by Eben Venter
Next to the wall clock hangs a calendar with a photo of the local Laingsburg rugby team. Mattheüs inspects the players and notices the flank, third row, second from the right, hair straight as flax, sallow-skinned, broad shoulders filling out the rugby jersey, one more peek, and turns around to sit down. Sissy gazes at him: impossible that she could have followed his train of thought, the thoughts that now unspool, while he sits down and unfurls the serviette from Ouma’s trousseau (he doesn’t mind that she got it, it belongs here), as Sissy holds her hand out to his to say grace: unspool in the total silence of the room, the silence outside in the farmyard where nothing is stirring, with only his sister’s voice rising and falling to intone the prayer with the necessary respect, with the last word, amen, a mere whisper, only her lips, wide and full like Pa’s, breathing on it, and then she lets go of his hand, his thoughts opening like a sluice in the wake of the prayer, the futility of his takeaway concept, leaving him astonished at the sudden and overwhelmingly negative idea that he will not succeed in opening Duiker’s Takeaway next Wednesday, and even if he does, it’s doomed to failure.
He, Mattheüs, day after day in a takeaway, with customers chronically insistent on friendliness, on a little extra, no matter that he started at six that morning, and he, he of all people thinks he’ll be able to handle it. He gets up.
‘Sissy, give me a minute, please. I’m going outside for a moment for a cigarette.’
‘What’s the matter, Matt? You can smoke in here, man. For you, I’ll make an exception.’
Should he take her into his confidence or not? Poultry, jackals, carting children to school on a dirt road, outfits at the new Worcester Mall, the Swartberg behind them like a bulwark against the coast, in front of them as far as the eye can see, the Great Karoo: the sum total of her world that hardly at any point overlaps with his. She probably shares Pa’s image of him as the wastrel of the family, although she’s never said it, it’s even possible that the assumption is a fabrication: he’s overwhelmed by a wave of self-doubt.
‘I wanted to start my takeaway on Wednesday, my idea of good food at affordable prices for ordinary people – low-income, poor people, you know. And now, ag, I don’t know. I don’t know if I can. Or if I should.’
‘I’ve heard about the business.’ She stuffs a chunk of lamb into her mouth and says nothing more. He shouldn’t have told her about it. Stupid exposed prick he’s made of himself, that’s all.
The fireplace in the lounge area of the room has been stacked, even though it’s still only February. Pages of the Sunday paper have been scrunched up into pieces the size of a tennis ball and put on the grid, with kindling criss-crossed on top. He bends down and blows his cigarette smoke up the chimney as he hears Sissy chewing. He glances at her over his shoulder. She eats, wipes her mouth with the serviette, fills her fork again, looks up at the clock, carries on eating, apparently unperturbed.
And then there’s Jack, whose loyalty he doubts right now more than ever before. And what about his own loyalty, his loyalty to Jack? Has he ever told the man that he loves him? And then there’s Pa in the guest room, his pyjama-covered arms crossed over his chest on top of the sheet as he usually does even when it’s cold – his uneven breathing barely audible – lost somewhere in his morphine valleys, the dreadful alienation it must make him feel, ag, Pa. And there’s the ever more constricting matrix of his own porn obsession, the action and effects of which become clearer by the day, the deformation of his brain that causes or activates the hunger, the images that feed the new circuitry, and in gorging the obsession is intensified, with his sex ever more bent and battered to conform to a closed circuit where only he and the screen in front of him exist. He shudders, puts out his cigarette on the stone floor of the fireplace, tries to turn his back on his last thought, tries, really tries, and again takes his place at the dinner table.
‘Your food’s going to be ice-cold now. Matt, my question just now. How long?’
‘What does it really matter, Sissy? We all die when we have to. They don’t know. He could live for years, still.’ (He doesn’t really think so.) ‘Professor Jannie de Lange didn’t say,’ he lies.
‘Ag, come on. Don’t lie to me. They know very well how long their patients have to live. They deal with cases like this every day, they know exactly.’
