by Eben Venter
The last photo to be posted is of the redhead on his own, still leaning against the swimming-pool railing, a profile pic, the evening’s orange glow illuminating the freckles on his cheek and the bridge of his nose, and no matter how pissed off or by this time sad Mattheüs is, he must admit it’s a sexy photo, which he immediately drags and drops into his wank bank. After that, nothing more from Jack – must be tired – and Mattheüs, also buggered and by now worried about getting up in the morning and driving all the way to Laingsburg with a half-dead person, for one last time obeys the peculiar wiring of his brain that needs a fix of porn before he’s done and tries to go to sleep.
They set out before dawn, Pa frozen to the marrow as Mattheüs helps him with his hundred-per-cent wool duffel coat with its bone toggles, pure vintage and desirable, and leads him to the car where he’s already started the engine and put on the powerful heater. When they’ve negotiated the set of half-moon steps and reached the paving leading to the garage, Pa presses on his arm to bring them to a halt.
‘I know this time of day, there’s dew on the lawn. Am I right? And the exhaust fumes of the car, I can still smell them. I don’t know if there are still roses. Are there? Perhaps one or two late ones. I suppose they’re already forming their rose hips.’
‘Yes, Pa.’ And he takes him to the car where he has to help him out of his coat again before getting in, Pa can’t tolerate stuffy heat.
Mattheüs has, as he predicted, had a bad night, and when he did manage to snatch some sleep, he found himself in a landscape seething with images.
Now he tries to keep a cool head, he tries to be nice to Pa so that nothing can go wrong. He wants the whole weekend to be like that, so that he can return to the Cape in a positive frame of mind and start his business. When Pa has been settled, he fetches the basket with two Granny Smiths, whole-wheat sandwiches (Marmite only), a thermos flask of black tea, his right arm circling the plastic container with two bottles of Oramorph – two means playing it safe – and then all that remains is the thing with Jack, which he can’t tidy up as nicely as with his father, who’s almost like a baby, he now realises; it’s like travelling with a baby. The dawn is breaking as the gate slides open and they pull away. In the rear-view mirror, an apparition in a mauve dressing gown comes striding up. Aunt Sannie. Does she always get up so early or does she have some kind of intention?
‘Bennie, Mattheüs. Wait, I’ve got something for you.’ Who can be so chirpy so early in the morning. She’s brought a Tupperware container with a face cloth freshened with orange peel, and a few strong plastic bags. ‘For the nausea, Mattheüs, I thought you wouldn’t think of it.’ He takes it from her and touches her hand, warm like a mother’s.
She peers at Pa. (She hasn’t brushed her teeth yet.) ‘And what’s with you, Bennie, sitting there like a frozen chicken?’ And makes the old man laugh.
‘Sannie, make sure our house isn’t burgled. We’re off to the farm. Probably my last time.’
‘Ag, don’t be silly, Bennie. You’ve still got plenty of strength. Mattheüs, look after your father well, my boy. It’s a privilege, remember that.’ (For fuck’s sake.) ‘And bring me back some of that excellent Laingsburg biltong.’
Mattheüs takes his foot off the brake and slowly begins to move forward with Aunt Sannie skipping along in mauve slippers next to the window, which he’s also slowly rolling up. ‘Bye, you two, bye-bye, Bennie,’ she gushes in the wake of the snow-white washed and polished Mercedes, the sanctimonious old witch.
As the car gets going, he battles the temptation to make a quick call at Clarence to see Jack. From his expression in the half-open door, he’ll be able to see if the bastard is there on his own or not, and if he didn’t spend last night on his own in his flat, he’ll be hounded by the thought all the way to Laingsburg, something to chew on obsessively. Jealousy in its various shades of green, he can say in all honesty, has never been something he’s indulged in; it’s his vulnerability right now with his ailing father and the putting off of his business that makes him want to be sure about Jack, and the conviction (another thing he wants reassurance about), please, that Jack won’t hold it against him that he can’t move into number nine Poinsettia Road right now. He glances at the man sitting next to him, hands folded on his lap, his dead eyes straight ahead of him. At the T-junction before the common he turns left onto the M5, which means that he’s decided not to check up on Jack; he’ll remain exactly as he is, suspended in a state of speculation.
