dystopia4 1
2013/06/03 5:16 PM
Dystopia
i
Dystopia.indd 1
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
Dystopia
First published by MFBooks Joburg, an imprint of Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd, in 2013 10 Orange Street Sunnyside Auckland Park 2092 South Africa +2711 628 3200 www.jacana.co.za Š James Siddall, 2013 ISBN 978-1-920601-00-3 Also availabe as an ebook dPDF 978-1-920601-01-0 ePUB 978-1-920601-02-7 mobi 978-1-920601-03-4 Cover design by publicide Back cover picture: Victor Dlamini Set in Sabon 11/15pt Job No. 002010 ii See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za
Dystopia.indd 2
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
Dystopia
James Siddall
iii
Dystopia.indd 3
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
Dystopia
iv
Dystopia.indd 4
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
Just another day in the life
Just another day in the life
P r o l o g u e
Just another day in the life Once I got a little tax refund. So I sat in my kaya and drank myself comatose on cheap, neat vodka that tasted of acetone and came with some stupid Czarist name. Somehow, I doubt that the Romanoffs would have touched the stuff if they were still around. I might also have staggered off to the shebeen in the township that began just down the road from my kaya. I don’t remember. I probably did. I was going there a lot. But I did decide to hitchhike to nearby Pinetown for reasons that still haven’t become clear. On the way to hitch from the main road, I stopped at my post box, fumbled my key into the lock, and withdrew a copy of GQ magazine, for which I’d written a story – on a multimillion-rand Maybach – some months before. Again I pondered this throwback to a life in the Real World, the days when I was a functioning member of the socio-economic firmament, my by-line picture smiling from the contributors’ page. Was I ever really that clean cut? Did I ever really own Ray-Bans?
v
Dystopia.indd 5
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
Dystopia
Oh, yes. I was and I did. During a short spell of sobriety. And of course I pawned the Ray-Bans. About two thousand rands’ worth of Ray-Bans equates to enough money – from a greedy, grasping little pawn shop smelling of old oil and desperation – for two, even three, bottles of vodka, and some cheap dog food. Always some dog food. No mix for the vodka though. That was a luxury. In Pinetown, a litter-strewn, piss-soaked little city-town that had lost its middle-class pretensions like a ravished secretary-class spinster, I sat at a licensed coffee shop and downed triple whiskies. I vaguely recall a whey-faced manager sort of hovering around my table, asking if there was anyone he could call to help me. I wasn’t quite sure why he thought I needed help. But I gave him the number of my sort-of girlfriend in nearby Durban. Of this I’m certain because she told me some days later, with predictable disgust. By the time I left it was dark. So I shagged a whore for R50 in an alley, but was too drunk to come, and got sjambokked by a security guard who saw the whole episode. Then I carried on drinking in a pub that was the dark inverse of TV’s Cheers fame. A bit later sharp chest pains took me reeling into a nearby private hospital. As usual it wasn’t death that scared me. Just the dying. I would have welcomed death like a demon-lover. They ran an ECG and then refused to admit me. I had no money for yet another hospital stay. And no medical aid. But they did phone the same sort-of girlfriend – and I do have a knack of picking lovely private-school numbers to whom this sort of pukeflecked sordidness is something they’ve never been exposed. Not even in literature or film. She also told me this some days later. And refused to collect me. So I withdrew the last of the tax refund from my account, and hired a HiAce taxi and a bemused driver to take me back to my kaya. The next morning I was again sitting in the police station in Hillcrest, my old hometown, while the SAPS uniforms debated vi
Dystopia.indd 6
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
Just another day in the life
whether to throw me into a cell. I’d neglected to pay my tab in a local pub. Apparently. But that was all before I really started drinking. Then things got bad. About three years later I was again in that same little pub that occupied a parallel universe to Cheers. This time I was an escaped detox patient from that same hospital. I was wearing regulation hospital garb under my jeans and jacket, with that thing to which they attach a drip sticking out of my arm. And I was downing quadruple vodkas and Coke. They would have been sextuple only the barman refused to serve them. In fact, he looked greasily grateful when a bar whore with a golden heart – they really do exist outside fiction, I’ve met several – led me tottering back to the hospital where there were consequences. Once more I incurred the wrath of the medical profession and was transported to another hospital, to the psychiatric ward, and shot full of heavy drugs. But I was still just limbering up.
