Wolf, Wolf

by Eben Venter

  Further down on the left is a lawn under the helluva big tree where only the grade twelves get to hang out. To the left is the sandstone main building with a wide staircase right to the double doors, locked at this hour. Above the doors is the school crest with an inscribed cement ribbon plaited through its narrow end: Altius et Latius. Embossed letters in pale blue on white. Come the April holidays, he’ll clamber up there and repaint the peeling ‘s’. Funny, but that’s a bit of untidiness that does bother him. He cares about the place. He says this without a grain of sarcasm.

  During holidays, he’s just here. Boys’ voices absent from the grounds. He doesn’t go home, to Worcester. No ways. He doesn’t call on his mobile phone. His phone is private, reserved for good times. He’s crazy about all the things he can do on his iPhone. When he phones home, he prefers to do the old-fashioned thing and calls from the phone booth with the graffiti scratches on the panes: Why don’t Zilverbosch boys play rugby? Cos they row. ‘Row’ scratched out and written over with ‘fuck’. Outside on the cricket oval hadedas are signalling. ‘Not even for Christmas, Jack?’ his mother asks. What kind of question is that? It instantly gets his back up. She’s just asking that because she knows that’s what mothers are supposed to ask. Maybe he’s wrong. But all the same. He’s not going home just to put his possible, only possible, wrongness to the test.

  Blaze is the guard who sits in the hut at the gate of the grounds. Hey, Blaze. Good evening, Sir. Come dawn, the man will still be sitting there half asleep. One eye drooping, his radio on Umhlobo Wenene FM 88–104, and his mobile phone nestling in his hand. Next to him is his two-litre Coke, half finished. Jack walks right in the middle of the road, oak trees to the left and right on the pavements, their tops touching one another against the twilight sky.

  He’s walking, he’s not driving. His beautiful silver Renault Mégane, every cent of which he paid for himself, he’s pissed away. To be honest, sniffed away, up his nose. Oh, well. He’s still paying off that little trip of his. Buying a new pair of top-shelf shoes at Fabiani’s, for instance, out of the question. No sweat. Sure was a blast while it lasted. Except for the end of it. Probably on the cards, anyway. He has a history behind him, ha-ha, with consequences. (And he’s not talking about the money right now.) Matt knows most of the story. It’s an issue between them. Jack can’t even say how much it bothers him.

  He lights a cigarette as he walks. On Fridays, the boys are rumbustious, to use an old-fashioned word. The metre of the stanza, he’ll begin. And: If you’d only listen for a moment. With your minds and not your arses. They roar. Ag, forget it.

  So he just tries to keep some kind of order. And now and then he takes the opportunity to talk about life issues, but not in a cheap or clichéd way. He can do this, he reckons he knows his boys. They respect Mister Jack van Ryswyk. They call him Mister Richie, he doesn’t know why. When they talk about him in the corridors they don’t diss him. They’ve got nothing to say about him behind his back. He’d even go so far as to say the boys love him. Notes are pushed under the door of his flat at Clarence. Innocent. Pure. Usually to do with their un-sorted-out sexuality. And who is there to talk to among the staff?

  A watchdog behind one of the high walls bounds along to the tread of his shoes on the tarmac till he’s gone past. Here, every house has its wall with electrified steel fencing at the top, and remote-controlled gates. The class of house with swimming pools and pedigreed dogs that Zilverbosch Boys’ High pupils come from; definitely not him. As he walks, he eases down his pants and belt. Fashion. Matt thinks he doesn’t know how to wear his pants. He stubs his cigarette out on a stormwater drain without slowing down: how’s he going to break the news to Matt?

  When he reaches Campground, the thoroughfare, he spots Matt on the other side on Carlucci’s verandah before Matt sees him. Matt has tipped his chair back and is leaning against a wall with naively painted scenes of Venice. He picks up his half glass of beer and drains it in a swig. He’s wearing a black V-necked T-shirt. On his wrist, his beer hand, is his broad dark-brown leather band.

  Jack catches a vibe from Matt. Left, right, he checks for traffic, trots across the street. He recognises Matt’s shallow breathing from here: he knows what kind of man is waiting for him tonight. Matt is in his hell-raising mood. He’s just waiting for Jackie, as he calls him, so he can start. Maybe he already has, with Carlucci’s waiters, quite a few of them ex-Zilverbosch boys, all of them handsome in their way and brimming with confidence.