He looks at all the food on the table. There’s roast lamb on an antique oval serving dish that also belonged to Ouma. Then there’s roasted pumpkin with cinnamon, sugar and butter, as well as frozen green peas from the Laingsburg Spar, a pyrex dish with Tastic rice, and a pretty floral jug, also Ouma’s, with fresh mint leaves in boiled water, everything sober, honest.
‘I like your food, Sissy. I’ve missed it. Pity Pa can’t enjoy it. He always did love his food so much. He ate with such enjoyment.’
‘A fortnight, a month, six months?’ The children’s voices unexpectedly rise again. ‘I …’ Sissy looks towards the passage. When the noise dies down, as she expects it to at this hour of the evening, she glances once again at the hands of the clock, and then back at him.
Slowly, he spins the serving dish with the leg of lamb and finds the small chip that he knows, the one that Oupa carefully filed down so that all it left was an even dent on the lip of the dish. He rubs it. ‘He doesn’t really eat any more. So you can think for yourself. I still manage to get him to take some of that Sustagen powder – he can only handle the vanilla – but apart from that, not much. You must watch him this weekend, Sissy. It gets to you, you know, twenty-four seven. And the daily deterioration. That’s the worst to see. And don’t think he’s an easy person. As you know. I’ve nagged him to get a nurse, but he says he doesn’t want to squander your and my inheritance. When he can no longer go to the toilet on his own, maybe then, he says. He’s almost there, I think. But he’s okay, I mean, it’s not that I’m complaining. He’s not that bad. The morphine helps a lot. It completely knocks him out.’
She’s shifted backwards so that the low-hanging light illuminates her from the neck downwards. In her hand, a glass of merlot: ‘Do you hold it against me?’
‘What?’
‘Ag, you know what I’m talking about, Matt.’
He lays his knife and fork side by side, as they were taught to do, wipes his mouth, folds the serviette, and places it to the left of his plate where it had originally been set. ‘Should we take the food to the kitchen before I smoke here?’
She flaps a hand dismissively. ‘Do you realise you’ve adopted many of Pa’s mannerisms?’ He tries to gauge her tone: compassion or plain vindictiveness? He thinks he knows, even though there’s hardly any light on her face. She’s also got something of Pa. The direct, tactless way of talking – attacks, in effect. Her broad, open forehead and the broad smile, when it appears, are pure Pa.
‘I’m his primary carer, there’s no doubt about that. As I say, it’s not always easy, but I’m not complaining. I’m okay.’ He half-fills his glass, as they do in the city, not all the way to the top, like here.
‘I think only one person at a time can care for somebody. That’s the way it is in most of the families I know around here. One child knows exactly how, and takes over the care. I’ve got no problem with that. Nor do you, apparently. This business of yours. Wouldn’t a restaurant selling liquor make more money?’
He becomes wary of her. ‘That’s exactly what I don’t want to do. I want to do something for the poor people of Cape Town. A small contribution, maybe. Nothing more.’
‘And who’ll look after Pa then?’
‘You!’
‘Ag, don’t be ridiculous, Matt. You know as well as I do that it’s totally impossible for me. I’ve got three children and a husband to take care of. We’re up against a drought of close to seven years. Do you think it’s easy to keep this farm going? Pappie, won’t you quickly write me out a cheque, we’ve run out of feed for the sheep.’ (So she knows about t
he cheque as well.)
‘Don’t start your nonsense, Sissy.’ He picks up the second bottle that’s been standing open at the far end of the table and fills both their glasses.
‘I warned Marko, I knew you were coming here with an agenda. I can’t get away from here. I can’t go and look after Pa, it’s out of the question.’
‘I’m joking, Sissy. You needn’t take everything so damn seriously. It was Pa who wanted to come here. I think we owe it to him: let him enjoy it. It’s his last time, he won’t come again. D’you know, what I’m sorriest about is that he can’t smell the Karoo veld any more.’
‘But who’s going to look after him when you’re working all day? How many days a week is this takeaway thing of yours open?’
