Up Against the Night

by Justin Cartwright

  Our lodge overlooks a lagoon at the point where a beer-coloured river runs into it. The sea is rushing urgently through a gap in the sand bar into the lagoon. The lagoon and the river are home to otters. The guide notes say these are the Cape clawless otter. The notes also promise fish eagles. As we approach our lodge, we see a group of antelope, bontebok. They are dark and brown-and-white in patches, each patch sharply differentiated, as if they are maps of contiguous countries. They have white faces and horns shaped like a lyre. Their tails switching, they glance at us without interest before going back to grazing. As we are unloading we hear the forlorn, haunting cry of the fish eagle. It rips violently and ecstatically through the more gentle background chorus of the cicadas and the small birds and the base of the distant pounding of the waves. Some African tribes believe the cry of the fish eagle is a protest of the dead from beyond the grave.

  Isaac and Nellie and Bertil and I go for a walk. Lucinda says she is still jet-lagged and needs a short sleep. She says that when she wakes up she will cook the leg of lamb we brought for supper. It is news to me that she can cook. I offer her a cookbook. She strokes my cheek and it warms to her touch.

  ‘Are you enjoying yourself, Bertil?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s great. It’s really great.’

  ‘I am enjoying myself, Grandma,’ says Isaac.

  I see that Nellie is moved: little, mysterious, affable Isaac is touching both of us. His presence confers undeserved credibility on us.

  ‘I am so glad you are happy, Isaac.’

  Nellie holds Isaac’s hand, and he walks gamely on. After a while I offer to carry him on my shoulders, and he agrees, which pleases me. He says, ‘Go horsey.’

  Nellie, like me, wonders what the full story of Isaac is. Has his mother abandoned him – along with her passport – or has Lucinda appropriated the child? And are we complicit in some way? I will have to talk to Lucinda eventually. But now I feel a familiar resentment. Why has Lucinda taken this child? We can’t spend weeks with an unknown child. We don’t even know how long Lucinda is proposing to stay. My questions are treated lightly.

  ‘Chill,’ she says when I ask, ‘let’s just chill.’

  Of course it is not that simple. She has a tendency to gloss over detail. I am aware that my disappointment springs from unrequited love; somehow I am expecting the perfect resolution for my daughter and I would also welcome some gratitude for my steadfastness in support. But with Lucinda, there is still the fear of imminent betrayal lurking in her mind. It may be the effect of drugs, a sort of persistent paranoia.

  Now Bertil is carrying Isaac, who is acting as a lookout. He laughs uproariously and points when he sees more ostriches; they are in a mating frenzy everywhere, rushing here and there distractedly. We stop at a pristine beach above the bay where, we have been told, whales calve at this time of year. Just below us we see a mother leading her white calf towards the open sea. The males are white at birth. They are half underwater, breaching and blowing every so often. It is a poignant sight, these huge mammals setting off to swim determinedly for thousands of miles back to their icy northern waters. I feel this migration is a test, as if the whales are in peril as they embark on their epic journey. Another whale follows, leading a calf to the turbulent ocean. Are the mothers nervous? Are they thinking about what could go wrong? I don’t believe they are. A friend of mine who makes documentaries believes that there is a connection between us and other species to be explored. Whales have been candidates for an exchange of ideas between the species for some time. But still, I think that the bumper sticker which reads What has a whale ever done for me? contains a certain cynical truth.

  When we get back to the lodge, Lucinda is roasting the promised leg of lamb on the barbecue, cookbook open. She seems to be very calm. Her smile reminds me of the happy child she once was. She hugs Isaac. She hugs me. She hugs Bertil and Nellie. She is wearing very short shorts, with a green T-shirt embossed with the words Oakland Athletics. Now that her face is no longer painfully ravaged and furtive, she’s beautiful, like her mother.

  ‘You seem to be happy, darling. How’s it going?’

