“Great,” I said. “I’ve started a novel about my father,” I bull-shat. “It opens at a very exotic place.”
“Where’s that?”
“Germiston station.”
“So it’s more than just a germ of an idea,” Jay said.
“But is it germane to the story?” Des wondered.
“Well, I do have German roots, according to the old man.”
Desiree: “But where’s the Scottish angle?”
Veron: (interjecting) “What’s that got to do with it?”
Desiree: (to Veron) “The original Germiston is in Scotland.”
Jay: “Excuse me, are we in that play or is this an assegai I see floating before me.”
Veron: (to self and all) “Fucking subs. You’re all the same.”
And so the night proceeded, with Des becoming increasingly drunk, morose and belligerent, but refusing to be a responsible driver and sleep over. She was perfectly sober thank you very much, and could drive just fine and she wasn’t going to fuck either or both of us, so there. It was her life anyway, did we mind? Veron told her there wasn’t going to be any of that while she was around and Des said she’d heard Veron was a lesbian anyway, so fuck her too. This got the three of us laughing uncontrollably, whereupon Des cursed us, started her car, reversed down the driveway and scraped the length of her Conquest on the tree trunk out on the pavement, then shot forward down the road and stopped at the crossing with a squealing of tyres. We waited for that sickening impact with gritted teeth, but it didn’t happen and we presumed she’d be okay – guiltily.
So I walked home, restless and aroused, checked that I had enough money to buy off some cop who wanted to lock me up, got into my car and left poor Butch looking puzzled in the driveway again. I finally ended up driving along Oxford Road, which of course was lined with black prostitutes and the occasional white junkie from Krugersdorp with a long, sad-luck story. I had been there and done that when I’d still been a successful screenwriter in my head, but these days I was a hocked-up subeditor. I just drove past to remind myself that I was still half alive before I spent too much time watching online porn at home. On the one hand it was much safer and cheaper, on the other being your own comforter had its limits.
Now, however, I saw a woman who might as well have been Naomi Campbell, just taller. She had long legs, smallish breasts and her hair was short and thick, like midnight corn on the cob. She was wearing a white T-shirt, a scrap of cheap brown sheshwe cloth for a skirt and sandals. I decided I wasn’t going to take this African queen to some quiet, neurotic spot and let her relieve me: I was going to take her home and treat her properly, or as properly as one could. So that’s what I did and gave “Ruth” the requested soft drink, noticing that those luscious legs were actually quite scarred, conjuring up recent images of machetes in Kenya and razor fences at our border.
“You’re not South African, are you?” I said, pouring myself a beer.
“No,” Ruth said, not a tenth as confident as Campbell.
“You from Zimbabwe?”
“Hmm.”
I was still expecting The Ex to make her livid appearance or Ms Motsepe to suddenly appear and give me one of her withering disapprovals, but they didn’t and I told Ruth to take off her clothes, which she dutifully did, and stroked those long cool legs, those full buttocks, that long back, those small breasts, that dense, smooth skin.
“How many kids have you got?” I said.
“I have two children.”
“How old are they?” I said, struggling to control my breathing.
“Two and six months.”
The little blighters had drunk her almost flat.
“And the father?”
“He’s somewhere in Zambia.”
“Does he at least send you money?”
“Yes,” she lied. “And Mugabe?”
“We are waiting for him to die.”
“But don’t you think his generals might just take over?”
“It will be all right,” Ruth said, clearly not understanding me.
“Put a condom on me,” I said, opening my fly and thinking that that more or less summed up my present state of mind.
She did as I told her and relieved me with her abundant mouth as I held her rough, exquisite head and drove her back to Rosebank afterwards, giving her double what she had asked for and too guilt-ridden to pick up on her hint that she would like to see me again, no doubt for my sexual prowess and sparkling personality.
Looking forward to oblivion, I was just about to get into bed when my cell rang. It was Kay, who apologised for calling so late, but would I possibly consider coming to fetch her at the, like, airport. She had no cash or credit cards because she’d left her wallet at a hotel in the lively metropolis of Port Elizabeth.
“Okay,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
No, I’m just saying so for the hell of it, I thought.
Driving to OR Tambo, I thought if you were of a certain persuasion and had a cell number in the old days it meant you had political credibility in the present. If you didn’t have a cell number as in mobile phone, now, you were completely out of touch with the twenty-first century, like the old man. I also thought if our political masters really had a sense of history, they would have left the airport’s name exactly as it had been, Jan Smuts, since it was internationally recognised. At least he had taken a stand against global fascism, letting people like the old man see the world, however reluctantly. But then Oom Jannie was seen as the one who had ordered a massacre at Bulhoek, though the facts suggest the members of the Israelite sect got their just deserts after even the ANC’s forerunners had tried to persuade their leader to cease his apocalyptic tripe. Surely if that same party retained Uncle Jannie’s name, in Mandela’s spirit of conciliation, then the need to build another airport with the next dubious leader’s name would arrive sooner than later and there’d be a sense of continuity, let alone economic progress? But no, history would start all over with the new elite and that kind of power was intoxicating, as I knew in a manner that was as ethically questionable as theirs.
