by Ian Martin
“Claude?”
“Matt. You alright, Matt? I’m afraid I’m phoning with some bad news.”
“Yes?”
“It’s Ben. He’s had a massive haemorrhage. Ben’s dead, Matt.”
The promising signs of tumescence were all but gone. Guilt, anxiety and despair were galloping towards him.
“Matt? Look, for God’s sake don’t blame yourself. We’ve been through this already. If it hadn’t been for you your mother would have been raped by those five animals and we’d all probably be dead. Christ, I haven’t got time for this – I’m supposed to be in a meeting already. Listen Matt, the main thing is this: if the police ask you any questions you must stick to the story. Remember, Ben was bludgeoned by one of the burglars. Now I really must go.”
Matt’s cock was hanging as limp and lifeless as a piece of raw sausage.
12
You could say that Ophabia Apollis’s future had looked too good to be true. Everything had been going for her, and certainly in fiction and the movies that usually means you’re heading for a fall.
She was from a well-connected family with plenty of boodle. Her father was coloured and had struggle credentials, so she could call herself black if she wanted to. On the other hand she looked white, so she was one of those few lucky South Africans who could afford to be oblivious of race.
Her features were so symmetrical there was a good chance, depending on how her personality developed and shone through, that one day she’d be beautiful. And she was tall and slim and had the sort of contours that made males, from adolescents to geriatrics, start constructing absurdly far-fetched scenarios in their imaginations. Like her in the missionary position with lover-boy cupping those breasts as she worked herself to a climax. Yes, countless men had used the thought of her to help them get where their hormones required them to go.
And she was bright, too. Without much sweat she had remained one of the top five students year after year.
What caused her downfall, despite her physical, intellectual and social advantages, was a fatal lack of judgment in matters of the heart. For how could any right-minded girl have allowed herself to fall in love with Matt Dreyer? What did she see in him?
Understandably, she was more than a little narcissistic. Who wouldn’t be narcissistic with a body like that, which was constantly being fondled by so many lascivious gazes? But, surprisingly, her narcissism didn’t get in the way of other traits; she also had a strong maternal streak in her. Her heart went out to the weak, the vulnerable, the exploited, the downtrodden, the marginalized and all the other underdogs of the world. If she was able to use her obvious superiority to help some miserable wretch it gave her a feeling of warm satisfaction and provided meaning to her life.
You see, not being a dumbo meant that she was aware of the shallowness and intrinsic worthlessness of the relationships she had with most people in her circle. She was also troubled by a sense of meaninglessness when she stepped back and contemplated the kind of life she was leading. And when she considered the wider world she was growing into, and what the future seemed to hold for her, she was filled with foreboding. The landscape of the future looked cold and desolate.
So when, at the beginning of 2006, barely 16, she saw the forlorn ghost sitting in the armchair, his heartless, uncaring mother shouting at him impatiently, something deep inside her had responded. She would help him to recover and face the world again.
And over the weeks she had indeed brought him back to life. As he made progress, so had her love for him deepened and matured. With her help he would become a fine, strong young man. Together they would be able to live hopefully and confront the future without dread.
Of course, they also had to live in the real world. When, a year or so later, Matt had gone off to Joeys and student life at Wits, she had been obliged to make a tolerable life without him. It was a double life: the superficial one of school and sport and parties and holidays, and the real one inside her head where she interacted with her boyfriend.
She did most of the things her friends did. She went to the parties, and danced, and popped pills, and drank vodka and cream soda, and even sucked a cock or two. But that was it.
Privately, it was all about Matt. Some days she’d come home from school and undress down to her shirt. Then she’d stand before the mirror and slowly unbutton the shirt and reveal the black fuzz, the flat belly and the magnificent breasts to him, and imagine his rapture. Then she’d lie on her bed, don earphones, and begin to explore with vibrator and fingers.
