After deadline on Thursday I habitually called the old man, who was in a filthy mood. I let him let off some steam and told him I’d see him on Sunday, for which he thanked me, passionately.
Friday and Saturday went much as usual, up to the point where I arrived at Jay and Veron’s. He had invited our fellow sub and No. 1 office fantasy over, possibly to match us up. Desiree Purple had bleached hair, large brown eyes and the freckled body of a Sixties goddess, the decade in which her parents had conceived her and officially changed their surname from Cohen. She only ever wore tight jeans and bra-less T-shirts and, frankly, it drove us a little mad. The problem was she could get all lovey-dovey with you the one second and accuse you of stalking her the next. Plus, she had a way of coming up with some really disturbing statements like: “This copy is so bad I feel like poking my eyes out with a pencil.” You kept things nice and distant with Des, who was about as “easy” as dancing barefoot on a field of thorns. Everybody wanted to bed this highly competent sub, but she was quite aware of it and that might well have been one of the reasons why she would occasionally throw a tantrum worth beholding. She would become incandescent with paranoid rage, which would have her seniors scurrying about and us aroused, guiltily. But it never lasted. You’d think the universe was about to come to an end, yet the next day she’d be as mild and reasonable as a New Zealander I’d once met. When she was on an even keel she was witty, generous and surprisingly sentimental, when she wasn’t you ran for cover. But we were all relaxed now, helped along by the usual loose juice, and she wanted to know how the writing was going.
“Great,” I said. “I’ve started a novel about my father,” I bull-shat. “It opens at a very exotic place.”
“Where’s that?”
“Germiston station.”
“So it’s more than just a germ of an idea,” Jay said.
“But is it germane to the story?” Des wondered.
“Well, I do have German roots, according to the old man.”
Desiree: “But where’s the Scottish angle?”
Veron: (interjecting) “What’s that got to do with it?”
Desiree: (to Veron) “The original Germiston is in Scotland.”
Jay: “Excuse me, are we in that play or is this an assegai I see floating before me.”
Veron: (to self and all) “Fucking subs. You’re all the same.”
And so the night proceeded, with Des becoming increasingly drunk, morose and belligerent, but refusing to be a responsible driver and sleep over. She was perfectly sober thank you very much, and could drive just fine and she wasn’t going to fuck either or both of us, so there. It was her life anyway, did we mind? Veron told her there wasn’t going to be any of that while she was around and Des said she’d heard Veron was a lesbian anyway, so fuck her too. This got the three of us laughing uncontrollably, whereupon Des cursed us, started her car, reversed down the driveway and scraped the length of her Conquest on the tree trunk out on the pavement, then shot forward down the road and stopped at the crossing with a squealing of tyres. We waited for that sickening impact with gritted teeth, but it didn’t happen and we presumed she’d be okay – guiltily.
So I walked home, restless and aroused, checked that I had enough money to buy off some cop who wanted to lock me up, got into my car and left poor Butch looking puzzled in the driveway again. I finally ended up driving along Oxford Road, which of course was lined with black prostitutes and the occasional white junkie from Krugersdorp with a long, sad-luck story. I had been there and done that when I’d still been a successful screenwriter in my head, but these days I was a hocked-up subeditor. I just drove past to remind myself that I was still half alive before I spent too much time watching online porn at home. On the one hand it was much safer and cheaper, on the other being your own comforter had its limits.
Now, however, I saw a woman who might as well have been Naomi Campbell, just taller. She had long legs, smallish breasts and her hair was short and thick, like midnight corn on the cob. She was wearing a white T-shirt, a scrap of cheap brown sheshwe cloth for a skirt and sandals. I decided I wasn’t going to take this African queen to some quiet, neurotic spot and let her relieve me: I was going to take her home and treat her properly, or as properly as one could. So that’s what I did and gave “Ruth” the requested soft drink, noticing that those luscious legs were actually quite scarred, conjuring up recent images of machetes in Kenya and razor fences at our border.
