‘Your cousin is not being prevented from leaving. He is simply being asked not to jump ship until his financial commitments are fulfilled.’
‘He is on a ship? Is that what you are saying?’
‘No, sir, he is not on a ship. It’s an American saying, “jumping ship”. It means deserting.’
‘I know what it means. I speak English. But I also happen to know that your organisation did in fact have some ships. Before you say any more, let me tell you I am certainly your only chance of getting paid to release my cousin from your church, where presumably he was attempting to achieve enlightenment.’
‘Firstly, Mr McAllister, I am a lawyer. I act for the Church of Scientology in that capacity. I wouldn’t know if your cousin was seeking enlightenment.’
‘Listen up, I am only going to say it once. I am prepared to send you $50,000 within a few hours as long as you can bring my cousin to the phone when the money is transferred to your bank account, so that he can confirm that he has been released.’
‘ “Discharged his commitments” would be our preferred description over “released”.’
‘Have you understood a word I said? I am not bargaining; no one on this planet is going to ransom Jaco Retief, except me, and this is your one and only chance to cash in. He must be in your office, standing next to you, in an hour. You can call me in the next ten minutes to inform me if my offer is accepted. And just in case you have forgotten, I am only prepared to pay $50,000.’
‘Just one thing, sir, this is not ransom.’
‘Please. Call it whatever you like.’
Ten minutes later Asphalter calls to say that my offer is accepted. I tell him to call when he has Jaco in his office. An hour later he calls: Jaco is now in the office. He is tearful, overcome with emotion. I call Coutts & Co. in London and give them the details. The transfer will be complete within a few hours.
‘Thank you, Oom.’
‘Jaco, please, enough of this “Oom” stuff. What are you going to do now?’
‘I am going home. I can’t wait. My girls is growing up and my wife has a new partner, he’s a life coach. Ek moes huistoe gaan. I must go home.’
‘That’s probably a good idea. Don’t join any cults.’
‘No, I won’t be doing that in a hurry, that’s for sure. Oom, one little thing’ – he uses the Afrikaans diminutive, ‘dingetjie’ – ‘can you pay for my plane ticket to Jo’burg?’
‘Okay, but don’t ask me for anything ever again. And listen, next time I will be rooting for the shark.’
Jaco laughs after a short silence, but the laugh has a strangled tone, and his voice is painfully hoarse.
The bank calls; the transfer will be with the law office of Asphalter and Gersbach within a few hours. When the bank confirms that the draft has cleared, Jaco will be turned loose on the world.
It’s dawn before I get to bed. I don’t sleep well. My mind is disturbed.
Even more disturbing is the fact that Jaco seems to think that I am his creator, his Geppetto.
8
I will calm down as soon as we are on the plane to Cape Town. I always look forward to the first sighting of Table Mountain, lapped by the sea. The moment the crew opens the plane’s doors I will inhale the perfume of the local fynbos, which people from the Cape find intoxicatingly sweet; I am one of them, although my relationship with these scents is complex; they soothe me but they also remind me painfully of boarding school. Scents can summon powerful memories of love and nostalgia and fear. This scent also recalls memories of my father, who claimed that the fynbos was health-giving, a free stimulant, a pick-me-up, floating about in the air. He also believed in the benefits of sea water as therapy. He found physical contact and affection difficult. All the same, he was a decent man, but too conventional to my youthful and cynical eye.
My father belonged to a generation that did not want to be conspicuous. He played golf in a V-necked pullover and a tie. He wore pinstriped suits in the heat of Johannesburg, suits made by Nelson Mandela’s tailor, Yusuf Surtee, who also made suits for the mining magnates. That was in the time before Mandela’s colourful ethnic shirts ousted the tailored suit.
My father’s conventionality sprang, I think, from the devastating fact that his father had died when he was only fourteen and his mother became an alcoholic who had to be locked away. Ever after my father was looking for approval and endorsement. He was a widely respected journalist and received awards in many countries for his crusading journalism and this acknowledgement calmed his insecurity.
