“Jazz,” she sneered.
“Ja. Township jazz. Kwela.”
I had wondered whether my empathy with this music was enough to gain me any political credibility and decided it probably wasn’t. Then again, I was here and not motorboating on the Vaal or something. There was, of course, the remote possibility that armed soldiers could burst in at any moment to capture or kill an activist, catching someone like me in the crossfire, but this was an open, cultural event.
“Why do you like that music?” she asked disapprovingly.
“Because it has a kind of … holistic quality to it,” I said, moving in on her. “It isn’t all just head; you can understand it without knowing exactly what the words mean. You can move to it, both mentally and physically. And there’s no separation of the two; in fact, there’s a marriage of them. So it’s easy on the ear. It has a rhythm that makes you move, loosens you up, makes you feel good, gives you space to think whatever you want to. It amuses you, cleanses you, leaves you feeling healthy. And if that isn’t intelligent – and democratic – what is?”
I was right up against her now, putting my arms around her, cupping her scapulae. She couldn’t offer a counter-argument, nor did she approve mentally, even if she was responding physically to me, so I turned her around and started kissing her neck, massaging her hips.
“You and Dolf could apply to emigrate. Places like England and New Zealand are always keen on teachers, and bookkeepers are always in demand, anywhere.”
“Dolfie would never do it,” she said, breathing a little heavier.
I slipped my hands up under her jersey and vest, cupping her full, sagging breasts, enjoying her instant response.
“And if I asked you to elope with me?”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
“We could go to Gaberone.”
“Never.”
“New Zealand?”
“I couldn’t live in a small wet place.”
By now my right hand had strayed down her stomach and into her panty, teasing her pubes, letting her feel my hard jeans behind her.
“Never?”
“Tell me about the man with the saxophone,” she said a little breathlessly.
“Everybody in the crowd had been waiting to see what Masekela would do once he spotted the man with the platforms, striped pants, floral shirt and pink shades,” I said, a little breathless myself. “Bra Hugh, the man with the big, angry-happy moon face who came from Witbank, which is about an hour’s drive from where I come from, Lyttelton, but aeons away otherwise.”
“What happened next?” she said half irritably, but responding to my hands.
So I told her how Masekela had finally given the Clintonite dresser his only chance to perform in front of a packed hall of smiling, sweating, pumping people, and how the man gave a perfectly cool, acceptable solo on his tiny saxophone. The crowd had almost collapsed with whooping, clapping, laughing applause, which was more or less how I felt as I took my hand all the way down and said I could live in a small, wet place – and a very wet one at that – easily.
On Ageing
* * *
That Saturday night I didn’t get slammed with Jay and Veron but took a very soberly dressed Kay out for her farewell dinner, where I very maturely declined to do drink, drugs or sex with her. When she cried I teased her until she laughed, walked her to her car and kissed her on her cheeks. Goodnight and goodbye. A company car would take her to the airport the next day.
The next morning I drove to the capital, thinking about Gaberone and how I hadn’t told the old man anything about it, as usual, thinking he wouldn’t have been able to relate to it in any way whatsoever, if I’d thought anything at all through my fog of an anger I couldn’t quite pinpoint. But that was then and now I had to go shopping for him at his local supermarket in a town I refused to call anything but Lyttelton. He had given me the list that Thursday and it had been as basic as ever: milk, sugar, bread, eggs, coffee, condensed milk, butter – “not margarine!” – boerewors, potatoes, carrots, beans, onions and those little cabbages that looked like brains.
Then I drove past that school where I’d played first-team rugby for my last two years and the old man had always stood watching me playing. Every single Saturday morning he would just stand there, smiling, unspeaking, shy, apart.
He wasn’t at the gates, the dog didn’t charge and the chain wasn’t locked. I drove to the back, took the supermarket bags and approached the apron and the old man’s back door, which was open. As I got to it I said somewhat tentatively: “Dad?”
The dog started barking, I went in and the old man was watching tennis on TV, his nose virtually touching the screen. The aerial had broken at some stage and had been replaced with a wire hanger, which only gave blurry black-and-white images anyway. This was in the spare room where we had once had a tenant, and once only.
She had had broad shoulders on which to carry her officer’s pips and she had been allowed to smoke in the house, too. She had arrived at a time when the usual cutting comments about Ma’s useless father and her cooking had become too much, when the endless repetition of the same old good-luck war stories and Dennis the Menace jokes had palled, when her usual good-natured rolling of the eyes had become a look of desperation, a film of sweat forming on her temples and beneath the snub nose I’d inherited from her. It had all been very strange and the old man was back in his dark clothes and still wearing that tatty old windbreaker of his.
“Hi, Dad. How’re things going?”
“You know, I get so bladdy irritated with these players.”
“Why?”
“Have you seen how many times they bounce the ball before they serve?”
“It’s probably to give them balance.”
The old man snorted contemptuously.
“I’d happily watch with you, but I can’t breathe in here,” I said, though he still dutifully kept all the windows and doors as wide open as he could.