One of her schoolmates had told her about the minimalistic music of Philip Glass. At first it didn’t seem to be music at all. It just went round and round, round and round, round and round, endlessly, like a stuck record. But then there’d be a slight variation, a hiccup, before going back to round and round. The more she listened, the more variation she began to discern. It had a strangely mesmeric quality that could be rewarding if you were in the right mood.
Her friend told her that it was great background music for erotic daydreams. It helped to prolong the periods of arousal, enhance the sensations of ecstasy, and drive the orgasm to further limits, greater heights.
So, plugged into her MP3 player, Ophabia would lie there masturbating until Matt fucked her diligently enough to make her come. And it was always Matt who gratified her, no one else.
At first she just couldn’t understand what was bugging him. It was ridiculous. How could he take something like that so seriously? All she’d done was suck the stinking cock of some pimply youth at an utterly unmemorable party. It was nothing.
Why did it mean so much to him? She had to live, didn’t she? Or did he expect her to lock herself up in a nunnery while he was away? What right did he have to call her a slut and a whore and a prostitute?
He didn’t even try. He just went ahead and broke the beautiful thing that was between them. With reckless cruelty he stamped on it until it lay in pieces, irreparable.
After her initial incomprehension and denial of any wrongdoing, she lapsed briefly into a state of self-doubt and guilt. Maybe he was right and it was all her fault: she had cheated him. But she knew she’d been true to him, and their night together had been proof of it. And when she stopped feeling guilty the horrible truth began to dawn on her. Like the creep whose cock she’d licked, nibbled and sucked hadn’t been worth any little bit of her, Matt hadn’t been worthy of her love. She had squandered the most precious part of herself, her first love affair of her life thrown away on an ignoble cripple. A physical, mental and emotional wreck who, instead of trusting and adoring her, threw his toys out of the cot in a jealous rage and tried to turn her into a slut.
She had deliberately deceived herself by glossing over and excusing Matt’s numerous faults and weaknesses. She had been so, so stupid to believe that he was capable of loving her like a good man should. She felt ashamed of herself. But worse, she knew that this self-betrayal was irreversible. Now, in her own eyes, she was a slut. There could be no going back, and the future lay in ruins. She could see no place for herself in a world that had been devastated to such an extent.
The endlessly repetitive music of Philip Glass underwent a change. Instead of the trance-like state it had induced as an accompaniment on her erotic journeys, it now took on a dark and compelling insistence. She was on the periphery of a giant whirlpool being swirled around and around. Whenever there was a change in tempo the sides of the whirlpool would steepen alarmingly and she could stare down into the vertiginous black centre.
Some months previously, this music had drawn her to The Hours, the 2002 film about Virginia Woolf. Philip Glass had written the score to the movie. Ophabia hadn’t really understood the three heroines’ complex and tortured personalities, but she had felt drawn to them, and identified with their situations.
She spoke to her mother, at first tearfully and then soberly, about her nihilistic inclinations. In alarm Mrs Apollis had called the family GP and, like any modern medical monkey would have do
ne, he immediately prescribed happy pills and a sedative. Fuck it, do you really need all those years of training before you’re able to employ such coarse tricks of the trade?
Anyway. When Ben Apollis was brought up to speed with what was passing through Ophabia’s mind, he shat himself most indecorously.
Of course he loved his daughter; but one could quite justifiably question the quality of his love. Love is a complex mixture of emotions, and in this case one must ask how much influence did an inflated male ego have on his feelings. How much perverse pleasure did he get out of knowing that every dog in the neighbourhood was crazy to get at her?
Well, be that as it may, he did nevertheless dearly love his beautiful daughter, and the thought of her trying to commit suicide put him in a terrible panic. That’s why he jumped in his car and rushed off to the Dreyers to try and reason with the offended suitor.
As has been noted, he didn’t get very far with his attempt to reconcile the young people. Instead, he got so badly clobbered on the head that it was bye-byes for six weeks, and then Bye-bye forever.
