Son

by Sonnekus, Neil

  “You know,” he said, “when we got to Bari it was raining and the women lined the streets. All I had to my name was what I was wearing: my boots, a pair of shorts I’d made from some canvas in the desert, and my greatcoat. The women were weeping, but I’m not sure if they were crying because we looked so forlorn or because they thought we were the bastards who had killed their husbands, sons and grandsons.”

  “What was the camp like there?”

  “Easy. The guards used to sometimes give us their rifles to hold while they ate. Sometimes they’d give us some of their coarse bread too. But one day I noticed there was a filly in the field. Beautiful creature. So I started talking to her. Just getting her used to my voice. Talking to her. This went on for about two weeks. Then one day I filled my hand with condensed milk and let her catch its smell.”

  “Where did you get the condensed milk?” I asked automatically, wondering how I was going to get through the rest of the day on no sleep.

  “From our Red Cross parcels, obviously.”

  “Of course. Sorry.”

  “You could see she was scared, but her nostrils were quivering. She had to have this stuff. So I let her come towards me. ‘Come on, my girl,’ I said. ‘Come. I won’t hurt you.’ I let her take a lick and pulled my hand away, but when she took a second lick I grabbed her neck and started rubbing her gums with the stuff. Boy, did she go mad! She bolted this way and that. But I hung on for dear life! I ploughed a furrow in that soft sand as deep as my elbow! But she finally calmed down and do you know what?”

  “No, Dad. What?”

  “After that, no Eyetie could come near her!”

  A Jog Sans Dog

  * * *

  Somehow I made it through that Sunday and by Thursday my corpse even told me it needed a walk, which got the perpetually optimistic Butch in a frenzy of excitement. By Saturday morning my body told me it needed more than just an impatient walk in the Gardens, so off I went for a jog early that chilly morning, leaving Butch looking as forlorn as a cartoon character behind the security gate and getting the neighbourhood’s dogs behind theirs in a frothy again.

  Despite the cold it was a refulgent day.

  I noticed Mandla was already there to catch the early folk, smoking a cigarette butt, accompanied by a little cough. On I went, past the notices and lost babies’ booties and keys hanging on the newly installed and spiky palisades at the entrance, towards a grove, through the mud and in between all the plastic that washed down the street and into the park every time it rained.

  After the grove I crossed the little stream that smelled of chemicals and which ran into the main dam, next to which I’d had my audio satori. I was just wondering whether I might one day be doing this and keel over from a coronary when I heard a squeal. At first I thought it was children, but it was too early for most people to have their offspring in the park. Next I heard men’s shouts and then three of them were running straight towards yours truly. It took me a couple of seconds to work out what was going on. They had just robbed three women, who were screaming, which got the park’s workers running to their aid with long machetes. That was all very commendable, but the trio running straight towards me had one outstanding feature about them. The man in the middle, a fine specimen, had his hand on a very large pistol half sticking out of the top of his trousers. This could ruin my day forever. Fortunately, these men were not focused on me but on those behind them, one of whom was still in his civvies and shouting that he was a policeman – “Poyisa!” – they must stop. Whether that was true I didn’t know, but the trio just kept coming towards me, so I thought I might stop, change course, and go around them towards the women. I don’t think they even saw me.

  The man in civvies was on his cellphone and the women were all rattled, their Border collie as enthusiastic as if they’d just suggested they were going to play fetch. The oldest woman told me they’d been walking along when the men had passed them, eyeing one of the other women’s jewellery. The men had returned, shown their pistol and demanded the woman’s rings. She’d refused – one of them was an heirloom – and one of the unarmed men had wrestled her to the ground and had tried to work the rings off her finger. That is when she’d started screaming.

  Now we were at the gate and the women had to go to a parking lot that was in the same direction the thieves had run. I stopped a bakkie and asked the man to give us a lift to the lot. He duly obliged, we turned a corner and the place was crawling with cops. There were at least five police vehicles. One of the fleeing men had suddenly stopped and started loitering like someone in a Carl Becker painting when the cop cars came wailing along. The mistake he’d made was that other gardeners had seen him and, since they earned their daily pittance the hard, honest way, they had no sympathy for him and pointed him out to the cops. Now he was being handcuffed and shoved into the back of a kwela van, scraping his shin bloody in the process. The bejewelled woman identified him as the man who had sat on top of her while the other cops poked around in the shrubs against the high suburban walls. Suddenly there were shouts. Another thief was found, lying low in a bush beneath some loose leaves and branches, looking up at five pistols pointing at him. I thought they were going to shoot him, but they didn’t and the man with the pistol was gone.

  That afternoon I went to Jay and Veron’s and, at halftime out in the garden, told Jay how reliable our cops were when it got to the really important things, like women walking in a park with heavy jewellery. He said the women and I were “fucking lucky” to still be alive.

  “I know. But don’t you find it amazing that here we are, living our privileged little lives, while we know exactly what’s going on – fifty murders a day, fifty reported rapes a day, a day – yet we carry on as if nothing’s happening, just like our folks did during apartheid.”