After a while on the N1: ‘Are we getting to the garage with the Woolworths shop, Mattie? Because I want you to stop there. I want you to buy sweets for the three little girls and something nice for Sissy, whatever you think.’
‘How does Pa know we’re there?’
His father laughs mischievously. ‘If you’ve grown up on a farm, you have a built-in sense of direction from early on. Just that one time in Stuttgart, no, really, I said to your mother, the sun will come up on that side of our hotel tomorrow. I was completely wrong then.’ Ever since leaving Cape Town he’s become more and more perky.
Then, while picking packets of sweets, it strikes him that Jack, looking at it rationally, hasn’t even acted terribly out of character. Jack is keeping to his logic and getting back at him for not wanting him to move in. Essentially, what Jack hasn’t known for a long time or has never known, in fact, is that the son must respect the father and stand by him to his very last day, though it’s not as if that’s what he always wants to do; it’s more of a given, ingrained in his very nature. The realisation gives him a measure of composure.
And Mattheüs (okay, add three packets of Mini Liquorice Allsorts) resolves to do everything he can to make things pleasant for his father, because he won’t be going to the farm again. This is the last time. He loves him, that much he can say. It’s a particular kind of love. With Jack it’s more complex. At least there’s now a half-baked sort of certainty that Jack won’t dump him. It’s a game Jack enjoys. Can you imagine what kind of low he reached with that whole Zilverbosch business?
Then shit hits just this side of Worcester. And the realisation that this weekend can’t possibly run smoothly; no matter how hard he tries, fate is out to get him in multiple manifestations and from every possible angle.
Flat tyre. Left or right rear. A tiny red eye winks on the dashboard. As his body temperature rises, affecting the hair on his forearms and thighs, and he becomes aware of his overheated face, his non-driving hand shoots through the steering wheel to cover the red light, which makes him laugh, anxious, and even more anxious about Pa’s hands grabbing at both sides of the sheepskin seat covers.
‘Mattie?’
‘Flat tyre, Pa. I know.’
‘Then you didn’t have the tyre pressure checked?’ Impatience, the merciless Benjamin Duiker version.
‘It’s not that, Pa. I did, but it’s not that.’
‘These are brand-new tyres.’ His impatience now unbridled.
‘It must have been a nail or something, Pa. How would I know? I thought these cars didn’t get flat tyres.’
‘That’s a stupid thing to say. All cars get flat tyres.’
He allows the speed to drop from 110 to 90 to 60 to 40 km/h and keeps well to the left inside the yellow line. Trucks and cars and minibuses rock the car as they roar past. As is to be expected of a car of this class, it keeps its balance amazingly well. Involuntarily, Mattheüs calls up a hard-core porn image as an escape from a situation bordering on the unbearable: this is no place to stop. Too dangerous. There are desperately poor people in this country, opportunists lurking in the Port Jacksons next to the road or the vineyards fuck-knows-where, and there’s the Mercedes marooned and inside it only a decrepit old man and it’s exactly what it looks like: money, wallets, mobile phones, watches, petty cash in the cubbyhole – whe’s de gun, you whitey cunt? – Pa’s Florsheims, sunglasses, all the larnie stuff, at least
he left his laptop at home.
And him busting his gut; he can’t even guess how long it’s going to take to change the tyre. First, all the luggage has to be unpacked and then you peel back the grey carpet from the bottom of the boot where the spare wheel lies in its cavity together with the tools in a pitch-black bag with two white gloves – Germans think of everything – the process apparently user-friendly, but the Merc, my man, that’s another story.
The small green dot, small, notably small, of the BP Ultra City in the distance: does he see it or is it only because he so badly wants to see it?
‘You have to pull over now, Mattheüs. This very moment, or you’re going to drive that tyre to shreds and then you’re on the bloody rim. You can cause us a lot of damage here. A tyre like that costs a fortune, we could still have this one retreaded. Pull off, Mattheüs!’