  ‘Admit it, you’re thinking “unnaturally wired”, aren’t you? No, I haven’t taken anything is the answer. What’s not to like here? By the way, a huge antelope came wandering by. Humungous animal with curly antlers and a bit of a straggly beard on its neck, like the Amish.’

  ‘That’s a kudu, for sure.’

  ‘Are they dangerous?’

  ‘Only in the mating season.’

  ‘Oh, watch out, everybody, Daddy’s getting a little risqué.’

  And now we are settling down, each happy to play the role we have been given. I am especially happy to be teased by my daughter.

  After supper, in the last of the light, Lucinda and I walk the short distance down to the lagoon.

  ‘We must be back before it gets too dark.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘The lamb was wonderful, sweet pea. Perfect.’

  ‘Thank you. I am not completely useless.’

  She takes my hand.

  ‘How is Mum?’ she asks. ‘Have you spoken to her recently?’

  ‘Only when she calls about something she thinks is important. You know that the baby is due any day?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you okay with that?’

  ‘No, I am not okay with it at all. I find it disgusting. It’s like it’s all about her. It always was. She doesn’t give a rat’s arse about the baby. And this baby will be my sister, or brother, of a sort.’

  She is suddenly upset. I hold her close.

  ‘We’ll be fine, sweetheart.’

  ‘Sorry, Daddy, I just remember how she ignored me and put me down all the time so that I was scared to speak and how she hated children and then left us, and now she’s having a baby at the age of forty-six. It’s sick. And the whole business is aimed at us.’

  ‘I am not sure that’s totally true.’

  I could add to her litany with my own grievances, but I restrain myself.

  ‘It is true. Absolutely. And tacky.’

  ‘Maybe. More at me than you.’

  The sea in the mouth of the lagoon is moaning as the tide storms out. The sea itself is calm in the last of the light. The late glimmers of the sun create a symmetrical pattern on the water, a web of fish-scale reflections.

  ‘You wouldn’t be surprised if a mermaid surfaced,’ I say.

  ‘You old softie.’

  Lucinda kisses me; she knows the reference, a mermaid book I had given her when she was six. She loved and cherished it. I ordered the essential prop, the detachable mermaid tail, but it was difficult to attach and seemed likely to lead to a drowning in our pool.

  ‘Daddy, I am so glad you have hooked up with Nellie. She is good for you. Actually, she’s good for all of us.’

  In the night I wake to the sound of the waves in the mouth of the lagoon. Their mood has changed: they boom like distant canon fire.

  ‘You are awake,’ Nellie says.

  ‘Yes. I can’t help noticing that you are too.’

  ‘Are you okay? You were sighing in your sleep.’

  ‘I’m fine. I have disturbing dreams these days.’

  ‘I know you do, älskling. But are you happy?’

  Her face is lit by the moonlight coming through the window. Her cheekbones are high and her forehead is shiny, almost nacreous, as though she is the Lucia Queen of the island of Grinda and the light from the candles in her crown is falling exclusively on her.

  ‘Nellie, I am fantastically happy. It’s wonderful to have us all together. The best thing I can think of.’

  ‘Lucinda told me that she hasn’t felt this happy for two years.’

  As she turns to me, her large eyes are caught for a moment by the light.

  ‘Did she really say that? That’s great. She looks so much better.’

  What Lucinda says to Nellie is not always the same as what she says to me. She is more straightforward with Nelli
e, so I am encouraged.

  Nellie hugs me, her body fitting with mine neatly like the Matisse cut-outs we saw in the exhibition at the Tate Modern. There are certain things middle-class people are obliged to do, and seeing the Matisse was one of them that year. Nellie, typically, was entranced by the accompanying film of the old man’s unerring dexterity. There are a few people in this world at any one time who can do wonderful, even miraculous, things. I see these people as the shamans or prophets of our times. They are attuned to other modes and other concerns; in our restrained and circumscribed lives we look to them for the deeper truths. Not the advertised truths of religions or crackpot sects, but the works and the ideas that singular people produce, which enable a kind of transcendence to exist on this earth.

