The road to Mallaig

Go Margot, go Margot…

So I went to the Brian Adams concert in Kirstenbosch last night. It was cold. There were about 5000 people, somebody said, and they had been there for a while, considering the long queues at the toilets even before the start of the show.

We were sitting in the VIP area. I know some VIPs, just like everybody does, and my VIPs get VIP tickets to rock and roll concerts, which is GREAT considering that these areas always have easily accessible VIP toilets Close By. Certainly one of the reasons I hate going to rock concerts is the distance one has to trudge through aggressive, suspicious, sweaty bodies for a pee and the large part of the concert you miss as a result of standing in a stinking queue in my personal experience, this is usually the part featuring the only song I really like. Or one may choose to avoid this and die of thirst. I can’t do it, I swear. As I get older, I HAVE to keep hydrated. But there we were, very civilised, drinking Moet and Prosecco out of pretty plastic champagne glasses when Brian came on to Thundering Applause.

Brian is a popular guy. He gives good show and his fans love him. They love him so much they know the lyrics to the songs; once, the intro of a song played and the audience started singing without him, he laughed, and they laughed, like he caught them out, and then he started the song for real. Even from the VIP section about 100 metres away, I could feel how cosy it was there, at the front. Since nobody smokes anymore the slow, magic sea of little cigarette lighter flames during ballads have disappeared. People wave their arms instead. It’s not the same. I think they should sell lighters at the entrance for this purpose specifically.

I suspect another reason why Brian is such a popular live performer here is because people believe him when he says he is happy to be back in South Africa. Otherwise he would not have been here five times, right? The fact that this might possibly be one of the few countries in the world where he still has a Huge Following, and where the promoter might make some money out of a Brian Adams Concert is beside the point. He says loves being here, he flirts with his audience and he sings with them. And usually one very lucky girl gets to sing with him, On Stage. The hopefuls are dotted in the front, waiting for the moment to start begging, me, please, me, please please- they have practiced the songs, knowing that he gets irritated when you don’t know the words, and nobody wants to be picked and stand up there like a dork.

From the back we heard him speak to one aspiring participant-. No, darlin’, put those away. They are not going to get you on stage. They might get you backstage, but-

In the end, the lucky one was Margot. Margo from Wellington. She was young, studying psychology, and was no taller than Brian. I am from Wellington, she had to repeat a couple of times, as he clearly has never heard of the place, but she was insistent, and proud. She had a feverish look in her big eyes, every pore was dipping with adrenalin and she admitted freely that she did not sing very well. He was taken aback by this for a moment, and asked her if she knew the words she said she did. And then she remembered to ask what song they were going to sing. The crowd loved Margot in that moment, perhaps even more than Brian. But she knew the lyrics, and she belted them out with vigour en energy, and Brian seemed as if he was also having a good time. They looked at each other, and Margot glowed, singing the songs of love and perfect understanding. I wondered if this was going be one of the biggest moments in her life, and I envied her.

I thought of a family holiday long ago, the last one we all had together, and a night in a bar, and being the oldest, trying to be a good, but cool example to my little brother who was busy failing his first year at Rhodes University. After miserably failing to extract a definition of Any Kind of passion that he might possibly have for Anything, we moved on to talking about music, and Brian Adams, inexplicably – as happens in memory fragmented by trauma.