‘Okay, Pa. Just keep calm, please.’
He keeps trundling along at 40 km/h in defiance of his father’s command and gobbles up the highway, so straight and careful his course inside that yellow line that he persuades himself that his father isn’t even going to notice that they’re still moving. That’s all he keeps telling himself, and he becomes extremely positive about the ever-larger green lights of BP Ultra City, convinced that they’re going to reach them. The wheel spanner, you see. Scrabbling between the hairs on the skin of his forearms there are tiny creatures like crabs, as in STD, he means: the wheel spanner is not with the spare wheel where it should be, neatly in its proper place.
He was, to put it mildly, pissed out of his mind; three o’clock, half past three that Sunday morning with a perfumed pickup hot on his heels, not what you’d call super-svelte, but that time of night, beggars, you know what they say. The two of them were making their way through the clubbers to the sauna for a last bit of sensual pleasure, the brain long since fucked, when he gets an SMS from Abrie Spannenberg, sturdy, strapping, a nicer guy you wouldn’t find; with his glowing, freckled face you could eat him on the spot. His wheel spanner is missing. Could Matt maybe help him out? He and his pickup boy go outside and take a deep breath and cross Strand Street and walk to his car where Etienne, by now high as a kite, is standing guard over the Mercedes. Abrie arrives and hugs him with his usual warmth. The spanner is taken out from under the spare wheel; Abrie does it himself. ‘Listen, Matt,’ Abrie knows late-night horniness when he sees it, ‘why don’t the two of you move on along? I’m coming into town on Wednesday, I’ll deliver the spanner into your hands.’ Oh fine, that’s absolutely no problem, he trusts Abrie one hundred per cent, coming from such a stinking-rich, exclusively Mercedes-driving, apple-farming family in Grabouw. And he and his pickup walk up the road and turn right and right again and dive into the steamy pit of the bathhouse, where he shakes off pudgy-bum, randy as hell, in a cloud of steam and exchanges him for more muscle and less flab. The spanner has yet to put in an appearance, he realises, disappointed in Abrie, while they traipse along at 40 km/h as if in stationary slow motion, if such a thing exists. (Does Pa notice?)
‘Mattheüs, you’re going to get me very, very angry now. That tyre is on its last thread by now. You’re messing me around now.’ And he hits the floor with the soles of both shoes to signal: stop, stop.
‘How can you possibly think we could stop here? It’ll take me five minutes or more to unpack all the stuff just to get at the spare wheel. Then ten minutes or more to jack up the car. Then fitting the wheel, and so on. By that time we’re surrounded. It’s not going to take them longer than five minutes to notice there’s a rich man’s car parked next to the road. Has Pa thought of that? On a silver platter. We are prey, Pa, did you think of that before beginning to shout at me!’
Pa is silent. He scratches at the sheepskin and moves his hands to his knees in dark-brown flannels and pat-pats and then his hands fall open on either side of his legs, imploring in helpless rage.
‘You always have an answer. You get me down, Mattheüs. You’ll wipe me out long before I’m dead.’
‘Listen, Pa. What we’ve got here is a flat tyre and a chronically ill elderly man and a guy on his own who has to change a tyre with superhuman speed and all this with South Africa. That’s it. I don’t know what kind of stuff you’re on about now.’
He guesses five, at most seven, kilometres to Ultra City, and he has to figure out how not to tell Pa the damn wheel spanner is lying in the boot of a gay apple farmer’s car – promises, promises – and his only hope is that there’ll be other Mercedes cars at Ultra City. Mercedes owners are known for their helpfulness to fellow Mercedes owners; in the old days, he remembers, two Mercedes passing each other would flash their headlights to affirm their exclusive camaraderie.
Pa utters not another word. He looks even smaller as he sits there, and from under the closed lids two tears trickle down his cheeks in the saddest way imaginable.
