Not so long ago, I was idling in my house in Notting Hill, when I saw an extraordinary clip on YouTube. Somewhere in the sea off the coast of South Africa, a man was swimming, wearing a head camera and carrying a spear gun. He was filming and describing what he was doing. Suddenly he became agitated. Oo, vok my, Jissus nee, vok-of jou poes. Loosely translated, he was saying, ‘Oh, fuck me, Jesus, no, fuck off, you cunt.’
A great white shark, on an outing from the age of the dinosaur, was approaching him smoothly. In his distress, his Afrikaans probably seemed more apt than English, more effective against shark-attack anyway, because of its rich vocabulary of imperatives, honed over the centuries of instructing the brown and black peoples. When he broke the surface I recognised the voice: it was my much younger cousin, Jaco Retief, who I hadn’t seen for nearly twenty years. He was now a man of about thirty-five, I calculated. As he swam, whooping hysterically, his voice was aerated by bubbles and his giant fins flailed away like windmills behind him.
But now the great white was coming back for a second look at Cousin Jaco and, to give him credit, Jaco dived and turned towards the shark – very bravely, I thought. The shark was as big as a house. Its face was inscrutable and cold, in the way that mass-murderers are always said to be emotionless. It was impossible to tell if the shark was hungry or just curious. Jaco held his flimsy spear gun with its puny harpoon, which was supposed to be propelled by a gas canister. This canister looked more like a can of beans than an offensive weapon, and now he pointed the spear gun at the shark as it came steadily closer with its smooth, suave face, that revealed two rows of huge teeth and what could have been mistaken for a smile.
Jaco was shouting at the oncoming horror: Vok-of jou poes, vok-of! But now the great white was approaching. Jaco turned towards the shark instinctively. He pointed his spear gun at the shark. The shark came steadily closer, suggesting that it might well be preparing to eat Jaco. When it was less than a metre away, Jaco prodded the shark with his spear gun, perhaps hoping to stab it in the eye. The spear gun barely dented the shark’s skin, but –miraculously – it turned away and glided off into the murk. Jaco swam fast for a few minutes and climbed onto what was probably a paddle ski; I couldn’t see clearly because he was creating a lot of turbulence. As he turned to see what it was up to, the shark surfaced very near the boat for a last assessment of Jaco’s potential as a foodstuff, before turning and diving.
I remembered one of Carlo Collodi’s stories about a giant shark swallowing first Geppetto and then Pinocchio; it looked as though my Cousin Jaco was about to suffer the same fate, although it seemed unlikely that Jaco would survive inside a shark, as Geppetto and Pinocchio had. It didn’t occur to me immediately that the shark would have swallowed the head camera as well as Jaco. And of course then there would have been no YouTube record.
Jaco paddled frantically for the shore, and when he got there, still gibbering and shaking, he described to the camera what had happened: ‘There I is looking for kabeljou or a steenbras and suddenly this fucking huge shark come towards me. I’m shitting myself. This is a monster, true’s God, and I think I am fucked, for certain this huge fucker is going to eat me.’
In the middle of this piece to camera Jaco began to laugh. The laughter was not born of merriment, but hysteria. It was very disturbing. ‘Every time what this fucker dives and I doesn’t see him I’m thinking he’s going to come up from under me at fifty kilometres an hour and chop me in two or come up to my paddle ski and then bite me and the boat in one hap. True’s God, I am sure I am fucked.’
Now, bizarrely, he made a confession, weeping. He was seized by the idea that this was some sort of payback for neglecting his native religion, the Dutch Reformed Church.
I saw Jaco a few months later at the funeral for Tannie Marie, who had died aged ninety. The last time I had seen Cousin Jaco, he was on a school rugby tour of Britain and he came to visit me. He needed some money: he couldn’t believe how fucking expensive London was. In return I went to watch him play rugby at Eton. To my mortification, he provoked a number of fights on the field. There was something about floppy Etonian hair and soft pale skin that enraged him, perhaps summoning in his mind images of the Boer War. After all, around nine hundred Boers, most of the women and children, had died in the British concentration camp at Potchesfstroom alone, not much more than a few miles from the farm. The following week Jaco was sent home after he punched a barman in Kent, where his team had just won a match 97–3. The three points were the product of a penalty awarded after Jaco stood on the opposing prop’s head. He was on a mission of retribution.
