Brutal Legacy

by Tracy Going

  As we sat there discussing the article, we chuckled about how I was asked: “What’s the best gossip you’ve heard about yourself?” I had answered that Bob the DJ and my ex-husband both agreed that I was the most conservative person they knew.

  And what was I looking for in a man? It was a simple response: “He shouldn’t be gay, an alcoholic, a paedophile or a wife batterer. Aside from any of those – he could be anything.” It was an answer that was altogether spontaneous and carefree, but regrettably, carelessly crass.

  But how we laughed, the two of us, out there on that deck.

  I was quite fascinated that he’d remembered all those details. I hadn’t put him down as a sensitive, thoughtful man, but his questions made me feel safe, interesting and valued.

  I had known him years before, from the time I was a crewing agent in the film industry and he was one of the crew. I hadn’t known him well and had seldom managed any of his bookings, but I knew enough about him to know he was not considered measured in his manner. In fact, he had a reputation for being abrasive and prone to aggressive outbursts.

  But as I watched him throw back his head and laugh, I was captivated by his charm and I berated myself, thinking how easily and unquestioningly I had accepted those judgements of him. As I sat there, caught in the autumn of his gaze, I saw him differently, a handsome man, rugged but gentle. His eyes were brown, dry oak leaves. They were sharp and keen, rustling with intelligence. His movements were expansive, and I liked the way he gesticulated with his arms as he talked, how he flicked his wrists like a tiger flicks its tail before it leaps. And his hands … they were beautiful. They were working hands. A little rough and calloused, browned from too much sun. I looked at my hands holding a glass of dry white. They were so much smaller, and paler. My nails were newly polished into a soft, pink glow.

  I glanced around to see that we were no longer alone. The tables around us had filled with other diners, mostly men on their lunch-hour break. They had ordered freshly tapped beers and were smoking and their laughter and loud talk peppered the air. Waiters blended in seamlessly as they glided past us carrying armfuls of chargrilled steaks sizzling on heated cast-iron bases, trailing smoky wisps of barbecue and cooked herbs.

  The ice that clinked lightly in our glasses soon melted as our lunchtime meeting stretched beyond midday and the late-afternoon shadows dappled the deck. When we eventually parted, having established much earlier that I wasn’t going to be an effective link in his marketing strategy, he casually tossed over his shoulder, “Can I phone you sometime?”

  “Sure,” I laughed, making my way to the car, my steps light like a cat high-stepping as it pranced down a bright alley.

  Eight

  It was never a formal courtship. Not some masterful seduction. Perhaps I should have demanded more. Perhaps I should have asked more questions. Where had he been staying before? Who had he been staying with? Why had he suddenly appeared in my life? But I never did. Or if I did, there wasn’t much to his answers. I never knew where he came from, just as one day I wouldn’t know where he went.

  But back then it was a comfortable and gradual progression of an unexpected relationship. To me it all seemed so fortuitous, that he was a heart-stopping detour in my strategically managed life. As time passed and I got to know him better, I was to understand how misunderstood this wonderful man was.

  He told me of his youth, of his family’s blue-chip social circle and the many different exclusive schools. He spoke of new cricket bats being delivered to the sports field by chauffeurs driving a showcase of the finest in motoring excellence. It was a life that pulsed with privilege.

  But there is nothing in this life that does not cast a shadow.

  He spoke of sitting alone on the back seat of those stately cars, a little boy all on his own, his father always working, his mother in a darkened room behind a closed door. His father, by all accounts, a successful man, driven and selfish, but with a deep-seated complex about his compromised height and, as with some who spend their entire lives looking up at others, he overcompensated by ruthlessly seeking power and conquest. And, with her six-foot stature, his mother became a daily reminder of his father’s physical shortcomings. She, in turn, sounded lost, as though she’d withdrawn into herself at some sad point, an alcoholic, who loathed her husband and who neglected her children.

  That’s what he told me. And that’s what I believed.

  I shook off my discomfort when I heard how he and his brother had sued his mother for their inheritance. I’d never heard of such a thing before. Perhaps it had been necessary, I reassured myself. I knew how much we ourselves had lost because of my father’s all-consuming need for yet another drink. I knew the devastation of careless financial ruin. Perhaps she had been incapable of managing the family finances. Perhaps. Maybe.

  He told me of his ex-girlfriend. She was crazy. Completely irrational and insane. It seemed that they were always fighting. I overheard a conversation between them once. I heard his phone ring. It was her. He moved discreetly off, but not beyond earshot. I could hear him.

  He was rattled by the call. It unsettled him. Disturbed him.

  He stalked up and down the passage, his voice booming as he shouted her down with his final words, “Leave me alone, you fucking bitch.”

  Afterwards, when he strode into the kitchen, his eyes still flashing in fury, his lips thin and tight, he gave pause, shrugged his shoulders, and stilled. I breathed in long and deep.

  “You wouldn’t speak to me like that, would you,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

  “I’d never do that to you,” he said. “You’d never deserve it.”

  No, I’d never deserve it. He was right.

  Then he grinned.

  She really must be insane, I thought.

