“I mean I’m tired of things being ‘in process’. Why can’t things just work for a change? Like now.”
She responded that the country was working and I said it wasn’t even a work in progress.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because of those things you are probably studying after hours. Stats. And I’m not going to rattle them off here. I’m supposed to be a creative type – oh, and witty – but I’m the only one who seems to be taking them on board.”
“Give me just one example.”
“All right, since you insist and seem to be a woman. How about the fact that fifty rapes are reported every day? And that’s just reported.”
“But you have to see the thing in its broader context.”
“Will you personally tell that to a seven-year-old rape victim in the township? ‘You have to see the thing in its broader context’?”
“We have to look at the cause of all of this, no matter how painful it is.”
“I think you’re a bit too young and well off to be that prescriptive.”
She could do nothing about where she came from, but she could –
“Yes, yes, change where you’re going to. And what was the cause of all this misery again? Oh yes, apartheid.”
“Obviously.”
“That word again. And I suppose it’s all the Afrikaners’ fault?”
“Ja,” she said, though not as forcefully, intuiting that my sarcasm – in tandem with my very Afrikaans surname – was pointed.
“Well, it is and it isn’t,” I said.
“Explain?”
“I don’t somehow recall hundreds of thousands of English people marching through the streets to protest their comfort, or moving to Soweto to show their solidarity with the oppressed black masses. I don’t recall them or their great British Empire apologising for what their forebears did to Boer women and children in the concentration camps. And blacks. More of the latter than the former, in fact. I don’t recall the Anglo Americans of this world setting up nice little family homes for their migrant workers from the homelands and the rest of the subcontinent. And isn’t it odd how the Old Mutuals are suddenly delisting and going international? In other words, leaving the country. They are taking their money and they are running. Now we are more than a decade into a so-called democracy, and I don’t see our great leader dealing with the present. I just see him exploiting the past for present political capital.”
“But I still have hope for this country,” she lamely capitulated.
“So do I, like I have hope in a cement life jacket.”
“I like that, even if I don’t agree with it.”
“How very libertarian of you.”
Now she asked me whether I’d read Disgrace, which impressed me since it tied in with some of what we’d been talking about. I told her I had and she asked me what I’d thought about it.
“I liked it a lot, if ‘like’ is the word. Maybe ‘admire’ is more accurate. The point is, it’s very difficult to counter Coetzee’s thesis that rape is the ruling metaphor for this country. Rape, the living murder of a woman, the –”
It suddenly occurred to me that I was doing one of the many things I didn’t like the old man doing, which was rave and dominate a conversation, usually as a form of shyness or self-defence.
“– wait a bit. What did you think of the book?”
“I haven’t read it yet.”
I burst out laughing, said it was after three and therefore any sub worth his or her office sweat wanted a drink.
“But now it’s your turn to tell me about you,” she replied.
After we drove to the nearby Jolly Roger in our mobile bedsits we occupied the balcony, partook steadily of the happy water and watched the late-afternoon sky grow dark purple, then increasingly inky in a way that Steven Spielberg’s special effects (SFX) department would never capture because you cannot feel the tug of the wind, nor smell the mine dust being stirred up.
But she persisted on wanting to know about me, so I went on a long, self-deprecating rant about how I’d been a spec screenwriter forever, but how my scripts had been too black and/or bad when they were supposed to be all white and now, a decade into the new lot, they still had characters as opposed to sincere stereotypes for those morons at the South African Broadcasting Cock-up – I beg your pardon Corporation (a bad joke that got her laughing a tad brashly) – and that there was something in me that would rather get up their psychopathic noses, even if it meant cutting off my own, than get the deal.
After years of that frustration I’d been lucky to get a job through an old university connection at the Daily News and, apart from subbing, made my grand switch from writing film scripts no one made to star-rated DVD reviews that at least six people read. A few peers had intimated, mostly silently, that I’d sold out or given up by becoming a critic, a sentiment with which I was inclined to agree. But the truth of the matter was that, no matter how badly the papers paid, they did so dead on time, whereas film folk suffered the happy delusion that you had to feel so honoured to be in their exalted profession that they could rip you off to their hearts’ content in terms of time and money. So I was fairly comfortable, if not exactly content, with the position that I’d rather write a half-worthy review than a lousy white-devils-and-black-saints abortion posing as cinema, let alone art.
“So what’s your book about?”
“Hey?”
“I heard you’re writing a novel,” she said.
“Everybody believes that, except me. Most of the time I stare at my blank screen, wondering how I’m going to live up to a myth I stupidly created.”
“I don’t believe that. I think you’re secretly writing the Great South African Novel.”
“‘Great’? If only I could find something to write about and finish it. That would be great.”
“And your family?”
“What about them?”
“Tell me about them.”
I told her I was an only child, that my mother had died a decade ago and that I went to visit the old man every Sunday. I didn’t, however, tell her about my alcoholic epiphany when I’d last seen him, which was that I would try to tease some kind of narrative out of him. This was partially because I had failed to do so with Ma, to my eternal regret.
“What’s he like?”
