by Eben Venter
Then Mikey whispers that he’s pissed on one of the grade tens. Immediately, Jack realises that this could cause trouble. All the details, please. Firstly: who was it? Mikey says it was Moenien Albertse. Moenien had been standing in the middle, surrounded by the senior boys. He could have left the circle if he’d wanted, but he didn’t. Then he, Mikey, took his dick out of his pants and started pissing on Moenien, because he had a piss on board.
‘Did you mean it like this? Did you plan it in advance?’
‘I suppose so, sir.’ He’d taken aim and started pissing on Moenien from where his gym pants started, no higher, no piss got onto his T-shirt, he’s sure of that, and then all the way down onto his legs and knees and onto his feet. He’d saved up a helluva piss, that’s the thing.
‘Was Moenien barefoot?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So on his feet too?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘On his chest?’
‘No, sir, you can ask anyone. Ask Moenien, all of them. Just from his gym shorts down. No higher.’
‘On his hands?’
‘No, sir. Maybe. No, I don’t think so. He took his hands away. Out of the way.’
‘How long did it take?’
‘I can’t say exactly, sir. A piss is a piss.’
‘So what did Moenien do then? When you’d finished.’
‘Moenien laughed, sir.’
‘Do you realise the consequences of what you’ve done? You could be expelled?’
‘Yes, sir. Not exactly, sir.’
Jack shines the torch straight in his face. He can’t see any remorse. Mikey’s expression is clean and shameless. For Jack, that’s the deciding factor. There’s no ulterior motive here. It’s permitted because it’s possible. That’s what he reads into the blond boy’s face.
‘Okay then, Mikey. I’m going to have to think about it. We can talk again tomorrow. In the meantime go to bed.’
‘Sir?’ Then Mikey wants him to hug him first before going back to his tent. The boys do that. In that brief moment of physical closeness, the boy is at once vulnerable and unconsciously erotic. (To him.) Easy to exploit the younger one then, but Jack is a rock in that respect. Simultaneously hot-blooded and cool. One foot wrong and it’s bye-bye Zilverbosch. He’s often discussed it with Matt. The scarce commodity of integrity. What he knows is that a weakling is not the man for Matt. He’s inherited that attitude from the old man.
After breakfast the next morning, two slices of white bread with sausage and tomato sauce in between, they have a heart-to-heart, Mikey and Moenien and the two of them, he and his young colleague. Right there in front of the teachers’ tent. Jack knows what he wants to say. He sees the mist rising from the dam, leaving a damp film on everyone’s arms. He looks at the crows flying up from the ploughed fields on the other side of the dam and then settling in patches on the brown soil. He looks at Jamie. His unshaven chin is ginger, the stubble varies from golden-red to whitish-pink as he moves his head in the morning sun, his shoulders hunched up in a green tracksuit top. Jack suspects it’s not the damp. The man is uncomfortable about the conversation with Mikey and Moenien. He doesn’t know what to do next. He’s afraid he’ll put a foot wrong.
Moenien seems relaxed, and in the course of the conversation it’s clear that he’s been unaffected by the pissing. It was nothing. He’s even proud of it, because as a rower and a bullshitter, Mikey inspires respect among the juniors. While they’re talking, Moenien is squatting on his haunches. He loses his balance, and Mikey takes him by the shoulders to right him.
The race thing, thank heaven, isn’t dragged into it. (Jack had been afraid of that.) Among themselves, he and Jamie and the two boys decide that not a word will be uttered about the whole affair. Neither to the parents nor to the principal, Mr Richard Richardson. Nobody’s been harmed, nobody need suffer any further on account of a rash deed. Mikey shakes Moenien’s hand and apologises. Moenien says it’s cool.
When the two walk off, Jamie wants to go and pack his stuff inside the tent. Jack calls him back. He looks at his colleague. ‘You’re sure about this, are you, Jamie? It’s the right thing to do? It was a joint decision?’
Jamie nods.
‘You’re absolutely sure, Jamie?’
