She pulled her hand free. ‘Why not?’
‘Damn, is that a proposal?’
‘Don’t be such a wanker, Roy. You can be so mean. Jesus.’
‘No, but seriously, I mean… uh…’ Her reaction had caught me off guard. My assumption was that we were at an equal distance with the thing. The sex thing. I hadn’t yet considered our actual relationship.
‘So what you’re saying is that you expect me to be fucking you and Gerald at the same time?’
‘No, not at all. No. But, but you guys have been… I mean, you did for quite a while, nè?’
‘We did.’ She was bolt upright now, arms folded. ‘But it didn’t work out that good. And we stopped. And…’
‘And?’
‘You stupid fuck.’ She punched me, hard, on the arm. ‘You’re just fucking me, aren’t you?’
I spluttered.
‘Jesus, you are. Of course you are. You don’t give a shit about me, do you?’ She was raging now, heat pulsing off her forehead, clouds breaking in her eyes.
‘No, Beatrice, you need to understand. I don’t give a shit about anyone. I never have. I’m just trying to get through here.’
‘Oh fuck. Thanks a lot. You can drop me off here, Roy, right here.’ We were on the cusp of Linden, a good couple of hours’ walk from the farm. She yanked on the door handle and it sprung open as we drove.
‘No, B, no, that didn’t come out right. That’s not what I meant. I meant… I meant…’ She glared at me furiously. ‘I meant that I’m so fucked I’ve never been able to have a relationship. Ever. I just wasn’t expecting one now. I don’t even know if I’m capable of…’
‘I can answer that for you. Stop the car. STOP THE FUCKING CAR!’ She screamed into my ear, at my eardrum, which stretched to pop. I braked and she bolted. ‘Just fuck off, Roy. Go be alone if that’s what you want.’
I circled a few Linden blocks, berating myself for being such a fool. Firstly, for tossing away another driving blow job, a quirky and not unpleasant experience, and secondly, for putting the cruel steel on the only person left in the world willing and able to screw me, and, more importantly, hold my hand.
Maybe, I rationalised as I turned another corner, surprised again not to find Beatrice’s stomping form, I was actually jealous of Gerald. Maybe I was too much of a South African male to be able to express my anxiety, and so her slightly cruel raising of his name as she was lowering got me scared and I reacted emotionally, etc., etc.
I drove up and down Barry Hertzog a few times – criss-crossing the side roads as I went – expecting to find her. But I didn’t.
As I drove I remembered a story my dad told me about how Hertzog was named after James Barry, the South African surgeon general and British frontier military doctor, because he, Hertzog, was a result of – or his family somehow was involved in – Barry’s introduction of the Caesarean section to South Africa. And how the Hertzogs, on naming their son, were completely unaware that Dr Barry was actually a hermaphrodite who had lived his entire life with undiscovered female genitalia. I loved that story as a child. It gave me goosebumps to think I knew this little snippet of history, a piece of us that no one around me perceived.
‘Female genitalia, huh!’ Russle, beaming, concluded with a thump on my knee. ‘Imagine that, Roy, just imagine.’ Knee thump, beam. ‘You go through a lifetime in the army with a punani and nobody notices? Imagine!’
Beatrice had vanished. She must have ducked across Victory Park. (Which victory was that? I asked myself, thinking again of my father and the paucity of his historical knowledge – Dr Barry’s punani was all he had.) I crashed the 4x4 through the low wooden railings into the park, skirted a few trees, examined the trickle of the Braamfontein Spruit – with no success. I got out and walked. I yelled out her name, feeling strangely conspicuous. A free pig checked me out from a distance. We held eye contact for a few seconds and then he turned back into the bush.
Nothing.
I thought of Angie and it stopped me dead. I tried to count how long it had been since she had even occurred to me. Months. Several months. At least. The thought of her occupied my mind as I drove back to Houghton, having given up on locating Beatrice, who clearly did not want to be found. I hoped she didn’t have to deal with too many animals on her journey back. It was a long walk.
Things weren’t the same between Beatrice and me after that. They weren’t the same between her and Gerald either, nor between me and Gerald. It was, of course, of bloody fucking course, a classic love triangle, straight out of the Hollywood script machine.
We covered ourselves in silence and functional tasks.
We spoke to others and got on with whatever we could.
We watched Beatrice’s belly grow, following Andile’s and Babalwa’s before her. We were all affected, those outside the triangle as much as those in it. Despite the careful planning, we had three babies in the works and no one had yet jerked off into a cup.
Watching the belly grow, something of mine baking inside it, I drifted further and further back into the past, latching onto smells and sights and riding their resonance into my teenage and childhood years. Flashcard memories of life as a very young child. The smell of the rain. The smell of my father’s cricket bat, unused, but always leaking the strange odour of his previous life. The light, woolly fragrance of my first kiss. Girls’ underwear. Trees bending in the wind, signalling September. Tobacco. The sharp stink of my old man’s cigarettes and then, in turn, the charming cloud of my own first inhalations. Life passing. Life smelling. Life taking shape, without ever taking form.
CHAPTER 41
You had it and you didn’t want it
As the babies arrived we all became like the weaver bird. Plucking and binding and stripping and threading an endless series of domestic compulsions. Now, our only reason was to keep it all going. We were governed by an arcing, noble aim. We lost the need to do anything else. To even think about anything else. We shut the horizon down and focused on the farm, and yes, there were rewards. Many, in fact.
The weaver, by the way, stayed in that tree, building and tearing down. I never saw a mate or an egg or a baby bird or anything. Just a weaver and his nests, falling as regularly as they went up. A never-ending procession of weaver engineering, with no end result.
I would sit and watch him after hours, in the early mornings or whenever I caught a break. Each year as spring broke the first descending helicopter leaves would announce his arrival. Each year my excitement grew, my hopes for him compounding annually. The second year I laughed. Teased him. Mocked a little. I presumed he would sort it out and his wife would descend from wherever weaver wives descend, and finally the family would progress and nest.
But it didn’t happen.
I stopped teasing and began encouraging and as soon as I started that the whole thing developed a level of pathos I was unprepared for. The weaver and I were now somehow bound together. Our trajectories and ambitions had accidentally meshed. I began to urge him on out loud. Come on guy, what’s the problem?
The thought of his life being as futile and directionless as mine, the thought of him failing at the single clear objective of his existence…
Eish.
After Roy Jnr came Andile and Javas’s Thabang, then Jabulani, the result of Beatrice and my awkward union. The three babies created a natural realignment of labour. To wit: heavy shit for the men, cooking and cleaning for the ladies.
At the agency, baby ads were always the easiest. We would rattle them off, always targeting the fathers, who held the metaphorical key to purchase decisions. The change of life. The embracing of responsibility. That bright little future all tucked up in your big manly hands. The time when a man must do what a man must do.