“He’s a World War Two vet, an octogenarian and impossible.”
“Why?”
“He prefers the company of animals to people.”
Now she wanted to know about that too.
“The first time I realised it was when I came back from varsity in the Eastern Cape, fresh from twenty years of future depression, most of it affected.”
“My friend also gets depressed. She calls it the black dog,” she said.
“Well, this realisation also had to do with a dog.”
“How come?”
“To cut a long story shorter, I inherited a St Bernard and only had enough money for the two of us to get as far as Germiston. The old man said he would come and fetch us – my mother was overseas at the time – and I didn’t sleep on the train that night. For one I was worried about Bella and for two I was worried that she would make a mess in the old man’s Valiant.”
“Was he precious about his car?”
“‘Was he precious about his car.’ You didn’t breathe in that car. It didn’t go out if there was a hint of rain or the certainty of a dirt road. My mother hated it almost as much as she hated the Chevy that preceded it. So I was pretty uptight by the time we got to Germiston.”
He had brought an old bedspread, a bowl and a two-litre Coke bottle filled with water. When we got in line with Tembisa she promptly puked all over the back seat. I thought the old man would freak, but instead he was the milk of human kindness towards Bella.
“Cool.”
If only he’d been like that towards Ma, I almost caught myself saying.
“So what kind of dog does your father have?”
“He d
oesn’t. He’s still mourning the loss of his previous one,” I said, realising Butch needed to be fed. I could have called Beauty and asked her to do so, but I didn’t feel like that weight either. Also, there was a carnal advantage to under-staying your welcome. I said I had to go but I would walk her to her car and halfway there, of course, the skies opened and we ran to her BM in the pounding rain, laughing like crazy, even though I couldn’t help quietly apologising to the crew filming this commercial for some fancy hair shampoo.
When we got to her car she didn’t get in but stood with her back against it and lifted her head to the rain and thunder. I expressed surprise that, like most Capeys, she wasn’t scared of that aerial violence, and she just looked at me through her greasy, rain-speckled specs, her breath more alive than the charged air, her lips as fresh as an apple the old man had once peeled me in a single, Escher-like curve with his steady brown hands.
“Thanks for the chat,” she said, and offered me her pale wet one.
On Fathers
* * *
In the middle of my second-last year at university I went to visit my then girlfriend, Alexandra, in the recently liberated Zimbabwe. It was wonderful to be in a free country and almost all the whites were happy about the way Mr Mugabe was conducting himself – at the time. It felt so good, in fact, that I couldn’t wait to get back to my back room and my little turquoise Olivetti. So I left Alex, came back into prison and landed up at Pretoria Station, where I took the first train of the day, passing the weekend siding of Fountains, stopping at the second station, Kloofzicht, then disembarking at the hard, functional Sportpark. It was a trip the old man had done thousands of times.
I had walked up Cantonments Avenue, a section of which had once caved in as deep as a house on the corner of Monument Avenue, and picked my mother a bunch of flowers, giving it to her while the old man smiled in the background. She, who so loved it when her darling son went travelling, as she did. He, who never stood in our way but spent sleepless nights worrying about us; who would never go anywhere else again except to see his sisters in KwaZulu-Natal once a year, forever.
He, who now looked ready for a fight, standing at the gates, following me to the back. Before he could say anything, however, I said “Happy birthday for yesterday, Dad” as I closed the Civic’s door.
“Agh,” he said, making as if his eighty-ninth birthday on St Patrick’s Day was an irrelevant irritation.
“Come on, Dad. It’s a big thing. Most people don’t make it to seventy, and if they do they don’t look half as good as you.”
“Do you know why that is?”
I told him exactly why that was so and he replied that we shouldn’t really be celebrating his birthday.
“What do you mean?” I said for about the seven hundred-thousandth time.
“Because I had nothing to do with it. It was my mother’s doing. If anyone should be getting a present it’s her. She’s the one who carried me for nine months and gave birth to me.”
“But she’s been dead a long time now.”
“Ja, and do you know what?”
“No,” I lied, too hungover to offer much resistance.
“I forgot her birthday one year and I’ll never forgive myself for it.”
“I’m sure she forgave you,” I said, not even bothering to apologise for not calling him the day before.
But he would have none of it and I remarked that he and Nelson Mandela had been born in the same year – full of useless sub’s info, I – but he was more interested in regretting forgetting and I wondered what these two very different men would talk about. I imagined that he would probably have the now-retired politician in stitches with his childlike candour, as he often did my friends when they met him. But then meeting someone once and seeing them regularly for four decades are two very different creatures.
“Here’s your present, Dad,” I said, giving him a block of Peppermint Crisp.
“You shouldn’t have,” he said, outraged.
“Why not?”
“Do you know it’s my favourite?” he said, close to tears.
“Hell, no.”
“Hey?”
“Shall we have some coffee?”
“Good idea,” he said and we crossed the cement apron, ascended the trio of steps into the kitchen and went through his coffee-mug-bargain-and-how-many-people-choose-the-mug-with-the-circles-around-it routine.
