by Eben Venter
‘We will get a taxi here to take us to our home,’ is all that Emile adds when he stops at the Shell garage closest to the Common. Emile doesn’t look at him, doesn’t say thank you either, as he’s so fond of doing. The woman, though, does: ‘Merci, merci,’ she has no inkling of the conclusion her husband has reached regarding Mattheüs.
Mattheüs waits there a while, his window open. Emile and his wife and the little boy with the pink-and-blue plastic bag huddle together to the right of the petrol pumps. For a moment Mattheüs relents and considers taking the family all the way home. The woman has taken some Fritos out of her handbag; she tears the packet open and offers it to the others. Emile has in the meantime put on that black leather glove he saw him wearing the very first day, the one with holes for the knuckles, and cut-off fingertips. When he sees Mattheüs watching them, he assumes a boxer’s stance, left foot forward, heel of the right foot slightly lifted, left fist in front of the nose and right fist poised in readiness against his right cheek. The neon light catches his knuckles and the whites of his eyes. He pumps himself up and looks bigger than he is, and the show he puts on is more than a game; he is, in fact, threatening.
Mattheüs slides up his window, turns the air conditioner right down, and with his left hand he gropes for the Beretta under his seat. The Congolese knows how to unsettle him. In his unarticulated, intuitive way he’s worked it out, from day one, in fact. At Duiker’s, it’s different; there, it’s the deference that at times verges on servility that perturbs him. Emile knows this too, knows that he throws him off balance, just a shade, and in that vulnerable moment he holds the whip hand. He looks in his rear-view mirror one more time to where Emile’s still standing like a bantam cock, his body turned towards the departing car.
When he stops at their spot on the Common, Mattheüs realises how heavily he’s been breathing all the way there from the garage. At last he can make the decision he’s always wanted to: he’s definitely going to get rid of the man. First thing Monday morning. This much he can still decide, still feel: he’s never liked him. Now Emile has put the noose around his own neck and he’ll have to take the consequences. He’ll just carry on on his own until he appoints a new assistant. And he’s also aware of his own relief, at least that’s some part of his emotional life that’s come back. He hasn’t become totally blunted, maybe he’s in recovery. That’s the first thing he’ll tell Jack, who really has suffered enough with him.
He openly threatened him, Mattheüs tells Emile at work, and he doesn’t put up with that kind of crap, not from anybody. And yet he can’t bring himself to chase him away just yet, and gives him a week’s notice. Emile tenses up, unpacking takeaway containers from a box and stacking them. He slowly straightens up, takes off his cap, rubs his bald head, pinches his nose as you would if you wanted to blow it, stands stiff and silent.
Then there’s a pleading: he’ll do his best, work extra hours, it was just a game, the boxing thing, he’ll do his best, put him to the test, so many mouths to feed, the little boy as well now, on and on until the pleading starts hammering at his inner ear. Emile, who is standing with his back to Mattheüs and doesn’t see him covering his ears, turns around slowly, and that’s when Mattheüs realises the extent to which he’s been restraining himself, how he’s tried to keep up the subservience until he can’t any longer and switches to the voice of a man who’s empowered himself in this very shop: ‘You can’t kick me on the street. I work here,’ he says. And repeats it.
A customer appears on the other side of the counter and asks for the lamb stew. Emile’s the one who first gets a grip on himself and takes a medium-sized container from the pile and fills it first with rice and then with stew. Efficiently, faultlessly, and hygienically, as Mattheüs has taught him. Mattheüs leans against the cold-room door and experiences a sense of real danger in his own shop, which infuriates him, a fury such as he remembers on his father’s face, the furrows that appeared on either side of his father’s mouth the first and surest indication that trouble was brewing.
When Emile has given the change, and the two of them are on their own again, Mattheüs is the one to regain the upper hand: ‘One week, and you’re out of here. One word of shit from you in the next few days, and you’re out straight away.’
He’s welcome to leave, he says to Emile, he’ll wash the last things himself and mop the floor. Emile says not a single word. Unties the black apron from behind his buttocks, neatly folds it and puts it in the rucksack he always brings with him. He’s drawn in on himself, the shoulders bent forward on either side of the neck, the back hunched like a dog cowering after a hiding. A short little fellow, nothing more. A human being fighting to make a living and lacking the necessary words to help him. Is he understanding him incorrectly, then? Has he made an error, overlooked Emile’s well-meaning heart?
