by Eben Venter
He glides onto a stretch of freeway, and beyond the city centre he slips off to Main and cruises calmly through Woodstock and Salt River, with all the grey security doors lowered over shop windows and locked at pavement level with industrial padlocks, a never-ending wall of exclusion in the early-morning hours. In Observatory he parks right across from his shop on the corner of Main and Albertyn, still with the To Let / Te Huur sign on its window. He mutters a little prayer of gratitude that the place is still there. This week he must take the bull by the horns – cheque, contract with the owner of the building, licence to trade as a restaurant. Another week, then it’s all settled. Then he can start his new life. The old man will be pleased, no doubt about it: something of his entrepreneurship in his son after all. Always knew his Mattie had it in him. He laughs at his sudden clench of fear at the plan, and gets into the car; Pa would call it having little faith. If the shop was fated to be taken, the sign would definitely have been painted over with ‘Let’. He aims and takes a photo of it with his phone. It’s his proof that it’s fated to become his. He stuffs the rest of the doughnut, sweet solace, into his mouth.
When he presses the remote at their gate – there’s also an intercom where you can punch in the code – his electronic music is turned down out of consideration for the old man, who is by now lying wide awake (pondering his life). Just then, Aunt Sannie from next door walks out onto Poinsettia Road, freshly bathed and all dolled up. She’s carrying food wrapped in clingwrap, and has Janneman on a leash. She places the food on the lid of the green dustbin in front of her gate. It’s leftovers of her famous Madeira cake that has started to mould; he can see the green from here. She’s leaving it out for the bergies. Then she prepares for her morning constitutional to buy Die Burger or some milk, looks up, pretends she’s only just noticed him, waves exuberantly, and just about yanks little Janneman’s head from his obese body. Behind his shades, Mattheüs nods just enough to register a greeting, presses the button of the passenger window to cut her off, and drives inside.
The strange thing is that in the entrance hall he now has to reckon with a presence just to the right, in the study. In fact, one of the double doors is ajar, not as he’d left it the previous afternoon, which means that the old man went to the toilet during the night.
He pops his head round the door. ‘Morning, Pa.’
‘Mattie, come here.’ The voice extremely feeble so early in the morning.
‘Pa, do you need anything? So, how did it go in the night?’
‘Do you know, I now have to sit when I want to make water? Have I told you this?’
‘Pa.’ He’s feeling the chill, his system sluggish with drink and Daniel’s cocaine and the all-night action. Back at home it’s okay to be defenceless, like he is right now; he’s just not equipped to listen to his father.
‘You know, Mattie, this illness drains the last little bit of manliness out of you. It’s a terrible thing to endure. If I didn’t have my faith, I wouldn’t have made it. My rock and my salvation. There’s nothing or nobody else to cling to. Pa wants you to remember that one day.’
‘If Pa is okay with everything now, I’ll get going.’
‘You must just leave some toilet paper in there for me. I couldn’t feel if there was any left. Apart from that, I don’t need anything, my son. I thought perhaps you could come and sit here for a while.’
He looks at the person in the bed. Pa is lying on his back with his face turned to the window. The curtains are half-drawn, as he left them late yesterday afternoon. The water carafe on the bedside table isn’t empty yet; there’s no need to go all the way in, up to the bed. There’s enough light, it’s nice and friendly there. The problem isn’t the light, though – something Pa can still sense. It’s the smell. The study, with its pleasant blend of smells, is a thing of the past. He’s sorry about that, sorry for Pa who’ll never again smell things like he used to. When Jassie had to be put down, also from cancer, his father said, ‘No, I’ll never get another dog. Jas was my last. Did you see how he shied away from me? I know, my son. It’s the cancer. The after-smell of the chemo. Jas stopped knowing me as his owner long ago. Poor animal.’
His father turns his face to the study doors, to him.
‘Can’t now, Pa. I’m dead on my feet. I need to sleep.’
‘But did you enjoy it, at least? It’s already morning, you know.’
‘It was all right. Just a club. Nothing special. If Pa doesn’t need anything, I’ll be off. I’ll make breakfast a bit later. After you’ve listened to your usual stuff.’