Little shit. Sometimes he’s tempted to tell Pa to change his will so as not to leave her a cent.
‘There’s Aunt Sannie next door and there’s Samantha, I think she’d take on more hours if you offered, and on Sundays I won’t be open, I don’t know yet. We’ll figure it out somehow. We always have. And Pa doesn’t need someone with him all day, every day. As long as he can phone. Thank heavens he can still manage that.’
‘I hear what you’re saying, but I know you’re holding back. You resent me, I can see it in that look of yours. D’you know what, Matt, even if I could, I wouldn’t look after Pa. I’d force him to get a nurse or I’d pay for one myself. He’s too much for me. I don’t want to mess around with our relationship at this stage, I want it to remain just as it is between me and Pa. How are Samantha and them?’
‘Okay. They’re okay.’
Then Sissy starts telling him things. He hears and also doesn’t hear; even though some of it is new, he knows the kind of stuff she talks about. The wine has made him slightly drunk and subdued, and he’d rather be in the company of his computer. He digs out his mobile phone and waves it over the table as if it were a fan. ‘Do you still have no reception here in the bundu? Why doesn’t Marko put up an antenna on the mountain? There are ways of doing these things, you know.’
‘Do you think for a moment money grows on trees out here in the veld? Do you know what, Matt. Oh, let it be. We’ll leave it right there. In any case, you think I don’t know anything. You think I’m stupid. Do you think I don’t know about you?’
Without waiting for his reply (she’s convinced her deductions are correct), she switches on the television and for a long time they sit there watching junk. Sissy has settled herself on the four-seater couch, her legs stretched out, every now and then she wiggles her toes against his thigh: she’s not in a huff.
‘What’s keeping the men at this time of the night?’ she asks again.
On the opposite wall of the sitting room, she’s hung a copper frieze of a pride of lions. It’s not his taste. And yet. The total seclusion here at Luiperdskop, the silence both outside and inside, in spite of the TV racket, soothes him, brings him to rest in a wholesome place. He wakes when Sissy suddenly gets up. The men are back earlier than she’d expected. That’s either good news or bad. She’s on her feet looking at him.
‘One last thing, Matt. If I may. I always feel I have to tiptoe around you. And what for? What the hell for? But okay, that’s another thing that I won’t go into right now. Just this one thing: please don’t let Pa’s will be tampered with. He’s told me what he’s left to everyone and I know what’s in it. That’s all I ask of you. Nicely, please.’
Fucking hell. He refills his glass, right to the top like they do here, and lights another cigarette from the butt. Sissy gets up with her arms folded across herself and unlocks the front door and goes outside. ‘Hey, you people,’ her voice echoes across the yard. ‘Hulloo-hulloo-hulloo, yes, there we are, Devil, don’t jump up, hello, my doggie. Did you give the jackal a hard time, my dog? Oh, here’s Socks too, ag, Socks, look at that blood on your nose.’
The men come in, full of themselves – not with conceit, just full of the experience they share with each other as well as the other four and the horses and dogs, all of them waiting there down-wind in the veld with a cigarette and a swig from the hip flask, speech reduced to a single word, to breathing, waiting for creatures that are a hundred times more cunning than they are at night in the open veld. Now they’re back with the experience – only two jackals that they’d managed to finish off in the veld, one a knackered old thing – and left old Grootpiet behind in the veld with his dogs, which is the only way of nailing the creatures.
It’s the exclusivity of the experience that he’d never be able to share in, Mattheüs thinks as he watches Marko pouring drinks for Frans and himself without asking him, Matt, whether he might not also like one. Khaki shirts and camouflage pants, Marko in Jeep boots, Frans in running shoes, that and the smell of gun oil, of dust and veld and a bit of blood, conspicuously macho: he doesn’t cut it, he’s not one of them. Hunting is normal, the checking of the magazine before slipping the gun into the hatstand is routine, Frans who now in full view of the company digs wax from his left ear and inspects it in the light; that’s how men here go about it, men who make a living from cattle in the veld, who marry and make children, the day’s work done, you crawl into bed next to your wife and if your luck is in, you get to admire her, not her, but her sex with all its parts, get to make love to her there, the miracle of it and the loveliness of it, the normality of that smell of hers with all the additional nuances that he can hardly describe from first-hand experience (the other one he knows a little better), and that here on the farm is presented as the norm without a second thought, so much so that it’s difficult not to succumb to it and start doubting your own normality.
