Son

by Sonnekus, Neil

  The Ex had at first accompanied me but soon tired of the old man’s endlessly domineering repetitions – she never did like competition – and I couldn’t exactly blame her for that. But why did I do it? Why did I go and visit a man who still had some kind of hold over me in the sense that I still couldn’t bring myself to smoke in front of him – at my age! Because I had promised my mother I would visit him at least once a week as she lay rotting of cancer a decade previously and, still being a man of words, I had stuck to them. But it wasn’t the only reason why I went to see the old sod. I wanted to know why she had stuck with him regardless, why she had imposed such a burden upon me, why he had failed to provide yours truly with any guidance whatsoever, why he had been content to be a fingerprints clerk in the South African Police for about a hundred and fifty years after the blasted war, and why there was a part of me that nevertheless admired – let’s not even talk about love – his intransigence.

  Moreover, I resented him because he had been one of those who had dutifully helped prop up the previous administration his entire working life, though in all fairness he’d hated and spurned the Hush Puppie, moustachioed mindset that accompanied it, one which the new lot were continuing without the blink of a slow eyelid beneath their hair straighteners and bulging Guccis. I therefore hated that city as well, even though we hadn’t actually lived in it. Instead, I grew up in a squeaky-clean mess called Lyttelton, named after the son of the Colonial Secretary, Alfred, youngest of twelve children to Mary and George, Fourth Baron Lyttelton. The latter had had a port named after him in New Zealand, had three more daughters from his second marriage and, according to Wikipedia, committed suicide by flinging himself down a flight of stairs at the ripe old age of fifty-nine.

  His last son, Alfred, was first and foremost a sportsman. As a footballer he’d been an expert dribbler in the days when passing the ball was anathema, and he scored England’s lone goal in his only international, which was against Scotland. The score was 3-1 against a country that, incidentally, if not paradoxically, hit upon the idea of actually passing the ball, though that innovation only came later and didn’t seem to benefit its originators very much after World War Two.

  Alfred was also an excellent cricketer in the position of wicketkeeper, playing four Tests against what were probably considered those criminal chaps from Down Under. But he later became involved in politics and favoured indentured Chinese labour to South Africa, opposed Welsh independence, but had an open mind to decentralisation in the colonies and women’s suffrage back home. The liberals, again according to that site which derives its name from the Hawaiian word for truth, completely opposed his idea of letting the colonies run themselves.

  Whatever the case, the town named after Alfred Lyttelton should never have been a suburb of Pretoria in the first place. Apart from being over twenty kilometres outside the capital, that undulating grid had a man-made forest that actually separated them. There used to be rolling veld between them, too. But some or other bright spark wanted another satellite that could serve the city’s burgeoning civil service and surrounding military complex. It would be connected to that other country to the south, Johannesburg, by road and rail, and beyond, all the way to the Cape of Good Hope, so named because some high-up in another century had thought Cape of Storms was bad PR. The railway track would run through the lowest point and alongside the main road of the valley that constituted the original township. Botha Avenue was named after the Boer general, Louis, who had set a precedent for future generations, black and white, when, grossly overweight, he expired of a heart attack.

  Lyttelton finally became a municipality in its own right and its road signs were usually mis-spelled by the mainly Afrikaans clerks who ran it, thinking quite logically that if “little” was spelled the way it was – which made no sense anyway, since that was not how it sounded – then Lyttleton should too. But then the English has always been a treacherous bunch, they would say. There was no cinema in that town, no hotel. The only place of entertainment by the time I left for university was an off-the-pavement bar within gobbing distance of the railway track. That was also the year the town’s name was changed, though the central grid and main train station retained the original. That dump was now called Verwoerdburg.

  “Bastard’s probably never even been here,” the old man had said, though it’s doubtful whether Alfred Lyttelton had, either.