  He walks around the table and right up to Matt, who’s been watching him, and shakes his hand, but Matt grabs him by the tie and pulls him in to himself, into his smell that he knows so well. Jack laughs.

  And is still laughing when he walks into the restaurant to order two beers and two pizzas. What’s he like with Matt? Whatever it is, he can’t help it. He’s on automatic pilot. And what kind of person is Matt, actually? Sexually, he knows what Matt wants from him. The man is insatiable. Even after they’ve drunk and danced through the night, he can carry on till dawn. Jack picks up the beers, takes a sip of his own and wipes his mouth on his sleeve. Returns to the old thought: he’s too lightweight for Matt. He’s on borrowed time.

  Carlucci’s is a standard little Italian joint. Their pasta and pizzas are tasty, but nothing out of the ordinary. At ordinary prices and served on a red-and-white checked tablecloth, not quite clean. An older man with grey sideburns is sitting with a much younger, dark-haired woman and a black boy wearing an upmarket CK T-shirt, probably an adopted child – that’s the class of people who hang out here. A rainbow restaurant; and he’s not being cynical now. Their pizza with roasted pumpkin and strips of lamb and feta and thyme is their best dish.

  He leans in and notices how Matt, still in his tipped-back pose, spreads his hands in front of him and then runs them over his face like someone who’s tired or has been thinking of something and has now done with it. Maybe he’s misjudged Matt’s crazy mood.

  Matt signals to him no, he must shift in next to him rather than across from him. And immediately Matt puts his arm around his shoulder. Jack can feel the man’s hands on his cotton shirt. He knows the feel of Matt’s hands on his bare skin.

  Matt tells him what happened today in their house. All of it, as you might read it in a story. What the morphine does to his father and all, and how he noticed Samantha’s sexiness. (Jack laughs. Matt’s obsession with the male body is above suspicion.) And how ugly and cluttered but in a way quite cosy the study seems now, and so forth.

  It’s a dream of a house. He’d never in his life been inside a place like this. Cape Dutch, number nine Poinsettia Road, est. 1890. He’s visited there, though not all that often. He’s eaten there at least once with Uncle Bennie and Matt, traditional bobotie with all the sambals in little dishes. The pain-in-the-Christian-arse Aunt Sannie from next door was also there that evening. Buggered up everything. Every conversation she sort of censors. Like, they were talking about the guinea fowl on the Zilverbosch playing fields. And how well they’re adapting in cities, and then Matt mentioned his mother (Jack never knew her) and her recipe for guinea fowl that he still remembers. And then, would you believe it, Aunt Sannie barges in with quails this and quails that, a story from the Old Testament. The Israelites just caught them by hand, clearly impossible.

  And that was still okay, but then they talked about the new digitally enhanced version of Last Tango in Paris showing at the Labia. Which Aunt Sannie hasn’t seen and will most definitely not see, but from their talk she gathers what it’s about. (Marlon Brando stuffing the slab of butter up Maria Schneider, and all that.) And then she started. Movies, food, manners, everything stuffed into a moral straitjacket so that you want to scream: please just fuck off back to your double-storey mansion from where, Matt says, she never stops spying on them with her binoculars on a tripod. Anyway, if it hadn’t been for her, Jack thinks the conversation would have flowed more freely. As he’d like it to be
with a prospective father-in-law, ha-ha. In his old age, Uncle Bennie is more receptive to and curious about almost everything. Okay, so he has his little list of thou-shalt-nots, but he’s a Reformed Church man and doesn’t force the stuff down your throat like Aunt Sannie who belongs to a charismatic thing.

  Carlucci’s verandah is packed. The rainbow customers eat and drink and chatter, and schoolkids with mobile-phone glow reflected onto their boyish faces don’t miss a single word of the table talk as they thumb away on their mobile phones.

  Again and again, Matt comes back to the cheque issue. The unsigned cheque. ‘Two more beers and two tequila shooters,’ when the waiter brings the pizzas. It’s a Malawian guy, Fulumirani. He sends just about every cent of his earnings home to his family. Tall and blue-pitch-black and built like someone who’s grown up doing manual labour and got his toning that way rather than by hanging around in gyms. Fulumirani always laughs about the meaning of Fulumirani: long trip. He wants to become a journalist.