I remember trying to explain to him and some arbitrary holiday friends he made for the night that with the good guitar riffs and the flawless rhyme, Brian really does us all a disservice. His songs are so unashamedly sentimental and they suggest that the necessary interaction between men and women could be an effortlessly elevated experience, not only filled with beautiful, constant intimacy, but fuelled by the mutual, affectionate understanding of equals who would die rather than see the other unhappy, by their own hand or otherwise. Most regular guys, like Brian, jumping around in his t-shirt and jeans, (we can so relate to him as a Regular Guy) are considerate in a relationship, the songs croon, and there are no requirements other than giving and receiving Love- there are no stakes, no power struggles, no personal fears that cause one to lash out, to do damage with cruel, undermining remarks or long periods of silence. It paints a picture too full of false expectation, I tried to explain to 17 year olds between whiskeys. And we are seduced by it because it is all accompanied by such a simple, cool tune. Anybody can sing it, and believe it. It binds us with the lowest of emotional common denominators, nostalgia and sentiment. Not that I used the term denominator that night, I already had a feeling that they did were wondering what the hell I was ON about, and wishing there were cool chicks their own age at the table instead. I even remembering letting it go after a couple of minutes, thinking, these are Guys, what am I thinking? They are going to grow up to be- guys.

My theory turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, as years later I had short tumultuous scene with just such a guy. You are not talking to me, I would scream at him, you are fucking quoting from a really bad fucking pop song. I love you I love you I love you- this is the chorus line from a fucking bubblegum song, its not a fucking emotional commitment Just Because You Keep on Saying It. It did not last, of course. Once the indiscriminate use of the expletive started dominating all attempts at communication, the thing was doomed and the end in sight. Another casualty in the war between life and fantasies spawned on a rock and roll stage.

But there I was at the Brian Adams Concert, and I looked at Margot glowing, grinding her hips as close to his as possible without bumping the guitar, belting it out, word perfect if slightly off key, and I knew that she knew the lyrics of every single Brian Adams song, and that Brian is big in Wellington. Go Margot, go.

And I tapped my feet and sang along to Summer of ’69- standing on your mama’s porch, you swore that you would wait forever- and-. everything I do, I do it for you- and- let’s make sugar darling, sweet surrender… Oh what the hell. He sings a good tune, and I think he really knows how to play the guitar. I was sorry when he failed to appear for an encore, but apparently (we are In The Know, in the VIP area) he lost his voice. He did put on a sweatshirt for the 2nd part of the show, and as I already said, it was cold. We waited with disappointed fans till the work lights came on and teams of guys in matching hard-hats started dismantling everything. We finished the Prosecco and went home. It was a great night out.

On a lighter note… rage.

So, there is Thando. I have taken up Yoga, eschewed cappuccino, chocolate and chardonnay for extended periods of time (up to four days) and now meditate for at least ten minutes a day virtually seven days a month. But even so I am acutely aware that Radical Transformation, True Knowledge of All Things and Fundamental Happiness based solely on the understanding that the universe is as it should be and that I am perfect, will delude me as long as I don’t love him, and accept that he is part of me, as he is of the part of the universe- which apparently is as it should be. What a fuckup. Oh- rage.

Unlike Celeste, Thando is not my immediate subordinate and therefore much harder to bully. He is under the impression that he is my immediate superior, which makes things difficult. He is not, and every fight stems from this. I always win, but I am getting tired, and increasingly bewildered by the insanity of it all. Albert Einstein said madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. I have decided not to take any more calls from Thando, as I always end up angry and frustrated. Or perhaps the trick lies in the EXPECTATION- I can take the call, but not EXPECT anything to be resolved in a manner that is theoretically possible for adults. Jan LA van de Snepscheut said that in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. (Whoever he was). *** So toss that.

Like Celeste, Thando is an idiot; he is so stupid that even the most craftily aimed cruelty simply slides off the brick wall behind his eyes. If the eyes are the windows of the soul, then Thando’s windows are simply painted squares on a hardboard flat, part of a theatre set, decorated to intimate a house of sorts, but requiring the imagination of a sympathetic audience in the dark to make it so. The real tragedy is that, again, unlike Celeste, Thando is not without a brain- he is simply too lazy to use his.

Ella the acupuncturist says I am hot, which is not good, because that is when you burn out. I certainly burn when I think of Thando, rage fires up the synapses and angry thoughts flow like high-speed lava. I had hoped that my holiday in June and all the Deepak Chopra I have been reading would cool things down a bit, but the slightest provocation inflames me. Hey, I tell myself, he is a moron-. calm down, how can you let him do this? But I toss and turn and sweat at night, and burn.