‘You need the rest, Mattie. Go and lie down for a while. I wanted to tell you something I remembered. My mind is sometimes so clear in the morning.’
‘I smell bad. Smoke and stuff. Pa doesn’t like it.’
‘I like the smell of beer on you. It’s nice. I just wanted to tell you something. But it can wait.’
‘G’night, Pa. Sleep well or whatever,’ he whispers to soften the impact. He has to get away from there. Not to be cruel, but he simply can’t right now. He turns away from the smell, caustic, the skin of a body cooling down permanently, just giving off a metallic dampness; appalling to have such a chemical smell on a human being, you can’t imagine it. He tiptoes to his room, turns the key, and as the metal tongue slides into its groove, a tremor runs through him. A warning that he has to get to the toilet. He knows it and knows he can avoid it, it comes and goes and is really only a physical sign that he’s about to enter the frontiers of his own world. He’s had it – head on the pillow and he’ll be gone. But he doesn’t allow himself that. He pushes himself, his nerve endings exposed; man, you must try to understand it. It’s a bit like shingles. The agony of your desires, the blessed, unconsummated desire that urges him on beyond all rational thought. He’s operating only at the level of his last remaining senses.
The curtains remain drawn, and in the bluish glow of his laptop, always switched on, he goes across to it, swipes the touchpad of his seventeen-inch screen, clicks on the bar at the top, and opens Bookmarks, chooses a porn site, shudders afresh with the pressure in his arse, raw randiness, and, while waiting for the site to load, peels off his stinking clothes. Wearing only underpants, he grabs the computer and places it to the right of him on the bed, folding the blanket so that the screen faces him at the optimal angle for sharpness. His bed is unmade; Samantha never comes in here, it’s his choice. He snuggles into the blankets and makes himself comfortable on his right side and explores the website while one of the videos starts up. Most are pirate copies distributed over a network of sites. All are hosted on Tumblr, and each photo or video on a site is linked to another site, apparently hundreds of them. If breach of copyright causes a video to be wiped on one of the sites, you can download it on a whole lot of others. He opens up eight videos, checking if the actors are his type, and if not he closes them one by one until he eventually finds one that’s to his taste – brown Brazilians in a palm forest – the cigarette still unlit between his lips.
He skims through the formula of every video: courtship (sic), undressing, touching and feeling, groping and gripping, oral fuck and the final full fuck of penetration. Over and over, the images flicker on his retina, switching on that part of his brain that helps him to manufacture a private erotic experience and take himself in hand and bring himself to the point of satisfaction – but not all the way – and to click over to the next video with its variation on the formula and then over to another that opens full-bore on the penetration scene and makes his hand, the palm sticky and smeared with the mucus of spit and pre-cum, fall open, and makes him keel over onto the right-hand corner of his computer, and his eyes flicker, not in time with the action of the penetrator, but slower, heavier, so that he falls asleep in that haven of his bedroom, his clothes crumpled on the floor next to other clothes from other days, and odd shoes in and out of the wardrobe, his towel from his last shower over the wardrobe doo
r, and recipe books open and turned over on their faces, other, older, possessions from his childhood, all the smells familiar and not unpleasant, Jack likes them, few other people ever have any contact with them, above his bed a photo of himself and his mother under the willow on Pa’s family farm in Laingsburg, socks worn and unworn on the floor and the carpet, on the desk a Coke, and a square box of soil with the experimental sprouts all half-dead or etiolating from the continuous darkness, three containers of deodorant (the one he likes best has a smoky, nutmeg aroma, almost like a wholesome man-breath, if such a thing exists), DVDs, several books from the time (age seven) that he started reading up to now, a small framed black-and-white photo of Kafka as a young man with middle parting and collar and tie that he’d bought on a bridge in Prague, lots of other objects directly or indirectly connected to his development and self-development. Okay, so Jack’s been in here many times. But essentially the room is for his own use, his castle.
