Son

by Sonnekus, Neil

  “What was that all about?” I said.

  “Nothing,” he replied vaguely.

  “That didn’t look like a social visit.”

  “I don’t know why everyone’s so worried about my soul,” the old man said. “I may not go to church, but I read my Bible, every day, hard as it is with the magnifying glass. But do you know what?”

  “No, Dad. What?”

  “I talk to the Old Man, all the time!”

  “Good,” I said. “Lock up.”

  “What for?”

  “We’re going out for breakfast.”

  “No,” he said automatically.

  “Dad, I’m taking you out for breakfast.”

  “Can the dog come?”

  “No. And we won’t be long.”

  He sighed deeply, shook his head and walked towards the house. Uncle Vern caught my eye, so we had a quick chat about his sons and their children – “Gosh, how time flies” – and exchanged phone numbers in case something serious befell his neighbour and I needed to be contacted, or vice versa. After that I joined the old man in what used to be the spare room, since he could no longer sleep in his and Ma’s old one because “It just doesn’t feel right”. He was struggling to get his one arm into the sleeve, so I helped him and asked him whether he didn’t like the jacket I’d bought him. He became very uncomfortable about that and all it really boiled down to was that it was too bulky for him.

  “That’s fine, Dad. I’ll take it. I like it.”

  “I’ll be so glad if you would. But don’t you want to look in my cupboard and see if there isn’t something you want?”

  “But that’s not my style, either.”

  He nodded, so we went through the struggle of finding the keys, locking up, bidding the dog farewell as if he wouldn’t see it again, ever, and headed towards the Irene Dairy Farm. Irene was a separate suburb that had always thought of itself as an English village and even had a typical cricket oval – though the people I knew there were Afrikaners from school days – and a golf course. It also had an Anglo-Boer War concentration camp cemetery, mentioning an unknown nurse, and, if you carried on with that road which ran parallel to the railway track, you could turn left at the village’s only four-way stop, dip under the railway line, turn right immediately again and head towards General Jan Smuts’s farm. The old man didn’t seem to connect that bit of information with his personal experiences over fifty years ago and let off steam about his usual topics.

  Apart from the smell of cow dung and the sound of milk sheds, the farm had changed. In the old days it used to have a small dairy where you could bring your silver canisters or glass bottles and fill them with fresh Friesland milk. Now there was an additional balcony next to the shop where you could eat light stuff, and a separate barn, in a postmodern echo of the original homestead, from which you could buy a big Sunday meal and sit at tables al fresco. But there were so many people that we got a bit flustered and ended up at the open-air restaurant, which was noisy from the usual imposing music and the old man suddenly looked lost, frail, half blind. I took his dog-smelling arm and led him away to the balcony, warning him of the stairs, sitting him down.

  It took him a while to calm down, but he didn’t lash out, as was his wont, maybe because that was not the kind of thing you did in public, which might be why he never went out. He just stayed at home (for about six decades) and lashed out from there, a massive hypocrisy from a man who supposedly hated it.

  Now he sits there looking uncomfortable and I expect him to rail against the service or the waste of money eating out, but when the poached eggs, bacon, toast and coffee arrive he eats with his new, uncomfortable false teeth as if this is the first square meal he’s had since returning from the war.

  “What’s the food like, dad?”

  “This is the best breakfast I’ve ever had,” he says, as discerning as ever.

  “Good,” I say, thinking of Klara, missing her in my highly evolved way, and the rest of the meal is civil.

  But after our second coffee he was restless again, as restless as I’d become, so we drove back via the narrow poplar lane crossing a bucolic bridge, popular and conveniently close to Johannesburg to feature in those car ads with their multi-cuts per second. Beyond that a golf estate had sprung up, containing more pseudo-Tuscan nightmares, and beyond it Centurion Mall, living its last-bastion dream before becoming what it should have been in the first place: an African marketplace.

  So we took in a bit of highway, passed the cemetery (he still didn’t feel right to go visit Ma) and for some reason made a small detour via Monument Avenue, so named because if you stood in parts of it and looked north, like Oom Paul Kruger on Church Square, you could see the Voortrekker Monument in the hazy bushveld distance. How clever, I’d thought a long time ago. And if you stand at a particular point on the tar between Cantonments and Langebrink streets, looking north, and turn right, you will see the face-brick church in which I’d been baptised and confirmed as a teen, affirming my faith in God loudly and clearly so the old man could hear, even though we all knew I was lying through my teeth.

  Then I took him home to his dog, who understood everything.

  Going Bush

  * * *

  The slow-motion nightmare that was the new South Africa hit home once again that night when I subbed a story about a family who’d been raped and tortured in front of each other before the intruders were interrupted and fled. The going comment, of course, was that at least they were still alive. I asked Jay if he’d read it and he nodded grimly. I typed one word into google.co.za and saw there would be a seminar on emigration in some or other plush northern suburbs hotel and emailed that I would be attending.

