Like it Matters

by David Cornwell

  “Maybe.”

  “So then share with us, please.”

  “No, thanks,” I say

  And I might be imagining it, but it seems like the crowd grumbles a bit at me.

  “You must,” calls out the American girl from the back of the room. “It’s part of the help process.”

  Everyone claps.

  “But I can’t go after that,” I say. “I don’t think anyone should.”

  “Everyone’s equal in the eyes of the Lord,” Tom says. “Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid, I’m trying to be respectful.”

  “Oh, come,” Tom says, and he makes praying hands and cocks his head to one side. “Don’t you have a story?”

  “Ja, I do,” I say. “And if I tell it I might end up in jail.”

  And, it’s quite thrilling—I realise I’m going to keep talking even if I don’t know what I’m going to say next …

  “Anyway, it’s boring. It’s fucking boring. I mean, I know what’s wrong with me, of course I do. But it doesn’t stop me. Knowing it doesn’t stop me. Isn’t that fucking wicked, Tom? What kind of cunt made me that way?”

  He half-closes his eyes and he tries to talk again, but I cut him off, it surprises me how violently I do it—

  “Tom, I swear to god if you say something about bearing my cross or how Jesus died for my choices or something like that, I swear to god I’ll walk out of here and kill the first nun that crosses my path. Okay? Here, take this,” I say

  And I give the football to a pretty cool-looking old guy in a Hawaiian shirt sitting next to me, who just says, “Pass” then hands the ball back to Pastor Tom.

  “Fuck sakes!” I shout. “Why couldn’t I do that?”

  “Because we know Rudi,” Tom says. “And we trust him.”

  And so after me, all that happens is Tom struggles through a long, long prayer—I’ve curdled the crowd and I feel bad about it—and then everyone stands up and heads off to the tables in the back to load up on coffee sachets and sugar packets.

  I leave very quickly, bumping into people on my way out because I don’t want to look up and meet any eyes

  And then I’m outside, and the sun bouncing off the tarmac reminds me I’ve got a headache and then I head through the gate and up Greatmore Street, hearing the names of five different drugs shouted at me as I do the block—almost like I had a lot of friends on this street, and a lot of nicknames.

  How’s that woman with the daughters going to make it up the road?

  How does she get out of bed?

  Shop, eat, put on clothes?

  I reach the corner and my headache’s moved behind my eyes, and it’s hot, I’m sweating in my hairline and I can taste sweat around my lips. Main Road is crazy—it’s lunchtime rush hour, buses and taxis filled with schoolkids, all that precious cargo carried between so much glass and steel, through so much noise and peril—

  I wait for the green man and I go find a bit of shade under the overhang outside the KFC and I stand there for a while and it’s good—all of a sudden things don’t have as much of a grinding edge.

  My headache subsides, and when I pay attention again, I realise I’m staring at a bum lying in the shade under the overhang.

  Wild beard.

  Long hair.

  Pale eyes, friendly kind of face—

  Grow up, Ed.

  You can’t let every rough old dude make you think about him.

  Then, from nowhere, there’s this breeze, cool and feathery on my skin

  And it’s so perfectly clear—

  I know where I’ve got to go—

  And I cross over Roodebloem Road while the red man’s flashing and I keep going down Main, past the fashion shops and the laundromats and the hardware stores and the secondhand car yards and the fisheries and the fast-food places, past men in overalls and reflector vests and schoolkids in their track-suits and bursts of pigeons and older kids smoking and kissing in alleyways and so many women in suits and headscarves smoking outside the factories, lots of them beautiful and shy to look at me, past people minding their shoes as they step into nice cars and drive off, past people with nowhere else to be but lying on the pavement under the sun—

  All the way till I get to the cemetery out in front of Groote Schuur.

  The old gate, the frilly one that opens onto Main Road, has a padlock on it so rusted you’d never get a key in there. But just a bit further down from the gate, I see a bit of the hedge’s been flattened, and the fence’s had a couple of its metal stakes broken out. Someone tried to patch it up with chicken wire but now that’s also broken

  And it’s easy to duck through.

  The light is harsh in the graveyard, clean and hot, and blinding when it bounces back off the headstones. The light feels wrong—too factual for a sacred place. Some of the headstones are big and ornate and they’ve got beautiful things carved on them, but mostly it’s very sad—unwatered, unkempt, the graves swamped with packets and newspaper and bits of metal and glass and bright pieces of plastic, takeaway containers and whatever else the southeaster whips in from Main Road.

  I think, Not even if you were a ghost and you were buried here.

  You wouldn’t visit.

  And I start to feel it, for the first time, the full weight of knowing that—unless they just sent him up a chimney—my dad probably ended up in a place that looks just like this, probably worse.

  Would they even have been able to put a name on the headstone?

  Like I’m running to be sick, I search and I find an unmarked grave—a rough concrete slab that might’ve had something etched on it once but not anymore—and I kneel down in front of it and I start to cry. Bitter tears, violent sobs—

  And the sun’s coming off the dust and my vision’s swimming and I’m either going to throw up or I’m going to say something, I’m going to shout something

  And then—

  The same way a TV station can suddenly appear out of hopeless static—

  An old, old memory starts playing through …

  It’s my tenth birthday and it’s the long summer holidays. My dad’s been coughing for months but obviously he hasn’t seen anybody about it—and then that day he wakes up and he’s so weak he can’t talk, he has to scrawl me a note saying:

  Call Dr B!!!

