by Ian Martin
They followed the rugged shoreline back towards Cape Town, the mountain buttresses towering up on their right. No human habitation to blight the dark slopes. Then up ahead they saw lights. The Twelve Apostles Five Star Hotel!
Actually, this hotel should never have been built there. Some filthy developer had spotted a legal loophole, greased the appropriate palms, gone ahead in the face of public outrage, and planted this cancerous growth in the midst of unblemished pristine nature. Fantastic setting for a hotel though, with the sea a stone’s throw away and the Twelve Apostles looming in the background.
Oh yes – another reason why it should never have been permitted was that this was Muslim sacred ground. The graves of several imams were situated in the area. Well, if maniacal Taliban hordes ever get to take over the world, let’s hope they dynamite this Western abomination, just like they did the Bamian Buddhas, with the scumbag financiers locked inside.
Classy, man, classy. The cuisine was worthy of some sort of merit award from a gourmet guide, the service was so good it was almost embarrassing, and there was a top-class cabaret act. Earlier on Matt had been prudent enough to take some extra anti-inflammatories and they were able to dance together on the crowded dance floor. How wonderful it was to hold her close, smell her fragrance and feel the contours of her body, the silkiness of her bare shoulders and arms.
Midnight came. The diners, a mix of locals and tourists, were getting to the tipsily merry stage, and the cabaret artist crooned a little louder. When Matt suggested it was time to go he was relieved and flattered by her eagerness.
Their room had a balcony looking out to sea. A strong moon, almost full, had risen from behind the mountain and was now overhead, making the surface of the ocean shiver with patterns of silver and black movement.
Ignore the cold, unromantic facts about biological function and the genetic imperative that was driving them to participate in the mechanics of bisexual reproduction. No, that’d be uncharitable and a little tasteless. They were in love, damn it! It’s perfectly accurate to say that they made love. They did so with passion and tenderness and nothing nasty or cynical should be said about it.
In the early hours he woke. Moonlight was streaming into the room and a faint summer breeze form the sea was stirring the curtains at the open balcony door. She seemed even more beautiful in sleep. Her lips were parted, her features were in gentle repose. So innocent and young, almost childlike.
As it was getting light they made love again and then dozed, drifting in and out of a warm, blissful state where everything was as it should be. He lay there, savouring the effects of this magical opiate deep within him, and it occurred to him that he had never been this happy before. This was the ultimate. And he was right. But what he didn’t know was that it was a once-off achievement. He’d never be this happy again – nowhere remotely near it.
9
Right, so to recap the story this far: Matt is born in Joburg, 1988. His father’s a rich businessman, his mother a society bitch. Mama and Papa and baby Dreyer move to Cape Town and set up house in Constantia, oink, oink. Trudy and Bruce can’t stand the sight of each other, and Bruce soon pisses off back to Joeys. From then on Matt rarely sees him.
Matt is sent to a posh school where he’s taught how to behave like an arrogant shit and get away with it (maybe). His fat uncle is soon humping his mother wholesale. He has some neighbourhood friends: Horry Horowitz and Rose and Gilbert Sternkranz. Also two distant cousins: Larry and Ophabia Apollis. But home life is kak, so he chooses to go to boarding school.
Formative Experience: witnesses his mother and uncle fucking like dogs on the bedroom carpet.
Another FE: boot camp training to prepare him for life in high school and the hostel. Yah, useful grounding, good toughening-up process, but leaves him with wounded psyche.
Reasonably content for four years. Acquiesces to bullshit indoctrination, kind of enjoys the vicious fanaticism of playing rugby – but ruins himself physically. Anabolic steroids, excessive working out, over consumption of supplements stuff up his metabolism. Also repeated concussion leaves him with headaches and God knows what other brain damage. Chronic painful inflammation of graunched knee results in a permanent limp.
And yet another FE: Sports psychologist equates losing a parent with losing a game of rugby. Matt sees the light and starts to doubt the system.
