Jackal's Dance

by Beverley Harper

  ‘It all comes down to one thing,’ James was saying. ‘My father’s reputation.’

  ‘Your father isn’t gay.’

  ‘No. But he might just as well be if it gets out.’

  ‘Crap!’ Mal said bluntly. ‘This is the twenty-first century. No-one gives a damn.’

  James placed one hand on Mal’s arm. ‘You know I love you very much.’

  ‘What about me?’ Mal asked. ‘I want to be able to show my feelings.’

  ‘Who to?’ James countered. ‘Even if people know we’re gay, they don’t want proof shoved under their noses.’ He shook his head. ‘Anyway, that’s not the point. It would kill Dad. I can’t do that to him.’

  Mal moved away, hurt and angry. James’ obsession with his father’s good name was coming between them. He had been waiting to come out for over a year. Before meeting James, he’d kept his homosexuality to himself, figuring it was no-one’s business but his own. Now, the strain of suppressing his feelings was beginning to tell. He didn’t want to flaunt the relationship, far from it. But it would be nice if well-meaning friends stopped trying to introduce both of them to women. If they could only mix with other gay couples, people who understood that true love really was possible between two men.

  James didn’t know it but Mal had already told a few people. His secretary knew. So did his mother, his sisters and younger brother. They accepted it, wished him well and hoped he wouldn’t get hurt. Funny that. Almost as though being in love with another man was fraught with more painful possibilities than being in love with a woman. Mal supposed that, in some ways, it was. A man and a woman could walk down the street holding hands, touching, arms around each other and passers-by smiled at their happiness. A kiss, provided it wasn’t too passionate, was permissible in public. Pet names and endearments were okay. But two men? Society hadn’t come that far.

  Mal had met James’ father. A High Court judge, the old boy certainly suffered from altitude sickness, taking the high moral ground at every opportunity, pontificating from what he perceived as the rarefied air of his profession. Pompous, boring old fart would be more like it. If the look on his wife’s face whenever he droned on was anything to go by, Mal was not alone in his assessment. He suspected that James’ reluctance to come out was less to do with respect for his father and more about a lifetime listening to lectures from a man who believed his was the only opinion worth hearing.

  Certainly, James had tried to conform, deny his homosexuality, come up to his father’s expectations. He’d married and fathered a child before confronting the fact that he was in the wrong role. The judge never missed a chance to express his disapproval about the divorce which, he’d been told, was due to irreconcilable differences. ‘What kind of reason is that? Work it out for God’s sake, that’s what my generation did. First divorce in the Fulton family,’ he’d rumbled within half an hour of meeting Mal. ‘A goddamned disgrace.’

  ‘Better disgrace than an unhappy son,’ Mal had replied, not in the least awed by the man’s position or opinion.

  The judge had harrumped, glowered, delivered a sermon and written Mal off as frivolous.

  ‘It’s better just to agree with him,’ James had said after they left the house.

  ‘Why? All that does is reaffirm his belief that he’s the only one who’s right.’

  ‘Dad’s okay. He’s used to being respected, that’s all.’

  Mal suspected it was rather more than that. The judge, he decided, relied on fear. And James, being a gentle soul, was scared to death of him.

  ‘Don’t be angry.’ James’ words brought Mal back to the present.

  Mal sighed, shook his head and gave a rueful smile. ‘That’s the trouble. I can’t get cross with you.’ James was the same age – thirty-four – but had the soft look of youth. Blond curls sat like a cap on his head. Blue-grey eyes brimming with optimism. Always ready to smile and laugh. Not tall, just over one hundred and seventy centimetres, slightly built, slim-limbed with long, almost delicate fingers. By comparison, Mal bristled. He had thick dark hair worn in a crewcut, eyebrows that sprouted wildly over deep-set eyes, and a chin and jaw, best described as stubborn, which always looked as if they needed a shave. His figure bordered on chunky, hands square with stubby fingers and he walked with the rolling gait of someone whose legs should be bandy but weren’t.