I try to balance and breathe, I practice long, polite soliloquies in the bath, which turn into tense conversations and conclude as venomous monologues where I tell Thando what an arse I think he is. I wonder sometimes if my neighbour can hear me, and then I go back to the balancing. You have to concentrate, or you will fall over. It offers some reprieve from the heat wave in my head.

Perhaps the trick lies in upping my meditation. Having found ten minutes in the morning to blow dry my hair, I am going to find ten minutes every night to sit and not think. As much as I like the good old bunch on the Hard Copy set, they can be trying, and by the end of our 13 hour day I quite like to liquefy into a complete vegetative state on the couch with a sitcom for ½ an hour or so. I will give up 10 minutes of TV (hell knows there’s nothing on to watch anyway) and deal with the rage. And come to love Thando, and the nasty idiot twin inside my skin.

*** Google says Jan de dinges etc was a Dutch-American computer scientist and educator at the California Institute of Technology. He died in 1994. Written about him, ‘On the theoretical side this work would find its continuation in the design of such things as a generator for error handling parsers and a beautiful algorithm for the minimization of finite automata’. Whatever the fuck that means, it sure sounds beautiful. The IT community was ‘bewildered and saddened’ by his death. I am enchanted by the idea of finite automata.

***(2) Somehow, with the WWW at the hot tips of one’s fingers, that line simply does not work anymore. Anybody can know anything. It’s both a tragedy and a wonder.

Things I don’t understand

Okay. So I just logged on and there is this message from the BlogTeam: the site is ‘under attack’, we are ‘getting hammered’ and experiencing a ‘site hack attempt’. Oh God. Is this the end? (Of course not-. BlogTeam JUST SAID that we are ‘getting there’) Are we out of the woods? Are these words designed to calm our crackling nerves?

It sounds like a war, and, like all wars, it sounds completely unnecessary, except that in this case the stakes seem quite mysterious. No borders are being contested, no oil, no other scarce resources, no sovereignty-. Here is innocent old Blogmark, a simple fellow, really, in anybody’s estimation, full of the fears, joys and the isolated, vague flashes of genius of the ordinary man, taking a lovely walk in the park on a sunny day and then suddenly-. BAM!!! WAR!!! RATATATATATA!!!! Ugh- (Sound of Blogmark hitting the ground, blood spewing from a thousand orifices in his skinny, pale corpse). And then- silence. Today the paint splotches on the masthead look like bullet holes.

Why? Why? Why?

What has he ever done other than provide a platform for the both the dull and the scintillating alike to disgorge their prose and poetry and Individual Point of View on the similar folk who care to read all that crap? Who could possibly hate him for this? It is a noble task, surpassed only, I believe, by the little old ladies who harbour thousands of stray cats only to be eaten by their charges when the old ladies die alone after slipping on some cat piss and cracking their skulls on the stoep.

I got my cell phone six years after everybody else, I learned to e-mail even later, and it was big moment for me when I sent my first attachment. Even now posting a link on the Blogmark is a mystery to me- My name is George Eliot and I am a technopeasant.

And I find this brutal onslaught on the poor Blogmark completely puzzling. Who could possibly gain from its demise? Even if JT and Andreas have taken someone’s ego to the cleaners, it is easier, surely, to just seek out a different corner in Cyberspace. Or fight back, for Pete’s sake. Fight where everybody can comment from the side. Mandy? Are you there? (What ever happened to her, so by the way?)

Attackers- hackers-. What information could they possibly want from the Blogmark? Evidence of how many bad writers can boast of a degree in English or Journalism? There must, ultimately, be little to fear from these foes because they are clearly demented.

