Up Against the Night

by Justin Cartwright

  We smile at Bertil and Vanessa encouragingly, as though they would benefit from our approval. The fact is, I am eager for their approval and affection. I have accepted that Nellie speaks to them more naturally than I do. She has a quality which young people quickly recognise: she is genuinely interested in them.

  Bertil and Vanessa approach the fire, staring at the flames as though drawn, like moths. The wood is burning bright and giving off the scent of eucalyptus.

  ‘How’s the surfing going?’ Nellie asks.

  ‘We went to Muizenberg with Vanessa’s brother, and we surfed there.’

  ‘How did that go?’

  Vanessa points at Bertil as though we need to locate him.

  ‘Bertil can stand up on his board already. It’s like amazing. Awesome. Natural talent.’

  She makes a fist and bumps it against Bertil’s knuckles. He laughs rather desperately and rolls his eyes.

  Vanessa says, ‘Respect, bru,’ to Bertil, before giving him another fist bump.

  I wonder if I should speak to Vanessa’s mother about drugs. She paints the harbour and the mountains in acrylic and sells the pictures at the weekly market. Sometimes she paints pictures of the squatter camps, the corrugated-iron walls, the buckets of water carried by children, the blue doors and window frames on the shacks, children playing with old inner tubes and tyres, the occasional donkey pulling a cart, which has the axle and tyres of a small car. All these scenes are in demand from tourists. Vanessa’s mother, Selina, wears wispy, trailing clothes, as if she is a postulant fairy; on reflection I don’t think news of marijuana in Kent is going to worry her. As boys we used to smoke Swazi Gold or Durban Gold, the best in the world, we believed. We were always inclined to believe that South Africa was, in some way, world class. The best stuff grew wild in the mountains of Swaziland, a kind of Valhalla for hippies.

  I wake Lucinda but leave little Isaac asleep. She groans and stretches and turns over.

  ‘Food’s up.’

  ‘I am not hungry.’

  ‘The lobsters are ready.’

  ‘Oh, okay, give me a few minutes while I shower.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I see her mother’s almond eyes as she appraises me for a moment.

  I sit next to little Isaac, watching him breathe. I am hoping he will wake up soon, but he’s out for the count. I am waiting eagerly for his levée. My mind is a little volatile. It ranges over Piet Retief’s death to the sardine run which is due to arrive in the bay any day now. I have never seen it, but the locals say you can catch your supper in a hat. If you want to catch your supper in a hat. I wonder, too, if Cousin Jaco is safely back in the bosom of his church; I have a feeling I haven’t seen the last of him.

  I hear a muffled childish cry. Little Isaac is awake.

  ‘Hello, Grandpa,’ he says. His face appears to be soft and vulnerable, as though sleep has made it malleable.

  ‘Hello, Isaac. Are you hungry?’

  ‘I am, Grandpa.’

  ‘Okay, I will just change your nappy.’

  I feel blessed as I clean him up. He lies amongst the mess amiably.

  ‘You have big ears, Grandpa.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I do. Compared with yours anyway.’

  My ears do appear to be getting bigger; perhaps they are trying to keep pace with my face.

  10

  Nellie and I walk hand in hand along Muizenberg Beach, which stretches into the distance. Lucinda and Isaac are making a dam in the sand. As Nellie walks, she radiates contentment. Inevitably I compare her to Georgina, with her moods and resentments. Her every instinct was to be restless and discontent. There was no place or circumstance that did not agitate her, and often the implication was that I was somehow to blame for her agitation. I began to believe it myself.

  Nellie is almost implausibly enthusiastic. She looks out to sea, where Bertil is learning to surf. I point her towards Seal Island, and she says it is beautiful. In the junction where the waves meet the mountain, they are regular and relatively easy to ride. Sometimes great white sharks are spotted cruising with menace in the surf. But today there is no shark warning outside the surf shop – a red flag bearing an outline of a shark – and I doubt if Bertil will anyway get far enough into the water to be at risk. When we left him with Vanessa and the coach, he was standing on a board in the shallows. The surfing coach is a former world champion, Vanessa says. The reverence for sporting success is strong here; it is a substitute for thinking the unthinkable about the future. The coach has a distinct paunch under his wetsuit.

