by Mark Winkler
“Nathan, let’s go back to our very first meeting. We established that no counselling had been sought for you in the years following the lake house incident. Do you remember that?”
I shrug. It’s part of my new vocabulary, I decide. It’s cheaper than words. I decide that it will mean whatever the other person wants it to mean. Like, “If you say so.” Or, “I don’t care.” Right now it means “I don’t know.” It’s a convenient addition to my library of faces.
“Do you remember those early sessions? After your troubles at varsity, I mean?”
I shrug again. This time the shrug means two things. Both “I don’t know” and “If you say so.”
“And can I assume that since we last saw each other, you haven’t discussed the incident at the lake house with anyone else?” Doctor Petrakis is losing it again. She should ask me a question that requires a proper answer. Not a “yes” or a “no” or an “I don’t know.” She should offer me some water. My tongue still feels like a sock. A sock wrapped in another sock, deep in an underwear drawer. She’s making notes. She’s scowling through her glasses. Or over them. Which is where the scowl happens. Scowling over them and looking through them at the same time. I’m sure the pen is tearing the paper with every underline. With every stab of a full stop. I can see that she’s angry. Then she looks up. She smiles. If she’s angry, she’s not angry with me. For a change her eyes smile with the rest of her face. I’m almost disappointed.
“Well done, Nathan,” she says. “See you tomorrow.”
There’s only one picture hanging in the common room. It’s held into its frame by a sheet of plastic. No glass in here among the lunatics. I’ve never looked at it. It’s hung too high up, the way some people hang artwork in their houses. Way above your line of sight, like laundry above an old European street. Maybe that’s why I’ve never bothered to look at it. I take one of the grey chairs and push it towards the wall. Johnson tenses. I suppose he thinks I’m going to do a Ricky Chin. Throw the chair around. Or at him. I push it up against the wall. Its rubber feet have long disappeared. The chair grates along the floor. Socks moans and flaps at one of his ears. There’s a new guy in today. He’s fifty or so. Big, with orange hair. He’s spent most of the day staring at his hands. They’re freckled. The fingers are short and broad. Sausagey, like a farmer’s. He pulls his neck in at the sound of Socks’s moaning. There’s already not much of a neck. Now there’s less. I stand on the chair. Johnson relaxes. In the frame is an old photograph. I see the grain before I can decode the black-and-white image. Me and old photographs. We know what we’re talking about.
The photo reminds me of my family on the wall at Pansyshell Park. Not because there are people in it. There aren’t. Just because it’s an old photograph. Of an old building. It could be a Herbert Baker. Or a disciple’s. Adapted colonial, someone once called the style. I don’t remember who it was. Great thick walls. A sense of symmetry. Grounded and belonging. Windows that always look smaller from a distance than when you’re close up or inside. The building in the photograph is big. Not Groote Schuur big. Big anyway. There’s a tower that rises above the building. Like a great squared stake that’s nailed the place to the ground. The tower has arches at the top. Like a belfry. The arches recede into darkness. There’s a pitched roof over them.
Either it was dark on the day or the photograph is badly printed. In the foreground are trees that all bend in the same direction. The photograph is cropped. You can’t see the ends of the building. The crop makes it look like the place goes on for ever. The whole thing is such a cliché. A madhouse out of a horror movie. At least I know where I am now. I squint at the dark arches of the belfry. I’m looking for bats. I stop looking before I don’t find them. It would be a pity if there weren’t bats.
I climb off the chair. I grind it across the floor to the window. Johnson tenses again. It’s boring. I’m not going to do anything. Mr. Naicker is sitting alone at the chessboard. I can feel his eyes on me as I pass by. I can feel the longing in them. Socks moans and drops to the floor, cross-legged. He puts his hands over his ears and starts to rock.
At the window I stand on the chair. It’s not easy to see through the mesh. The window isn’t the cleanest either. Still, I can make out a highway at the bottom of the hill. I watch the cars for a while. For no good reason I pick out a black Range Rover and follow it. Even through the grime I can make out a blonde woman in the passenger seat. She’s probably beautiful. Women in Range Rovers usually are. And thin. I’m sure that her handsome and successful husband is driving. There’s probably a child in the back. Maybe more than one. They’re probably all singing along to a CD. Off for a holiday or a weekend together. Even when I think hard I can’t decide what day it is. Between me and the highway are trees. They’re not very tall. They all grow at the same weird forty-five degree angle to the ground. The southeaster will do that. I wonder which of the windows in the photograph I’m looking out of.