He nods again. Jack puts out his hand. Deal. The redhead glances at him briefly. As in, almost not. He doesn’t open his mouth again. Then Jack sees a puniness in the man that puts him off. And knows for sure what he’s suspected all along – he and the teacher are never going to hit it off. He’s seen something in him that’s too close to the bone, something about himself he doesn’t like any more. He’s long since outgrown it, that’s for sure.
Pa wants one of his pale-blue shirts to wear to the oncology clinic. And his tweed jacket.
‘Pa will be too hot, it’s not cold outside.’ He helps him with his shoelaces, on his knees while tying them for his father. Perhaps it is better here in the study after all. Pa hasn’t been morose since moving here. It’s the clinic visits that make him anxious, in fact even before he got sick, that he’ll fall or wound himself, or that somebody will hurt him by handling him roughly.
‘And Pa’s cheque book lying out here in the open?’ He picks it up from the bedside cabinet to put it back where it belongs.
‘Oh that, yes. No, just a little help I gave to Sannie and them.’
‘Yes?’ He flips to the last counterfoil. He hates this kind of thing before he’s even finished reading. He hates Aunt Sannie for strolling in here as if the place belonged to her.
‘Pa, I know this is your business and I suppose I’ve got no say in it; who the hell is the Silver Cloud Christian Fellowship?’ He hates it that Aunt Sannie’s been in here handling his father’s cheque book.
‘Oh, that. You’ve looked. But no, I don’t mind if you take an interest in my affairs, Mattie. I’ll never hold that against you. Not in my condition.’
‘Who is the Silver Cloud, Pa?’
‘You see, it’s this charity organisation of Sannie’s. It all goes to the poor whites up in Krugersdorp. Apparently there are more than three hundred of them. I can’t remember offhand the name of the caravan park, but that’s where they live. All of them in caravans. Apparently those people are having a really bad time.’
‘Silver Cloud?’
‘You’ll have to ask Sannie about that, Mattie. She’s the treasurer and so on. She administers the charity. But we have to get going now, son. I want to get it over and done with.’
He takes his father firmly by the arm, tries to anticipate his needs and helps him along when they get to the Panorama Clinic, which looks like the Cape Grace Hotel, but is actually a hospital; just look at the kinds of flowers and the size of the arrangements in the entrance hall and you’ll know more or less what your bill will be. Pa is on the Motor & Allied Worker’s Insurance, he’s paid in literally thousands since selling his first Chevy. (It was only later that Benjamin Duiker, once he’d become a truly outstanding salesman, acquired the Mercedes-Benz agency. In his father’s words: that’s not for every Tom, Dick, and Harry.)
Through the lobby, he leads the man – good morning, Mr Duiker – and they trundle along on this day, Wednesday of every month, he with the old man with the sunken cheeks, his father who still looks human – fuck it, you must see him post-chemo if you’re thinking walking skeleton. And all the time, during the drive here along the N1 and throughout his mutterings, if he so much as brakes a bit too hard or the back of his father’s head tilts back a millimetre in pulling off at the Parow off-ramp – other people, normal passengers entrusting themselves to the driver, wouldn’t even notice the hiccup, whatever – throughout the drive here and now in the lift as big as a medium-sized storeroom (dreadful in there, a real terror trap), up to the oncology unit, his mood is darkening, which makes it impossible for him to behave equably, like he
was when he got up after jerking off, without even watching porn; he did, after all, greet the day or at least the morning with a measure of self-control, and the success contributed to an invincibly positive attitude and even deep compassion towards the man he’s going to help today to do one of the most terrible things you can do.
Now that resolve has been scuppered, he’s the hell in, and all because of two words: Silver Cloud. A preponderance of curlicues in the capital S and C, the handwriting of an imbecile or a dyslexic moron, on the last counterfoil that does his head in: what the hell is going on here?
The transparent liquid, almost like liquid KY, suspended from a frame on wheels, everyone knows the contraption, and a tap at the top of the pipe leading to the needle, drips over a period of five hours drop by drop into his poor father’s body to finally destroy such little function as his organs are still capable of.
