly good question, for one of ecstasy's big
surprises in Britain in the beginning was its impact on previously
entrenched prejudice. In the late 80s, style magazines were
astonished to report that white Wythenshawe scallies and black Moss
Side gangsters had been spotted sharing bottles of water in the
Hacienda. Famously, rival football fans in Manchester took Es on the
terraces, and stopped trying to hit each other. Clubbers were moved
to speak highly of their former enemies, and the definition of a good
night was adjusted from one that ended in a fight to one that ended
with a new friend. The delight, I think, came less from the new
friends' loveliness than the novel thrill of no longer hating them.
The simple answer to our question was yes. An embryonic multiracial
dance scene was emerging in Cape Town, pioneered by clubs such as
Unity, and it should have been what we explored - only there was one
problem. Their DJs played only hard house and techno, and here Paul
put his foot down. That was that, and I wasn't sorry, but the techno
ban necessarily confined us to the more culturally questionable
social circles of Camps Bay.

Camps Bay is a kind of seaside Knightsbridge. Tucked between the
ocean and the rear face of Table Mountain, it is a tiny resort but
wildly opulent, attracting fashionable whites from all over South
Africa. For the holiday season, two open-air clubs had been built on
the cricket field opposite the beach, and their DJs played
astonishingly beautiful house.

Both bars did a roaring trade. From mid-afternoon until the early
hours they were jammed with Cape Town's young rich, and the overall
impression up close was of a Baywatch party. During the day, topless
men in surfer shorts and women in neon bikinis drank bottled beer and
shrieked with laughter. At night, the girls changed into miniature
skirts and strappy sandals, and backless tops tied together with
ribbons, which they checked carefully every few minutes. The men wore
tight white tops and liked to smoke fat cigars, and everyone's
dancing was faultless, as polished an accomplishment as the rest of
their appearance, giving the scene the flawless choreography of a pop
video. In the corner of one bar was a pair of Jacuzzi tubs, and these
were particularly popular. All day and night, you would see people
dancing waist-deep in the foam, a mobile phone in one hand and an ice
bucket in the other.

Evidently everyone spent a tremendous amount of their time in the
gym; alas, they were all so perfectly beautiful that they tended to
cancel each other out. The men in particular looked faintly unreal -
like action superheroes in boys' comics, with inflatable bodies and
upside-down-triangle heads, spiky yellow hair, pink lips and
wraparound sunglasses. They didn't actually outnumber the women, but
they gave that impression and dominated the space. Between
backslapping and joshing among themselves they would eye up the women
sensationally blatantly. Towards one another, though, the single
women were icy, and fiercely competitive.

On our first night in Camps Bay we fell into conversation with a
couple at the bar. Mark was in his late 20s, here from Johannesburg
for the holiday with his terribly pretty blonde girlfriend, Sophie.
It was a "trial honeymoon", he joked; they were getting married next
year. Sophie was hysterically excited about our newlywed status. "You
guys must start reproducing at once! What are you waiting for?"
Sophie could answer only two questions with ease. When are you
getting married? What star sign are you? (The second was in response
to her asking ours. Sophie was genuinely troubled by an anecdote Paul
told about an end-of-the-pier astrologer in Brighton who read our
charts and found us calamitously incompatible. She listened
sympathetically, and looked alarmed.)

I asked Sophie what she did for a living. "Well, Mark's an
accountant," she announced with pride, but then fizzled out. What she
did for a living, I think, was encourage Mark to marry her - and she
was doing a brilliant job. She straddled him, fawning and cooing
delightfully.

We had a few more drinks, and began to warm to the scene. Everyone's
favourite tune in Camps Bay that Christmas was a remix of Bob
Marley's The Sun is Shining; it sent them wild, and they danced along
without a trace of irony. When it came on I put down my drink to
dance, but as I turned, I happened to glance across the street
towards the beach, and spotted a young black woman dancing alone in
the dark. She moved with shy delight, hands longingly outstretched
towards the music; I nudged Paul, and Mark and Sophie saw us turn and
look, but they appeared unable to see her.

