Wolf, Wolf

by Eben Venter

  ‘Jack, have you gone completely crazy?’

  Jack goes down on all fours and trots on the spot. The cocked head looks at him with vibrating whiskers, and deep inside is the glint of real eyes. He announces that he’s moving in as a dog, his name is Wolfie. Uncle Bennie won’t mind, of course. Doesn’t he have a soft spot for dogs?

  ‘Get up, for God’s sake, Jack, you fucker. You’re out of your mind. Take that thing off.’

  ‘I don’t want Aunt Sannie to see me. Just until I’m inside.’

  Mattheüs looks at the double-storey house next door; he’s paralysed with wanting to laugh and wanting to cry and heightened excitement at the thought that this is the dawning of a new era. At last the commandment forbidding him and Jack to bed down together under the paternal roof has been defied, a thought that he simultaneously shies away from as it approaches, comes closer, making him fumble for the cigarettes that he knows are in his bedroom. Jack fishes out his own packet.

  Mattheüs again peeks at Aunt Sannie’s double-storey through one of the gaps between the gate’s fleur-de-lis tips. Night in all the windows on the upper level, downstairs only the security lights illuminating her garden.

  Jack gets to his feet, slowly lifts the dog mask from his head until it drops behind his back, hanging from its elastic, the dog muzzle pointing heavenward, and gives Mattheüs a wet, spontaneous kiss.

  ‘I love you, man. Do you really think I’m going to move in with Charnie in Pinelands or into some depressing flat when I can sleep in your bed, Matt? In your house, with all those empty bedrooms just standing there.’ Jack carries on talking, but his whole body is shivering. If Mattheüs wants to, he can phone a taxi and send him packing.

  Mattheüs looks at the wolf’s muzzle that is now perched on top of Jack’s head, the mouth open, immobile, with fangs made of hard plastic or something that looks horribly real, and then strokes Jack’s back, all the way up to under the mask until he finds Jack’s shaven head, that irresistible eroticism of a smooth male head that makes him take his tongue from Jack’s mouth, but before he can say anything, Jack says: ‘Well, is Wolfie being invited in?’

  Way down in the street, Mattheüs sees an ADT guard approaching on a bicycle. ‘Stand inside the gate so he doesn’t see the mask behind your back.’

  ‘Everything okay here, Mister Matthew?’

  He knows him, it’s Christopher. The guard shines his powerful torch over the luggage, over him and Jack, and again over Jack so that the rivet buttons glint on his black shirt, and stops on Mattheüs’s face.

  Mattheüs signals to him to cool it, this is his friend, he’s coming to overnight here, just got off the plane.

  ‘He has lots of luggage, I see.’

  The man has a sixth sense for the unusualness of the situation, for the tension of the unfinished conversation between the two men. He must divert his attention: ‘How is your sister, Chris? I’ve been thinking about her.’ Christopher’s sister, a lesbian, was recently raped in Khayelitsha by three young men: to try and ‘fix’ her same-sex orientation, the Argus reported. Both the incident and the fact that Christopher knows Mattheüs is gay have established a strong bond between them.

  ‘She is suffering all the time, the criminals are out on the loose.’ His sister bumps into her rapists every now and again, and then they taunt her.

  ‘He’s flying out again tomorrow,’ Mattheüs says when he notices that Christopher is still looking askance at Jack, who’s standing his ground in the gap at the gate.

  ‘Cigarette? Jack, give Chris one of yours.’ Then he says goodbye, they also say goodbye, and Mattheüs sends his regards to his sister. Christopher cycles down the street with his crackling two-way radio, the torch flashing this way and that as he passes the homes of ADT clients.

  ‘Come in, then,’ says Mattheüs.

  They haul in the luggage, the gate slides shut and locks. They must get the stuff to his room without making any noise. Mattheüs has by this time plotted the whole scenario: his room will now be inhabited by a second person, his loved one. His father is blind, but by no means an imbecile, and will know within days what’s going on. Samantha will spot the traces of another presence in the house: Jack almost always pisses past the toilet; Aunt Sannie with her don’t-miss-a-thing binoculars, oh hell, what does he care? Must he really, at the age of thirty-two, and a few hours before opening his own business, try to pretend to an ADT guard that Jack isn’t coming to stay? Is that what his father expects of him? That he should abandon Jack, not lend him a hand in his hour of need? That’s surely not what Pa’s own dominee proclaims from the pulpit.

