Up Against the Night

by Justin Cartwright

  I hug Lindiwe, ignoring her embarrassment.

  ‘Lindi, I want you to meet Nellie, and this is her son Bertil.’

  Lindiwe gives every appearance of being pleased to see us.

  ‘Welcome, madam,’ she says to Nellie, holding one of her wrists while shaking hands in the traditional way with the other, as if readying herself for a two-handed tennis stroke.

  ‘Welcome, Master Bertil.’

  ‘Please call me Nellie and my boy, Bertil.’

  Lindiwe smiles, but I know this is not really negotiable.

  ‘Lindi has worked for me since I built this house five years ago. She runs the place, don’t you, Lindi?’

  ‘I am trying, sir.’

  She will never be able to shake off the deep deference she was taught. To her I am security and reliability; in African custom I am the big man who looks after his extended family. Like President Zuma. I love her for her loyalty and her kindness. She is also shrewd, making sure that everything runs smoothly.

  ‘Sir, where is Miss Lucinda?’

  She pronounces ‘where is’ as ‘whez-a’.

  ‘Oh, she is coming very soon. There has been a delay.’

  ‘Is she a big girl now?’

  ‘Yes, she is twenty-two years old.’

  ‘How! She has twenty-two years already. She muss be beautiful now. She will have a husband.’

  Lindiwe has had troubles of her own and God knows what horrors she has seen; she wanted to leave the townships after her husband died because of the numbers of young people on tik, crystal meth. They would kill anybody for a mobile phone and kill anybody’s enemy for less than two thousand rand, something like one hundred pounds. Her husband was hit on the head with a litre bottle of Coca-Cola and robbed of his wages. He died in the back of the ambulance.

  All the bedrooms are made up with fresh linen; there are flowers from the garden everywhere and the pool is crystal clear. The pool guy is a coloured man who lost his job as a clerk in the municipality, and took up swimming pools. He has a pick-up, a bakkie, and will transport plants and building materials. He’s Afrikaans-speaking, and his name is Frikkie. His face is a record of his previous drinking habits. Now that he is dry, he goes to the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society near the harbour for reassurance.

  I show Nellie and Bertil around. Nellie is entranced by the house; she thinks it certainly does have a Martha’s Vineyard look, all painted wood floors and gentle, Baltic colours of blue and white. Bertil appears to like his room and shower right at the top, a sort of crow’s nest with a small balcony and views all the way to Argentina. Skeins of sea birds fly low over the water through the burnt-umber light. Now ships are passing purposefully some way out; at this time of year the whales are close to the shore, sending us fraternal greetings as they pass. The light falls quickly and as a result the cormorants are always in a hurry to roost. There is something sensible and well-drilled about them.

  My bedroom – our bedroom – has the advantage of being as far from Bertil’s as possible; it has its own, private terrace beyond the room. One side of the terrace looks down onto the indigenous scrub and a small stream. By the pool, under a tree, Lindiwe has laid out the tea and a cake. It’s her speciality, granadilla cake – passion fruit – and there is no question of refusing. She has observed that white people must have cake, often.

  I am anxious about Bertil and how he is going to react. I tell him he is more than welcome to have a swim in the pool and that we have some wetsuits he can try for size if he wants to swim in the sea, but he should only do that if the lifeguards are on duty. Nellie gives him the parcel that holds the Vilebrequin cozzie. He opens it; the cozzie is adorned with a design of dark red lobsters and green palm trees.

  ‘Thanks, it’s really cool,’ Bertil says.

  ‘How about a kiss for your mother?’

  ‘Okay. If I have to.’

  The water, I tell him again, is often very cold here on the Atlantic side – our side – of the mountain and the riptide can be frightening. When I first came here I nearly drowned. Down below a few boys and one girl are surfing in increasingly tumultuous waves. It’s heroic; they lie on the boards paddling hard, and duck through ten-foot waves until they are three hundred yards off shore and they come storming back towards the beach, carving down the face of the wave or riding the tubes. The search for the perfect wave drives them on with a fervour; they can’t stop because the next wave may be absolutely perfect, unique – the second coming. It’s an addiction.

