by Eben Venter
‘What’s the matter now, Mattie?’
In the last ten days or so, the voice, always modulated and full of the cadences so characteristic of Pa, has started to wear thin in places. A word collapses, say for instance the ‘r’ in tomorrow, becoming blunter, depleted of expressive power. Oh, he could have died when he’d first noticed this. His father, oh, he’d wanted to hold him to his breast. In his sleep that night he’d wept, so that by dawn his pillowslip was stained with a track of salt.
The question on the tip of his tongue mingles with the anticipation of the finality that the signature will seal, so that he loses clarity and starts confusing the sequence of the two, and from behind, from behind the back of his chair, looms something misshapen with shoulders and arms attached to the shoulders, a massive thing: it’s the incarnation of his vacillation in the presence of Benjamin Duiker. Now, previously, and all along. He’s afraid he’s not going to get his question asked. It’s a fear that he despises: that it’s so deeply rooted.
Wait. (It’s already become futile.) The seventy-six-year-old hand is not going to rise from the bedspread and start moving, the signature is not going to happen. The signature: BDuiker, with the muscular, erect stem of the ‘B’ and the two perfect semicircles sprouting vigorously from it, the lower one slightly larger to stabilise and lend balance to its most important letter. The signature then flows from the lower, stronger semicircle to the upper loop of the ‘D’ so that it seems to grow from this semicircle, without your seeing how it’s done, and from there swoops elegantly all the way to the bottom to execute ‘uiker’ in symmetrical letters, each with a perfect slant to the right.
On scraps of paper, or suddenly while reading, he sometimes grabs a pencil and tries, at a random whim, to forge the signature, say for instance on the blank edge of a page of the book he’s reading: BDuiker. His attempt is pathetic. A dying swan or some such.
If he were to forget and put behind him everything, everything about his father, and he really does mean everything, all the reproaches and incomprehension and old, old grievances and misunderstandings and all that shit, all the unfinished business, and he knows there’s still going to be a lot, and the hundred-and-one other feelings, his empathy too, his identification with a man like his father, then he would still cherish that signature. It’s pure, that’s what it is. It is masculinity, the essence of it, that engenders such a signature.
The temperature of Pa’s hand has changed from lying against the skin of his own wrist. And he himself must be just about at fever pitch with anxiety over his lost chance. The simplest question conceivable, thirteen words in all. And spit it out he can’t. By tonight he’s going to be sick with self-reproach.
And by tomorrow the self-authored drama will play itself out again, from waking up to going to bed, with all its shades of bravado and might-have-beens. Every part of his business plan has been plotted in the finest detail, including his suppliers and recipes, the lot – he’s just waiting for the money. The amount was not too conservatively estimated; he’s taken into account unforeseen contingencies. Sundries, as they say. More ideal premises for his concept you couldn’t hope to find. To Let / Te Huur, the corner store on Main and Albertyn Streets, Observatory, with a view of Groote Schuur Hospital, not that that really matters. Used to be a fish-and-chip shop, which does matter because it’ll be easier to get a restaurant licence. The only question is how much longer the place will sit vacant, waiting for him.
Around one thirty, when Samantha walks in, he immediately announces that she needn’t bother with vacuuming and dusting – the old man’s orders.
She’s not one to be surprised. ‘If that’s how Mister Duiker’ – that’s what she calls him – ‘wants it.’ She has her purple vinyl backpack with her. He knows she’ll be pumping iron at the UCT gym afterwards; she’s a part-time student in Environmental Science.
They work fast and hard. From the wardrobe in the spare room, she wheels out a clothes rail that he’s forgotten about and finds a place for it in the study. Shirts, overcoats and trousers are carried down in layers, then sorted out and hung up. Going-out shoes, church and casual, all in pairs under the clothes rail. The bedside cabinets, both of them. They take extra care with the medication, Samantha not needing to be told. They decide the double bed should be placed in front of the window where there’s a bit of morning sun, and move the circle of armchairs to the right. All the time they’re coming and going his father lies there small and frail, and by the fifth or sixth time Mattheüs comes in, his father’s face increasingly deathlike – the comparison is inescapable – he feels bitterly sorry for him. This time, he’s collecting his toiletries to take them to the guest toilet closest to the study.
