by Eben Venter
‘It was a conditional kind of love.’
‘Aren’t we all like that? Love, but just up to a point.’
‘Hell, he was my father.’
‘Matt, I must be off now. Fetch kids in town. They’re all taking ballet now. Leona is already on pointe. A real little ballerina. You can see she has it in her. Now go and have a drink and celebrate, Matt. Enjoy your life.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’
@ Charnie’s. Pinelands after midnight. For those of you who are still awake: a riddle. How do you sleep when you’re stuck with another guy’s problem in your head?
Jack stares at the blue-lit screen of his iPhone for a while. Not a soul. All of them in dreamland.
‘Talk to me,’ Jack says to Matt, who has in the meantime got out of bed. The guy has clammed up. Pent-up anger. Jack doesn’t know how to open it up and resolve it. It’s not the first night that he’s woken up on Charnie’s sponge mattress and found Matt gone.
‘Cheap and plastic. And a bit dirty too,’ Matt says, standing in front of the only window, smoking and gazing out at the pine tree. He can’t stay there any longer. She’s got a heart, Charnie, that’s true, but she doesn’t know how to make a place cosy. Then he says, why don’t they go and stay in the parking area at Rondebosch Common. They can make themselves comfortable on a mattress on the back seat of the Mercedes, eat at Carlucci’s, Jack can shower at the Zilverbosch gym, he’ll manage with the takeaway’s toilet. He knows how to do a body-wash at a hand basin, all you need is a facecloth and soap. ‘And every evening,’ then he’s quiet.
‘What?’ He knows what Matt wants to do. He wants to go back to number nine Poinsettia Road. That’s why he wants to go and stay on the Common. To be close to their house. Jack is sitting down on the edge of the bed in his pyjama pants. He’s got a late-night erection that’s throbbing. He wishes Matt would concentrate on him and stop his shit. Go and stay on the Common. He’s crazy. And yet it’s the most he’s heard Matt say in days. Okay, so they’re going to stay on the Common like vagrants. Bergies in a grand car. Now he’s seen everything.
He knows the Common well. Forty hectares of fynbos and veld. Milner Road is on the east side and Campground Road on the west. It’s close to Zilverbosch Boys’ High, and he likes walking there. In spring, the Common is a garden, with rare flowers that only grow on the Cape Flats. He doesn’t know their names, only the white arum lilies he knows, a smaller species of wild arum. And then there are all the dogs that dog owners take there to run around freely. Pure joy. Up and down the paths among the grasses and flowers that have been trampled by people and by dogs’ paws. He knows it sounds a bit silly, but he associates the Common with a zest for life. He’s often seen two brothers who go there with their two chocolate Labradors. The men look alike, they could even be lovers. People say that after a while lovers start looking alike as a result of osmosis. He always watches them, those two. All tail-wagging hyperactivity, the Labradors run off in front of them. Sometimes the two men walk with their arms around each other’s shoulders. The path trodden between the flowers and grass, the shiny-coated dogs, the brothers or lovers with that obvious bond between them, and to the east the beautiful dark-green backdrop of Table Mountain – to him it’s one of the most beautiful scenes he’s ever seen. When he comes across those two with their Labradors, he always feels a pang in his heart, wanting to have something like that in his own life, as complete as the two of them.
The next afternoon, towards dog-walking time, at about five or sixish, they pull up in the parking area. All the dog lovers come driving along in bakkies or 4x4s, then park, open the back for their dogs to leap out, walk and return after a while, dogs and owners all panting. Eventually, there’s just the two of them. They’ve collected two takeaway lasagnas from Carlucci’s, and each of them has four beers. The wind has turned nasty, and they sit in the car with half-opened windows. The whole car smells of lasagna. By now Jack is used to Matt saying nothing and clearly not about to say anything. He regards the Common as the last phase of the business of shedding the will. After that they’ll take a flat together and maybe, just maybe, live happily ever after.
@ Common, he facebooks Charnie after supper. Can you believe it? Common = our garden, Merc = our house. Two on a mattress on the back seat. Imagine someone peeping in on us in the middle of the night. Shock & awe.
