It is late. The moon is riding high. The little lanterns sway in the warm breeze. They get up. He brushes his warm hand swiftly over her neck. Maria in the course of this night derives pleasure from the self-same Daisy Duck mouth, which he applies with surprising skill, and from the texture of his skin, and from his dark eyes, which in the semi-darkness smoulder in his head like spent coals. (Radioactive deposit.)
*
Her first thought the next morning is that today she’ll have to help manage, or solve, Benjy’s problematic situation, and that she’s not looking forward to it.
Why can’t he, like so many other children (the children of friends, for instance) lead a simple, reasonably successful, reasonably happy life? Ever since she can remember, he has constantly been in some sort of fix. Either he’s bamboozling somebody or he’s being bamboozled by someone. She’s not even sure what his sexual orientation is. She doesn’t know if he’s sure himself. Truth to tell, she’s never thought of him as a particularly sexual being (no time for sex between all his plotting and planning). And how would she know? Twenty-seven years old and he’s never given any indication of any passionate feelings for anybody. Once again — how would she know? What does the parent know about the hidden erotic life of the child and vice versa? Perhaps she’s always misread the signs. Denial. Is a parent supposed to feel sorry for a child? He’s never been lacking in initiative. It’s just that his initiatives are generally unwise, often with catastrophic consequences.
This morning there’s an additional problem. Maria has hardly left home, when spunky Joy Park, the designated guardian of her house and worldly possessions, serves notice that she’s ill. She thinks it’s serious. She’s been having severe pain of late, and she’s going for a series of tests today. The results, Maria realises, can have far-reaching consequences for her role as keeper of her house. If Joy Park, for whatever reason, can no longer keep an eye on her house, she’ll have to return to Durban earlier, and that she does not want to do.
Maria meets Benjy in a café in Cape Town. How her maternal heart warms to him when she embraces him! She is glad to see him. He’s always had something disarming about him, which wrings her heart and breaks down her defences. So plucky, so bravely on the make, and yet so vulnerable. He’s wearing a striped T-shirt, baggy, calf-length shorts and running shoes. (She hopes his underpants are clean — Benjy’s never maintained a particularly high standard of hygiene.) But this morning there’s something else about him. He’s changed since she saw him a few months ago. Whereas since his twenties she’s never seen him as a teenager but also not yet as a man — indeterminate, everything about him so indeterminate, as if he didn’t want to commit to adulthood — this morning his masculine embodiment strikes her as less ambivalent. He seems taller, his arms seem stronger and hairier. And it startles her slightly to see signs of dark chest-hair peering out above the neck of his shirt. When did that happen?! His father has no chest-hair (ambitious opportunist and fucking insufferable charmer that he is). The child has definitely acquired firmer sexual definition. That at least is gratifying. Whatever comes next.
But in spite of his physically less ambivalent embodiment, his talk is still frustratingly clumsy. How is it that an intelligent, articulate child can choose to make himself so hard to understand? There’s nothing wrong with his linguistic abilities. He was uttering full sentences at the age of eleven months. Now there is this linguistic regression, as if the coordination between his brain and tongue is malfunctioning. It must be a deliberate, strategic choice, this abysmal verbal projection of himself. (Possibly even an ideological choice.) Part of a strategy to disarm his opponent: frustrate him, confuse him, subvert his expectations. It’s not going to be of any use to upbraid him or to get impatient — he’s the most counter-impressionable person she knows. His hair is also darker, she notes. Good hair, thick and curly. And the appealing eyes, speckled like quail’s eggs. Is she concentrating on his best qualities, as if she’s weighing up the child’s chances on the relationship or marriage market? Does she want Benjy to come into his own in a constructive relationship? A good woman, man, whatever, somebody who will care for him body and soul? Apparently yes. So that she need stress about him less and live in peace and ultimately die in peace.
How are you? she asks. He is evasive. No, he’s okay. (No point in putting it off any longer.) What’s the matter, she asks him, what’s the problem?
He’s actually like in this business, this kind of venture that you can call a business but it’s not actually that either, anyway he and two other guys like sort of initiated it, he’ll take her there, the premises are shit great, it’s actually shit hot and the prospects are like massive, if they only, if only actually, if it wasn’t for, it’s like vast, the possibilities are endless, it’s just sort of these initial stumbling blocks, as in obstacles, just worse. But it’s actually sort of like an ideal opportunity.
From this she deduces, she says, that he’s started a kind of business, that he started it along with two other persons, that the premises are promising, that the prospects are good if only they can overcome a few initial stumbling blocks. (Stumbling blocks — to be expected when Benjy gets involved in anything.)
Where is this business and what is its nature? she asks him. It’s a warehouse in an industrial area, he says, sort of just south of the docks but actually like on the Foreshore if you just keep going on the main road, a warehouse that they’re renting and they actually deal in sort of recycled paper that they then want to distribute, they now have like the space they must just actually get a few other things in place.
Who is financing this? she asks. It was actually sort of fine but then the two other guys like pulled out. Now he has to on his own like shell out the money if they want to actually carry on with the project, he replies.
Benjy has once again, for the umpteenth time, been bamboozled by swindlers and sharpers and snake-oil salesmen. Or he’s acted on impulse without ensuring that he had the necessary indemnifying contracts.
What is the estimated loss? (No point in making a hullabaloo about it now. After all, it’s only money that’s at stake.)
‘But it’s sort of not all,’ he says suddenly.
‘What else?’
‘It’s sort of that there are guys after me. It’s that there are people who are as in out to wipe me out.’
‘What do you mean — wipe you out?’
‘Well. Sort of to take me out.’
‘What do you mean — take you out?’
‘Ma,’ says Benjy, ‘there are guys who are threatening to kill me. And they are sort of serious.’
The dominion of the cloven-hoofed
THE DOMINION OF THE CLOVEN-HOOFED is the dominion of the Headman. And the swine’s head there is the effigy of his god. The Headman rules over this empire of the cloven-hoofed — those in human as well as in animal guise. The Headman is the deputy of the swine god and his chief executive officer. The swine god issues instructions and the Headman executes them. The Headman is without conscience, without pity, without mercy.
The end is nigh! The end is nigh!
THAT AFTERNOON, SLIGHTLY GROGGY from painkillers, Karl thinks now he can no longer put it off. Now he has to read Iggy’s report all the way through. Whether he feels up to it or not. In spite of his lethargy, he takes the neatly typed pages and carries on reading with anxious foreboding.