  In one of his more light-hearted moments, the man whose wife and sisters called him Son would name that place the more appropriate and deadly accurate Verwurgburg: Strangle City. But even after the African National Congress came into power the town still kept that despicable moniker, and its fancy new shopping mall was called Verwoerdburgstad for quite a while before it was hastily changed to the more politically neutral Centurion, what with a chill wind blowing in from the capital’s Union Buildings. Name-changing was clearly a long and arduous business because, by the time The Ex and I got divorced, Centurion Mall was still surrounded by Hendrik Verwoerd and John Vorster drives. It had been built along the Sesmylspruit, close to where a girlfriend had lived and we malcontents had spent endless Chekhovian weekends beside the Six Mile Stream, devising ways to get out of that town. Back in the present, however, a kind of progress had been achieved: all the houses along the stream had been bought up and demolished, and that rural stream had been transformed into a mall with cinemas and a couple of generic hotels next to a shallow, man-made lake that had coloured fountains – when they worked. And, to make us all feel just that little bit better, an international cricket stadium, named after its sponsor, was thrown into the mix.

  But the only reason I still went there was to visit my late mother’s grave and the old man’s living one. I would never put my foot in that town again once he was gone, he who had never had a drop of liquor over his lips, nor smoked a cigarette, nor slept with any other woman except Yvonne, my dearly departed mother.

  Now I was driving to Lyttelton and getting pissed off anew about all the warehouses sprouting up along the highway to the capital. When I’d finally returned from varsity, ready to be fêted by the world, there had been a sole thorn tree on a rolling green Highveld hill. Then came the Development Bank, which had at least planted indigenous trees to swallow up “my” lonely acacia, followed by each and every designer-stubbled wanker’s idea of what constituted industrial chic along the way. If apartheid had had its unfair share of abominable architecture, then the new money was not doing any better. In fact, it was doing worse because it was supposed to know better.

  Also, I was working myself into the usual state after making the guilt-ridden mistake of telling the old man I would be there at about ten o’clock. By the time I got to that dull, previously and still predominantly white suburb – passing the new hospital in which my mother had breathed her last, then the architecturally brutal Afrikaans high school I had attended, I’m really sorry to say, quite happily – it was half-past eleven.

  My only consolation was that I had a definite escape route in that I had to leave at the stroke of one o’clock, thereby avoiding an awkward lunch, to get back to the News by two for the start of my working week. If the old man had been silent about my years of being a successful but non-income-generating screenwriter, then he was completely supportive about my current job, no matter that he didn’t understand what the hell it was all about. If it felt to me like the last refuge of a complete failure, then for him it was work, it was paid and it was therefore good. Period.

  Now he was waiting, as always, at the gates of the only house I had known up to the late age of twenty, when I’d left home for good – or so I’d thought. It was from the late Fifties and functional in a slightly less aggressive style than my Sixties face-brick school: a three-bedroom house on a quarter of an acre flanked by a smaller, matching block consisting of a washroom, single garage and tiny servant’s quarters at the back. Both the roofs were corrugated and from the street the garage complex looked like a soldier’s head: a lance-corporal wearing a stiff be
ret with the washroom’s window serving as his visible eye. The old man had co-designed this house and he had paid it off over a very long time. Now it was his and the only way he was going to leave it was when he was “as stiff as a dead man’s you know what”.

  There he stood with his still-full head of fine, silver hair combed straight back beneath his tanned scowl, his careless sun moles and broken nose from a police college scrap. He was dressed as if he was going to some event he wouldn’t attend on principle in his polished old HPs, neatly ironed trousers, buttoned-up golf shirt and check jacket. He stood as upright as the only filmmaker who’d ever made any sense to him, Charlie Chaplin, and as defiantly good looking as the intuitive version of someone he’d never listened to: Beethoven.

  He opened the gates, I hello’ed him as I drove through and down the driveway, flanked by neatly clipped grass, past the side of the garage, over the obsessively mowed back lawn and under the double canopy that had been installed for Ma’s car and mine. As I disembarked he came through the door connecting the house and the garage, crossing the cement apron towards me.