  That night I was sitting on Dolf and his wife’s couch, getting turned on by her rattling on about something or other. She was wearing a creamy V-neck jersey, a charcoal winter skirt and black tights, and so we went through the whole charade of exchanging social pleasantries. Maybe she was so desperately lonely, I vaguely thought, that she needed to unload all that nonsense onto what was effectively a stranger, so I let her carry on for a while longer before I started stroking her face and neck. She liked that but kept her distance and carried on talking, which merely stoked my fires.

  “Come here,” I said.

  “Are you going to behave yourself?”

  “Of course I am.”

  So she snuggled up with her back to me and carried on talking and I carried on stroking her high cheeks and strangely erotic neck. After a while I slipped my finger into her mouth, which she gave a small suck before she gently expelled it with her lean lips and carried on talking, so I simply put it back again.

  “I thought you were going to behave yourself.”

  “So did I.”

  “Ha.”

  And on she went about how she’d gone down to the shops that morning and wasn’t the price of everything just too awful?

  “Terrible,” I said, letting my right arm stray down to her breast and cupping it, then stroking her woollen stomach.

  She was virtually sitting on my lap and must have felt that my interest wasn’t exactly intellectual, let alone economic, but on she went as I worked my hand under her jersey, stroking her stomach, the soft, sagged breast instantly responding. All the while I was nibbling her ear, kissing her neck.

  “This is so wrong,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because it is.”

  “Then why is it happening?”

  “Because you’re a monster,” she said.

  Exactly, I said, and took my hand right down to her small wet cunt, she accommodating my quest by opening her legs.

  “I can’t believe what I’m doing,” she said.

  “You were still talking about, uh, the price of things.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What exactly is it that is so expensive?”

  “Food,” she complain-moaned.

  This was getting too uncomfortable for me, so I told her to move away so that I cou
ld stand up.

  “What for?” she said.

  “So that I can take my pants off.”

  “You see. Here it starts.”

  “Actually, it started quite a while ago. Take off your clothes.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ha,” she said again and duly obliged by taking off her jersey and vest and had to be told to take the rest off too in the unlit living room, with everything happening in a kind of tangible silhouette, the light coming in from the adjacent dining room.

  “Why don’t you want the light on?” I’d said.

  “I know you men. You go by what you see.”

  It had been on the tip of my tongue to remind her that she’d only ever been with one other man, her husband, according to her, but I didn’t think it was quite the moment to remind her about that. So I took off my jacket and shirt in her and Dolfie’s warmed up living room, kicked off my shoes and told her to undo my belt and jeans.

  “You’ve got a cheek,” she said.

  “Actually, I’ve got four. Do it.”

  Again, she duly obliged, struggling a little with the belt, but not the zip. What would the old man think of what was happening to me now, I once again distantly wondered.

  “Put it in your mouth,” I said.

  “No,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too intimate.”

  “Have you done it to Dolfie?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Okay,” I said, and went down on my knees with my tumescent IMP bobbing about like a buoy and started running my tongue along her shore, like an oystercatcher on Prozac.

  On Cars

  * * *

  I don’t know if it was just my age, predisposition or geography, but I seemed to be losing more loved ones each year. In this case it was another older friend who had died, another surrogate father, I suppose: Rob Amato. A friend called to give me the news the next morning – Ted Hughes was right: a dead body will fall out of your telephone – after which Butch and I went for a walk down to the park, passing a gaunt, wracking Mandla.

  Rob had been the son of a Spanish Jew and I’d met him while in the careless ecstasy of student love with Alexandra. If this intense, compact man was shorter than me he felt much larger with his broad, powerful shoulders of a keen swimmer. He had burning black eyes behind his round silver frames and a curly mind as open and, paradoxically, sharp as the ocean. His father had been an industrialist in the Congo until that became too dangerous in the Sixties and the family moved to East London, where Rob had come into the orbit of black and white struggle royalty. When his father died Rob could have run the sunflower-oil factory, but he had other plans. He blew virtually his entire inheritance on funding a cultural magazine, which folded, and a theatre, which gave voice to the likes of Athol Fugard and Pieter-Dirk Uys. The theatre also later collapsed, but that wasn’t the point as far as Rob was concerned.

  “What about your children?” I’d asked him.

  “There’s enough for them to be educated,” he’d replied. “What more do you need to inherit?”

  Not for him the yarmulke, ever, the shirt often skewly buttoned up, occasionally accompanied by a food stain. But always there was the matter of the domineering father, the man of action and industry, the provider. And, therefore, the questions. Was it really better to provide mental sustenance as opposed to food – and work – for people?

  My only claim to fame was that I could spin a yarn with some persuasion and maybe that’s why we became friends. Like me, Rob had delighted in Alexandra and I had admired him for managing to stay so young and alert, even though he was a good fifteen years older than us and had three children back in Cape Town. He and his wife had separated and occasionally he’d miss his kids with a painful twist to his blackly bearded mouth, but there were also other problems to be solved – too many, we sometimes thought – and pleasures in which to delight. He had a great capacity for delight, did our Rob. And listening. You might toss off a casual line and he’d start interrogating you about it, black eyes boring into you, until you had to admit you’d just been flippant, Rob. His guts and shoulders would start shaking, and he’d push air out through his clenched teeth, eyes twinkling with mirth, building towards the next brilliant idea. That was the one kind of laughter.

