by Eben Venter
Then he is in front of the Duikers’ gate. The forbidden gate. The gate is made up of three steel panels pompously spanning the double-laned driveway. At head height there’s a border of fleurs-de-lis, but welded in such a way that the steel tip of each flower looks more like a spear that’ll rip your arse apart if you try to clamber over. Jack peers between two of the steel spears, an opening as wide as a hand span. From the garden, two concealed lights shine onto the two gables at the front of the house. On the stoep, there are two coach lamps on either side of the broad front door with its upper and lower halves. Over the garages, a floodlight. Lining the driveway, three ground-level lights on either side, and to the right in a bed of shrubs and stuff there’s also a bright floodlight illuminating the lawn. To get in, if you can, and to get yourself from the gate to the stoep without being noticed, and to hope that the front door is unlocked, and then pass through the entrance hall and down the passage on the left all the way to Matt’s bedroom, is a superhuman task. Jack looks up and down the street and then presses the intercom button. He holds his ear against the box and listens to the static crackle that the open circuit transmits to him. It’s an empty house. Nobody inside. He releases the button and pushes his hands inside his pockets, just standing there.
An ADT guard cycles up. ‘Can I help you, sir?’
My friend lives here, he says. Just checking. No, no need to worry. They do the checking. That’s their job, day and night. The guard looks at him from under his cap. Jack offers him a cigarette, which he accepts gratefully. He hangs around a while longer on his bicycle, the cigarette tucked into the top pocket of his bottle-green uniform, for later. He’s not altogether reassured. And yet there isn’t quite enough either to make him suspicious.
‘Good night, sir.’
Jack loiters there for a good five minutes or longer. And does his reconnaissance. He looks slowly from the driveway to the far right of the garden where a narrow river-pebble path runs around the house. On the south side of the house there’s another gable, exactly like the two in front, and underneath the gable are the windows of the study Uncle Bennie has moved into. He’s been in the study three times, each time in Uncle Bennie’s absence. On each occasion, Matt poured them drinks from the liquor cabinet. He would lift the bottle with a flourish, elbow in the air, as if the place belonged to him. And they’d sit there, chatty and cosy. Matt, this must be what rich people feel like, he’d said. Matt said he’s never in his life felt like a rich person. Then, with legs spread wide on either side of Matt, he sat on his lap in the big armchair and playfully cuffed him in the ribs. Matt liked that, Matt likes all physical contact.
Just call me Uncle Bennie, the old man has told him several times. Still, he has kept the necessary distance between him and the man. He’s not so dumb as to be fooled by Uncle Bennie’s thinly veiled homophobia. He feels most at home in Matt’s bedroom. It’s completely different from the rest of the house, where everything’s in its place, everything hand-picked to complement the Cape Dutch exterior and interior architecture. Behind Matt’s closed door, definitely closed, one, dim light is burning. The curtains are also drawn. Honestly, when he thinks of it. No, he couldn’t even say what colour the walls are painted in Matt’s room. And always with a frisson of sex hanging about the place. And on Matt’s computer, as if he didn’t know it, as if he hasn’t known it for a long time, hundreds of porn videos bookmarked. That’s how things stand now. Not for ever, hopefully. Whatever. When you find yourself in Matt’s room, you’re in a Matt-created space with rules à la Matt.
The Duiker home is on a corner, so there are no neighbours on the right-hand side. To the left is the double-storey belonging to the Sannie woman. If he stands in front of the far left panel of the gate, he’s out of sight of that house. (The light in one of the upstairs rooms has just gone on. It’s exactly 7.15 in the evening.) If he stands in front of the central panel, he can see most of her house. From in front of the right-hand panel the whole house is visible. So he assumes that his human head amidst the steel spears must also be visible from her top storey. He observes all these things, stores them away, and doesn’t give them another thought.
@ the Duiker home, he facebooks his friend Charnie.
Charnie: Thought Matt’s gone to the farm? With the old guy.
Jack: Have a master plan.
Charnie: What?
Jack: Can’t tell. Plan = a bomb.
Charnie: Bomb?
Jack: Bomb of a plan.
Charnie: As long as you don’t fuck up, please Jack.
Jack: OK, cool.
