Somehow I made it through that Sunday and by Thursday my corpse even told me it needed a walk, which got the perpetually optimistic Butch in a frenzy of excitement. By Saturday morning my body told me it needed more than just an impatient walk in the Gardens, so off I went for a jog early that chilly morning, leaving Butch looking as forlorn as a cartoon character behind the security gate and getting the neighbourhood’s dogs behind theirs in a frothy again.
Despite the cold it was a refulgent day.
I noticed Mandla was already there to catch the early folk, smoking a cigarette butt, accompanied by a little cough. On I went, past the notices and lost babies’ booties and keys hanging on the newly installed and spiky palisades at the entrance, towards a grove, through the mud and in between all the plastic that washed down the street and into the park every time it rained.
After the grove I crossed the little stream that smelled of chemicals and which ran into the main dam, next to which I’d had my audio satori. I was just wondering whether I might one day be doing this and keel over from a coronary when I heard a squeal. At first I thought it was children, but it was too early for most people to have their offspring in the park. Next I heard men’s shouts and then three of them were running straight towards yours truly. It took me a couple of seconds to work out what was going on. They had just robbed three women, who were screaming, which got the park’s workers running to their aid with long machetes. That was all very commendable, but the trio running straight towards me had one outstanding feature about them. The man in the middle, a fine specimen, had his hand on a very large pistol half sticking out of the top of his trousers. This could ruin my day forever. Fortunately, these men were not focused on me but on those behind them, one of whom was still in his civvies and shouting that he was a policeman – “Poyisa!” – they must stop. Whether that was true I didn’t know, but the trio just kept coming towards me, so I thought I might stop, change course, and go around them towards the women. I don’t think they even saw me.
The man in civvies was on his cellphone and the women were all rattled, their Border collie as enthusiastic as if they’d just suggested they were going to play fetch. The oldest woman told me they’d been walking along when the men had passed them, eyeing one of the other women’s jewellery. The men had returned, shown their pistol and demanded the woman’s rings. She’d refused – one of them was an heirloom – and one of the unarmed men had wrestled her to the ground and had tried to work the rings off her finger. That is when she’d started screaming.
Now we were at the gate and the women had to go to a parking lot that was in the same direction the thieves had run. I stopped a bakkie and asked the man to give us a lift to the lot. He duly obliged, we turned a corner and the place was crawling with cops. There were at least five police vehicles. One of the fleeing men had suddenly stopped and started loitering like someone in a Carl Becker painting when the cop cars came wailing along. The mistake he’d made was that other gardeners had seen him and, since they earned their daily pittance the hard, honest way, they had no sympathy for him and pointed him out to the cops. Now he was being handcuffed and shoved into the back of a kwela van, scraping his shin bloody in the process. The bejewelled woman identified him as the man who had sat on top of her while the other cops poked around in the shrubs against the high suburban walls. Suddenly there were shouts. Another thief was found, lying low in a bush beneath some loose leaves and branches, looking up at five pistols pointing at him. I thought they were going to shoot him, but they didn’t and the man with the pistol was gone.
That afternoon I went to Jay and Veron’s and, at halftime out in the garden, told Jay how reliable our cops were when it got to the really important things, like women walking in a park with heavy jewellery. He said the women and I were “fucking lucky” to still be alive.
“I know. But don’t you find it amazing that here we are, living our privileged little lives, while we know exactly what’s going on – fifty murders a day, fifty reported rapes a day, a day – yet we carry on as if nothing’s happening, just like our folks did during apartheid.”
“I know.”
“Have you ever thought of leaving?”
“Sure. But can you see Veron ever leaving?”
“Ja. Why not?”
“She’s not interested. She’s told me. Are you thinking of leaving?”
“Ja.”
“What about your old man?”
“I don’t know.”
“Look, the teams are coming back on,” Jay said.
“Ja, like highly strung prize horses. What a bunch of paffs.”
So we went back inside, put the sound back on and Jay shout-asked Veron to bring us some beers from the kitchen.
“Get them your fucken self,” came the eloquent reply.
“Who said it was going to be easy?” I said.
“And fuck you too. Go get the beer.”
“Okay. But I’m warning you: every time I leave a room a goal is scored. Usually against the host’s team.”
Jay showed me a middle finger, so I went down their passage and into the kitchen, where Veron was eating a sandwich and asked whether we were getting “shit-faced” again.
“No, Veron,” I said, taking two beers from the fridge. “We’ve been discussing the antithetical aspect of Comrade Hegel’s theory of history.”
“My fat Khoisan arse,” she said, having just published a scathing diatribe against the use of the insulting word Coloured.
Veron had been a cadet at the News’s sister paper in Durban and Jay, who had fled the Free State to start off his career in that sub-tropical city, had taken one look at her smouldering green eyes and soft brown skin and that, as the saying goes, was that. Six months later they’d been secretly married. What most people, including Jay, didn’t know at the time was that she was also an ANC operative. But as far as she was concerned she didn’t join the struggle to get rich but out of principle. Equally, she didn’t believe in two girls being brought up with both parents absent – she’d seen how families had been torn asunder by parents married to the struggle – so she worked from home where she could keep an eye on the girls. She might have seemed all domesticated, but her opinions were published, known and respected, if not always liked, especially not by her erstwhile comrades. She and The Ex had been (and still were) friends and we’d all got on like a house on fire. The difference was that Jay and Veron had a roaring sex life and nothing else in common except their kids, one of whom wasn’t even his, but he’d adopted her and loved her like his own and that was their life. They were nuts about each other, but some or other domestic war was brewing and I didn’t want to know too much about it.
When I got back to the living room, of course, Wayne Rooney had scored for “the scum”, which put Jay into a particularly bad frame of mind. I always teased him that Liverpool were (sports teams and rock bands took the plural at the News) my second-favourite Spanish team. He didn’t care who their coach or players were, as long as they won – and of late they weren’t.
After the match we slouched back into the yard again and I asked him what he thought of Kay.
“A bit uptight, you know.”
“Ja, you’re probably right,” I said.
“But she’s got a great arse,” he added, sensing my disappointment. “Why?”
“No, I was just wondering …”
“Would you like to dick her?”
“If we were alone on a desert island? Sure. Wouldn’t you?”
Of course he would, but he’d been hearing rumours.
“What kind of rumours?”
“That she’s a bit of a schnarf head.”
“As in coke?”
“Ja.”
“Interesting,” I said, adding that I thought I should go home.
Jay didn’t protest that impulse and I looked forward to getting away from the acrimony in his home and flopping onto the bed in my empty one. But halfway there the phone rang and Kay said she wanted to come and spend the night. She also wanted to come with me to see the old man tomorrow.
How about I come over to your place, I responded testily, inspired by Veron. But her place was a terrible mess and she really wasn’t trying to hide anything. I told her I thought she should get some sleep for a change, which she gratefully acknowledged, but she persisted with tomorrow. I couldn’t think of a quick enough reason for her not to come along to the old man’s – it might break the monotony of the drive – and acquiesced. Goodnight.
Refusing her request to come over had been more contrariness than any kind of maturity. I wasn’t going to allow her to call all the shots, but by about one that morning I still couldn’t sleep, so I got into the Civic and went looking for Ruth again. I couldn’t find her and most of the bars I knew were closing up, the last stragglers all fairly senseless, so I finally, predictably, settled for the PC screen with Aunt Gertie and her Four Daughters, wary of the many links leading off to children, trying to comfort myself that at least I wasn’t a rapist.