vii
Dystopia.indd 7
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
Dystopia
viii
Dystopia.indd 8
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
I come undone
I come undone
C H A P T ER
1
I come undone What is this? I ask myself. Right now I’m well over two years clean, almost three – the sacred two–three years, the time your brain is meant to have rewired itself after prolonged addiction, say the experts. And you, the addict, have been propelled into a land of rainbows and ponies, as one of my girlfriends used to put it. Yet, like Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, I want to tear my teeth out. Like Colonel Kurtz, I have seen the horror, the horror. And I sit at my desk in my home office at three in the morning, marvelling at the emotional wasteland I have created with my seismic inability to maintain romantic relationships. Love me, let me love you, and I’ll lash out in a tsunami of selfdestruction. I am electric with self-hate and it cuts to the femoral artery as hungrily as does active addiction. Almost. Because nothing quite rivals the pain of active addiction. After a year, clean addicts are supposed to be ready for relationships. So dictates recovery wisdom. I’m going on for three years. And I still can’t even begin to do them. “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The words of J. Robert Oppenheimer, co-father of the atom bomb, after its first detonation, echo. I am, as a friend put it, “a relationship Enola Gay”. 1
Dystopia.indd 1
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
Dystopia
That I’m not a poster boy for recovery seems wrong. Misery memoirs – or victim literature (vic-lit), as their detractors dub them – are meant to follow a solid, linear path from gutter to glory, from zero to hero. They’re meant to end with a rosy-sounding “and they lived happily ever after and became well-paid motivational speakers”. But right now that’s not happening. I can drink. But my addiction is at the pre-fatal level – 11 out of 10 on the alcoholism scale, as one psychiatrist put it after I’d escaped from a psychiatric ward to carry on drinking. Only to be found unconscious outside the nearest bottle store to the hospital, and loaded into an ambulance, and taken back to the ward. I’d still been wearing my hospital identification bracelet and someone had seen it. One nip of vodka and it’ll be days, probably hours, before I start the whole sad cycle of car crashes, hospitals, institutions and perhaps jail cells again. Over two years of intense sobriety training in rehab means that the vestiges of a coping mechanism still function. I hear the words of the Life Skills teacher at the last rehab I was at: “Remember the end of the story.” And the end of the story – the last freefall binge – was sad. Sordid. Dirty. And fearful. Above all, fearful. Unless the active addict is near-paralytic, sodden and saturated with drugs and alcohol, fear of things known and unknown, temporal and heavenly, saturates every cell. My temple throbs for the cool, cruel pressure of the Heckler & Koch 9mm I’d been window-shopping the other day. I don’t yet own it. Even if I did, I remember that suicide by gunshot apparently has a 50 per cent failure rate. Even if you ram the muzzle into your mouth. Even if you use hollowpoint ammunition. And it would leave a terrible Technicolor mess for someone else to clean up. That wouldn’t be nice. So I drive instead. Hanging in the kitchen of my cosy, little rented garden cottage in Hillcrest, my hometown, are the keys to a couple of press test cars – a job perk that, as a deeply dysfunctional occasional motoring writer, was often for months at a time, once well over a year while 2
Dystopia.indd 2
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
I come undone
in rehab, denied to me as I cycled in and out of addiction. Each time more chronic, because this is a progressive disease. As progressive and inexorable as the flow of hot magma. The keys for a Kriegsmarine-grey Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG Roadster glowering in my driveway briefly beckon. But now is not the time to run hard and fast in a snarling, crackling, popping R3-million supercar. Tempting as it is to revel in the Wagnerian drama of this Mercedes, with the rev counter scything to the red warpaint of the no-go zone, I settle instead for the keys of the big Chrysler Voyager parked next to it. The heartbeat throb of its diesel motor will soothe. So will its pillowy ride and auto gearbox. But before I go out onto the pre-dawn roads around Hillcrest I’ll need music. So Eddie Vedder’s Indifference comes with. My recovery song. So does Guns N’ Roses’ Patience. My song for the Pop Icon, who you will meet soon. It resonates. If I can’t have her I’ll wait. Johnny Cash – the Man in Black’s – Like a Soldier. Another recovery song. Johnny Cash and I – we both could have died a hundred times. Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Of course. The ultimate angst album and the anthem of my youth. And Night Ranger’s Sister Christian. When I play that, it takes me back to near the end of last century. I’m cruising the streets of Miami, behind the wheel of a behemoth of a borrowed Lincoln Town Car, courtesy of the press division of the Ford Motor Company. Lincoln is Ford’s luxury division, what Lexus is to Toyota. I was still a semi-functioning addict on that Miami trip. Still able to limit myself to a fistful of tablets and getting drunk in the evenings only. Or in the day, if I could find a cause for celebration or commiseration. The carousel of detox wards, prison holding cells, and lock-down psychiatric wards hadn’t yet begun – but it would soon, reminding me of that great addict’s denial-word: “yet”. It’s normally tacked onto denial-sentences. “I don’t drink in the morning… yet.” “I haven’t been arrested for drunk driving… yet.” 3
Dystopia.indd 3
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
Dystopia
“I haven’t lost my job and family and house… yet.” I don’t dare load one of the Pop Icon’s albums into the car stereo. Hearing her clear-arrow voice – especially one of her ballads – would feel like being shot with one of Colonel Kurtz’s diamond bullets through the forehead. This doesn’t make me fascinating. Not even to myself. It just makes me sad. Or, as the Pop Icon would put it – and she tried, she tried so hard with me when The Darkness would descend in a heavy, humming wave – “Jamie, you’re being a bastard, baby.” She tried so hard. And she was the only one who ever called me that. Jamie. Last night The Darkness came. It was bad. I lay hugging one of my dogs, the other between my feet, my hand on a copy of the Bible – the New International Version – as a talisman. It didn’t work. I didn’t sleep. I still take medication. Light doses of antidepressants – selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs, such as Prozac), and mild mood stabilisers. And I have for over three years now. Last time I went off them I was suicidal – and I would have got it right only I had numbed myself into an insensible vodka coma. Now the drugs definitely don’t work… That’s what The Verve sung. And now I need to roam the wasteland in my head. To be calmed. To be comforted. Without wrapping the cloying, chemical arms of benzodiazepines around me. Or heading to a shebeen for the certain dystopia and destruction and darkness that a bottle of vodka holds. I know I should use my support system. Call my AA sponsor. Or seek refuge at Careline, the remarkable institution that catalysed my recovery. Its doors are always open to me. But I don’t. The big Chrysler’s metronomic heartbeat soothes me a little. Like dropping 10 milligrams of Valium – without the side effects or the trigger to take more, more, more. Ever more. “One drug is too many and a thousand not enough.” That’s standard Narcotics Anonymous text. Eddie Vedder goes into the CD system. I slot the automatic transmission into Drive and, like a Spanish galleon under a trade 4
Dystopia.indd 4
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
I come undone
wind, the minivan sails forth, down the roads of Hillcrest – the town where I’ve gone to primary school, high school, SAPS holding cells, and long-term rehab. By court order. The town where I’ve set my personal equity so low that my new-found ability to go to the shops and buy a loaf of bread without puking on a pavement, passing out in a gutter or getting thrown into a police van is cause for applause and congratulation. The town that I’ve lived in, on and off, for over three decades, watching it grow from a somnolent little village to a buzzing urban sprawl. There’s so very, very little left that anyone can do to me that I haven’t done to myself in active addiction – and now in recovery. The worst someone could do is kill me, and God knows I’ve tried enough times in active addiction. But even then I’d welcome the chance to Go Home and meet The Man in White. It’s just the dying that scares me a bit – unless it’s by a morphine or Nembutal overdose or a heart attack in my sleep. Sometimes it’s wonderful being me. Knowing that it can’t ever get any darker. And now, with the big Chrysler’s headlamps cutting through the pre-dawn darkness, I go back – back to being a scared little blond boy.