He opens his eyes. There’s a man on the screen whose symmetrical chest hair follows the twin undulations of his pectoral muscles to his sternum, the man is sitting handling himself on a blood-red sofa covered in some easy-wipe material, the man has milky droplets on the snail trail from his navel to the fringe of his fuck-fur and remains like that freeze-framed on the red sofa, legs spread wide.
The tip of Mattheüs’s index finger starts moving automatically, tickles the touchpad to the next website, all of them in Bookmarks. There are up to seventeen different sites, apart from the extensive Tumblr network, which he regards as the ultimate porn site and which, strangely, he keeps secret as if other people mightn’t stumble upon it. He finds two actors who take his fancy and arranges the pillows behind his back and leans back and picks up the crumpled underpants, lifts himself and puts them on again and takes hold of himself in the green-and-white elasticised cotton material and follows the whole on-screen ritual again until his head is light, his body chilled with sweat, the fluid he still manages to produce thin and watery, and yet he floats on, on, the images no longer on the screen but fused onto his retina, impressed upon his brain, which after one-and-a-half-years of obsessive porn-watching needs a daily fix, otherwise you’d find him hanging about hungry, jittery with a day’s worth of quick-fix jobs, his mood feverish, though he did make an exception for his father’s tomato stew and simmered and supervised it for a whole day, the preparation efficient and just this side of rushed – you can’t have that with food – at last, like now, to reach his source of nourishment in his darkened room. There’s nothing more to be said.
At one stage he lowers the volume, thought he’d heard a shuffling at the door or his father ringing the bell. Nothing. He switches from the video he was watching and surfs to a new one, twenty-eight minutes long, as the window in the bottom right-hand corner tells him. He moves the cursor until he finds his kind of action at the thirteen-minute mark and carries on manhandling himself, striped underpants half on, half off, until he falls asleep again, wakes up again facing a frozen image and slides his index finger along the pad at once, hunt and peck, now completely independent of his conscious self so that the longer he carries on, the less he knows whether the images are spooling in front of him or inside him. After each doze he wakes up without any memory of dreams, at most a single, persistent image of the porn star François Sagat bending over and tying his shoelaces on a beach – he’s on sea sand, a perfect butt if ever there was one – which he wakes up to, and eventually after the fifth or sixth or seventh time he wakes up without any image in his head, without remembering anything of the twenty or thirty films he’s run through, no action that stands out, not a single actor he can recall. He’ll be able to sleep now, purified at last of the urge, until it returns like a monstrous thirst after an orgy of eating salt: that’s how he understands it without wanting to mess with it or relieve himself of it, without ever telling everything to Jack, or to anyone.
Benjamin Duiker turns his head on the pillow and lightly touches the hands of the clock. (When his sight started to go, he peeled off the convex face of the alarm clock with his penknife.) It’s half past eight.
The first chore is to sit up and put on his slippers. Groping for the left slipper, he touches the floor by accident and rubs his two fingers together. Mattie will have to have some vacuuming done here.
The second chore is to make his way across the room to the door. Last night he bumped himself against the corner of the desk; the other two must have moved it from its original position, which he has a good idea of. He’ll take that bruise to the grave with him. There’s quite enough time before the start of the service. A Pastor Mikey Bruins of the Apostolic Church, Parow South, is taking the service. They’ve got such a soppy way of saying ‘Jesus’.
He’s got himself as far as the door. He’s light on his feet, he must tell Mattie that. There are so many things he still wants to tell him. See, he always had such a heavy tread. His staff always knew when he was coming. He liked leather soles for working shoes. He wore German shoes, the Marc brand, and he preferred a rich brown colour. His heavy tread meant that he had to have them resoled often, on the market square in front of the city hall, there at Solly’s. When Solly held out his properly resoled shoes in a paper bag and he opened it to inspect the handiwork, which was never actually necessary, he could smell the food Solly and his family had eaten at home. His sense of smell was always pretty sharp. If he had to smell now, it’d just be an old withered leaf.
