He’d been too educated and English, he’d reasoned, to play with “those big Dutchmen”, even though we all knew that you didn’t necessarily have to be short to be a good scrumhalf anymore. He’d been a good court and later crime reporter, but now he was in his late fifties and had become the revise subeditor, and a very good one at that. Chief among his bugbears was “the leafy suburbs”, a cliché that was strictly verboten. He had come from an era that felt it necessary to kick every new sub’s arse into gear before he and, later, she, was properly initiated. If the sociologists spoke about the gatekeeping process in the media and academe, then Bob simply said you do as I say or you’re out, pal.
Come mid-evening, we would be on deadline with some or other scandal about to break and a lawyer standing by. One of us would try to sub the front-page splash while Bob poured himself a beer, loudly called an old police connection to find out if there was any dirt, failing which he’d watch the week’s rugby matches at maximum volume online, cursing all the players for being useless, incompetent Dutch arseholes. This did not make it easy to sub a story seamlessly, and Bob had an eagle’s eye for clashing tenses or a name spelt in two different ways. Once he’d revised your subbing and changed your brilliant headline, he’d open his second quart of beer, stand up, loosen his belt, unzip his fly, rearrange those furry jewels beneath his gut for some reason, belt up again and go onto the balcony for his cigarette of the day.
Black prided himself on the fact that he only smoked one fag and drank two quarts every twenty-four hours these days, and always went out for a late steak with his wife on a Thursday night. His wife was quite the babe, had a New Zealand passport and, if the weather wasn’t so crap there, he’d emigrate there tomorrow to get away from all these dumb (black) journos and stupid (Afrikaans) crunchies. Bob would say that loud enough so that everyone could hear, knowing he’d reached his ceiling at the paper and all he was really doing now was cruising until his retirement in a few years’ time. Unless, of course, upstairs made him a retrenchment offer he couldn’t refuse. But don’t come to him with arguments like black journalists were actually writing in what was not their first or mother tongue, hey. It wasn’t his job to hold their hands – or learn their language in turn – but to challenge their facts, correct their grammar and therefore maintain the News’s impeccable journalistic standards, which were still going down the slimehole on a daily basis as far as he was concerned.
What didn’t occur to him, management or possibly even the journalists in question was that a completely new kind of English could have been born right there, the kind I had found in Njabulo Ndebele’s Fools. The man’s use of English to describe events was recognisably set in a uniquely South African township, though most whites would only have driven past them, at best. It was rich, inclusive and therefore, to my mind, exciting. Occasionally the odd columnist or guest writer might experiment a little, but generally if they veered too far off Bob’s idea of English, which was a kind of neutral, mid-Atlantic mess, they’d be in for the chop. In that sense the “ultra-left” had a point that the paper still was a white one, for we still “spoke” in a language that was directly descended from Thomas Pringle to Jan Smuts to Robert Black, who didn’t give a flying toss about any discourse on the ideological implications of linguistic tone.
Nor did Lesley Makhene, for that matter. It took me a long time to meet him because he didn’t like being in the office, but when he was there he would smile at me as if we’d known each other for years, let alone never been introduced. He, too, was short, had a bald head full of creases as deep as the Rift Valley, a permanent frown on his nevertheless beautifully benevolent forehead, an enormous burned potato for a nose, skew teeth, no neck, big stomach like Black, X-legs and splayed flat feet. As we became friendly through sheer proximity I gleaned that he had been at the paper since the early Seventies and had therefore seen plenty of change. He had started as a messenger and stayed thus for five years, until Black had taught him how to write journalese – “that man, I owe him my life!” – and had spent the rest of his career covering the townships. That was what he knew, that’s what he liked doing and that’s where he liked being. He was a township boykie through and through. He had covered the ’76 children’s uprising, the dark Eighties, the vicious early Nineties and the brief honeymoon of liberation before its side effect, crime, had sprayed its bloody yellow pus like a lanced boil during the early, so-called Noughties. He had been surpassed by the new lot who had come off the streets in the late Eighties, been given some writing lessons by European institutes and were now our bosses. Like any hack worth their desperation his desk was a messy mountain of old newspapers, an ancient PC and a grubby, much-fingered keyboard. His partition wall was decorated with a single photocopied press photograph: a beaming Lesley Makhene shaking hands with the tall Bushman himself, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela.
Even when he was at the office, Les was more inclined to hang around the car pool in the basement and talk to the guys there, or even the security guards – somnolent men who worked twelve-hour shifts and reminded me of the old man’s lifetime of meniality. It was down there where he would catch me on his way back from Soweto or maybe a catnap in his exhausted Toyota, one of its windows broken from a smash and grab, wheels filthy from the township dust, innards messy from children’s toys and endless chicken and chips takeaways.
“How are you, my friend?”
“I’m fine, thanks. I’m Len.”
Les just smiled at me and said: “Have you got family?”
“No?”
“You’ve got to have family.”
“I’m working on it,” I lied.
“And do you believe in God?”
“No.”
