‘And I said, sure, I see that things can work this way — but I don’t think they should.’
‘You’ll have to get used to it, Nev.’
‘Or not. For the first time in years, I’ve been thinking I might be better off in England, somewhere the world meets my expectations more closely. But I’m not even sure about that. Everything seems harder to manage these days, and stranger. Perhaps it’s part of getting old.’
‘Wait till you’re my age,’ she said. ‘I can hardly follow what people are saying any more. My ears are nearly as bad as my eyes. I was watching telly the other night and I thought I’d flipped over to the wrong channel. It looked like a quiz show from Bulgaria or something. And then I recognized that chappie from Strictly Come Dancing and I realized they were speaking English.’
I’m growing into my father’s language: it will fit me eventually like his old overcoat that was once two sizes too big.
We went inside. An aide came with a wheelchair, but she wanted to walk. ‘Arrive in one of those and God knows what you’ll leave in.’ The lobby had a low, subtly shadowed ceiling, bloated sofas in private corners and paintings steeped in lukewarm pools of light. The wrought-iron tables and chairs belonged to the coffee shop. It felt more like a hotel than a clinic. We made for the lifts in baby steps. I realized again how much she’s shrunk over the years, she barely reaches my shoulder. Clinging to my arm, and blinking in wonder as she looked around, she seemed like a delicate child being taken on an outing to cheer her up.
Dr Jacobson had his own waiting room. There were pot plants with enormous leaves, which proved to be real, and posters showing the human eye in cross section. It brought back bits and pieces of my long-forgotten school Biology, the rods and cones, the blind spot, the aqueous humour.
I looked at the man on the cover of Longevity. His age was a mystery to me.
‘Do you ever do popcorn?’ my mother asked earnestly. ‘In the microwave?’
The nurse behind the counter tensed.
‘No …’
‘Good, because it’s making people sick. Popcorn lung.’
‘Popcorn lung!’
‘You get it from exposure to microwaved popcorn, the artificial butter flavour, to be precise. It’s a completely new affliction.’
‘Talk about death, disability and dread disease! The insurers must be reeling.’
‘You can laugh, but it’s the scourge of our times, every bit as horrible as consumption.’
Janie emailed to say she’d posted her first impressions on her blog. As soon as the article was done, she’d let me know. She’d looked again at my thresholders — they were more like gatekeepers, to be frank, just a thought — and for all the lack of drama in the pictures, found them engaging. They had a cumulative effect.
Had I heard of gate trauma? A dozen South Africans are killed by electronic gates every year. Closing gates cause a third of the fatalities, while falling gates account for the rest.
Some thoughts about the dead letters, btw: ‘You’re making them up. Heard it on the grapevine. So the ethical question — Whose letters? — yields to an aesthetic one — How convincing are they? Well done on clearing that hurdle. I picture you bent over your bench like a monk, with a stack of antique stationery under your fist and an old airmail sticker on the tip of your tongue, stuff you’ve been hoarding for ever and at last have a use for. Pretending to be someone you’re not, inventing signatures for your alter egos, making up weird handwritings and breaking English into little pieces.’
The digital grapevine: now there’s a poisoned plant. I wrote back: ‘Would hate to be accused of authenticity, but don’t believe everything you hear in the whispering galleries of the internet. No one knows about the dead letters except you and Leora, whose lips are sealed.’ It didn’t seem appropriate to mention my mother.
The first impressions were cut to a pop song, perhaps one of her own. The tune burbled along like a cellphone ringing underwater. Small animated shrieks zipped out and faded like rockets, while larger groans thumped in the bottom of the pot like root vegetables. Antoine K’s shanty town and Aurelia Mashilo’s palazzo. Street corners, flyovers rushing closer, bursting into the slipstream like surf, letterboxes, shrubbery, an ejaculation of soapsuds across a dirty windscreen, a braid coiled on the pavement like a house snake, capering children, here and there against a scudding backdrop my solemn profile, my double chin, my hands on the steering wheel, steering. The designated driver. Neville the Navigator.
I went to see Saul Auerbach. This was a few years after the walkabout at the Pollak, where I’d failed to introduce myself; and a few years before my late start at the Switch Box, where I showed my photos of walls. I took some of those prints with me, the first I ever made, thinking I might ask Auerbach to look at them, let him cast a beady eye or a blessing. But when I drew up outside the house in Craighall Park, it seemed presumptuous and I left the pictures in the car.
Still at the same address after all these years. People take root in places, it gets to the point where they cannot imagine being anywhere else and it’s too much trouble to move.
Auerbach came to the gate in his trademark khaki shorts (as the papers would put it) and a worn pair of combat boots. He was smaller, bonier and browner than I remembered.
Another visitor was just leaving, a tall man of about sixty wearing a fawn linen suit, impeccably crumpled, and a doffable panama with rising damp on the crown. We shook hands on the pavement — Matti Someone-or-other, a photojournalist from Finland — and then he got into an Audi with Budget stickers in the windows and drove away. An intrepid explorer with an expense account and a hotel room in Sandton. You could imagine that he had just got off a paddle steamer, but not that he would die soon of a fever.
As Auerbach ground beans for the espresso machine, the aromatic details of my last visit to his house swirled into my head. The place had not changed much in twenty years, but whereas I had felt then that I was stepping back in time, now I seemed to be lurching forward. I glanced into the lounge to see if the Swedish chrome and Afghan kilims were still there. That archaic term ‘futuristic’ came into my head. It was not that fashion had caught up with the house, but that the house had gone on ahead. Quotation was a curse. It was no longer possible to imagine a different future, let alone a better one. Tomorrow always looked like a recycled version of yesterday. It was already familiar.
When we were seated in the garden at opposite ends of a long wrought-iron table, the espresso cups steaming before us, mine host in the full glare of the sun, toasting himself lightly, yours truly in the shade of a frangipani, I reminded him about that day.
‘Your father was worried you were smoking pot,’ he said, ‘and I soon began to think it might be worse, although I had no idea what I was meant to do about it. You were so silent and morose for a young man.’
A strange impression I must have made, a boy dressed like a professor, chewing on a pipe with a plumber’s bend and fouling the air with my ditch-digger’s tobacco, brooding.
‘His real concern was that I would end up sweeping the streets, which then marked the bottom of the scale,’ I said. ‘He looked to you to set me on a brighter career path.’
‘Obviously worked,’ Auerbach said with a grim laugh. When I called to arrange the visit, I’d mentioned that I was a photographer.
There was not much left of the day in Auerbach’s memory. What for me had been a revelation, had for him been another working shift, only slightly out of the routine. He remembered Veronica and Mrs Ditton, of course, he remembered the photographs; and that it was poor old Gerald Brookes, whose ticker packed up in a hotel room somewhere back in the ’90s, who’d started the game with the houses up on Langermann Kop. But he’d forgotten that I was also there. ‘Look, it was a long time ago,’ he said, ‘but was that really all the same day?’