End of Grade 11 he cracks under stress of exams. Onset of mental illness. While convalescing he falls in love with Ophabia. Wow!
Finishes school. Goes to Wits in 2007, but not long after arriving in Joburg his father is murdered by hijackers. Hijackers? Matt has to identify the body (FE no. 4). Finishes first year and decides to switch to Rhodes.
January 2008 Trudy and Claude get married. Matt receives nocturnal visitations – the ghost of his father is trying to tell him something (real kopbefokt, hey).
Horry (clever chap, Horry) recommends a sangoma. The worthy diviner interprets the dream – Bruce baby wasn’t killed by hijackers after all. No, no, no. Guess who?
Horry confirms horrible truth – naughty Uncle Claude.
Horry jets off to see the king of Bhutan, and Matt gets laid. Oh lucky man.
All the stuff about rats, walking sacks of shit, atheism, the king of Bhutan, and unjust societies is there for a reason to be made evident at a later stage of the story.
Now let’s get back to the odious narrative: Matt is in for a shock.
The shock Matt’s in for revolves around a certain cultural phenomenon. We all know what culture is, don’t we? Anyway, the culture Matt was familiar with was largely worthless culture of the West, heavily loaded with influences from the US of A. Some call it postmodern culture, or post-postmodern culture. Whatever. The main feature of this culture is its worthlessness.
You see, everything in this culture has been trivialized and robbed of value and meaning. Even history has been trashed. For eegee, take the gormless British prince who went to a party dressed as a Gestapo officer, complete with swastika armband.
Nobody at the party raised an eyebrow, because they too were victims of the same culture that had deprived them all of historical perspective. If the royal parasite had been got up as Christ in loincloth with crown of thorns and bloody nail holes, their response would have been similarly bland. “Hi, Jesus. Howzit? Cool, man.”
But when a picture of the nazi holding a drink and puffing on a fag appeared in the tabloids, there were some who took exception to the choice of fancy dress. They said it diminished and blurred the significance of the uniform, which was a hated symbol of a particularly evil human perpetration, the holocaust. Prince Dickhead was helping to obliterate the memory of a dreadful crime against humanity. Do they have a point? Or do we sympathize with the party-goers and say ah, come on, man, WTF?
OK, so we’re up to speed with a certain aspect of pomo culture. Let’s get to the specific cultural phenomenon that had a shocking effect on young Mr Dreyer.
A few days before Matt was due to leave for Grahamstown he received a visit from Gilbert Sternkranz. Gilbert had a business proposition to make.
“You know I’ve got this adult images Internet company?” he said. “It’s called SweetFanny.co.za. Well, I was wondering if you’d be interested in acting as an agent for me when you get to Rhodes?”
Matt was only mildly interested. He didn’t see himself as a salesman, and he didn’t need the money. His mother and Claude paid for everything, and his father had left him a pile, which he’d come into when he turned 21. But he was naturally curious about the porn.
“So how does it work?” he asked.
“I can offer the client two products,” said Gilbert. “He, or she – the chicks also go for this – can receive images on their cellphone, or they can log onto the website where there’s a much richer range of options. Costs more, though.”
He had brought a laptop with him and now he opened it up on the dining room table and switched it on. For half an hour they sat clicking through image after ima
ge. From tame shots of topless babes through to hardcore, full-on fucking, fellatio and even some bestiality and fetishism.
Matt’s heart pounded and for a while he was titillated and felt the urge to go off to his room and masturbate. Then his excitement dwindled and he began to lose interest: it was all rather repetitious and limited. Tits and cunts, cocks and balls. There were only so many sexual acts to perform, so many positions to try out. And there was no trace of wit or humour, no subtle emotions, and definitely no challenge to the intellect. After 30 minutes he was beginning to get bored.
“I encourage people to take pictures with their camera phones,” said Gilbert. “You’d be surprised at what I get sent. Especially the school kids. Check these pics taken at a rainbow party.”
TA-RA-RA! THE CULTURAL PHENOMENON!