I am beginning to feel the same about the Checkers workers striking now for the 3rd or 4th week in a row. They seem to rotate the city, because they don’t do the Rissik/President Street intersection every day. But every now and then one notices a small band bobbing along the pavements, toyi-toying hurriedly towards a greater mass somewhere in some square. With flags and banners and everything. Are they not bored by now? Do they rotate the shift? It is not that I am unsympathetic to their cause, I just wish there was some sign of their protest being even vaguely effective. Checkers is still open; we buy toilet paper there almost every day.

It is so disheartening to see the rolling mass of their first march trickle down into tiny streams. I think it was Einstein who said that a sure sign of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. In this case, it would mean that both the union and management are insane.

It is a day filled with many things I do not understand. Well, two things, at least. Normally I would keep this to self because nobody likes a stupid whiner. (Indeed, what good is anybody who does not understand to anybody else?) But today, considering that the Blogmark is out of the woods, having survived both a hammering and a hacking attempt, I wanted to celebrate its daft but brave purpose- and say something.

Flush beats Straight

Harry was canoodling his cards under the table. People have been shot for less in the Old West apparently, but here we were just going to shame him into the grave.

The guys were alarmed. ‘Hey, what the hell are you DOING down there?’ Jem wanted to know. Harry was unapologetic; he said Gert and I were sitting too close, so how was he supposed to look at his cards without us seeing them. He had a point, I had been looking at his cards all night. Well, once or twice anyway.

‘It is called ‘playing your cards close to your CHEST, Harry,’ I pointed out and then Zeb added (for clarity’s sake) ‘Yes, Harry, not ‘playing your cards close to your COCK.” Tony drew his hand close to his shirt buttons and peered half-lidded down at the pictures. ‘Oh yes. Of course. close to your chest.’ He spoke with gravitas. There was a small chance that he was actually serious but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. He was losing for a change. The wanking-under-the-table theme covered quite a few quips in even the following round, but then that got tired. It was noted that girls had an easier time implementing the ‘close to the chest’ strategy successfully, and I could not disagree.

Harry was not actually invited, even though I like him. I don’t invite vegetarians to my house when I am cooking. I do not stand in front of the stove for 2 hours just so that somebody can NOT eat my food. I like to feed people. It makes me feel deficient when I can’t. And I will NOT have people bring their own food to my house when I am serving dinner. So fuck them. If you don’t eat meat, stay away. But Harry phoned looking for a game at about nine thirty, so I did not have to look at him either not eating, nor nibbling his damn vegetarian pizza takeaway. And we were only six since Martin couldn’t play so a 7th was not undesirable.

‘Pity you missed dinner Harry,’  Gert said when he arrived. ‘It was vegetarian.’ Not. Chicken and pork sausage stew in Fino sherry. Winter poker food. But Harry is such an easy target. ‘Seriously?’  In that calm, soothing yogi-yoghurt voice of his. I think he was hoping there was some left. Not. Either.

I did not start the evening so well, buying in for a second hundred within about an hour, and then watching my little pile shrink slowly but steadily. Sometimes you just get such crap cards. I did not win a single hand for almost three whole rounds. And I so hate losing, watching other piles grow into huge fat towers while my own shrivels like a dick in a cold pool, drops like the WTC on 9/11, fades like a lightsabre when the Jedi’s dead. I can feel it in my face, that losing thing, it goes stiff and strained and eventually it starts to hurt. And then I usually start playing badly, and the whole thing just ends with me much poorer. But I managed to change that thing, hang onto the chips, I played conservatively and then after I walked around my chair three times I got the four threes (penalties!), and things were much better right to the end.