  Bertil watches the surfers closely.

  ‘We will fix you some lessons for tomorrow, Bertil.’

  ‘Thanks, Frank, that would be great.’

  The three of us walk down to the beach, which is almost deserted; stilts and avocets are still fussing at the far end of the beach and a woman is walking two English setters; using a sort of catapult, she throws a tennis ball into the waves for the dogs to fetch, which they do eagerly; they were born to this life.

  Two lifeguards sit on the boardwalk outside their hut, kissing. The boy has long blond hair. I know the girl: she is embarrassed to see me under these circumstances. She is only fourteen. She is wearing red shorts and a sort of singlet – life-savers’ kit. I introduce her to Bertil and Nellie. The boy walks away as we approach, ostentatiously using his binoculars to see how the surfers are faring, as if snogging Vanessa Ovenstone was just a passing diversion, nothing to do with his main work, which is to prevent surfers and swimmers from drowning themselves.

  ‘Can you surf?’ Vanessa asks Bertil.

  ‘Not yet,’ he says, ‘but I would like to learn.’

  ‘I can help you to get started tomorrow: the wind is going to change and the water will be warmer.’

  ‘Thanks, that would be great.’

  With her enthusiasm she is making up for being caught kissing the boy with the long hair.

  ‘Where you guys from?’ she asks Nellie.

  ‘We are Swedish, although we live in England. Bertil is at school in England. But this is something special; this is paradise. I want to live here,’ Nellie says.

  ‘Ja, it’s pretty good, isn’t it? Maybe a bit samey if you live here all the time. I better go, I am supposed to be on duty.’

  ‘Lovely to see you again, Vanessa,’ I say.

  She is golden brown, her hair bleached by the sun. I think she may never be this beautiful again. She turns to me.

  ‘How long are you staying, Mr McAllister?’

  ‘Nothing is fixed. Bertil has five weeks off. So we will see. Will you tell your mum we are back? And we would like to see your parents.’

  ‘For sure.’

  She jogs down the beach.

  ‘Sweet child,’ says Nellie. ‘She looks very young. Is she a lifeguard herself?’

  ‘She is training; these kids were brought up here, they can all swim like fishes. Being a lifeguard is very glamorous. And there are perks. But believe me, they know how to use buoyancy aids or paddle boats if things get rough out there.’

  ‘Pretty girl,’ says Nellie.

  Bertil grimaces at this maternal intervention. Mothers are incontinent with their opinions. He watches Vanessa walking along the shore, her feet in the water. She looks back and gives us a wave. Bertil waves in return, bloodlessly. I am hoping that Vanessa and Bertil will become friends. I have a mission to bring us all together, to find some sort of happiness for Lucinda – which would assuage my guilt – and ditto for Bertil. I want him to like me, even to love me, but I must go slowly. I have a tendency to be overbearing. At least that was Georgina’s widely published opinion. But I am aware that I have brought them all here and I am responsible for their safety. Lucinda sends me a text: she is now due to arrive in two days’ time. She gives me the flight number. There is no apology or explanation for the delay.

  We have a late lunch on the terrace. Lindiwe is rushing about; there is watermelon and winter melon on the table, coronation chicken, Lindiwe’s speciality, on a huge pale blue platter commissioned for the hous
e from a local potter, and there are piles of lobsters, fresh from the boats, served with home-made mayonnaise and after that home-made rum-and-raisin ice cream. I see that it is a ritual, a celebration. I think that the sun’s warmth and the sea’s mysterious insistence below us are already forming us and siphoning off the residual anxieties of travel and dislocation. I have an overwhelming feeling of well-being. Nellie squeezes my hand and whispers, ‘Thank you.’ Bertil notes this, but he too seems to have succumbed to the promise of happiness.

  After lunch we take a rest; we are jet-lagged and we have as much time as we want. In our room Nellie and I make love silently; I am seized by the idea that there is something of profound meaning at stake.

  Nellie whispers, ‘To love someone is to aim for one soul and one body. That’s what you said, min hjärtat.’

