I fell asleep just before Butch started exercising his lungs on a pair of crack-of-dawn joggers, went through all the usual rituals and drove over to Kay’s block of flats. She wanted to drive and that would also be a change. She met me downstairs and didn’t look like she’d had much sleep either, and she’d attacked her facial skin again.
“How’re the studies going?” I said as we sped towards Midrand.
“Exhausting,” she replied, sniffing. “But I’m fine.”
“Of course you are,” I said, squinting at the Highveld glare.
“What’s the matter?” she said in a fit of selflessness.
“Every time I go to Pretoria I get pissed off about all these bad-taste security villages going up. I used to play in this veld, which was then deemed to be too dolimitic for development. Now every second house is a pseudo-Tuscan nightmare.”
“It’s amazing how much it’s developed.”
“I don’t know if that’s the word, but my father predicted ages ago that Johannesburg and Pretoria would eventually become one.”
“Clever man. But how are you otherwise?”
“Oh, just dandy. Getting over my ex and trying to get some hussy almost half my age into bed.”
She slapped my leg playfully and wanted to know The Ex’s name and I didn’t want to tell her, so I continued bitching about how my beloved Highveld was being despoiled by bad-taste capitalists and commies alike.
“Len: what was her name?”
“Jesus!” I said as a white minibus taxi scraped past us at speed. “Where did that arsehole buy his licence?”
“Your ex.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I’m curious.”
“That’s not a very good reason.”
Kay suggestively put her hand on my leg.
“That’s a much better reason.”
“I’m waiting.”
“Could you move your hand up a little please.”
“First tell me.”
“Okay, what the hell. Shanti.”
She also thought it was a nice name, but that wasn’t enough: she needed a surname.
“Govender,” I said.
“You don’t mean the Shanti Govender?”
I said I didn’t know what she meant.
“The deputy editor of the Weekly Herald?”
“The very same.”
Kay was impressed, though whether it was because Shunt had an important position or was “non-white” I couldn’t fathom, nor did I care at that very moment.
“So she never took your name.”
“No, I wasn’t famous enough,” I tried to say ironically, but wondered whether there wasn’t a modicum of bitterness in the inflection.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve heard of the most battle-hardened left-wing feminists realising their mate’s got struggle credentials and suddenly becoming Mrs So and Fucking So. Now could you move your hand up a little, please?”
“No. It’s not safe. How did your father respond to her?”
“Like he responds to any good-looking woman. His final word on the matter is that ‘all pretty women are pretty’.”
We sped on in sniffing silence for a while.
“And your mother?”
“Couldn’t stomach her. Saw right through her. Instant dislike. I should have gone with her mommy-knows-best instinct. I thought she was being a racist, but I was wrong.”
“What did she object to?”
“Her ambition, her heaviness. This was not the woman for her darling son.”
“How did you and your mother get on?”
“That’s one hell of a question.”
“You had a pretty quick answer about you and your father.”
“It was normal,” I said for the sake of brevity.
“Okay. What did she call your father?”
“Son, as in child.”
“Oh.”
Pause.
“Why?”
“From his surname. Sonnekus. Sonnie became Sunny became Son, as in male child. His sisters call him that. His wife called him that. Sometimes he’s even like that.”
“It’s an unusual surname …”
“He thinks it was German, but I don’t. I didn’t come across any Sonnekuses in Germany. But if he’s right then I wonder if the original surname wasn’t something as common as Schmidt, because the first Sonnekus arrived here in plus minus 1850 in George, according to the Cape archives. I think Mr Schmidt was causing kak on the ship and sentenced to fifty lashes. Now he had a choice. He could be flayed on board or take his chances over it. So he dived into the water, splashed about like mad and got washed out on that golden shore, that sunny coast, that coast kissed by the sun.”
“What a nice story.”
“One of the things that militates against it, of course, is the fact that the sun almost never shines in George. Not for nothing was its old registration number plate CAW, as in cold and wet. And no wonder PW Botha lived there.”
“How come you don’t have the same surnames?”
“I’ve taken the maternal one. Mommy’s boy. And the Bezuidenhouts have been here longer. The first one was a master gardener at the Castle in 1668. Moreover, I’m convinced my mother had Spanish blood in her – she looked Spanish – and that’s because Bezuidenhout means south of the wood, or forest. Some Spaniards settled south of the wood in The Hague after the Eighty Years War and no doubt intermarried with the locals. So, flamenco music, it stirs me. And if I’m correct then it means that those Spaniards had Moorish blood in them, too. All that whiny North African and Middle Eastern music, it’s the original trance article. I can get off on it for hours. I really do understand it in my blood.”
“So where does Beethoven fit in?”
“I suppose that’s my Western side.”
This didn’t seem to interest her whatsoever.
