Son

by Sonnekus, Neil

  “Hi,” a female voice said.

  “Hello,” I said, “who is this?”

  “It’s Kay.”

  It took me a full two seconds to realise who Kay was.

  “How are you?” I said a little too loudly.

  She was okay, but not sounding it, and naturally I asked her what the matter was. She was feeling terrible about the dinner party. I told her to forget about it, for God’s sake, adding that we might as well keep God out of it. But she wanted to come and say sorry to me personally and I said she didn’t need to; I accepted her apology. But she was missing me, and Butch, and she wanted some advice, but if I was too busy she’d understand.

  “Okay,” I said, drunk and magnanimously in lust, though not with her. “Come over.”

  Butch did a series of three-hundred-and-sixty-degree swivels when he saw her, but I did not share his excitement. She wasn’t so much dressed as barely covering her nakedness. All she was wearing was a pair of sandals, a skirt that just covered her panties, of which I got liberal glimpses, and a sleeveless top that managed to cover her nipples, but only if she didn’t breathe too hard. That she looked alluring was beyond question, even if none of the colours matched, but that she must have been somewhere between cold and freezing was beyond doubt: I could see the goosebumps and erect hairs on her firm young forearms.

  Inside, I put on the second movement of the fourth quartet, the piece I’d introduced her to, hoping against hope that it might penetrate some recess, stimulate some continuity, but she probably thought it was good background music, perfect for a restaurant, perhaps, if she thought anything about it at all. Once I’d poured us a Grouse and she’d once again assured me that she wasn’t getting cold, she said she was sorry about “the other night”.

  “And as I said, it’s fine. So what’s up?”

  “I’ve been like, what do I do?”

  “Why have you been like that, like?”

  “Sorry. I’ve been head-hunted.”

  “You mean in the Elizabethan sense?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. By whom have you been head-hunted?”

  “PrestonSmythe.”

  “I take it they’re not a folk duo, so they must be a pharmaceutical company.”

  “They’re international brokers,” she said in her usual quick-witted way.

  “Ah, high finance. What are PressaPiss offering?”

  “PrestonSmythe. Double my present salary?” she said tentatively, as if I was finally going to snap and say how dare they fast-track her like this when the likes of me were hanging onto our jobs by the nails of our cancerous pinkies. But I said I thought it sounded like a damn fine idea and when could she start. There was a snag, however. Wasn’t there always, I replied. I suppose so, she said. Did she, I wondered, now have to work twenty-eight hours a day?

  “Very funny.”

  “So what is it?”

  “It’s in Cape Town.”

  “Oh shit,” I replied, eloquent as ever.

  “What’s the matter?” she said.

  “That’s far away.”

  “How would you feel about my going there?”

  “What does it matter what I think?”

  “I thought we had something going,” she said.

  Down the toilet, I thought.

  “I mean,” she continued, “I really started falling for you that night. I’ve been … missing you.”

  “Oh,” I said by way of moving things along.

  “Wouldn’t you want me to stay?” she persisted.

  “On the one hand I would, yes,” I lied massively. “But then I also don’t want to stand in the way of your career,” I said, wishing I had the gonads to tell her we should just call it a day, which would have been the sensible, let alone mature, thing to say and do. She was destined for great things in the world of business, no doubt. I was sure she could be very happy with her separated parents, their new spouses, her brother and friend. Then, once she’d recovered from the first blush of Big Business, she could settle down with some nice balding bean counter who took their kids fishing on weekends at Noordhoek or wherever such things transpired, according to the banking ads on TV. There were tens of thousands of whites taking the so-called Grape Escape to the “charming winelands of the Cape”, where they could suffer the happy delusion that they were still living in an enclave of Europe. But I had decided that if I was going to leave Johannesburg I was going to do so properly; I would leave the country.

  “Have you told anyone else about this yet?” I said, playing for time.

  “Well, I went to management and told them about the offer, so they made me a counter offer.”