From the top of his head to the tip of his toes he’s lighter. He’s lost how much fat and bone mass? ‘Mister Duiker,’ Solly used to say, his worker’s hands touching his own as he passed the paper bag, ‘I’m told Mister Duiker’s cars are selling like hot cakes.’ And then old Solly would roar out his laugh, to this day he’d be able to pick it out from other men’s voices and traffic noise. If only he could get out once more to mingle with the creatures on the Lord’s earth. What kind of unthinkable place is it that he’s headed for? There is no true revelation in that regard. Dominee Roelf agrees. About that, you’re left in the dark for the time being. What he wants to tell Mattie, now, is how unusually well he’s feeling this morning. The nausea has gone down a bit. Not gone altogether, but it’s bearable. He’s learnt to live with it. And that’s why he’s such a featherweight, it’s the oddest thing on earth.
He stands still there, with his old body that can’t even dent the inner soles of his slippers (can you believe it, Mattie?), and tries to listen down the passage to his son’s room. He suspects that part of his hearing has come back since he’s had to rely on just four senses. Mattie is still awake. He was convinced he’d gone to sleep. He hears a rustling and voices. He must remember to tell Mattie about his visions after taking the morphine. It’s enough to really scare him.
Mattie. Step by step he walks on. It’s wide and easy and open here in the entrance hall. He goes into the toilet and touch-feels until he’s seated. He can’t get the child out of his mind as he sits, waiting for it to come. His urine stinks, he thinks. A miserable little piddle, too, and it seeps out, all burning. How he remembers the day on the dam wall on their farm when he and Hannes wanted to see who could piss furthest. He was sixteen, grown up, he had a bull of a prick already and his stream arched thick and high. Out of sheer jealousy his brother knocked him over, and as he fell his piss sprayed a sort of drizzle.
When he’s finished in the toilet and has checked that he’s done everything there that needs doing, he gets up to listen again down the passage for Mattie. He’s unsettled, his child, he can hear it even from Mattie’s breathing when he bends over him in his sickbed. Mattie never sits with him for long. What he manages to get of Mattie’s time, he more or less has to steal. ‘I’m coming in a minute, Pa.’ But he doesn’t come. He asks him to peel his apple, anything, just to keep him by his bedside a little longer. It’s no use. His heart bleeds for his son. He’d hoped that the overseas trip he financed at considerable cost would motivate him. But Mattie
returned with a renewed restlessness. He pities him with all his heart. He doubts Mattie’s faith in the Almighty. It hurts him very much. If only Providence would make him end this thing with Jack. It’s a passing phase, oh, he’s never doubted that. Even though Sannie from next door says differently. Mattie has his head screwed on right. Not quite his head for business, but still, quick on the uptake. Look, let him put it like this, this Jack chap is not a bad boy. But for Mattie, no good can come down that path. What on earth are these influences that have now sucked in his son too? If only Mattie could see it in that light. He prays every day for a change of heart – except when he has to swallow his dose, there’s no time for prayers then. If only he’d find someone to share his life and set up home and settle down. Mattie’s such a good-looking boy. Now that he’s lost his sight he wants to say it to him: Mattie, come here so that I can touch your face.
He passes his desk and sees-remembers his things there, the fountain pen in the blue glass globe with inlaid bubble eyes that always make him think of a frog. Daimler-Benz engraved on it. It was a gift from the time he was chosen as one of the ten best dealers in South Africa, when his whole trip to Germany was paid for. His wife’s ticket he paid for himself. Heavens, those Germans knew how to treat them. They were waited on hand and foot. Schweinebraten. The taste of it nauseates him, as he now remembers it.
At the back of the desk on the right is his old Philips tape recorder. A reel-to-reel, as they used to say. He’ll use that. All his secretaries over the years, Leandra Kruger, Jeanette – another Kruger, had such a hard time with her weight – and then the last and prettiest of the bunch, Jaydee Minnaar. He often dictated his letters on the Philips and then they had to type them out with no mistakes on the Duiker’s letterhead. But Jaydee Minnaar made many a slip, from the very first sentence. The soft flesh of her palm suddenly on his forearm: Mister Duiker, I’ll fix those little things for you in a jiffy. He overlooks her slips – how else?