The Brand
M.N Providence
Published by M.N Providence at Smashwords
Copyright 2013 Providence Mpumelelo Ngwabi
2011: THE BEGINNING
SOUTH AFRICA
Chapter 1
They buried him at the West Park Cemetery, north-west of the Johannesburg city center and nestled between Melville, Westdene and Northcliff. Many people that he had known, and then many more that he had not known but who had nevertheless taken great care in knowing him, had come to pay their last respects to the man widely known and equally feared as Ugly Joe Vermuelen. It was perhaps a miracle that Ugly Joe had been successful in life, because psychologists will tell anyone who cares to buy and read their books that ever since the beginning of time, ugly people have always had to make twice as much effort as attractive people in order to be heard and therefore be treated kindly. It had, however, nothing to do with magic why Ugly Joe had been lucky with women: they were attracted to him by his staggering wealth. Conspicuous by their presence at his burial service were four women of an astonishing range of ages, all of whom could rightly claim to have been married to Mr. Vermuelen – Lord rest his soul – at one point or another during his admittedly long life. Ugly Joe had lived to seventy-two and had died with all his mental faculties intact and all his thirty-two teeth in place.
After the burial rites were performed, the crowds dispersed and went away to carry on with their lives. That night, Hudson Vermuelen lay in bed pondering his future. His father had just died. He felt no joy and no resentment. It was as if his heart had frozen and rendered itself incapable of feeling. Like most great men’s sons, Hudson had spent the thirty-two years he had lived on earth trying to please his father. He had tried to emulate his father in most things, and failed in all of them. He had lived in his father’s shadow all his life, unable to escape the bitter truth that he was not his own man, but a product of what his father had wanted him to become; in short, he was his father’s puppet. Now that the strings were cut, Hudson suddenly found himself with the freedom to dance to his own tune, but because he had spent most of his life in mental incarceration, he did not know how to begin to take the first step. So he lay in bed and pondered his future.
His wife lay next to him on the bed. Named Joelyn, she was a remarkably beautiful woman with blonde hair and an exquisitely gorgeous figure that had once been featured in Sports Illustrated. Like his father, Hudson had never had trouble finding beautiful women. Fortunately, his own mother, Wife Number 2 for Joe, had diluted Joe’s beastly features to give her son an understated handsomeness that women found irresistible. Once the first words were exchanged, Hudson let his family’s money do the rest of the talking. He had had various flings with several women during his twenties, some of them cherished but most of them regrettable. At age thirty, he had married Joelyn, to prove to his father that there was, after all, one thing he could do better than the old man: staying married to one partner for the rest of his life. But deep inside, Hudson knew that the old man was not fooled. Both of them knew that Joelyn had married him for his family name and fortune and nothing else of substance – even though she tried hard to hide the fact.
Now that his father had ceased to exist, Joelyn had suddenly ceased to be a commodity of purpose in his very private and secret war of egos with his father, because Hudson had nothing more to prove. The old man was gone, together with the chains that had kept Hudson in a restrictive line of obedience and unfailing subservience. Joelyn was suddenly and worryingly a liability of the first order, especially considering that with the old man’s unexpected demise in between the thighs of a voluptuous blonde ordered from a VIP escort agency, Hudson was catapulted to the helm of the multi-billion dollar empire that spanned across continents. Granted, being the CEO of a Fortune Global 500 company certainly had its perks, but it had a nasty way of letting in the sharks when said CEO decided to divorce his wife, especially for no apparent reason.
So, Hudson Vermuelen lay on the bed and pondered his future. His wife stroked his chest affectionately with her left hand and then moved it slowly down his stomach to his genitals and grabbed them in a firm grip. Hudson felt no desire to have sex with her. In fact, he was revolted by her being there next to him. He rolled to his side and feigned sleep. Dejected, Joelyn pouted and turned her back to him. They lay like that, like two total strangers forced onto a bed together, for a long time, until the coaxing hand of Sleep lulled them both to the land of dreams.
