Driving to Pretoria, I thought about the time I’d been given a holiday job as a student reporter at the Capital News. But what did I do? I hid behind a pillar and tried to write a play. That month was the only time the old man and I ever worked in the same city and occasionally we’d catch the same train in the afternoons, since he got up at five in the mornings, cursing, and I did two hours later, sulking. Then we’d shoot past the Fountains, stop at Kloofzicht and disembark at Sportpark. This he’d been doing for about thirty years by then, every single working day.
That afternoon a typical Highveld storm broke out just as I got to the Herbert Baker-designed station, the rain hammering its high roof. I passed Oom Paul Kruger’s mounted coach and entered the electric one. Waited. As the doors started juddering closed a bunch of white, middle-aged men squeezed in, half wet, breathless, joking. Civil servants in their grey suits and Hush Puppies. The old man, who only wore his HPs at home, was one of them, laughing at their banter. As the train left the station the sun burst through that pouring rain – a baboon’s wedding! – and beamed into that section where the old man was standing at the other end of the dark coach, he and his colleagues illuminated by gold. He was unconscious of his son watching him, his son who never told him they’d been in the same coach that black-golden day, the old man enjoying his fellows’ company, but somehow desperately separate, desperately alone.
Back as opposed to forward in the present he still wasn’t standing at the gate but his dog was charging, already picking up weight. I noticed that his master had forgotten to lock the laughable chain securing the gates so I opened them, drove the car in, closed them again and told the dog to bugger off. It rolled on to its back, micturating itself, so I got back into the car and drove around to the back, wondering whether I was going to find the old man walking around the perimeter or lying dead on the apron, but he was nowhere to be seen.
I walked towards the back stoep, the mutt barking incessantly. Up the three steps. The security gate was open, the bottom half of the door was closed and I called out, but there was no reply. I called a bit louder. Nothing. So I went into the kitchen, shut out the barking sausage, my chest instantly closing up from the smell of dog, my mind running through all the possibilities the Afrikaans media presented us with on a daily basis. I looked in the main bedroom, my old bedroom, the toilet, bathroom, the airless living room over which Tina presided.
“Dad?”
But there was nothing. Maybe he was in the laundry, I thought. Sometimes he had an army bath in there, just for a change. But he wasn’t there, either, and I thought if I had a gun now I would put that barking bastard out of its misery. But under that noise I could hear a sound coming from the garage next door: a low hum. It was the Valiant in the garage. It was running, and then I was running, thinking about what the old man had said recently about doing himself in.
I jerked the garage door open and the Valiant was still running, but I couldn’t see whether there was a pipe leading from the exhaust pipe to the driver’s window for a few seconds because it was too dark in there after the bright winter light outside. The car was so wide it gave one very little room to move on the sides, so he’d nailed rubber bands along the walls to prevent us from accidentally denting the doors when we opened them. As my eyes adjusted I saw there wasn’t a pipe: the old man was just sitting behind his steering wheel, deep in thought in his ship-like yellow automobile.
“Hello, Dad.”
“Ah,” he said, in his new outfit of comfortable, dog-hairy clothes. “Hello my boy.”
“Are you okay?”
“Ja, I’m fine,” he said, switching the car off and pulling the lever that released the car’s hood. “But I want to show you something,” he said conspiratorially.
“Wait a bit. Let me see that thing on your eye.”
His eye was covered with cotton wool, held there by a pink plastic patch and elastic band that made him look slightly dashing, piratical.
“What does it feel like?”
“Gravelly,” he said.
“Remember not to bend or pick up anything heavy.”
“Look at this,” he said, ignoring me as usual, lifting dusty pink and white-checked bedspreads off the Valiant, then displaying the engine with its chromed parts to me.
“Wow,” I said, bored.
Now he carefully, almost religiously, closed the hood again and covered it with the bedspreads of my youth, including the one Bella had sprayed with vomit outside Tembisa.
Next he opened an old briefcase full of silver Parker pen-and-pencil sets and a black Montblanc beauty. Not only did he have good, strong hands, but he also had a beautiful handwriting, which he liked to show off. Now he wanted me to take one of the sets we had given him decades ago for Christmas, not knowing what else to buy a man who wanted “nothing” and wept embarrassingly and shamelessly when he did receive them. So I took a set and said let’s go have some coffee, feeling a bit hemmed in.
“I’ve got something else here,” he said, putting the case away next to another, saying I should remember that that one held his last will, surrounded by about a dozen two-litre Coke bottles he kept filled with water for “just in case”. He opened a dusty bag, which had probably conveyed government documents back in the day, but was filled with piles of paper-clipped notes now; plenty of them.
“What’s that?” I said, knowing very well what it was.
“I want to give you a little something.”
“You don’t have to do that anymore.”
“Here’s ten thousand,” he said, ignoring my protestation. “Count it.”
So I counted it and it was correct.
“Thanks, Dad.”
“Don’t tell anyone I gave it to you.”
Like I was going to tell the whole world he’d just given me a pile of money; like the whole world was even interested.
It was a relief to stand out in the winter sun again and, as he locked up the garage, the dog started barking at me again. I cursed it and it rolled over and pissed itself, which was when I noticed that the paver had inserted a little hewn brick heart into my parents’ driveway. Like so many things, I didn’t mention this bit of kitsch to the old man and, after we’d gone through the mug speech in the kitchen, I asked him whether the dog was sleeping inside.
“You know,” he laughed mischievously, “sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and he’s sleeping on the pillow, right next to my head.”
“Well, hopefully he’ll alert you if anyone tries to come into the house.”
“If anyone puts their foot on the property he barks.”
“Good,” I said, feeling my chest close up. “Could we go out now please?”
So we took our coffees and Lemon Creams outside and after a while he said the dog had almost gone berserk when “those other two” had been here.
“What other two?”
“Those bastards come here and ask me for work. I’m just sitting here and suddenly they’re standing there.”
“What did you say?”
“I told them to bugger off.”
“Dad, you can’t talk to people like that.”
“Do you think they really wanted work? They were looking for what could be stolen.”
“Still, you must be careful.”
“This is my property and those bastards can go to hell!” he said and gave his dog the last bit of his coffee in a saucer with a broken-up Lemon Cream as a Boeing passed overhead. After a moment or so he looked up and, listening, said: “I’ll probably never see those again.”