As soon as I first heard the word, I saw myself as a flâneur, roaming the streets of Paris, London and Rome. I roamed all of these, and more. I slept in a phone box in Paris and under an upturned fishing boat in Ostia; I hitch-hiked around America; I had a love affair with a contessa in Rome and I was deported from Tunisia, because I had no visa.
As I lie on my bed with the night-sounds of the forest for company, these things go through my mind as if on a loop. I think of my father in his fawn jersey; of the wind blowing in over the sea from the south-east, propelling the sand of Muizenberg to the squatter camps where the wind launches the detritus into flight, sending it towards the Atlantic coast. The detritus consists mostly of plastic bags, flying urgently away on a mission, or perhaps fleeing. My mother found these scenes disturbing; she reacted as if plastic bags were souls fleeing, as if every bag contained the avatar of a child who had died of hunger or some obscure illness of poverty. I think of the entrancing, inescapable, mysterious, overwhelming mountain, a natural cathedral rising out of the city and its suburbs, a cathedral which looks as if its towers have not yet been finished for lack of funds; I think of the sea rolling non-stop onto the endless beach of False Bay; I think of the great white shark menacing Jaco with its rows of frightening, clinical teeth. Jaco’s fate could have been worse than Piet Retief’s but for the whimsical and choosy nature of this particular shark. I see Piet Retief sitting down with Dingane in anticipation of the fatal dance, of his eager expectation of how these kaffirs will jump and posture and exclaim, like large children. And I wonder how the Reverend Francis Owen could have watched the killing. Was his life blighted for ever? Did he see it as a vision of hell? The ninth ring of Inferno?
History will always be a mystery, never fully trustworthy, never wholly or fully understood by those who come after. History is a narrative written for a purpose – for any number of purposes – but it is seldom able to convey the essence of being human. It is difficult enough to understand these things in your own time and place.
Finally I sleep, and when I wake the ponies have gone and the morning is calling urgently. Alone in my house I am wondering if I really did speak to Jaco and, if I did, whether it wasn’t perhaps some sort of scam to get his hands on my money. It’s possible that Mr Asphalter, Attorney at Law, is a fiction. ‘Attorney at Law’ – how sonorous, how pompous, the legal profession is. My battles with Georgina exposed me to many of the high-altitude crooks who always opened a meeting with a little unsolicited eulogy devoted to themselves and a litany of their many accomplishments, including their first-class degrees at Oxford and their many prizes from the Inns of Court. All through a conference in Gray’s Inn, the barrister I was consulting walked around his antique chambers, describing to me his successes as a divorce specialist. I felt I was there only to admire him, when what I wanted was his plan of action to bring my torture to an end.
There is a direct line from the law to absurdity. He was probably unaware as he promenaded around his chamber that he was not as different from Dickens’s comical lawyers as he would have liked to believe.
I see Jaco’s number on my phone; other details of the night surface in my memory, so that I have to accept that I didn’t dream that I had sent $50,000 to get Jaco away from the Scientologists. I should perhaps have made a donation to ensure that he stayed where he was a little longer and worked on his ability to fly to Mars. Or any other planet and star other than ours.
I walk on the fores
t for an hour in the stillness of the early morning. The animals are stunned by the night and are just getting their bearings; the deer are somnolent and pensive and the cattle lie comfortably under the trees. The early sunlight filters down through the mist clinging to the trees; it lacks only Merlin, in Burne-Jones’s painting, to capture the mystic past. The ponies, perhaps because of the advance of the pint-sized stallions, are anxious, and maybe excited, as if a Viking longboat has landed and is about to get on with the rapine.
Bertil’s housemaster calls to say that he is obliged to tell all the parents that some of the year elevens in his house have been caught smoking marijuana. One boy has been expelled. He says that it is possible that Bertil may have been smoking marijuana.
‘Are you really worried?’ I ask.
‘No. Not seriously worried. But the marijuana available is much more potent than it used to be. I thought I should tell you. I am speaking to all the parents in year eleven. I am very sorry this should have happened.’
‘What should I tell his mother?’