Ag, Pa, give him one chance, just one, and everything will be all right. But he keeps silent, overwhelmed by the situation; he should never have given in on the issue of this journey.
Three kilometres, can’t be much further, his indicator flashing already. The plan looks like this: he’ll find a safe parking spot with an open space next to it to change the tyre and be on the lookout for another Mercedes so he can go and ask whether he can borrow their wheel spanner and then quickly pour Pa some black tea before he starts. Maybe there’ll even be someone to lend a hand.
As he turns off, he feels the last layer of rubber peeling away from the now unrepairable tyre so that they’re crawling along on the rim of the wheel, which for the first time really scares him. The spare wheel of a Mercedes, he knows, is slightly smaller; it’s a temporary affair. If the rim of the flat tyre has also been irreparably damaged, they’re way past shit street and his father, he can guarantee this, just this side of a stroke.
‘Mattheüs, you’re going to have to help me to the toilet now.’ The fury has given way to an exceptionally icy chilliness.
‘No, that’s fine, Pa. I’ll just. I’ll see if I can find another Mercedes guy to help me, then we’ll be done in no time.’ He switches the engine off. His whole body is trembling. They’re safe.
‘Another guy? Listen, Mattheüs, I can see very well what’s going on here. You’re too bloody useless to change that tyre yourself. God Almighty. Help. Me. Here.’ He’s got the door open and is trying to get out.
‘Listen,’ while they’re moving along, step by step, to the restrooms, ‘I know old Gawie van Straaten, the manager here at Worcester Mercedes. Old pal of mine, also been in the motor game for many years. Find his number so I can talk to him. Let him come and help us, for God’s sake. We can’t carry on mucking about like this. What does that rim look like? Anything left of it? Honestly, Mattheüs, I might as well tell you, today you’ve really disappointed me.’
He dials directory enquiries, relieved not to have to listen to any more of the old man’s whingeing. All he sees before him is a Mercedes workshop with those perforated panels from which tools are suspended; he sees a wheel spanner, ten or even twelve of them.
‘Oh, Mr van Straaten? No, he left the Worcester branch a long time ago. He’s gone to Umhlanga, they offered him a manager’s position. His wife, you know, is from Natal. They’re terribly happy there.’
He asks, hoarse but firm – he’d ordered a coffee at the Wimpy and knocked it back boiling hot while waiting for his shitting father – can they please, urgently, his father is sick to death, send a wheel spanner to Ultra City, Mercedes E-class, he’ll pay every cent, please please, who’s he talking to now? Wendy. Wendy, please, he’s begging here. His father is dreadfully ill. He’ll need some morphine any moment now.
Short silence; he thinks he’s going to dissolve. ‘Okay just for you, Matthew. I’ll see who I can find, we’re clean-out of them here. Give me your number again? Okay, got it. Now, how come you people travel without spanners?’
He sees his fa
ther stumbling out, led by one of the BP men in uniform. He gulps down the last of his coffee and runs across; he’ll probably write himself off today on top of it all. He takes over and thanks Sebego and announces that Worcester Mercedes is sending someone to help – Gawie van Straaten was transferred to Umhlanga years ago.
‘Mattie, I couldn’t get anything out this time either. I need a dose of that medicine. I’ve got a stitch here in my lower belly. It feels as if it’s a blade working its way into my guts.’
@ Carlucci’s, Jack facebooks. Anybody out there?
He has a last beer from one of the slender Peroni glasses (36-24-36) that comes with this particular brand of beer and walks in the direction of Matt’s house, about half an hour’s walk or so. He walks tall and smartly, not like somebody who’s been drinking. He thinks of nothing in particular. Several beers in quick succession have left him light-headed, even a bit happy after the previous few out-of-sorts weeks. He chooses the right turn each time to get there by the shortest route. Seven cars pass him from behind, and four on the other side of the street. As he gets closer, he meets two ADT guards on bicycles. Both look in his direction. What? Okay, that’s their job. He nods. Red trumpet shapes in the dark-green hedges, quite pretty, and the blue-flowered shrubs, he doesn’t know their names.