Just ask him, Mattheüs, when he’s holding the oblong Belleek dish, decorated with grass-green clover leaves, under Pa’s chin. Ask him what he sees emerging from the innards of this human being. What the colour is of this vomiting forth, and he’ll tell you now: this man is going to die, and it’s not because of the overabundance of so-called CD20 cells that convert the normal lymph cells to cancerous lymphoma cells. Why his father chose that delicate little dish – his mother used it for petit fours and not even always, well, he assumed that, as with all other things, his father wanted nothing but the best. If he must puke, let it be in Belleek.
Fuck. Brown gunge, an unholy brown, a colour you associate with the devil himself, not that he believes in that trumped-up creature. This sludgy slime that Pa tries to void his body of and that the body itself rejects, for heaven’s sake – even if Professor Jannie de Lange, the oncologist, can’t see it – is an alarming colour, if ever there was one. It’s the consequence of the MabThera manufactured in a laboratory as anti-CD20 treatment. But while the self-destructive mechanism is switched on, intentions undeniably good, the healthy organs are also attacked and destroyed.
Mattheüs takes his father’s wrist, the one without the needle, and bends down and presses his lips against the cool, scared skin and stays like that with bowed head, handkerchief out of his pocket so that the other patients undergoing chemo, family and loved ones, in that waiting room stinking of sickness and suffering, shouldn’t see that there are tears. Such physical closeness between father and son is uncommon. He’s never kissed his father like that.
Later he fetches a You from a pile of magazines and flips it open on a photo of the Beckhams, the most impeccably dressed family on earth, and hangs his head low; tears won’t stop, he’s crying about more than just this.
Only by recalling the lurking name of Silver Cloud Christian Fellowship can he temper his sadness. He’ll forbid the bloodsucker to enter their yard. As soon as he’s home he’ll phone the technician to come and change the gate code, so that those who have no business to enter can be locked out for ever.
Ten thousand. Just like that. He smells a huge rat. And he, primary caregiver, can’t bring himself to ask Pa to help him with a cheque. Or, or, he can talk to Aunt Sannie himself. It’s just that the woman has a way with him. She fetches him when she’s spotted him on the screen at her own gate: oh, that’s Bennie’s Mattheüs, plonks him down on her cream-coloured puffed-out sofa in her sunroom with its uninterrupted view of their house (those binoculars are hidden somewhere), and then the tea arrives with those golden-brown koeksisters, no bigger than a smallish thumb, the syrup tempered with a dash of lemon juice. The woman has something of his mother or Granny Fransien (on his father’s side), or the universal mother, and with her broad, hospitable lap she draws him in, all the way.
On the N1 back to the city Pa sits hunched up, clammy with all the injected MabThera combined with chemo and finally paracetamol or antihistamine to prevent allergic reactions.
To think about the treatment as Mattheüs does is impossible for his father. Professor Jannie de Lange can’t put a foot wrong in his blinded eyes. It’s a matter of grasping at the last straw. And outside the Panorama Clinic, on the raised parking reserved for doctors and specialists, you can see them lined up: the latest models on the market, the fruit of long and reasoned conversations with men and women on the verge of dying: the operation and the treatment can prolong your life, Mister Duiker, so many of our patients have benefited immeasurably from it, extended their lives, now they can look forward to cake and cool drinks under a willow tree with their grandchildren, ag, it gives us such pleasure (modest little chuckle).
Just once, as they slip onto the Muizenberg exit, does he admit to having doubts about Aunt Sannie coming to beg for her old projects.
‘Does Pa believe in them?’
Pa doesn’t reply. Mattheüs thinks it’s deliberate. He tugs at the seat belt, which is hurting him, he says.
‘Ag, rather put on some nice music for us, Mattie.’ Now he knows it’s deliberate.
Back home, he gets him into bed as soon as possible. His glass of milk with vanilla Sustagen on his bedside cabinet.
‘Take that stuff away, please. I can’t even look at it.’ This makes Mattheüs wonder if it’s the beginning of the end.
Pa doesn’t want to lie down yet. He remains sitting with his legs dangling from the bed. Mattie must first help him with something. He’s embarrassed to ask, he says.
‘Oh good heavens, Pa. I do everything for you in this house.’
‘Yes, but at least there’s Samantha too.’