‘Well perhaps you should just keep a watch for drugs. By the way Bertil is a very able boy. He’s not one of the ringleaders and this is only an alert.’
‘I am sure it will be fine when he gets to Cape Town with us,’ I say. ‘And we will look out. Thanks for calling.’
In South Africa hash was called ‘dagga’ and we all smoked it during the school holidays. We also drank cheap brandy, so I am not really qualified to advise. I notice that the housemaster hasn’t given me the latest information, which is that regular dope smoking, particularly of skunk, alters the structure of the brain, and does not steer us towards a better understanding of our world; in fact it sends heavy users in the direction of a narrow, reduced, world of paranoia and depression and agoraphobia. And the damage can be permanent.
I call Nellie to tell her about what the housemaster has said. She says immediately that she will talk to Bertil and explain that there can be no drugs because of Lucinda.
‘I am sure – well – I hope,’ I say to Nellie, ‘that he will get caught up with surfing and so on. I have already booked a lodge for a few nights on a reserve not far away, where we can fish and swim and see plenty of animals: antelope and wild cats, tortoises, baboons, snakes and zebras. It wouldn’t be good for Bertil or for Lucinda to smoke dope there.’
‘No, that’s right. As I said, I will talk to him about it. I know he’s sensible after all. He will understand.’
‘I’m sure he is. And he has had a lot to contend with.’
I am saying these things, which I can’t possibly corroborate, because I see myself as responsible for everyone’s happiness. I want all of us to be happy and relaxed. The last thing I need is to have Lucinda taking up marijuana again with Bertil.
Nellie and I go over the arrangements about meeting at Heathrow. I have the tickets. She and Bertil and Lucinda will meet me there, and so on … all the minutiae of travel, which have become so tedious. Liz, my secretary, has done all the work.
I give Nellie an account of my dealings with Jaco last night. She’s shocked: she finds it hard to believe that a church could behave like this. It’s just not conceivable. But then she’s thinking Lutheran Christianity. I tell her what L. Ron Hubbard wrote about flying to Mars under your own steam, achieved by harnessing your mental powers. I do it to give her an indication of the discourse in the Church of Scientology.
‘Poor Jaco, is he all right?’
‘Yes, and he is heading for South Africa. He wants to go home for ever. He thinks he may have strayed too far from his roots and I think he’s probably right.’
‘Don’t be unkind. He has had a terrible ordeal.’
And it’s cost me $50k.
‘He has had a hard time, but he is a lightning rod for disaster. My advice is, don’t stand near him in a storm.’
In the evening we are gathered at Heathrow, apart from Lucinda, who has not arrived as planned. Her text says she is coming to Cape Town a couple of days later. She gives no reason. She will text me her flight details when she has them. I try to suppress the fear that she may be as unreliable and erratic as ever. Bertil is silent, but Nellie says he is very happy to be going to South Africa. I wonder if she will be the interpreter of his inner feelings. He is wearing narrow jeans and bright blue trainers with a shiny, laminated look. He is already as tall as his mother. We have a brief conversation; he wants to know if he can have surfing lessons.
‘Absolutely. We will get you all you need, and an instructor. Below the house the water can be very cold, depending on the currents and the wind, but over on the other side, the Indian Ocean side, it is always warm and you can stay in all day.’
‘Great. Thanks, Frank.’
He has a steady gaze, perhaps still a little narrowed by grief; his eyes are some distance above his mouth; his nose bridges the gap. His forehead is wide and in this respect too he is very like his father. Also, strangely, they both resemble Alfred Nobel, who accidentally blew up many of his family members and in this way leaving himself lonely and single by the time he was fifty.
Morning reveals a beautiful view of Cape Town; the sea is streaming around Table Mountain, and the mountain is lightly and gently attended by wispy cloud. As the plane heads obligingly close to the city, I point out Robben Island, lying flat on the sea like a ragged green-and-brown fragment of carpet. I feel duty-bound to adopt the role of tour guide: Robben Island means Seal Island, and there are penguins on the island; the water is freezing; it’s 4.2 miles from the mainland; nobody has ever escaped; Nelson Mandela was imprisoned there for eighteen years.