When he gets to the door, he takes off his cap and turns towards Mattheüs without raising his eyes: ‘There is no hate,’ he says. ‘I do not hate you.’ Then he nods good night, puts on his cap and walks out, and Mattheüs follows him with his eyes, sees him quickly getting smaller and smaller, the rucksack eventually just a dark-blue hump on his back as he strides on his sturdy legs towards the stop where he’ll catch his taxi, by now the rucksack with leftover food just a dark-blue dot, all that’s left of him among the homebound workers.
Mattheüs clears up, fishes the Beretta out of the lentil drum and drives to the Common. He’d planned to wash his hair after work in the toilet washbasin, his shampoo in a box next to the broom and cleaning apparatus, but he’s in too much of a hurry. When he arrives at their usual parking spot on the Common, he sees what Jack meant when he said that their life was getting a bit messy: somebody has moved onto that patch of ground. There are beer-bottle tops, an empty sardine tin that they hadn’t noticed (they no longer eat at Carlucci’s every night), the wooden pallet that they put on the ground behind the car as an extra room and that will certainly be carried off by someone. Jack had then said he didn’t mind at all, that’s the way it goes with possessions around here. Did he mind?
Mattheüs can’t wait for the moment when he and Jack will set off for number nine Poinsettia Road. The past few evenings they’ve been playing ‘Wolfie, Wolfie, what’s the time?’ on the pavement in front of the house. Jack has worked the game out so that each time he drastically changes the number of paces before shouting out the hour. Sometimes it’s fourteen paces, sometimes just one big one. Mattheüs tries to anticipate the number and each time he’s wrong, which releases an impatient desire in him, makes him blind to everything except when he sees Jack before him or hears Jack’s voice, and when he comes, gruff and hoarse (Jack’s very good at it), he can think of nothing else.
Mr Mkhonza, still wearing his suit and tie, comes marching out onto the stoep shouting at them: ‘Voetsek, you white trash.’ (Next time they must remember to wear gloves, all the exposed white skin must be covered up.) Soon afterwards, the ADT guards turn up on their bicycles. Christopher immediately knows who they are. Public nuisance, he hammers on. Cigarettes are distributed, he’s not really serious, that’s easy to see. But he did have to respond to Mr Mkhonza’s call.
The following evening, they make sure that they arrive an hour later on the pavement in front of number nine Poinsettia Road. The Mkhonzas must have received their first electricity bill, because only one stoep light is on. Both he and Jack have dressed in black this time, gloves included, he with one of those ordinary black masks, and a black jersey draped like a scarf around his neck and face with only a strip of white skin visible on the bridge of the nose. The game commences.
When Mattheüs thinks the whole thing through, as he enjoys doing when they get back to the Common and snuggle up to each other, he can see what it still needs to be a perfectly choreographed game. Their steps, for instance, are perfectly coordinated – that’s been sorted out. When Jack calls out the hour, he turns his head to the right. Mattheüs immediatel
y swings his to the left. It’s their arms that still need some work. When he reacts to Jack’s shout, his arms feel loose and begin to windmill around his body. (He still gets a fright every time, just like a child, he can’t help it.)
Most important of all, though, is how eagerly he looks forward to Wolfie throughout the day at Duiker’s. He hardly takes note of Emile, the small, bitter ant scurrying around in his last few working days, and has an appetite only for the pleasure that will commence at twelve that night (they make it an hour later every evening). It’s the same anticipation that he’s successfully and quite by chance transferred from his porn addiction to this ritual game. And when Mr Mkhonza bursts out of his house pointing a desperate index finger at the gate – he’s not really an aggressive man – his breath races and he becomes aware of a tingling in his muscles: the dopamine fix, but got in a different way.
On Sunday night they turn up as late as three o’clock, and a reckless Mattheüs is stoned and pissed, and on top of everything tensed-up because of the next day, Monday, Emile’s last shift. After only two rounds of Wolfie – Jack never shouts twelve o’clock any more and he doesn’t know when last he tried to catch him – Mattheüs goes up to the intercom at the gate, he hasn’t been so present in his body and so absent in his head for a long time, and keys in the numbers that opened the gate for the Duikers. He’s breathing so hard that inside the scarf-thing he’s glowing. The gate glides open on its track.