  “Which was what?”

  “They’ll pay me the same, but they’d also want me to go to Cape Town.”

  “Are you going to take it?”

  “No,” she said, looking deeply insecure, vulnerable even.

  “Why not?”

  “I like being close to you, Joburg. It’s got a buzz.”

  “Look,” I said, in a flash of inspiration, “in my experience people who get transferred to the Cape usually end up spending half their time back here anyway, since this is where the business is. They might have the beauty, but we’ve got the bucks. It’s like whites who get fired because of their colour and then get paid double to consult. Moreover, these migrant workers often spend a year or two there and then get promoted back here anyway, because this is where the big decisions are made, regardless of new media. So why don’t you take the bucks, go to Cape Town and we still see each other about as much as we do anyway?”

  “That’s what I like about you older men,” she said, beaming.

  Me too, I thought, rejoicing. Me too.

  On Parole

  * * *

  But if I thought that was the end of it I had another think coming. Now she wanted to stay the night and when I said maybe it wasn’t such a good idea she burst into tears. Again I asked what the matter was and it transpired that her father had cancer. When she finally told me what kind of cancer it was – prostate – I told her it wasn’t necessarily a matter of life and death, but she carried on about how safe she felt with me and I finally acquiesced, hoping Klara wouldn’t see her car in the driveway and that Kay would leave early the following morning, as she usually did.

  “So do you want to sleep now,” I asked somewhat naively.

  “No, I actually want you to fuck me.”

  “Come on Kay, not everything can be cured with sex, wonderful as it is.”

  “Does that mean we’re not going to have sex?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Have you ever had coke before?”

  “Once or twice, but I was too broke and disconnected in all directions when it was all the rage in the Eighties.”

  “Well, I’m offering you some now. Free.”

  So we started snorting away my time, after which she really felt like going out to a disco, but I probably didn’t do that kind of stuff anymore, did I, so off we went to a disco.

  It takes me a while to get going on a dance floor and when I do I don’t want to stop and I expect the DJ to have some kind of continuity, some sense of a dramatic arc, though lately the only criterion seems to be to maintain the same beat, which is so fast that it kills all sensuality. There’s lots of exhibitionism, but that’s got very little to do with sex. In fact, it probably serves as a substitute for it. Obviously this beat – a kind of perpetual, masturbatory frenzy without the build-up or climax – also kills off any conversation. In other words, it’s a kind of captivity, a kind of murder, a kind of death. In the meantime, we’d sneak off to some dark corner and snort pinches of the white stuff, get a drink after shouting our fluid desires to a free soul with a half-shorn head of dead black hair, go back onto the dance floor and act like we were being ultra-cool and energetic. The thing about this music is that it’s so loud, so mechanised, so stupid, that after a while it becomes totally silent. It’s a great place to think about other things
, but I finally got fully into the swing and even started feeling attracted to Kay again, and she seemed to start feeling the same way.

  Back home everything was heading towards a satisfactory consummation of the evening when she told me, in a fit of passion, real or performed, that she didn’t want me to wear a condom. I said there was no way I was going to not wear a condom and she wanted to know why. I said I’d led a fairly licentious lifestyle after my divorce. Had I slept with prostitutes? Yes. (Though I hadn’t slept with them. I had fucked them, or, to be completely accurate, they had fellated my paranoid IMP.) Black? What did the colour matter, I wondered. Nothing, she said. Did I use a condom then? Yes. Well then she was prepared to take a chance. Well, I wasn’t. What about her? She shrugged. That’s very evasive, I said. Was I or wasn’t I going to ditch the condom, she insisted. No. Why did she insist on not using one? She preferred the feeling. Well, it’s a small compromise. Please? No. Okay, she said, adding it was almost dawn and she might as well go home and start studying. What, the politics of condomisation, I wanted to say but didn’t. See you, she said. I wondered out loud how I was going to get through the day and she gave me a small piece of white paper with some powder in it. Sweets for adults.