“Let’s go and sit outside,” he said, resigned.
I said let’s first make some coffee, which he thought was a hell of a good idea. We packed away his groceries and there was something different about him, but I couldn’t work out what it was as he complained about the fact that the players didn’t wear white anymore, and they didn’t shave.
“And you’ve shaved every day of your life since you were seventeen?”
“That’s right. Difficult as it is now.”
“Why difficult?”
“I can’t lift my bladdy arms above my shoulder anymore,” he complained.
“Maybe you should go for some physio,” I said, which was duly ignored.
“But do you know what really gets my goat?”
“What?”
“Bladdy soap operas.”
“Why? What about them?”
“These people are constantly stabbing each other in the back, and if they’re not doing that they’re sucking each other’s faces!”
“I know,” I said. “I avoid the stuff like the plague. But then I know some allegedly intelligent people who are completely addicted to it. But what gets my goat is that you have people out in the sticks who think this is normal. They can’t read or write, but they’ve got the TV set, the antenna sticking out from their shack, like a knife in Caesar’s back. This is their education, this is what they aspire to.”
“That bladdy man from the church wants to sit here and talk to me about television programmes,” the old man continued on his own groove.
“What did you say?”
“I told him I’m not interested. I pay my tithe and that’s that. Every month. On the dot.”
“But you don’t even go anymore.”
“What’s the point? I can’t hear anything. And the last time I went someone said it was good to see me there for a change!”
“When was that?”
“You would have been about twelve or so.”
“Dad, that was thirty years
ago!”
“So?”
“Maybe they just said it was good to see you again,” I said, knowing he’d heard what he’d wanted to hear on numerous occasions before.
After the usual speeches we went outside and I threw the ball for the dog, which was so fat you could rest a tray on its back, but it still pursued the ball with all the zest at its blubbery command. The old man looked as pleased with that as he used to when I threw the javelin.
“So what was it like being back in your home town?” I asked.
“Not bad,” he said, having lost all his enthusiasm for that particular adventure, or maybe he just couldn’t remember it anymore.
I wondered whether he’d actually seen Eshowe or just another town en route, and whether he realised this might be the last time he ever saw home again.
“There’s something different about you,” I said, the dog exhausted. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But do you know what? I was wondering why that man from the church hasn’t come round to pester me anymore, but he actually kicked the bucket.”
I laughed and asked him where he’d heard that if he didn’t go to church anymore.
“At the dentist’s.”
“What were you doing there?”
“Bladdy bastard tells me I can either have another bridge made, or he can pull the whole lot and give me dentures, so I said pull the bladdy lot.”
“That’s what’s different about you. You’ve had all your teeth pulled, north and south, like the singer sang.”
He was too pissed off to even grace that with a comment, his cheeks slightly sunken, his speech ever so slightly whistly.
“And you still look good.”
Still no reply.
“When do you get your dentures?”
“In a week’s time, if Lord Muck next door will deign to take me there.”
“Uncle Vern’s very good to you, Dad.”
“Agh.”
“I mean, aren’t you grateful he fetched you at the airport the other night?”
“I can’t see the planes anymore. The car’s battery charger doesn’t work anymore. My car won’t start!”
“How’s the leg?”
“Oh, that’s fine,” he said, starting to pull up his trouser leg.
“Dad, I don’t want to see it.”
“But look here,” he said, showing me his thin white shank minus the slightly soiled bandage he’d still worn a few weeks previously. There was a jagged maroon scar there, but it was as healthy and shiny as that of a young man’s.
“That is amazing,” I said.
“Do you know how I got rid of the scab?” he said, his eyes lighting up.
I didn’t think I wanted to know but said “No?”
“Sandpaper,” he said.
Interpenetration
* * *
Dolfie was in for the rest of the week and on Thursday night, after deadline and calling the old man, the managing director happened to come down from upstairs and asked whether anyone had a corkscrew. Shunt had once bought me a Swiss army knife because she, like me, had no idea what I really wanted, but I’d started carrying it around with me, of late, noticing that it was very handy for things like, well, bottles of the alcoholic variety. The old man also always had various pocket knives, along with his Parkers and Montblanc, so perhaps I’d osmotically started absorbing that habit. Anyway, I offered my tool and Jay and I were invited upstairs for a drink.
I couldn’t think of any white MD who would have invited two lowly subs for a drink, so I was hugely impressed with this exunionist who always greeted me when he glided by in a BMW that resembled a glossy U-boat. But I instantly disliked his accountant, a short, big-headed, shrivelled-eared shit in a too-large leather jacket expensive enough to buy my drinks for a year. He quickly made us understand that he had been an exile and couldn’t help mentioning that his parents wouldn’t hire whites to do their housework in London because they didn’t clean properly.