  James looked like a concert pianist or a surgeon. Mal could have been a fisherman, a bricklayer or someone who worked on an oil rig. Despite acute physical differences, their personalities were very alike. In fact, they worked in closely related fields – Mal in advertising and James in public relations. They’d met nearly two years ago at the launch of a new fashion magazine in New York. The attraction was immediate but neither man made a move. Mal accompanied a female friend he often took out when he needed a partner. James was there with his wife. A few months later, the two were thrown together to devise a new corporate image for a mutual client. Over drinks after a late brainstorming session at the agency, James admitted he was married in name only and was thinking about divorce.

  They fell into the habit of stopping off at a bar after work. When the joint project was successfully concluded, they carried on meeting. By then, James and his wife had separated and started divorce proceedings. It was to be a civilised parting of the ways with everything shared equally between them, including time spent with their daughter. Halfway through, James’ wife became vindictive and it was to Mal that James turned, desperate to download his problems. One evening, with James visibly upset, Mal suggested they prepare a potluck dinner in the privacy of his apartment.

  The wrangling over custody of his daughter was getting to James. He drank more than usual. Mal kept up with him. Around midnight, Mal admitted that he was gay. James confessed that he might be too. Both of them knew where it was heading. Mal was James’ first gay encounter. And his only one. The relationship swiftly escalated until James moved in with Mal and the two of them shared their lives, happiness, laughter, tears, a haughty Siamese cat and a love of classical music. In everything but the question of coming out, they were in accord.

  And now, here they were in the middle of nowhere having exactly the same argument they often had at home in New York.

  ‘Tell you what,’ Mal suggested finally. ‘Let’s shelve the subject. We’re in Africa. We’re on holiday. We’re together. Let’s not spoil it.’

  James playfully punched Mal’s shoulder. ‘Good idea.’

  A car went by. The driver hooted his horn and waved. Mal smiled and returned the salute. James jumped as though he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t.

  ‘Slow down, Johan. You’re going too fast, man.’

  ‘Ach, woman, stop complaining. I’m only doing one-forty.’

  ‘It’s too fast. You don’t know the road.’

  Johan Riekert glanced sideways at his wife of thirty-odd years. Henneke did not return the look. She stared straight ahead, hands clasped tightly together in her ample lap. Always the same. So bloody predictable. Always worrying about something. She hadn’t even wanted to make this trip. ‘Etosha is so far, Johan. It’s in Namibia. It’s not the same. I’ve heard stories . . . it’s not safe.’

  The trip to Etosha was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The Riekerts could never have afforded it on Johan’s pension. Their children had all chipped in for a surprise wedding anniversary present. Johan had been delighted but Henneke had serious doubts and suggested that the money would be better spent on house renovations. As usual, Johan’s wishes prevailed and Henneke reluctantly agreed to the holiday.

  Johan made no attempt to ease off on the speed. He liked to drive fast. The roads in Namibia were ideal for it – dead straight, deserted tar. Driving fast made him feel young again, made him forget he was in his mid-fifties, balding, overweight, shortsighted and a grandparent. They passed a car pulled off the road. Johan hit the horn and waved. One of the two men acknowledged his greeting.

  ‘I wonder if they’re going to Etosha?’ Johan
said absently.

  ‘Where else could they be going?’ Henneke asked.

  ‘Somewhere further north. Caprivi even.’

  ‘They were white.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So why would they go up there? Only blacks live beyond Etosha. Anyway, they were tourists.’

  ‘You could tell that, could you?’

  ‘You can always tell.’ Henneke nodded. ‘I can anyway.’

  ‘Angola. They might be going to Angola,’ Johan suggested, stifling irritation. His wife rarely argued with him. It wasn’t so much what she was saying now as how her responses were deliberately provocative.

  ‘No-one goes to Angola.’

  ‘Of course they do. Don’t be so bloody silly, woman. Lots of people go to Angola.’

