Dead Before Dying

On the porch teenagers sat in an uneasy, self-conscious no- man’s-land between childhood and adulthood. Joubert noted them briefly because their clumsy attempts to appear at ease betrayed them. They had transgressed. He concentrated until he realized what they were trying to hide: the glasses on the porch table were filled with forbidden contents. Two, three years ago he would’ve smiled about it, recalled his own stormy adolescent years. But now he simply withdrew the feelers again.

He joined the circle of men around the fire. Each one’s passport to the group was a glass in the hand. Everyone stared at the lamb that, naked and without dignity, was turning on Stoffberg’s spit.

“Jesus, Mat, but you’re big,” Wessels, the press photographer, said when Joubert came to stand next to him.

“Didn't you know he’s Murder and Robbery’s secret weapon?” Myburgh, Bellville’s traffic chief, asked from across the fire. His luxuriant mustache bounced with each word.

Joubert’s facial muscles tightened, showed his teeth in a mechanical smile.

“Ya, he’s their mobile roadblock,” said Storridge, the businessman. They laughed respectfully.

Casual cracks and remarks were tossed back and forth across the sizzling lamb, all of it aware of and careful about Joubert’s two-year-old loss— brotherly, friendly, fruitless attempts to rouse his quiescent spirit.

The conversation took a quiet turn. Stoffberg turned the spit and injected the browning meat with a secret sauce, like a doctor with a patient. Sport, quasi-sexual jokes, communal work problems. Joubert shook a Winston out of a packet in his shirt pocket. He offered it around. A lighter flared.

Members of the circle at the fire came and went. Stoffberg turned the spit and checked the progress of the meat. Joubert accepted another beer, fetched another a while later. The women’s kitchen activities had decreased. They had spilled over into the adjacent television room.

Outside, the conversation was geared to Stoffberg’s lamb.

“No use giving it another injection, Stoffs. It’s dead.”

“I'’ve got to eat before sunrise, Stoff. I have to open shop tomorrow.”

“No way. This liddle lamb will only be ready in February.”

“By that time it’ll be mutton dressed as lamb.”

Joubert’s eyes followed the conversation from face to face but he took no part. Quiet, that’s how they knew him. Even before Lara’s death he hadn't been a great talker.

The children’s voices became softer, the men’s louder. Stoffberg sent a courier to give the guests a call. The tempo of the party changed. The women called the children and walked out with plates laden with side dishes to where Stoffberg had started carving the lamb.

Joubert sucked at a Castle while he waited his turn. The alcohol had misted his senses. He wasn'’t hungry but ate out of habit and politeness at a garden table with the other men.

Music started up inside, the teenagers rocked. Joubert offered cigarettes again. Women fetched men to dance. The music grew steadily older but the decibels didn't. Joubert got up so as not to be left alone outside and grabbed another beer on the way to the living room.

Stoffberg had replaced the room’s ordinary bulbs with colored lights. Writhing bodies were bathed in a muted glow of red and blue and yellow. Joubert sat in the dining room, from where he had a view of the dancers. Wessels’s short body jerked spasmodically in imitation of Elvis. The movements of the teenagers were more subtle. Dancing past a red light, the body of Storridge’s pretty, slender wife was briefly backlit. Joubert looked away, saw the daughter of the house, Yvonne Stoffberg, her breasts bouncing youthfully under a tight T-shirt. Joubert lit another cigarette.

Myburgh’s fat wife asked Joubert for a traditional waltz. He agreed. She guided him skillfully past the other couples. When the music changed, she smiled sympathetically and let him go. He fetched another Castle. The tempo of the music slowed. Dancers moved closer to one another, entered the evening’s new phase.

Joubert walked outside to empty his bladder. The garden lights had been switched off. The coals under the remains of the lamb were still a glowing red. He walked to a corner of the garden, relieved himself and walked back. A shooting star fell above the dark roof of the Stoffbergs’ house. Joubert stopped and looked up at the sky, saw only darkness.

“Hi, Mat.”

She suddenly appeared next to him, a nymphlike shadow of the night.

“I can call you that, can’t I? I'’ve done with school.” She stood silhouetted against the light of the back door, her rounded young curves molded by T-shirt and pants.

“Sure,” he said hesitantly, surprised. She came closer, into the protected space of his loneliness.

“You didn't dance with me once, Mat.”

He stood rooted to the earth, uncertain, stupefied by seven Castles and so many months of soul-searing introspection. He folded his arms protectively.

She put her hand on his arm. The tip of her left breast lightly touched his elbow.

“You were the only man here tonight, Mat.”

Dear God, he thought, this is my neighbor’s daughter. He recalled the contents of the teenagers’ glasses on the porch.

“Yvonne . . .”

“Everybody calls me Bonnie.”

For the first time he looked at her face. Her eyes were fixed on him, shining, passionate, and purposeful. Her mouth was a fruit, ripe, slightly open. She was no longer a child.

Joubert felt the fear of humiliation move in him.

Then his body spoke softly to him, a rusty moment that came and went, reminding his crotch of the rising pleasures of the past. But his fear was too great. He didn't know whether that kind of life had died in him. It was more than two years . . . He wanted to check her. He unlocked his arms, wanting to push her away.

She interpreted his movements differently, moved between his hands, pulled him closer, pressed her wet mouth to his. Her tongue forced open his lips, fluttered. Her body was against his, her breasts pinpoints of warmth.

In the kitchen someone called a child and alarms broke through Mat Joubert’s rise upward, toward life. He pushed her away and immediately started toward the kitchen.

“I’m sorry,” he said over his shoulder without knowing why.

“I'’ve done with school, Mat.” There was no reproach in her voice.

He walked to his house like a refugee, his thoughts focused on his destination, not on what lay behind him. There were cheers announcing the New Year. Fireworks, even a trumpet.

His house. He walked past trees and shrubs and flowerbeds that Lara had made, struggled with the lock, went down the passage to the bedroom. There stood the bed in which he and Lara had slept. This was her wardrobe, empty now. There hung the painting she’d bought at the flea market in Green Point. The jailers of his captivity, the guards of his cell.

He undressed, pulled on the black shorts, threw off the blankets, and lay down.

He didn't want to think about it.

But his elbow still felt the unbelievable softness, her tongue still entered his mouth.

Two years and three months after Lara’s death. Two years and three months.