Son
Page 20
Pause.
“You mustn’t think I don’t appreciate this, hey.”
“Good,” I said, the Highveld light burning his house’s white walls.
“Don’t bother coming in,” he said. “You’ve wasted enough time already.”
“I’ll just see you in, Dad.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. We might catch more robbers in the act or something.”
“Leave well alone,” he said.
“No.”
I thought he might create a scene, but he seemed impressed, so we got out, looked for his keys for a while, finally found them and unlocked the gates.
“Hello, my dog,” the old man said, rubbing his loved one’s head, almost in tears again as he comforted his piddling pup and apologised to it for having gone away, saying he would never do so again, “ever!”
I couldn’t stomach the sop so I checked out the yard for any intruders, my hand in my pocket pathetically holding my Swiss army knife, without which I’d begun to feel naked of late. Then I checked the house thoroughly – behind doors, under beds, in cupboards – catching a glimpse of myself in the square mirror with the fake gold rim at the end of the passage, where the phone was, where the old man had begged his wife to come back to him, saying he had banished that woman from our house and that he would forgive her, Ma, for anything and everything.
“Look,” he’d said. “I’m on my knees!”
She can’t see you, I’d thought as my teen self lay listening in the suburban dark.
Beware: Sociologist
* * *
The ants in my pants would not go and I thought it might ease a bit if I told Kay we had reached the end of our road, which felt increasingly like a mean street leading up a littered cul-de-sac alley. We had spoken to each other on the phone a few times, but it had felt hollow, we both knew it and I wanted to have a stiff shot of Grouse before I called her and told her it – whatever “it” had been – was over. Thus I proceeded and when she answered the phone it sounded as if she was in a pub.
“How are you?” she said all chummily.
“I’m fine,” I said, “but I don’t think we should see each other again.”
“What?” she said, not because she was shocked but because there was so much noise in the background. There was a slurred but good-natured political argument going on as someone sang they didn’t like reggae, they loved it, and I repeated myself.
“Just like that?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I think it’s for the better.”
“Okay,” she said breezily, and cut me off.
Butch looked at me as I called Klara, as prearranged, to find out whether Dolf had gone for the week.
“Yes,” she said.
“So can I come and see you?”
“Ja, I suppose so,” she said, sounding bored.
I should have known something ominous was brewing on that front, but I still dutifully went to Klara’s and got her to tell me what I was doing to her in the most direct and vulgar way possible, which drove me to the kind of heights Shunt and Kay, for all their savvy cocktail talk, couldn’t even begin to imagine.
“What’s the matter?” I said, still shuddering, having put the myth of the male orgasm being a short, sharp, singular event to bed.
“I feel like a whore.”
“But we’ve got such a good thing going.”
“You’ve got a good thing going.”
“Are you just a passive victim of this whole thing then?”
“No, but I am married.”
That was the first time I felt like sleeping with her, but she would have none of it and the next morning I woke up feeling good and asked Butch whether he was a closet dolphin or what. He started laughing like one, twisting this way and that. Yes, you are a dolphin, I said. I know you are. He may have been shaking his head like those motion-driven toys in the back of people’s cars, but his smile was one thousand per cent affirmation, so off we went, passing an increasingly emaciated, hacking Mandla. Deeper into the park, a briefcase had been forced open, its contents removed before being flung aside.
The only thing that kept me here now was the old man, my writing and Klara. He had told me to go, but I couldn’t just leave him in the lurch, dog or no dog. As for the writing, which wasn’t even happening these days, it was how I made sense of what was going on around me, possibly even inside me, even if no one ever read it. Writing was like going on a big adventure: you discovered things you didn’t know you knew, or remembered. And then some. You also discovered that you knew considerably less than nothing. I had always written about crime in one form or another and realised I was continuing the old man and his father’s legacy of policing. And crime was most certainly the problem. People were being killed at the drop of a hat and, worst of all, most of us made as if it wasn’t happening. How could we? The reality of fifty murders and rapes a day was too much to process. And so we denied it, made as if it wasn’t really happening, “got on with our lives”, essentially cowered. But constantly it was there, like a township, like the old man. It was the frog in the pot that didn’t know it was slowly being boiled alive; being hypnotized by the snake that’s about to kill you. Perhaps a single bloody revolution, a national bloodletting, would have been preferable in the long run because if the streets never flowed with blood then our living-room carpets were certainly drenched in it, perpetually. On a purely expedient level, there was plenty to write about, but who said that was right? Might it not therefore be a good idea to write about my country from afar? Who said I had to write about my country at all? Who said it was mine? Who said it wasn’t my crutch? Might it not be good for me to walk right away from all my safety blankets? Yes. Therefore I could go, should go, stretch myself. Fly.