  Henneke was still staring straight ahead. ‘Name three,’ she said quietly.

  Johan barked out a laugh. She did that sometimes, came out with something completely unexpected. Just as well, since most of her conversation was boringly repetitive and Johan could pretty well tell in advance what she would say in any given situation. In the early days it hadn’t bothered him.

  She was the little sister of a friend. He’d known her all his life, though a four-year difference in age meant they hadn’t been thrown together very often as children. Henneke had a different circle of friends and kept pretty much out of her brother’s way.

  Johan was twenty when he’d been bowled over by an attractive young girl at his friend’s house. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t be silly. That’s Henneke.’ Her brother sounded surprised.

  ‘Henneke!’ Johan had been astonished. Last time he’d noticed her – and he couldn’t remember when that had been, though surely not more than a couple of months ago – she’d been a chubby little child. When did the hips and tits occur? When did the solemn little face become chocolate box pretty?

  Johan was smitten. Being a young lad from a strict Afrikaans family, and possessing not one jot of subtlety or romantic inclination, he set about courting Henneke with the straitlaced finesse of a sledge-hammer. He asked her to the bioscope and, when she refused, went straight to her father and repeated his request. Henneke accompanied him to the pictures only because her father gave the order. Subsequent outings were always arranged the same way.

  So when Johan decided she was the one for him, he made no mention of it to Henneke. He asked her father. The first Henneke knew she was betrothed was when her father told her. And like the dutiful daughter she had been brought up to be, Henneke didn’t dream of refusing.

  To the marriage, Johan and Henneke carried nineteenth-century traditions. Both believed that the man made decisions and his wife willingly obeyed. She never contradicted him, obligingly fell pregnant six times and produced four sons and two daughters with a minimum of fuss, kept the house clean and tidy, always had food punctiliously on the table, never so much as glanced at another man and rarely, if ever, refused his sexual requests. She was the perfect wife in every respect and Johan often thanked the Almighty for giving him such a contented and obedient partner.

  As far as he was concerned, Henneke had only one flaw. She didn’t seem to have a brain in her head. It hadn’t mattered much until he retired. His job as a clerk with South African Railways kept him occupied during the day and, outside work, six growing children provided ample diversity. But now, with the kids grown up and gone and him being home most of the time, Johan realised that his wife tended to talk for the sake of talking, had few, if any, original thoughts and usually responded with banal and often irrelevant comments. And it was driving him mad.

  Henneke’s face remained impassive, watching the road but not really seeing it. She had to be careful. Lately she’d caught herself contradicting Johan. It had been easy enough to fob off his bombastic domination with placating praise and meaningless tittle-tattle when he hadn’t been underfoot all the time. But now, the continual interference and laborious lectures were getting on her nerves.

  Right from the beginning of their life together, Henneke had coped with her marriage by taking refuge in fantasy. Movies and books provided the fuel, a fertile imagination did the rest. As she went about her daily cooking, cleaning and mothering chores, Henneke ceased to be the dowdy dumpling, the invisible, personality-less, feeling-less family anchor who no-one considered might have needs, ambitions, likes or dislikes of her own. Johan would have died if he’d ever found out the antics she got up to in her mind. Having perfected the art of being mother and wife in the flesh, she became mistress, temptress, glamorous, sensual and abandoned in her head. She lived in two separate worlds and infinitely preferred the one without Johan.

  Her mother had said she would grow to love him. Well, she never did. Her father saw Johan as a well-mannered man of honourable intentions. He was, but with absolutely no ambition and even less idea of a woman’s needs. Her brother had winked lewdly and implied that Johan would be quite a man in the bedroom department. But Henneke, still a virgin when she married, had read books and listened to her friends. Johan’s idea of foreplay was to grab her hand and place it over his penis so she would know he was ready for her. His idea of good sex was to climax as quickly as he could, roll off her groaning and, within two minutes, be fast asleep.