For Ophabia to feel partly responsible for what had happened to her father was quite natural. This didn’t do her psychological or emotional state any good at all. Guilt and remorse bore down on her with such weight that any last doubt about what she must do was crushed into submission. No more doubt, no more delay. It was time for unflinching resolve.
At the end of the movie Virginia Woolf, played by Nicole Kidman, drowns herself by wading into a river, heavy stones jammed into her coat pockets.
Ophabia made her preparations and then waited until well after midnight. Not that her mother would have heard anything, for she was heavily sedated. As for Larry, he had his pad in the granny flat on the other side of the house.
She had tied either end of a length of ski rope to two of her brother’s dumbells. 7.5kg each. At the appointed time, the time when it felt right, she got up from her bed and took a towel and folded it into a pad about her neck and shoulders. Then she bent over, positioning the rope on the towel, and stood erect, lifting the heavy iron weights. They hung just above her waist like pendulous breasts.
But what about the note? Don’t forget the suicide note. What suicide note? Suicide notes are corny, man, like famous last words. ‘Goodbye Cruel World’? Or something profane and abusive: ‘Fuck you all and see you in hell, you bunch of motherfucking cuntlickers’? No man, this was a beautiful suicide and didn’t need any hackneyed crap like a suicide note.
After hanging the dumbells around her neck she put on her mother’s heavy evening coat. The one that smelt faintly of mothballs. She buttoned it up and then put a paving brick in each pocket. She was almost ready. Now for Philip Glass.
She had heard about the perlemoen poachers who take their cellphones with them when they go diving. Amazing how ingeniously resourceful criminals can be. It wasn’t easy, but finally she had her iPod inside a condom. With sticky tape she sealed the opening around the headphone cable. She looped the cord, placed it over a button and pulled tight. The player dangled against her and she put on the headphones. Ready.
There was a piece of moon up there, lighting up the garden, giving the scene that frozen look. She took small, careful steps till she reached the pool and stepped out of her slippers. Standing on the edge her toes could feel the cool sandpapery roundness of the bullnosed tiles. She turned on the MP3 player and found the right place, adjusted the volume. Then she stood listening and watching, waiting for the right moment to begin.
The rope was cutting into her shoulders, despite the towel. She lifted the weights with her hands to ease the pain, and then stepped gingerly into the water. Overbalancing in the shallows was not part of her plan.
She paused on the second step and listened attentively, feeling the dark power of the whirlpool music turning and turning inside her head. She was already used to the coldness of the water lapping at her knees – it wasn’t going to be a distraction after all.
For some five minutes she stood there, feeling the urgency of the weight she was carrying, as it bore down on her with increasing heaviness. She listened to the insistence of the music and sensed the tug of the gyrating funnel.
She stepped down and began to move into deeper water where the centre of the whirlpool awaited her. Soon she would satisfy this slow, consuming passion. She would reach the ultimate destination, the only possible conclusion that had been waiting for her all of her life.
When she was waist deep she stopped again. Now the music was swirling and circling with gathering speed, sucking at her, drawing her on. The music suddenly lurched, she was tipped forward and she was sliding down into the bottomless black vortex of oblivion.
It was Larry who found her the next morning. Fleetingly, he entertained the absurd thought that it was a vagrant who had fallen into the pool in the night. It was the bulky brown coat that made him think this. Then he saw her long hair lifting and swaying in a current from the pump. And the bare feet, and ankles, and the smooth calves of a young girl.
He also noticed the slow approach of the Kreepy Krauly, as if it was coming to investigate. Let’s hope the irritating tap-tap-tap hadn’t marred her appreciation of the musical climax to Mr Glass’s minimalistic masterpiece.
13
Matt had deliberately killed the one burglar, and had happily finished off the second.