  We spoke of loss and longing and love.

  I had recently lost my father, but he knew that already – it was in the Fair Lady piece. I had been asked when last I had cried and I had spoken of my father dying the week before the interview. And I had cried. Not a deluge of tears that flooded my being from a deep and devastating, mind-numbing loss – I would never feel that sense of bereavement for my father. I hadn’t seen him for the last five years of his life. I heard that he had been found dead on the floor by some local fishermen. They were his friends apparently. He was fifty-two years old. After his death I saw the picture on his ID and he looked much, much older than that. He looked at least eighty. All colour seemed to have drained from him. His face was ashen, his forehead furrowed, cheeks carved with thick grooves. But what really made him look aged was the madness in his eyes.

  I don’t know what he died of. I don’t know the specifics. I suspect his body was simply exhausted from the years of abuse.

  But what I do know is that I gave up on him long before his body did.

  And yet, although I would never be swamped in sorrow at his passing, I did cry. I cried tears of sadness. I was sad that I never had the father I wanted or needed. Sad that I would never know him as a man with dreams, hopes and aspirations for a greater tomorrow. Sad that his alcoholism had denied me the opportunity of knowing him as much else other than a tortured, broken, mean-spirited, angry and violent man. I do have some memories of him being different, from when I was a child. They are vague and fuzzy, though, and I’ve had to think hard.

  I remember that he used to allow me to sit on his lap as he drove the car up the gravel road and I breathed in the musk of his Old Spice aftershave. I remember that I used to drive the tractor with him, or run alongside, as he ploughed the fields for hours and how the sun burnt the back of his neck and the top of his bald head.

  I recall how he loved showing 35-millimetre movies, and how he’d line the projector up on a stack of books for a Sunday-night viewing, moving up and down in front of the tunnel of light, making sure that he got it just right, casting a long shadow across the lounge wall, the projector clicking and whirring loudly as we waited.

  That he loved to cook. And bake. Espec
ially curries and meat pies – he particularly enjoyed making those – and I was usually his assistant and had to peel the potatoes and cut the onions. He left me that, his love of making food.

  I remember, too, how his shoulders would shake as he laughed. And how his eyes watered.

  I remember that I was his favourite.

  But that was a lifetime ago.

  The last time I’d really looked at my father – properly looked at him – he was crying. It was the last time we had all been together as a family. My mother was sitting, holding my much younger brother. My sister and I sat alongside her – we were on one side, my father on the other. My brother, David, was lying in a coffin between us.

  It was the first time we’d been together in a room for many years and we’d never be together again.

  Then I was defeated by death.

  When I lost my brother I lost myself. I had wanted it to be me. Why him?

  I had fought so hard to keep him safe. But that weekend he was still in the army and he was coming home for his final pass when he took the Olifantsfontein bend at speed, lost control of his vehicle and died. I had tried to protect him, even at the very end, when I tried to get him out of Angola where he had been based for his military service.

  He was in the technical services retrieval division, his job to silently creep through the bush, under the protection of darkness, and enter the war zone to retrieve broken-down trucks and vehicles. He was in a foreign country, alone, for days at a time, his face greased and his body camouflaged in dirt. He was exhausted by all the violence. He was afraid. One day he’d phoned me from a payphone at the army base.

  “You need to help me,” he’d said, his voice deep and hoarse.

  “You need to get me outta here.” There was a brief silence.

  “If you don’t …” His words choked. “I’m not going to make it.”

  I knew he was crying.

  David, six foot three, with shoulders like a Brahman bull, was falling apart on the other end of the line. He was begging me to help him. This was my brother, the one afraid of so little. It was he who would fearlessly rush up the stairs to find me on the dance floor at the Molani Hotel in Brits, the light bouncing off the mirror ball. I’d see him on the other side, across from the bar where watered-down double brandy and Cokes were poured generously. He’d be beckoning me from the other side, his arms waving wildly.

  “Tracy, come quickly,” his voice raised in excitement. “Come watch. I’m going to fight.”

  And I would be right behind him, shouting for him to be careful, knowing that I couldn’t stop him, but all the time hoping it would be over by the time the cops arrived and that there’d be no need for an ambulance. The dance floor emptying behind me as everyone pushed their way outside.

  “Kom gou. Hulle gaan baklei.”

  “Dis die Engelsman.”

  “Hulle gaan mekaar bliksem.”

  “Watch. Nou kom ’n lekker snotklap.”

  But now my brother was feeling hopeless. The boy who would steal his father’s beers and take them back to boarding school with him on a Sunday night, where under the hooded veil of darkness he and his friends would knock them back, hiding beneath the unlit stairs, pushing to see if he’d be caught. David, the one was always looking for more.

  Now he wasn’t coping.

  Hearing his words reminded me instantly of a time years before when I’d been woken by a lion. A lion roaring flames of fire. A dream. Just a dream. There was no need for me to search for an underlying meaning. It had come to me instantly. I knew that my brother must never go to the army or he would die. The lion would swallow him in its fiery jaws.

