Wolf, Wolf

by Eben Venter

  ‘By when must I decide? I mean, by when do I have to? I mean, by when must I inform you of my decision?’ Rotten, that’s how he feels. He can’t wait to get the hell out of that over-cooled office.

  ‘I thought I’d give you a week or so. What do you say, Jack? The ball’s in your court now.’

  One strike and you’re out. Incredible. ‘I. Well. It’s tricky for me. To be honest, Mr Richardson, I have a lot of debt.’

  ‘We all have debt, Jack. That’s life, nowadays.’

  Mister Richardson is turning his back on him. This is a principal he hasn’t known until now. Watch it, Jack. Don’t chuck out the baby with the bathwater. You’re on your own, pal.

  ‘I’ll see. Well. It’s difficult.’ Jack regains a little strength. ‘My reputation at Zilverbosch is spotless. If there’s one person who knows this, it’s you, Mister Richardson.’

  ‘Of course, Jack. And for that I respect you. That’s why I’m asking you to take the decision yourself.’

  ‘Fuck,’ he says behind half-closed lips.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘No, nothing. It’s nothing.’

  ‘Well, then, that’s that, Jack. I trust that we can rely on you. Till next week, then.’ Manly handshake. Wedding ring set with a tiny diamond.

  He walks out of the main building and sits down outside under the wild fig in the grade twelve garden.

  @ Demise, he facebooks his bosom friend, Charnie.

  Charnie: What?

  Jack: It’s started.

  Charnie: What are you talking about, J?

  Jack: They want to chuck me out of Clarence.

  Charnie: Ag, don’t be silly. They can’t.

  Jack: I’m finish & klaar x.

  ‘Hello, hello, hello. Bennie, it’s me. Sannie.’ She flutters in just as he’s rubbing Sorbolene onto his hands. Comes over and kisses him. He knows it must be boiling outside from the heat she radiates.

  ‘Wait, pass that here, Bennie.’ She takes the jar of Sorbolene and starts massaging his fingers one by one with a gob of the stuff, a skill acquired in her days as a paramedic. She has plump, round fingers and she’s working very gently.

  He sinks back until he’s lying flat, ouch, and without withdrawing his hand from hers. ‘Heavens, Sannie.’ He almost feels as if she’s doing something that only a woman can do with a man. He’s secretly pleased that there’s still a bit of man in him. He realises that the chemo and the pain treatment have smothered most of the passion left in him.

  ‘Other hand.’

  He gives it.

  Then he must have drifted off, because when he wakes up, Sannie is no longer next to him on the bed.

  ‘Sannie?’

  ‘Over here, Bennie my boy.’ Oh, she’s sat down on the chair next to him with a bowl of something.

  ‘Bennie, I’ve made you the most delicious blancmange. With just a touch of granadilla. It won’t make you feel sick. Come, sit up so I can help you.’

  He feels the shape of the bowl. Square, they don’t have pudding bowls like that. Pudding spoon stuck bolt upright in the middle of the dessert, enough to make him laugh. Soft, he presses it. It’s all spongy. He eats slowly while Sannie talks non-stop. Search him, he’s got no idea about what. He was always a slow eater and an excellent shitter. But now, good grief, he doesn’t even want to talk about it. He hands her the bowl when he’s done. He’s eaten about three quarters, he’d say.

  A breeze pushes in through the open windows. It’s balmy and lovely and caresses the back of his neck. He can’t tell when last he felt so good.

  ‘Professor Jannie de Lange. Hell, there’s a man who knows his stuff. He’ll still get me out of this pesky thing. It’s not over with me yet.’

  ‘Your oncologist, Bennie?’

  ‘I believe it was ordained from above that I should end up with a man like that.’

  ‘Our lives are constantly in His hands, Bennie. Let His will be done, we must abide by it. It’s our Christian duty, Bennie. I’m going to take you out to Kirstenbosch one day. You tell me when you’re ready. You’re looking so pale today. I knew you’d enjoy the pudding. I know you men.’

  ‘Sannie, won’t you bring me my cheque book over there, and also my pen. I want you to write for me.’

