Wolf, Wolf

by Eben Venter

  He enters his room (Jack is still showering) and for the first time the mustiness hits him. He’ll have to clean up before the funeral, as one should, surely; the house must be vacuumed and dusted and polished inside and out so that his father’s soul can depart this life from a squeaky-clean earthly home. Behind the drawn curtains on the windowsill is a vase of old proteas, almost as old as his mother’s death, or even older; he’s aware of their presence, sometimes something scrabbles around in their bone-dry flower heads. The big mother spider has her nest in the left back corner of the room, with hundreds of babies, and there, right in front of her nest, he’s positioned the open mouth of a Consol jar that’s supposed to entice them so that he can carry the whole family outside. And then there’s the packet of soggy Romany Creams on the lower surface of the book table that he’s going to chuck out. And there’s all Jack’s stuff that needs a bit of sorting out.

  In all fairness, he’s not going to blame Jack for the mildew, the grey-green growth, some of it already powdery. It’s since he’s moved in, no, this evening, that the room’s felt so stuffy. There’s the open wardrobe where Mattheüs emptied three drawers for him and that he hasn’t used yet, the drawers are still pulled open as he left them. In front of the wardrobe, his running shoes sit gaping, with their worn inner rubber and a year’s foot sweat. And there’s the damp aftertaste, everywhere in the room, of the Ingram’s Camphor Cream that he uses and that Mattheüs always rather liked on his mother’s fingers rubbing it in hard all around his chapped heels, but now it bothers him.

  He’s exhausted. Torments himself mercilessly with the next day’s work schedule, everything that has to be done before he can roll the shutter up at twelve. Late this afternoon, he discovered a piece of garlic peel the size of his pinkie nail in the leftover dahl. Emile gone already, so he couldn’t question him about it. He sinks down onto the bed. Last one up is supposed to make the bed, he can’t remember who it was this morning. He could happily sleep through a whole day and night’s worth of dreams until he’s slept his fill. Next to him on the pile of crumpled sheets the screen of Jack’s iPhone lights up.

  Mattheüs leans across and opens Facebook.

  Charnie: Meantime done lots of private research on porn, spoke to everyone who knows anything. Über addictive. You really need a professional to dig you out of the hole. Shit Jack. What are you going to do?

  Mattheüs turns off the screen and falls back on his bed, on their bed, on the four pillows that smell of him and Jack, of their hair and their head sweat and all the things that happen to you at night when you’re sleeping and tossing and turning, oblivious of everything except flashes in your subconscious, a primitive condition. He refuses to fill his headspace any further, certainly not with anything like regret, not about the condition of his room, his world in the house, and definitely not about his porn obsession; and he’s done everything in his power for his father.

  Jack comes walking in, towel around the waist, silvery sexy droplets on his shoulders. Mattheüs says to him (listlessly): ‘Jack, it’s a phase, the porn thing, it’ll blow over. Just give me a chance.’

  As Jack bends over to dry himself, light from the single reading light casts knobbly shadows all along his bent spine. He puts on some tracksuit pants and picks his T-shirt up from the floor and slips on his running shoes and paces up and down without sitting down as Mattheüs asks him to do; his slow-moving form – sometimes inside and sometimes outside the light cast by the reading lamp – disturbs him. The end of an era, he thinks, he is at last going to be on his own in this huge house, and then Jack begins to speak from a spot at the back of the room where Mattheüs can’t see him, only his voice he hears, soggy like someone who’s been crying a while and has phlegm in his throat, and in that sodden voice he cuts to the quick, Matt’s and his own too, touches the most sensitive nerve.

  He talks about the heightened level of sensation that Matt and he adore, or rather that he thought Matt adored, and that Matt has now sacrificed for the sake of porn. He talks about the sensation that you achieve only if you play the sex game for an hour or more without a break, okay, short breathers in between, no matter who takes and who gives, that breaking point you reach just before you reach it, the senses individually and collectively tuned to their most receptive key, and the breaking point that together they don’t reach, deliberately withhold from each other so that neither the one nor the other can reach it, on and on until both of them have emptied themselves completely of all thought and all activity that could possibly occur in the rational sphere, both of them now surrounded by a new smell that sweat carries and that both recognise precisely because they don’t know it, because you don’t smell it anywhere else, and then, at that moment: the overwhelming, all-inclusive sensation of pure animality.