  “Try that. It works for me,” she said, got dressed and left.

  I tried to sleep, but couldn’t. This was no good. I had to do something to pass gnawing time so I got up, went downstairs and put on the first of the trio of quartets ambassador Nikolai Galatzin had commissioned, which for me qualified as doing something. Maybe that would balance out the junk we’d been subjected to at the discotheque. I listened while I paced back and forth, stopping every now and again to warm my hands on the heater in that dry Highveld cold.

  The B-flat major has a restless first movement, starting off portentously before bursting into a Bach-like cascade, of which we had some forebodings towards the end of the twelfth. But only for a while; then it’s back to the doldrums. Another cascade. All still very Germanic. But the man is moody, coming in from all directions. He’s working towards a shift. Pausing. Wait for it. Shifting. Moving on to the snowy steppes. Here it comes now. Building towards the loveliest, briefest Russian ice melody against driving lower registers, before returning to those Bachian cascades. Back to the court in Moscow. Brooding again. Cascade. Darkness, followed by an upward, courtly ending.

  The second movement was the one that had ripped me out of myself and was still as alive and vigorous as ever. It was also completely unrelated to its predecessor. Crisp, soaring, funny, brisk, business-like. I couldn’t understand how people couldn’t perceive its immensity, how Beethoven had conquered indifferent time.

  The third movement returns to a courtly situation, nodding to a light, Haydn-like sweetness, but with that dark undercurrent always there, however distantly.

  The quartet should be in its final movement now, but the man is only getting into his stride. There is a sentimental start that might well have been heard in a Viennese tavern. It’s verging on oompah sing-along stuff, veers away, but comes back to it.

  We return to a slow, almost churchy, but more abstract, seriousness. If it echoes the starting portentousness, then that’s its only relation to any of the rest of the pieces. Then again, they’re all related because they’re all bundled together, like family. Thinking of which, why couldn’t the old man just listen to something like this at night when he lay worrying about his late wife, his dead and alive dogs and, possibly, his son? Was he just worrying? Was he not perhaps mourning and, if so, about what or whom, apart from the obvious? Or was he hurt, or lying awake in fear?

  Nothing has prepared us for the Great Fugue. Prince Galatzin probably wanted more Russian music than he might have heard in Razumovsky’s triple commission and the first movement of the present quartet, so Beethoven gave him Russian all right. But it’s the Russian of a century hence, after imperialism, so modern that it’s Stravinsky’s favourite Beethoven piece because it’s so primal, dissonant, fractured, desperate, half hysterical, displaced: a portrait of the Soviet century – in 1825!

  What were the listeners thinking of this colossus, eyes widening, ears unbelieving? The near-hysteria ceases for a while, but the letup isn’t much of one, building towards a parody of the court, going beyond it, spitting out defiance, the cascades now cubist, jagged, industrial, the instruments sounding like they want to break, the notes falling down, going right down. Pause. Growl. Pause. Growl. Rebuild. Silence, before returning to a semblance of courtliness.

  How could there be anything after this? There is nothing more to say. But that mighty fugue was just too real, too violent, too ugly, if you will, so give them a little cavatina, a merry tune as Butch started barking at the first early-morning joggers passing by, leaving me peeved beyond belief with myself for wasting my one day off from the old man, playing my pseudo-pa role for Kay. Beethoven had wasted so much time trying to father his nephew, Karl, and the old man had spent so little fathering me, except as a loyal kind of servant, hating to leave his home.

  Butch did his own little cavatina when I hauled out his chain and he dragged me down to the park, where the sound and sight of Mandla did nothing to improve matters: his cough had become worse and he’d lost quite a lot of weight.