  Sannie gets up and puffs and pants to the bedside cabinet. ‘Bennie, we haven’t yet handed over your donation to Coronation Park. It takes time with those people. In the meantime, it’s safe and sound in the Silver Cloud Christian Fellowship Trust. Nobody can touch it. We’re preparing for the Big Baptism. Ministering to the people. You must know, Bennie, some of those people are hardened. It’s the drink, if you’re asking me. We’re having small silver-cloud coins made. Everyone who confesses and is baptised gets a silver cloud. That’s how we’ll know whether this one or that one has been saved. Then the cheque will be handed over.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Who should I make it out to, Bennie? Say the word and I’ll write.’

  ‘Mattheüs Duiker. For the amount of five hundred thousand rands only.’ He crosses his arms over his chest. Pleased. Show him the man who can take a sum like that from his back pocket without flinching.

  ‘Heavens, Bennie, but you really are one of the most open-handed people I’ve ever come across. I only hope your son appreciates it. He’s just been overseas for heaven knows how long. This is an almighty pile of money, this. Not to be sneezed at. I only hope.’

  ‘Mattheüs’s head is screwed on right, Sannie. He’s got a very shrewd business concept.’

  ‘Then that’s fine, Bennie, I just thought. I just want, how shall I say. You’re number one for me, Bennie. Your welfare, that’s what I think of before anything else. I’m not going to allow anybody on this earth to take advantage of you. You can take my word for it. Not that I’m – Mattheüs, I mean, he’s your son.’

  ‘Where must I sign, Sannie?’ She places the pen between two fingers of his right hand, then guides it to the dotted line.

  Sannie can’t help marvelling at how evenly the man can still write. Not like an old man at all. She wonders as she so often has in the past, she’d never actually say it, but she does wonder whether Anna appreciated and cherished this remarkable husband of hers in the way he deserved.

  ‘Put it back in the drawer, Sannie. Thank you. I’m going to doze for a while, I think. I’m almost without pain today. It really is wonderful, medical science today. Come and kiss me goodbye.’

  ‘Tell me, Bennie.’ He can hear she’s standing at the foot of the bed. ‘Does that other one still come around?’

  ‘Who? Jack?’

  ‘Between you and me, Bennie, I don’t have a good feeling about that man. He may be a teacher and all.’

  ‘Goodbye for now, Sannie.’

  He pulls up the bedspread. The bed supports him as gently as you’d carry a child, he sinks slowly, contented and without a single distraction. It’s the mattress, inner-spring quality. He’s never believed in buying cheap stuff, no matter what Annatjie accused him of in later years. Take a look now inside his wardrobe, there’s a Rex Trueform there that he bought in ’61 at Stuttafords. One hundred per cent new wool. You could step out in it now to meet the queen.

  Somewhere near the door of the study, Sannie is taking her leave with a final grumble: ‘You must see to it that your beliefs are adhered to, Bennie. This is your house and nobody else’s. I can only hope that that son of yours respects your principles, because the Lord only knows I can’t see that he has many of his own.’

  He pages through his recipes as if it’s an old photo album, precious recipes collected and copied and annotated. Got this one last year from his ex-South African friends in Antwerp: black mussels with their beards plucked and properly rinsed and then steamed in white wine and a chiffonade of celery, carrots, and leeks with a dab of
cream; okay, that may be a bit rich for his takeaway. He closes the file and hides it in the bottom drawer underneath other papers and resists the temptation to refresh himself with porn, he resists it three times, and lies down on his bed trying slit-eyed to be just a human being, an ordinary human being with happiness and a future, that’s all.

  When he wakes up, he masturbates to an old favourite that he’s bookmarked, dries himself with a cum-encrusted towel and goes to the kitchen to make some food.

  He decides on a frittata in the big pan, a wedge for Pa, a wedge tomorrow for Samantha, and the rest for him. The secret of a frittata is very finely grated Parmesan beaten into the batter, and when you’re sure the first layer is cooked through, always on a low flame with the lid on, you grate more Parmesan on top and put it in the oven at 130°C, you just have to keep an eye on it.

