Son
Son
Neil Sonnekus
For
Rudolph Henry Sonnekus
(1918–2007)
First published by MFBooks Joburg, an imprint of
Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd, in 2017
10 Orange Street
Sunnyside
Auckland Park 2092
South Africa
+2711 628 3200
www.jacana.co.za
© Neil Sonnekus, 2017
All rights reserved.
d-PDF ISBN 978-1-920601-89-8
ePUB ISBN 978-1-920601-90-4
mobi file ISBN 978-1-920601-91-1
Cover design by publicide
Job no. 002926
See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za
Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate,
Know his work or choose his mate.
– UNDER BEN BULBEN, W.B. YEATS
Contents
The Usual Department
On Time
A, Like, Cool Night
On Youth
Bring on the SFX
On Fathers
Sex and the Metropole
On Hunting
Food for Africa
On Loss
The Leafy Suburbs
On Dreams
Yuppie Pleads Exhaustion
On Luck
Septimana Irritabilis
On Captivity
A Jog Sans Dog
On Principle
These Sporting Days
On Living
Flirting with the Foe
On Freedom
The Priorities of Power
On Caring
A Mounting Need
On Sight
My Fullest Attention
On Falling
The Couch Lothario
On Beauty
The Grape Escape
On Parole
A Small, Wet Place
On Ageing
Interpenetration
On God
Going Bush
On Cars
Beware: Sociologist
On Decay
A Shortish Holiday
On Funerals
Chickens Come Home
On Rage
Symptoms of Morbidity
On Edge
Late Spring
On Death
Dog Guards Master’s Corpse
On Farewell
The Usual Department
* * *
The best few moments of my marriage, without a doubt, took place in a divorce lawyer’s office. I signed my name on the solid line, walked out of those shadowy chambers and into the loud sunshine of a bustling Johannesburg street. Hawkers were shouting, hooters were blaring and shop radios were throbbing as a crowd of pigeons exploded around my feet. I was a free man.
As far as I was concerned there was only one rule going forward, if you’ll pardon that piece of corporate speak, and that was this: no more relationships. None whatsoever. The sole activity I was interested in from now on was good old-fashioned sex, having lost a whole decade to The Ex and her adulterous bastard of a lover, her career. But that was all over now, thank you very much. We were finished. History. Kaput.
I had what may be called a life again, even though it very much resembled the days preceding that particularly bright Monday. The next morning I got up, abluted, dressed and got dragged down Emfuleni Road by what used to be our “baby”, Butch, a mottled mongrel with the look of a hunter and the eirenic soul of a suburban florist. Once in the park I let him go chase hadedahs, squirt his personality all over the place and smell each and every available pooch’s rectum. After that little constitutional I ate, drank and left the key on the windowsill (but out of others’ sight) for what used to be “our” domestic worker, the one and only Ms Beauty Motsepe.
This was also a relationship, of course, but it wasn’t romantic – or sexual. I was the landowner, she the worker. But if I controlled the means of production, she controlled the very atmosphere, being even more of an expert at casting a mood than I’d been in my scowling, sugary youth. So I made sure that by the time she came in with her emotional baggage I was upstairs writing my novel about, well, something. I wasn’t quite sure yet.
After that double dose of living hell it came as a great relief to go and perform some paid work at that receptacle of universal misery, otherwise known as the Daily News, where all the casualties of the community, city, country, continent and cosmos appeared on my screen in seemingly dead black bytes. Millions died of war, AIDS, mudslides, train crashes, mining disasters, earthquakes, traffic pile-ups, drownings, religious fanaticism, hunger, terror, riots, more starvation and mainly political incompetence, which I coolly cut to size and gave a fitting headline.
I liked my job because it was relatively well paid, populated by lunatics and seldom – or almost never, as modern journalese would have it – followed me home. If I did remember anything it was absurdities like Man Holds Up Bank With Carrot. I was forty-two, suddenly single and probably depressed, but I was also employed and fairly independent, a privilege of which I was well aware. Most other men my age looked way beyond it, but I was lucky enough to have a body that didn’t show the punishment I meted out to it, yet easily responded to any bit of exercise I hurled in its direction. Then again, most of those I compared myself with – not to, note, with – thought nothing of starting the day with a determined beer, joint or sometimes worse, so that wasn’t saying much.