“Anyway, then the Bezuidenhouts came here and no doubt had a lot of hanky-panky with the locals, but always denied it. In fact, they were so patently anti-pom and darkies that they started a rebellion because of it – and got hanged for it. Not hung, by the way – that’s for washing. Hanged.”
“So that’s why you look the way you do …”
“What? Like a South American pimp?”
“Yes. But didn’t you and Shanti want children?”
Shun had never wanted children and I had always thought it was an affectation. She’d change, I’d reasoned. She’d see that a career, her ego, wasn’t everything. As in most things, I’d been perfectly deluded. People will hang onto their miserable little positions and possessions for all they’re worth. Not for nothing had I called her Shanti GoveRnder. But the folks had always thought we would eventually have kids and I never told them it wasn’t going to happen, assuming they would either die before we could; or I’d make up a story about how one of us was infertile or barren; or we’d get divorced, which we duly did.
“I never told them Shunt didn’t want children.”
“‘Shunt’?”
“The mouth, like the eye, is lazy. But also as in around. In fact, later on it just became Shun.”
“Did you want children?”
“Ja. I like the sound of children playing. That, too, is music.”
“Would you still like to have children?”
“Well, it’s getting a bit late in the day for that kind of thing.”
“No, it’s not.”
“You say the sweetest things.”
Just then another minibus taxi swept by.
“Fuck it! Why don’t you and Ed do an exposé on the taxi industry?”
At which point Kay almost overturned the car.
“Hey,” I shouted. “I’d like to die in a slightly more exotic manner than motoring to Pretoria, okay?”
She wanted to know how I knew they’d been asked to form an investigative unit and when I said I honestly didn’t know what she was talking about, she said: “If you tell anyone about it I’ll kill you.”
“Interesting how we use that term so often – and so easily – especially with kids.”
“Promise me you won’t tell anyone,” she said, completely focused on state secrets as opposed to everyday usage.
“I promise.”
“Why are you smiling?”
“I’ll just write about it.”
“Len …”
“Don’t worry. I couldn’t care less whether you start three special units. Your secret is perfectly safe with me.”
“Good.”
I said turn off over there and then asked whether her esteemed colleague had come up with any new pearls of wisdom. No he hadn’t because he was in Queenstown.
“Xhosa Nostra country,” I said. “What’s he doing there?”
“Family, I suppose,” she sniffed. “Is that your father?”
The old man was standing at the gates with his silver hair in his Sunday best, which he would wear nowhere except at home, but he looked confused. He didn’t know Kay’s car and only let us through once he’d seen me. So we drove to the back yard and, after he’d closed the gate behind us, he came through to the back, smiled and said: “Shanti, I’m so glad to see you again!”
Kay found this highly amusing while I said: “This is not Shunt, Dad. This is Kay.”
Now he looked confused again.
“What do you mean?”
“Kay is my” – what was she? – “colleague.”
“But aren’t you –”
“No, Dad. I’m not married anymore. I’m divorced. Remember?”
“That’s right,” he said. “What a fool I am!” Then: “Hello, my darling,” he said, took her damp white hands in his big, dry brown ones and kissed them.
Obviously she was charmed and we proceeded to the kitchen and went through the coffee-mugs-and-lemon-treats stories, all of which delighted Kay no end and got me in a mood that was at the opposite end of the spectrum.
Outside, we sat in the winter light and the old man suddenly stopped juddering his foot and clicking his nail, asking Kay whether she knew what. She obviously said no and he, for about the one-hundred-thousandth time said: “I’m a poet / and I don’t know it.”
“Really?” she smiled, charmed, while I wanted to kick a dog or something.
Now he went into a lyrical rendition of his favourite poem, ‘Pete the Piddling Pup’. It was his party trick and I wasn’t going to spoil it. Truth is, he did it well and it was pretty impressive that he could remember it virtually word perfect at almost four score and ten. Having ended it triumphantly with Pete’s deep and abiding secret of diabetes, Kay applauded and praised him, which of course he downplayed with an “Agh”.
“I believe you were in the war,” Kay probed.
I was waiting for one of the lucky speeches, but the story he chose to tell was in continuity with what we’d been talking about, though it also conveniently had great shock value.
“You know, in Italy,” he said, “we were told to clean the fields. Hay fields. They stretched for miles … right over the horizon.”
“Yes?” Kay said.
“But I refused to work for them.”
“So what did they do?”
“They wanted to force me to work for them. But I came up with a solution.”
“What did you do?”
“The one sergeant said to me: ‘Bravo, you don’t work for the enemy.’ But the captain told me I had to work, so the night before I had to start working I took a hayfork and placed its middle prong on my foot.”
“And then?” Kay said, captivated.
“I jammed it,” he said, smacking the top of his left fist with his open right palm, “through my foot.”