  ‘Matt, I’ll skip the shooter. I can’t tonight. I have to – Something’s turned up.’

  ‘When I ask him again – okay I haven’t yet, what am I saying – when I ask Pa, I’ll go all the way and ask him for a hundred thousand more. Okay, now I can see how it works. That’s why I had to wait. Why it wasn’t possible to ask him today. I can see it all clearly now.’

  Two shooter glasses arrive at their table, green-and-gold Springboks. Jack and Matt both look to the left. With compliments to Mister Richie from an ex-pupil.

  ‘Off to California on a swimming scholarship. Lucky devil. No, but he deserves it all the way,’ Jack says about the ex-pupil. ‘Are you here by car?’ he asks Matt. He’s referring to Uncle Bennie’s. Mercedes E-Class, white, but it never looks plain white to him. It’s a kind of ivory or meerschaum. And then the camel-brown seats inside.

  ‘Or maybe I must just do it on my own.’ Matt pushes away the pizza; he’s eaten only three wedges. He looks back to get the waiter’s attention for more drinks and then rests his head on his hands clasped together behind it, making a triangle of his arms. ‘Maybe I should try to do it all on my own steam. But how?’ He addresses the table from the bowl of his arms. Jack knows the hair on his arms well.

  ‘Aren’t you going to finish your pizza?’ He leans across and takes Matt’s pizza and slides it in front of himself. Personally, if he’d been Uncle Bennie’s son and come back from years of travelling around overseas, he wouldn’t be asking for money. Not that Matt doesn’t deserve it. Totally. I mean, look what he’s doing for his father now. That’s sacrifice, that, first-class sacrifice. His sister won’t be driving all the way to the Cape just to mope by the bedside of a dying old man, day after godforsaken day. But if you add it all up, say for the few years or so that he’s known Matt. What he’s talking about is access to bucks. That’s what Matt’s got, which other people can only dream about. Access, that’s what counts. No, to be honest, if he’d been in Matt’s shoes he wouldn’t have had the guts to ask his father for yet another cheque, half-dead or not. His father. Fuck it, when he thinks of his own father. Mechanic for a while, and then chucked it all. Where’s he now? Gone without a trace, pal. The cunt ditched his own family. His mother, him. Jack his son? No ways. East London or somewhere. Who cares.

  ‘Maybe I should shut the fuck up. You’ll do what you want to anyway,’ Jack says, taking another wedge from the pizza that now, at room temperature, is even tastier. Another round of drinks arrives. Jack pushes his shooter across to Matt.

  ‘What are you on about, Jack? Why should you shut up, about what? You’ve said almost nothing all night. What’s the matter now?’

  ‘Matt, listen, please don’t be pissed off with me. I forgot. You also forget sometimes. It’s a question of totally, as in totally, impossible.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When I’m finished here I have to go. Can’t go out with you tonight. Please, Matt.’ (Matt’s way of turning to him and looking at him from under his eyebrows.) ‘You’ve also got your responsibilities. I have to get up very early tomorrow morning. Me and Jamie, the English teacher. He can’t drive. He hasn’t got a licence. A total retard. We have to take nine boys to Misverstand Dam. And the boat. It’s out at Moorreesburg. Totally impossible. Can’t wriggle out of it. I have to drive. You’ve met Jamie. Red hair. Straight and shy. Matt?’

  ‘If there’s one person on earth who knows how to put a fucking crowbar of a spoke in my wheel, it’s you, Jack. I don’t understand. After this whole day with all its shit, and you don’t want to go out with me.’

  ‘I want to, I always want to. But not tonight. Give me a break, Matt. It’s my job.’

  Matt grabs the Malawian waiter round the waist as he passes, orders another drink, and leans across to him: ‘Will you have a last beer with your lover or is that too much to ask?’

  Way over the limit, he slides in behind the wheel, and despite Jack’s (responsible) jibes he drops him at Clarence, and, as expected or not expected, Jack won’t let him come in even though he’s told him he’s desperate for a blow job, and so he kissed him passionately and Jack it was who gave in, yielded in spite of himself and got out, tore himself out, driven by a sense of responsibility you only develop when you know there’s nobody to wipe your arse if you fuck up, because you’ve got nobody.

