That Saturday night I didn’t get slammed with Jay and Veron but took a very soberly dressed Kay out for her farewell dinner, where I very maturely declined to do drink, drugs or sex with her. When she cried I teased her until she laughed, walked her to her car and kissed her on her cheeks. Goodnight and goodbye. A company car would take her to the airport the next day.
The next morning I drove to the capital, thinking about Gaberone and how I hadn’t told the old man anything about it, as usual, thinking he wouldn’t have been able to relate to it in any way whatsoever, if I’d thought anything at all through my fog of an anger I couldn’t quite pinpoint. But that was then and now I had to go shopping for him at his local supermarket in a town I refused to call anything but Lyttelton. He had given me the list that Thursday and it had been as basic as ever: milk, sugar, bread, eggs, coffee, condensed milk, butter – “not margarine!” – boerewors, potatoes, carrots, beans, onions and those little cabbages that looked like brains.
Then I drove past that school where I’d played first-team rugby for my last two years and the old man had always stood watching me playing. Every single Saturday morning he would just stand there, smiling, unspeaking, shy, apart.
He wasn’t at the gates, the dog didn’t charge and the chain wasn’t locked. I drove to the back, took the supermarket bags and approached the apron and the old man’s back door, which was open. As I got to it I said somewhat tentatively: “Dad?”
The dog started barking, I went in and the old man was watching tennis on TV, his nose virtually touching the screen. The aerial had broken at some stage and had been replaced with a wire hanger, which only gave blurry black-and-white images anyway. This was in the spare room where we had once had a tenant, and once only.
She had had broad shoulders on which to carry her officer’s pips and she had been allowed to smoke in the house, too. She had arrived at a time when the usual cutting comments about Ma’s useless father and her cooking had become too much, when the endless repetition of the same old good-luck war stories and Dennis the Menace jokes had palled, when her usual good-natured rolling of the eyes had become a look of desperation, a film of sweat forming on her temples and beneath the snub nose I’d inherited from her. It had all been very strange and the old man was back in his dark clothes and still wearing that tatty old windbreaker of his.
“Hi, Dad. How’re things going?”
“You know, I get so bladdy irritated with these players.”
“Why?”
“Have you seen how many times they bounce the ball before they serve?”
“It’s probably to give them balance.”
The old man snorted contemptuously.
“I’d happily watch with you, but I can’t breathe in here,” I said, though he still dutifully kept all the windows and doors as wide open as he could.
“Let’s go and sit outside,” he said, resigned.
I said let’s first make some coffee, which he thought was a hell of a good idea. We packed away his groceries and there was something different about him, but I couldn’t work out what it was as he complained about the fact that the players didn’t wear white anymore, and they didn’t shave.
“And you’ve shaved every day of your life since you were seventeen?”
“That’s right. Difficult as it is now.”
“Why difficult?”
“I can’t lift my bladdy arms above my shoulder anymore,” he complained.
“Maybe you should go for some physio,” I said, which was duly ignored.
“But do you know what really gets my goat?”
“What?”
“Bladdy soap operas.”
“Why? What about them?”
“These people are constantly stabbing each other in the back, and if they’re not doing that they’re sucking each other’s faces!”
“I know,” I said. “I avoid the stuff like the plague. But then I know some allegedly intelligent people who are completely addicted to it. But what gets my goat is that you have people out in the sticks who think this is normal. They can’t read or write, but they’ve got the TV set, the antenna sticking out from their shack, like a knife in Caesar’s back. This is their education, this is what they aspire to.”
“That bladdy man from the church wants to sit here and talk to me about television programmes,” the old man continued on his own groove.
“What did you say?”
“I told him I’m not interested. I pay my tithe and that’s that. Every month. On the dot.”
“But you don’t even go anymore.”
“What’s the point? I can’t hear anything. And the last time I went someone said it was good to see me there for a change!”
“When was that?”
“You would have been about twelve or so.”
“Dad, that was thirty years ago!”
“So?”
“Maybe they just said it was good to see you again,” I said, knowing he’d heard what he’d wanted to hear on numerous occasions before.
After the usual speeches we went outside and I threw the ball for the dog, which was so fat you could rest a tray on its back, but it still pursued the ball with all the zest at its blubbery command. The old man looked as pleased with that as he used to when I threw the javelin.
“So what was it like being back in your home town?” I asked.
“Not bad,” he said, having lost all his enthusiasm for that particular adventure, or maybe he just couldn’t remember it anymore.
I wondered whether he’d actually seen Eshowe or just another town en route, and whether he realised this might be the last time he ever saw home again.
“There’s something different about you,” I said, the dog exhausted. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But do you know what? I was wondering why that man from the church hasn’t come round to pester me anymore, but he actually kicked the bucket.”
I laughed and asked him where he’d heard that if he didn’t go to church anymore.
“At the dentist’s.”
“What were you doing there?”
“Bladdy bastard tells me I can either have another bridge made, or he can pull the whole lot and give me dentures, so I said pull the bladdy lot.”
“That’s what’s different about you. You’ve had all your teeth pulled, north and south, like the singer sang.”
He was too pissed off to even grace that with a comment, his cheeks slightly sunken, his speech ever so slightly whistly.
“And you still look good.”
Still no reply.
“When do you get your dentures?”
“In a week’s time, if Lord Muck next door will deign to take me there.”
“Uncle Vern’s very good to you, Dad.”
“Agh.”
“I mean, aren’t you grateful he fetched you at the airport the other night?”
“I can’t see the planes anymore. The car’s battery charger doesn’t work anymore. My car won’t start!”
“How’s the leg?”
“Oh, that’s fine,” he said, starting to pull up his trouser leg.
“Dad, I don’t want to see it.”
“But look here,” he said, showing me his thin white shank minus the slightly soiled bandage he’d still worn a few weeks previously. There was a jagged maroon scar there, but it was as healthy and shiny as that of a young man’s.
“That is amazing,” I said.
“Do you know how I got rid of the scab?” he said, his eyes lighting up.
I didn’t think I wanted to know but said “No?”
“Sandpaper,” he said.