Jay was now hitting the bottle with a vengeance and telling the new MD about the general unhappiness on the work floor. I thought this was equally rude: the man invites you to have a drink with him as an equal and you start getting all workerist and repetitive. Jay was too far away for me to kick, and the more I tried to divert the discussion the more he dug in.
The MD said, very reasonably, that he didn’t mind dealing with the discontent, just like he wouldn’t mind reverting to an old Toyota (like Les Makhene’s) if he had to, but I could see he was mildly peeved. So I got us out of there as fast as possible, regretfully, and gave Jay a piece of my mind in the lift. He wasn’t interested.
Friday passed in its usual way, as did Saturday, but stumbling back from Jay and Veron’s I saw Dolfie was out and stepped into his and his wife’s living room and her arms. Something had changed. She was holding onto me with a kind of desperation and we went straight to the spare room’s bed and there was something she was trying to tell me as we tried to do everything simultaneously. I could feel that there was some line she wanted to cross and asked her what it was after losing myself for quite a while.
“You don’t understand that women see these things differently.”
“What things?”
“You’re just here for sex.”
“What are you here for?”
But she wouldn’t say, though it was clear to me that she was falling for me and she was right: I was just there for the sex and had always been very clear about it. But then I’d been thinking recently that maybe there was something like sexual love. You could want someone so desperately, so obsessively, all the time, that it became a kind of love. That was certainly the case for me. I wanted to fuck her from morning to noon, midday to midnight. I had never been so close to anyone sexually in my life before. She could talk about anything and I’d have an erection. Why couldn’t that be love? I didn’t care what she said and I wasn’t interested in it. I had never been this predatory before and I probably never would be again. I was convinced we could screw ourselves beyond all social and emotional needs and sense. I could literally lose myself in her and come back wanting more. Obviously there was a degree of titillation in the fact that I was cuckholding her limp dick of a husband, but it went way, way beyond that. You got soul mates and you got sex mates and for me she was the latter. Pure, hot, grunting, sweaty, decadent fuck sex. She had no idea what I meant by the fact that my desire for her was purer than most kinds of love and neither did I, but I meant it.
Obviously there was some kind of Freudian angle to the fact that she was more than a decade older than me, but I wasn’t particularly interested in analysing it too closely. I didn’t care what might transpire ten years hence. Telling her I’d be the son she never had during coitus was enough of a turn-on in itself. Who cared what it meant? Psychologists perhaps, but not I. She obviously wanted more than that and I, if I understood her position, wanted nothing to do with it. Was I supposed to go through her divorce, set up house like I had with The Ex and act like my love for her was anything but physical? What would we talk about? Her boring bookkeeping clients? I would have to liven things up with my subbing and cinematic stories, which also had their limitations. She knew – or sensed – that I wouldn’t be able to live like that. But she couldn’t bear the thought that she was cheating on her Dolfie without something concrete coming from my side, and I couldn’t give her that.
Straddling her, I said it wasn’t only women who could be penetrated, you know, and for such a “stupid” woman – her word – she knew exactly what I meant and duly gave me a firm peasant’s middle finger.
On God
* * *
The next morning I drove over to Lyttelton in an understandably better mood than my pre-Klara days, except that a certain restlessness had taken hold of me. Maybe I just needed a holiday, I told myself, but it felt like it was more than that. Much more. Just to add to my woes, there was a car in the old man’s driveway, which was unsettling.
Once I’d ne
gotiated his charging dog and its urinary ways I found him and Koos de Freitas’s minister son on the back apron, finishing their plastic coffee. Gerhard was tall and bald like his father, had bad skin like his tiny mother, and it didn’t help much that he represented a church I couldn’t help associating with unrelenting Afrikaner exclusivity, whereas we’d been working-class Methodists when we’d been anything. But it was his mother who had sat with mine and held her hand and prayed for her as the cancer had eaten away at her memory and bodily functions. One by one. Such people were angels, whatever their beliefs. Where do such people come from? Are these the “sisters of mercy” Leonard Cohen sings about so delicately? It had always struck me that Ma, in her often imperious way, had spoken down to Mrs de Freitas. But no. Here was a woman who had helped someone step into the unknown and, in the old man’s terminology, surely there had to be a “special place” for such beings.
“Gerhard,” I said. “How are you?”
“I rejoice in the grace of God,” he said calmly, standing up to shake my hand.
I don’t, I felt like saying, but nodded affirmatively and greeted the old man, who was dressed smartly again, but still minus my jacket.
“Hello, my boy,” he said.
“How are you?” Gerhard said.
“I am very well,” I lied under his gaze, sounding as two-faced as the old man to myself.
“That’s good,” Gerhard said softly. “It’s good to see you again.”
“Likewise.”
He was just about to leave and the old man, the dachshund and I accompanied him to his car. As he started reversing his dirty old Nissan Skyline the dog went ballistic. The old man told it to shut up, which it finally did, whereafter he walked up to the gate and shook Gerhard’s hand in that grovelling way he had towards people with any kind of authority. Then he closed the gates after him and came walking back to me.
Son Page 18