“You’re not South African, are you?” I said, pouring myself a beer.
“No,” Ruth said, not a tenth as confident as Campbell.
“You from Zimbabwe?”
“Hmm.”
I was still expecting The Ex to make her livid appearance or Ms Motsepe to suddenly appear and give me one of her withering disapprovals, but they didn’t and I told Ruth to take off her clothes, which she dutifully did, and stroked those long cool legs, those full buttocks, that long back, those small breasts, that dense, smooth skin.
“How many kids have you got?” I said.
“I have two children.”
“How old are they?” I said, struggling to control my breathing.
“Two and six months.”
The little blighters had drunk her almost flat.
“And the father?”
“He’s somewhere in Zambia.”
“Does he at least send you money?”
“Yes,” she lied. “And Mugabe?”
“We are waiting for him to die.”
“But don’t you think his generals might just take over?”
“It will be all right,” Ruth said, clearly not understanding me.
“Put a condom on me,” I said, opening my fly and thinking that that more or less summed up my present state of mind.
She did as I told her and relieved me with her abundant mouth as I held her rough, exquisite head and drove her back to Rosebank afterwards, giving her double what she had asked for and too guilt-ridden to pick up on her hint that she would like to see me again, no doubt for my sexual prowess and sparkling personality.
Looking forward to oblivion, I was just about to get into bed when my cell rang. It was Kay, who apologised for calling so late, but would I possibly consider coming to fetch her at the, like, airport. She had no cash or credit cards because she’d left her wallet at a hotel in the lively metropolis of Port Elizabeth.
“Okay,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
No, I’m just saying so for the hell of it, I thought.
Driving to OR Tambo, I thought if you were of a certain persuasion and had a cell number in the old days it meant you had political credibility in the present. If you didn’t have a cell number as in mobile phone, now, you were completely out of touch with the twenty-first century, like the old man. I also thought if our political masters really had a sense of history, they would have left the airport’s name exactly as it had been, Jan Smuts, since it was internationally recognised. At least he had taken a stand against global fascism, letting people like the old man see the world, however reluctantly. But then Oom Jannie was seen as the one who had ordered a massacre at Bulhoek, though the facts suggest the members of the Israelite sect got their just deserts after even the ANC’s forerunners had tried to persuade their leader to cease his apocalyptic tripe. Surely if that same party retained Uncle Jannie’s name, in Mandela’s spirit of conciliation, then the need to build another airport with the next dubious leader’s name would arrive sooner than later and there’d be a sense of continuity, let alone economic progress? But no, history would start all over with the new elite and that kind of power was intoxicating, as I knew in a manner that was as ethically questionable as theirs.
Arriving at the airport in a mood not entirely void of self pity, it occurred to me that I was used to taking people to and fetching them from the airport. I liked doing it, maybe because I’d been doing it all my life. If it hadn’t been The Ex off to Durban then it was friends, or the old man and me taking my mother there, endlessly. Good old Len Bezuidenhout, no one would say at my funeral. He was the one who always stayed behind: he was the stayer. A traveller by proxy, was our Len. He liked seeing the distant horizons in other people’s eyes, or on his blank PC pages.
“Do you want to go home?” I said, once we’d collected Kay’s stuff.
“No. I’d like to see your house.”
“I could show you my lithographs. Literally.”
So we went to my big, empty house and she and Butch instantly loved each other.
I poured us a Grouse, hoping the air freshener I’d dug out hid the smell of used condom. I proceeded to tell her about said lithos, which I’d bought with my credit card, by an artist whose work I not only liked a lot but whom I also thought was going to be the next best thing, aesthetically and financially. All the while I was half aware of a rustling sound behind me, but I was too busy delivering my lecture to realise what it was. Once I’d finished telling her why I thought Johann Louw was a master, I turned around to see what she thought of that, but she had become more interested in finally acquiring a bit of dress sense.
Apart from her spectacles, she was stark naked.