“The mouth, like the eye, is lazy. But also as in around. In fact, later on it just became Shun.”
“Did you want children?”
“Ja. I like the sound of children playing. That, too, is music.”
“Would you still like to have children?”
“Well, it’s getting a bit late in the day for that kind of thing.”
“No, it’s not.”
“You say the sweetest things.”
Just then another minibus taxi swept by.
“Fuck it! Why don’t you and Ed do an exposé on the taxi industry?”
At which point Kay almost overturned the car.
“Hey,” I shouted. “I’d like to die in a slightly more exotic manner than motoring to Pretoria, okay?”
She wanted to know how I knew they’d been asked to form an investigative unit and when I said I honestly didn’t know what she was talking about, she said: “If you tell anyone about it I’ll kill you.”
“Interesting how we use that term so often – and so easily – especially with kids.”
“Promise me you won’t tell anyone,” she said, completely focused on state secrets as opposed to everyday usage.
“I promise.”
“Why are you smiling?”
“I’ll just write about it.”
“Len …”
“Don’t worry. I couldn’t care less whether you start three special units. Your secret is perfectly safe with me.”
“Good.”
I said turn off over there and then asked whether her esteemed colleague had come up with any new pearls of wisdom. No he hadn’t because he was in Queenstown.
“Xhosa Nostra country,” I said. “What’s he doing there?”
“Family, I suppose,” she sniffed. “Is that your father?”
The old man was standing at the gates with his silver hair in his Sunday best, which he would wear nowhere except at home, but he looked confused. He didn’t know Kay’s car and only let us through once he’d seen me. So we drove to the back yard and, after he’d closed the gate behind us, he came through to the back, smiled and said: “Shanti, I’m so glad to see you again!”
Kay found this highly amusing while I said: “This is not Shunt, Dad. This is Kay.”
Now he looked confused again.
“What do you mean?”
“Kay is my” – what was she? – “colleague.”
“But aren’t you –”
“No, Dad. I’m not married anymore. I’m divorced. Remember?”
“That’s right,” he said. “What a fool I am!” Then: “Hello, my darling,” he said, took her damp white hands in his big, dry brown ones and kissed them.
Obviously she was charmed and we proceeded to the kitchen and went through the coffee-mugs-and-lemon-treats stories, all of which delighted Kay no end and got me in a mood that was at the opposite end of the spectrum.
Outside, we sat in the winter light and the old man suddenly stopped juddering his foot and clicking his nail, asking Kay whether she knew what. She obviously said no and he, for about the one-hundred-thousandth time said: “I’m a poet / and I don’t know it.”
“Really?” she smiled, charmed, while I wanted to kick a dog or something.
Now he went into a lyrical rendition of his favourite poem, ‘Pete the Piddling Pup’. It was his party trick and I wasn’t going to spoil it. Truth is, he did it well and it was pretty impressive that he could remember it virtually word perfect at almost four score and ten. Having ended it triumphantly with Pete’s deep and abiding secret of diabetes, Kay applauded and praised him, which of course he downplayed with an “Agh”.
“I believe you were in the war,” Kay probed.
I was waiting for one of the lucky speeches, but the story he chose to tell was in continuity with what we’d been talking about, though it also conveniently had great shock value.
“You know, in Italy,” he said, “we were told to clean the fields. Hay fields. They stretched for miles … right over the horizon.”
“Yes?” Kay said.
“But I refused to work for them.”
“So what did they do?”
“They wanted to force me to work for them. But I came up with a solution.”
“What did you do?”
“The one sergeant said to me: ‘Bravo, you don’t work for the enemy.’ But the captain told me I had to work, so the night before I had to start working I took a hayfork and placed its middle prong on my foot.”
“And then?” Kay said, captivated.
“I jammed it,” he said, smacking the top of his left fist with his open right palm, “through my foot.”
These Sporting Days
* * *
Jay was in a foul mood because Liverpool hadn’t managed to win the Champions League like the year before (though they won the FA Cup) and the football season was now officially over. Television had spoilt us so much that we weren’t interested in local soccer, which wasn’t half as good as the northern hemisphere’s, even though African players were infiltrating Europe very effectively on that score, thank you very much. Local soccer was as boring as the government’s machinations, and the reason for that as far as I was concerned was because it was equally corrupt. So come winter – and it was here in all its hard, dry Highveld beauty – we would switch to local rugby instead of footy. But that had become increasingly tedious too. The game had become a dull, kick-and-chase affair in which the front row often became spectators as much as we did, except when it came to doing the hard work.
Jay was loyal to the Sharks because that’s where he’d met Veron, who shouted for Province because that’s where people thought she came from and to give Jay a bit of opposition. I was supposed to shout for the Blue Bulls because I’d been born in Pretoria, but I’d been allergic to that place from the start and I’d fallen in love with the calming Free State flats on my way to the educated east of the country, so that’s who I “shouted” for. Later I’d discovered that the old man’s father had been born in that province’s Bethlehem, which I might have sensed, but there were good dry jokes by and about the Free Staters, too, so that was that. In matters of rugby, I was a Free State man.