  And Jack. He’s stark staring mad, the man. To arrive here like this. And he himself is mad about his insistence tonight. It’s so not-Jack. Mad about that, for sure. Jack with that bald head of his above the wolf mask on his back, now walking purposefully, with a suitcase in each hand, up the three fan-shaped steps, into his new home.

  ‘Mattie, what’s going on, son?’ from the study.

  He knew his father was still far too attuned to anything out of the ordinary in their house. Until he loses that sharpness, he won’t surrender his spirit.

  Tempered till now by the excitement of the situation, his anxiety about Jack’s arrival as a guest returns, a disturbing kind of thing that grabs hold of him, grapples with him. Something like a sin, though he doesn’t easily think of any of his deeds or thoughts in terms of sin.

  Mattheüs chooses a kelim where he deposits the last suitcase and box that he’s carried in, and walks to the study. As he enters the sick air, his anxiety over the impostor intensifies, his loved one notwithstanding, and above all there’s the realisation that the new era could very well become an age of anxiety, and that the honourable status that he’s maintained up to now is starting to show cracks, even though he may not agree with its underlying ethos. It is a kind of sin, this. Not against his progeny, because he doesn’t have anything like that, but against his ancestry.

  And he remembers the dawning of another growing anxiety during his high-school years, and how immeasurably upset he was about what was still to come and would still come. One evening at table it happened, a summer evening in Cape Town it was, and still full daylight outside, with a roast leg of lamb and roast potatoes for supper, a special leg sent from Luiperdskop to the city, and Pa getting up, his jacket draped across his armrest, and with the sharpened knife starting to carve the leg against the grain – he’d never manage to slice it like his father did, not so thin – and then exploding: ‘Good heavens, do you think I can’t see that the leg is totally overdone?’ And a slice of meat on the carving knife is pushed in front of his mother’s nose, which she turns towards the dresser decorated with her copper pot of hydrangeas. ‘Dry. Can’t you see, all the life roasted out of it.’ He hurls the knife down with a clatter, wipes the fat from his hands on the serviette, chucks that down too, takes his jacket from the armrest and clears out.

  And for the first time he hears his mother swear. ‘Piece of shit!’ If only she’d shouted it after Pa, who by then had started his car to drive to town, but she mumbled it into her chest, where it collected and became toxic. Then he, Mattheüs, realised that everything was falling apart, that it had fallen apart a long time ago; what he’d just witnessed had only been the aftershock, and it wasn’t even about the leg of lamb. He was then in his second-last year at high school and understood what was happening in their home, had in fact always understood, but was only then able to verbalise it.

  Addressed to the sickbed (his gaze on the steep hillock made by the old man’s feet at the foot of the bed): ‘It’s me, Pa. I thought I heard something at the gate.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Scavenging dogs or something, Pa. I think somebody further up in the street let their dogs out on their own to go and do their business.’

  ‘So late?’

  ‘Yes, Pa.’<
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  Jack is in, the smart-arse, and he’s not going to get him out in a hurry. To be honest, he doesn’t want to, not after his tremendous effort (he radiated tension, his stare urgent, not once did he look away from him); buggered if he’s going to do that to him.

  He’s tired. Tomorrow at five-thirty, no, five o’clock to make sure, he must get himself up. He must go to bed now.

  He kisses his father on the forehead, leaves the room, this time closing the double doors.

  They quietly carry the luggage into Mattheüs’s room, lock the door, strip off their clothes and crawl into bed. Jack cuddles up against Mattheüs’s back, behind his buttocks and in the crook of his legs, and Mattheüs immediately drops off to sleep.

