Back at the office we had two political obsessions. In the case of foreign affairs it was that old fruitcake just north of our border, Robert Gabriel Karigamombe Mugabe. In national affairs it was our Supreme Leader, who was another foreign affair since he spent a great deal of his time placating, if not brown-nosing, the nut job up north. And if he wasn’t there he was pointing his fingers at the West at the United Nations while insisting on investment, quite content with what he would have learned was called a contradiction – or possibly tactic – at a colonialist university during his extensive time in exile.
The honeymoon period of Nelson Mandela was over and Comrade Mugabe had started appropriating white-owned farms left, right and centre. In essence, he was telling the world to go and get stuffed in a perfectly – and unintentionally ironic – Oxonian accent. Everything was the imperialists’ fault, which was largely true, but then he was hardly acting in a manner less vicious and expedient than his predecessors. Blaming the past always proves a point, even if it rarely solves present problems. This, however, didn’t matter because, like so many left-wingers, he somehow thought criticism was only his to give, not receive.
Obviously we white subs and mainly black editorial thought he was barking mad or just plain impractical, but it wasn’t half as cut and dried as that. There were people in the office who became silent when we mouthed off about Uncle Bob, and when he came to the country for some or other convention in which the only decisions reached were when to have the next bloody summit or symposium, he was not greeted with boos. He was hailed as a hero of the revolution in a manner that seemed to veer between idolatry and sheer, infantile spite. His speeches were eloquent and made perfect sense to all those ex-exiles who had been schooled in an ideology that had been formulated in the nineteenth century by a European, whose watered-down philosophy only seemed to work properly in countries like Hamlet’s old stomping ground.
No matter. He was always invited as a matter of protocol by our Supreme Leader, who maintained a successful, though inherited, infrastructure – which most people seemed to think was astute instead of calculatingly strategic – but also personally oversaw a mainly black populace dying like flies thanks to his deliberate inaction on treating the symptoms of AIDS. His greatest transgression, from my point of view, was that he was the most boring little mass murderer I had ever listened to. “His” people were being raped and murdered at such a rate that, statistically, it made the war in Iraq look like a Women’s Auxiliary tea do.
But, as with most things South African, it was all invisible. The violations happened elsewhere, meaning mainly in the townships or on the farms, both of which he, as an outsider and theorist, knew squat about. Most of the tortured and then murdered farmers were Afrikaners and, because their tribe had previously been the supposedly sole oppressors, they weren’t given much ear time by the powers that be, including the English media: us, we, who tried to convey the impression that we were looking at the bigger picture of building a constitutional et cetera, et cetera.
Most of the white intellectuals had fallen silent or resorted to class analyses, while the black heavies were in a bind because this was what they’d clamoured for all along. We couldn’t expect everything to be perfect immediately. After the Big Bleed we’d have the Big Build, even though it felt like we’d need another three and a half centuries to sort everything out. But our glorious leader’s rhetoric was very much the same as in the past: we had to stand together as one nation (with eleven official languages), fight the injustices of the past and the resulting poverty of the present, so that we could have a renaissance for the future. Not a renewal or a rebirth or something truly African, but a renaissance. I fantasised about seeing him fall asleep over one of his own speeches, as I tended to, but as far as I was concerned the enemy was still those who abused power, regardless of their skin colour, which was a dangerous thing to say. In fact, it was seen as unbridled racism in those halcyon days of carrot-up-the-arse correctness. You couldn’t criticise the new lot, since they had come from the moral high ground, and this is what annoyed them most about the Daily News. Somehow they’d expected the so-called liberal, white-owned press to fall over backwards and praise them to high heaven, no matter what they did. The problem was they weren’t doing much that was worthy of praise. Sure, they were making all the right noises, even laws, but the people who were supposed to execute those orders were either fired because they were white or appointed because they were related. These so-called leaders were screwing their own people more than their fascist predecessors by abusing the principle of ubuntu in its most cynical guise possible. If they were what they were through others, then surely they couldn’t be held individually responsible for being caught with their fat fingers in the till, could they?
