by Eben Venter
Steve (it’s clear that he wants to participate fully in the conversation): If you watch chronically, as in full-on addiction, you no longer get a hard-on with your partner. Only with porn. That’s on the cards. Then you’re in the danger zone. Point-of-no-return. You can watch porn, but you have to realise what it’s doing to you.
Jack: Where do you get that from?
Steve: Read it. There’s lots of literature.
Jack: Christian Family Circle kind of literature?
Steve: No, serious studies. I’ll have a look.
Charnie: Just been out for the first time in my new boots. Very sexy. Got stares at the Waterfront. Are you coming around this evening? I’m making your favourite, ag pleez my dahling.
Jack: Kiss-Kiss. Can’t. Must stick to the programme.
Charnie: I’m worried about you.
Jack: So sweet.
Mikey comes sauntering along, the guy who pissed on Moenien at the Misverstand Dam. His piss. Jack’s demise.
Mister Richie, just the man he’s looking for. He wants to know if he can sit next to him on the bench. Polite. He takes out a memory stick. It’s a present for him. There are a thousand songs on it to download on his phone. It’s to say he’s sorry he messed things up like that for Mister Richie. It was impulsive. He was being childish.
Jack laughs at this. Mikey sits staring straight ahead of him at the lawn to lend gravity to the matter. It’s funny. He wasn’t made for gravity. Prime specimen, Jack thinks secretly. Is this what Matt is hankering for with his porn watching? And does he think he doesn’t know that’s what he does or wants to do the moment they walk into that room?
Mikey holds out his hand as a final gesture of reconciliation.
‘No big deal,’ Jack tells him and shakes his hand. Mikey bends down quickly and gives him a hug.
Another comment from Steve comes through: How deeply is he into porn, do you think?
Jack: Deep deeper deepest.
Steve: OK, so you’ve got a problem. Love him in the meantime. Love always works. I’ll give it some thought.
Jack: Love you, Steve.
He slips his phone back into his pocket, close to his kidneys where the pain is. (Could also be his heart.) It’s a pain that registers gradually. Matt has given him the cold shoulder, sexually speaking. And the result is that he feels horribly inadequate. Like never before in his life. He walks to the tuck shop and buys a packet of Zoo biscuits. By the time he takes the bus to Obs, he’s eaten them all.
In the fourth week of the existence of Duiker’s Takeaways, his father by now extremely weak, little Emile worms his way right into his shop. The business is starting to take off and because of this he’s behind with his preparation. Peeling garlic, onions, scouring saucepans, mopping the floor at the end of the day, his legs throbbing from the exertion and still throbbing when he eventually crawls into bed at night: all this makes him pick the nearest man at hand to help, the man who’s nagging to be given a chance. (Is he perhaps making the mistake of his life?) Then, right underneath his arm, the short-arse briskly walks in on bandy legs, his pitch-black eyes looking everywhere and into everything.
No, says Mattheüs once he’s inside, he thinks he’ll have to get a testimonial from him first, surprising himself with the volte-face, usually he’s not indecisive. He can’t employ somebody just like that, that’s not how things are done in South Africa (he bullshits). He simply has to listen to the inner voice warning him against Emile.
‘Not starting today?’ Emile folds his arms over his chest, still stony-faced. He’s small, but he’s strong.
Mattheüs nods and makes him march out again.
‘No problem, I’ll ask Father Raymond. He will come and talk for me. He will help me, always.’
By three o’clock that afternoon, he’s sold out of his chicken curry; Emile is standing side by side with the Catholic priest across the counter. The man is wearing his dog collar and all, and has these feeble paedophilic peepers – an appalling thing to say.
In a velvety tenor voice, he starts laying out Emile’s refugee history. Luckily, he keeps it short, and from that moves on to what he knows of him here in the Cape, his willingness to be of use in and around the church; it’s just that there are already so many hands and that’s why he’s looking for work. He talks about his faith in human beings and how Emile has not disappointed him. Whether or not to employ him, is of course up to Mattheüs. But he does believe that Emile will yet make a worthy contribution to the Cape Town community. And if not here, then somewhere else. He thanks Mattheüs for his time.