As usual we carried on with our office-sex talk and Jay, of course, had picked up that there was something “happening” between me and Kay, whom I’d agreed to meet at my house much later. I told him that we were merely flirting, so far.
“Nice,” he said.
“You don’t like her, do you?”
“I think she’s dangerous, bruh.”
“You’re probably right.”
“So why are you carrying on with it?”
“You know …”
“Pass the fucking ball!”
One of the Sharks’ wingers had run the ball dead again, which really got on Jay’s tits.
“Just be careful.”
“In what sense?”
“In the sense – Jesus! Can you believe it? – mind your back.”
“Is there something you’re hearing in the office?”
Jay, who got really excited when his team messed up, held the palm of his hand parallel with the floor and wriggled it, meaning there were murmurings in the office.
“Are you going to tell me or not?”
“No, but you of all people should know better than to get involved with a colleague.”
“Look who’s talking.”
“Do I look happy?”
“You’re still married.”
“I’ve got children, okay.”
“Fair enough.”
We carried on drinking once the game was over and started preparing for our ritualised braai and much later I said if only the country could be run like our cricket instead of our soccer.
“Are you saying darkies can’t organise themselves?” Veron said, heading towards her late-night, alcohol-fuelled aggression, the girls having been sent off to bed.
“I’m saying we’ve got world-class cricket, but crap soccer. The first has taken a gradualist a
pproach, the latter has taken an absolutist approach. The government wants representative cricket, but doesn’t give a toss that soccer isn’t. That smacks to me of arrogance, if not downright reverse racism. All the money the soccer bosses get for youth development, which is key, goes into some very aged back pockets. The result is there for all to see: shit football.”
“There is another way of looking at all of this,” she said.
“I know,” I said, equally drunk and obstreperous. “Start all over. Scrap everything. Fire all the European coaches you get across Africa for their alleged managerial skills. Get rid of all other whites and Indian entrepreneurs while you’re about it too. And to hell with the so-called Coloureds, as usual. Start from ground zero. Who cares if it takes a generation or two before Africa is purely black and African again? Africa is patient, and who says it can’t one day produce an all-black team with all-black coaching staff to win the World Cup?”
“Well, by then the English team will be completely black too,” Jay slurred.
“This is not what I meant by another way of looking at things,” Veron said.
I asked what she did mean.
“I was thinking more along the lines of banning all fucken sport,” she concluded.
She had a point. The older I got the less reason I saw to watch men (and, increasingly, women) chasing balls of different shapes and sizes. Why would someone feel such loyalty to a team so far away that they would, as in one case in Kenya, hang themselves when their favourite European team lost? Then again, Jay would say, anyone stupid enough to shout for Arsenal deserved what they got.
Sometimes these teams’ managers became as famous as their wards. If a team lost too often the manager would get the chop, but if it won and made a lot of money for its club he’d become almost as wealthy as his charges in the short term, but he could work into his seventies if he maintained his winning ways. They were usually ex-players and others became commentators, models, film stars or drugged-out nutcases after their relatively short spells of glory. But things were slightly different in South Africa. If your team lost you were fired and, if your team won something as piddling as the Rugby World Cup, you were fired too. It was such a constructive, generous culture.
Even less understandable was why anyone would be happy that their golfing or tennis heroes had just made more money in one tournament than they would make in a lifetime. Was it a kind of sublimated desire in which the sporting god fulfils your failed dreams for you? Did people not want to be their own heroes? Obviously it was all the media’s fault. Occasionally there’d be a moment of aesthetic beauty, usually in a five-day cricket match, for which no one had any time anymore, or thanks to Barcelona FC’s chess-like cool, but most of the time it was just a slog and I watched because I liked socialising with Jay and Veron.
“Why do you support Barca anyway?” Jay had slurred.
“Because I once knew someone from Barcelona, and his name wasn’t Manuel.”
“Ja?” Jay said, shit-faced.
“He was a good mate and I was cruel to him and he died.”
“What did he die of?”
“AIDS,” I said.
“How were you cruel to him?”
“I told him he’d been looking for it.”
“Eish.”
“So I believe you’re fucking Kay Greenwood,” Veron, ever the diplomat, said.
“Where did you hear that,” I asked as I remembered that terrible silence at the other end of the telephone.
“Reliable sources,” she replied in a go-and-get-stuffed kind of way, at which point my cell started ringing.
“Talk of the devil,” I said.
“Guess what,” Kay said, breathy with excitement.
“Are you at the airport?” I said, hearing familiar background noises.
“No, I’m at a hotel with Herman Sebogodi and Jack Schwartz.”
Sebogodi was the chief of human resources and Schwartz, as already mentioned, his suck-up.