Then Ricky is tugging at my trousers. They’re not really trousers. They’re pyjamas that have an elasticated waist. With each tug he’s exposing an arsecheek. Ricky is excited. Then, Ricky is always excited.
“Come on, come on,” he rasps. As if we have a plane to catch. I’m tired of people telling me to come on. I get off the chair. Scrape it away from the window. Ricky pulls me to the chess table by my arm. Pushes me into a chair. Mr. Naicker has disappeared. He has left the board set up for a game. “I’m white!” Ricky says and does nothing. For a moment I think he’s talking about the honorary Chinese thing. Then he opens with a pawn. Instead of two squares he moves three. “Did you see the new guy?” he says. He looks at me a moment. “I can’t believe I’m asking you questions. Like you’re going to give me an answer. Anyhow, you couldn’t miss him. Big. Fat. Ginger. Burned down a building with his sister in it. Shot his old man in the head. Then burned down the family house. With the old man in it. A low score, sorry for you, Ginger. What a way to do things. Took them months to find the old guy.”
Ricky grabs one of his knights and jumps it over the row of pawns. He takes a pawn from my side of the board. Bangs it over two squares as he counts, “One! Two!” Releases his queen by pushing the king’s pawn two squares up. Forgets to play for me. Sends his queen streaking out of the blocks. “Who’s on top?” he yells. “Me. Me me me. Seven up. Leading on goals and on aggregate. Followed by Nathan No-speak at two and a half. Fuck Ginger. I’m the poster boy here. Substance trumps style every time. Seven trumps two, trumps your pathetic two-and-a-half every time. Fucks you up at chess as well.”
Ricky isn’t making any sense. I move my queen out. Then my bishop. I don’t need to look at Ricky to know that his mouth is hanging open. I grab two handfuls of his pawns and thrust them towards myself. Only one stays standing.
“Nathan, for fuck’s sake, you’re ruining the game,” Ricky whines. I’ll show you fucking ruining, you twisted little cunt. I take my back row of heavies and push them all forward. I take a bishop off the board. Mine, Ricky’s, who knows? I make a fist. I stick the bishop’s mitre out between the knuckles of my first and second fingers. I punch Ricky in the chops. The bishop buries its mitre in the flesh of his cheekbone. For a moment it hangs there. Then it drops to the floor. Ricky’s cheek has a hole in it. Then the hole wells up with blood. Ricky is frozen in space. He is staring at me. The blood overflows the hole. It runs down his cheek. Ricky puts his hands to his face and howls. He pushes back on his chair. The legs stick on the linoleum and he goes over backwards.
“Checkmate,” I say. Nobody hears. Ricky’s screaming too much. Everything is good for a moment. I have my anger back.
Of course they up my meds
Of course they up my meds again. I suppose I make it hard for them. Sweetness and light one moment, standing up for myself the next. Mr. Naicker tells me this. I agree with him. We’re sitting on the grey plastic couch. He doesn’t feel like chess right now.
“I felt the weig
ht of a thousand worlds lift from my shoulders,” he says, “the moment I’d cleansed myself of my family. Society sees this cleansing differently. Society seeks to revisit my original burden and to turn it into a burden of a different shape and description. Have you ever done judo, Nathan?”
I shrug. It means no. Mr. Naicker’s eyebrows fly up.
“Ah. After all this time, a communication. Which I shall take as yes, no or maybe. And regard as progress nonetheless,” Mr. Naicker says. “Anyway. In judo, as I understand it, you are taught to use the weight and force of your opponent to your advantage. If he comes flying at you—and forgive my primitive way of putting this, having never done judo myself—you are trained to manipulate his strength and speed against him. Presumably by stepping aside and tripping him. Or using his momentum to fling him into the wall behind you.”
You can use judo when you play chess too, I want to tell him. Just ask Ricky Chin.