  Jack has in the meantime moved back into the circle of lamplight, and from where Mattheüs is lying on the crumpled bedclothes and listening and hurting, hurting nearly as much as in that condition of heightened sensation that Jack is trying to capture, except that that is a hurt which manifests itself through increasing degrees of pleasure, he dozes off and removes himself from Jack’s words to reduce their checkmate effect, and then, looking up, he sees Jack’s shaven head floating halfway between the bed and the ceiling, the glimmer of the low light on the stretched-to-breaking-point scalp, speckled with pinheads of shaven hairs, and he looks and looks until he succeeds in no longer taking to heart Jack’s painful summing-up of their situation, but listening away, far away from the bobbing gleaming head that forms no part of him, of his existence, of the vision with which he now replaces Jack’s damning words: a recent image from a porn movie of two Latinos on a sofa, bronzed on Rio’s beaches and bulging with muscle yet without being out of proportion, and the approach to the whole thing, smiling and playful, that’s what he remembers now and what makes him smile, he stretches out his hand and adjusts the lamp so that his face is veiled in darkness, and the memory of the image provides such pleasure, the total freedom with which those two interact. ‘Jack, please, stop all that stuff,’ and he turns on his stomach until he feels Jack’s hand tapping his shoulder.

  Then he looks back to see what Jack wants him to see. Jack is holding one of those foul running shoes of his right above his computer where it’s in touching distance on the floor, his computer, his trusty partner. A blob of mud and dirty grass fall from the sole of the shoe onto the silver lid of the computer.

  ‘Do it and you’ll find yourself on the other side of the gate tonight.’ (Imagine threatening Jackie, of all people, like that.)

  Then Jack sits down on the chair under the string of sunglasses that will have to be dusted and Windolened, one and all. Mattheüs takes the end of the sheet and wipes the dirt off his computer lid and flaps it shut. He knows what Jack is saying. It’s a phase. Nothing more. He can change again, after all, the brain is essentially plastic, everyone knows that. Arms folded across his chest, he lies thinking of some consolation for Jack; the man is shattered. He wishes he could tell him that he’s come to the end of his porn cycle, that he’s ready to walk away from it.

  ‘Inadequate. Do you know how it feels, Matt? I might as well cut off my prick. You brought me in here and now you’ve swapped me for sex that doesn’t exist. Think of it, Matt, it’s all in your head.’

  ‘I didn’t bring you in here.’

  The two of them sit there until it becomes unbearable. Mattheüs gets up, arranges his clothes, smoothes his hair, says he has to go to his father. He bends his head down between Jack’s knees, lays it on his legs that smell of him and his tracksuit. Jack puts his hand on Mattheüs’s head, says he doesn’t know what more to say. At least he was honest.

  Mattheüs tiptoes into the study and takes his father’s hand. With his ear against his half-open lips he can only just discern some breathing. He’s not in a coma: the hand in his performs tiny twitches of acknowledgement. Mattheüs asks if he has pain. This prompts a
hardly distinguishable movement of the chin that has by now become completely beardless. He sits down without releasing the small, trembling bird in his hand.

  For the time being he forgets about Jack’s objection to the loss of the little death (a thing to cherish while you’re still alive), but in the presence of death it’s an objection that cannot be sustained; here, only death prevails, imminent, he can see it is upon them.

  He doesn’t cry. No need for it. He holds his father; with that frail hand in his, he’ll hold him as he requested, that’s what he’ll do, and reminds himself of the most beautiful thing his father ever told him: you are a good son, Mattie. That’s how he holds him, that’s how he’ll hold him to the end, the bequest of those words his only possible consolation.

  Where is his father now, he wonders after a while. He tests for warmth over the nostrils. The unconscious is still operating, where is the old man wandering, with which person or thing is he still lingering?

  A sob. ‘Pa?’ There will be no more words.