Charnie: Ag Jack, you’re crazy, man. High-risk area that. People have been killed on the Common.
Jack: We = OK. You know about Matt’s present from Uncle Hannes.
Charnie: What about those two gay guys who were chucked out near Klipfontein Road? Shot in the back of the head. Execution style. You’ve forgotten, haven’t you?
Jack: Matt feels at home here. Healing, all that stuff. Try to understand.
Charnie: Where do you eat?
Jack: Carlucci’s.
Charnie: And where do you wash? And all that?
Jack: @ Zilverbosch gym.
Charnie: Hope your nails = clean.
Jack inspects his nails, which are not in fact very clean. It’s difficult to keep everything tidy, his case this side in the boot, Matt’s that side. Inside the Merc there’s companionable chaos. Finding a sock’s partner becomes more and more of a problem.
Jack: Funniest thing is when somebody comes to walk his dog first thing in the morning and I have the Cadac on with our espresso pot on top. And the car with all its doors wide open. Mattress, bedding, everything. In a car like this. Nobody understands.
Charnie: You two scare me. Your life = a precious thing. Remember that.
Jack: I’m holding onto it.
At bedtime, Jack props the Alsatian mask against the windscreen. He’s begun to believe in the mask as a talisman. He refuses to connect Wolfie’s moving into number nine Poinsettia Road with the will that turned out so badly. ‘It was on the cards,’ he tells Matt, who stares at him blankly. Nobody, Jack realises, can feed the man a line any more. He’ll have to draw his own conclusions.
During the night, Matt goes outside with a roll of toilet paper to use the Common as the Common dogs do. Jack lies looking through the back window at the stars that he can make out in spite of the glow of city lights. It’s cosy in the back of the Merc with the mattress and pillows and duvet and everything. And he enjoys it despite the deadly silence of his mate. He experiences a simultaneous tranquillity and low-level excitement, as if something tremendous is about to happen to them.
It’s undoubtedly got something to do with Matt’s ongoing silence. Sometimes it’s even reassuring, because he knows what’s happening in his head. But at other times he hasn’t a clue as to what’s bugging Matt. Probably because they’re now living so intimately in the climate of the Common, he thinks of Matt’s silence as dew, glistening and lovely in the early morning, and then again like frost, chilly and nothing more than that, and sometimes it’s a sticky damp that makes him shiver, something you want to dry off, that you want to get rid of.
On the second evening, Matt’s mouth opens and words issue from it. Grateful! The man has a clear idea of what he wants to do. And it’s exactly as he thought. It’s the reason for the squatting on the Common. Matt suggests that they walk past number nine Poinsettia Road. He wants to check what’s happening there. Okay, he’s got the picture. Matt’s, that is. It’s all been planned beforehand, Jack has no doubt about that.
When they arrive before the familiar gate with its fleur-de-lis spearheads, Matt orders him to stop. Then Matt takes him by the hand and he and his friend start marching up and down in front of the gate. (No, the man hasn’t flipped. It’s his way of healing.)
The house, garden and driveway have all been lit up in a way that the Duikers never did, except when there was a party. Every possible outside and inside light is on. Mr Mkhonza and his family are either very scared or they simply enjoy the luxury of all the lights. Next door, at Aunt Sannie
’s place, only the upstairs light of the TV room is on. Matt shows him the two eyes of her binoculars peeping out between her curtains.
Matt stands in front of the intercom. He looks at him over his shoulder. ‘I want to see if I can still open the gate. Maybe they haven’t had the code changed.’
‘Don’t, Matt.’ And he puts his hand on Matt’s, which is about to touch the numbers on the keypad. ‘There’s Mr Mkhonza,’ Jack whispers in warning when he spots the man behind the right-hand window of the stoep. Matt ducks behind the gate. Only Jack’s shaven head is still visible between the fleur-de-lis tips. When they see two ADT bicycle lights approaching from the far end of Poinsettia Road, they quickly take off in the opposite direction.