Charnie: X
He positions himself in front of the central panel of the gate and turns his back on the house and takes a photo of himself. He dawdles along. Twice he stops, the first time still within sight of the house, and sends the photo he’s just taken to Matt. The last time, he stops opposite a house where a watchdog is barking hysterically. Yes, yes, he talks to the animal. Then he reaches the furthest corner of Poinsettia Road, where you can catch a last glimpse of the steel-green gate.
In the late afternoon, when the surrounding Karoo changes from a dry, steel grey to pale yellow, they approach Laingsburg. Pa’s neck lifts from the support, emerges from the coma into which he’s been plunged, straining to the surface almost like a duck that’s dived down and is now coming up again, his neck indeed like that of a duck that’s lost some feathers on account of age or in a narrow escape from a jackal attack – a lonely neck, Mattheüs thinks, and wishes that he could wrap it in one of his woollen scarves, if only it had been a bit colder. He feels the need to protect Pa from the gaze of Sissy and to a lesser extent that of Uncle Hannes. How the three little girls are going to see their grandfather, he couldn’t give a damn about; they’re children, and children accept everything. And about whatshisname, Marko, his brother-in-law, as long as he sees to it that his, Matt’s, glass is full, he’s at peace with a man who can hardly bring himself to discuss anything with him other than the weather.
And that while everybody knows, he and Jack for sure, that Uncle Hannes is also gay and has been all those years in those flapping white trousers of his with the pressed turn-ups and ironed shirts, unbuttoned just enough to accommodate the paisley cravat on a Saturday evening at a braai with beer and brandy on a goddamned Karoo farm. The last time Uncle Hannes came to Cape Town, it feels like so long ago, he and Jack took him to the new Labia Theatre to see that gay cowboy movie Brokeback Mountain, and the man just about swooned. For the rest of the weekend, he tried to analyse the movie with them, not that there was much to analyse, rather a question of giving voice to his need, and then when Pa or Sissy came into the room unexpectedly he clammed up.
‘This is where those terrible floods were,’ Pa says as they enter the town at 40 km/h, there’s always a speed cop with a camera hiding under a thorn tree to the left.
And then there was the old man clinging to a log who got washed away into the dam and saw his old wife clinging to a log on the other side of the dam, and he called out: is that you, Marie? Mattheüs finishes his father’s story, because if he has to hear it one more time he’ll go mad.
His father’s head bobs as they cross a speed bump. Mattheüs looks at him, shudders when he sees how he flinches at his son’s tone of voice, a blow with the fist, and at the point he wanted to make, to drive home, by rattling off the story himself without allowing the old man the opportunity to enjoy the nostalgia of retelling the story himself.
‘Sorry, Pa, I didn’t mean it like that,’ but he knows he’s saying it too softly for his father to hear, his father in any case switched off again, withdrawn into his morphine world.
On the other side of Laingsburg, past the koppie where peeling whitewashed stones urge, Dra Wol / Wear Wool, he turns off to the right onto a tolerable dirt road as far as the railway line, where he stops, checks for the Shosholoza Meyl, the name of the passenger train that he’s never m
anaged to figure out properly, then further on along a dirt road that has by now turned into a two-track that takes you thirty-five kilometres or so to Luiperdskop. The snail’s pace on the dirt road seems to revive his father, weak as this he’s seldom seen him before. This is either going to be the end of him, this visit, or he doesn’t know what.
He phoned Sissy last night and warned against shock: ‘You haven’t seen him for a long time, Sis, he’s deteriorated enormously in the meantime. You’ll have to prepare yourself.’
At the other end of the line on that telephone contraption – a chair with a padded square cushion edged with gold braid and next to it the raised table with the phone, all-in-one – she was silent. Then said: ‘Thank you, Matt.’ And he could hear it was heartfelt, which made him feel more positive about the visit.
With the headlights now on the double-track (‘Mattie, have you switched on?’), blond grassy fringes on both sides of the road, the two of them drive on. Mattheüs has half opened his window, hoping to breathe in the veld, and is worrying that he’s made a mistake in not bringing his laptop. Behind the farmhouse you can climb the mountain, and then there’s a plateau with a flattish black rock, which last time he’d marked with a pile of rocks – if the baboons haven’t chucked it over yet – where you can just get a signal. The fact remains – and it’s enticing right there in the dusk with the veld wafting in at the window – he’s got an archive of porn pics on his computer, an impressive collection built up over the years, which could see him through a weekend with no signal if things got too heavy.