  “I know.”

  “Have you ever thought of leaving?”

  “Sure. But can you see Veron ever leaving?”

  “Ja. Why not?”

  “She’s not interested. She’s told me. Are you thinking of leaving?”

  “Ja.”

  “What about your old man?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Look, the teams are coming back on,” Jay said.

  “Ja, like highly strung prize horses. What a bunch of paffs.”

  So we went back inside, put the sound back on and Jay shout-asked Veron to bring us some beers from the kitchen.

  “Get them your fucken self,” came the eloquent reply.

  “Who said it was going to be easy?” I said.

  “And fuck you too. Go get the beer.”

  “Okay. But I’m warning you: every time I leave a room a goal is scored. Usually against the host’s team.”

  Jay showed me a middle finger, so I went down their passage and into the kitchen, where Veron was eating a sandwich and asked whether we were getting “shit-faced” again.

  “No, Veron,” I said, taking two beers from the fridge. “We’ve been discussing the antithetical aspect of Comrade Hegel’s theory of history.”

  “My fat Khoisan arse,” she said, having just published a scathing diatribe against the use of the insulting word Coloured.

  Veron had been a cadet at the News’s sister paper in Durban and Jay, who had fled the Free State to start off his career in that sub-tropical city, had taken one look at her smouldering green eyes and soft brown skin and that, as the saying goes, was that. Six months later they’d been secretly married. What most people, including Jay, didn’t know at the time was that she was also an ANC operative. But as far as she was concerned she didn’t join the struggle to get rich but out of principle. Equally, she didn’t believe in two girls being brought up with both parents absent – she’d seen how families had been torn asunder by parents married to the struggle – so she worked from home where she could keep an eye on the girls. She might have seemed all domesticated, but her opinions were published, known and respected, if not always liked, especially not by her erstwhile comrades. She and T
he Ex had been (and still were) friends and we’d all got on like a house on fire. The difference was that Jay and Veron had a roaring sex life and nothing else in common except their kids, one of whom wasn’t even his, but he’d adopted her and loved her like his own and that was their life. They were nuts about each other, but some or other domestic war was brewing and I didn’t want to know too much about it.

  When I got back to the living room, of course, Wayne Rooney had scored for “the scum”, which put Jay into a particularly bad frame of mind. I always teased him that Liverpool were (sports teams and rock bands took the plural at the News) my second-favourite Spanish team. He didn’t care who their coach or players were, as long as they won – and of late they weren’t.

  After the match we slouched back into the yard again and I asked him what he thought of Kay.

  “A bit uptight, you know.”

  “Ja, you’re probably right,” I said.

  “But she’s got a great arse,” he added, sensing my disappointment. “Why?”

  “No, I was just wondering …”

  “Would you like to dick her?”

  “If we were alone on a desert island? Sure. Wouldn’t you?”

  Of course he would, but he’d been hearing rumours.

  “What kind of rumours?”

  “That she’s a bit of a schnarf head.”

  “As in coke?”

  “Ja.”

  “Interesting,” I said, adding that I thought I should go home.

  Jay didn’t protest that impulse and I looked forward to getting away from the acrimony in his home and flopping onto the bed in my empty one. But halfway there the phone rang and Kay said she wanted to come and spend the night. She also wanted to come with me to see the old man tomorrow.

  How about I come over to your place, I responded testily, inspired by Veron. But her place was a terrible mess and she really wasn’t trying to hide anything. I told her I thought she should get some sleep for a change, which she gratefully acknowledged, but she persisted with tomorrow. I couldn’t think of a quick enough reason for her not to come along to the old man’s – it might break the monotony of the drive – and acquiesced. Goodnight.

  Refusing her request to come over had been more contrariness than any kind of maturity. I wasn’t going to allow her to call all the shots, but by about one that morning I still couldn’t sleep, so I got into the Civic and went looking for Ruth again. I couldn’t find her and most of the bars I knew were closing up, the last stragglers all fairly senseless, so I finally, predictably, settled for the PC screen with Aunt Gertie and her Four Daughters, wary of the many links leading off to children, trying to comfort myself that at least I wasn’t a rapist.

  On Principle

  * * *

  I fell asleep just before Butch started exercising his lungs on a pair of crack-of-dawn joggers, went through all the usual rituals and drove over to Kay’s block of flats. She wanted to drive and that would also be a change. She met me downstairs and didn’t look like she’d had much sleep either, and she’d attacked her facial skin again.

  “How’re the studies going?” I said as we sped towards Midrand.

  “Exhausting,” she replied, sniffing. “But I’m fine.”

  “Of course you are,” I said, squinting at the Highveld glare.

  “What’s the matter?” she said in a fit of selflessness.

  “Every time I go to Pretoria I get pissed off about all these bad-taste security villages going up. I used to play in this veld, which was then deemed to be too dolimitic for development. Now every second house is a pseudo-Tuscan nightmare.”

  “It’s amazing how much it’s developed.”