  He unclasps his father’s hand from his and quickly pours himself a double brandy that he knocks back, pours another double tot and takes the hand again, delicate now, the skin sacred to the touch because it covers the final human fragility with only the flicker of a pulse somewhere inside to preserve it.

  The Sly Fox and Little Red Hen was one of his father’s earliest stories. About the little red hen who sat on a rafter in the shed, trying for all she was worth to keep her balance while the fox, sly as sly can be on the floor below, marched and pranced and flattered and flirted so that Little Red Hen felt quite dizzy. That was Pa’s best story; he on his lap. He cherishes that intimacy of his father’s voice, warm as his own breath, exciting as it rose and fell, and the long whisper just before the hen succumbs and you don’t want to know, even though you do know, what’s coming.

  That, and then later, his father as a man as he saw himself, and as Mattheüs saw him as a man, his father coming from work in his elegant tailored suit and always smelling of money and strange women and the leather of the seats of those dream-mobiles he spirited from the showroom floor (so clean you could eat off them) to the garages of his clients, his father returning from work, half past five or six o’clock or seven o’clock or even later, he always used to phone then, and he’d lean against the frame of the double door of his study while Mattheüs was in there reading or looking for something to do in his favourite room, and his father then, with one arm up against the varnished frame so that his tailored jacket pulled up and showed more of his shirt, a pure white or a pale-blue one, with the right tie knotted in just the right way, and if he then went to greet his father and walked past him, his father remaining in exactly that position, his appeal wasn’t lost on his son, he could smell his father, his own private smell after a whole day’s working and negotiating that took place without his taking off that jacket, at most a slightly loosened tie.

  When he wakes up, he has the feeling that he’s been sleeping into his own old age, right until he has arrived where his father is now, the hand in his has grown cold. Pa is dead.

  He must have slept for a terribly long time, he can’t tell, his mobile phone is in the bedroom, he can’t name the hour when his father died. He was waiting for the death rattle; it was supposed to come, still.

  Or otherwise he has slept for a very short time, maybe only minutes. His father was still with him a moment ago. The Sly Fox and Little Red Hen. Tumbled down. His father.

  He takes the hand from his and carefully places it by his father’s side on the bedspread. He tests again over the nostrils. It is so.

  He’ll go and tell Jack. Actually, he needn’t really tell Jack anything, he’ll just know. (Even though he’s angry about their waning sex life, it won’t interfere with his ability to read him correctly.) After that he’ll go and phone. Sissy, Samantha and Auntie Mary, Aunt Sannie, Uncle Hannes, Dominee Roelf. He’ll bring the tidings to each one in a different way, depending on how close they were to Pa. To Sissy he’ll say: ‘Sissy?’ and then she’ll know the time has come. She didn’t fear Pa’s end as he did. She didn’t want to come to be with him at the hour of his death. Get finished and move on: she’s made of different stuff to him.

  He won’t use the telephone in the study. His father’s body is empty and cooling fast; in the next few hours it will become rigid, and if you place your hand on it then – he’s decided already that he won’t – the onset of death is more shocking and more incomprehensible than now when you might still, if you slid your hand inside the pyjama jacket and stroked the belly, discern a lukewarmth – that, too, he won’t do. He pictures the lukewarmth as blinding-white in colour, tender as the skin of a newborn, more tender and softer than ever, just before rigor mortis sets in.

  He goes out and closes the double doors infinitely slowly, and when he hears the soft click, he grabs his chest, his heart jolting, the pain fresh, tremendous, coming with a single, fierce stroke, and not again.

  While his father’s remains are lying in the mortuary, he decides to open Duiker’s Takeaway after all for those two days. The show must go on, says Jack, frankly pleased that the old man has, as he says, got on with it. It’s school holidays, and Jack is going to tackle the mustiness in his bedroom from the floor up, although, says Jack, he actually likes the dusty duskiness of his room in broad daylight, the smells and things that lie around just as they were left there.

