The next day was Thursday and, as already mentioned, the last day of my working week. That day of thunder was effectively my Friday, which meant it was the end of the week and time to celebrate, which I duly did – religiously. The real Friday night, however, when the rest of the gentile world started carousing, was my Saturday night, so I just continued jubilating. Saturday night, of course, was when the rest of the infidels really got into the swing of drinking, but that was effectively my Sunday night. This meant I had to start preparing for my working week, but then I’d never liked feeling excluded from the rest of sinful humanity, so I always joined in on Saturday night too. The result was that I always started my working week with a hangover. But then, apart from having a little curative session on Sunday nights, just to get back into the rhythm – if not shock – of the working week, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday could serve as my collective Sunday night. Mostly.
I mean, I worked in the media, for fuck’s sake.
But the one little part I omitted, like any subeditor worth his or her office grime, was another kind of relationship. This was the one that happened every Sunday morning, which I didn’t just faff, fart, fidget or fritter away in the house The Ex had lost instant interest in co-paying as we went our separate ways. Oh no. While the rest of my friends, colleagues and peers might nurse their hangovers, start abusing themselves afresh, fight with their second spouse or post-marital partner, clash with their children or stepchildren or both, watch sport, less likely partake in it and more probably return home from gambling in one of the former homelands, I would struggle up and drive to Pretoria to visit my old man, who was determined to make it to ninety-three. This had to do with some or other ditty he liked, which he had quoted me numerous times and I nevertheless always forgot instantly.
The Ex had at first accompanied me but soon tired of the old man’s endlessly domineering repetitions – she never did like competition – and I couldn’t exactly blame her for that. But why did I do it? Why did I go and visit a man who still had some kind of hold over me in the sense that I still couldn’t bring myself to smoke in front of him – at my age! Because I had promised my mother I would visit him at least once a week as she lay rotting of cancer a decade previously and, still being a man of words, I had stuck to them. But it wasn’t the only reason why I went to see the old sod. I wanted to know why she had stuck with him regardless, why she had imposed such a burden upon me, why he had failed to provide yours truly with any guidance whatsoever, why he had been content to be a fingerprints clerk in the South African Police for about a hundred and fifty years after the blasted war, and why there was a part of me that nevertheless admired – let’s not even talk about love – his intransigence.
Moreover, I resented him because he had been one of those who had dutifully helped prop up the previous administration his entire working life, though in all fairness he’d hated and spurned the Hush Puppie, moustachioed mindset that accompanied it, one which the new lot were continuing without the blink of a slow eyelid beneath their hair straighteners and bulging Guccis. I therefore hated that city as well, even though we hadn’t actually lived in it. Instead, I grew up in a squeaky-clean mess called Lyttelton, named after the son of the Colonial Secretary, Alfred, youngest of twelve children to Mary and George, Fourth Baron Lyttelton. The latter had had a port named after him in New Zealand, had three more daughters from his second marriage and, according to Wikipedia, committed suicide by flinging himself down a flight of stairs at the ripe old age of fifty-nine.
His last son, Alfred, was first and foremost a sportsman. As a footballer he’d been an expert dribbler in the days when passing the ball was anathema, and he scored England’s lone goal in his only international, which was against Scotland. The score was 3-1 against a country that, incidentally, if not paradoxically, hit upon the idea of actually passing the ball, though that innovation only came later and didn’t seem to benefit its originators very much after World War Two.
Alfred was also an excellent cricketer in the position of wicketkeeper, playing four Tests against what were probably considered those criminal chaps from Down Under. But he later became involved in politics and favoured indentured Chinese labour to South Africa, opposed Welsh independence, but had an open mind to decentralisation in the colonies and women’s suffrage back home. The liberals, again according to that site which derives its name from the Hawaiian word for truth, completely opposed his idea of letting the colonies run themselves.
Whatever the case, the town named after Alfred Lyttelton should never have been a suburb of Pretoria in the first place. Apart from being over twenty kilometres outside the capital, that undulating grid had a man-made forest that actually separated them. There used to be rolling veld between them, too. But some or other bright spark wanted another satellite that could serve the city’s burgeoning civil service and surrounding military complex. It would be connected to that other country to the south, Johannesburg, by road and rail, and beyond, all the way to the Cape of Good Hope, so named because some high-up in another century had thought Cape of Storms was bad PR. The railway track would run through the lowest point and alongside the main road of the valley that constituted the original township. Botha Avenue was named after the Boer general, Louis, who had set a precedent for future generations, black and white, when, grossly overweight, he expired of a heart attack.
Lyttelton finally became a municipality in its own right and its road signs were usually mis-spelled by the mainly Afrikaans clerks who ran it, thinking quite logically that if “little” was spelled the way it was – which made no sense anyway, since that was not how it sounded – then Lyttleton should too. But then the English has always been a treacherous bunch, they would say. There was no cinema in that town, no hotel. The only place of entertainment by the time I left for university was an off-the-pavement bar within gobbing distance of the railway track. That was also the year the town’s name was changed, though the central grid and main train station retained the original. That dump was now called Verwoerdburg.
“Bastard’s probably never even been here,” the old man had said, though it’s doubtful whether Alfred Lyttelton had, either.