  Didn’t add tuna this time so that Pa can at least try the thing. Very ripe tomato. He reckons the old man needs something acidic. Ag, who’d know? And who ever thought he’d last this long – there goes the bell as if on cue. He leaves the whisking for the time being, you have to whisk in lots of air otherwise your frittata will be too dense.

  ‘Pa?’

  He’s pushed a cassette into his antique radio-cassette player, it’s boeremusiek. ‘Mattie, come and listen to this. Hendrik Susan and his band. Man, I know it’s not your kind of music, but give the man a chance. He was master of the concertina years ago. Just listen this once, Mattie. Listen: the Moepel Waltz. Just this once. For Pa.’

  He leans his elbow on the mantelpiece and looks at the man sitting straight up in his bed, both arms lifted, doing dance steps.

  He tries to get into the music, really he does. Of course he’s heard it before in the house, but now he tries to listen as if it’s the first time. He even tries to think what kind of porn you’d screen to the concertina music. He tries everything. He looks at the man making small movements with his upper body and arms, as if he were dancing with his partner of long ago in some town hall. The pyjama sleeves have slid down over the pale arms and light catches his blue-white nails, and the only emotion he can summon up is an admittedly rather stale pity for the man.

  ‘I’ll have to get going now, Pa,’ he says softly. ‘I’m busy making us something.’

  He thinks his father hasn’t heard him, but he presses the stop button on the radio-cassette player, drops his arms and fixes Mattheüs with a blind stare as only he knows how.

  ‘Do you know what puzzles me, Mattie. It’s what you do with yourself the whole blessed day. In that closed room with the door always shut, hours and hours every day. Do you think it’s normal for a strong young man like you? Pa can’t help wondering, you can’t blame me. Not that I want to tell you what to do.’

  In the kitchen, he immediately fetches a beer from the fridge and goes out onto the paving outside. This is where he’s thought about reviving his mother’s herb garden, so that he can harvest seeds and pick fresh stuff to use in his takeaway. Ag, the hell with it all. All of it, please. One tattered basil plant has remained, its sweet leaves chewed ragged by bugs. He violently uproots the plant and flings it over the back wall to the neighbours. Let him admit it once and for all: he can’t wait for his father to peg off.

  The year before last, while he was staying with his friends in Antwerp for a while and they got him a painting job via a friend of a friend, her whole flat was full of glass, glass tables and glass shelves with glass knick-knacks, she was a lesbian, not that that had anything to do with the glass obsession, whatever, he had to be so careful with the paint splashes that he only got home in the evening after dark – it was more or less always dark there – more exhausted than you should be after a day’s painting, and that’s probably why he reacted so strongly to the parcel from his father. Carefully wrapped, a parcel containing magazines, In aller Welt, the Mercedes Benz trade magazine, and with it the killer of a self-help book, How to Be the Best Car Salesman in Town. That was his father’s way of inviting him yet again – he’d often done so either directly or indirectly – to become a partner in Duiker’s Motors. Duiker and Son. It was so damn tragic that he could only react to it with anger. Raging anger, he got angrier and angrier at that pile of propaganda, as he thought of it years later, and he was unable to forget it. The mighty established business with a reputation all over Cape Town: You could be a millionaire, Mattie, listen to your father. And he, the only heir, a total loser.

  He tries to banish the memory from his system – now, previously, the old, old callus – he smokes two cigarettes and goes indoors, whisks the batter so that it splatters the work surface with yellow goo, lights the flame, puts the lid on and fetches another beer. The tragedy is this: the aversion that he’s retained for the antagonist, for the harm that man has done him, increasingly becomes a projection existing in his own head and nowhere else. He’s unable to associate it with the pale man in his sickbed; it has long since ceased to have any bearing on him.

  The intercom at the gate rings. ‘Mattheüs?’

  It’s Jack. Jack has a habit of turning up suddenly, without an SMS, a neutral tone of voice on the microphone like an announcement at a station, knowing very well that there’s another person in the house.

  Mattheüs presses the button, checks his frittata which is cooking slowly from below, quite safely, and meets Jack just as he enters, his expression complex and also remote, especially, as if to protect himself; he’s come to know him like that. He pulls Jack over to him and pushes his hands between his jacket and shirt along his sides and strips him of his jacket; he can smell Jack on the lining of the jacket, on the dark blue under each arm of the blue shirt. ‘Jack?’