  “Howzit, Dad.”

  “You’re late,” he said with faux friendliness.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, instantly annoyed.

  “I’ve been standing out there since a quarter to ten.”

  “Ja, well …”

  “I’ve been worried sick.”

  He showed no interest in the reminder that I’d said I’d be there at “about” ten o’clock, because he had never been late in his life.

  I muttered something and he said “What?”

  Physically, this was the only thing wrong with him. While my mother had been alive I’d suspected that his deafness was selective; now I was convinced of it because he always answered the phone when I called him on Thursday nights after deadline, just to check if he was all right and to say I’d see him on Sunday. Of course, he always answered the phone as if he was about to hit whoever had the audacity to call him so “bladdy late”, meaning just after nine.

  “Nothing,” I said, back in the present.

  “And your car’s dirty.”

  “I must have driven through a puddle last night,” I said pathetically.

  “You know, people used to think the Chevy was brand new after twenty-five years.”

  “Ja, you’ve said so.”

  About a million times, I thought, always rounding things off for the ease of the non-existent reader’s eye. His repetitiousness might well have pushed my mother towards a permanent solution because it would most certainly have driven me to divorce, suicide or murder if I’d had to live with him for the half a century she had.

  “Twenty-five years!”

  “How are you, Dad?” I said, offering my hand to the man who, statistically speaking, should have died long before his much younger wife. Ma had confided in me that she was hoping she’d live off his meagre police pension, which would have been further reduced because she was the spouse, for a few years of peace and quiet after he “went”.

  “Hello my boy,” he said: eighty-eight years of puritanical piss, gall, vinegar and Nestlé’s condensed milk rolled into one.

  Then he squashed my tender little sub’s hand.

  A, Like, Cool Night

  * * *

  Now that I was aware of Kay, we kept on making eye contact across that great open-plan divide that separates hacks from their saviours. We would see each other in places like the canteen with its canine-friendly food, the distorting brushed-steel lifts and the less glamorous parking basement, where she might rush by in her second-hand BMW while I fired up my very seasoned Honda Civic.

  It didn’t make any sense. She was somewhere near her big-three crisis (in other words, thirty), while I was definitely managing a permanent one in my early forties. She was on the up and up and I was on the fixed sideways with a bias, all things considered, down. She no doubt believed in the corp and the country, while I found it hard to even believe in the after-hours’ writing I did to relieve the endless tedium of relativity. She radiated an air of positivity, while I wore the sour mantle of a recent divorcé. She was probably a good person, when all she had to do was give our opposition paper a call and ask The Ex what kind of creatures ground their serrated legs between my ears.

  Or was I imagining things? It had happened before, much to my acute embarrassment. Maybe she wasn’t attracted to me at all. Maybe she was just being friendly, with a dash of sympathy thrown in for my age and all the misanthropes, druggies, pisscats, cynics, tired chefs, failed writers, broke muzos and vicarious sportsmen who seemed to litter my profession. I couldn’t be sure about those looks, which was why I kept things friendly but aloof. The last thing I felt like doing was making a fool of myself with someone I might have to see every working day thereafter: one of the many lessons I had learned from The Ex.

  But after a few more days of visual fornication we were introduced by good old Jay at an event that was clearly intended to be a little more than just a post-deadline drinks session (and usual call home) that Thursday night. We had gathered on the balcony of a fortress-like building that reeked of mid-Eighties paranoia, but it was a late-summer’s evening that still had a faint whiff of lemony jasmine battling its way through the metallic carbon monoxide, closer nicotine and rank journalistic sweat. Most of her mousy hair had fallen away from the clip that was supposed to contain it, and she’d been scratching her face again, her old-fashioned specs slightly greased up. Moreover, a bra strap was protruding from under an ample orange tank top, and her brand-new, unwashed black Kenyan kikoy seemed on the verge of falling to her very used brown sandals at any moment.

  All she had on her side, really, was youth.