5
Dystopia.indd 5
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
Douglas
Dystopia
C H A P T ER
2
Douglas I’m three again, toddling up the stairs of our big house in the upmarket suburb of Westville, just outside Durban. It’s the early seventies in South Africa, a time when just by being white and by some process of osmosis you got a well-paying job, a big house, two servants. Dad went to work. Mom went to tea. Or if she was my mom, went to tea and rode horses and went ice skating and talked about how hard it was to find good help, and the perfidy of “them” – blacks. Douglas, my father, is sitting in his big wingback chair. His legs in brown trousers are tightly crossed, ending in dark green socks with diamond patterns and tan shoes. The shoes are not very clean. The chair is covered in seventies-style brown fabric. I still have it, now crisply covered in blue-and-white-striped fabric from Wetherlys, that upper-middle-class furnishing store. Next to Douglas is a highball glass of cheap white wine that smells more of sour acid than grapes. He takes a gulp. My mother – elegant and coiffured in the idiom of the time, looking a bit like one of those pictures you see of Apollo astronauts’ wives in old copies of Life magazine, and still trim even after giving birth to three children – says something to him. Douglas replies in his Yorkshire voice, “You bloody bitch.” Those are the first words I remember hearing. Decades later, 6
Dystopia.indd 6
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
Douglas
my mother – three husbands down, two of them abusive, one alcoholic – hotly denies that Douglas would have ever spoken to her like that. The next word I remember hearing is “soon”. “Daddy is coming home soon.” It’d be night already, and I’d be standing by the big windows of the playroom looking onto the driveway. I’d wait. And wait, teetering on little three-year-old legs. After an age Douglas’s bilegreen Mini Countryman – a tiny, two-door estate car far removed from the big boutique Mini Countryman of today – would come up the driveway, singing its sad song of diff-whine. Now I’m six. My parents are divorced. My older sister, my mom and I are back living with my grandparents. My eldest sister has already moved out of home. My older sister and I share a room, the walls covered with her posters of South African “supergroup” Rabbit – remember them? – Donny Osmond, the Bay City Rollers and John Travolta. But we’re with Douglas for the weekend, away from the disapproval of my gran and her frightened middle-class conventions. In her world people didn’t sweat. They perspired. Douglas – a highly decorated World War II hero who was parachuted behind Japanese enemy lines in Burma, and who surely had what today would be diagnosed as chronic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – is drunkenly swerving down Musgrave Road, an upmarket avenue in what’s now the scrofulous port city of Durban. My sister and I are in his white Datsun 1600 SSS, which has replaced the Mini. My sister is in the front seat. I am on the black vinyl backseat. We’re on the way to the sad residential hotel he now calls home, where other grey ghosts are his housemates and where he may or may not be delighted to be living. Now he can drink to destruction without my mother’s censure. Addiction, alcoholism, isn’t called The Lonely Disease for fun. In its late stages, addiction is not about interacting with other soaks and druggies, it’s about being quietly left alone to get out of your head. Douglas’s drinking was too much for my mother. So was the 7
Dystopia.indd 7
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
Dystopia
Valium-popping that piggybacked on his alcoholism. And legend has it that when I was brought back from the hospital as a baby his response was an airy, indifferent wave from a deckchair on the lawn. Legend also has it that the print company where he worked as a lithographer – and this was in the beginning of the seventies, when firms were still paternal – was concerned by what they euphemistically termed his “health”. I think they suspected what was happening, but weren’t quite sure. So they gave him six months’ paid leave to “get well”. And like any good addict, Douglas had a six-month party, with the wine topped up by the Valium prescribed by our well-meaning but ignorant-as-fuck family doctor. In those days addiction – and I use the term throughout to include alcoholism too – was poorly understood. And demonised. Then addicts were almost universally held to be in much the same category as, oh, child molesters and members of the then-banned ANC. They still are sometimes, although addiction awareness is improving. Addicts are no longer universally held to be bad, wilful, morally bankrupt individuals. For years after his death from cirrhosis of the liver, a yellow, wasted spectre in a government hospital bed, I was told that my father died of a heart attack. Yet I remember Douglas as a sad, gentle man. One of those men to whom the label “misunderstood” is applied like Elastoplast. Douglas, who – when I was three or four, and terrified by summer thunderstorms – would lie next to me in my narrow little bed in the big house in Westville, an arm over me. Douglas, who’d take my sister and me shopping on Saturday mornings in his green Mini. Every Saturday I’d get a new Matchbox car. I used to vandalise those Matchbox cars, melting their plastic wheels over a hot stove plate. Douglas, who once – sad and alone and confused and drunk and hungry for his children – followed the swaggering yellow 1970 Mercury Cougar belonging to my first stepfather when my mother remarried. “Oh no, it’s Douglas,” I can hear my mother saying. “He’s behind us.” 8
Dystopia.indd 8
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
Douglas
The swaggering Cougar growled ahead, leaving Douglas’s Datsun trailing. The Douglas I remember bought my mother a pet shop in Westville, the town near Hillcrest where I spent the first years of my life. Douglas, my earthly father, the diseased dog-lover. Douglas, at whose funeral the minister was apparently prompted to say, “I hope Douglas has found the peace he was looking for.” Douglas. Whenever I think of him a line from Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth comes to mind. Even though Owen’s was a different war to Douglas’s. “And bugles calling for them from sad shires. / What candles may be held to speed them all?” Sad shires. Dales. Douglas’s ashes were scattered on the Yorkshire Dales, where he loved to walk with his dogs as a boy and then young man. I visited there a dozen years after his death for a disgracefully drunken family weekend. How my mother could have surrendered us into the weekend care of a full-blown alcoholic drinking at the wonderfully termed pre-fatal level, I don’t know. But I’m glad she did. On that weekend when I was just six, Douglas – even though he was an Anglican – pulled over his white Datsun at a Catholic church in Musgrave Road. In the cool and quiet of God’s House, Douglas knelt at a pew and clasped his hands to his head, my sister and I watching, not understanding. Three decades later I would be in the same church, praying for the same reasons. Now I’m seven. I am at home, sick, feverish in my bed in the middle-class house in Westville that Douglas has bought for my mother after the divorce. I am like the fictional Pink in Comfortably Numb. Through a sodden fever-dream I smell rather than see Douglas leaning over my little bed, with the Scalextric track on the floor. He smells of sweat and defeat and cigarettes. Rembrandt van Rijn. His brand. They’re still on sale, still in the nicotine-yellow box. He’s wearing a dark green, button-down shirt with stains around the armpits. He hands me a gift. A Lego diorama with 9
Dystopia.indd 9
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
Dystopia
astronauts. I tell him I already have one. I never saw Douglas again, except in my dreams. I was deemed too young to go his funeral a few months later.