Les burst out laughing as if he’d just heard the funniest joke in the world, so I started reading his stories with more attention: dry, factual stuff about what actually happened in the townships, all the while implying that life there could be cheaper than a discarded plastic Coke bottle.
The next time he caught me down in the basement, he took my hand and walked with me to the Civic: the short black man holding the uptight white prick’s hand as if he were God didn’t only know what.
“You know, me,” said Les, “I’m a pastor.”
I must have expressed some surprise at this bit of seemingly contradictory information.
“But I’ve got a problem man, Len,” he said, rolling his r’s.
“What is that, Les?”
“No man, Len, the women: they thrrrow themselves at me.”
“But you’re married. You’re … you’re a pastor!”
“Ja,” he said. “But what can I do?”
And he bursts out laughing.
Les Makhene and Bob Black were old school, and Jay, Desiree and I were probably heading that way too. The likes of Mhlophe and Greenwood, however, were new school. Their orientation was blatantly political and corporate, respectively, and now that Kay and I had had an attempt at cellular interaction, we made eye contact in a completely different way. She had asked me whether we could keep what was happening between us strictly between us. Okay, I’d responded, wondering “what was happening between us” and relieved that she didn’t want to announce it to all and sundry. My colleagues and I had laughed over her copy and Jay had said it was so bad she was clearly meant for management. I had replied that you got good reporters, good writers and sometimes both in one person, and neither she nor Mhlophe were any of the three.
But she and I did agree to go out to supper that Saturday after two changes of time at a restaurant in Parkhurst, not far from the Jolly Roger. It was one of the few joints that played music at an acceptable volume. That is, soft enough not to intrude but hearable if you wanted to tune into it. Loud music irritated me if it was bad, and most of it was, but distracted me if it was good. After all, how many people could claim to be more interesting than even the vastly overplayed Four Seasons? Very few, if any. Yet every Tom, Dick and Thabo wanted to force their idea of (whining, thud
ding) good music down your earholes every minute of every day. In malls, supermarkets, restaurants, banks, cars, lifts. If obesity was a way to extend your empty power physically, then noise was your way to extend your hollow power invisibly. The louder the music in a restaurant, the more inclined you are to leave sooner and thus hasten turnover. Noise and silence, the only two approaches fascists have to sound – in that order. It was audio rape and it drove me around the twist, as Ma used to say.
Anyway, I couldn’t help noticing that Kay was dressed as skimpily as was legal and tried to ignore my alarm system, which had a woolly theory that the more people showed, the less they performed. After ordering our drinks and a steak and chicken salad, respectively, I said we were living in the lap of luxury.
“I know,” she said, putting on a momentary spare-a-thought-for-the-starving look.
“Strange, the old man always goes on about how grateful we should be for food. Not that he eats out, ever. Maybe it’s because he’d known what hunger was during the war.”
“Yes,” she said, glowing with a kind of romantic fascination.
“We don’t know that kind of stuff. I mean, when he got back he ate a whole pound of butter, just like that.”
“Oh God.”
“Well, I don’t know if he has much to do with it.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Never mind.”
Our drinks arrived and she took a sip of her chardonnay while I took a deep slug of Windhoek.
“Are you going to see your father tomorrow?”
“Ja, most Sundays.”
“You don’t look very happy about it.”
I muttered something about duty and she rather perceptively asked if there was anything about him and me that was similar.
“Not that I can think of,” I said as our dinner arrived.
She poked a piece of smoked chicken with her fork and put it in her mouth while I sawed into my steak, unable to suppress seeing its sad journey to my bloody plate, yet persisting.
“Tell me about your mother,” she said.
“Well, she didn’t have a very good education, having first looked after her mother then her lazy father for the rest of his long life. Then she married my old man, a fingerprints clerk, and became a dental assistant to supplement his meagre income.”
“Were they compatible,” she asked, listlessly poking around in the rest of her salad, like a chicken.
“Absolutely not. If he never went out, she was outgoing, sociable, which is probably what got her her other job. Friends of theirs had started a travel company and suddenly became fabulously wealthy. So she became a courier for them, travelling all over the globe for about a third of the year.”
“And your father didn’t mind?” she asked, having settled into the liquid part of her dinner.
“I don’t know if he minded, but he certainly didn’t stand in her way. Then again, he probably lay worrying himself sick about her.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad,” she said, taking another sip.
“No, it doesn’t. But the most important thing is she had a voice. She could sing. She sang in the local opera chorus. She sang in the church, at weddings, christenings, for the aged.”
“Cool.”
“When the neurosurgeon called us in and told her she had six weeks to live, she asked him whether she could carry on singing.”
“That’s so sad.”
We were finished and I signalled the waiter that we wanted the bill by writing in the air.
“Yes it is. But somehow she had cobbled together an existence, and I suppose one should be grateful for that. And your parents?”
“They’re divorced,” she said as the waiter arrived and gave me the bill, but she insisted on paying. He was slightly embarrassed and I found her friendliness towards him a little over-compensatory, but he didn’t seem to mind and she was amused by something as he walked away with her credit card.