The two-way mirror effect is a fixture of the smarter parts of town.
Blacks and coloureds linger in the shade watching whites enjoy
themselves in cafes and convertibles and clubs, but the whites are
frequently blind to the dark faces eyeing them from just feet away.
Even on Long Street in the most bohemian bars, the artless young
liberals seem not to notice that the staff collecting their glasses
at 4am are old black women in frilly maids' uniforms. In time we grew
accustomed to the blindness, but it made the study of race and
clubbing a non-starter, for ecstasy is in no danger of making riviera
lovelies get down with their brethren. What rich young white South
Africans like to do when they take it is undress in front of each
other, for a bouncing riot of muscle tone.

Gender was a more surprising study than race. White women never, ever
went out in groups together, let alone by themselves, but instead
soldered themselves at all times to the gigantic arm of a man. They
were smaller than the men in every way, and you had the feeling that
were all the men in a room to leave at once the women would simply
deflate. One afternoon when we forgot our mobile number I asked a man
in a Camps Bay cafe if I could call his phone to see our number come
up. The woman beside him tugged laughingly on his arm, and shook her
glossy mane from side to side. "She's just after your number,
Stefan!" She flashed me a thin, dangerous smile. "Good strategy! I'll
try that myself some time."

At times it felt as if we'd flown back to the 1950s. There are no
sunloungers or parasols for hire, so everyone brings their own,
making a patchwork of multicoloured deckchairs, and giving the
seafront the look of an old postcard. Along the peninsula south of
the city, in the pretty seaside villages with their strict speed
limits, twee horticulture and oppressive community rules, it is
easier to believe yourself in Guernsey than Africa. Late in the day,
the verges along the coast road become dotted with hampers and wine
coolers and deckchairs as Enid Blyton families assemble to watch the
sunset.

The shops in Cape Town have their own distinctive atmosphere,
unnerving for anyone raised in the slick, sullen retail world of
Topshop. Apart from the new Waterfront complex, there are practically
no chain stores in the city, and instead you find stores that would
make Are You Being Served? look dangerously modern. Shop assistants
are faultlessly attentive, call their customers madam and sir, and
refer to each other as Mr This or Mrs That. But South African culture
has become a muddle of new and old, the peculiar economics of
apartheid delivering unimaginable luxuries without producing the
usual high-street standards of a consumer society. For example, we
could find virtually no bookshops, and certainly none that sold much
besides Maeve Binchy and cookery books. The supermarkets are a dowdy
shambles, like Britain's in the 70s, selling cleaning products from
an age of washing soda. As white women never had to do the housework,
what would have been the point of improving the products?

Drugs, on the other hand, are fantastically easy to buy. The 60s more
or less skipped white South Africa, but majority rule in the 90s has
produced one of the most liberal constitutions in the world, so next
door to the prim 50s dating culture of Camps Bay are Green Point's
new sex shops, brothels and gay bars. On Boxing Day we were sitting
on a garage wall watching the comings and goings outside a club
called Detour when Paul noticed a group of coloured gay men fumble
with something. One handed it to another, and with a wince he
swallowed it.

"Hello." Paul marched straight up. "I'm from London and I'm trying to
buy drugs. Do you know where we can get any ecstasy?"

"Of course," said one. "How much do you want? Hold on a sec and I'll
go and get some." He disappeared into the bar.

While he was gone we chatted with the others. One was just back from
London; another had been working on a farm in Telford until
Christmas. Another was home from Johannesburg for the holiday. "Cape
Town. Yeuch," he sniffed. "It's so provincial, so lah-di-dah, so
let's-do-it-tomorrow, why worry? And they have no sass. They have no
style."

The first man reappeared with pills, and we bought two. He looked
more Asian than African, with high cheekbones and flashing eyes, and
had the delightfully straightforward attitude to drugs often found on
the gay scene.

"Here's my number, I'm Faisal. If you want more, give me a ring. The
dealer's a good friend." A police car idled by just as he was handing
over the pills. "Oh," everybody shrugged, unfazed. "The puh-lice."

The pills turned out to be brilliant, and we saw a lot of Faisal over
the next few days, as we sampled Es with the forensic dedication of
lab technicians. With New Year's Eve only days away, we were leaving
nothing to chance - much to the amusement of Faisal's dealer, who was
reported as thinking ours a "very British" approach.