‘Hey, Matthew,’ they hear behind them. It’s that Christopher-guard with his friend.
‘Hello, Christopher,’ Matt says in a friendly voice, so that Jack feels heartened: this is his final phase. After this, Matt will revert to his old self. And they’ll fuck like rattlesnakes (maybe) to make up for all those dry spells. At least Matt is no longer watching porn. That is, he hasn’t caught him at it yet. Only the occasional pissed-off glare as if it’s Jack’s fault that he’s had to lay off the sleazy stuff. He’s on a 3G connection and it’s too expensive and too slow to download videos and play them. Matt is as terrified as Uncle Bennie was that poverty will grab hold of him. Duiker’s Takeaway has gone rather quiet. The morose and silent person behind the counter makes the lunch trade wonder about the food.
But he has to add: Matt’s morose moods don’t last. And he knows him all too well. ‘Let’s go for a walk on the Common.’ No, too late and too cold. Still, they put on their tracksuits and take one of the paths. It’s not completely pitch dark, there are street lights on the four roads bordering the Common as well as an urban glow. They’re not at all afraid that they’ll be mugged. There are two of them. And neither of them is the fearful type. Jack takes Matt’s hand as a father would a son’s. He likes it, he knows the shape of Matt’s hands. Broad and veined on top and rough on the inside from all the kitchen work. As they walk, Jack smells the early evening dew on the grass, and an odd whiff of exhaust gas blowing onto the Common. There’s no need to say anything. All you have to avoid is possible dogshit on the paths. He suddenly ducks in behind Matt and tackles him slo-mo so that his knees buckle and he collapses onto the grass.
‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’ Matt lies there, propping himself with his hand on a tuft of grass.
‘Matt. Matt.’ He wants to tell him that all he wants is to bring him back. Make him ordinary again, like he always was. Happy. He pulls Matt up by the hand, but only halfway, so that they’re both sitting on their haunches, heads level with the grass.
‘What?’ says Matt.
Jack looks north, west, south, east. ‘Nothing. You can’t see anything of the city from here. Only the grass and the mountain there, to the west. This is our hiding place in the middle of the city. Isn’t that something. We’re white tramps, bergies. With a Merc!’
‘Let’s go and sleep,’ says Matt.
Matt doesn’t relent. He doesn’t want to, Jack realises. Matt’s soul is worn out. But he still keeps hoping. Jack places a high premium on the happiness he associates with the Common. This is the right place for them. When they leave here, Matt’s headspace will be okay again.
With the (forced) abstention from porn, Mattheüs experiences withdrawal symptoms that manifest mainly as grumpiness and impatience, twin symptoms he’s deeply aware of without liking them – he doesn’t want to be this way. Don’t take that away from me as well, he prays, while rinsing a bunch of celery under the tap. But what god wants to listen to a porn addict? It’s especially in the evenings after work when that particular circuit in his brain kicks in: he really misses it. He sometimes gets gooseflesh as a result of the absence of the dopamine fix after a porn session – his only relief from the muscle fatigue after nine hours of work – a physical lack of the pleasure he enjoyed with his old friends, porn stars, positions (studied), sounds (comical and/or erotic), the whole gang of old acquaintances that he wants to revisit to release the same triggers and to take him inside; he always thinks of it as a private domain, a single abode inside a cocoon nobody knows about or needs to know about, with him as the only occupant, success guaranteed on the first try or on the second or the third try at least. There are no restrictions in this domain; his friends never make demands, never get uptight if he doesn’t do the right thing, and never disappoint with their carefully contrived offering.
It’s a certainty he once had, in the past. Listen, if he thinks about it clearly, he blushes with shame. (His father would shudder in his grave if he knew that this was his pillar of support.) But the loss he experiences around five, six o’clock every afternoon is substantial; it’s the deprivation of a physical pleasure that vibrated all the way to his fingertips. And so intimately connected with the person he’s become inside it, that it’s impossible to explain to Jack or to anybody else.