  His room really smells like a sick person and I can’t stand it, I go and wait barefoot in the road for Doctor Benyon to come. He was the good doctor in town—we only saw him sometimes; if we were just a bit sick we’d go somewhere else—and he comes in a hurry, with a fat leather satchel on his shoulder and pens and syringes sticking out the pocket of his shirt. I follow him inside, right to the door of my father’s room.

  “You can come inside,” he says.

  “No, thanks,” I tell him, and he goes in and I sit outside the door and lean my head on the thin wood and listen.

  In the beginning, only Doctor Benyon talks.

  But he must’ve given my dad something on his way in, because soon after my dad revives, and I can hear his voice, also there, muffled and buzzing on the wood against my ear.

  Now I hear it again, and I know what it is—his voice is full of drugs.

  But at ten years old it just sounds thick, and strange, and so unfamiliarly calm that I worry he’s never going to be the same again. The doctor barks and barks at my dad—basically trying to humiliate him into improving his health, giving him a long list of stuff he can and can’t do, what he should and shouldn’t eat. I run to my room and write down everything I can remember.

  The doctor leaves and I go into my dad’s room. In a way, he looks like shit—he’s pale and drawn, it looks like he’s got two black eyes—but what I can’t deal with, what’s scary, is how happy he looks. How serene. And he’s talking in soft, warm sentences that his eyes follow as if he can actually see the words flowing out his mouth and swirling in the air around the bed. His hand’s heavy on my head, his fingers clumsy in my hair.

  He passes out soon
after and I lie on the bed next to him and start doing this weird thing I did a lot when I was a kid—well, I’d go through spells of doing it a lot—I curl up in a ball and bite the tough skin on my shoulder, not breaking the skin, but keeping that pain prolonged

  Until I wake up with a bruise and go find my dad. He’s milling around the house—just acting like everything’s normal. His old voice is back. He doesn’t want to talk about what the doctor said and when I give him the note I’d made he just throws it in the bin and tells me, “He already gave me pills. They’ll work.”

  And, I see it now—

  It’s the first day of my life that my natural pity for my dad turns angry, and on the spot I concoct this crafty revenge scheme—the kind of thing I hope I’m not capable of anymore. I say to him, “For my birthday I want to go kick a ball this afternoon, Dad,” and I won’t stop, I start believing in that desire, I get close to manufacturing a tantrum before he finally says, Okay, we’ll do it …

  On our way over to the school fields, in our sports clothes, and I look over my shoulder and I see my dad battling up a hill, having to stop with his hands on his knees at the top of it—the pang that gives me—but I’m not going to blink, I’m going through with it

  I get to the field and I punt the ball off and run after it, collect it somewhere in the middle of the pitch and wait there for him. Watch him trudge through the gate. Holding his side and rubbing his chest.

  All I want is for him to walk up to me and say, I can’t.

  Tell me that the doctor had let him know he was basically at death’s door, and if he didn’t take better care of himself he was going to orphan me.

  But all he does is take up a position further down the field, then some of the most ginger, rusty stretches you’ve ever seen, then he tries to shout to me to go for it but ends up in a coughing fit instead—

  And I fall apart right then

  I don’t think I’ve ever cried like this in my life.

  When he comes over to me, lying on the grass in the middle of the field, all I can say to him is, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry”—

  And I say those words again, kneeling there on the grave.

  Over and over again.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  I reach for all the bits of trash around me, stuffing the packets and bottle caps and little bits of plastic and toilet paper straight into my pockets. The only sound’s the lowing of the traffic on Main Road, and to overcome it I start singing a ccr song my dad used to love

  Till the crying stops, and all I’ve got left in me’s a headache.

  “I’m sorry,” I say again. “I’m sorry about your wife. I’m sorry about running away, I’m sorry you got so poor, and”—I heave—“I’m sorry you came looking for me. That one’s the worst. I was coming, Dad. I was just late.”

  I notice I’ve been crying so much that I’ve wet the dirt in front of me. I put my finger in the softness and it comes away with a thin coat of mud and I use it to write his initials on the stone.

  R.B.

  It’s not bold.

  It won’t be there tomorrow.

  But you’ll know.

  You’ll know, Ed.

  I stand up to kick a rusty can off the edge of the grave-plot, and as I stand, in the brightness surrounding my shadow, glowing in the sun I see a thick clump of dandelions.

  I tear about ten off the clump and I pick up the can and I shake it out and then feed the dandelions through the hole at the top. All of them except one.

  I kneel and set the bouquet in front of the headstone and then I stand up. I know it’s for the last time.

  I twirl the dandelion in my fingers and I say, “God, Dad—and it must’ve happened so fast.”

  I’m crying a bit again.

  Something Freddy said to me once, You live like nothing matters, streaks through my mind and I say, “That’s not true, Dad. Don’t worry, okay? I’m not that young anymore but I’ve got some time. I’ve got some time.”