The next day, he and Emile carry a wooden pallet inside, and now the short-arse is standing there at the work surface peeling onions, a whole plastic container full.
At seven o’clock in the morning when he reports for work, his wife and three children come to see him off. The whole family cut from the same cloth, all short-arses, and with the gaze of the victim. How long were they in a refugee camp before coming here? Very long time, too long. And the chained dog, he always comes along too, by Mattheüs’s decree still a good distance from the shop. Long after they’ve started working inside – he must admit that Emile has proved to be a willing worker – the woman still hangs around with the children, one on the back and one at each hand. Most of the time, she just stands around or squats until he tells Emile his people must get going now, back to their single room in a backyard in Woodstock, the rent apparently three months in arrears; the church does help out a bit.
The cash register stands on the far right of the counter inside a steel chest, made by the same welder who did the steel door, and at the same sizeable fee, and the money drawer is under the counter in a concealed steel casing, like a safe, and, to tell the truth, he has never seen Emile’s eyes rest on that – those pitch-black penetrators which, if they watch you long enough, become reproachful, and if a bit longer, there’s also resentment; hatred, he hasn’t seen yet.
Take the garlic, for instance. He only showed him once the quickest way to peel a clove of garlic. Place the clove on your board, tap it lightly with the flat of the knife, bruising the clove but not breaking it, and see, the papery skin will peel off by itself. He tries to love the short-arse as you’re supposed to love your neighbour.
He has a new recipe here, actually one he came across in Galicia, northern Spain. It’s a delicious peasant stew, perhaps more suited to midwinter, but still. It fits into his menu and it’s cheap: a pig’s trotter or two, chickpeas cooked to marrow-softness, a bay leaf (in Galicia you go out and pick yours from a hedge), potatoes, salt and pepper and a few tablespoons of paprika, not the pungent one. Speaking of loving your neighbour, his mother is the only contender when it’s a matter of unconditional love. Although, come to think of it, in her last years she turned inwards, to a bottomless, murky lake where nobody was permitted and where nobody wanted to follow.
He gives Emile a cake of soap and a towel to wash himself with in the back toilet that they share with the laundry. Under the arms, he indicates. A sour odour he refuses to tolerate on top of everything else, here in his takeaway. Personal hygiene – he doesn’t baulk at talking to him on the subject. This is where his Duiker nature comes into its own. Man, if it looks as if any member of your staff doesn’t want to cooperate or maybe doesn’t have the temperament you’re looking for in your business, you have to act quickly. Give him notice that very day, see to it that you part on a good footing.
Emile, with his knobbly shoulders and those sturdy, bandy legs that could be sexy, but alas are too short, and the frown followed by a deferential nodding when he’s given a new task; a painful servility that prevents the man from growing on him.
Sissy phones him during the day at Duiker’s and he loses his temper with her; she’d better come quickly if she still wants to see her father. No, she’s getting into the car this very minute. The following afternoon s
he phones again, no, she’s spoken to Professor de Lange, it’s not the end by a long shot.
‘Professor de Lange has no more business with Pa,’ he says. He shuffles his feet impatiently because she’s phoning him at work: he could have been halfway done with a new jar of pickles. Fatigue makes him even more tactless. She’s cruel, he says to her, she’s hard. He becomes so emotional because he’s also unclear as to what exactly it is he wants to tell his sister, so that he loses his presence of mind in the shop and stares glassily at a customer who has apparently been waiting quite a while. Emile has, for the time being, been forbidden to deal with the public, and the customer shakes her head and walks off; it’s an elderly woman with a headscarf, and when he ends the call he turns around to Emile, who is paging through his personal recipe book, his finger trailing the words of the recipes, some in Afrikaans, others in English.
‘What are you doing?’ Mattheüs says to him. (There is surely nothing wrong with kitchen staff looking at your recipes.)