‘I don’t believe it,’ says Jack.
‘Me neither.’ Mattheüs is elated. ‘Let’s go and play Wolf, Wolf on the lawn.’
‘Whoa! Now you’re looking for shit. Mr Mkhonza trusts you. All you Duikers. That’s why he hasn’t changed the thing. I’m not going in. What we’re doing is enough already. You’re on your own now, Matt. You never know, he could even be armed.’
Mattheüs coaxes and cajoles, every which way, sweet-talks and soft-soaps: just this once, only two rounds, then they’re done. He wants to go inside just one last time, to let Mister Mkhonza know that he can.
‘Okay, quickly then. You’re crazy in your head,’ says Jack and they slip in by the gate that Mattheüs has opened just the width of a man before pressing the stop button.
Mattheüs takes off his shoes and socks, ‘Fuck it, Matt,’ he wants to step on the mowed lawn as they always did, like his mother who walked barefoot all summer on her two slender feet. (Hers not as perfectly formed as his father’s.) Everything, all their games, their winters and summers, come to him like tastes in his mouth; all the memories still belong to him, even though he’ll never live here again. Soon these will also fade, his mother’s scent already much vaguer than his father’s; and what do they actually mean after all, all the memories, what’s the use of remembering that Pa’s dog always chose the pebble path to the lemon tree to do his business?
‘Matt, I beg of you.’
He’s standing with his toes spread on the roughness of the lawn and doesn’t respond to Jack’s cajoling pleas.
‘Matt, are you going to play or not? What’s the time, Mister Wolf?’ Jack manages to make his pleas sound more threatening than on any of the previous evenings.
‘What’s the time, Mister Wolf?’ The grass cool and over-familiar as step by step he follows Jack. Mr Mkhonza is maintaining the place beautifully.
Then all the lights go on: those inside the house, the floodlights in the garden, and the six uplighters next to the driveway. Mattheüs swings round, grabs his shoes, drops one of his socks and takes off behind Jack to the gate that’s starting to slide shut. He has to force his arm through the final gap, a police van comes hurtling along into Poinsettia Road. Mattheüs pulls off his mask and they try to stroll along like two friends out for a breath of air at three in the morning. The van’s lights shine even harder on their bums.
The van stops, and a policeman’s arm signals to them to do likewise. There are two of them in the van, both rather young. Pushovers, thinks Mattheüs.
‘Have you just been at the house back there? The owner phoned with a complaint.’
‘No, Constable. How would we get in?’ says Mattheüs.
‘The owner says you managed to get in somehow.’ The policeman who’s not the driver and hasn’t yet said anything shines a powerful torch, first at Mattheüs and then at Jack.
‘We didn’t, Constable. That’s not possible.’
‘What have you got there with you?’ The voice like a boy’s that hasn’t quite broken.
‘Nothing, Constable. We’ve just come from a party. That’s my car over there.’ Mattheüs presses the remote and the car’s lights flash.
When the policemen see the Mercedes E-class, it’s enough to establish their innocence. ‘You boys mustn’t cause any shit here in this neighbourhood. Good night.’
Arriving at their parking spot on the Common, they prepare the mattress and bedding in the back. Matt takes up his spot under the pine tree where it’s starting to smell of stale piss, and unbuttons his fly. Jack makes them take multivitamins every day and the smell of it wafts up from his stream. He can’t say exactly what happened on the lawn in front of their house; no longer dopamine-induced, he just feels tremendously satisfied, refreshed, like after a prolonged sex session, say three, four hours long, and later you’ve got up to make tea with fynbos honey in the kitchen, all bare-arsed and glowing, and while you’re stirring in the honey you realise that the session has become more than a physical thing, it’s therapy, your mental gremlins and gruelling anxieties have been confronted without your even noticing it, they’ve cleared off. If he’d had Mr Mkhonza’s phone number, he’d have phoned him now. Mission accomplished, may you and your family live in peace from now on in one of the most wonderful houses in the city.
He shakes off and looks up at the faint golden glow above the Common, sprints to the car, and with his cold limbs snuggles up to Jack.