‘Pa?’ he asks. The hand lifts from the bedspread and signals, nothing, no, nothing, and drops again. This is quite possibly his very last journey.
The wooden chair they leave for the time being. That’s where they’ll help him to, to wait there while they move the bed with all its parts. At three-thirty, Samantha comes in with a tray, tea and a milkshake for Mister Duiker. A sort of milkshake made with Sustagen Hospital Formula that has been prescribed for Pa to drink; strawberry made him feel sick, chocolate is out of the question, vanilla he can just about swallow. Mattheüs thanks Samantha for the tea. He doesn’t expect much more from her than hello and goodbye, instructions she gets from her mother, payment directly into her bank account, or sometimes, at the end of a shift, a pasella via him via his father from a drawer in the bedside cabinet, from the purse with the golden clasp.
They tuck an arm under each wing and fold back the sheet and the bedspread – feeble human warmth wafts up from the bedding. With all the lifting and the propping up of his body, his pyjama fly flaps open, briefly exposing to view the grey hair and his flesh. Samantha’s the one who takes charge and folds the flap back in place.
She is her mother’s child. Auntie Mary was and probably still is very fond of his father, bless her soul back home in Jakkalsvlei Avenue, Athlone, close to St Monica’s Maternity, where all her children were born, four of them in all. She cherished Pa as if he were one of her own, and passed on to Samantha a certain kind of solicitude with a bit of flair and banter (always); a tight triangle to which Mattheüs was never admitted. That’s why he doesn’t even look at her as she adjusts the fly of his father’s pyjamas: it’s something between her and Pa and Auntie Mary’s legacy, and it’s got bugger-all to do with him.
Pa is sitting on the chair. He supports his head with one hand.
‘Mister Duiker okay there?’ Samantha asks. ‘We’re taking across the mattress now and making it up nicely and then we’re coming to fetch Mister Duiker. It’ll all be over now-now.’
‘Samantha, how’s it going with your studies?’ His head still supported on the cupped hand, he speaks into his hand.
‘Mister Duiker, it’s only going well. I’m passing all my subjects. Next year is my second-last and the year after that I’m finishing.’ Samantha stands arms akimbo in tight-fitting black lycra Adidas pants. She’s looking at his father, and Mattheüs looks at her compassion for his father.
He’s still brooding on the thing with the cheque and can’t think it away. Viewed positively, the matter looks like this right now:
Pa is capable of rationally considering his request for money. If he hadn’t been capable, he wouldn’t have asked to be moved.
Pa loves him.
Pa would like to see him get ahead, row his own boat. It’s not as if Pa’s given up on him. Any undertaking is better than twiddling your thumbs. (There’s always the pressure.)
Opening a takeaway with good, nutritious food at affordable prices is a noble undertaking. (He’ll never get as rich as Pa, but he’s living in a different era where you have to reach out and play your part, or you’re a zero in the community.)
Pa has money. No doubt about that.
Viewed
negatively, the matter looks like this:
The move, the mere thought of it, has weakened Pa so much that he should be left in peace to process it.
It is underhand, to say the least, to pester a man for money when he’s in a weakened state. (And that on account of his own failings. Is he convinced of his business plan or is it a belated convulsion of the dutiful son?)
Pa gave him an advance to go overseas, an almighty one. (Now remember, Mattie, this is part of your inheritance one day.) When he was in a tight spot in Athens, he transferred some more money. To this day, Sissy doesn’t know about it, though she has her suspicions.