Which left Klara, who was married and therefore limited. But an addiction, like a country, is an addiction and it isn’t easily cured. Ms Motsepe could find other work, with which I could help her. Obviously I also loved Butch, but I didn’t belong to that school of people whose lives were determined by their pets. He would easily fit in with others, much as I would miss him. And Jay and Veron? Well, I could access them via cyberspace, even though I would miss them too. In fact, I had come to the conclusion that they represented the only small ray of light in that dark hole of a geographic entity. That is, people were doing what they always did. They were falling in love, but now they were doing so across racial, religious and linguistic lines – naturally. The Redlands were the perfect example, the real vanguard of change. Work, live and sleep with each other and you’ll soon find out how boringly, predictably, comically similar we all are. After that it’s all up to you. That is the part I didn’t take into account with Shanti. After the intellectual and racial romance petered out it had just become another battle for power, the opposite to how Jay and Veron made things work. If Shun had broken away from everything that signified tradition in her culture, then she had replaced it with an ambition to override everything else, including sex, and it had left her a nervous wreck. She couldn’t think about anything else except this new lover of hers, and I had been a jealous man – a very jealous man. If ten years of marriage had made me feel like a trapped diver whose oxygen supply was rapidly running out, then divorce felt like breaking that oceanic surface and taking in great lungfuls of fresh, life-affirming air. But that soon faded after I realised something else: there was no boat, land or other soul in sight. Nothing.
Later that day I went to work, couldn’t find Ruth on Thursday night and went to the emigration seminar at a generic Hilton hotel that Friday night. Most of the people there were precisely the kind of people with whom I didn’t want to be associated, but the man said he wasn’t trying to bash our country; his country wasn’t perfect either. In fact, there was at least one murder a week, whereupon everyone burst out laughing.
On Saturday I went to Jay and Veron’s and had an almighty fight with Jay when he let slip, drunk, that Kay was basically considered the off
ice’s top-floor mattress.
“Thanks for letting me know,” I said, equally drunk.
“It’s none of my business who you screw, bruh.”
“You should have become a rapper, but I thought we were supposed to be friends.”
“Would you have listened to me?”
“That’s not the point.”
“Jay, you’re pissed,” Veron intervened. “Len, go home.”
“Thank you very fucking much,” I shouted at Jay.
“Only a pleasure, china!”
“Arsehole!”
“And fuck you too,” Jay said, pale and almost passed out.
I stumbled to Emfuleni Road and the thought of facing that façade called home was too much, even with Beethoven, so I took a taxi to the disco Kay and I had been to, not because I liked it (or her, or me) but because all the ones I used to know had closed or moved on, as is the nature of such grand institutions. I didn’t want to dance or meet someone, I wanted my head to melt into some kind of numb neutrality, but what I got was something much worse. I became a sociologist and came to the depressingly conservative conclusion that what a society needed to function was four interlinking elements. Irony of ironies, they formed the acronym of NEWS. That is, nurture, education, work, security.
If a child came from a loving family it already had a massive advantage in life. One loving parent was better than none and two or more were better than one. If the child then went to schools which integrated body, mind and soul it could start flying, but how did that happen? Teach children how to think more than remember with the abovementioned three. As for religion, analyse all and enforce none as part of general philosophy. Any society that could be that open would always deem the petrol attendant as worthy as the state president. If people don’t have work, then their leaders shouldn’t get paid. And if the down and outers did not want whatever work was provided, well then they could starve. Basic services had to function. Cops needed an incentive to become cops, as did nurses and teachers. Obviously they had to love their jobs and subjects, but you can’t eat love. They needed to be paid as well as middle managers because that was exactly what they were, which meant they had to take as much responsibility too. Mess up and you have to leave or try again.
If your people are secure in themselves and their environs that’s all the security they need.
If those who didn’t want to work became criminals they were welcome to that as well. But what was to be done with them? Were they to be isolated and allowed to create what amounted to an alternative society? No. Were killers to be killed? That would be economical, but it would also be deeply irresponsible. Those people weren’t animals; they were an insult to animals, the old man’s people. Nor were they human, for they had decided to play God over others’ lives. They were therefore gods. And gods have no claim to human rights. So, too, those soft-handed high-ups who steal money from the magnitudes. If they want their rights back they must earn them back by doing what we do. That is, they have to work. They have to learn that most of us roll a rock up a mountain with the full knowledge that as we sleep that rock rolls down the mountain again and we have to roll it back up upon waking. For that we get paid. This is a right they must earn by digging a hole every day and filling it up every day. If they want to carry on being gods they can carry on digging and filling up holes. If they want a right they can acquire a skill, trade or degree. Those who want to work must be separated from the hole diggers. As soon as those who choose to work get their skill they must do what we do. We work, we get paid, we pay taxes. We pay our debt to society. Why can’t they, even in prison? The secret, of course, lies in those who oversee these gods. Their warders are usually badly educated and therefore inmates themselves. How can they teach their wards what their parents or teachers did not teach them, which is that you cannot take another’s life (or dignity, or property)? There are consequences. They have to be taught by educators, not sadists. Only once they can understand what they’ve done and start making amends can they insist on that other human right, that other form of torture, that other death, television.