Emile gets a fright as if he’d indeed had his hand in the biscuit jar, gets a fright at the harshness of Mattheüs’s reaction, he doesn’t know him yet, asks pardon, please, flaps his little hands in front of him, and then turns around abruptly and carries on with the mortar and pestle: whole cardamom, cumin, and roasted coriander that exude an irresistible aroma when crushed.
Sannie must please help him to get to his desk. He wants to make his last recording.
‘But Bennie, man, really. In your condition.’
Something of the extra-sweet that she sprays on penetrates the air, making him light-headed and adding to his nausea.
It’s no problem for her to help him there, she says. She could almost piggyback him by now. ‘Bennie, you’re breaking my heart.’ Shouldn’t she carry the machine to his bed and just give him a hand there? She won’t listen to what he says if it’s anything private.
‘That will be the day. You. Not listen!’ He’s lost his spirit. A feebleness has taken possession of him. Sannie, ag, they’ve known each other for many years. Notwithstanding the overblown sentiment, she is after all a kind of mother to him. A person of principle, he can rely on Sannie always to be the same.
She need only lift the lid of the Philips and then move the machine into position, that’s all. When she’s done this, he signals that she can go, he needs his privacy. This is his final one. She tsk-tsks with her tongue against her teeth. When he hears the doors click shut behind her, he remains sitting, not knowing how he will ever get going. His thoughts are now coming more sluggishly, not like at the beginning of his confinement to bed, when they flooded his mind. It was the most beautiful and precious hoard of memories. And clear. Now he has to be on the lookout, or his thoughts run amuck like a herd of wild horses. He can’t even remember his ID number.
If he wants to lift his hands from his knees and get started, he’s going to have to do so now, otherwise he’ll never do it. He lifts them. Like lead. He is drawing on his last reserves. His hands on either side of the Philips. His hands flop down. He picks them up again, searches for the Play button with his index finger, and drags the machine a bit closer:
My dear son,
This will be the last one. The need to talk to you keeps nagging at me. And it’s also my fatherly duty. I can’t get away from that. I no longer want to preach. You have chosen your way of life. That’s how things are.
Imagine, the other day Dominee Roelf was sitting here and said to me, what we must remember, brother, is that they don’t harm anyone. I was slightly shocked. I no longer have the strength to oppose him. Yes, my son, it’s a different sort of world this, which I’m leaving, to the one I entered seventy-six years ago.
The doves outside my window have such a pretty way of talking to each other. And then every now and again the shrill old yaya-ya-ya of the hadedas. Ag, I love them too. I say it’s a different world I’m leaving, but it’s still a wonderful world. A gift from God, your whole life long.
Do you know, Mattie, sometimes I pray that I can spend just one more day here, right here in my chair at the window. Just one day without nausea. It’s a long time since I’ve known how it is to feel ordinary and not nauseous to death. It’s not the kind of nausea you get in a car on a winding road. Or perhaps from a bad oyster. It’s a nausea that takes possession of you. It takes over your whole system, day and night. With every breath you take and every time you breathe out. There’s no let-up. If only I could vomit to get some relief, but that is not granted me. My son, it will be a blessing to be rid of this nausea that’s taken possession of me like a devil.
Now that I’m talking about oysters, I remember the Christmas holidays in East London, years ago. You weren’t there yet, only Sissy, a floppy baby. In those days we could walk from the caravan park down to Orient Beach, everything safe, and clean as a whistle. Well, so I’d get up early in the morning and go for a jog along the beach and swim in that water, too, like champagne it was. I’d take along my towel and my pocket knife. Right there on the rocks, you could pick yourself some oysters. I’d rinse them in sea water and eat them just like that. They were the best oysters I’ve ever eaten, those. Of course, they say oysters make a man feel very lustful. Mattie, your father has never had a problem with that.