  Sissy talks nonstop about Pa lying so cold and lonely on his own, shame. He reminds her that he can’t possibly still be there, it’s just bones, dust, she can go and see for herself, she’s silent and then eventually says: ‘I still don’t know whether I’ll wear a hat or a mantilla to the funeral.’

  Emile presents him with a slaughtered, badly plucked chicken as a mark of respect for his deceased father. He immediately puts the thing away, stuffed into one of those thin plastic bags, its skin is close to the touch. They never again mention his father; none of Emile’s business.

  Emile is energetic and efficient in all he does, to the point that it’s difficult, Mattheüs even finds it disturbing, to explain how he so quickly managed to get on top of everything, even though he maintains that he used to work in a restaurant. He is even more deferential than in the previous week, and this hugely irritates Mattheüs. He doesn’t want to work here with a sub-human: the short-arse he literally looks down on, even when he’s standing on the pallet. That irritates him even more.

  The only way he can counteract the lovelessness – and that’s surely what it is – is to succumb to another disturbing tendency, which is to distrust the Congolese. Two of his people, poorly dressed short-arses, turn up with his wife and children over the next two days, supposedly to see him off, the dog also in attendance, as usual. The whole bunch of them some distance away on the pavement as he unlocks the steel gate and the door, and Emile enters underneath his arm and immediately takes the key of the cold room from its hiding place on the shelf under the bottle of sea salt, opens the cold-room door and starts carrying out the heavy pots – he’s got these rock-hard little apples for biceps – or a pocket of potatoes or whatever is needed for the day; he knows without even asking or being told. Emile’s lot sit there and chatter among themselves, one of the men rolls a cigarette for them all to share, until he asks Emile to tell them all to leave. He uses the dog as an excuse. (Its snout with the gums and fangs dripping saliva seems bigger every time.)

  They get on very well over those two days, better than in the previous weeks. Emile doesn’t put a foot wrong, even reminds him about preparation for the next day. His own mind isn’t all that clear. He’s battling with the last image of his father on the bed in the study, the face turned to the ceiling: bloodless, skeletal.

  It’s wearisome working right next to a person in a cramped space all day long, and then there’s also the heat from the four flames of the hob. He hears his father: My son, there is such a thing as intuition,
even in us men. Don’t let them tell you otherwise. And with the staff working for you, man, you must have a fine perception. Doesn’t matter how harsh it seems. It’s your business, Mattie. It’s your bread and butter, remember that. If it goes wrong, there’s nobody to bail you out. It’s yours, Mattie. Pa knows you’re man enough for the thing, son.

  Emile always prefers one of the meat dishes when they have something to eat in the afternoon, and a Coke that makes him burp every time he takes a sip. He makes a point of not using his hands to stuff his mouth. But as soon as Mattheüs has finished and goes to rinse his plate, the hands begin to roll the food into little balls, stuffing them in. Then he jumps up to go to the washbasin, chewing open-mouthed and still shiny with the delicious taste of the food. It’s a child-like surrender and gratitude – it’s not as if he’s blind to the human being who probably for the first time in his life is being fed regularly. If only he could concentrate on that.

  His fourth child, not by his wife here in Cape Town, is still in Kakuma, the refugee camp, Emile starts telling him, and turns around often from the washbasin to catch Mattheüs’s eye and to convince him of the seriousness of the situation. It’s a little boy, he says, and he’s also coming out here now. His other father-in-law never wanted him to fetch the boy, even though the mother was dead; the way it works is that in the camp you’re given a food coupon for every child you have. So if that child also left, the other father-in-law would lose a food coupon. But the boy has now been released, after all. Father Raymond helped him with this. ‘Very good man. Very good heart.’ The boy will arrive by plane on Saturday.

  Mattheüs says he’s glad for Emile’s sake. It’s his child, he belongs with him. He doesn’t ask what the mother died of.

  Afterwards, Emile washes his hands with a few drops of sterile soap from the wall-mounted bottle, as Mattheüs has shown him, and dries them with a paper towel. ‘I want to make this business a big success, I want to build it and build it.’ The pitch-black eyes glisten. ‘I need a house, man. My family, we all need a house, I want to buy a house – then I will be a very, very happy man.’