Pa says he needs one of those dry-throat suckers which Mattheüs, without taking his eyes off the road, fishes out of the cubbyhole, tearing off the cellophane with his teeth and placing it in his father’s extended hand.
‘He didn’t give me enough for the farm. Daylight robbery.’
‘Ag, Pa, you’re not really going to start on that again.’
His father is on about Oupa’s will, where Luiperdskop was left equally to him and Uncle Hannes. But then it turned out that, at about this time, Sissy married Marko, a rich young guy from the Nelspruit area, who wanted to clear out of the north (‘the Western Cape is the only place where a white man can still survive’), and so he bought the farm after a terrible fight with Pa and Uncle Hannes, especially Pa with his sharp head for business, and so in the deed of sale there was a clause granting Hannes the lifetime right to stay on the farm – and stay he has ever since, in the rondavel in the yard with all his dogs, but Pa still has twinges of dissatisfaction at the agreed purchase price.
His father sucks at his sucker and nods. He understands, he’ll obey his son. Digging up old bones, that’s not why he got Mattheüs to drive him all this way. He asks for his window to be opened just a bit, pushes his nose out into the dusk, filled as it is with arid aromas, shakes his head. His sharp sense of smell has abandoned him. As the best smeller in their family, he used to be able to tell when the potatoes started sprouting in the darkness of the store room, he could smell their mother’s monthlies, which he didn’t mention, at least not to her.
The double-track takes them through a drift overgrown with thorn trees, and across a cattle grid that makes his father vibrate in his seat. A little pepped up after all at the prospect of being on the farm, he leans forward, he knows exactly where he is.
Mattheüs checks his mobile phone: the signal is still two bars strong. This is probably the last spot on the road where there’s a signal. Two messages from Jack. The first is banal. Jack is getting dressed to go out. And then: Something unexpected has happened with him and Jamie. Nothing to worry about. It’s what Jack doesn’t say that Mattheüs finds disturbing. With yet another photo of him and the redhead teacher that evening in Sea Point, one not sent to him before. He carefully inspects Jack and Jamie as he tries to interpret the photo. Jack’s smile is artificial, saccharine, to say the least. He knows what he might think of the two of them together like that, but he doesn’t want to go there. It’ll frustrate the hell out of him here on the farm. With his thumb, he wipes the image from the screen and switches off.
‘It’s dry here, isn’t it, Mattie? That’s how it seems. I know this farm like the back of my hand.’
‘Looks like it, Pa.’
‘Sissy said they last had a spot of rain in January. Nothing much to talk about, though.’
The farmyard comes into view in front of Mattheüs, the single-storey farmhouse with its red corrugated-iron roof and light-brown fifties-style face-brick walls, nestled between tall poplars and American ash trees. He perceives it not in the present, but rather as a visual memory one keeps remembering, years later, a landscape painting from your grandparents’ home, until the activity in the yard between the house and the outbuildings draws his attention. There are floodlights and people and Marko’s four-wheel drive with its hunting lights on and then another bakkie with its doors open, two farm horses saddled up and dogs everywhere, two ridgebacks and dogs belonging to the farm workers, four men still in today’s blue overalls. He notices another farmer as they drive up, both he and Marko have guns over their shoulders, and both walk up to the Mercedes.
First to reach them is Sissy with her corn-blonde hair tightly pulled back in a ponytail, and her wide smile with the even white teeth; he’s forgotten how attractive she is. Her three daughters also there in the background, giggly and curious, but hesitant as farm children often are. (Oupa is seriously ill, see to it that you behave yourselves, or something of the kind to school them in advance for the visit.)
Sissy opens Pa’s door, takes him carefully (he can see she’s not forgotten his report on Pa’s condition) by the shoulders, kisses him on the forehead, as they tend not to do in their family, it’s usually on the lips. ‘Pappie, ag heavens, my dear Pappie.’ (Since when has she called him that?)