There is no greater security than a happy childhood, a good education and available work. But the ravages of AIDS had already left a million children parentless and our Supreme Leader was still dawdling, creating a breeding ground for sociopaths and protecting his old struggle pal, the chief of police. If apartheid had been a crime of commission, then the new lot were committing just the opposite: one of omission. If the structural violence of the old order had been the slow death of the soul then the country post-Mandela was the quick murder of the helpless: the women, the children, the aged. Yet a great show was made of holding everybody’s tender little hand at school, in the workplace and in prison, which was not the same as teaching them how to think. It was giving them an aspirin for a rotten, putrid tooth. Pension funds were being robbed by old capitalists and new socialists alike. The leaders pretended to lead, their friends the rich joined them at the top of the pile, the minority middle class paid punishing taxes to retain their dubious, paranoid privileges, and the majority remained un-led, unread and not alive, just undead.
In a word, fucked.
On Decay
* * *
This time I took a detour to one street up from Monument Avenue and a block south of the church to my primary school on Pretorius Street. It was named after the poet and chef Louis Leipoldt and in that first-storey room I had sung in the school choir. If I played rugby like my father then I sang like my mother and we would sing of the joys of the veld in Afrikaans and then the heavily accented ‘My Grandfather’s Clock’ in English. “Ninety years without slumbering (tick, tock, tick, tock), his life’s seconds numbering (tick, tock, tick, tock). It stopp’d [beat] short [beat] – never to go again – when the old man died.”
He was still nowhere to be seen but the dog, of course, went ballistic and came charging, if a bloated sack of smooth fur can charge. The old man wasn’t at the back either, but the security gate was open, I could hear a rugby match on the TV and I said loudly: “Dad?”
Nothing.
“Dad?” I said louder.
Still nothing.
“Dad!” I almost shouted.
“Ja!” he said and came into the kitchen, squinting, as if from deep space.
“Hi,” I said, relieved.
“Hello, my boy,” he said, sounding a little delicate, but taking my hand in his big one.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Oh, I’ve just been watching a bit of rugby, but it isn’t rugby anymore.”
“I’ll say.”
“What?”
Who the hell was this man, this stranger? Why had it never occurred to him to remarry? Why did he live his late life so stoically alone? He was so desperately lonely and craved company, but when he got it he just talked, poured out his heart and his soul and then went back to his hermitic life, usually criticising whoever had crossed his path. I sometimes wondered whether he made the same negative statements about me to Uncle Vern as he did about him to me. And yet those who had come into contact with him were fond of him, loved him and cared for him, as I tried to.
“I said I agree with you that it’s just become a kick-and-charge bore,” I said.
“Why the hell haven’t you shaved?”
“Because I didn’t feel like it.”
“I shave every day of my life.”
“Shall we have some coffee?”
“Good idea,” he said.
After we’d run through the usual speeches he settled down with his coffee and Lemon Creams outside, but he’d acquired a new habit. He’d discovered if he wore a pair of Ma’s discarded and scratchy sunglasses he could see much better in the glare and, as usual, he looked good in those too. But I realised I couldn’t sit down again. I was all sat out, sensing that the old man wasn’t going to move off his property that day, so I found the ball and chucked it for the dog, which duly chased and collected it and returned it to its master.
He ignored that, juddered his left foot and picked his right nail and said: “Do you know what I did the other day?”
“What did you do the other day?”
“I handed in my service revolver.”
“So how’re you going to commit suicide now?”
Ignoring that flippancy, he said: “They asked us to.”
“Well, that’s very responsible of you, and I think it’s safer for you.”
“Why?”
“People often get killed with their own weapons, or those weapons get taken and used on others.”
“Well, I’ve got my little dog to protect me, haven’t I my dog?”
Pit-pat, pit-pat the fat bastard’s eager tail went, sitting on his foot.
“Won’t you please reconsider going into an old-age home?”
“Never, never, never.”
“Then won’t you at least let me put up palisades for you?”
“Leave it, Len. Just leave it.”
“Do you realise you could be killed?”
“Let them come. I’ve got my dog.”
“I can’t exactly see him keeping two or three young thugs at bay.”
“We’re fine,” the old man said with some finality. “Those other two came yesterday and I gave them some bread and tea when they asked for food. They thought I was very funny.”
“You must still be careful.”
A plane went overhead to land at OR Tambo as I took that all on board while he looked in its general direction, regretfully.
“Hannah said I must go and live with her in Empangeni,” he said.
“So why don’t you?”
“You people don’t understand something.”
“What don’t we understand?” I asked, wondering who exactly fitted into that broad category of “you people”, though I had to agree that Aunt Hannah was quite bossy.
“My wife is buried here.”