Of course, the News was by now owned by blacks, run by blacks and edited by a black man, but they, of course, had been co-opted by the white, capitalist pigs. This from male and female comrades who were as obese from the proceeds of our taxes as those clunky, petrol-guzzling 4x4s they drove. They truly hated us for not applying their brand of democracy, which was to defer everything to the Supreme Leader – who could and did deny anything that took his paranoid fancy – and I truly liked the fact that they hated us, because we were at the frontline of another battle. There was a passionate debate raging for the soul of South Africa, and we literally had it at our fingertips. All things considered, our office was a fully functional, integrated and therefore sexy social democracy.
But the likes of Mhlophe and Greenwood bothered me; they were unknown quantities. Now she had invited me out for a chat in broad daylight on a summery Saturday afternoon, so it didn’t exactly appear to be any kind of sexual come-on. And I needed sex. Badly. Or maybe she first wanted to check me out, as such. Assess me. Maybe this was the modern, liberated way of doing things. I certainly had no idea how to ask someone out. What did you do? Call them up and ask them to go to a movie or eat out with you? Talk about one thing and think about something completely different? Why couldn’t you just call someone up and say, would you like to have sex with me tonight? Surely that’s all it boiled down to in the end? The Ex and I had had an argument in the office, had continued it in a bar and then got sidelined by sex. After that initial distraction, which lasted about a year, we had only had arguments. Unfortunately by then we had also been married. Big mistake.
Kay wasn’t in the Zoo Lake parking lot as agreed, so I smoked a cigarette and three of those later she arrived, looking as sartorially challenged as ever.
“You’re late,” I said.
“I’m, like, sorry,” she said.
“You could have called.”
She had run out of air time and we started walking as I tried hard to ignore the duck shit, the litter and a pair of conjoined hounds showing what they thought of social decorum.
“How are you otherwise?” I said.
She was cool and I was fine and I wondered what I could “do for you, Ms Green Wood?”
“Nothing,” she virtually sang. “I just wanted to, like, talk.”
“Okay, if you want to talk, please do me a favour. Please try to talk without, like, using that expression the whole time, and if you must use the word ‘cool’, could you please keep it to a minimum.”
“Sorry.”
I don’t know which was worse: the abuse or the apology.
“But what, pray, would you just like to talk about? And why with me?”
“I don’t know. I just found you interesting.”
“What? Like an old rock in a museum?”
“No,” she said, laughing, “you’re funny, and not many South African men are –”
“– funny. Have you been out with all of them?”
“No, but all of those I have been out with are –”
“– what?”
“Dull.”
“You see, you can use the occasional adjective,” I said as two middle-aged women strode past us, talking simultaneously and held together, respectively, by their Spandex attire. “But maybe you’ve been moving in the wrong circles.”
“That’s quite possible,” she gamely said.
“Then again,” I said, “I haven’t met too many laugh-a-minute South African women either.”
“Have you been out with all of them?” she shot back somewhat annoyingly.
“No, we usually just stayed in,” I replied.
At which point she slapped my arm playfully, almost intimately, as if we were a couple already. I asked her to tell me about herself and she didn’t know where to start.
“Well, where did you go to school? Which university did you attend? What do your parents do? Do you have any siblings, friends, hobbies? What kind of music, art and writing do you like? You know, all that stuff that nice, white, middle-class liberals like ourselves talk about.”
She had gone to upper-middle-class schools in Cape Town and her mother was a businesswoman, her father a retired advertising executive who had started out as a copywriter and had opposed apartheid, “obviously”. He was a “witty, creative type like you”.
“Excuse me, I’m not retired, creative is out to lunch and only some people find me funny.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Siblings?”
“My brother is a really interesting accountant who loves cricket,” she said.
Her best friend was currently the art director for a women’s magazine (the kind that has models breaking the aquamarine surface in the Seychelles for hair products, toothpaste and tampons).
After school she had done a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Cape Town, gone on the almost obligatory overseas trip (OT) afterwards, working her way around Europe as a barmaid. She had met a French businessman and they had started importing African fabrics to Paris. Business boomed. But the man had been a racist and a sexist and she’d finally dumped him “after five, like – sorry – intense years”. She returned to Africa, not Cape Town, and did an additional Bachelor of Commerce while working as a journalist.