Arriving at the airport in a mood not entirely void of self pity, it occurred to me that I was used to taking people to and fetching them from the airport. I liked doing it, maybe because I’d been doing it all my life. If it hadn’t been The Ex off to Durban then it was friends, or the old man and me taking my mother there, endlessly. Good old Len Bezuidenhout, no one would say at my funeral. He was the one who always stayed behind: he was the stayer. A traveller by proxy, was our Len. He liked seeing the distant horizons in other people’s eyes, or on his blank PC pages.
“Do you want to go home?” I said, once we’d collected Kay’s stuff.
“No. I’d like to see your house.”
“I could show you my lithographs. Literally.”
So we went to my big, empty house and she and Butch instantly loved each other.
I poured us a Grouse, hoping the air freshener I’d dug out hid the smell of used condom. I proceeded to tell her about said lithos, which I’d bought with my credit card, by an artist whose work I not only liked a lot but whom I also thought was going to be the next best thing, aesthetically and financially. All the while I was half aware of a rustling sound behind me, but I was too busy delivering my lecture to realise what it was. Once I’d finished telling her why I thought Johann Louw was a master, I turned around to see what she thought of that, but she had become more interested in finally acquiring a bit of dress sense.
Apart from her spectacles, she was stark naked.
On Hunting
* * *
How shall I put this, while driving to Pretoria? I could blame age, Ruth, drink or pornography, but the short of it was that I couldn’t get an erection. Obviously Kay had said that was all right, making as if it (the situation) was charming and asked whether she could sleep over. I’d been too slow and embarrassed to say that I still felt as if I was violating The Ex and my space, so I resorted to my
old trick and soon had her laughing about my Independent Member of Parliament, which did just what it liked, when it liked, if it liked.
“So do you call him your IMP?”
“Exactly. But right now he’s an impi, isn’t he?”
“That depends.”
“My God, I’ll still make a sub out of you,” I said, impressed that she could see the rich possibilities of talking in the bellicose sense if she meant it in isiZulu, or the diminutive sense of it in Afrikaans, if that’s what she meant at all.
“Maybe he’s just an impimpi,” I continued.
“What’s that?”
“Don’t you remember how township informers used to be doused in petrol and set alight in the mid-Eighties?”
“I was born in the Eighties.”
“Sorry. I forgot. Well, those kinds of township informers were called impimpi.”
“Tell me a story.”
“What?”
“Tell me a story. I love it when you tell stories.”
“Just like that?”
“Ja.”
“I always blank out when someone says tell me a story or a joke. What kind of story do you want to hear?”
“I don’t know. How about a love story?”
“Okay … Once upon a time I was sitting in the office and I saw a very beautiful woman walk by …”
“What did you think of her?”
“I thought she was very sexy.”
“So why did you do so little to pursue her?”
“What do you mean? I married her.”
“You shit!” she laughed, not entirely convincingly.
“Sorry. The reason why I didn’t pursue the woman was because a) she was much younger than me and therefore I didn’t think she’d be interested, and b) I’d just come out of a divorce. I didn’t think I could have any more relationships,” I said, leaving the option open in case one was developing here, if only sexually.
“So there’s no one in your life now.”
“No, apart from the master/servant thing with my domestic worker – ‘my’ domestic worker – and a different kind with my father.”
“Is the maid pretty?”
“Yes, she is.”
“Have you ever thought of – you know.”
“Fucking her? Yes, once or twice.”
“Why haven’t you?”
“Because it would disturb the local economy. She’s got standard three. I’ve got a bad degree. What would we talk about?”
“I thought that sort of thing wasn’t important for men.”
“Well, it is for me.”
That seemed to impress her.
“And what kind of relationship do you have with your father?”
“Difficult. We don’t have much in common. I mean, his reading matter consists of the Bible, the Reader’s Digest and Dennis the Menace.
“That’s so sweet.”
I probably grunted.
“You seem angry with him.”
I probably grunted again.
“Why?”
“Long story.”
“I don’t mind long stories.”
So I started telling her about my resentment towards him over my mother and the past and was just getting into my stride when I realised she was fast asleep and – hello – the IMP wasn’t. Story of my life. And so I spent the rest of the night wrestling sheets and now – hungry, hungover, horny – wondered about my “failure” to perform at the given time. The more I thought about it the more I became convinced that the main reason for it was that I’d felt pursued, hunted. I’d had a similar feeling when entering the Skyline in Hillbrow with a friend back in the gay Eighties, finding myself – ha! – making a fine study of a large contingent of straight-looking men’s Hush Puppies. Was this how women felt most of the time? Perused, pursued, visually pawed?