‘She’s only coming on Wednesday, Pa.’
‘You’re a good son, Mattie. You’re good to me.’
He looks at his father as he says it. He is glad that he’s said it. He is very, very glad, he can’t say how glad.
‘What must I do for Pa?’
It’s the left toenail that’s growing inwards. His father wants him to cut a notch right in the centre of the nail so it can grow out of the flesh.
‘My feet aren’t dirty. At least, I don’t think they are.’ He tries to laugh. Sunlight falls on the bald head with the last baby fluff on the temples.
‘It’s nothing, Pa. I’ll fetch the nail clippers.’ But it is something, after all, and they both realise it. It’s an intimacy forced on them by necessity, which wouldn’t have happened by choice under normal circumstances.
He kneels and takes the foot in his hand and places it between his knees. His father’s blindness makes the physical exchange between the two of them, two men, even more intense. What makes it easier is that he no longer experiences the foot as flesh. It’s a transparent, white, porcelain object, cold from disuse. It’s no longer a limb for walking; its function is lost, he thinks, as he manoeuvres the clippers to cut the nail at an angle. A broad flat toenail testifying to good foot genes, now chalk-white and barely distinguishable from the skin on the arch of the foot, with a pink rim on the right where the nail is vindictively penetrating the flesh.
‘Wouldn’t scissors be better?’ Pa is scared he’ll hurt him, he can hear it.
‘I’ll go fetch some.’ He gently lets go of the foot. On the way to his father’s old bathroom where the sharp-pointed scissors are kept, he lifts his hands to his nose. Neither sock nor sweat nor foot he smells, he wishes he could. It’s just the alien, rusty-tin after-smell of the chemo that’s remained on his hands.
The little operation is performed successfully. Mattheüs is relieved. ‘Does Pa want to know how I did it?’ Not really. Pa draws his legs up and wriggles them in under the sheet and bedspread. ‘It’s a very neat little V I made there for Pa. Nobody could have done a better job.’
‘They say your nails and hair carry on growing even when you’re in the grave.’
Mattheüs has no answer to this. He takes his father’s hand, that’s all. Then Pa places his right hand over his. He clears a space on the bed and sits waiting for Pa to release him. He doesn’t know how long it
is that he’s been sitting there with his hand in his father’s. His thoughts are in such turmoil that he eventually starts feeling ill at ease, starts muttering: let go, let go, let go of the hand that tingles and throbs and wants to be released from between Pa’s two grey, lukewarm hands. On top of it all, he’s tussling with a suspicion about his porn-goggling: that his insides, steeped in all the lascivious images, are sweating onto, infecting, someone as exposed as his father; and Jack to a lesser extent – though he’s not really vulnerable.
‘Pa,’ he says out of the blue, ‘I need hundreds of thousands to start my business, Pa. More, even.’
He withdraws his hand from his father’s without really knowing that he’s doing it and gets to his feet and walks away from the harsh sunlight into the interior of the study and catches sight of himself there in daytime dusk in the mirror above the mantelpiece, an unusual mirror for a study, one with Castrol Oil diagonally emblazoned across it in red paint, both mirror and letters stained in antique style, a relic from Pa’s days as a petrol station owner in Observatory. On this side as well as that side of Castrol, Mattheüs sees himself as he is right now, confronted with his own cold, manic glare. And he seems to himself a predator, one that will tear the food from the beaks of its own children, his gaze hard and his eyes round and distended like those whatchamacallit birds in the Kruger Park, and he feels sick, because that he is not. And his request to his father was not how he meant it. He leaves the room.
In the small hours, he half wakes up and gropes for his computer on the floor next to his bed and surfs to Done-in-Darkness where he begins browsing and then clicks on Watch, chooses a video and sets it going, making the cursor jiggle along impatiently to the relentlessly hard penetration scene that he gazes at with the dull stare of a third- or fourth-generation porn junkie, force-fed on a diet of hardcore, long since relieved of the need to think, his flesh immobile and heavy on the bare mattress (the sheets have shifted), with the hand now coming into play and working himself up, only to let the computer slide down onto the floor immediately afterwards, and then sinking into the sleep of a primitive being.