  The beach stretches for twenty miles towards the Hottentot Holland Mountains to the east. I see myself as holding stock in all this sky and beach and mountains. This endless beach has always been democratic, open to all, despite the efforts of the apartheid government to segregate it.

  A fishing boat has come ashore and is being pulled up the sand; two of the crew are hauling in the nets. I wave to Lucinda and Isaac to come see. A small crowd of people wait to find out what is in the nets. The coloured women are ready with their enamel basins. Little Isaac is very excited. He laughs when the fish wriggle.

  The fish are red roman, stumpnose, and some steenbras; they are all familiar to me. I buy a whole stumpnose for the barbecue. I exchange pleasantries with the fishermen, showing off a little, always keen to speak Afrikaans. There are nuances in Afrikaans, which I value. I tell Nellie that these coloured people are not happy with the advance of the Xhosa squatters from the Eastern Cape, who live along the edge of the coast road in shacks in the bush. I say that the coloured people believe they have been marginalised by the African government; nothing has changed for them.

  An older fisherman addresses me as ‘Master’, which makes me uneasy. He asks for a cigarette, but I don’t smoke. He can hardly believe it. He shakes his head as if to say the world has gone to pot. His face has weathered so that every wrinkle seems to be neatly folded onto another, like linen panelling in a Tudor house. His few remaining teeth are yellow, and his eyes are watery and filmed over. Perhaps tens of years out in the glare on this bay have damaged his eyes. They appear to be weak and barely focused, like a kitten’s.

  The fisherman says that white stumpnose are declining in numbers, and that is why my fish is expensive. He seems surprised that I should have been willing to spend so much money. The white stumpnose has a complacent demeanour, like a well-fed Greek Orthodox priest.

  I am content, as if this landscape and these people are there for my happiness. Both speak to me. I take the fish back to the car and put it in a cool bag. I run rather clumsily over the deep sand, wishing I were bounding along, lithe and unbowed, as once I was. Further up the beach, in front of the surf shop, Vanessa is on her board and surfing with Bertil. They are both in very high spirits. Bertil gives us a wave, and they surf in for about twenty yards, before Bertil’s board dips down and he falls head first into a wave. Vanessa glides up to him and holds his board in line while he climbs on again.

  ‘They are having a great time,’ says Nellie. ‘It’s wonderful to see him so happy.’

  ‘It’s pretty difficult not to be happy here.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘I just hope that Lucinda is going to be reasonable.’

  ‘Don’t worry. We will look after her. She’s been just fine so far.’

  She doesn’t want to usurp my parental role, but actually I think she will be better for Lucinda than I will. There is a kind of obduracy in Lucinda that quickly upsets me. And she can be pointlessly insistent at times.

  ‘I am not sure if she will ever be right,’ I say.

  ‘Right?’

  ‘Right in the sense that she may never recover from what happened with Georgina and then the drugs. I was reading only the other day that marijuana, never mind the hard drugs, warps and changes your brain for ever. She was such a sweet child. Nellie, what we did to her was inexcusable.’

  ‘Don’t be pessimistic. We will do our best. Please don’t worry too much. She’s a lovel
y girl.’

  There is no hint of a reproach. Nellie has a touching inclination to look for the best qualities in everyone. I am keen to acquire this talent; I have always been too ready to judge. I put my arm around her and we stroll along the beach.

  ‘What you did wrong,’ Nellie says, ‘is to marry the wrong person.’

  ‘How do I find the right person?’

  ‘Ah, that’s up to you. Of course. I could not possibly give you any clues.’

  She pronounces ‘clues’ as ‘cloos’.

  ‘No, I can see that would be wrong.’

  ‘Also, we skogsfru come from the forest. A skogsfru lures men down into endless caves. No man can resist her seductive powers.’

  ‘Goodness. Are you a fully paid-up skogsfru?’

  ‘I might be.’

  ‘Help, I may not be able to resist your charms.’

  I start to run down the beach, bounding over kelp and streams. I slow down quite soon and in those few charged moments I see that we will be married. I have been rescued from bitterness and purged of resentment and I have found tranquillity with Nellie. I must marry her.

  She is laughing when I come back at a gentle jog, panting.

  ‘You can’t run away from a skogsfru.’

  ‘I can see that. If that’s impossible, we might as well get married. Where would you like to be married?’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course. Where do you want to be married?’