  Henneke discovered early in their marriage that fantasy and masturbation made good bedfellows. Not so bothered about sexual gratification these days, her imaginary life continued. She could be anything she wanted: famous actress, cancer-curing doctor, world-class tennis player. Anything at all.

  Right now, Henneke was giving a press conference. The world was anxious to hear how the first female formula one Grand Prix racing driver juggled a successful marriage and dangerous career. Johan could drone on to his heart’s content. He never listened to her responses anyway.

  Felicity Honeywell thought, not for the first time, that a solo trip to Etosha had to be the silliest bloody idea she’d ever come up with. What on earth possessed her to do it? A game reserve was like a tropical island, a place to be with family, friends, a lover, or even, if all else failed, a louse of a husband whose eyes touched up every bit of skirt from twenty to sixty. A woman on her own was khaki fodder. Shit! Why had she come?

  There was still time to change her mind, catch the airbus back to Johannesburg and go home. Instead, she passed her First National BOB card to a girl on the Avis counter, signed a form where indicated and was handed the keys of a Toyota Rav 4 automatic. As it often did, Felicity’s mind shifted into rhyming mode as she went in search of her hired car.

  Dream of space and dusty roads,

  Of endless blue and brown . . .

  Felicity stopped and considered a moment. What rhymes with roads? Toads? Loads? Loads and loads of toads?

  Dream of dusty roads and space,

  Of endless brown and blue,

  The traveller pauses in this place,

  And tries to find the loo.

  Grinning slightly, Felicity located the vehicle, heaved her suitcase into the back, slammed the door in a way she’d never do with her own car and unlocked the driver’s side. Honeywell, you’re losing it! she thought, getting a quick mental image of someone, probably her, standing in the middle of nowhere with their legs crossed. The mind-picture faded. Felicity stood looking into the car, feeling slightly apprehensive. What was she doing here? This white cocoon waiting to wrap its hollow emptiness around her, accentuating the fact that she was utterly alone. Felicity shook her head and climbed behind the wheel. ‘Okay, beast. It’s just you and me.’

  Felicity Honeywell was South Africa’s most published poet and, up until recently, that was just how she wanted to keep it. But when life sticks out its foot and causes a tumble, sometimes it’s time to take stock of the damage. In Felicity’s case, the collapse of her seventeen-year marriage meant looking closely at what she did for a living.

  Reading every single poem she’d written, Felicity was startled to discover that they virtually mirrored her life. As a young bride she
had been heavily into love sonnets. A few years later everything was an elegy, triggered no doubt by the numbing news that she was unable to conceive. Her next phase dabbled briefly with heroic epics, railing against the system and lauding Africa’s struggle for identity and fairness. Injustice became the child she would never have. In her late thirties, when she faced the realities of a less than perfect marriage and political policies in a country that seemed hell-bent on self-destruction, her work took on a satirical note, although whether Felicity was mocking herself or the world was unclear. Probably both.

  More recent poems held a bitter quality and were so markedly different from her earliest work that she wondered if they could possibly have been written by the same person. That was when she began to question the relevance of her chosen profession.

  Felicity was in savage, cynical mode when she’d said to her publisher, only last week, ‘Poetry is horseshit. An outpouring of drivel over which literary minds scramble to find meanings that the poet didn’t even know were there.’

  From writing her own poems Felicity began to read the works of others, searching for a clue as to whether they, like her, had grown weary as they stumbled along life’s highway. The more she read, the more she enjoyed those who saw life through a froth of frivolity. Felicity currently favoured Ogden Nash.

  The song of canaries never varies

  But when they’re moulting they’re pretty revolting.

  There wasn’t much the critics could make of that. It was what it was.

  Felicity realised suddenly that sitting behind the wheel of a stationary vehicle might also be considered pretty pointless. Etosha was a good five hours away. It was eight in the morning. Time to move. She adjusted the seat and mirrors, strapped in, started the engine, selected R for reverse and damned near ran over a man wheeling his suitcase across the car park. ‘Sorry,’ Felicity mouthed through the still closed window.