It was the most relaxed poker evening in a long time. Jem and Gert did not get up each other’s nose for starters. Actual, funny jokes were told instead of Jem randomly needling one or the other about – whatever – their taste in music (Martin) their finances (Gert) their dogs and/or bestiality (Martin) their looks/clothes/language/anything you care to name (Gert). You might find it surprising to know that Gert and Martin dislike him. Suckers. You simply cannot give Jem a gap, the moment he senses a weakness he will wear you down with well-executed blows to the kidneys ’till it’s TKO time. He is relentless and frankly, scary. He started having a go at Gert about his hat, and most of us joined in- But Gert’s mojo was up and he had such a huge stack in front on him that he was invincible. Amazing how our sense of humour falls and rises with the fortunes on the table. Gert was so little concerned about being the butt of the joke he told us…

“… a guy walks into a bar with a box under his arm (okay, so its an old one, but still). He puts the box on the counter and orders a beer. Barman wants to know what’s in the box. Guy says, go ahead, look inside, you won’t fucking believe your eyes. Barman opens the box and inside is a tiny little grand piano and tiny little man wearing a tuxedo. What! Barman can’t believe his eyes. Nooit. Sure. Go ahead, the guy says, ask him to play something. Barman asks for the 3rd piano concerto by Rachmaninoff (music student) and the little guy plays like a pro. Barman is stunned. So, where did you get him, he wants to know. Well, I picked up this small, broken urn one day. I tried to clean and fix it, and when I started polishing it a genie popped out and told me I could make a wish. So I did. The guy thinks for a moment. I still got it, he says to the barman. Wanna have a go? Damn straight. So the barman rubs the urn, out comes the genie and the barman blurts out, I want a million bucks! Next thing there are ducks everywhere, coming in the door, flying in the windows, peeling out of the cupboards. What is this shit?! The barman is furious. Oh get over it, the guy says. What do you think I asked for- a twelve-inch pianist?”

So that was droll.

And shortly after midnight the boys went home, and I stacked the dishes and put out the trash and ate the last piece of chocolate left on the counter. I counted my money and it was more than I had when the guys arrived. Caspar once  told me an old poker vet once said to him – it will cost you ten thousand rand to learn this game. And that was WAY back, in the Hillbrow poker club days. God, I hope not. But I wondered if, calculated over a couple of years, it was perhaps cheap at the price. So far so good.

Latin Lessons

So Katrien said on the phone last night that short horny Italians are 1) easy to train 2) eager to please and 3) not squeamish. I am not sure about the last one. It would never have occurred to me that it should go on the list of desirable qualities of a potential lover, mate or one-night stand. But as she said it I realised that ‘not squeamish’ should really be right on the top of The List. In my own experience the Italians, French and one Argentinean were mostly well taught and full of enthusiasm. The single exception simply was not that fond of sex, I think. ‘Squeamish’ was not a label that sprung to mind. ‘Lazy’ did. Funny how they were all quite short- another thing that I never noticed particularly. Patterns emerge when one starts to make gross generalisations, and what a lot of fun they are.

(But back to the topic.)

So. If one expects a… complete experience of the… business… of sex, squeamishness would be such a disappointment. There is a deeply disturbing scene in Dangerous Liaisons between Uma Thurman and John Malkovich, where he seduces her and says, ‘let’s start with a few… Latin terms… shall we?’ I wonder now, in the light of these musings, if it is perhaps the supposed enthusiasm of Latin men in this area that may have caused these terms to retain their Latin roots, and as such their common use.

The whole discussion was initiated by the fact that I have lightly pencilled a date in my diary with a short Italian man whom I have never met. I wrote to him… exactly which side of ‘172cm to 178cm’ are you on? And he said, 5ft 8 u? (Note economical use of word & letters). So I said, 5ft 11 and ½, but shorter men than me have often called themselves 6ft. And then I wrote… so now what? And he said that he will still ‘love’ to meet me, and am I ‘game’. I think he certainly rose to the challenge, and therefore I may well have a glass of wine with him.