Hudson had a disturbing nightmare about his father. Joelyn dreamt of a pair of Jimmy Choos.
Chapter 2
There are people who thrive in bad publicity, but they are exceptions. Most people abhor bad publicity, more so those in legitimate business. The death of Ugly Joe Vermuelen had caused a nationwide sensation in the days preceding his funeral due to the salacious nature of its occurrence. It is always going to be a controversial affair – and lucrative for the media – when a seventy-two-year-old distinguished and respected gentleman has a fatal heart-attack while engaged in the throes of wild passion with a high-priced prostitute. Because Vermuelen had in life been a charismatic smooth talker and cunning operator, he had had a remarkably good working relationship with the press. Closer inspection would reveal that he was friends with all the owners of the country’s biggest-selling newspapers, but upon his death they all dropped their pretenses at friendship and promptly betrayed him. The electronic media, still in its inchoative stages in South Africa and therefore considered harmless and largely ignored by Ugly Joe for most of his life in business except for purposes of marketing his various products, picked up on the story and promptly forgot that Joe’s business was one of the country’s principal advertisers. The result was that the death of Ugly Joe Vermuelen became the most discussed topic on people’s lips for the entire month of November 2010 in South Africa.
When the news that Mr. Vermuelen had met with his unfortunate death at the hands of an expert masseuse first broke, the company’s shares, listed at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, commonly referred to as the JSE, plunged to unprecedented levels. The deputy chairman of the company’s board of directors called an urgent meeting at the company’s headquarters in Johannesburg to devise a strategy for damage-control. Located to the north-east of the country, Johannesburg is to South Africa what New York is to the US – on a smaller scale. It is a melting pot of diverse cultures, new money and old money, and criminals and lowlifes. It is a city that can make one’s dreams come true or shatter them to pieces. It’s a place where most South Africans, born in many other parts of the country, as well as hordes of people from the rest of the African continent, go to in search of better prospects in life.
Home to around fifty million people as of current estimates, South Africa’s population can be divided into three distinct groups: Black, White and Indian; somewhere in there you can throw in Colored – the term used to denote a person whose origin can be traced back to both Black and White progenitors. Coloreds are found in virtually every place in South Africa, including the city of Cape Town, where their population is large. Cape Town is a coastal city, located south-west of the country, and it might be termed South Africa’s Florida. Most White families who have “made it” in Johannesburg have a holiday home there. Facing the Indian Ocean to the south-east of the country is the beautiful port city of Durban, with an Indian population that far outstrips the White population there. Both Durban and Cape Town are lucrative tourist destinations, and they are some of the favorite haunts of the world’s rich people. In Durban, Ugly Joe had a palatial mansion in Umhlanga, a plush suburb with gated communities and stand-alone properties of the rich and not-so-famous. In Cape Town, he owned a 3-story villa facing the Atlantic Ocean in expensive Llandudno. However, he spent most of his time in J
ohannesburg, where the headquarters of his conglomerate was situated, and he lived in a sumptuous mansion in Sandhurst, an exclusive suburb of the Sandton area, where the cream of Johannesburg society resides. Unsurprisingly, the suburb is one of the most security-conscious suburbs in South Africa, with properties hidden behind high walls and streets constantly patrolled by security personnel. It was also where he had died while exploring the sensuous body of a gifted young woman who had trained herself in the art of sexual intercourse.
While for the immediate future the death of Ugly Joe Vermuelen was bad for Vermuelen Holdings, the company he had created from scratch some twenty-odd years ago, it was oddly good for one Jansen Vermuelen, his one and only daughter. It should be noted that it was somewhat strange that for a man with such a well-documented and prolific sexual appetite, Joe had not been talented at making children. He had fathered only two: Hudson and Jansen.