‘Where are you staying, Mattie? What’s your address? I’ve still got a few bits of game biltong that I want to send you.’
‘Sissy, we haven’t found a place yet. It’s hard. You know how picky I am. Just like Pa.’ He laughs.
‘So, where are you staying? Jack lost his flat in the hostel, didn’t he? Honestly, the two of you!’
‘Sissy, to tell the truth, we’re living out of the car at the moment. We’ve parked here on the Common, you know where it is don’t you, not far from Poinsettia Road. We’re staying here for the time being.’
‘Are you joking, or what?’
‘I’m serious.’
There’s a silence. She’s changed towards him after all the will business. Okay, they’ve got the money now or they’ll be getting it shortly, but he doesn’t hold this against Sissy at all. She’s less sarcastic, milder, as if she’s looking at his life in the same way he does. Or is at least trying her best to do so.
‘Matt, listen. I know you’re going through a shitty time, but I don’t want you to end up in the streets. Must I come to Cape Town? I don’t want to ask if I can come and help, you’re a grown-up man. But please tell me if there’s anything I can do. Do you maybe want to talk to me or something? Ag, I don’t know, Matt. I don’t even know what I’m saying. I’m a bit shocked, please don’t hold it against me. I thought you’d moved into a flat long ago.’
‘That’s the plan.’
Again silence.
‘Matt?’
‘Yes?’
‘Pa always said: I’ll never say die. Do you remember?’
‘Yes, very well.’
‘I’ll send the packet of biltong to your takeaway. What’s the address there? You were looking so thin the last time I saw you.’
‘Sissy?’ Now he’s the one who’s silent. The thing that would have pissed him off before, her concern that’s never come across as sincere, now touches him. He’d seen some antique silver earrings in Observatory the other day, with a blac
k onyx stone, he’s going to buy them for her.
‘What were you going to say, Matt? Go ahead.’
‘We’re okay. We’re not going to stay like this for ever. It’s just that I can’t make a decision right now.’
‘Good. Did I tell you it’s started raining here? Such wonderful, gentle rain, started falling last night. Everything’s soaked. It’s a real mercy.’
‘I’m glad for your sakes, Sissy. I must go now, it’s Emile’s last day at work. You know, the guy who works for me. The short little one. He’s leaving today, I don’t want him in my business any more.’
‘You’ve got discretion, Matt. You’ll know what to do when the time comes. You know the right thing to do. Love you, Matt.’
‘Me too, Sissy.’
She’s really trying, he thinks while reluctantly holding back the tearfulness and negotiating the morning traffic on Main, the cars and buses and taxis that gradually become less and less distinguishable from one another. He digs a hanky out of the cubby-hole: Sissy’s trying to keep the remains of the family together now that the house and their father, common denominators between him and her, have fallen away. All that remains is a choice of words signifying sympathy, the expression of love, and a visit to each other two or three times a year. It’s also, of course, a point of honour to be able to say to her friends in Laingsburg, when they’re fishing for information: I do at least have a brother left, the two of us are closer than ever before, he’s got his own business in Cape Town, it’s just a bit too far otherwise we’d see each other just about every weekend.
Arriving at Duiker’s, he finds Emile keeping to himself as always, though even more silent, and while they’re preparing they only talk about absolutely essential things. Once, his hand touches Emile’s on a work surface, and Emile jerks his away, and for the rest, the day doesn’t pass too badly. By half past twelve the dahl is just about sold out, and he goes to the cold room to see what’s available for a quick vegetarian curry, maybe one with large, firm pumpkin chunks and black mustard seeds, and is surprised to find the bowl of soaked lentils on the second shelf from the bottom, a low shelf, and he tries to remember whether he’d soaked the lentils the previous Saturday before closing time, while he walks out with the white pumpkin under his arm, looks at Emile’s back in a black T-shirt, his hairline shaved to a perfect horizontal along the back of the neck, a hairstyle he’s picked up here in Cape Town, and decides not to ask him about the soaked lentils, which he’ll leave as they are for the following working day, for Tuesday, because it might just betray something of his hesitation or rather his concrete doubt (he is now turning the pumpkin around in the deep sink, with the tap half-open) regarding the dismissal of a conscientious worker.