  We are close together, slightly moist, her breasts pressed against my chest.

  ‘It may sound impossible and I know it is corny, but that’s what I believe. You have to remember, I am just a simple Boer.’

  ‘Oh, of course you are. I forgot. And you know, I like corny.’

  We sleep deeply, as one.

  Suddenly there is a screaming and the crashing of chairs turning over outside. I run towards the garden with a towel around my waist. Two male baboons are fighting for the remains of our lunch, retrieved from the bins. One baboon is holding the shell of a lobster as it gallops across the terrace and leaps over the table. It turns suddenly, its huge yellow teeth bared, menacing the other baboon, which backs off. Then it runs and jumps nimbly off the terrace and into a tree, still clutching the exoskeleton of the lobster as Lindiwe arrives with a broom and shouts at the baboons in Xhosa.

  ‘What was that?’ Nellie asks as she appears cautiously in her robe.

  ‘Just two baboons. There they are, in those trees. We are open to the bush and forest on this side. But they don’t often come our way, don’t worry. I keep a catapult just in case they get a little bit presumptuous. I like them actually: they are highly intelligent, but a little low rent. All I have to do is pretend to use the catapult and they are off.’

  ‘Are they dangerous?’

  ‘Not really. They sometimes attack dogs and they can look very menacing, but they know the limits. Were you frightened?’

  She is pale and still lightly moist. She is trying to assess the danger in a rational way.

  ‘When I woke up I didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t know where I was. I just heard this terrifying noise and you were running out.’

  ‘They scream and bark. They make a hell of a noise. I’m sorry you were frightened. But don’t worry about them. This is Africa and there are lots of them up on the mountain but, as I said, they almost never come down this far.’

  Bertil has slept through it, and thank God that Lucinda isn’t here to see the baboons. They are truly creatures of the dark side. I am anxious about how Nellie will take this incursion.

  As we are having tea, Vanessa comes into the garden. She says she has a board ready for the morning, and wonders if I would ask Bertil if ten o’clock is good for him. Bertil appears, walking groggily, and she gives him the message herself. He is in his Vilebrequin cozzie and his hair is brushed in all directions; it’s Harry Styles hair, so Nellie told me. She is up on teen fashion. Bertil’s torso is white and a little soft, but a few weeks on a surfboard will put that right. For some reason I think that young boys should have muscles. It’s my upbringing – the South African in me: England is peopled by a lardy variety of masculinity. And young women have become solid; they congregate on the street with other fat women to act out a kind of loud and improbable cheerfulness, which my cynical self believes is to compensate for the fact that men have detoured around them.

  Vanessa says a whale has breached quite close to the beach. Does Bertil want to see it? Yes, he does. Nellie and I exchange smiles as they walk down through the garden. We are pathetically keen to see our children happy. I guess that the whale is mostly an excuse to get away from us. I envy them and I would like to see the whale if it hasn’t already gone on its way to who-knows-where.

  ‘What does “breached” mean?’ Nellie asks.

  ‘It just means that it has broken the surface of the sea, sometimes to blow, sometimes from joie de vivre.’

  ‘Do whales have joie de vivre?’

  ‘I believe so. God, I certainly hope so. If not they have wasted a lot of their time and mine with their leaping and frolicking in the sea for no purpose.’

  We can see Vanessa and Bertil intermittently in the thick bushes as they walk down a path to the beach to look at the sea. There are always interesting things to say about the state of the sea and its moods and currents and waves. It is a sort of philosophical study in its own right.

  Nellie says it’s very promising that Bertil wants to learn to surf: since Lars and she separated, she has felt a huge responsibility for Bertil’s happiness. I say that the anxiety never goes away, even when your children have grown up. I never expected that, even though I had heard it from many people. It’s become a commonplace: parents never stop worrying. These beliefs swirl feverishly around the lives of the middle classes of London.

  ‘Oh God, are you sure?’ says Nellie.

  ‘Yes, I am sure.’