  And then I take a deep breath, and I hold the dandelion up to my face and for a while I just stare at it, its brightness and frailty—and then I close my eyes and stroke it over my nose and against my cheek and then I can’t hold my breath anymore and I open my eyes and blow it away into the bright sun.

  I wipe my eyes and move off, back towards Main Road.

  I go through the hole in the fence and I’m on my way down the little grass bank

  When I see this dog—this kind of dog I recognise from the Eastern Cape. You don’t see lots of them around in the city—mainly you see proper breeds—but I’ve always liked them. Long-necked, upbeat and long-suffering things—living in packs, sharing meals out of trash bags, roaming and fucking their way around town, when it rained in summer they played in the gutters, in winter you’d see them sleeping in piles outside bars or petrol stations or wherever’d have them

  And I’m feeling completely nostalgic about the dogs—and I suppose about Grahamstown as well, and about everything to do with being young and still having eternity on your side

  But I snap out of it when he just darts over from the pavement and launches himself onto my leg and starts humping my knee.

  “Jesus, boy,” I tell him, and I force him off me. He starts biting my shoes and barking, then he does some spins in front of me and sits down on the pavement and barks some more. I see he’s got those wonderful, open, brown eyes they normally have.

  “Hey there, boy,” I say. “What’re you doing out here on your own?”

  I scratch his neck a bit and his tongue starts lolling and when I stop scratching he tries to give me his paw about five times.

  I tell him, “Be careful out here, boy,” and I walk off down the street.

  I get to the end of the block and then I hear this grating scream—it’s a bus coming in, and I get a face full of black exhaust as it pulls over about twenty metres in front of me.

  The doors open and there’s a wash of people, they stream past me in both directions—

  And when they’re gone, there’s the dog sitting next to me on the pavement.

  You’ve fucking always had a thing with dogs, Ed.

  I try not to acknowledge him too much, I walk fast down the road

  But he follows

  And the saddest thing is when I turn and look at him, he stops and cowers and looks away, almost like he’s pretending he’s invisible or something, it’s ridiculously endearing.

  You’ll need to buy him a collar.

  You’ll have to walk that fucker every day.

  You’ll have to get him some toys and shit to chew, as well.

  Or how about a proper place to live?

  Or food?

  You need a job.

  A proper job.

  While I’m on my haunches, squatting next to him on the pavement, stroking his ears and staring into his bottomless eyes

  This girl, she’s wearing school clothes and a headscarf, and she comes up to me and she says, “Is this your dog?”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  She looks into my eyes and asks me, “Are you feeling chilled?”

  “No, I’ve been crying.”

  She puts a cigarette in her mouth. “Do you have a lighter?”

  Only strippers and young teenagers wear that much make-up.

  “Are you allowed to smoke?” I ask her.

  She smiles at me.

  “No, I mean legally.”

  Still just smiles.

  I give my lighter to her and she lights the cigarette and coughs.

  “Ooh, careful.”

  “Please, man,” she says. “I’ve been smoking for years.”

  And then she bites her thick, red bottom lip

  And she says, “I also do other stuff.”

  I laugh.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Your poor fucking dad,” I say.

  She’s still smiling at me.

  “Go home,” I tell her

  And I walk off and the d
og follows me.

  Out of the corner of my eye I see her crossing the street, not at a corner or anything, just skipping through the traffic and then turning down Scott Road, not smoking the cigarette much, tilting her face up and letting the sun have it

  And I stop where I am and I watch her till she vanishes, then watch her shadow finally melt from the walls and then I imagine her getting home—

  Probably some falling-down Victorian place, dark inside. She’ll go in and straight to the bathroom and she’ll wash her face and brush her teeth in case her ma’s home. And then she’ll lie on the couch and watch TV, and think about boys all afternoon. Her dad won’t be home till six. Where’s her dad? He’s stuck behind a counter or a cash register or a computer in one of these buildings surrounding me, all of them looking burnished as the sun begins to soften, already on its way over the city and into the sea—

  And what’s he thinking about?

  And what does he want?

  And my heart breaks at the sudden sense of how many lives there are in this world, how much need—I’m astonished the street doesn’t just cave in.

  But it doesn’t.

  And it won’t.

  I see it, it’s built for us, us and our leaden dreams—our heavy fortunes, our pregnant hopes and their mangled issue

  It goes on, Ed. And people do it.

  They do it.

  And lots of them have dogs. And all of them have ghosts. And all of them are lonely and all of them—every single one in their very own way—are as scared and entranced and misfit as you.

  And they do it.

  And they do it.

  I keep on going down the street and now the dog’s jogging out in front of me, sniffing everything—it looks like he’s having a great time

  But he never goes too far before he spins round and sits—

  Just for a second

  Just to make sure I’m still here

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The author wishes to thank:

  Damon Galgut, for his friendship

  Fourie Botha, for his faithful support

  Beth Lindop, for her unerring work on the manuscript

  Dave Tyfield and Brendon Robinson, the first readers of the book

  Gretchen van der Byl, for the beautiful cover art