  Near the most southerly tip of Africa, and encouraged by a restless lagoon, I think we are close to transcendence. I feel a distinct current running in Nellie’s body. I remember the telegraph poles and the thrumming of the attached wires on the road that led to the old farm. I wondered then how these wires carried messages. Even now I don’t really know. The messages, however terse, always contained something of importance, something urgent or tragic or congratulatory. After my mother died, my father never failed to send me a birthday telegram and a postal order to my boarding school. All gone.

  Nellie holds on to me; her hold is light, ethereal. I am charged with a sense of the possible. Outside we hear briefly the night warning of a leopard – the sound of linen being torn – but we are safe in our lodge. Safe and content.

  Et in Arcadia ego.

  We know its secondary meaning and its terrible ambiguity: death is present in Arcadia. Some art historians say that all art derives ultimately from the appalling awareness of mortality. I believe that all religions are a response to mortality.

  Nellie is asleep. I find myself worrying about Jaco and his troubles. I am searching my mind to see if there is some nuance I have missed. I will speak to Jaco tomorrow. If he goes public on the Scientologists he is opening himself to a fresh kind of hell.

  13

  What gets on Jaco’s tits most about Potchefstroom these days is the black people. Swart mense. He does not like the way they walk around as though they own the place even though the town was founded by Voortrekkers in 1838 just after Piet Retief was murdered by the Zulus.

  Everything here have been built by white people, by us. Black people has done fuck all. When the Boers arrives here the blacks is sitting on their arses watching a few cows wandering around. These people can spend hours looking at cattle although they haven’t got a fucking clue how to fix them if they is sick. Sometimes they blow smoke up their noses. Many of the black kids was used to die very young. Now because of modern medicine they are breeding like flies. What for? I want to know. What is the use? They worse educated now than they was under apartheid. Apartheid was not so bad as what everyone says, ask a black, many of them says they was better off before. Now their own people is robbing them blind. It’s a shame. The ANC crooks who runs the place is so fucking corrupt they is bleeding their own people to death. The blacks knows where they stand when the whites was in charge. There was respect. Now it’s fucking chaos with murders, hijacking and fuck knows what all.

  One good thing I have bought a gun with the money Oom Frank gave me but even that is a hassle. I must take a test and I must have a permit. More worser than that I must have two hours of instruction from a kaffer policeman who can’t hit a watermelon with a shotgun from five metres away. I want to tell this fat poes so-called policeman that I am shooting since I am five and I don’t need any help from a policeman straight from the bush, thank you. Also I have to write my ethnicity on the form. Why? I thought we was all equal now. Maybe they don’t want too many whities buying guns but I keep my mouth shut. You have to. Now you can’t even shoot on your own farm without a permit but no worries the black people can come and snare your buck at night or steal your sheep and the police does zip. Or they steal. The black people steal anything they can. They kill our cattle out on the veld and cut it up right there and sell it to butchers and they just jack up your bakkie on bricks and take the wheels. And God help you if you leave your radio in a car for two minutes, it goes like shit off a shovel. Democratic shopping. And another thing is getting me the hell in: my cousin hasn’t answered me. He’s too fucking important, he’s turned into a sort of Engelsman with a medal from the British government for his success in business. If you ask me, he got the medal for giving money to politicians more like licking their arse. He’s a ware piepiejoller. He’s a Member of the British fucking Empire. When I go to England to play rugby ten twelve years ago the place was so cold and grey and shit I couldn’t stand it. The whole fucking country is more or less the size of a sheep farm in the Karoo anyway. Still they call themselves an empire, how do you like that. And now my cousin who is also a Retief on his mother’s side is so up his own arse you will think he was born in Buckingham Palace, not Jo’burg. Jewburg. You can’t even say that no more. Oom Frank’s dad was a commie also. Even Oom Frank hisself is really a commie deep down. He visited Thabo Mbeki and Oliver Tambo up in Lusaka with other big cheeses. It was in the papers the Citizen which was a pile of shit.