Marko drops into his chair. ‘Fuck, I’m knackered,’ Sissy on his lap with his arm around her waist, his hand holding the glass on her thigh in yellow tights.
He’d fallen into an unusually deep sleep after a failed attempt at vividly calling up the flank in the rugby photo, second row, third from the right, for the kind of stimulation that made him realise the value of internet porn. He was still thinking of this when he’d apparently drifted off again on the single bed with its second-rate mattress and yellow floral sheets, then woken early. Now he’s up and about in the balmy February morning, up the mountain among the spekboom where he hop-skip-and-jumps to the flat rock where his pile of marker stones has been tossed about, as he’d expected.
Two messages come through on his iPhone, each with a photo. Another one of Jack and Jamie, which is to say emotional blackmail, and the second is a mysterious one of Jack in front of their gate at number nine Poinsettia Road. Both messages are cryptic, the gate one says: Look who came calling. It’s impossible to get clarity on Jack’s motives. Behind and above him he hears baboons beginning to go about their business. From here, there’s nothing he can do with the messages, he’s not even going to reply to them. He’s not going to get jealous, that would be out of character for him, and he won’t get upset or whatever. He switches off his mobile phone, starts running downhill as fast as he can without losing his step; if he sprains an ankle, he can’t open on Wednesday.
All the way down to Uncle Hannes’s rondavel with the barking dogs, he runs, and smells the coffee. Uncle Hannes says he’s been waiting for him. Uncle Hannes is wearing sunglasses even though he’s indoors; he’s dressed in his usual uniform of flapping turn-ups, pale-pink shirt and cravat, his bald head lightly oiled: ‘You can still be handsome if you try, Uncle Hannes,’ to which his uncle smiles, putting his cup of coffee with two aniseed rusks in the saucer in front of him. The dogs have the freedom of the house and lie down wherever they like, on the chairs or on the lynx-pelt bedspread on his bed, a rickety old thing. Just not on his lap when he’s dressed like this – Uncle Hannes chucks off a small one that tries its luck.
Even though it’s not real coffee, it’s good. His current reading matter with its guinea fowl feather bookmark lies on the coffee table – F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Unc
le Hannes notices him taking it all in and winks. He says he’s been thinking about Mattheüs’s visit; there’s more than enough time here in the Karoo to reflect, and has decided to share something with him this time that he’s always kept to himself. He doesn’t look at Mattheüs while he talks, then he gets up, opens the drawer of the dresser and takes out a framed photo. He says he trusts Mattheüs because, after all, he knows about him and Jack, how things are between them. Mattheüs must please remember that he regards this as completely private, it must remain between the two of them, please, his father, dear old Bennie, ag, to think that he’s also on his way out now, but there you are then, it goes without saying that it’s a matter that Bennie cannot and never ever could or would deal with. He taps his middle finger on the glass in the frame, then brings the picture across, the four dogs tracking him with their eyes.
‘So that’s my Paul.’ He pronounces it ‘Pole’.
A black-and-white street photo of a man from the nineteen-fifties, legs crossed and cigarette in hand, coffee cup on a round table in front of him, forming part of a row of tables and wicker chairs on a sidewalk, with a plate-glass window behind them both, clearly recognisable as a bistro in Paris or some other French city.
Uncle Hannes has meanwhile turned round – two dogs jumping to the floor as they misinterpret the movement as going for a walk – the dresser is opened and he takes out a bottle of brandy, adding a stiff slug to his coffee. Mattheüs nods and is given one too. Clearly a weighty matter this, for Uncle Hannes.