As the plane banks in a great arc, I point out Devil’s Peak and the cable station. We bank more sharply and turn north over the sea, wheeling in from False Bay and crossing its twenty-mile beach before losing height; miles of shacks and squatter camps, also known as informal settlements, come into view. The new South Africa favours these anodyne changes of name. A wag once described stealing from whites as ‘affirmative shopping’.
We drive in a hire car towards the mountain, sweeping by the shacks, then passing close to the docks before rising up towards the Malay quarter with its many-coloured cottages and its small mosques, as we head up towards the pass leading out of Cape Town and down towards the Atlantic. The view as we arrive at the top of the pass is breathtaking. Down below are the Atlantic and the village of Camps Bay, with its perfect beach. I indicate to Bertil the best surfing, Glen Beach at the northern corner of the main beach. I feel proprietorial. Every time I make this drive my spirits soar. The village itself is surrounded by the fynbos, and I take in its scents eagerly. How persistent these ancient and irrational attachments are.
‘You didn’t tell me just how beautiful this place is,’ says Nellie.
‘I tried. But you have to see it for yourself.’
We drive down from the mountain to sea level. Surfers are out at Glen Beach. I used to surf there as a boy. Nothing has changed; I remember every rock. The road is not far above the waves. Sometimes sea spray sweeps across the road. The sea is relatively quiet today. In lay-bys, Africans are selling wooden giraffes and masks and Dogon doors and carpets and zebra skins. Behind them is a glorious seascape. On the mountain side, the houses end abruptly and the mountain wilderness reasserts itself. There are baboons and green Cape cobras in this dense fynbos and in the deep forests that line the ravines. These cobras are venomous; their poison can kill a dog in a few minutes.
I pull over to point out a pod of southern right whales, cruising up the coast towards some mysterious destination. Capetonians see whales as a compliment to them, as if they and the whales are in partnership, exchanging vital knowledge, not accessible to outsiders.
‘I can’t believe this,’ says Nellie. ‘I have never seen anything so, so incredibly beautiful.’
She seeks agreement from Bertil in Swedish. I hear the word ‘vacker’, beautiful.
Bertil raises his eyebrows and gives me a look, which I take, happily, to be complicity
. I remember just how critical fourteen-year-olds are of their parents, as if they are waking up to their failings for the first time. I take this as a good sign, evidence of bonding. I remember specifically how touchy Lucinda could be with me and her mother in public. How fervently you want your children to be happy, and how readily they will renounce you.
The road rises sharply now. Halfway up, we turn off and descend towards the sea on a narrow, winding road leading to the beach. My house is at the bottom of the road. We pull up in front of the house. I have the remote control and the gates open. The house looks directly down onto huge rocks of granite, where the Bushmen, the Khoisan, once lived. And a boy drowned. An enormous midden of shellfish in a cave is the proof. These people were the strandlopers, the beach-walkers, who foraged along the beaches and the bays. Piet Retief’s Hottentot boys were voorloopers, those who walked ahead on the doomed march into Zululand.
My house is called Menemsha, after a fishing village on Martha’s Vineyard. I drive the car down directly into the garage under the house. It has a sophisticated security system. From the road you reach the front door of the house by crossing a small ravine on a bleached wooden boardwalk. Down below the sea is roaring.
Lindiwe is waiting for us. I see that she is wearing her best shoes and housecoat. I am touched. Her face is a little more creased. Her husband was murdered recently and I have been supporting her. Her house is miles away in the townships on the windy flatlands out of town, near the airport, and it is dangerous to travel there and back every day in the taxi-buses. I have had a bedroom and sitting room added on to my house for her and she says she is very happy. Still, she takes her days off in the townships. There, women beg for the discarded intestines of cows from butchers, cutting them into lengths like socks, and cleaning them in the open before cooking them to sell by the road. Here we eat Cape rock lobster and tuna. Two worlds are living side by side. Nellie is alert to inequality; after all she is Scandinavian.
Up Against the Night Page 8