  “I don’t know if that’s the word, but my father predicted ages ago that Johannesburg and Pretoria would eventually become one.”

  “Clever man. But how are you otherwise?”

  “Oh, just dandy. Getting over my ex and trying to get some hussy almost half my age into bed.”

  She slapped my leg playfully and wanted to know The Ex’s name and I didn’t want to tell her, so I continued bitching about how my beloved Highveld was being despoiled by bad-taste capitalists and commies alike.

  “Len: what was her name?”

  “Jesus!” I said as a white minibus taxi scraped past us at speed. “Where did that arsehole buy his licence?”

  “Your ex.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I’m curious.”

  “That’s not a very good reason.”

  Kay suggestively put her hand on my leg.

  “That’s a much better reason.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “Could you move your hand up a little please.”

  “First tell me.”

  “Okay, what the hell. Shanti.”

  She also thought it was a nice name, but that wasn’t enough: she needed a surname.

  “Govender,” I said.

  “You don’t mean the Shanti Govender?”

  I said I didn’t know what she meant.

  “The deputy editor of the Weekly Herald?”

  “The very same.”

  Kay was impressed, though whether it was because Shunt had an important position or was “non-white” I couldn’t fathom, nor did I care at that very moment.

  “So she never took your name.”

  “No, I wasn’t famous enough,” I tried to say ironically, but wondered whether there wasn’t a modicum of bitterness in the inflection.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve heard of the most battle-hardened left-wing feminists realising their mate’s got struggle credentials and suddenly becoming Mrs So and Fucking So. Now could you move your hand up a little, please?”

  “No. It’s not safe. How did your father respond to her?”

  “Like he responds to any good-looking woman. His final word on the matter is that ‘all pretty women are pretty’.”

  We sped on in sniffing silence for a while.

  “And your mother?”

  “Couldn’t stomach her. Saw right through her. Instant dislike. I should have gone with her mommy-knows-best instinct. I thought she was being a racist, but I was wrong.”

  “What did she object to?”

  “Her ambition, her heaviness. This was not the woman for her darling son.”

  “How did you and your mother get on?”

  “That’s one hell of a question.”

  “You had a pretty quick answer about you and your father.”

  “It was normal,” I said for the sake of brevity.

  “Okay. What did she call your father?”

  “Son, as in child.”

  “Oh.”

  Pause.

  “Why?”

  “From his surname. Sonnekus. Sonnie became Sunny became Son, as in male child. His sisters call him that. His wife called him that. Sometimes he’s even like that.”

  “It’s an unusual surname …”

  “He thinks it was German, but I don’t. I didn’t come across any Sonnekuses in Germany. But if he’s right then I wonder if the original surname wasn’t something as common as Schmidt, because the first Sonnekus arrived here in plus minus 1850 in George, according to the Cape archives. I think Mr Schmidt was causing kak on the ship and sentenced to fifty lashes. Now he had a choice. He could be flayed on board or take his chances over it. So he dived into the water, splashed about like mad and got washed out on that golden shore, that sunny coast, that coast kissed by the sun.”

  “What a nice story.”

  “One of the things that militates against it, of course, is the fact that the sun almost never shines in George. Not for nothing was its old registration number plate CAW, as in cold and wet. And no wonder PW Botha lived there.”

  “How come you don’t have the same surnames?”

  “I’ve taken the maternal one. Mommy’s boy. And the Bezuidenhouts have been here longer. The first one was a master gardener at the Castle in 1668. Moreover, I’m convinced my mother had Spani
sh blood in her – she looked Spanish – and that’s because Bezuidenhout means south of the wood, or forest. Some Spaniards settled south of the wood in The Hague after the Eighty Years War and no doubt intermarried with the locals. So, flamenco music, it stirs me. And if I’m correct then it means that those Spaniards had Moorish blood in them, too. All that whiny North African and Middle Eastern music, it’s the original trance article. I can get off on it for hours. I really do understand it in my blood.”

  “So where does Beethoven fit in?”

  “I suppose that’s my Western side.”

  This didn’t seem to interest her whatsoever.

  “Anyway, then the Bezuidenhouts came here and no doubt had a lot of hanky-panky with the locals, but always denied it. In fact, they were so patently anti-pom and darkies that they started a rebellion because of it – and got hanged for it. Not hung, by the way – that’s for washing. Hanged.”

  “So that’s why you look the way you do …”

  “What? Like a South American pimp?”

  “Yes. But didn’t you and Shanti want children?”

  Shun had never wanted children and I had always thought it was an affectation. She’d change, I’d reasoned. She’d see that a career, her ego, wasn’t everything. As in most things, I’d been perfectly deluded. People will hang onto their miserable little positions and possessions for all they’re worth. Not for nothing had I called her Shanti GoveRnder. But the folks had always thought we would eventually have kids and I never told them it wasn’t going to happen, assuming they would either die before we could; or I’d make up a story about how one of us was infertile or barren; or we’d get divorced, which we duly did.

  “I never told them Shunt didn’t want children.”

  “‘Shunt’?”