Sissy is wearing pale-yellow tights with matching shirt, loose and feminine with a pattern of pale-yellow flowers and a perfume that wafts in the dry air. Marko comes to shake hands, affable, genuinely so, asks how the trip was, and so on, then helps Pa out of the car, in passing handing his gun to the other farmer, who is introduced as Frans; for the rest, the whole farmyard with all the other people and dogs has settled into a lull at the sight of the figure, helpless between Marko and Sissy, she who apparently can’t stop saying: ‘Pappie, we missed you so.’
A jackal hunt is being planned, which accounts for the activity in the yard. Five lambs killed last night, seven the night before. No, things can’t carry on like that. Pa brings it all to a halt, raises his hand; it’s now even quieter. They are standing on the rough lawn that in the stark white floodlights appears more yellow than green and is clearly only just being kept alive. He wants to know, he says, he just wants to know if they don’t tie bells to the lambs’ necks. And has Marko made sure that there aren’t gaps in his fences. To which Sissy replies, ‘Ag, Pappie. My dearest, dear Pappie.’ Marko laughs in a way that can only be described as good-natured, which makes Mattheüs think that he can’t be altogether an arsehole, and in turn gives him hope that the weekend may after all go quite smoothly.
Apart from that, a drowsiness overcame him on the dirt road, especially the last bit to the farmyard, more or less from the railway track, with the smell of herbs and dust given off by the half-dead scrub and the almost-not-sweetness of the granaatbos here and there that is opportunistically sprouting yellow blooms.
It’s a to-and-fro chatting, with dogs that break loose and jump up, the three children who huddle behind their mother, waiting to be told what to say and how to behave with their oupa. Shy, they’ve only ever seen blindness in sheep.
‘Come closer, so that Oupa can touch you.’
They press forward until their children’s heads are under the old man’s hands, extended waist-high, suspended there.
‘This is Anna,’ (she was named for her grandmother), ‘this is Leona, say hello nicely to your oupa, Leona,’
when she wants to squirm away, ‘and this is Leeutjie,’ the youngest.
From the direction of the rondavel, positioned at some distance to the north of the farmhouse under a copse of bluegums on bare soil, Uncle Hannes comes walking with his clutch of dogs – a mix-and-match little fox terrier mongrel, a sheepdog with gentle eyes, and two smaller dogs of mixed parentage. Pipe in hand. ‘Goodness gracious, Bennie, there’s nothing left of you,’ he smiles, literally pushes Sissy and her children aside and hugs his brother, hands him back to them so as to hug Mattheüs in turn, ‘Such nice sturdy shoulders, my goodness, man.’
The people all cluster together on the stoep with its six yellow bulbs in six old-fashioned bakelite shades evenly spaced on the ceiling, and wicker chairs and a bright-red geranium in a barrel, an outstanding specimen and Sissy’s pride. Here, Marko and his friend Frans take their leave after receiving a basket containing two thermos flasks of coffee and four two-litre bottles of Coke from the kitchen. The jackal hunt will keep them out until daybreak.
‘What does his oncologist say, how much time does he give him?’ Sissy asks later, at table.
‘They no longer tell you that sort of thing, Sissy.’
It’s only the two of them here. Uncle Hannes had one glass of merlot and then excused himself; he prefers eating his food in the rondavel. For Pa, she’s made fresh weak black tea – he’d only eat one of the left-over Marmite sandwiches – and put him in bed, so exhausted that one couldn’t tell whether he was even just a little pleased to be there.
Mattheüs doesn’t sit down, even though the food is on the table – this is regarded as impolite.
‘Come and sit down now, Matt.’
From where he’s standing on the other side of the open-plan room, looking back at Sissy as she dishes up, glancing every now and then at the clock above the sideboard, he indicates that he’s coming. She’s jittery, with the dogs and Marko out till who knows when. He parts the curtains in front of the big sitting-room window and looks at the yellow lawn lit up outside, with its encircling bed of agapanthus which Sissy is still trying to keep going, a fine example of how people around here battle against barrenness. He closes the curtains. The food has been dished up, she’s looked at the clock again. Towards the back, down the passageway, the antics, shrill and silly, of the three children in their bedroom are heard once or twice, and then no more.