“My point being,” Mr. Naicker is saying, “that when they come at you with their own version of history, which they will, rather like a bull in a bullring, you should simply step aside as a matador would. Flash your cape at the bull so that it merely spears air. Use the energy of its charge to drive your picas deep into its back. Judo-style.” He consults the ceiling for a moment. “I do believe I am mixing my metaphors,” he says. “Nevertheless, I’m sure you understand. My actual point being,” he continues, “that we are here to get better. While we have each of us transgressed in some way, this is not the place for further misdemeanour. The place for that was in our previous lives. The things we did before arriving here must stay out there. As if we’d been in Vegas. If you transgress in Vegas and you are caught, you will serve your punishment in Vegas.” He smiles and lifts an arm as if in benediction. “So in here, our challenge is to be calm. To let the drugs do their work while we meditate, contemplate and heal. To take comfort in what we achieved before they put us here. To enjoy the peace those achievements bring. Let the disturbed and distraught shout, for we are safe in the knowledge that their tantrums are not directed at us. Let the doctors throw medications and psychobabble at us, and let us make it work towards our individual wellbeing with our clever judo tricks.”
Mr. Naicker looks at me. I’ve been staring at the feet of the red-haired man. I’m wondering if he could walk across burning coals and come out unscathed. I’m wondering just how mad Mr. Naicker actually is. As in, where would he sit on the Ricky scale of one to completely batshit. Mr. Naicker pats my forearm. He smiles. I can’t help myself. I like Mr. Naicker.
“Here endeth the lesson,” he says.
You’re expected to go to university. So I did. Dad was paying. If I’d had to draw a picture of him it would have been of a guy in a suit with a credit card as his head. He went away when I was, like, twelve. One day he was there and then he wasn’t. Left Mom to entertain a string of Aunty Mike clones. At least they stayed away from me. I gave the first ones a hard time. It took time for me to understand that none of them wanted to roger me in the woodshed. Not that we had a woodshed any more. Or a lake house. Those went when Dad went. Nobody was sad. Not about the house or the man we called Dad. Dad, the stuffed Polo shirt. Soft-cock Dad. Then Isabel went away too. She found a dentist. He was everything a dentist should be. Short, efficient, depressive. Procreative. Isabel sent me an email when I was at varsity. Dad’s dead, the email said. And it said a bit more about booze and rehab and a liver that more or less imploded. Good, I wrote back. Good to know that I’ll never again have to take it up the arse while he’s asleep. While he’s passed out on the couch and his best friend is tearing my rectum apart with his giant dick. And Dad doing less than nothing afterwards. Other than giving advice. Put on your brave face, sister dear. Bye, I wrote. I never heard from her again.
The next day I came out of a Tech lecture with a headful of numbers and dreams. Bridges with minimal environmental impact and affordable housing schemes for the poor and airports that actually worked. The usual undergrad stuff. Excited, and exciting. Nobody had raised the dead ends yet. Nobody had said that reality was doing alterations to Mrs. Jones’s bathroom. Or debating conservatory layouts with Mr. Smith, or spending three months trying to get plans through the City Council.
Next was Architectural History. Stuff we should have known anyway. I was doing a non-credit course in furniture design and the lectures clashed. I knew my Michelangelo from my Wren. So I went to the furniture design lecture instead. The lecturer was late. She always was. She’d keep us waiting at least fifteen minutes before arriving in a great brown caftan that was meant to hide her bulk. If hell is a place of our own devising, mine will be a place of waiting. Don’t make me wait. I’d rather climb Mount Fuji on my knees than wait. Or my elbows, even. My forehead, in fact.
I made a point of never sitting next to the same person in lectures. I was there to graduate, not make friends. The guy who sat next to me that day looked like a B Com student. Rugby-ish. Totally wrong for Arch, pronounced Arc. Then there was the furniture design module. Us arty-intellectual types with our little rectangular glasses and polo-necked sweaters. Way superior to the rest, we Arch students. There was the need for food and water. And then there was us. Shelter. Beautifying your shelter was the first step to sublimation. That first handprint on the cave wall. Dogs and antelope could find food and water. Only we could build a roof. Fuck me if we weren’t brilliant. Or on the way to brilliance.