  Of course, we men were not allowed to dress so sparingly. We had to wear collars, even though we never got to work with the public. But at least we had moved beyond that sartorial atrocity, that corporate noose, the necktie. So I generally wore brown boots, black jeans and good, freshly ironed white shirts (thank you, Beauty), which I flattered myself carried a head sparking with subversion. Jay, on the other hand, showed his deep and abiding regard for management by wearing old red sneakers, holey blue jeans and a Liverpool supporter’s jersey which, if the suits really wanted to get technical about it, sported a collar, even if it was one of canvas. In winter he deigned to wear one of his father’s sick-green check jackets that dated to roughly around the time of the Rinderpest. The reason he got away with this, of course, was that he was so bloody good and fast at what he did that he was indispensable.

  “And this is Len Bezuidenhout,” he said, getting to the point where everybody was his good old chum. She looked me directly in the eyes with her steady, framed ones, but she had a damp handshake.

  “Hi Len.”

  “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” I mocked, having had a couple of beers to summon up the me I preferred.

  “Ja, I started here a few, like, days ago,” she said earnestly.

  “So what, as we in Joburg so subtly say, do you do?”

  This, of course, was a stupid giveaway because it could mean that I knew she wasn’t from the Highveld and had therefore made discreet enquiries about her.

  “I’m one of the, like, new political reporters,” she replied, not giving anything away either.

  I knew that, too, but couldn’t tell her I, like, knew.

  “And you?” she said.

  “What about me?” I said, noticing her fingertips held the bubbly glass with the concentrated pressure of an alcoholic in training.

  “What do you, like, do?” she said rather earnestly.

  “Oh, I work in hell.”

  “What do you me –”

  “I fix other people’s copy.”

  “Oh, you’re the guys who make us look good,” she said rather witlessly.

  “That’s us,” I said, impressed that she could utter a full sentence without liking it, whereupon she concluded our conversation with that new word du jour.

  “Cool.”
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  The editor cleared his throat loudly and said he would like to welcome two new additions – “not editions”, he added, eliciting polite if not necessarily sincere grins – to our editorial team. The first was Kay Greenwood, freshly arrived from the Mother City, who most of the men tried hard not to show they were assessing sexually, making the air all the more charged. The other was a “fellow comrade”, a bald-shaven Edward Mhlophe. I had seen this strutting peacock in passing but hadn’t thought for one second he might be a journalist; he certainly wasn’t dressed like one. He was wearing a very expensive Italian suit, a designer T-shirt that would have covered my monthly drinking bill, a gold necklace for the mortgage and those fashionable, elongated crocodile-leather boots that made him walk as if he’d spent the night with a cellful of sex-starved impi.

  I watched the older, more regular political reporters and picked up expressions of detached disapproval from the last remaining whitey to ones of dead-eyed patience among the darkies, meaning they’d seen similar poseurs come and go before the likes of Mhlophe, but the times they were a-changing. Fast.

  Towards the end of the evening Edward and a vertically challenged, obsequious prat called Jack Schwartz spoke to Kay. Schwartz was another piece of work in his colonial uniform of tasselled, well-polished brown shoelets, grey flannel trousers, a navy-blue, double-breasted jacket to soften the blows of the pallid gut beneath, an equally pale shirt, and a maroon cravat and matching pocket kerchief to complement his florid phiz. Then, to complete the picture, he sported a billowing coiff to give his remaining few hairs “body” and, just to show that he had once been a hip music critic back in the Eighties, Bono-like specs. He had worked his way up from junior reporter to senior arts editor to freebie general and, finally, deputy head and sole honky in that department which always gets it budget cut first: human fucking resources.

  But if he and Edward looked all pally-pally while they laughed and chatted with Kay, then their exorbitant deodorants were invisibly battling for racial and corporate dominance. More odiously, they were smoking fat cigars, fingering their Johnnie Walker Blacks and talking to her in such a manner that they might as well have been ejaculating onto her – let’s be kind here – black skirt.