“What’s so funny?”
“Other men will not let me pay for them.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I think they’re threatened by the fact that I’m equal to them, even though I still earn much less than them. But just the fact that I’m young and doing an MBA seems to, you know –”
“– intimidate them?”
“Yes.”
“Well, the only reason why I’m not threatened by your forthcoming millions is because I’m secretly hoping that, when I finally get my novel written and published, it’s going to become an international bestseller – after which I’m going to be rolling in my own millions.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then I’m just going to become more bitter and twisted than I already am, obviously.”
“That’s the other thing I like about you,” she said, putting her arm through mine as we strolled along the postprandial boulevard of Fourth Avenue, always distantly aware of the fact that, if we were lucky, we’d only get harassed by needy car guards, many of whom came from the Democratic Republic of Congo, spoke fluent French and could earn more hovering like a conscience than as the engineers and doctors they were qualified as back in the old, alleged heart of darkness. If we weren’t lucky we’d get attacked and/or abducted and/or tortured and/or raped and/or murdered.
“What? The fact that I’m a demon sub?”
“No, you idiot. The fact that you’ve got a sense of humour.”
I liked her confidence, even though she was already getting repetitive.
“Well, it’s one of the few things we older men have going for us.”
“Strange, I don’t think of you as being older than me,” she said.
“Thank you. Neither do I, until I look in the mirror and see I’m not twenty-four anymore. And it’s actually okay: I still feel twenty-four.”
“What were you doing when you were –”
“– twenty four? Wandering around Europe, starving, wondering about a song by Neil Young.”
“Who’s that?”
“You don’t know who Neil Young is?”
“No. Who is he?”
I gave her a brief biography of the Canadian singer/songwriter and, when I croaked her a section of his best-known hit, it rang a bell.
“My father probably listens to him,” she concluded.
“Or maybe part of the song was sampled on a rap song.”
She didn’t want to know about ‘Old Man’, in which the young artist talks to and praises his father, but asked whether I’d ever smoked dope before.
“Hell, no,” I said.
As usual the irony went right over her head, but we went to my place and did something Jay and I had outgrown. We smoked a joint on Ruth’s couch and I told her that if she wanted to go into business she had to know that KwaZulu-Natal’s biggest export wasn’t sugar cane but marijuana, ganja, dope, dagga. And the stuff from that neck of the woods certainly had a more recognisable brand in certain quarters than Huletts sugar. What was it, she asked.
“Have you never heard of Durban Poison?”
“Yes,” she said, dreamily poisoned and affectionate in a red-eyed way.
“So why don’t you do your MBA thesis on the financial benefits of legalising good old DP?”
“It’s an idea,” she said, stoned.
“You might even give it a medical angle.”
“Could we please not talk about work?”
“Sorry. What would you like to talk about?”
“Nothing,” she said, dreamily inviting me to start kissing her, with which I had almost no problem at all, apart from an alarm bell distantly ringing in that fraction of my skull that could be considered rational. And my theory had once again held: the truth of the matter was that Kay had lain there and seemed to think that opening her legs wide and shouting at what seemed the appropriate moment somehow constituted good, wild, deeply satisfying sex. It hadn’t and, after she’d considerately assured me that my IMP wasn’t so impish, she had fallen asleep and my natural nocturnalism had kicked in
. Others could sleep on the stuff, but all it did for me, combined with the beer and Grouse I’d been consuming, was rev up my already excitable metabolism. I couldn’t just leave her there and go and sleep in The Ex and my bed upstairs, or carry her there, so I got two blankets and covered her and tried to sleep on the other couch and finally started dozing off when the phone rang.
An older friend of mine’s much younger wife was calling from England to say her beloved husband and our good friend had just died. Kay got up and started getting dressed, which turned me on because it was morning and the opposite of the usual jump cut from a dressed porn starlet to a naked one, her vagina dentata wrapped around some well-hung stud’s cock. She was very sorry about my friend, had an assignment to do and once again requested that we keep “this thing” strictly between us.
On Loss
* * *
I tried to doze in after that, but it wasn’t working. Maybe I should take Butch for a walk, as The Ex and I used to do, so I checked the time and saw that it was, in fact, late. Maybe I had slept a little, after all. But now I could feel guilty about Butch and arriving late at the old man’s, speeding along, trying to work with the scraps he’d given me. His father had hit him randomly, it seemed, but had then sensed something about his son and stopped hunting. Prod too much, however, and the old man clammed up. He wouldn’t say why he thought his father had acted thus, so he was also being a bit of a subeditor, perhaps even a censor. But where did that leave things as he stood at the gates, checking his watch at arm’s length?
“You’re late,” he said as I got out of the Civic at the back.
“Ja.”
“And you haven’t shaven.”
“I don’t need to shave, Dad. We don’t work with the public. And it’s Sunday.”
“I have shaved every day of my life, since I was seventeen.”
“Good for you,” I said.
“You’ll lose your job.”
“Well then I lose my job,” I snapped.
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