Rugby Boy looked me up and down. He lifted the corner of a lip. He was smirking or laughing or something. I didn’t know what.
“So,” he said, all quiet and secretive, “should I bend you over the desk and fuck you right here, or should we skip this shit and head for the gents?”
I suppose some rugger-bugger B Com types are bona fide gay. That’s fine by me. I don’t mind gay people. I don’t judge them. It’s illogical. When, say, Student X comes into class, you don’t snigger behind your hand and say, ooh, she likes it doggy style, and then deny her any career or social prospects because of that. You don’t deny rights or privileges because of some minor paraphilia. Ability and talent are seldom connected to the way people deploy their genitalia.
Some of the rugger types spent their lives looking for a fight. They’d seek out gays and then beat them up. I didn’t know if this one was trying to pick me up or insult me. Or genuinely wanted to fuck me. It didn’t matter either way. You didn’t decide without my input that I should take it up the arse. Not more than once in my lifetime anyway. It’s why I was expelled from res in my first year. There was a head-butt and a broken nose. He was an Arts student, which is probably why I wasn’t expelled outright. I looked at Rugby Boy. He was barely twenty-two and already the drink was showing on his complexion. Tiny blossoms of veins flowering on his nose. Yellowed eyes. I found my smiling face. He grinned back and I felt for my digs key in my pocket. It was newly cut and sharp as a saw-blade. I embedded it in his neck. Attending the lecture was a med student considering a switch of degree. Lucky for Rugby Boy.
So that’s why I was thrown out of university in my third year. I kind of understood. I was sent to Doctor Petrakis. I told her, among many other things, that the guy was like Aunty Mike. She pretended to see the similarity. There wasn’t one. Not at all. He was just some boozy denialist coward trying to get laid by an Arch student while his rugby buddies weren’t watching.
There is a flip chart on a stand where Humboldt used to sit. At least the chart commands attention. Some of the pages have been flipped back. I wonder what’s on them. Whatever is worth writing down is generally worth hiding.
Doctor Petrakis is almost cheerful. “So, Nathan,” she says. “How are we doing today?”
I shrug. I’m liking this shrug. I like that it can mean anything.
“Good, then,” she says. “I hear, by the way, that you’ve had a bit of a fallout with Ricky Chin?” I shrug again. Yes, no, maybe. She’s working hard at ignoring the flipchart. All it does is make the
thing more interesting.
She comes from behind her desk and leans her butt against the front of it. She crosses her ankles. There is an insufficiency of calf muscles. A little bandy, too.
“Mike Bauer,” she says. “You called him Aunty Mike.” My tongue is a sock again, stuffed into a trainer. I can’t move. Can’t shrug. “He was arrested five years ago and put away for grooming and paedophilia. Twenty-five years, so he has another twenty to go. That means you’ll be over fifty when he gets out. If he lives that long. He’ll be well over eighty by then.”
I don’t need her to do the maths. All I know is it’s not enough. Whether he dies there or not. Not enough for what was swept under the carpet. The jungled thorn-infested beast-ridden carpet. Can you get rid of a carpet like that? With all that stuff under it? Surely some dark residue will always cling to it. Will always bring its contamination with it. Wherever it goes.
I manage a shrug.
“Okay,” says Doctor Petrakis. She goes over to the flipchart. I’d never before noticed how broad her hips are. She flips a sheet over. Underneath it are two images. Madge on the left, looking young and healthy. On the right Sonia, badly printed. Doctor Petrakis takes a blue marker from the tray. She draws a slow blue circle around Madge.
“Do you know why you’re here?” she says.
I ask Doctor Petrakis
I ask Doctor Petrakis for a glass of water. It’s the third thing I’ve said in God knows how long. She buzzes for a nurse and September comes in. He nods and comes back with a paper cup filled with water. I can see it won’t be enough. I drain it before September is out the door.
“More,” I say. “Please.” September looks around at me. His eyes are enormous. The whites are not as clear as they should be. He turns to Doctor Petrakis. She tells him to bring a jug. He looks at me again on his way out.