There is not much else to recommend him, unfortunately. He is 50, ‘divorced 6 year’, and has a 26-year-old daughter who lives in London. His English appears to be a second language, the little of it he used for correspondence. One hopes that he would do better with spoken language and perhaps other, non-verbal forms of communication. Normally, when choosing which character to pursue and which to ignore, I give many marks for wit and a good sentence. But in this guy’s case…

I am, I admit freely, a sucker for Italians. This is mysterious, as I was an exchange student over there for a year and I found them deeply eccentric, if not downright unfriendly. I detected a profound confusion in the average Latin male brain between virgins and whores. The best example of this is actually found in the film Analyse This, when Robert De Niro says to Billy Crystal, are you crazy? That’s the mouth she kisses my children with! The mother of his children is neither virgin nor whore, but his girlfriend (and ALL of them have girlfriends) is both. But the food is spectacular, and I think any nation which eats that well but stays generally in such good shape has a thing or two to teach the rest of us about the sensual pleasures.

Besides, shortly after Katrien said goodbye and we stopped lauging, Mal and I agreed that there is space in life at the moment for a short horny Latino. A girl only lives once.

Shadow Girl

So we are all, I am sure, familiar with this thing called ‘shadowing’. For those of us who survived even a single night at the Hard Rock Café in Illovo (yeah, OK, so I go way back but I swear I don’t look it) traipsing behind a waitress in a similar little white skirt and feeling like a fool, the word invokes nothing but horror. But still they come, youngsters, eager to participate in the glowing world of work, of infinite possibility, ready to observe a process completely foreign to them for many hours during which time people are too busy to tell them what the hell is going on. (Don’t be ridiculous, of course I knew what was going on at the HRC, I am talking about shooting a TV series here, it is Very Different.)

She arrived, a straight A student from some Bryanston school, blushing, smoke-free peach-skin with a gentle whisper that was difficult to hear over the drone of the city outside. The previous one puffed it up happily with the cast and the crew outside as soon as her parents hit the road, but then she was about to fail standard nine (or, I think they called it ‘not get into matric’) at the Waldorf School. Which, it just occurred to me, is also in Bryanston.

Hmmm.

Anyway.

The Girl arrived later than her requested 9am because her mother did not want to drive into The City and dropped her at HQ in Auckland Park instead. We had to fetch her, which we hate.

I sent e-mail to Cherry saying does the SABC know she is sending me all these white chicks to set, and do the white chicks know that they are more likely to get pregnant by a yeti than a job in production by the time they need to start to earn a living, or to get out of their parents house for their own sanity, or something. It’s almost as absurd as my mother dreaming she saw me sitting on HF Verwoerd’s knee, and deducting that her infant girl is sure to be president some day. Cherry had nothing funny to say about that.

But enough about me. So here she was in the production office, self-conscious and timid, and everybody immediately struck a pose indicating that they had no idea what to do with her. I took the lead, as I am expected to do, and suggested 1) we give her the scripts for the episodes we are shooting today and let her read them 2) Robert then explains the schedule to her, and how we break down the script to shoot it, and 3) we send her down to the set where she can hang with continuity, next to the director, so that she can see how it is actually being done. I felt very much in charge, which of course I am.

Seconds later she had no scripts and Robert and Ian were arguing about whose pen Robert was using. Ian said it was his. I inspire such prompt, precise action in my crew, I swear. Lesson number one, I said to The Girl, don’t leave your stationery lying around. She laughed. I don’t think she genuinely thought it was funny. Soon after that Robert was explaining the ‘sides’. I shuddered to imagine what he was telling her. What the hell, either she was going to get it or she was not. But she was going to be all right for now.

Almost… quite… anywhere…

I am not transformed. Neither do I quite feel like my Old Self.

I feel OK. God is dead. Marx is dead. But I think I’m gonna make it.

We have been shooting Hard Copy III in the old Rissik Street post office for almost two weeks now. Most mornings are freezing: when the weather report says ‘very cold’, it is here, on the 2nd floor of this cat infested ruin that you understand (and I mean UNDERSTAND, Mr Krishnamurti sir) what Very Cold means.