  He wakes just before dawn as he usually does, gets up from Jack’s encircling arms, goes to the bathroom and listens in the direction of the study whether everything is okay with his father. He crawls back into bed and drops off almost immediately, only to wake suddenly at daybreak, minutes before his mobile phone alarm is due to go off, to a vision, Old Testament-like and therefore dramatic, a hand writing on his sea-green wall above the string of sunglasses, the commandment, fourth or fifth it must be: honour thy father and mother as long as you live – the one that Dominee Roelf read out Sunday after Sunday when he unwillingly accompanied his father to the Reformed Church, Gardens, and which would be read out again the following Sunday, and had been read out by Dominee Klaas too, before Dominee Roelf, his mother then in the last years of her life, hatted and gloved in the pew, all of them listening to the commandment echoing all the way back to his baptismal dominee and even further into the past, Sunday after Sunday, to keep the memory of it alive in the minds of the sinfulness-inclined congregation, a commandment enjoining his people, his tribe, and himself, in a very particular way, not to stray from the ways of the fathers or you’ll be burnt to a cinder. As a reflex to the writing hand, a rebuke if ever there was one, his hand gropes around on the floor for his computer, which he wants to flap open to seek consolation on his favourite porn site, but with Jack next to him it’s way too unprivate.

  A month, two at most, then Pa won’t be there any more. Couldn’t Jack have hung on for just a while? He closes his eyes. Behind him, Jack is bed-warm and now, just before dawn, hard. He squeezes shut his eyes that are wanting to open.

  ‘It’s Sissy, Pappie.’

  ‘Oh, it’s you, my child. Are you phoning from the farm?’

  ‘Now where else would I be phoning from, Pa?’

  ‘No, it’s just that. It feels as if you never phone me.’

  ‘Ag, don’t be ridiculous, Pa. I phone every Wednesday and every Sunday. Pa knows that very well. Why do you do this to me? But tell me, is Pappie settled in again at home?’

  ‘I’m alone here. Mattie, you know, has started with his business. Dominee Roelf is coming to fetch me soon for the chemo.’

  ‘I really hope Matt doesn’t neglect Pa with him being out and about all day and every day with that business of his. Couldn’t he have waited? No, so now at the very end he has to go and do exactly what will take him away from home. No, really. Ag, I don’t know, Pappie. I’m just saying.’

  ‘It’s his prerogative, Sissy.’

  ‘Prerogative.’ She pauses a while on the word. ‘I mean, couldn’t he have waited a bit, Pappie?’

  ‘Couldn’t he have waited for what? For me to die?’

  ‘No, I mean. Ag, I don’t know. Pa knows what I mean. Listen, one of Pa’s socks got left behind. Shall I post it? Pappie must say if there’s anything I can help with. I can always drive down. Cape Town isn’t that far, after all. I mean, if there really is something.’

  ‘Sissy?’

  ‘Yes, Pa?’

  ‘It’s a terrible suffering you have to endure when you’re old.’

  ‘I know, Pappie.’

  ‘Do you know, when I lift my old arm against the light, it’s all flabby skin. And I always had good solid arm muscles. Do you remember Pa’s arms, Sis?’

  ‘Ag, heavens, Pa. My dear, dear Pappie.’

  ‘Well, my child, I suppose I must get myself ready. Mattie has put out my clothes.’

  ‘Pappie sounds a bit off-colour to me this morning. What is it? Is something wrong?’

  ‘How would you know what Pa is going through?’

  ‘Ag, Pa. I hope it goes well with the chemo and all. Tell Matt to phone me.’

  ‘Goodbye, my child. Give my best wishes there.’

  ‘Same, Pa. And remember I love Pappie very much.’

  ‘Me too, my child.’

  @ staff room, Zilverbosch, Jack Facebooks. (Does he post it Public or Close Friends only? He decides on Public.) Get this: a Grade Elevener asked me, the teacher with the least discretion on the planet, for counselling. Is Mister Jack van Ryswyk on the official counselling committee? You must be joking. Tell me: how does this tally with my so-called lack of discretion?

  Mister Richard Richardson is a total prick. (He wishes he could facebook that too.) Whenever he happens to come across him near his office, Mister Richardson’s greeting is abnormally friendly.