Our working week started on Sunday afternoon and ended on Thursday evening, whereupon I now continued cruising for flesh after post-deadline drinks and passed out, unsated, after more post-deadline drinks. But there was no luxury of sleeping in that Friday morning, for Ms Motsepe still had to work. I had seen no point in getting someone to clean our mini-mansion five times a week, but The Ex had said at least it was creating employment and live-in shelter for one other soul, not to mention food and a rudimentary education for Beauty’s three dependants out in the back of beyond. It was an argument only the most hard-hearted bastard, which The Ex had accused me of being anyway, could counter. I had also seen no point in having a pet, which required all kinds of additional commitments, but after most of our neighbours had been robbed and/or assaulted and/or raped and/or murdered – with or without high walls, spiky palisades, razor wire, electronic devices and dodgy-looking security guards – there was a fairly persuasive bit of logic to that bit of reasoning, too.
Coming back to Beauty (and it always does), I could usually tell by the way she knocked whether she was in a good mood or not. If she was peeved because I’d forgotten to put the key out the night before, or her kids were giving her grief, or her sister had once again told her that she was earning more than Beauty, she almost broke the door down. If she was feeling really sorry for herself, which was often, she knocked so timidly that I could barely hear her, except that I was always half expecting it tensely anyway. I don’t know which annoyed me more.
Why couldn’t I just give her her own key, she had asked. Because I had read and heard of other domestic workers being attacked, then having their keys taken to get to the real target, the wealthier inhabitants of the house. It was a lose-lose situation, I’d said in our lingua franca, Afrikaans, which used to drive The Ex wild in all the wrong ways. It really wasn’t because I didn’t trust her, Beauty. She had pursed her lips and the silence had said it all: the dog was supposed to protect her. But, I’d said, I had also been informed about walls and palisades like ours being scaled, the dogs poisoned, the domestic worker subjected to variations of the above, whereafter it was the owner of the house’s turn. Her grumble had implied I was thinking of the domestic workers (the
word maid was a no-no) who collaborated with the criminals against their employers and that I suspected her of being one of them. I was ready for that argument too, for if she really wanted to pursue this matter to its very bitter end she knew I would say – because I had done so before, much to The Ex’s chagrin – that if I suspected her of anything I wouldn’t have kept her in my employ. Moreover, I was the one who was actually paying her, and if she didn’t like living in her spacious back room and getting paid more than double the minimum wage our new masters had determined – even though it was less than her bloody sister was being paid – she could always go and work somewhere else. Two days of sulking would follow, after which Ms Motsepe would mysteriously cheer up again.
Life was so safe and simple in the new South Africa.
If she let herself in on a Friday morning, of course, I could always go back to sleep. But that never happened because I could hear her washing the dishes downstairs, the volume entirely dependent upon her state of being. If I did lie in or pretend to sleep until ten o’clock and then head downstairs for breakfast, that would clash with her coming upstairs with the vacuum cleaner, muttering much better. The last thing I felt like doing was trying to get in and out of the shower with a non-interested party around, and if I pretended to sleep after that it was in an atmosphere of such tolerant disapproval that it wasn’t worth it. So: I’d wash myself in a daze (as I did now) and see to it that I was dressed and gone by the time Beauty came muttering up the stairs, though we usually ended up shuffling past each other anyway. Worlds apart.
Out in the allegedly free one I bought myself a breakfast, quickly scanned the paper to see that I hadn’t committed a sub’s worst nightmare – a factual mistake or typo in the headline – and got annoyed by a pair of middle-class housewives complaining about their servants. Didn’t they have anything better to talk about? Then I rented a movie, had a chat with the shop’s knowledgeable proprietor and went home. By that time Beauty was finished vacuuming, dusting and emoting upstairs, and I watched the DVD on my computer in the study while she made an almighty racket downstairs. Just as the movie ended she took her lunch break and sat in her room for an hour to the very second, staring at something that looked suspiciously like nothing.
I had lunch too, then went back upstairs and wrote up the review for the rest of the afternoon and the weekend edition a week hence. By six I was in the pub, by nine I liked almost everybody and by one I was gliding through the quiet back streets of suburbia to avoid the cops and passed out in a stupor of more missed opportunities.
That Saturday I could finally sleep in but didn’t because, well, I was getting older. Also, Ms Motsepe approached the front of the house in her white and green church uniform, noisily unlocked and relocked the gate in the larger electronic one and headed to the main road, where she caught a minibus taxi to church and spent the rest of the weekend in tearful communion with her fellow workers, both loved and despised.
This was the best part of the week. I didn’t have to go out shopping with The Ex or stay in fighting with her anymore. It was still summery and I walked around dick naked and listened to the music I liked and gradually eased myself into the day. Then, after a basic lunch with a bias towards carbs in preparation for further alcoholic traffic, I ambled over to my colleagues and friends Jay and Veronica Redland’s house in the next suburb, just like The Ex and I used to do, but without any of the simmering tension.
Jay came from a province that was supposed to be fully Afrikaans on the white side, the Free State, but he was a soutie, a redneck, an African pom. Veron, on the other hand, was a firebrand from the Flats, or so I’d assumed.