  One night we’d all been sitting around and heard there was a new local band coming to campus. By that time we were half paralysed on Western and African substances and too inert to go, but Rob got us all up and moving and we went to see an outfit called Juluka. Up on the stage there was a white and black man, which wasn’t allowed at the time, and they were making their own local music. Johnny Clegg had embraced and been accepted by Zulu culture without sacrificing his own. He was wearing African skins and dancing like a warrior, in unison with his friend, Sipho Mchunu. We shouted our heads off and danced ourselves into sweaty sobriety.

  “This is so important,” Rob said afterwards, analysing every political and cultural nuance of the evening as we started smoking and drinking afresh. “What do you think Alex?”

  “If I’d been wearing panties I would have thrown them at him,” she replied.

  That time Rob didn’t laugh, he bellowed with Mediterranean joy.

  After we’d finished varsity we had all gone our separate ways and he’d moved to another campus. About a year ago he’d called to say he’d migrated to Jozi, impressed with how dynamic it was. He was living in a cottage at the back of his ex-wife’s house, reading stuff like his good friend Don Maclennan’s poetry, had an influential column about the separation of powers (his father had always said he’d make a good lawyer) and we could continue our conversations as if decades hadn’t flown by in the interim. There was still that capacity for listening and laughter from this man who wanted to write a retort to Disgrace and call it Delight.

  We had diametrically disagreed on where the country was going – he the political optimist, not I – and he had bought himself a Romeo-red, second-hand Alfa Junior. He had always wanted one and now he had it and came to visit me. There was a small painting of a mother and daughter he particularly liked, having lost a daughter in her infancy. So I gave it to him in the spirit that it had been given to me by my good friend, Dick Reineke.

  Then one fine evening Rob went to a Cosatu meeting in his Junior, this man who took everybody’s ideas so intensely, generously seriously, and on his way home some moron had pulverised the Junior and him in a haze of Saturday-night auto testosterone.

  I stopped the Civic outside the old man’s local Spar, got his groceries, resisted kicking the dog’s head off as I tried to carry all the bags simultaneously, helped the old man pack his goods away and told him we were going for a drive.

  “No,” he said.

  “Yes, Dad. We’re going out.”

  “Can the dog come?”

  “No, it stinks.”

  “Well then I’m not going.”

  “Dad, we’re going to be away for half an hour. It’ll do you good.”

  “What if those bastards try to rob me again?”

  “What bastards?”

  “There was a break-in here.”

  “This is news to me. Tell me more.”

  Now he seemed to regret having told me and I had to drag it out of him. “They” had come onto the back stoep and forced the bathroom’s curly burglar bars back and taken some of his suits, Ma’s old radio and some food.

  “Did you report it?”

  There was no point in it, he said. The new police were useless. Uncle Vern had soldered the bars back into place and everything was fine again.

  “If we leave the dog here he’ll protect the place.”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing to me,” he said tearfully, the dog looking up at him with its soulful eyes.

  Now the old man had to get dressed in his trousers, golf shirt, smart zip-up jersey and check jacket with his stiff shoulders, which took half an hour, whereafter he c
ouldn’t find his goddamned keys – “shit!” – but it finally all came together like a film production. He shakily bade his bloody canine – with its soft brown eyes and long, aquiline nose – farewell, telling it he would soon be home again, “see, my dog?”

  Thus we went for a spin on the highway and spoke about its cars, which he could barely see, and he came to the deeply profound, though regretful, conclusion that the Volkswagen Jetta was probably the best car ever made. I wasn’t even going to bother telling him about Rob, so I said a little cruelly, fishing, “I can’t believe you think that after the Chevy.”

  “Don’t even talk about the Chev.”

  “Why not?”

  “Do you know it’s being used on a farm now?”

  “No,” I lied, thinking the reason why my Civic was always dirty was probably a subconscious reaction to his deification of the Chev, then the Valiant. I also thought about the many, many near-heart attacks Ma had had with his tempestuous driving, especially in the Chevy, during our holiday drives down to the same small towns where his sisters lived, year after tedious, torpid year.

  “Do you know what that Merc costs new?” I said.

  “No?”

  “Three-quarters of a million rand.”

  “What?”

  “I know. It’s criminal.”

  “That’s probably what my house is worth,” he said as we passed the cemetery next to the highway.

  “Do you want to go to Ma’s grave?”

  But he still wasn’t in the right frame of mind, meaning he was probably worried about his dog, but did I know what? I didn’t.

  “I’m really annoyed that we have to lie facing east.”

  “Why?”

  “How am I going to see the cars on the highway?”

  As usual I couldn’t think of a retort to that and, when we got back to his house, the dog was sitting at the gates.

  “He sleeps on the pillow next to my head.”

  “Hmm?”