Conclusion: He’s not a ruthless person and doesn’t want to be known as one. He should just let Pa be. (But it nags and niggles at him. He’s got the money. Why not? And isn’t he his father’s primary carer?) No, he can’t ask a man who’s in such a condition. It’s exploitation, forget it. On the other hand. No. Just put it out of your head. Everything in its own time. But it’s such an ideal opportunity right now. No. No-fucking-no.
A mattress is an awkward thing to schlep and wrestle through a doorway, especially if one of its handles is half torn off. Besides, you can’t drag the thing along by its handles alone – you have to give it extra support underneath where you can’t reach, unless you have an abnormally long arm; in other words, you have to grab it somewhere in the middle on the two short sides, possibly tearing your fingernails.
‘But it’s queen size, why’ve you been going on about double?’ Samantha’s arms and neck are milky, like light-brown sea sand. She starts giggling with the exertion, which makes her even more attractive.
‘Samantha, please stop it now, you’re killing me,’ and he gets the giggles himself in the passage with its old Cape clay tiles and two runners, so that the mattress slides down at an angle. He loses his balance and collapses, weak with laughter. Samantha relaxes her grip and places her hand over her mouth and then dangles it over the back of the mattress, and in the sliver of Cape sun from the skylight on her lips, glistening with spit, he feels the same sensation – as in this same house when she took over from her mother, but at its strongest right now just where he’s lying looking up at her, at the insides of her gym-toned biceps – that her skin, her smooth beach-skin, is just a shade away from what for him is erotic and that he could get up and go over to her, to her kind, and annihilate that shade. He would be able to have her, is what he’s saying.
‘Mattheüs, come on, man. We must move. I’m not leaving here after five. It’s my time, man.’ From the white-and-mint-green house with the asbestos fence next to the United Reformed Church building, he often dropped Auntie Mary and Samantha off there, she has emerged with a self-discipline he can only dream of.
The bed is remade and even looks quite good in the light from the tall windows, as if it’s been there all along and has appropriated a space for itself in the now overcrowded study.
Samantha apparently notices this as well: ‘Mister Duiker will lie here nice and private. It’s a nice little place for him, shame.’
They fetch him from where he’s been sitting patiently listening, trying to figure out what’s being done, everything, and walk him step by step to his destination until he starts protesting in a voice that Mattheüs knows, Samantha too: ‘For God’s sake, it’s not as if I’m dead yet,’ so that they glance at each other and shuffle quickly past the bedrooms, his and Sissy’s, and the narrower door to the guest toilet that Pa will now have to try to reach at night in pitch darkness with arms flailing in front of him to find his way, come what may. It’s his decision, let’s see if he has it in him to apply his highly developed sense of direction in his own home.
The Murano glass vase, an aqua-green stork, its bill gaping to gobble up greenery, towers on its Imbuia pedestal to the left of the guest toilet and will have to be moved; you don’t want the thing crashing down and cutting his feet. Slippers he’ll always have to wear, Mattheüs must remember to tell him. Opportunistic infections must be avoided at this stage.
They make him lie on his left side, facing one of the big windows. He’s said little enough throughout the whole palaver, a shock to his system. Samantha is still moving stuff around, making sure that everything is just so.
Mattheüs is squatting next to the bed by his father’s face. Tentatively, lightly, he strokes the face all over with the flat of his left hand, starting with the clear brow, across the bridge of the nose and the tip and barely touching the jutting of the lower lip, his lips have retained their fullness surprisingly well. The pad of his thumb hovers on the lower lip so that it parts and closes, and the fleshy inside, almost moist, comes into contact with his bare palm.
‘Pain?’ Mattheüs asks.
Pa’s head nods feebly.