  ‘If you are serious, maybe here, maybe Sweden. I’m easy.’

  ‘You know that “easy” also means promiscuous?’

  ‘We Swedish women are famous for being promiscuous. It’s not true, but the myth makes us seem more interesting than we really are.’

  After a few minutes she says, ‘Can we have a party in Sweden also? For my friends and relatives?’

  She leads me into the water. She puts her arms around me. We are standing waist deep in the water. A thick rope of kelp brushes against my leg and for a moment I think I have trodden on a sand shark. A wave knocks us over. We disappear for a few seconds under a wave.

  Isaac is crying when we come out of the water. He is confused and upset, even though Lucinda has told him we were just swimming. I pick him up. His curly hair brushes my face as he hugs me. He puts his thumb in his mouth for a moment.

  ‘Did you swim, Grandpa? Can I swim, Grandpa?’

  I take him waist deep and pretend to dunk him. He laughs wildly, as though it is the most wonderful thing he has ever known. Nellie towels him off. We go on to the ice-cream shop which sells rum-and-raisin and chocolate and tutti-frutti ice creams as well as plain vanilla. That’s their full range and I take pleasure in buying everyone an ice cream, especially one that evokes my childhood. Nellie suggests we stop at the sports shop to buy Isaac a small wetsuit. I buy one for Bertil too.

  ‘That’s, that’s so cool,’ he says.

  The mountain behind is a deep, deep green, broken by the leaves of the silver trees, which are more gun-metal grey than silver. On a walk with school friends on this mountain – we were about thirteen – we were attacked by coloured boys, some of them possibly living on the mountain, bergies – who pelted us with large stones so that we had to run back to Boyes Drive. I was in fear of my life.

  Now we take the high-level Boyes Drive and descend to a café further along the coast; it has fine coffee and a pleasantly louche atmosphere. The plates and teacups are all different as if acquired in house sales. It’s just the sort of place Georgina would have hated.

  When we reach home the sun is going down directly off-shore. It moves fast; you can see it moving as it is pared away by the horizon and then quickly dragged into the sea. But the sky beyond is magnificent; from below the horizon, the sun is colouring listless clouds in pink and gold and Naples yellow.

  I prepare the barbecue happily, using wood I bought from squatters along the road, neatly sawn and tied into bundles. They told me they were refugees from the Congo. I spoke to them in French.

  ‘C’est une vie dure,’ they said.

  ‘Oui, je le crois.’

  And I can easily imagine that life is hard in the Congo; it is one of those countries we believe is always on the brink of anarchy. I blame Joseph Conrad.

  The two men said that the locals hated them.

  A whole stumpnose requires delicate treatment, wrapped in foil, before direct exposure to the wood embers. Nellie cleans and scales the fish; she says that Swedes know how to do this kind of thing; they are close to nature. She offers to make a salsa verde. Lindiwe wants to know how it is done. The barbecue is under a white milkwood tree, out of the wind, and I have a table fashioned from a long slab of Table Mountain granite. The massif of the mountain above and behind us is made of granite and sandstone.

  ‘Am I embarrassing you by saying I love you?’ Nellie asks.

  ‘Of course not. Say it as often as you can. I am amazed that you love me, but I can’t have enough of it.’

  I hug her; she is richly perfumed by basil and mint and garlic.

  ‘You smell fragrant. That’s enough for me. I am marrying salsa verde. Nellie, honestly, I have never been so happy.’

  And it’s true. I wonder why I have taken so long to acknowledge that I was deeply unhappy with Georgina.

  The children appear from the beach. I guess that they have been kissing. They stop holding hands. Bertil looks a little flustered, in case we should see the rash of passion on their avid mouths. You don’t want to expose young love to your parents. Young love is anyway transient, a summer storm.

  The stumpnose is wonderful. The salsa is perfect. The fire is glowing bright now, holding the darkness at bay.