  I suffered great pain when Lucinda became an addict. I was advised to push her out of the house – even to throw her out of the house – and leave her to her own devices so that she could come to terms with her drug-taking. That was the psychiatrist’s line. I didn’t believe a word of it, but I was desperate to help Lucinda and I could think of no better way. It was the most difficult thing I have ever done, to take my only daughter’s suitcase and her clothes and to throw them into the street. I felt like Abraham in the land of Moriah – making a sacrifice for a higher purpose. The tawdry, crushed and stained clothes in her suitcase were pitiful to me. She picked the case up and walked uncertainly down the road as though any direction would be as good as the next. I hoped that no one in Notting Hill had observed this forced exit and misunderstood my apparent cruelty. I lay on my bed, distraught, for hours. I didn’t have the strength to move. I felt as if I had parted with my humanity. How had I been persuaded to do the thing I least wanted to? I was desperately anxious about where she was sleeping and where she was spending her days – perhaps with dealers – or what she was doing to buy food. I knew that dealers were everywhere. After six weeks I was so worried I decided to get her back, but I could not find her. She had slid deep into the junkie world. I hired a detective to look for her, so that he could tell me where she was and I could at least check up on her occasionally. He came up with nothing after three weeks. Nothing except the bill. He had no trouble locating that promptly, just before I fired him.

  I was given a tip-off by one of her friends. It turned out that Lucinda had found a flat with some other troubled kids and there they made a life of a sort for a few months. It was a life dominated by the need to find money to buy heroin. I visited the flat and it was so chaotic and filthy and insanitary that it looked as though it was some kind of installation depicting the end of civilisation, with all the inmates drifting in and out of consciousness on the banks of the Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, now relocated in unlovely Peckham.

  It took me a few weeks to extricate Lucinda. I tried to persuade her to have a crack at the clinic in California.

  ‘Crack? Like a weird choice of words, Dad,’ she said. ‘Did you say crack?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘not a very good choice under the circumstances, no. I will come with you and live near by if it helps.’

  We laughed at the idea. I was clutching at anything drifting on the stream. But in truth my heart was being sundered. She looked so vulnerable, clearly unable to live in this world, as if the drugs had inducted her into a realm without hope of redemption and without anything remotely rational as a guide. She had a butterfly tattooed on her neck, and on one nostril her nose was pierced in five places. The butterfly reminded me of the
suicidal moths in my aunt’s sitting room, her sitkamer. Worse, she had two silver bobbles side-by-side on her tongue – which I learned were called a venom piercing – and another right through the septum with two bobbles on either side. I wondered, fastidiously and absurdly, what happened if she needed to blow her nose. I was thinking back to childhood colds. Now I found it almost unbearable to look at her. When she was a child I changed nappies willingly and I wiped her face with a flannel and performed all the little intimacies of parenthood. I have always cherished the memory of those days of innocence. She would ask for me in these intimate moments, rather than Georgina or the nanny, and I was secretly pleased. There were many nannies who always had problems with Georgina.

  As we talked, Lucinda’s piercings caught the light intermittently; I was faced with a zombie, someone who could hardly speak a simple sentence without muttering and chanting. As a way through the miasma I tried to speak calmly to her about what piercing meant – as if meaning was relevant to this conversation. My words seemed to be hopelessly inadequate and trite. It was as though I was speaking a language that had gone extinct. She mumbled something about the venom piercing being the most powerful of her piercings. I assumed from this that piercing had a mystical importance. I have seen African men and women – Maasai and Zulu – with round, decorated wooden plugs in the earlobes, and they seemed to be carrying on a beautiful practice, something interestingly folkloric; they weren’t doing it as an advertisement of otherness. Or of delusion. It was difficult for me to understand the point of piercing in London: it appeared to me to be self-hating, a form of obsession, and I found that hard to bear. I tried to discover what this piercing indicated – I consulted young people awkwardly – but I also found it difficult to accept that totally irrational beliefs could have taken root in my beloved daughter and that a sort of rampant mycological growth was advancing blindly within her brain. Maybe something like that has infected Jaco too, although with a different kind of madness.

  Finally, after four long months, Lucinda agreed to go to California and we set off for Marin County.