When the wind blows outside, a gentle and mysterious movement of air originates somewhere inside the cavern which we have transformed into an office and caresses the body parts not covered by parka. It chills, it freezes, it teases, it drives you crazy. For survival, I firmly clutch a scalding oil heater between my thighs: it is a desperate relationship, full of need, dependency and almost psychotic levels of separation anxiety when I have to pop downstairs to speak to the director for some Very Important Reason. Or to admonish the AD for not wrapping on time. (There must be some change in me a month ago I would have just plain crapped on him. See? A bit of yoga and pranayama will save the world still, I think.)

But today the sun is out and the large windows are letting in a lot of light. The temperature is up and the traffic hums like a chain gang on acid. The city noise is beautiful; it is a day in which anything is possible. I am happy to be here, I have energy to write. I’m in the mood to say something. I want to flirt with someone. I wear my hair down.

I am In Between, Neither Here Nor There, and I don’t mind.

DREAM

I dreamt of you the other night
I saw your lovely face
and the things you said and did
when you were in my space

Humming in the morning,
Getting ready for the day
Coffee, showers, sweet affection
Before you drove away

The dream was unambiguous
So true I nearly cried
The softest lips for kissing
A tongue that never lied

Considerate and loving
You called when you were late
Which was almost never dear;
That was really great

I was adored, secure and loved
And nothing that I felt was false
The dream was you, I think- I thought-
My god, that’s someone else!

Ag, Potchefstroom!

I believe in God. But Christians have a helluva lot to answer for. Christians and organised religion (I believe) are responsible for most of the wars in history and most of the deaths not caused by disease. And they have caused this horror and bloodshed in the name of what they believe is Holy, and therefore, Right, and therefore, others must believe this too, or Suffer the Consequence. The foundation of all the scriptures, regardless of their chosen prophet (I believe) is Love. This includes Love you neighbour as you Love yourself. (No, I have not forgotten Celeste, but I am not a Christian. And I was never going to kill her, honestly.)

But back to the Christians. Regardless of the above, you do find truly amazing individuals amongst Christians once you separate them from the herd. When the stampede out of the church door is over and the masses disappear for a Sunday afternoon braai, you start discerning good people. Salt of the earth types. One can respect their generosity of spirit, their kindness to others and selfless engagement with a largely ungrateful world. Sometimes one wishes for even one grain of their decency. My father is not one of these.

Neither does he wish for a grain of their decency, nor has he a grain of the kind of decency one wishes for. But he is a Christian.

I hit the road in the golf to the former Wes Transvaal last Sunday to go and visit him. I love that road. I love that countryside. I think there is a poem about it. Some Afrikaans poetess wrote about how ugly it is, but it is the kind of ugly I like. With my prescription sunglasses tinted to match the pearl pink antique frame, I cannot only see where the hell I am driving but everything always looks as it does in art films. I travel though spectacular cinematography and everything is beautiful and slightly, surreally, rosy. And this movie, My Life, has a great soundtrack. It started off with Johnny Cash (American III) in the CD player. When I got tired of singing along to One, I slipped in CD2 of Salt and Pepper, the sound track to The Sopranos. The last track is the excellent theme song, and it was accompanied by ‘Woke up this morning, got yourself a gun-‘  that I slowed down to 60km’s per hour and drove into Potchefstroom.

I had not seen my father since – hell knows when. January, probably. Maybe even last year. Am I a bad daughter? Probably. And honestly I have felt guilty about my absence in his life. At least twice, that I can remember. The visit was prompted by an SMS from him saying he missed me. I think that was the second time I felt guilt, so I called him and made a date. He cooked a ‘lamskenkel potjie’ for us. The Wife was on some academia trip to Windhoek. My father remarked more than once how it was more personal, him cooking for us, than going out for lunch. His potjie is not bad, if you like Rajah curry powder. He does not do it like they do it in Cape Town, he reminded me a couple of times…  that thing about layering the ingredients and never stirring it…  no, he has his own way.