When I put five spoons of his Ricoffy into my mug he wanted to know what I was doing and I made a mental note of bringing a bottle of my own, better poison next week.
“You’ll kill yourself,” he said.
“Shall we go and sit outside?”
“Ja,” he said, and we went out and down the steps and onto the apron and sat at the table, which had to be restabilised before we had our bad coffee and crisply fresh Lemon Creams, which I made the mistake of remarking upon.
“Take them home with you.”
“It’s okay, Dad.”
“I got a whole lot on special yesterday.”
“It’s fine,” I said, wondering whether Kay had been deliberately leading me up the garden path while surveying the back lawn, which used to be an orchard. But the old man had hated cleaning up the leaves and after Ma had died he’d cut down most of them. The apricots, peaches, plums, pears and quinces – all gone. The loquat had been given to my mother by “some man” who sang with her in the opera and it, too, had gone the way of most flora after she’d died. The avocado tree, which had once overshadowed a large part of the back lawn and in whose branches I’d smoked my first vile but determined cigarette, had been hacked down to make way for the parking canopy. The six trees that remained were two umbrella-like evergreens in the middle of the lawn, trees whose names I didn’t know and never bothered to find out. There was also a struggling lemon that produced a few fruits for the occasional Vitamin C tea a season, the fig, and pines that had grown from seedlings to a pair of giants overshadowing the main bedroom, “mucking up” its section of the roof with thousands of small, sticky needles.
The quarter-acre yard had been veld when he’d bought the property, and he’d dug up numerous jagged rocks from that rich but dolomitic Highveld soil. The smaller ones he’d used to make flower beds, but the larger rocks he’d rolled to the bottom border. The massive one in the corner, however, he’d rolled from the veld when the school opposite us hadn’t existed yet. It had taken him the whole night to do so.
Beyond this rocky boundary there was a slight incline and topping it, in all its dumb, generic glory, a grey Vibracrete wall. On the other side of it you could see the neighbours’ wide, corrugated roof and tall syringa with its poisonous, mustard-yellow pods, which had made excellent ammunition for my catapult in days gone by. Through its branches we could see the Waterkloof Air Base hangars in the distance because between us and it there was the Lyttelton valley. Above it all was a sky Jacob Hendrik Pierneef could have painted every day, so large, billowing and varied were its clouds. Gliding through that, right now, was the underbelly of a Boeing, silent and white, a little like a whale, I imagined.
“God, that’s beautiful,” the old man said.
“So where does a father fit into a birthday arrangement,” I wondered, wary of flying.
“You know, my father was on the ship, in Durban harbour, all ready to go to World War One when they pulled him off.”
“Why,” I said, for about the six-hundred-thousandth time.
“Because he had a German surname, obviously.”
“Right,” I said, remembering a dark oval frame with a photograph in it in my Eshowe aunt’s living room. The man is sitting upright in a cane chair, legs crossed, wearing riding boots, khaki police uniform, twirly moustache and ruddy cheeks, possibly studio-enhanced, his pale brown eyes looking slightly unhinged.
“What was he like?” I asked.
“Well, he was a big game hunter, a sportsman and, boy, did he have a temper. He had a real German temper.”
“What do you mean?” I said,
wondering what an unreal German temper would be like.
“One day I complained that my sisters had more food than me and he got so furious he fell off the chair!”
“What did you do?”
“I went and hid in the orchard.”
“So you were scared of him.”
“Scared? I was terrified! He hit me when I was naughty, and I often was …”
“But?”
“Sometimes he just hit me,” he said, as if he’d never thought about it before.
Sex and the Metropole
* * *
After deadline on Thursday I habitually called the old man, who was in a filthy mood. I let him let off some steam and told him I’d see him on Sunday, for which he thanked me, passionately.
Friday and Saturday went much as usual, up to the point where I arrived at Jay and Veron’s. He had invited our fellow sub and No. 1 office fantasy over, possibly to match us up. Desiree Purple had bleached hair, large brown eyes and the freckled body of a Sixties goddess, the decade in which her parents had conceived her and officially changed their surname from Cohen. She only ever wore tight jeans and bra-less T-shirts and, frankly, it drove us a little mad. The problem was she could get all lovey-dovey with you the one second and accuse you of stalking her the next. Plus, she had a way of coming up with some really disturbing statements like: “This copy is so bad I feel like poking my eyes out with a pencil.” You kept things nice and distant with Des, who was about as “easy” as dancing barefoot on a field of thorns. Everybody wanted to bed this highly competent sub, but she was quite aware of it and that might well have been one of the reasons why she would occasionally throw a tantrum worth beholding. She would become incandescent with paranoid rage, which would have her seniors scurrying about and us aroused, guiltily. But it never lasted. You’d think the universe was about to come to an end, yet the next day she’d be as mild and reasonable as a New Zealander I’d once met. When she was on an even keel she was witty, generous and surprisingly sentimental, when she wasn’t you ran for cover. But we were all relaxed now, helped along by the usual loose juice, and she wanted to know how the writing was going.
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