And when he struck the figure concealed behind the curtains it was with murderous intent, there’s no doubt about it. One could say he’d been obliged by typically South African circumstances to go on a killing spree, and that’s what he’d done, finished and klaar. He had performed in a heroic fashion. It would make the story sticky with sentimentality and blur the main issue if one were to suggest Matt was in any way to blame for Ben Apollis’s death. No, the fact that the figure behind the curtain wasn’t another burglar but turned out to be Ophabia’s father was just an unfortunate fuckup, a cruel accident of fate. Collateral damage.
So why did he feel responsible? If a drunk steps off the pavement in front of you and you run him over, you feel bad about it but you don’t beat yourself up. You jumped on the brakes, didn’t you? He tried reasoning like this but it didn’t make him feel less culpable.
If he’d possessed the intellectual attributes necessary to analyse his feelings and his situation, he might have been better able to deal with his angst. He would have realised that the less moral, just and ordered a society is, the more pervasive and evenly distributed is its members’ burden of guilt. In a utopia, on the other hand, anti-social behaviour is an aberration and only the criminal is guilty. Everyone else is outraged and unanimous in their condemnation and insistence that such behaviour is intolerable. So in a country like South Africa, where injustice is commonplace and tolerated, a sense of failure and responsibility grips everyone like a contagion. No wonder then that Matt woke in the dead of night, trembling and bathed in icy sweat. And worse was on the way.
His phone rang. Claude. Now what did that fat prick want this time? Again it was afternoon, so it must mean trouble. He had been working at his desk, immersing himself in an assignment, trying to ignore the spectre of Ben Apollis.
“More bad news, Matt,” his uncle said. “Ophabia’s gone and committed suicide. She’s dead. Larry found her at the bottom of the pool this morning. Drowned herself.”
Waves of vertigo and nausea surged through him. Again he was sweating, and black ink bombs exploded before his eyes.
“Matt, Matt! Are you alright?” his uncle was shouting at him as he began to fall forward onto his desk.
“Aargh… terrible… aargh…” he groaned.
“Christ, I think he’s fainted, or had a heart attack or something.”
Then he heard his mother’s voice shouting.
“Oh for God’s sake! The fucking little wimp. Here.” She must have snatched the phone, for now her voice was even louder. “Matt, can you hear me?” she bellowed. “Matt, lie on the floor and put your feet in the air. Do as I say immediately, o
r…” Or what?
Lie on the floor? Fuck, he was on the floor. How had he got there? He made a mighty effort and lifted his feet and propped them against the desk. Immediately his vision began to clear and the nausea subsided. Trudy was still shouting instructions and abusive threats.
Ophabia was dead. She’d killed herself like she said she would.
The bus broke down about 5 ks from Riviersonderend. It was nearly seven and the sun was already up.
“Die fokken waterpomp is in sy moer,” the driver announced to the attendants and several of the passengers who had gathered around, waiting for his verdict. He wiped grease off his hands and then got on the phone to Cape Town.
A replacement bus couldn’t be expected before midday. It would take at least half an hour to transfer all the luggage. Then two and a half hours drive to town. Three o’clock at Cape Town station, and the funeral was at three.
Well, he’d managed to miss Ben’s send-off the day before; now he’d conveniently get out of the embarrassment of having to face all those people at Ophabia’s funeral. But did he really want to miss it? Didn’t he want to see her in her coffin? Horry had often regaled him with accounts of the undertaker’s art. She was bound to look serene. One last look.
“Hey, my old bum chum,” Horry answered. “You’re up bright and early. Sorry to hear about Ophabia. What a waste.”
“Yah,” said Matt. “But listen, Horry, I’m not in Constantia. I’m on my way in for the funeral, but the fucking bus has broken down. Riviersonderend.”
“Ow, that’s not good. What you need is a buddy with a car to come fetch you, right? But I’m not in Constantia either.”
He explained that he’d taken the week off to attend a lekhothla out at Grootbos, near Gansbaai. It was a discussion and planning meeting for the launch of the Fifty Fifty Foundation.