  He carries the jacket as they walk before sitting down in a sheltered corner of the stoep, safe from prying eyes next door, from her upper storey she has a one-eighty-degree view of the Duiker garden. While walking, he fishes Jack’s cigarettes and lighter from his inside pocket and lights up for both of them, Jack’s hand on his, cupped around the flame.

  ‘What’s the matter, Jack? Just say something.’

  The story emerges in fits and starts on the wrought-iron bench with its red-and-white striped cushions, a Garden and Home scene it could be. ‘Fucked’ is the word Jack uses once, twice, three times, and Mattheüs develops a sense of vertigo, as if it’s not Jack but rather he who’s losing his balance.

  A sensation that intensifies when Jack says: ‘The carpet’s been pulled from under my feet. How unfair is that, Matt? Hey?’ On and on he tells the story with emotion and in detail, and gradually Mattheüs starts to see in this carpet of Jack’s a red thread that he’s weaving into it, at first surreptitiously so that he doesn’t see or notice it at all, but then a more vivid red and more noticeable: does Matt have any idea how much money he still owes?

  He should never have come back, should rather have tried to make it overseas, rather fail there if he has to fail at all. Jack is in the shit, he with his business somewhere far in the distance once he’s long since run out of energy; that’s how things now stand. He’s limping along and Jack’s following him with his red thread that he now sees so clearly that the rest of the carpet fades from sight till eventually it’s all red thread. ‘Matt, I’m moving in with you. That’s the only solution. You must help me. I mean. We’re in a relationship. Hey? I’ve got nothing. I’ve got a few weeks left and then I have to be out of there. I’m coming to stay here, Matt,’ and he bangs the red-and-white cushion with his hand.

  Mattheüs gets up holding his head and walks up and down the long stoep, right as far as the yellowwood door at the end leading to the study where Pa will surely have been buzzed awake by the intercom or made out Jack’s voice or is simply lying there wondering who it is with his sense of right and wrong, his law, fuck knows, towering like a horse’s hard-on. And he all the time with his head in his hands: how can he? He can’t possibly let Jack come and stay here. It’s non-negotiable with a
bullhead like Benjamin Duiker who probably in that filthy backyard of a mind of his tries to imagine what it looks like when two men fuck, and how at the end of that broad highway they arrive at the great open portal of hell and that, that most deeply sinful of things, he will never ever allow under his roof, may God have mercy on him.

  He rushes indoors and grabs the pan of frittata from the flame, takes off the lid and puts it into the oven that he’s preheated, and fetches two beers from the fridge. On the stoep, it’s now Jack’s turn to sit with his elbows on his knees, cupping his head in his hands, waiting for an answer, for mercy. For the absurdity of this situation (there are four bedrooms in this house, only one of which is currently occupied) to vanish like the morning mist.

  ‘Are you praying, Jack?’ Mattheüs gives a wry laugh. ‘Here, another beer.’

  Jack accepts gratefully.

  He must have dozed off, for he becomes aware of a shuffling at his bedroom door that wasn’t there before. It’ll be Pa.

  Since the old man’s moved into the study, the toilet visits have been going well. The commode’s been put on hold for the time being, for which he and Samantha, not forgetting Pa, are all grateful, none of them too keen on that whiff. Although he must admit that Pa’s toilet, when he’s been to clean it with Jik and a scrubbing brush, has never emitted anything but the most discreet of odours. Not exactly perfume, but far from revolting. It’s one step away from the chemo, that’s what it is.

  ‘Pa?’ Actually, he doesn’t want to be heard. Old man must learn to stand on his own two feet, it was after all his choice to move.

  He lies dead still and listens and swallows when the spit collects. (He’s just zapped through three short porn videos, at most six minutes of heightened attention.) Nothing. He waits for a sound that will make him get up, though he’d prefer at all costs to prolong his siesta, the immediate, post-randy, total immersion on a hot afternoon, his favourite of all sleeps.