“I heard you’re doing an MBA now.”
She was, she said, with an emphasis on that great oxymoron: political science.
“Ah, business, politics …”
“You say that as if they smell bad.”
“No. Rotten,” I said, warning myself that I was being way too negative for a seducer, but I couldn’t help myself, seeing a tramp half sitting, half lying but fully asleep on a bench beneath a willow: drooling democracy in action.
“Why?”
“Because they do.”
“But that is what society consists of,” she said, getting ready for an argument.
That explained a lot, I said, which of course she wanted explained.
“Do you think it’s working?” I asked.
“Yes I do.”
“Then why are you writing so critically about it?”
“Because it’s still in process.”
“That’s a real hey-shoo-wow Cape Town expression,” I said.
She wanted to know what I meant, again, as a group of men and boys played cricket on the kikiyu lawn and the women in their saris sat on blankets where the food was, chatting away – the quintessence of what The Ex had opposed.
“I mean I’m tired of things being ‘in process’. Why can’t things just work for a change? Like now.”
She responded that the country was working and I said it wasn’t even a work in progress.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because of those things you are probably studying after hours. Stats. And I’m not going to rattle them off here. I’m supposed to be a creative type – oh, and witty – but I’m the only one who seems to be taking them on board.”
“Give me just one example.”
“All right, since you insist and seem to be a woman. How about the fact that fifty rapes are reported every day? And that’s just reported.”
“But you have to see the thing in its broader context.”
“Will you personally tell that to a seven-year-old rape victim in the township? ‘You have to see the thing in its broader context’?”
“We have to look at the cause of all of this, no matter how painful it is.”
“I think you’re a bit too young and well off to be that prescriptive.”
She could do nothing about where she came from, but she could –
“Yes, yes, change where you’re going to. And what was the cause of all this misery again? Oh yes, apartheid.”
“Obviously.”
“That word again. And I suppose it’s all the Afrikaners’ fault?”
“Ja,” she said, though not as forcefully, intuiting that my sarcasm – in tandem with my very Afrikaans surname – was pointed.
“Well, it is and it isn’t,” I said.
“Explain?”
“I don’t somehow recall hundreds of thousands of English people marching through the streets to protest their comfort, or moving to Soweto to show their solidarity with the oppressed black masses. I don’t recall them or their great British Empire apologising for what their forebears did to Boer women and children in the concentration camps. And blacks. More of the latter than the former, in fact. I don’t recall the Anglo Americans of this world setting up nice little family homes for their migrant workers from the homelands and the rest of the subcontinent. And isn’t it odd how the Old Mutuals are suddenly delisting and going international? In other words, leaving the country. They are taking their money and they are running. Now we are more than a decade into a so-called democracy, and I don’t see our great leader dealing with the present. I just see him exploiting the past for present political capital.”
“But I still have hope for this country,” she lamely capitulated.
“So do I, like I have hope in a cement life jacket.”
“I like that, even if I don’t agree with it.”
“How very libertarian of you.”
Now she asked me whether I’d read Disgrace, which impressed me since it tied in with some of what we’d been talking about. I told her I had and she asked me what I’d thought about it.
“I liked it a lot, if ‘like’ is the word. Maybe ‘admire’ is more accurate. The point is, it’s very difficult to counter Coetzee’s thesis that rape is the ruling metaphor for this country. Rape, the living murder of a woman, the –”
It suddenly occurred to me that I was doing one of the many things I didn’t like the old man doing, which was rave and dominate a conversation, usually as a form of shyness or self-defence.
“– wait a bit. What did you think of the book?”
“I haven’t read it yet.”
I burst out laughing, said it was after three and therefore any sub worth his or her office sweat wanted a drink.
“But now it’s your turn to tell me about you,” she replied.
After we drove to the nearby Jolly Roger in our mobile bedsits we occupied the balcony, partook steadily of the happy water and watched the late-afternoon sky grow dark purple, then increasingly inky in a way that Steven Spielberg’s special effects (SFX) department would never capture because you cannot feel the tug of the wind, nor smell the mine dust being stirred up.