On the day Emile’s little boy is due to arrive from Nairobi, business is slow. Mattheüs selects three chillis from the plastic bowl, finely chops them and stirs them into the curry that’s not selling fast enough. Emile has been singing for days, today’s song is happy. He refuses to be irritated by it. For the time being his feelings of compassion and self-pity and reproach, the whole spectrum, have been numbed. Standing next to him, washing the day’s saucepans, is a man experiencing one of the most important days of his life; a man who, without asking, longs for the tiniest concession from him, even if it’s just an iota of pleasure.
How does he feel about the arrival of his son, Mattheüs eventually asks out of politeness. Emile just shakes his head, laughs and carries on humming. Soon after five, his wife turns up in yards of brightly coloured damask. They can leave now, Mattheüs says almost immediately out of respect for the two people: their stray lamb is returning to the fold.
They lock up and walk round the building and Mattheüs unlocks the Mercedes with the remote. Emile’s wife claps her hands about the car that’s going to take them to the airport, she hasn’t once looked him in the eye. Emile has in the meantime gone to the toilet to put on the going-out clothes that he’d brought along in a plastic bag. He emerges in a navy-blue suit, shiny on the seat and under the arms, the sleeves and pants too long.
‘You look smart,’ Mattheüs says, and this time Emile looks up at him defiantly. He is a man who is led by his emotions and knows where he stands with Mattheüs.
The stocky wife sits in the back, Emile in front, his short legs in their wide trousers crossed, fingers playing on his lap. ‘Nice car,’ he tries to keep things going well.
‘My father’s.’ He pushes in the cigarette lighter.
‘Your father was a good man,’ he says, evidently without intending it as either a question or a statement.
Mattheüs lights his cigarette without bothering to reply. The two people have introduced smells into the car: a mixture of rose water and palm oil, their cooking oil of choice, and of the new cloth around the body of the woman, and the powdery, slightly toxic dye on the new cloth, and a light, excited sweat behind it, and all the time their breath, lukewarm and full, while talking to each other. Emile constantly fiddles with his seat and with the door handles; his excitement is tangible, on display, as if intensifying in relation to Mattheüs’s dullness.
When they arrive, Matt says he’ll wait right there in the parking garage. Level D-4, the colour is green, make a note of that now, and looks at the couple walking away: the colourful woman and Emile in his navy-blue suit and white shirt buttoned to the top and tieless.
He remains sitting there without listening to music on his iPhone or reading the book that he’d brought along for the purpose. Sometimes he registers people walking past to the lifts, wheeling their luggage, chatting as family members do after not seeing each other for a long time, the jovial
, cruelly candid comments about so-and-so, and then he’s wrapped up in himself once again, out of place and not knowing where to go. Deliberately so, but what’s the use of saying this?
In the rear-view mirror, he sees Emile’s group approaching from a totally different direction; they must have got lost. When they arrive at the car, with all the child’s belongings in a single pink-and-blue plastic carrier bag, they are beside themselves with joy. Emile is glistening with pride: his son, look! The child is indeed lovely and is dressed in an old-fashioned suit with a blue shirt, white-and-navy-blue-and-gold sailor’s cap with gold piping, and a short red tie that reminds Mattheüs of a rabbit’s ear, and makes him smile at the precise moment Emile introduces his son to him.
And then he realises anew that the man sees right through him. He opens the boot and Emile stows the solitary bag and Mattheüs really wishes he could press a button to escape this reticence of his; he is powerless against it, or rather: he doesn’t want to.
While the two in the back seat are chattering and giggling away, and Emile’s wife every now and again strokes the child’s head as if he were her own, Emile asks if he can tell him something. Mattheüs nods. Then he is informed: ‘You are not my friend. You do not like me. There is nothing.’ That’s all the man manages to say, his only way of expressing his frustration with the aloofness that he can no longer tolerate.
In the rear-view mirror, he notices how the child has gone silent as they drive off the freeway onto the M5, his mouth literally hanging open at the sight of the roads, the tall freeway lights, the buildings and factories everywhere, the shoulders of other cars right up against them. And at times he bursts out laughing and shouts, pointing at things, so that Emile’s wife repeatedly has to silence him.