Jansen was nineteen-years-old in 2010, and she shocked the tennis world by winning the US Tennis Open women’s singles title of that year, on the night when her father died in Johannesburg. Because Johannesburg is seven hours ahead of New York, it was night in that part of the world where her father had died, while it was day in New York, so she went into the match fully aware of her family tragedy. It so happens that the last part of 2010 brought with it severe weather elements that brought to a standstill many parts of the world. Catastrophic conditions were reported worldwide; floods in parts of Australia were wreaking havoc to homes; in the UK snowfall had reached knee-length and grounded airplanes; similarly, flights into and out of New York were suspended due to snowfall that was battering the east coast of America. In South Africa, flood waters had destroyed homes in Soweto and other low-lying areas; homes were fatally struck by lightning in the KZN province; in the Eastern Cape Province poorly constructed school buildings had collapsed due to the incessant rains…
The ladies’ final of the US Open had to be postponed due to bad weather. When it eventually took place and Jansen Vermuelen won the trophy, she was asked afterwards how it playing under the cloud of her father’s death had been. The precocious nineteen-year-old took a badly embarrassing situation and manipulated it to her advantage; she said her father’s spirit had been with her throughout the match, and that the knowledge that he was there with her had helped her in winning the US Open title.
So, while in Johannesburg men in business suits were doing everything in their power to contain the calamitous situation brought onto Vermuelen Holdings by the reckless behavior of the company’s Chairman and CEO, Jansen was thriving amidst the storm of bad publicity.
Chapter 3
Although none of them will ever agree to this declaration, it is universally understood within high-society circles in any part of the world that there is nothing wealthy people fear more than losing their wealth. Indeed, they might give some away to charity, but never all of it, because rich people grow so accustomed to the comforts brought on by enormous wealth that they don’t dare dream of a life without those comforts. Also, all wealthy people understand that the power of human motivation is money, and therefore will hold on to that crucial commodity that ensures they maintain their superior position over the rest of society’s classes.
Hudson Vermuelen had been born into the lap of luxury and comfort. From an early age he had understood that he was privileged. He had been schooled at Michaelhouse, one of the country’s best boarding schools. The boarding school had instilled in him a discipline comparable to a soldier’s fixation with protocol and a dedication to succeed similar to a defeated boxer’s quest for revenge. He had gone for further education at the University of Cape Town; arguably one of Africa’s best learning institutions. While there, he had become the president of the Student Representative Council and earned himself an Honors degree in Economics, graduating cum laude. After that, he had no chance. Roped in to become the chief economist at his father’s merchant bank at just the age of twenty-two, he began his apprenticeship at the old man’s various business units. By the age of thirty he would be well-versed in all the various units’ operations; the merchant bank, the Stellenbosch winery that exported premium quality wines to Europe, the gold mine close to the Vaal River near Vereeniging, and the flagship chain of retail stores that were strewn across South Africa and some countries in Africa, numbering 480, as well as the food-packaging unit that supplied the retail stores.
Ugly Joe Vermuelen’s wealth could, at least to a certain extent, be attributed to the Apartheid regime of the 1970s and 1980s, because the laws and conditions – social and otherwise – prevailing in the country then had allowed White people to prosper at the expense of the majority indigenous Black people. Ugly Joe was a descendant of Dutch settlers who had ventured into this part of Africa in the 1600s and decided the gold and diamond reserves to be found beneath the vast land were too tempting to be left alone. As time went on, the descendants of these Dutch settlers would own vast tracts of farmland and mines, becoming increasingly wealthy, while they pushed native Africans out of fertile land into crowded reserves and restricted their movement by employing oppressive tactics. By the 1900s, it was clear that White people would be rich for life by virtue of the color of their skin and being descendants of European settlers who had denied Blacks a slice of the cake, and that being born Black would ensure poverty for life. This state of affairs went on for so long that when Apartheid eventually ended and the Afrikaner regime released Nelson Mandela after 27 years of incarceration, the damage had been so deep even subsequent Black governments could not fully redress it.