  Jaco is sitting in a pub with Jannie and Stoffel.

  He sends his cousin another email. It starts Please Oom. But Oom Poes MBE is busy or he has blocked his emails.

  Potch has gone to hell. The streets is dirty, the university what was built by Afrikaners for religious reasons is now full of blacks. They eat their free lunch at the cafeteria and fuck off immediately. One or two writes papers, Ph.Ds, total crap nobody knows what they is about not even the blacks who writes them. They piss just about anywhere and they drop all their rubbish straight onto the street. They cut branches from the municipal gardens for firewood even jacarandas so the botanical gardens looks like a bomb fell on them. Sometimes they have kak art shows there what nobody likes but they look at masks and Bushman painting and shit rugs which is made from potato sacks and then their faces looks like they has a mealie up their arses as they are trying to say something which shows they are trendy. Or tries to pretend they knows what this bullshit means.

  Jaco’s phone rings. A researcher from Cape FM Radio tells him that a great white has eaten someone in Fish Hoek, Cape Town. The researcher says that there will be a debate about whether these sharks should be shot or tagged if they are seen near the bathing areas. They want Jaco to come down to Cape Town for the big debate on Cape FM Radio. As it happens Jaco would love to shoot a great white, the more the merrier in fact. It’s them or us, take your pick. It’s fine for these tree-hugger poephols to say the great whites must be protected. Great whites are bastards and he should know he’s been inches away from death. The researcher says, ‘That’s interesting, but please don’t come on quite so gung-ho.’

  Jaco has no idea what she means. He agrees to go – there’s a fee and a plane ticket. He is in the Bourbon Street Pub, where he and some of his mates meet most days at lunchtime; he pays up, he’s only had four Windhoeks, maybe five, and one dop of Commando brandy, who’s counting. He leaves a message for Flip Steenkamp on his phone to tell him he’s off to Cape Town.

  ‘Jammer ou maat ek moes Kaapstad – toe gaan vir die radio en televisie oukies.’ I must go to Cape Town for the radio and television people.

  Cape FM. He hasn’t been on that for a while, not since he came back from the States. Meanwhile four or five people has been killed by great whites and he has not had one call. Not one. Nitzs.

  It’s eleven o’clock. He climbs a little unsteadily into a bakkie they lend him and drives out to the farm to pack. His mood is completely changed. He sings ‘Ring Of Fire’. He wishes he could sing good. Johnny Cash is his favourite singer, you can’t beat him. He’s so happy he even offers two black women a lift in the back of the bakkie. He never gives the black men a ride if he don’t know them.

  As he turns off onto the dirt road to the farm his phone rings again. Shit, it’s Cousin Fra
nk. He pulls over.

  ‘Ja, Oom, thanks for calling.’

  ‘Listen, Jaco, I am off to the Addo Elephant Reserve with my family. So I can’t meet you now but I can speak on the phone. Maybe in a couple of days when we are in town.’

  ‘No, that’s only fine because I am op pad to Jo’burg to get the plane now right this minute. I am going to talk about sharks for Cape FM.’

  ‘Okay, well I won’t be able to see you at the house as I have my daughter here and so on. We will be back in Cape Town in a few days. You know Lucinda was in rehab and she must have peace and quiet? So when I am back I will call you and we can meet somewhere to talk. Basically I don’t think you should do it. By the way I think your shark days may be a diminishing asset.’

  Jaco has no idea what a diminishing asset is but he guesses it is not good.

  ‘Thanks very much, Oom, baie dankie, hoor. Thank you. I am very grateful for all what you has done for me. And we will talk about the other dinges.’

  ‘That’s fine. But don’t ask me for more money because I won’t give it to you. And listen, whatever you do, don’t say yes to the Scientology business until we have spoken.’