“Okay. What are you doing there?”
“Guess.”
“You’re having a ménage a trois,” I said jokily.
“No,” she said, too excited or ignorant to get the dig, “I’ve just been offered a promotion. So I can’t come over.”
“You’ve just been offered a promotion,” I said, for my drunk hosts’ sake.
“Yes,” she laughed.
“To what? Senior political commentator?”
“No. Management.”
On Living
* * *
Someone – a driver, a pedestrian – had carelessly flicked a burning cigarette away and the butt had landed next to a bone-dry tuft of yellow winter grass. It had lain smouldering there for a while before a faint Highveld breeze had made the tuft’s fringes touch the butt’s heat and started smoking, then crackling into life. The flame spread to the next tuft and soon the fire had a little life of its own, smoking blue, spreading rapidly under that distant but unobstructed sun. Soon the fire was a quarter of an acre big, then a hectare, roaring towards the highway and greedily licking at it and trying to reach across as I drove through under a pungent black cloud.
The old man was standing at the gates with an equally dark cloud circling his silver head as I passed him and went to the back. After getting my hand squashed, I asked him how things were going.
“Up to shit thanks.”
“Why, what’s the matter?”
“They sent me a letter and said they want to take my pension away. I’ve been worried sick.”
“You’re looking pretty good for someone who worries so much,” I mumbled.
“What?”
“Let’s have a look,” I said, relieved that we weren’t going to go through the whole mugs-and-eats and you’re-late-and-haven’t-shaven routines. We went to the kitchen and he gave me the Department of Internal Affairs letter.
“I put the kettle on,” he said, by way of contributing.
“Good,” I said.
“Do you know how much I paid for this mug?”
“Let me just read this, Dad.”
“Sorry,” he said, looking lost.
Silence.
“All they’re saying,” I said, “is that you have to prove to them that you’re still alive.”
“Of course I’m still alive!”
“I know that, but they don’t.”
“So what must I do?”
“We must just go to the cop shop and have you certified.”
“Let’s go right away.”
“Do you know why they want this,” I asked.
“No.”
“Because people claim against their dead relatives’ pensions.”
“Bastards,” he said. “Bastards.”
“People are desperate.”
“No, they’re just bladdy dishonest!”
“Get your ID.”
“I’ve got it right here,” he said, feeling in his jacket pocket, then the other, then the inside pockets, getting panicky.
“Now where the bladdy …? I could have sworn …”
“It’s on the table, Dad.”
“You know,” he said gravely, “sometimes I think I’m going out of my mind.”
“You’re just getting a little forgetful, and that’s at your age. I often find myself running downstairs, standing in the living room and wondering what the hell I’m doing there. Then I go back upstairs and, as I’m about to sit down and write again, I remember I wanted to get a CD to listen to for reference purposes.”
He didn’t react to that, as usual, so we drove down to the police station and got the old man certified and, as we got back into the car, he said: “Did you see that cop?”
“Which one, Dad?”
“That one standing there.”
“What about him?”
“Look how fat the bastard is.”
I had to agree it didn’t look good.
“And he’s smoking – in uniform!”
“Times have changed, Dad.”
�
�I have never smoked a single cigarette in my life! Not in uniform or out of it! Nor have I had a single drink!”
“And you didn’t sleep with any other woman except Ma.”
The old man looked slightly taken aback by that.
“Do you want to go to her grave?” I said, the cemetery being just down the road.
“No. I’m not in the right frame of mind.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “Let’s go and have some coffee.”
“That’s a very good idea,” he said as we left the new station, which was opposite a vast old-age home, situated on a piece of land that used to be a lush expanse of Highveld.
“How’d you like to live there?”
“Over my dead body,” he said. “If I die it’ll be in my own house and they will carry me out of there, feet first.”
If he died, not when.
“But do you know what?” he continued.
“No, Dad,” I said, wondering what was coming.
“I worked for thutty-six years to get a pension. Then I was declared medically unfit because of that horse.”
“What horse?”
“A horse threw me before I even went to the war. My neck has been calcifying ever since.”
I remembered that he’d had to stay at home for a year while the medical board decided on his fate. He had stayed within hearing distance of the telephone for a year of working week days, but then that wasn’t so unusual; he never went out anyway. Over weekends he’d still go into the garage, put his neck in a leather halter and creepily hang there, stretching his spine.
“So I was boarded, got my pension and left the police. And do you know what?”
“No, Dad. What?”
“The day after I left the cops I started working for the State Tender Board and stayed there for another eighteen years. Do you know what that means?” he said, eyes glinting triumphantly.
“No, Dad,” I said, wondering about what Jay had said concerning Kay.
“It means I get two pensions!” he laughed.
“Amazing,” I said, not meaning it at the time.
“One big and the other not so big. But all those bastards who smirked behind my back about what a menial job I was doing: where are they now? Dead, most of them. Or sick. Or broke. Or both!”
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