During the 1970s and 1980s, when South Africa was isolated by the international community because of its Apartheid regime, there was need for the country to sustain itself by manufacturing its own products and goods. There was more than enough food to be produced on the country’s fertile land. Joe Vermuelen came to prominence during this time by opening food-processing plants across the country and selling his products at his stores, first in Johannesburg and then later spreading across the nation as profit margins soared. Because there was no foreign competition, the Vermuelen retail stores grew to a commanding position, monopolizing the market share, such that when Isolation was over the Vermuelen brand was etched so deep into South Africans’ psyche that foreign grocery store retail brands found it difficult to crack it into the lucrative market.
As his wealth accrued, Vermuelen had diversified his business interests, delving into wine making, gold production, and opening new stores in African markets after the end of Isolation. When he died in November 2010, following a fatal cardiac arrest whilst engrossed in the pleasures of the flesh with a busty young blonde woman, Joe Vermuelen was the fifth richest man in South Africa. In Forbes’ list of the richest people in the world for 2009, he had been ranked number 449. The Daily Sun, a ragtag national tabloid, liked to classify him as The Ugliest Rich South African.
With the passage of time, generation after generation that had descended from the Dutch settlers added new words and meanings to the original language of their forbearers, such that there existed today an evolved and bastardized version of Dutch, known as Afrikaans. Although Hudson Vermuelen’s home language was identified as Afrikaans when filling in tax return forms, he was well-versed in the English language, owing to the fact that his mother was a descendant of subjects of the old British Empire. He had, however, polished on his Afrikaans at school, and he could get fairly understood in the Netherlands. However, Hudson considered himself a modern man, and as such deemed English to be the preferred medium of exchange between the peoples of the world, and hence he thought Afrikaans to be a useless language because it could neither be spoken or understood anywhere else but South Africa, except for Namibia – and Namibia was an annex of South Africa anyway, only politicians refused to think so.
He was married to a woman who also refused to acknowledge her Afrikaner roots and had not bothered to learn the language at all, instead taking up English, the language spoken by her parents in order to understand
each other. Her father was an Afrikaner who spoke English with a hideously think accent, and her mother was an Italian immigrant who had been lured into South Africa in the 1980s by the promises of gold by a guileful man who had disappeared into thin air upon their arrival on the African continent, leaving her stranded. She had been rescued by a kind policeman in a khaki uniform and oxide-brown knee-length boots, who would later marry her and father Joelyn amongst four other children. Even though her mother had lived thirty years in South Africa, she still spoke her English with a thick Italian accent.
Joelyn spoke neither Afrikaans nor Italian. She was content with her English, which she spoke with the rapid fluidity of a United Kingdom native. She was an anchor on SuperSport, a local subscription-only TV sports channel. She did the job for fun, not to earn a living. Her main job was being married to the heir to the Vermuelen billions, and it required lots of energy to be in a position like that.
Chapter 4
Mrs. Joelyn Vermuelen drove herself around Gauteng, the province that contained Johannesburg, in a red BMW Z4. The zappy hard-top convertible had personalized number plates that read JOE V – GP (the GP stood for Gauteng Province). The car was a present from her husband to celebrate her recent 26th birthday. For her 25th birthday, the year before, he had bought her an Audi TT roadster.
She drove the Z4 from her Sandton apartment, where she lived with her husband, towards Pretoria, her workplace. Pretoria lies about 60km north of Johannesburg. There are people who work in Johannesburg but prefer to live in Pretoria. What this means is that these people have to endure heavy traffic congestion on each day of the week to and from work, because the N1 highway that connects Johannesburg to Pretoria is notoriously flooded with traffic from Pretoria in the mornings and then traffic from Johannesburg in the after-hours on weekdays throughout the year except on public holidays. By a stark contrast, traffic flows smoothly from Johannesburg to Pretoria in the mornings and also Johannesburg from Pretoria in the evenings, owing to the fact that very few Johannesburg citizens work in Pretoria. This situation worked out well for Mrs. Vermuelen, who was impatient by nature.
The Brand Page 1