He has always had his own way, and sometimes I wished that his last law-firm partner fucked him up worse than he did when he declared himself insolvent. It was a real blow for my father, but unfortunately, mainly a financial one. The betrayal of a friend and monetary dire straits did not inspire in him a desire to examine the world that he lived in with new and different eyes. It simply drove him to marital fidelity (my stepmother inherited money and would, unfortunately, turn out to be the third and last wife) and the Bible, where he makes notes in the margins and contemplates the meanings of the contradictions, which he eventually accepts as ‘alles is in God moontlik’, and that is that. A real tragedy: he is a clever, blind man.

We sat in the lounge where the sun warmed the couches, I drank whiskey, he drank red wine, and we talked and reminisced, mainly about dead people. At my grandfather’s funeral my late grandmother’s sister, Tannie Pop, came up to me. ‘Wanneer trou jy?’ she wanted to know. ‘Nee, Tannie Pop…’ I started to squirm, but it turned out she was not really interested in the answer. ‘Onthou jy, op Santie se troue, was ek besig om haar sleep te stryk, en jy het daar gestaan en vir my gevra, ‘Tannie Pop, wanneer ek trou, sal Tannie my sleep ook stryk?” I tried to look vaguely familiar with an ancient childhood memory that fired a complete blank, but she wandered off, Katrien helping her huge bulk along the dusty path of the Boksburg North cemetery. And later at tea I saw my older brother Herman (half brother, actually, from the brief liaison with the first wife) and he started a photography business in Nelspruit and when was I going to come and visit? I thought about it seriously, actually, and I might still do it. Lots of people that you only ever see at funerals always want to know why they don’t see more of you. Well who knows why that is? Maybe it’s because we are not Italian, or something. Maybe its because I find them all simply unbearable rabid racists and Christians – my least favourite combination in any human being.

Anyway. So we sat and drank and later talked about music. My father loves Al Jolson and bought a double CD in Johannesburg once, a few years ago, and we listened to it. I quite like it, the old songs, I even know some of them. My father also likes Percy Sledge, Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole. All, as he pointed out, ‘kaffertjies’. It was new, this word in his vocabulary. In recent years he tried to avoid using the term ‘kaffer’ when I was around. Perhaps he thought that the diminutive would somehow make it less offensive. I think he feels a vague discomfort with the term: in the past he used to distort it in various ways, for example, ‘kwaffers’ with the ‘w’ inserted – does this fall more softly on the ear? WHO THE FUCK DOES HE THINK WOULD SOMEHOW NOT FIND THIS TERM DEMEANING? But anyway. There is little point in being furious with my father when I am away from him. So his current word for black people is the Afrikaans diminutive of ‘kaffer’. I tried to imagine asking him not to use it, but then I stopped. Eventually we talked about his conversations with God, you know, when he is in a quandary about something or the other, and about the notes in the margin of his Bible.

Later we watched TV. On the news was some government official that he called, looking up briefly from the Rapport, ”n bleddie kommunis”. The Wife came back from Nam and we watched The Drowning Pool (Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and an extremely young Melanie Griffiths) together, and then we went to bed.

I drove home on Monday at about 11h00. I originally planned to stay until after lunch, but I changed my mind. I promised to try and make another trip that way before the end of my holiday, but he looked unconvinced, perhaps with reason.

I had no desire for a sound track, my life no longer felt like a movie, I listened to the engine and looked at the road and the fields and the signs to mysterious places that pointed left and right. Somewhere I passed a huge fire burning on the shoulder of the road. Traffic slowed down because of the thick smoke and reduced visibility. I took off my glasses, the world glared, suddenly a different colour. Beyond the smoke it seemed as if fires had burned all night. They must have: I could not remember the fields being so black when I came in the opposite direction the day before.