10
Dystopia.indd 10
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
“Meet your new daddy”
“Meet your new daddy”
C H A P T ER
3
“Meet your new daddy” Uncle P-, my new stepfather, and my mother married during lunchtime. You have to love the triumph of optimism over experience that second marriages represent… I came home from Westville Primary School one day, home to the middle-class house with swimming pool and servants’ quarters that Douglas had bought for the family just before his death. Ellen, the old family housekeeper, had walked me home as usual. My mother smiled an air-hostess smile and said, “Uncle P- and I got married today.” Uncle P-, an Italian, called me “Tiger”, and had brought a TV, a white flokati rug and a matching white lounge suite when he moved into the house. The house that Douglas had bought. He had also brought a crude, monochromatic TV game. You could play one game one it – something called pelota. This was to be conjured with in the mid-seventies. And Uncle P- drove a yellow Ford Mercury Cougar, a big, burbling, menacing muscle car. I was happy at this. Young and easily bought and hungry for affection, I forgot Douglas, the war hero drinking himself to death in a sad hotel room, pissing in the sink, while I played pelota and 11
Dystopia.indd 11
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
Dystopia
watched my mother hold night-time swimming parties populated by countless, kaftan-wearing aunties and uncles, as all adults were addressed in the seventies. Soon afterwards, we moved to the arid little Free State farming town of Boshof, overshadowed by a massive sandstone NG Kerk. Uncle P- had relocated us there when he took over a small family hotel that smelt of stale food, spilt alcohol and gently decaying, dusty carpets. Then one day after we moved to Boshof, Uncle P-, flew into a rage. This time my mother’s face didn’t bear the brunt. He erupted into my bedroom, a volcano of wop rage, and by the tail picked up my first dog, Snoopy – a black-and-white pug-cross, with a Churchillian jaw-set – who was dozing on the carpet, and flung him by his tail out the ground-floor window. Onto the red concrete of the veranda outside. I didn’t like Uncle P- after that. He scared me. Even when he rented James Bond movies especially for me, and put up a white sheet as a screen in the hotel dining room that smelt of stale food. In fact, I should have been grateful to be packed off to boarding school 60 kilometres away in Kimberley. But it was too much for this little seven-year-old boy and, at the end of weekends at home in Boshof, I had to be dragged into the car, screaming and clutching onto doors and window ledges. My hatred of institutions was nourished here. These fortnightly performances became too taxing for my mother and me, and for a few months I was enrolled in Rooidakkies, the local school in Boshof. This was late-seventies South Africa, deep in Afrikaans territory – behind the Boerewors Curtain, as the expression goes. Yet the staff and some of the senior pupils cosseted and encouraged this frightened little blond rooinek boy. Every morning we’d stand in the quadrangle to sing the national anthem – Die Stem – and watch the South African flag being hoisted. Then it would be into the main hall, glowered over by a portrait of Dr Nicolaas Diederichs, the one-time state president and a former pupil at the school. At least once a week there was rugby practice. In a world where 12
Dystopia.indd 12
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
“Meet your new daddy”
dominating a stupid oblong ball was held sacred, attendance was compulsory. I’d lie outrageously and inventively to get out of it, and spend the afternoon in the little local library, which amazingly had some of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books and a side order of hardcover Tintin comics. Time and again I’d turn to the scene in Tintin in Tibet, where Tintin and Captain Haddock – Kaptein Sardyn in Afrikaans, I learnt in later years – are playing chess after dinner one evening. For me that crystallised the domestic serenity I dreamed of. A stranger in a strange land indeed.