  A Small, Wet Place

  * * *

  Jay was late for work and reeked of alcohol, Desiree was in a snitty sulk, Black was being his usual cantankerous self and I got by with a little help from the Colombian army. Somehow the shift passed. I only got to sleep at about two the next morning, too tired to sleep, and Ms Motsepe tip-tapped the back door five minutes later, or so it felt. I flew up in a rage and opened for her, couldn’t go back to sleep again and was too exhausted to go see Klara on Monday night. But at least I got a decent night’s sleep and was starting to feel half human by the time I went to work on Tuesday, where I had the privilege of subbing the letters, which were becoming increasingly telling. Apart from the whack-heads and old farts complaining about the waterworks, a black reader had written in to say whites didn’t understand that until the land was restored to blacks there would be conflict. In contrast, a white reader had argued that if blacks wanted to vote for idiots just because they were black then they had to suffer the consequences. So I went through the motions and finally got to the point where I could call Klara on my cell to find out whether I could come over.

  “Yes,” she said, sounding bored, but I knew her wiles by now and, later, told her about the letters I’d been subbing, her mouth growing increasingly thin.

  “Have you ever thought of leaving this country?” I said, doubly standing in her kitchen as she prepared our drinks, assuming that if she didn’t say anything about Kay’s car in my driveway, she hadn’t seen it.

  “I see your girlfriend was over on Saturday night,” she said.

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “You don’t have to lie to me. I’m married. I don’t have a foot to stand on.”

  “She’s a friend.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “We used to be lovers, but not anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re so much better.”

  “Why? Because older women don’t swell and they don’t tell?”

  “I mean it.”

  “Maybe you’ve got a problem.”

  “Well, if I do, I’m not having sleepless nights about it. Are you?”

  “I’ve got better things to worry about.”

  “Like what?”

  “This country.”

  “Like I was saying: have you ever thought of leaving?”

  “No. If it really comes to the crunch we’ll go and live in SouthWest.”

  “But isn’t Namibia just a short-term solution?”

  “What else can we do? We don’t have foreign passports. We’re Afrikaners, not liberals like you.”

  I reminded her again that I wasn’t a liberal and she asked me where I would go to.

  “I don’t know.”
/>   “Ja, fuck me and forget me,” she said with a little entitled bitterness, which of course got my nether regions even more excited.

  “What about Botswana,” I wondered.

  Again, that purl.

  “Hey, I’ve been to Gaberone and it’s a fine place.”

  “What were you doing there?” she virtually sneered.

  I had heard that the great exiles Abdullah Ibrahim and Hugh Masekela would be playing in that African city and I wanted to see them, and it. So I’d caught the train to Mafikeng to see a friend and then a bus to Gaberone, where I ended up on a balcony, drinking beer. After a few of those I staggered into a photographic exhibition, got talking to a woman and ended up in bed with her. Later a child came into the shack and said she liked the contrast of our skins. The woman wanted money and I gave her some, but I didn’t tell Klara about any of this. I just told her I ended up staying in some or other nurses’ hostel for the week, meaning black nurses, which got her pursing her thin lips again.

  “I went to the Culture and Resistance Conference and rumours were flying that Abdullah would be playing with Masekela. In the meantime, speeches and resolutions were made and Ibrahim ended up playing alone in a large, flat, packed, stifling hall, telling a white crew member to get his arse off the stage. All the South Africans burst out laughing, having never seen a black man ticking a white one off.”

  Klara wasn’t impressed.

  “So the genius didn’t play with Masekela and when the latter’s turn came on the final night he played about being so near yet so far away from home, the stage getting progressively crammed with musicians elbowing their way on with a tacit nod from the trumpeter.”

  Standing in the wings was a man on an outrageously high pair of platform heels, his legs like pins in ultra-tight striped jeans, a floral shirt as gaudy as a disco, and pink-rimmed shades as wide as the surrounding Kalahari sunset on a cheap postcard. In his hands he held a soprano saxophone, but it wasn’t the usual straight one. It was curved, which made it even smaller, and gave it a plasticky, lucky-packety look.