A wonderful life, Mattie. A wonderful life. That’s what Pa still wants to get across to you for the last time. It was so short, so short, all of it, Mattie. I can’t believe it. Everything over in the wink of an eye. A tiny little seed. What does that poet of ours say, like a grain of sand. Mattie, my dear child, if I look back over my life, I can’t believe how quickly everything has passed. The old cot where my mother lay me down, painted a glossy light-blue, from there to where I’m lying here, worn to a frazzle, I can’t believe it’s all over.
Remember this, Mattie. Pa feels moved as he’s sitting here. My wonderful life is over. And I can’t believe how quickly. My tears have come too late, Mattie. It’s all over, from beginning to end, in a wink. My life is over.
The Lord is coming to fetch me to his eternal home. I suppose I’ll see your mother there too, but I’m not in the least concerned about that. You see, it is written, in heaven there’s no man and wife, as on earth.
I’m ready, Mattie. You’ve been a good son to me. I believe I gave you guidance where I could. It was my privilege. You’re now standing on your own two feet. May the Lord bless you abundantly, my son.
Your Pa.
‘There’s no need for me to see him again. I’ve said my goodbyes to Pa.’
‘Well, then that’s fine, Sissy. It’s your decision. I respect it.’
‘I’ve started baking for the funeral. If it’s a fine day, we’ll have to carry tables out onto the stoep. We won’t have people messing and spilling on the floors and carpets then, for us to clean up afterwards. I’ll be roasting a few legs of lamb too. There’s nothing nicer than cold lamb with mustard. Everyone enjoys that.’
‘I take it you’ll be staying here.’
‘That goes without saying, Matt. Or do you have a problem with that? You must speak up, man. It’s your house, after all. Soon.’
‘I need to know so that I can tell Samantha to make up the beds, Sissy. My time is divided between Pa and my takeaway. I don’t have a minute to spare.’
‘Oh.’
Mattheüs says nothing more. He stands there staring at the arrangement of strelitzias he’s put in the hallway. Jack is showering.
‘Does he ask after me?’
‘Pa? He isn’t really talking any more. I want to be with him when he goes. He asked me about that too. Mattie, sit with me till the Lord takes my soul away.’
‘Oh.’
‘I want to do it. I want to see what it’s like when someone dies.’
‘And if you’re at work?’
‘Samantha will phone me in time. The university is closed for the holidays and she’s sitt
ing with him while working on essays and stuff.’
‘Ag, here on the farm we see how sheep die all the time. Nobody who lives on a farm is ignorant about death. Here you’re too close to the earth.’
‘I can’t believe you’re saying that. Those are animals, Sissy. Sheep. It’s Pa I’m talking about.’
‘I’ve said goodbye to him. That’s all I mean, really. And he knows it. He had all his wits about him. There’s no point in my driving down to come and sit there. It’ll just draw things out. Pa and I understand each other very, very well. We always have.’
Jack is a man who enjoys showering. If Sissy would get off the phone now, he could still get to his computer for his daily fix.
‘Are you still there, Matt?’
‘Yes.’
‘You mustn’t let us grow apart when Pa is no longer there, Matt. Remember, it’s just the two of us. I love you, man, even though you’re an otherwise kind of person.’
‘Love you too, Sissy.’
‘Well then, let me know if there’s anything else I need to bring. How’s Jack? I suppose he’ll also be at the funeral.’
‘Fuck, Sissy.’
‘Okay, okay. I just wanted to know. Sleep tight, Matt. And phone me.’
‘Bye, Sissy.’
It’s the end of an era. Once Pa is no longer here, Sissy will have even less reason to come to Cape Town, she’ll phone even less frequently, they’ll become estranged and neither of them will have the will to put things right. It saddens him for a moment. He sees a future where he’ll have to reorient himself, and the house with all its rooms and every space that for so long he’s wanted to make his own, mainly the study, suddenly becomes a melancholy place. His hand in Pa’s, then Pa’s hand in his (he’ll give himself another hour or so and then he’ll go and sit there again), and soon enough the final severing of the old bond.