  At that moment, in the almost ominous half-light of the Zilverbosch grounds, wild figs dripping with early dew and rows of clivias in single file with their bottle-green leaves, he experiences a sensation of unravelling; he’s all fired up, and so, in a spirit of good will, one might say, he releases his Jackie to go where he must.

  Then he drives out of the gates and the guard with the nice teeth waves at him. He pulls up some distance down the road, just outside the Zilverbosch grounds, to look for the bottle of water that’s rolled in under the seat and tunes his iPod to Proton, a Chicago radio station that streams electronic music, plugs it in and lets the powerful speakers pump it out all round him and sits like that for a long time, smokes one, two cigarettes and downs the whole bottle of water, gets out and angle-pisses against one of the high security walls, slowly, as a man who was hoping for something else pisses. An ADT security guard comes cycling past, ‘evening brother,’ he says to the guard to keep up the lingo and the ADT guard with the crackling two-way set nods uncertainly and pedals on. He shakes off and spits to one side and reckons he’s sober enough to drive to town. With drum and bass permeating his body on the N2, he thinks of nothing at all, and keeps his head empty and open like that without even trying.

  The club is pumping already. Heat pours from the entrance so that you get that familiar club fug as you approach. He walks in, flanked left and right by two bull-necked bouncers, one black and one white, both dealing with stroppy clients, both dressed in black with bouncer batons, black leather, in the right hand.

  He orders a Black Label from one of the bare-chested bar-boys with attitude, and moves over to one side to light a cigarette, and soon, say on the third puff, Daniel sidles up to him. Daniel pronounced in the French way, a man who always cosies up to him because he judges him on his jeans and classy Adidas shoes as someone with money. Warm breath in his ear, Daniel advertises his wares. He trusts him, but also not. Each man for himself – he follows Daniel down and on the stairs to the lowest level where the cubicles of toilets number one, two, three, and four come into sight, and the darkness turns blue-black. As he steps down onto the floor strewn with unidentifiable objects, for a split second he sees this gateway to hell through the eyes of Benjamin Duiker, the total destruction of everything decent, then rejects the vision and enters cubicle number four with Daniel, the only available toilet, not that you’d expect to find toilet paper or a toilet seat for your arse or anything similar there. From his pocket, a small Ziploc with the goods. R100 tonight. He uses the word ‘partager’, a French-sounding word that seems to mean ‘partake’. Daniel now offers rather to p
artager his body, tasty, smooth and muscled, in exchange for the money for the shit. He supplies, Mattheüs pays, Daniel keeps the shit.

  ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute.’ As turned on as he was a moment ago, he’s now more in the mood for the shit in the Ziploc that Daniel has stuffed back into his jeans pocket. He is given what he wants. He trusts the man.

  And so he drifts off, and he hadn’t even wanted to – or had he? Back among the clubbers on the first level, he no longer contemplates them with quite the same heartfelt compassion as before. They now seem hard and narcissistic, even the women. He hadn’t wanted to, you see. Drowsily, he squeezes past the crowd to the counter and orders two seriously sugary cans with a high concentration of caffeine, and pays laboriously; it takes an hour, or so it feels. He sways off, and downs the cans one after the other. Daniel walks past once again, winks (he trusts him), looking for new clients. He hadn’t wanted to. All he’d wanted was to mingle with the people and to love everybody.

  When he gets outside, dawn is breaking. A feeble little drizzle edges seawards from the mountain and moistens his skin. He must, must get to the fish-and-chip shop in Observatory – the premises he wants to rent and bind to his name to contractually. He walks fast, but not so as to appear afraid, across to the BP garage. Three people slouch up to him and ask for money and food and shit; he avoids their eyes. He joins the back of the queue snaking through the shelves of sweets and biltong and magazines to the cash register, and buys a bottle of water allegedly from the springs of Franschhoek, and cigarettes. To round it off, he selects from a perspex cabinet a chocolate doughnut, its lower crescent dipped in pink icing sugar, forges his way out, and walks to his father’s car. Tonight’s car guard is Etienne, in a pink-and-white striped Lacoste. He pays him R15 for the white car that’s standing there without a scratch or a dent.