The old man was waiting at the gates of 123 Harry Smith Avenue, named after that colonial cradle snatcher who had thought it meet to decapitate the paramount chief of the Xhosa nation. We greeted each other as I drove through, down, past, over and parked out back. Beyond the bay I saw that one of the trees, which had survived his scythe after Ma had died, was carrying fruit. So I got out and helped myself to a fig as he came through the door, over the apron and across the lawn towards me. The fig was as decadently swollen and sweet as ever and the old man said he would put some in a bag for me.
“Don’t worry,” I said, giving him my left hand to crush, since the fingers of my right were too sticky, wondering why a fig had been used to depict the beginning of all schmertz between man and woman. Was it because the inside of a fig was sweetly vaginal, or was it because figs just happened to come from that neck of the arids – or was it an even later imposition? I would have to look it up, knowing I’d probably forget.
“You know,” he said, ignoring what I said as usual, “when I grew up we had figs, avocados, mangoes, bunches of bananas. All in our garden, all growing wild. We had a whole acre of garden.”
“Good,” I said, elongating the word in that Afro-Afrikaans way of filling up space, seeing a low, spread-out house surrounded by orchards and monkey-vine forest in the place we’d gone to every holiday since time immemorial. “That’s probably why you’re still so healthy.”
“Not only that,” he said, as I started body languaging us towards the cement apron. “It’s because I’ve never smoked, drunk or slept with another woman.”
“So you’ve said,” I muttered, about nine-hundred thousand times, I thought.
“What?”
“Shall we have some coffee?”
“Good idea,” he said as we stepped onto the apron, which formed a rough U between the main bedroom’s one wall, the small back stoep, the washroom that we called the laundry, and what used to be the servant’s quarters, which then became my teenage bedroom and was now a dusty storeroom. Under the shortened gutter leading down the long arm of the U’s wall was a grey 45-gallon drum. This was to catch the rain water but it also caught about a thousand cigarette butts, which I’d known nothing about, honestly. In the opposite corner stood a silver javelin I had once brought home from school and never returned. It and the drum were fairly rusty in places. There were also two white wire chairs and a matching table that always had bits of cardboard under its legs because, like so many Joburg coffee bars’, it wobbled.
We were about to ascend the three steps onto the back stoep when something unusual happened: my cellphone rang. It was Kay, who hoped I didn’t mind her calling me out of the blue like this. “I’m sure I’ll survive,” I said, but she was going away on a job for the week, but would be back next Saturday. That’s two “buts” in a single sentence, I thought, but could we possibly go out for a walk then, she continued. Watching the old man go into the laundry on the left and emerge with a vomit-yellow Checkers bag to fill with figs, I responded that I’d have to consult my diary, but that it should be okay: I’d call her if Random House or Hollywood suddenly rang. You never know, she said much too positively for my liking. After enquiring and hearing that she was working on a job with Ed Mhlophe, I said good luck. See you next Saturday, she laughed, and rang off.
The old man said he’d put the figs in the car. All I’d wanted was to eat one or two bloody figs, but no, and he told me the Civic was dirty.
“Maybe I’ll wash it after coffee,” I said.
“I’ll help you,” he replied.
This was just what I needed after a night of heavy drinking with Jay and Veron as we went up the three steps, past his flimsy security gate and halved door into the kitchen, which still had its original 1950s oven, sink and cupboards. The tiles and wooden furniture had replaced the old linoleum-covered floor, table and chairs some time since. I’m sure Ma had told me about it, but like so much else it had passed me by in a haze of anti-detail impatience.
One of the objects that had survived her demise was her hefty, fake-marble bust of Beethoven, which had spent years on the rarely used piano in the no-longer-utilised living room, staring way beyond the modestly naked torso of J.H. Lynch’s ubiquitous Tina on the opposite wall. But Uncle Ludwig had moved to a kitchen shelf for reasons unknown and always seemed to be looking at me from under his eyebrows, no matter where I stood. Maybe he was accusing me of preferring African music to his pomposity, and I think the only reason why the old man never got rid of him was because he’d paid for it. Ma had never really listened to old Thunderballs (Gé Korsten, yes) and the old man didn’t just hate classical music, he hated most music. As for those long-haired rock ’n roll bastards with their reedy voices on Popshop, “they should all be shot”. The only kind of music he liked was the stuff that had rhyming lyrics from the Thirties and Forties, none of which he collected. But right now he was telling me about how he’d bought himself a floral coffee mug at Checkers for two rands ninety-five.
“Oh?” I grunted.
“They’re usually six ninety-five,” he crowed.
“Goo-ood,” I said, trying to sound positive, absently, thinking of Kay’s musical arse as she walked ahead of me in an open-plan office awash with testosteronal egos and oestrogenic strategists.
“Which mug do you want?”
There was now a choice of five floral vessels and one that had half-pleasing rings around it and showed no hint of Biggie Best inclinations.
“I’ll take this one,” I said for about the eight hundred-thousandth time.
“Everybody likes that one,” he said for the corresponding number of times.
“Really?” I managed to exhale.
“I got us some Lemon Creams,” he jumped ahead.
“Good,” I said, wishing my mother a good rest.
“But, you know,” he said, pouring water onto his one spoon of insipid instant mud and my five spoons of the same to make up the deficit, “someone said to me the other day I should stop taking my coffee with two spoons of sugar and two spoons of condensed milk.”
“Dad, you’re eighty-eight; you’re as healthy as a pig. If you’ve made it to here I don’t see why you should suddenly change anything.”
“Ja, but I want to make it to ninety-three.”
“I know,” I said, my temples starting to throb.