The old man, with his body of a gymnast, had also been perved during his police college days, he’d once told me, but he’d been emphatic about not indulging that angle whatsoever, whereas I’d been more tolerant; a bit of a tease, even. Now he was standing in his HPs at the gate with his silver hair and I wondered, if his father had hit the living daylights out of him, why had he never lifted his hand to me – not once. It didn’t make sense: usually those who were abused became abusers in turn, but he hadn’t and I had certainly given him plenty of reasons to give me a deserved thrashing.
“What’s that?”
“It’s coffee, Dad.”
“But I’ve got coffee.”
“Ja, but this is better coffee,” I said, having come to the end of my tether in those stakes. I, a real coffee snob, usually only drank strong and foreign filter coffee, but from now on I was only prepared to have Nescafé, a mild improvement on his Ricoffy, even if it, too, was instant.
“You should have told me,” he said. “I would have got you some.”
“You don’t have to buy me anything anymore, Dad.”
“But I want to,” he said.
So I gave him my hand, which he proceeded to demolish and I accepted. Why? Because my mother had always complained about how painful her arthritic hands were and I’d always scornfully dismissed such things, following his lead, so this was payback time. This was my deserved punishment, I thought, asking him how he was.
“What?”
“Shall we have some coffee?” I said, somewhat aggressively.
“Good idea,” he said. “But you know, I’ve just had some oats. I’ve probably eaten oats every day of my life since the war – and before.”
“That’s probably another reason why you’re so healthy.”
“Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night and I’m starving, so I make myself some Jungle Oats.”
“Goo-ood,” I said, insinuating us towards the kitchen, where he told me about his bargain buy and how everyone chose the mug with the circles and would I like to take a packet of Lemon Creams home?
“What are you cooking?” I asked, to migrate from one boring subject to another.
“I’m making my usual stew with some boerewors, two small cabbages, carrots, potatoes and onions.”
“Smells good.”
“But you know, I never eat chicken.”
“Why not,” I said for about the five-hundred-thousandth time.
“Because when I was a child I had to chop off its neck and it would go running around the yard, headless. Blood all over the place.”
“You used to make chicken for your dog.”
I might as well have punched him in the stomach.
“Don’t even mention her.”
“Why not?” I said a little cruelly, seeing his and Ma’s dachshund in my mind’s eye. The poor thing had become so overfed that her guts had dragged on the ground and she’d died of kidney failure, because the old man had always poured the last of his sweet, insipid coffee into a saucer, broken half a Lemon Cream into it and then given it to the dog.
“I still dream of her,” he said.
“And Ma. Do you dream of her?”
“Um, no,” he said, a little taken aback. “But I think of her. All the time.”
“Shall we go and sit outside?” I said, feeling unexpectedly emotional.
“Ja. Good idea,” he said, relieved.
So we went out through the bottom door, as such, down the sunny steps and sat on the wire chairs, the table needing adjusting again. We watched a Boeing fly overhead and spoke about his kind sister in Eshowe and the bossy, beautiful one in Empangeni. Once the coffee and Lemon Creams were finished, the mugs had to be washed and dried immediately, and then in a particular way. First they had to be scrubbed in warm, soapy Sunlight and then rinsed in cooler, soap-less water. After that they had to be given a cursory wipe with a damp rag and then with a dry-as-bone dish cloth. They also had to be packed away, there and then.
“You know,” he said, “my father often shot food for the pot. We often ate venison. But one day I went out hunting with him in the Amatikulu valley. The trees formed a kind of canopy, so you c
ould see for miles under them. And there in the distance stood a kudu. It was a male, and it had huge curly horns. My father told me to be quiet and went down on his knee, taking aim. He was going to kill that beautiful animal …”
“So what happened?”
“I was standing behind him …”
“Ja?”
“So I waved my arms.”
“Then it skedaddled,” I said, thinking of Kay’s full breasts. “What did your father do?”
“He asked me whether I’d frightened the buck off.”
“What did you say?”
“I said ‘yes, I did’, shitting myself.”
“And then?”
“He said, ‘Let’s go home’ and never hunted again.”
Food for Africa
* * *
Of course, if we were obsessed with the dictator up north and his local pal, then we had our own little dictators right here in the office. While the politicians were seeing just how and where they could screw their people, we would argue, fret and complain about hyphens, commas, the death of the semi-colon, split infinitives, compound nouns, the use of adjectives, verb-less sentences, upper cases, lower cases, court cases, nutcases and the falling standards of modern journalism in general. In short, we dealt with words, words and more words, and the chief dictator in all of this was another Bob.
Robert Black was a short, bald man with a very big beer stomach and he had almost been a Springbok. He had been selected for a tour and he’d been injured just before that tour and his replacement, an Afrikaner, had shone to such an extent that Bob Black – or Bob Martin, as we called him, after a dog food brand – was never selected again. He’d continued playing top-flight provincial rugby for a while after that, but the combination of the recurring injury and his disappointment had worn him down so badly that he had become what all lost souls do when they fail in their dreams and somehow bypass the film industry: he’d become a hard-drinking journalist. Not a sports journalist, mind, but a real one.
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