In one of his more light-hearted moments, the man whose wife and sisters called him Son would name that place the more appropriate and deadly accurate Verwurgburg: Strangle City. But even after the African National Congress came into power the town still kept that despicable moniker, and its fancy new shopping mall was called Verwoerdburgstad for quite a while before it was hastily changed to the more politically neutral Centurion, what with a chill wind blowing in from the capital’s Union Buildings. Name-changing was clearly a long and arduous business because, by the time The Ex and I got divorced, Centurion Mall was still surrounded by Hendrik Verwoerd and John Vorster drives. It had been built along the Sesmylspruit, close to where a girlfriend had lived and we malcontents had spent endless Chekhovian weekends beside the Six Mile Stream, devising ways to get out of that town. Back in the present, however, a kind of progress had been achieved: all the houses along the stream had been bought up and demolished, and that rural stream had been transformed into a mall with cinemas and a couple of generic hotels next to a shallow, man-made lake that had coloured fountains – when they worked. And, to make us all feel just that little bit better, an international cricket stadium, named after its sponsor, was thrown into the mix.
But the only reason I still went there was to visit my late mother’s grave and the old man’s living one. I would never put my foot in that town again once he was gone, he who had never had a drop of liquor over his lips, nor smoked a cigarette, nor slept with any other woman except Yvonne, my dearly departed mother.
Now I was driving to Lyttelton and getting pissed off anew about all the warehouses sprouting up along the highway to the capital. When I’d finally returned from varsity, ready to be fêted by the world, there had been a sole thorn tree on a rolling green Highveld hill. Then came the Development Bank, which had at least planted indigenous trees to swallow up “my” lonely acacia, followed by each and every designer-stubbled wanker’s idea of what constituted industrial chic along the way. If apartheid had had its unfair share of abominable architecture, then the new money was not doing any better. In fact, it was doing worse because it was supposed to know better.
Also, I was working myself into the usual state after making the guilt-ridden mistake of telling the old man I would be there at about ten o’clock. By the time I got to that dull, previously and still predominantly white suburb – passing the new hospital in which my mother had breathed her last, then the architecturally brutal Afrikaans high school I had attended, I’m really sorry to say, quite happily – it was half-past eleven.
My only consolation was that I had a definite escape route in that I had to leave at the stroke of one o’clock, thereby avoiding an awkward lunch, to get back to the News by two for the start of my working week. If the old man had been silent about my years of being a successful but non-income-generating screenwriter, then he was completely supportive about my current job, no matter that he didn’t understand what the hell it was all about. If it felt to me like the last refuge of a complete failure, then for him it was work, it was paid and it was therefore good. Period.
Now he was waiting, as always, at the gates of the only house I had known up to the late age of twenty, when I’d left home for good – or so I’d thought. It was from the late Fifties and functional in a slightly less aggressive style than my Sixties face-brick school: a three-bedroom house on a quarter of an acre flanked by a smaller, matching block consisting of a washroom, single garage and tiny servant’s quarters at the back. Both the roofs were corrugated and from the street the garage complex looked like a soldier’s head: a lance-corporal wearing a stiff beret with the washroom’s window serving as his visible eye. The old man had co-designed this house and he had paid it off over a very long time. Now it was his and the only way he was going to leave it was when he was “as stiff as a dead man’s you know what”.
There he stood with his still-full head of fine, silver hair combed straight back beneath his tanned scowl, his careless sun moles and broken nose from a police college scrap. He was dressed as if he was going to some event he wouldn’t attend on principle in his polished old HPs, neatly ironed trousers, buttoned-up golf shirt and check jacket. He stood as upright as the only filmmaker who’d ever made any sense to him, Charlie Chaplin, and as defiantly good looking as the intuitive version of someone he’d never listened to: Beethoven.
He opened the gates, I hello’ed him as I drove through and down the driveway, flanked by neatly clipped grass, past the side of the garage, over the obsessively mowed back lawn and under the double canopy that had been installed for Ma’s car and mine. As I disembarked he came through the door connecting the house and the garage, crossing the cement apron towards me.
“Howzit, Dad.”
“You’re late,” he said with faux friendliness.
“I’m sorry,” I said, instantly annoyed.
“I’ve been standing out there since a quarter to ten.”
“Ja, well …”
“I’ve been worried sick.”
He showed no interest in the reminder that I’d said I’d be there at “about” ten o’clock, because he had never been late in his life.
I muttered something and he said “What?”
Physically, this was the only thing wrong with him. While my mother had been alive I’d suspected that his deafness was selective; now I was convinced of it because he always answered the phone when I called him on Thursday nights after deadline, just to check if he was all right and to say I’d see him on Sunday. Of course, he always answered the phone as if he was about to hit whoever had the audacity to call him so “bladdy late”, meaning just after nine.
“Nothing,” I said, back in the present.
“And your car’s dirty.”
“I must have driven through a puddle last night,” I said pathetically.
“You know, people used to think the Chevy was brand new after twenty-five years.”
“Ja, you’ve said so.”
About a million times, I thought, always rounding things off for the ease of the non-existent reader’s eye. His repetitiousness might well have pushed my mother towards a permanent solution because it would most certainly have driven me to divorce, suicide or murder if I’d had to live with him for the half a century she had.
“Twenty-five years!”
“How are you, Dad?” I said, offering my hand to the man who, statistically speaking, should have died long before his much younger wife. Ma had confided in me that she was hoping she’d live off his meagre police pension, which would have been further reduced because she was the spouse, for a few years of peace and quiet after he “went”.
“Hello my boy,” he said: eighty-eight years of puritanical piss, gall, vinegar and Nestlé’s condensed milk rolled into one.
Then he squashed my tender little sub’s hand.