Outside the church Jaco greeted me. His suit was too tight and his boep pushed vigorously against the lower buttons of his shirt. He gave me a card so that we could keep in touch. His face was pitted and he had lost his rugged, blond, Voortrekker appearance. The dominee preached in a strange, liturgical sing-song from within a brown suit roughly the colour of dried cow dung. I hadn’t seen Tannie Marie for a long time: I wondered if tannie wasn’t another Huguenot word in origin, from tante.
‘I was shallow, very, very shallow behaved,’ Jaco told me, revealing the depth of his new wisdom. ‘A man shall have a close encounter with death so that he must understand what is really important for his children and his wife and such like.’
I can imagine that if you were convinced you were going to be eaten by a shark you might say more or less anything. In fact, Jaco had left his wife and children for a liaison with a woman he had met in Sun City. She was probably the ‘such like’.
Jaco went on for five or ten minutes, sometimes exultantly born-again. He felt that he had betrayed the memory of our common ancestor, Piet Retief. I had the feeling that he wanted me to exonerate him. He was, I think, trying to make a complex biblical analogy between his encounter with a huge shark and Piet’s encounter with one thousand Zulus. It was an analogy that, in my opinion, didn’t quite work. Anyway, he proposed to give thanks publicly for his deliverance. It was all very unsettling and slightly mad. Soon after the funeral, Jaco achieved minor celebrity when his video went viral. He gave inspirational talks about staring death in the face. (In this case a very large, inscrutable, face.) He gave interviews about sharks – he was, after all, an expert – and he forgot about his promise to make retribution to the Dutch Reformed Church; he also forgot his wife and two blond children, and even the woman from Sun City, a croupier, whose main job was to draw attention to her breasts rather than the cards, as drunk gamblers placed their bets.
Before he could don the promised hair shirt and recant publicly, Jaco was invited to go to California to talk about his shark encounter. He was introduced to Scientology and told he could learn about the superpowers that the Scientologists were promising him. They required him to hand over a lot of money, so that he could start his training as a pre-Clear, the first rung on the Scientologist ladder. He signed a contract binding him for a billion years. Jaco thought it was a deal: it seemed that with the help of superpowers he could live for ever or be reincarnated or, if he was diligent in his training, he could become a Thetan. As a Thetan he could float around the universe at will. He could even land on Mars if he felt the urge. ‘At the very least,’ to quote L. Ron Hubbard, ‘this is the means that puts Scientologists into a new realm of ability enabling them to create the new world. It puts world-clearing within reach in the future.’
I wondered what ‘world-clearing’ means. It has unfortunate associations.
As a warm-up for acquiring Thetan powers, Cousin Jaco practised turning red traffic lights to green with the power of his mind alone, something which he had been told could be one of his skills if he trained hard enough. If he focused. With new insight, Jaco convinced himself that it was with his mind that he deterred the giant shark from eating him. His inspirational speeches now involved shark pacification, Dianetics, and the power Dianetics confers on the enlightened. But Jaco found the process of assessing his talents, which involved an electric lie-detector apparatus, the electro-psychometer – E-Meter for short – invented by L. Ron Hubbard himself – very disturbing. In the process of this ‘auditing’ he was expected to examine his previous lives and reveal his spiritual distress, as if escaping a huge shark in this life was not distress enough. He remembered an encounter in the sheep shed with a black woman when he was fourteen, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell the auditor.
He spends some months at his studies and doing the tasks given to him. One day, when he is sent on a mission to deliver printing paper to the headquarters of Sea Org, he catches a glimpse of Tom Cruise. Cruise is playing tennis with his coach. Jaco is under instructions not to speak to anyone, and particularly not to Cruise.