  I rushed into the kitchen at breakfast the next morning,

  “Mom, whatever you do, you mustn’t let David go to the army,” I pleaded. “I had a dream … Please, Mom.”

  “Yes,” she had said, nodding her head vigorously in an attempt to reassure me that she was taking me seriously. My brother was ten years old.

  A decade later he made that call.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  “Get me out.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said. “I promise.”

  And I did. I picked up the telephone directory and looked up the contact details of the office of General Magnus Malan, Minister of Defence. I asked to speak to him. His secretary told me that he was unavailable but she kindly put me onto the brigadier general’s office. Astonishingly, the brigadier general agreed to meet with me.

  A few days later I was guided through the security checkpoint in my rattling 140Y Datsun onto the army base in Pretoria. In the parking lot I was met by a young uniformed man, not much younger than my twenty-one years. He escorted me through the military maze to the brigadier general’s office. The brigadier general did not keep me waiting. When his secretary ushered me in, he stood tall behind his desk and then stepped forward to greet me. His insignia was polished bright on his epaulette, bronze on maroon. I sat down opposite him at his desk, and stretched myself straight, straighter than the old South African flag hanging in the corner and fast losing its lustre. It was only once my heels were anchored before me, my ankles touching and my skirt tucked neatly around my knees that I told him of the promise I had made to my brother.

  He summoned the Army chaplain and so it was that the three of us sat together and discussed the matter further over a cup of tea. We chatted as we nibbled on dry-baked biscuits and sipped from the finest Royal Albert china served off a polished sterling-silver tray. It was an unhurried gathering and I left the base assured in the knowledge that the South African government and the Defence Force were pulling all their forces out of Angola. The war was finally over. I also had their personal undertaking that my brother’s departure would be expedited.

  It wasn’t.

  He was among the very last troops to be withdrawn from the Angolan border.

  And he had only two weeks left in the army when he recklessly took that hairpin bend at speed, lost control, and was flung from the vehicle, tossed aside and discarded, a maimed soldier who had lost his last battle. He had been lying broken and dying along the verge for hours before the emergency medical services arrived. But by then it was too late; he’d taken his last shallow breath and could no longer be resuscitated. So, instead, the ambulance personnel removed his still body from the scene and then callously helped themselves to all his personal belongings, taking the shoes and clothes I’d bought him the last time I had seen him.

  My brother died with his hand on the steering wheel. There was no other vehicle involved. It was him, the turn, and the accelerator beneath his foot, ensnaring him, luring him, drawing him in to the fiery mouth of the roaring lion.

  He was wild and angry, and constantly needed to challenge the world around him in his desperate attempt to make sense of it, but he was also the young man who took his father’s gun apart, separating the bolt from the barrel, to keep his mother safe in his own absence. He took the mechanism with him and stowed it like a silent secret in the back of his school locker.

  While my brother might have courted danger in life, in death his parting was dignified and precise. When he died, he was a young man in uniform, which meant he was entitled to a military funeral. It was an honourable farewell where his comrades-in-arms stood as one and raised their right hands to their berets in a last goodbye before his flag-draped coffin was loaded into the hearse and he made his final journey away from us.

  As the long, black vehicle drove off, I wanted to follow.

  I wanted to shout and scream and rip the clothes from my body.

  My brother was dead.

  He was gone.

  I felt as though my soul had been syphoned from my body, that the air within me was gone, senselessly stolen from within me.

  I saw my father once more after that final salute.

  My son was six months old and perhaps it was the endless cycle of life, death and birth that drew me to him. I wanted to introduce my child to his grand
father. My father had been living quietly in his mother’s garden cottage for many years when we visited. But we didn’t stay long. My father had lost his sense of being and, it seems, large chunks of his mind too. He spoke impressively of his plans and what he was doing. But none of it was true. He had long ago succumbed to the fanciful flights of his mind. He was unwashed, dirty; he rambled incoherently and my son screamed every time his grandfather came near him. I never saw or spoke to him again.

  But, still, I was sad to bury my father.

  We had that in common, he and I. He had lost both his parents. We could talk about it. He understood.

  It seemed as though the gods of fortune had sacrificed their souls for me. Besides the ampleness they had already bestowed on me – my son, my career – they had now delivered me a soul mate. A good man with whom I could share my life.

  This was clearly going to be a journey of mutual discovery, of support and understanding. I was overwhelmed, not only because we had such a strong personal connection, but also because we were both so focused on our futures. He had recently bought a fledgling ginger-beer bottling company with his inheritance. I was building my career. He was fascinated by current affairs and worked his way through the daily newspapers every morning. I was a news anchor, in negotiation with the public broadcaster to become the prime-time evening newsreader. It seemed we both demanded the most from life and were working hard to realise our dreams. We shared the same humour and I couldn’t remember when last I’d enjoyed someone else’s company so much. He was an answer to a question I hadn’t even asked.

  And I wanted to share him with everyone.

  So I did.

  I introduced him to my son. I introduced him to my family. I introduced him to my closest friends. I even introduced him to my ex-husband.

  He, in turn, introduced me to no one. Not one single person. In all the time we were together I never met a sibling, a friend or a business acquaintance. No one.