  There wasn’t time to eat at Matt’s this morning, so he takes out the Tupperware with his lunch. He balances it on his knees. The container isn’t greasy underneath, he’s checked. He opens it. A cold chop. It’s a loin chop with a narrow strip of fat that’s now congealed yellowish-white. The belly of the chop is grey and also hard. It’s one of the nicest things you can eat, a cold chop the next day. Matt taught him that.

  This morning he opened the fridge in Matt’s kitchen to take out the milk. Take the chop, Matt said when he saw him eyeing the side plate with the cold chop. Now it’s the chop itself that’s got him all frazzled.

  Look, if you were to ask him what kind of person he is, Jack would always say his senses come first. He hears and sees how a situation looks, he licks and spits, he acts on his senses. But now, this chop. It’s as if he can’t even bring himself to taste it. The chop represents the house that he’s entered. By force. It may in future become his chop, but at the moment. Let’s face it, in all his life he’s never taken a chop from his own or his mother’s fridge, as the chance of there being a chop in one of those fridges was zero. Sauerkraut, don’t even ask why his mother developed a taste for that. That’s all he can remember from their fridge in Worcester. The stinking bottle of old cabbage; hours after his mother had opened the thing and helped herself, the smell still hung in the air in that kitchen.

  In the staff room there are two circles of fifties-style armchairs that have been covered a few times, nothing luxurious but also not shabby, in the style of Zilverbosch. Along one wall is a counter with a hand basin and an urn with coffee- and tea-making things. There is decaffeinated coffee and herbal tea for the abstemious. Along the opposite wall there are pigeonholes containing all kinds of crap, and to the left of that a notice board with black-and-white xeroxed covers of the counselling books available to boys and counsellors. There are titles such as Dare to Succeed and Raise Your Game and The Quest for Masculinity and The Secret of Happy Children.

  The boy will soon come in, probably confused about his sexuality. Jack doesn’t have to plan what to say to him. He talks to the boys like an ordinary person. That’s what they want. No shitting about. They see right through you.

  He points and takes a photo of the chop inside the transparent pale-green container on his khaki chinos. He doesn’t share it, unusually for him. He’s mainly trying to figure out what’s going on here.

  He’s forced himself upon the Duikers’ Cape Dutch house, I suppose you’d say residence – that’s how he’s started thinking about last night’s entry. And with all those counselling books in front of him and him now having to give advice, he doesn’t know what to make of his own scheme. Matt was so nice to him this morning, so friendly and loving and warm and sincere. Take the chop,
Jack. This, after he’d forced Matt to open the gate so that he could invade number nine Poinsettia Road.

  With his index finger he up-ends the chop so that it lies leg-in-the-air. Payback. He’s going to have to give the man what he wants. And that’s connected to the thing he can hardly bear to think of. Do you understand? If he even begins to remember the incident, he wants to puke. It’s a whole lot of veiled images; if he could, he’d delete them one by one.

  That morning, he’d woken up on his stomach. With his hands folded under him. Never sleeps like that. That was the first thing that hit his drug-fucked mind. That, and then all the other things, the sour air in the room with a picture of one of those palm-fringed beaches ridiculously high on the wall. And the slimy blood and coagulated blood on him and also on the polyester sheet around him. And the pain all the way, up and up, right through his very being. And the shameful taste of it. And the knowledge, immediately, that his life from then on would be marked by it. That’s more or less all he wants to say. And all that he could tell Matt. And finally: when he hobbled out of there like a crippled fucking penguin to the taxi that had to take him to emergency, he had the presence of mind to look. He wanted to know where he was. Where it had happened to him. Cabana Hotel, Rooms available from R199, corner of Loop and Marine Streets. And the man who helped him out, a tall Nigerian in jeans and a pink Lacoste polo shirt, who didn’t look back. Just walked back into his hotel and pulled the security door shut behind his butt.

  More? No, he can’t.

  He turns the chop on its side again, looks up to check that nobody’s coming in, and smells the goodness of the meat. Then he presses the lid closed all along the square of the container. He could get all worked up about the thing that he’s taken that doesn’t belong to him. And the only way he can think of it in his stupid way, is to pay Matt back. And that’s the shit of it. He’s zipped up tight, he is, and he accepts it like that. That’s his status quo as a sexual being. He slips the Tupperware container back into his pocket for later.