  11

  An unwelcome email from Jaco arrives:

  Oom Frank, I am maybe going be in a documentry about my time in Scientology. A journalis from the BBC have phoned me. He says all I must do is tell him my story. I had a crash what they call a wreck in the US because the traffic lights doesn’t change like they say it will when I have become a Clear. They says I must pay them back for the other guy’s car because he was on green. They say I owe them $5,000 for the insurance. Oom jy moet my glo, dit is kak. Die hele ding is kak. Dit het absoluut niks omdien Die Here to doen nie. Oom, it is all shit, it’s just to make money. It has fuck all to do with God. It’s not a fucking church at all, just a bunch of mad people what believes you can fly to Mars by will power. When I ask them how you are supposed to breathe on this journey they says I have disrespected the founder Elron Hubbard. I have tried to speak to Tom Cruise because he is a nice guy but he says he does not take part in management decisions. He is walking to the tennis court for his coaching and he have no time to stop. I was sweeping leafs. I put my hand on his arm and one of the ouks with him pushes me away so I give him a broken nose and blood is pouring out and I run that night because I know I must find a way to phone you, Oom. I thank you and God for getting me out. A few days ago I speak with this journalis he phoned me again from London and he says he is filming a doccumentry about these people and he wants me to tell my story. I am living in Potch temporarally on the farm now but I want to take your advice on if I shall do this doccumentry. Like I say this journalist wants me to go to London to speak about what happened to me. He says the BBC will pay the flight. Maybe I can sell my story but you have to be careful with these people. I tried to bell your cell phone but it is not working. I want to speak with you urgently, Oom, please. Please bell me.

  Alles van die beste, Jou neef Jaco

  Jaco leaves his telephone number. I don’t reply. I have a strong feeling that he is trouble. He doesn’t know I am in Cape Town, and I don’t want a visit from him.

  12

  I have hired a lodge for a few days at a reserve on the sea near the Tsitsikamma Forest. It’s about three hours east from my house and we are heading there for a weekend so that Nellie can see something of the country and some wild animals; in fact, so that we can all see the wonders I have been talking up. I have planned th
e journey to include a detour through the wine lands. My grandfather owned one of the great estates many years ago. We plan to stop at Franschhoek, a beautiful small town where we will have lunch on the veranda – the stoep as we like to call it – of my favourite restaurant, Le Quartier Français.

  As we descend from Hells Hoogte – Hell’s Heights – I feel as though we are crossing the border to a secret but familiar and blessed world, a series of valleys and steep passes to wild mountains which suggest all kinds of possibilities, which include small towns that have hardly changed in a hundred and fifty years. But I know that this intimacy with the landscape is self-serving, a pleasant delusion. We drive down through the valley with vines on both sides of a road that follows the valley floor to Franschhoek, where we have lunch on the stoep and set off again somewhat reluctantly to drive up and over the pass. The last elephant was seen leaving the valley in the nineteenth century on this pass, just about the same time my ancestor left a nearby valley for his own Eden, where he was killed. Bertil is a little quiet, perhaps wishing he could have stayed with Vanessa, but he has his new surfboard strapped to the roof. After all, Vanessa has said that he is a natural and there are plenty of beaches where we are headed. Also, there are deep forests, where one wild elephant cow lives on, all alone, the last survivor of a great herd that had been there long before the white people arrived with their guns. It’s a sad story. When I was young I knew a girl who went for a walk in the forest on her own and was never seen again. At that time there were thought to be thirteen elephants living in the forest, and they were known to be very aggressive.

  You could see this country as a kind of tapestry, intimately woven of beautiful landscapes and violent death. Some of the whites say that it is stimulating. At least it’s never dull here, they say.

  The drive into the reserve is beguiling. When we open the windows of the car we can hear the roaring of the sea in the distance. On the dirt road towards the lodges, we see three tortoises and two snakes. We slow to a halt so we can look at the snakes closely. One is unmistakably a puff adder and the other a grass snake, I think. It’s certainly green. Lucinda is frightened, but the snakes are inert although their ever-alert tongues are testing the air. Bertil wants to know if they are poisonous. I tell him that the puff adder kills more people than any other snake, because it does not move fast and strikes when anyone comes too close. It lies on the road, full of truculent menace. In the background male ostriches, in their dandyish fashion, are displaying – unleashing their wings and dancing with a vain dipping movement designed to impress a drab female ostrich. Further in the distance there are some Hartmann’s zebras, the mountain zebra that not long ago was almost extinct. We are against animals and plants becoming extinct. We have adopted these politically neutral causes because we lack a moral or political role.