Kay had moved up a floor or two, so I didn’t see her that often and when I did we greeted each other with bemused embarrassment. It felt good to have her out of my life, but I couldn’t go over to Jay and Veron’s that Saturday because he’d been booked off sick and was only interested in staring at the wall.
I was about to go out to watch some rugby at the local when there was a ring at my gate. It was that grim Afrikaans woman I occasionally saw in the park, looking particularly unattractive as Butch barked at her and the Alsatian she had in the back of her idling old bakkie. I contemplated ignoring her, but I was curious as to why she would suddenly come ring my bell.
Klara Groenewald had a strong, dry handshake, was in her mid-fifties, and had a horsy fringe, steel-grey eyes, a block of a schnoz, a fairly lipless mouth and was still fairly trim, helped no doubt by the amount of daily exercise she got in the park. She and her husband, partner, brother or tenant lived further up in the next suburb, I knew, because I often walked or drove past their house on my way to the Redlands. He was a stocky, bald man with a broad ginger moustache who, according to the sticker on his Japanese generic, supported the Blue Bulls. Occasionally I’d see his whatever drive past my house or me on the street, either going to or returning from the park.
Klara was terribly sorry to bother me but she had a very embarrassing thing to ask me and she didn’t really know where to start but she had rearranged her entire living room but now that she had moved all the chairs side tables and coffee table she couldn’t move the sofa it was just too heavy and she felt such a fool this was supposed to be a surprise for her “better half” who was coming back early tomorrow after being away for a week and he was going away on Monday again and she’d wanted to give him a surprise but if I was too busy then it didn’t matter and she was really very sorry for bothering me.
“Let’s move your couch,” I said, leaving Butch looking forlorn as we drove off with her dog, Verdi, barking at me incessantly through the little connecting window. After telling it to shut up a third time she jerked the window closed.
“Verdi?” I said.
“Yes, I love opera.”
“So did my mother,” I said. “And your husband? Does he like it?”
“He hates it, so he calls the dog Ferdie. You’ve got to call them by roughly the same sounds apparently.”
“I know,” I said, and told her about the old man’s new darling.
Her simple house was as neat as any other in this predominantly white, English suburb, which was becoming increasingly Indian due to the new mosque nearby. The living room suite consisted of the couch and heavy chairs covered with faux, chocolate-coloured leather and studs to give them that supposedly learned look. The coffee table had a glass surface, graced with the appropriate book of photographs depicting a soft-focus Cape. At least the bad oil paintings against the walls were originals, even if they were the kind of stuff you bought on Sunday afternoons at Zoo Lake. But my best was the three angels. There they stood on a side-kist from the days of Trekker yore, elongated and playing the violin, flute and trumpet. It was the kind of living room my long-suffering mother would have appreciated, since it was moteless.
Verdi wouldn’t stop barking at me so Klara lost her temper with him again and locked him in the back yard. I couldn’t help noticing she had a flat arse, about which I had another woolly theory: I was convinced such people were sexually dull.
“Geez!” I said in her language. “Do they put lead in these sofas?”
“Do you see what I mean!” she laughed, still embarrassed that she’d imposed on me in such a way.
Once we’d done that she offered me a cup of coffee or a beer and I settled for the latter. Man, her Dolfie (short for Adolf, as in Hitler, I couldn’t help thinking unfairly) loved his beer as much as he loved his brandy and Coke, whereupon I asked whether I could have a shot of brandy too. I liked chasing it with cold beer and she said that was very German and did I like the Blue Bulls too? I replied that, for better or worse, I was a Free State supporter. Wasn’t that a coincidence, she said, she also liked the Free Staters, and she didn’t even know why!
You see, she was actually from Southwest and half German and she was sorry that she was talking so much but sometimes she realised that she hadn’t spoken for days (like the old man) and so talk she did, apologising for it but continuing when I said it was fine. Dolfie used to be a teacher and so she went on about the appalling salaries teachers (and nurses and cops, I dutifully added) got, how the only other employment he could manage after being retrenched at his school – “affirmative action, you know” – was a commission-only job as an agricultural rep. Did they have children? Ja, a twenty-year-old daughter, but she had disowned them because they were too straight, apparently. She was living with some artistic type in Cape Town, Klara said with a bitter twist to her mouth, saying her daughter was actually supporting the man.
“Well, at least you’ve still got Dolfie,” I said.
“Ja, we’re all we’ve got, I suppose. And I should be grateful that he isn’t like most men.”
“What are most men like?” I enquired.
“Oh, they just want to mount each and everyone they see like randy dogs.”
I really don’t know what she said after that, but I suppose I went through all the motions of polite society: making as if I was listening; saying I had better go now; thanking her for the brandy and beer, hoping Dolfie noticed the couch; walking home at dusk; feeding Butch and having quite a few more drinks to blot out waking consciousness. But it wasn’t working. Maybe if I put on the rest of the eleventh it would help, trying not to think of the effect the words “mount” and “randy” had had on me. I continued with the third serioso movement in a swoon, then I listened to the calming first part of the fourth movement before it went all agitato again, like me, because all I could think of – if think was the word – was mounting that older, seemingly unattractive woman in the next suburb.