But she persisted on wanting to know about me, so I went on a long, self-deprecating rant about how I’d been a spec screenwriter forever, but how my scripts had been too black and/or bad when they were supposed to be all white and now, a decade into the new lot, they still had characters as opposed to sincere stereotypes for those morons at the South African Broadcasting Cock-up – I beg your pardon Corporation (a bad joke that got her laughing a tad brashly) – and that there was something in me that would rather get up their psychopathic noses, even if it meant cutting off my own, than get the deal.
After years of that frustration I’d been lucky to get a job through an old university connection at the Daily News and, apart from subbing, made my grand switch from writing film scripts no one made to star-rated DVD reviews that at least six people read. A few peers had intimated, mostly silently, that I’d sold out or given up by becoming a critic, a sentiment with which I was inclined to agree. But the truth of the matter was that, no matter how badly the papers paid, they did so dead on time, whereas film folk suffered the happy delusion that you had to feel so honoured to be in their exalted profession that they could rip you off to their hearts’ content in terms of time and money. So I was fairly comfortable, if not exactly content, with the position that I’d rather write a half-worthy review than a lousy white-devils-and-black-saints abortion posing as cinema, let alone art.
“So what’s your book about?”
“Hey?”
“I heard you’re writing a novel,” she said.
“Everybody believes that, except me. Most of the time I stare at my blank screen, wondering how I’m going to live up to a myth I stupidly created.”
“I don’t believe that. I think you’re secretly writing the Great South African Novel.”
“‘Great’? If only I could find something to write about and finish it. That would be great.”
“And your family?”
“What about them?”
“Tell me about them.”
I told her I was an only child, that my mother had died a decade ago and that I went to visit the old man every Sunday. I didn’t, however, tell her about my alcoholic epiphany when I’d last seen him, which was that I would try to tease some kind of narrative out of him. This was partially because I had failed to do so with Ma, to my eternal regret.
“What’s he like?”
“He’s a World War Two vet, an octogenarian and impossible.”
“Why?”
“He prefers the company of animals to people.”
Now she wanted to know about that too.
“The first time I realised it was when I came back from varsity in the Eastern Cape, fresh from twenty years of future depression, most of it affected.”
“My friend also gets depressed. She calls it the black dog,” she said.
“Well, this realisation also had to do with a dog.”
“How come?”
“To cut a long story shorter, I inherited a St Bernard and only had enough money for the two of us to get as far as Germiston. The old man said he would come and fetch us – my mother was overseas at the time – and I didn’t sleep on the train that night. For one I was worried about Bella and for two I was worried that she would make a mess in the old man’s Valiant.”
“Was he precious about his car?”
“‘Was he precious about his car.’ You didn’t breathe in that car. It didn’t go out if there was a hint of rain or the certainty of a dirt road. My mother hated it almost as much as she hated the Chevy that preceded it. So I was pretty uptight by the time we got to Germiston.”
He had brought an old bedspread, a bowl and a two-litre Coke bottle filled with water. When we got in line with Tembisa she promptly puked all over the back seat. I thought the old man would freak, but instead he was the milk of human kindness towards Bella.
“Cool.”
If only he’d been like that towards Ma, I almost caught myself saying.
“So what kind of dog does your father have?”
“He doesn’t. He’s still mourning the loss of his previous one,” I said, realising Butch needed to be fed. I could have called Beauty and asked her to do so, but I didn’t feel like that weight either. Also, there was a carnal advantage to under-staying your welcome. I said I had to go but I would walk her to her car and halfway there, of course, the skies opened and we ran to her BM in the pounding rain, laughing like crazy, even though I couldn’t help quietly apologising to the crew filming this commercial for some fancy hair shampoo.
When we got to her car she didn’t get in but stood with her back against it and lifted her head to the rain and thunder. I expressed surprise that, like most Capeys, she wasn’t scared of that aerial violence, and she just looked at me through her greasy, rain-speckled specs, her breath more alive than the charged air, her lips as fresh as an apple the old man had once peeled me in a single, Escher-like curve with his steady brown hands.
“Thanks for the chat,” she said, and offered me her pale wet one.