The rest of the week slowly got better as my hangover receded and Kay and I greeted each other with detached intimacy. She would be away for the next week on some or other top-secret investigative job, about which Jay was seriously sceptical.
“She needs to first investigate the basics of journalism,” he said. “You know, the five double-u’s and an aitch: the facts, not to mention readability.”
In other words, things were returning to normal. Ms Motsepe was emotionally stable, as was Desiree, and I enjoyed listening to Van Beethead driving home after work at night. I had always only wanted to hear the fast movements of “classical” music but was now perfectly content to hear the long, slow, melancholic genius of the second quartet’s rewritten adagio, always maintaining that dramatic tension in case one should get complacent, jolting one towards the end anyway. The final movement of the third – in effect the first – was equally exquisite. I even saw and reviewed a fairly good film that Friday and had a bit of glad-eye with an older woman at the pub. Jay and I watched an excellent match the day after and only got mildly drunk. Hell, even Veron was in a good mood. All of which was good and well, but it wasn’t solving my primordial problem, which was sex. Still, I felt newly resolved and only slightly hungover when I drove to Pretoria, thinking about what the old man had said about missing his father, and losing him at such a young age.
Had I ever missed him? There had been that one night in Crete. My German girlfriend and her entourage of two had left for another town, and I had sat in an open-air tavern drinking the local rotgut, retsina. There were two car speakers nailed to posts and they were rattling out ‘Old Man’ by Neil Young. I had gone down some steps and stood there in the middle of the night, the black Mediterranean lapping at my sandaled feet. Just over there was Africa, I thought, North Africa, where the old man had once been, which he never stopped talking about. The next thing I knew I had liquid crocodiles running down my cheeks.
Back in the present we went out onto the back apron with the usual coffee and Lemon Creams.
“What was school like, Dad?”
“I hated it. I clung to the pillars at the entrance on my first day like my life depended on it. I cried like a little baby.”
“And girls?”
Now he shook his head as if this was another one of life’s numerous obstacles that had to be endured.
“Some bright spark thought he would put a girl on the bench next to me, but I refused to sit next to her.”
“Why?”
“I can still remember her name to this day. Ethel bladdy Meriwether.”
“Ja, but …”
“I never wanted to be near girls.”
“Why not?”
At which point his phone rang and he said he’d had one wife and that was enough while I got tense about the phone, which was set at its loudest. I finally said the phone was ringing, excused myself, ran into the kitchen, careful not to slip as I had once long ago, into the darker passage, down towards myself in the mirror above the phone, which stopped at the very last moment.
“So you didn’t like girls?”
“It’s not that I didn’t like them. It’s just that I wasn’t interested in them.”
“What were you interested in?”
“I had colours in rugby, hockey, athletics, gymnastics and cricket.”
“That’s amazing.”
“Hmm,” he said, juddering, clicking.
“So then you get to matric?”
“Which I did three times.”
“Really?”
“I couldn’t do the maths. I just couldn’t.”
One of the few things I did recall about Steiner was that if a pupil didn’t understand something, it wasn’t his or her fault but the teacher’s.
“And in those days you had to do it,” I added.
“No, most other cops just went up to Standard Eight and then joined the force.”
“But you stuck to it.”
“It was hell.”
“Good for you. And after school?”
“I went to Police College and broke in horses.”
“You broke in horses?”
“Ja. My father had taught me. But I was also a junior PT instructor. Man, there was a course being offered in Denmark …”
“Yes?”
“We were preparing to go on it. I could become a senior instructor. I dreamed about that course.”
“And then?”
“Then came the bally war.”
“Why’d you volunteer?”
“My station commander said if I didn’t go they’d post me to the Cape.”
“What’s so bad about the Cape?”
“I don’t like the Cape.”
“But you’d never been there!”
“Man, I wasn’t going to the Cape.”
“You married a woman from the Cape.”
“So?”
“And you want to go to Elgin.”
“What’s your point?”
“And there I thought you were fighting international fascism.”
“That too. But you know, I must have been the luckiest guy in the war.”
“Why’s that?” I said for the four-hundred-thousandth time, trying to reconstruct him from a faded black-and-white photograph, sitting stark naked in the Libyan desert with the Mediterranean behind him, covering his privates and scowling at the photographer who had crept up and tried to surprise this simple man with the temper of a Teuton, the body of a god and the smile of an angel.
“Every day we’d get a ration of water and I kept mine until I had enough for a bath. But someone ratted on me and they wanted to charge me for stealing water, which amounted to treason. They could have shot me.”
“So what happened?”
“Some of my friends came up for me.”
“But why didn’t you go on the course after the war, Dad?”
The old man either didn’t hear what I’d said or acted as if he didn’t hear me or he wasn’t going to answer it, or it was a dead spot, juddering his foot and clicking his nail, and I somehow couldn’t bring myself to ask the question again.