13
Dystopia.indd 13
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
Another new daddy
Dystopia
C H A P T ER
4
Another new daddy My mother’s second marriage quickly disintegrated. Years later I’d learn of how Uncle P-’s fists would fly like a threshing machine. I didn’t know this at the time. But I do remember loading into my mother’s green VW 412 estate – “The Green Mamba”, we children called it – one frigid Free State morning for the long journey back to Durban to stay with my grandparents. Again. And once more my older sister and I shared a room at my grandparents’, her half again festooned with posters of TV stars such as Farrah Fawcett-Majors from Charlie’s Angels and Eric Estrada from CHiPs. My grandmother was all middle-class Anglo piety and respectability, who insisted on calling her snuffling Pekinese “my children”. What she thought of her eldest daughter’s perpetually disintegrating marriages I don’t know. But I suspect it was WASP-y disapproval. My grandfather was an Afrikaner and terribly proud of it. As a young train driver he’d been a dark and dashing rake. Looking at early pictures, I could see my grandfather not as a stooped pensioner with leather sandals and long socks and a vegetable garden that never yielded more than sad lettuces and stunted carrots for all his 14
Dystopia.indd 14
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
Another new daddy
efforts, but a saturnine young man, a wolf of dance halls. It was rumoured that my deeply Anglo gran’s marriage to an unabashed Afrikaner had caused great family consternation. Meanwhile, I was back at Westville Primary School, a lonely little boy who’d sometimes get into terrible playground fights if he ever ventured out of the Tintin-stocked library during break, and who would try hide that he didn’t go home to a normal, nuclear family. Soon my mother met another man. Perhaps she was lonely. Perhaps she wanted a father figure for her children. Like my first stepfather, he was another Italian. He was also involved in a job related to textiles. And he had the same first name. My mother soon got engaged, and weekends were spent at his five-acre smallholding in leafy Hillcrest. There were horses at the smallholding. And I had use of a pellet gun, a big old BSA monstrosity the size and weight of a Lee-Enfield. A new life called, and a wedding – my mother’s third – quickly followed at Uncle P-’s Hillcrest house, where his parents had now moved into a cottage especially built for them on the grounds. It wasn’t long, though, before cracks started to show. At first my mother would spend all day with Uncle P- and his two daughters and me at dusty horseshows where Uncle P- jumped. Then she’d join us in time for morning tea. Very soon she wouldn’t come at all. Uncle P- was short and, now that I look back, a strutting bullyrooster. Once he took me aside in the garage to tell me the truth about Douglas, my father. Douglas hadn’t died of a heart attack as went the version launched for public consumption. (Remember, when Douglas died in 1977 alcoholism was held to be shameful, sordid, self-inflicted condition, not a disease. It still is in some circles.) Uncle P-, I think, told me this less out of paternal altruism. More out of emotional terrorism and abuse. In fact, the same little man later delighted in telling that once Douglas wanted to slaughter the family. But my mother’s brother – my boorish bachelor uncle – came and took the rifle away. This was again hotly denied by my mother, and never confirmed by any other source. The same little man told jokes about South African Indians 15
Dystopia.indd 15
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
Dystopia
– Pillays, Reddys and Naidoos – with an exaggerated, parodied accent that was meant to induce mirth but didn’t. The same little man drove a vulgar American sports car, a Pontiac TransAm – I didn’t yet know the term “penis extension” – and mocked me for being a “bookworm”. A foul and flabby thing in his greaserimmed world of “proper” work and “real” men. And the same little man beat my mother time and again. I have an amber-crystallised memory of her head banging against something – the lounge door, I think – while I huddled in my bedroom in the Hillcrest house, in my pine bed with the duvet with brown-and-white geometric patterns. With the pillow over my head I cried softly, too scared to go out and tell Uncle P- to stop. Today shouting still scares me. Today I still sleep with a pillow over my head. Years later, my mother – who was always so careful to deify Douglas, my father – told me about those beatings. About the time my stepfather held a .22 revolver against her pelvis in bed and said he’d shoot her there. So she wouldn’t die. Just be crippled. I was delighted when they got divorced.
16
Dystopia.indd 16
2013/06/06 1:52 PM
dystopia4 1
2013/06/03 5:16 PM