“What’s a rainbow party?” asked Matt.
“You haven’t heard?” Gilbert was surprised. “This is another cultural import all the way from the US of A. It’s a form of group sex, a little party game where the girls line up, each with a different shade of lipstick on. The boys throw dice or play cards until there’s a winner. The lucky guy then presents his dick to the ladies. Look.”
He pointed to the screen. It wasn’t good resolution but Matt could make out young people in a dimly lit room. A boy without trousers was facing a row of girls, his penis standing stiffly to attention. Gilbert clicked through several more shots showing girls taking the lucky lad’s cock in their mouths.
“You see,” explained the purveyor of porn, “the competition is to see who can get deepest penetration. You can tell the winner by the colour of the lipstick. That’s why it’s called a rainbow party.” There was a close-up of the multi-hued organ. “The winner gets to complete the rainbow by sucking the guy off.”
Matt suddenly sat forward. His heart had stopped beating, having turned into a lump of concrete. He couldn’t breathe because his airway was being compressed by a giant vicegrip. The contents of his bowels had turned to liquid.
“Go back one,” he managed to say in a dying man’s croak. “Blow it up.”
“Hey man!” Gilbert had enlarged the picture where Matt’s shaking finger pointed. He too leaned close. “Isn’t that Ophabia? And that other chick, that friend of hers?”
It was all over.
When he wouldn’t take her calls she got her father to bring her over. At first he wouldn’t say anything and just sat glaring at the flickering of the TV. Finally she persuaded him to go out into the garden with her.
“I didn’t know you were a slut,” he kept saying.
“But, Matt, you don’t understand. It means nothing.”
“Sucking somebody’s cock means nothing? Is that what you’re telling me?”
He was pacing up and down between the pool and a big plant bed. How he hated these dragon trees. Not to mention the tree ferns and the cycads. And that potted palm at the pool. What a fucking cliché! Every pool in South Africa, every pool in the world, had to have a stupid potted palm next to it.
“What you’re telling me,” he said, “is that nothing means anything at all.” His fists were clenching and unclenching as he walked. For a fleeting moment he contemplated attacking the potted palm, snapping it in half, toppling it into the pool. “Our night at the hotel means nothing to you. You know what that makes you? It makes you a fucking whore!”
She was crying and pleading with him to be reasonable. She loved him. Their night had been the most perfect, the most precious night of her life. He mustn’t destroy it. Please, Matt. Please, please, please.
But to no avail. There was something slightly old-fashioned about Matt Dreyer. Maybe his crappy upbringing had left him with a deep longing for stability and meaning. He had allowed himself to fall in love with her on the assumption that her feelings for him would be equally strong and true. What a fool he was! He should have known that such a prize piece of poes would have been bombarded with temptations. And what did she see in him, anyway? He was a physical and mental wreck at the age of 20. She had just been playing games with him.
Well, he wasn’t prepared to accept that there could be no depth to a relationship. Long ago he had made the decision that he wasn’t going to become like his parents and uncle, callous and calculating and without any intensity of feeling.
What else had she been getting up to at these parties? Christ, and she was still at school! Some fucking school. Just like his own school – shallow people with trashy values. Desperate to be cool and abreast of the trends. Mindless conformity for conformity’s sake. Rainbow parties now; what would be next? What a fool! For the whole year at Wits he hadn’t so much as touched another chick. No man, fuck it, it was over.
10
Horry Horowitz got back on Friday night, and Saturday morning he came over to see Matt. He was all fired up and eager to talk about his amazing trip to the kingdom of Bhutan. But one look at his friend stopped him in his tracks.
“Now hold it a moment, old pal,” he said, once he’d heard the bad news. “Don’t be too hasty. You must think with your brain here, not with your wounded prick.”
But what he went on to say sounded pretty close to the line taken by Ophabia: social behaviour had to be seen in context.
“Sucking a man’s cock doesn’t mean nothing just because it was sucked at a stupid rainbow party,” Matt objected. “Cocksucking is cocksucking.”