“Do you think Coloureds only come from the Cape?” she’d challenged me the first time we’d met.
“No, but most of them do.”
“Well I’m not most of them.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right, but don’t do it again,” she’d said.
“Glad to hear you’ve got a chip on both shoulders.”
After which we got on famously, though only she had the distinction of fame, and then only in certain circles.
Jay and I sat and watched two English soccer teams with about three Limey players between them, commenting on how they each earned more than our annual salary a week and, more to the point, who in the office we would like to screw and in what order. We never seemed to tire of that particular conversation. All of this while drinking up a storm of good cold beer and going outside for a smoke next to their pool at halftime, lest Veron crap all over us from a dizzy height for doing so indoors.
“Life in the suburbs,” I would say in the constant sunshine.
“Who said it was going to be easy, bruh?”
As usual, he invited me to stay for a braai with Veron and the kids and as usual I accepted. Then we got even more trashed, whereupon she sent the girls off to bed, started drinking as well and got particularly bellicose as the evening headed for its social climax. My friend was inclined to get all sloppy when he was drunk, and Veron was more than just inclined to give poor old pasty-faced, mealy-tongued Jay a verbal lashing second to none. Contrary to what many people thought, this was not interracial – or even matrimonial – animosity, but sexual foreplay. What it therefore meant was that it was time for me to stumble home from their jacaranda-lined suburb to mine of plane trees, wondering whether one fragrant night I’d end up on the sidewalk with a knife between my ribs, though I always woke up with a rusted old tanker lodged firmly ’twixt mine ears.
I lay scowling in the small mansion I had insisted on buying for us in a moment of sexual optimism, when all I’d really wanted was a two-bedroomed flat in Rosebank within walking distance of work. The property was so big it could have accommodated two more houses and extended families, like the more practical folk a couple of doors down the road, Indians with whom The Ex had wanted nothing to do. They had not yet cast off the yoke of tribalism, she’d maintained. Be that as it may, I had obviously belonged to that class of idiots who did what they thought others wanted them to, so I was clearly getting some or other karmic comeback for all my other years of mainly imagined bastardy. In summary, all I had to show for my life with The Ex was a mountainous mortgage, a domestic worker who had perfected the art of sulking and a dog that seemed to shit more than it ate.
Yet, just as I was getting used to my new existence and finding it increasingly agreeable, albeit in a numb sort of way, I went to work as innocently as one can on a sweltering, mid-week afternoon in southern Africa, which is when I first laid eyes on one Kay Greenwood. She was rushing headlong to the deputy editor’s office and, being a man in the usual department, I was instantly attracted to her. She must have been about twenty-seven, had straight brown hair and was extremely well built. She was also quite badly dressed and her facial skin was clearly stressed, but she was full of focused energy behind her specs that I, for some or other reason, found a bit of a turn-on. Hell, I’d be a liar to say I didn’t know there were porn sites dedicated solely to women who wore glasses. But my head wasn’t the only one that was turning and I didn’t expect anything to come of it. After all, I was at least fifteen years older than her, rapidly greying, and I preferred older women.
“Who’s that?” I nevertheless said to my good friend and fellow sub, Jay.
“Haven’t a clue, my bruh,” he rap-rhymed.
On Time
* * *
The next day was Thursday and, as already mentioned, the last day of my working week. That day of thunder was effectively my Friday, which meant it was the end of the week and time to celebrate, which I duly did – religiously. The real Friday night, however, when the rest of the gentile world started carousing, was my Saturday night, so I just continued jubilating. Saturday night, of course, was when the rest of the infidels really got into the swing of drinking, but that was effectively my Sunday night. This meant I had to start preparing for my working week, but then I’d never liked feeling excluded from the rest of sinful humanity,
so I always joined in on Saturday night too. The result was that I always started my working week with a hangover. But then, apart from having a little curative session on Sunday nights, just to get back into the rhythm – if not shock – of the working week, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday could serve as my collective Sunday night. Mostly.
I mean, I worked in the media, for fuck’s sake.
But the one little part I omitted, like any subeditor worth his or her office grime, was another kind of relationship. This was the one that happened every Sunday morning, which I didn’t just faff, fart, fidget or fritter away in the house The Ex had lost instant interest in co-paying as we went our separate ways. Oh no. While the rest of my friends, colleagues and peers might nurse their hangovers, start abusing themselves afresh, fight with their second spouse or post-marital partner, clash with their children or stepchildren or both, watch sport, less likely partake in it and more probably return home from gambling in one of the former homelands, I would struggle up and drive to Pretoria to visit my old man, who was determined to make it to ninety-three. This had to do with some or other ditty he liked, which he had quoted me numerous times and I nevertheless always forgot instantly.
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