Mattheüs gets up from his haunches and goes to the kitchen, where he takes a measuring glass from a sterile cabinet and pours Oramorph, a syrupy morphine solution, from one of three brown bottles on the bottom shelf of the Kelvinator and carries it back and thinks how wise it is of Pa to acknowledge his pain and to permit himself one of the most potent of painkillers. He himself can never resist the temptation to sniff at the bottle when he unscrews the top, and again when he replaces the cap and returns the bottle to its two companions. He’s told Jack the stuff is in the house and they were both silent, not saying what they both thought they could get up to with it.
Pa licks the syrup from the crook of his arm. Then opens his eyelids, this time as if he really wants to survey his new, familiar environment. ‘The wedding photos,’ he says.
Clearly, so that it cannot be said afterwards that there was any doubt on this issue: ‘Pa, we thought it wasn’t necessary. It’s not as if you can see the things any more.’
‘It’s not about seeing, Mattie. You of all people, who are so focused on the unseen. I want all of them here with me. And the one of me and your mother at the Mercedes plant in Stuttgart. I remember it as if it were yesterday. With her hundred-per-cent pure wool two-piece she was very stylish that day. And with a blue opal necklace that Hannes brought her all the way from Australia. Man, you two! You’re trying to pull a fast one on me. It’s not as if I actually have to see the stuff,’ and he smiles mischievously, as if sneaking a bite of cake, and Mattheüs, who was on the point of getting irritated, melts a little.
He turns around with Samantha briskly at his heels, and fetches the photos from the wall above the bed – all of them, from small to large, the engagement, Ma with her first baby, Sissy, all. And to save time, he and Samantha pack towels between the glass so as to carry three or four at a time, and that’s how they leave his parents’ room, a devastated domain that won’t easily, if ever, be inhabited again. They cart the photos in their frames and take down the painting of the baobab tree in the Lowveld and other pretty ones and some of the lesser ones, Pa’s taste, and hang them in the study and stand them on the mantelpiece, wherever there’s a spot, Samantha with an underarm whiff from all the pottering about.
‘Pa, are you satisfied now?’
But the old man is asleep. On his left side, with the afternoon light through the tall windows fragmented by the long, pointy leaves of the frangipani beyond; light on his cheek, on the hillock of his hip, on his pyjama-sleeved arm lying exhausted on the bedspread. Thanks to the brown bottle, the old man will venture on distant journeys and arrive at fierce destinations. How his father used to warn him against substances and their consequences, things he really knew nothing about. Now he’s off to zombieland himself. By tomorrow at breakfast, with a soft-boiled egg he won’t eat, everything will be forgotten. Perhaps in an earlier fully aware era between father and son, if there ever was such a thing, he’d have noticed that. Whatever the case, he was too weak. He had thought the time was right, but then he wasn’t ready.
@ Clarence House, Jack facebooks a quickie to Matt. I = stink. Shower first?
Matt: Come as you are.
Jack: Okay, if you say so.
So Jack doesn’t change into fresh clothes. He likes fresh. Sounds exactly what it is. Okay, he keeps on his white shirt with the steel-blue stripe, blue tie with tiny pink dots, black pants, black nylon-and-cotton socks pulled up to just under his knees, and black pointy-toed shoes. Matt likes him like this, just as he’s been teaching all day. Not that he lets Matt call the tune, but he knows when he has to please. Tonight he’s got an issue, something he deliberately forgot to tell Matt. Let’s face it, Matt is a weirdo. Not because he likes sweat. That too. It’s just his whole mixed-up make-up. You don’t even know where to start. Take him as he is, but just remember. He’d like to meet the guy who can unpick that number.
He shuts the door of his flat on the ground floor of Jonathan Clarence House, the floor of the grade tens and nines. The top floor is for the grade elevens and twelves, the boys’ hostel where for the last three years he’s been the youngest resident housemaster to date and loving every minute of it. The first time in his life, just about. He walks along a pathway between flower beds and reaches the spot where a tree root has pushed up the cement. Zilverbosch Boys’ High is kept tidy, is very orderly and extremely PC. But he likes the root that refuses to conform.