“No it isn’t,” said Horry. “When she sucks your cock, if she does, she feels entirely different emotions to when she sucks some stranger’s cock at a rainbow party. You must remember, Matt, the kind of peer pressure these kids are under. If they don’t conform they get ostracized. It’s a pretty vicious world they move in.”
“Oh,” said Matt, “so I suppose it’s alright for her to also fuck other guys as well as suck their cocks? Just as long as she feels nothing for them?”
“Well…” Horry was hesitant. “You might have a point there. Where does one draw the line? Tricky.”
That evening – it was after 8 and already dark – Ben Apollis rocked up in an agitated state, wanting to talk about Ophabia and Matt. The guard opened the gate for him and he rode up the driveway and parked his fancy BMW Obscenemachine next to Claude’s brand new Mercedes Benz Varkmotor. If he’d glanced in his mirror at the right moment he might have seen a figure dart inside the closing gate.
Matt was lying on his bed dozing. His mother knocked and called out.
“Matt, are you awake? Can you come to the sitting room please? Uncle Ben’s here. It’s about Ophabia.”
God he felt terrible! Frowsy and unable to focus his eyes. And his head was pounding away again. He went to the bathroom and splashed cold water in his face. Shit, he didn’t want to have to listen to a whole long story about Ophabia. He was through with Ophabia.
By now the guard was lying on a bed of variegated ivy under the giant Strelitzia. He was quite dead, his chest having been punctured several times with a long sharp object.
When Matt came downstairs the three of them were waiting for him like vultures, or priests, intent on ripping into his entrails.
“Hi, Uncle Ben,” he said, and flopped down on the two-seater, not bothering with the handshaking bullshit.
“Matt,” said Ben Apollis in a rather formal tone of voice, “I know I have no right to interfere in your personal life, but Ophabia is my daughter and I’m very worried about her. She’s in a terrible state over the… er… problem between you. She’s talking about taking her own life.”
Shit! Matt stared at him. So she was not only a slut but a hysterical neurotic too. These fucking people are all the same, he thought. Look at this creep. He’s brought up his daughter with these crappy values and now he doesn’t know what to do when the wheels come off. What did he expect? Pathetic!
Indeed there was something both miserable and ridiculous about the man. He was frightened and helpless, and there was panic in his eyes. (He also had an uncomfortably full bladder.) And what made him even more contemptible in Matt�
��s eyes was that new piece of art Trudy had just spent thousands on. It was a sculpture standing just to the right of Ben. Fuck, it was hideous! Anorexic Prostitute with Baboon Foetus. All this pseudo aesthetic refinement and sensitivity. When just beneath the surface they were gross materialists. It was a con, this display of Art objects. They weren’t interested in the art at all. Money and status – that’s what it was about. Like that bloody William Kentridge on the wall over there. How many hundred thousand had they paid? Christ! Klipdrift and Chocolate Kotched on Canvas. And that…
“Matt!” Trudy spoke sharply. “For God’s sake concentrate. You look all glassy-eyed like a bloody dead fish. How you’re going to cope with university this year I don’t know.”
She and Claude were sitting on the sofa. They were both ill at ease. Maybe they were embarrassed. The sight of them together certainly didn’t arouse any feelings of fondness in him. She was wearing high heels and a ‘little tart’ skirt and a tight stretch-knit top that showed off her cleavage and shamelessly accentuated her middle-age flab. And all that bloody jewellery! Ridiculous hoop and pendant earrings. And Claude in his shirtsleeves and his fat belly hanging over the belt of too-tight trousers. In his multi-focals and double chin he was looking positively ancient. Also distracted. Probably thinking about some crooked transaction he was setting up with his ANC cronies.
“You look terrible. Have you got another of your migraines?” Trudy sounded almost accusing. “Go and take three Syndol and then we can sort out this tiff between you and Ophabia.”
Matt got up and went off to the kitchen where the medicine cupboard was. Ben also got to his feet.