Up Against the Night

by Justin Cartwright

  It’s dark and the fire is nearly dead. The lady says okay I am going to bed I am tired, forgive me. What for? I don’t know. Oom Frank says I will be up soon, darling. This should be his new wife. And my wife and Wynand who can maybe be dead, how are they? I have dropped them right in the shit. I must get away where I can take Junie and Elmarie and Elfrieda. But maybe she doesn’t want to speak with me no more. If Wynand have not attacked me we can be in Durban with the Banana Boys right now eating ice cream and seeing the snakes, black mambas and so on, in the snake park. They has had shark nets for years there, no trouble. Now they are trying nets at Fish Hoek. I was a doos telling them at Cape FM to shoot sharks but it was because I was drunk. Everyone knows I was totally pissed – totally wrecked like they says in California. Maybe I can go back there one day.

  I am falling asleep on a stripy lounger.

  I need to take a piss. I look out of the window. Now they is all in bed or in the sitkamer. I go round the back of the pool house and take a piss. I see the light is still on in the sitting room. I can see someone standing up and another person gets up. A boy and a girl, it looks like, goes out through by the gate. I lie down on the stripy mattress again. I must get up early in the morning.

  27

  Only Lucinda and I are awake. We are waiting for Bertil to come back after walking Vanessa home. We are listening to music and talking. She has her head on my shoulder. It seems to my susceptible mind that she is happy to be close to me.

  ‘Where do you think the lovebirds are?’ I ask.

  ‘Lovebirds? Don’t be an old fogy. But snogging on the beach would be my guess. Don’t panic, Dad.’

  ‘I want to go to bed.’

  ‘I will wait up for them. I am quite happy here.’

  I kiss her.

  ‘Thanks. That’s kind. Goodnight, darling. Don’t forget to put the alarm on when Bertil comes in.’

  ‘I won’t. It was such a lovely wedding, Dad. And you made a great speech.’

  ‘Thanks, my darling.’

  I pop into Isaac’s room to see if he is all right. He has a small room of his own now. He is sleeping, clutching his teddy bear. For a moment his hands are opening and clenching. There is something magical about a child’s bedroom. Isaac’s hair spreads out on the pillow, framing his face, so that he has some of the aspects of an icon. I can’t let him go.

  As I slide into bed, Nellie, half asleep, whispers, ‘Hello, darling, it’s so good to see you again. My husband. I love to say that.’

  Her breath is warm and enticing. I want to tell her to look at the moon on the water; it is like pewter, gleaming rather than shining. But I don’t suggest it because I know I am too ready to push people to admire a view or the birds or the protea bushes or even – as the other day – little tongues of water advancing across the parched earth. Georgina’s diagnosis is that I am an insecure colonial, always too ready to make a point: It’s not English, Frank. Believe me it really isn’t. Even now I can hear the contempt in her voice.

  The pleasure of curling up with Nellie, my wife, is intense. I kiss her and she smiles, half asleep. We don’t speak; we don’t need words at this moment, as if we have made a fair exchange of our essences.

  28

  I wake up. The light is still on in the big house. The creepy-crawly starts up. There was a green snake in the pool yesterday. I hit it with the pool scoop. I hate snakes. I can’t sleep no more because I must get up in a few hours. I have a dop of Commando and I eat half the meat pie what’s left. I go outside the pool house for a piss by the flowers. There’s a helluva lot of flowers and bushes in this garden. The moon is shining on the sea. Oom Frank has got every fucking thing he wants even the moon shining up his arse. We have fuck all. What that outjie says in the Oliver fucking Tambo Airport is right: Ons is nou die kaffers. We are the kaffers now. But we are the real South Africans the real Boers and we lost everything what is belonging to us. Stolen. We made this country and we have been verneuked, cheated. I must drink some more brandy. Not too much because I have to stand up early. Fuck, there is someone in the garden. It’s two o’clock. I hide in the pool house and look out the window. Now there’s another munt just behind. I cock the Beretta. Ten up. Two black guys, kaffers, is walking slowly around. They go to the maid’s room. I see them taking her to the house.

  29

  I wake. There is a terrific noise somewhere in the house. It’s a chaotic, terrifying sound, of shouting and breaking. Now Nellie wakes up.

  ‘What is it, Frank?’

  ‘Don’t move. I will go down. Just don’t move. I’m calling security.’

  The phone is dead. I hit the button by the bed which sets off the alarm, but that is dead too. I run to the sitting room. Lindiwe is tied up and two men are fastening Lucinda’s wrists behind her with cable ties. She is sobbing gently.

  The men turn to me. ‘Good evening,’ I say.

  You must engage them. I remember someone saying that: You must speak to them. I am not frightened; a torrent of anger is drowning out all fear. I would kill them if I could. There is a presumption and an entitlement to these people here in my house that incenses me. I walk towards them.

  ‘Stay still.’

  One man holds up a machete and makes a chopping gesture to suggest what could happen to me. The second man produces a gun.

  ‘We must talk,’ I say. ‘You can take what you want. The car, money, credit cards, anything, I will show you. But please don’t hurt anybody.’

  ‘If you lie to me I kill you,’ he says.

  I know that in many robberies the intruders choose to kill the witnesses because the police make so few arrests. Survivors can cause trouble. There is even a belief that some robbers take revenge by raping any women present.

  I can’t see them clearly in the gloom. It is the gloom in which horrors traditionally take place, as if there are particles in the air presaging something frightful.

  ‘You must give to us every-ting: money, keys, credit cards with pin code and your car. If you do that you can live.’

  I detect a Congolese accent.

  ‘Vous êtes congolais? ’ I say. ‘Du DRC? ’

  ‘Vous parlez français? ’

  ‘Mais oui. Bien sûr. J’étais quelquefois a Kinshasa. Je peux vous aider.’

  He hits me on the side of my head with his hand. It’s a warning. He thinks I am up to something. He smells of liquor. The other man points his gun at me. Still I am not afraid.

  ‘This is my daughter. She has a child. I will give you whatever you want, but you must leave my daughter and the others. If you want to take me in the car to get the money that is okay.’

  ‘Take your clothe off,’ the man with the gun says to Lucinda.

  The second man is not happy about this proposal. He shouts at his colleague, waving his hand towards the door. He turns to me:

  ‘You get everything you ’ave, like you ’ave said. Bring it all here in this room. No cell phone. This man come wif you. Or we kill your daughter and you also.’

  I lead the man with the machete all around the house. I tell him that my wife is in bed. Au lit, I say. We enter. Be calm. Nellie asks if I have Isaac. I don’t. The man with the machete waves at Nellie – go out. I tell Nellie that she must go to the sitting room.

  ‘Try to stay calm, darling. I will handle this.’

  She is wearing my dressing gown.

  I give the man our cell phones and wallets and all the credit cards. I go with him to my study where I open the safe and take out the money. There is about two thousand pounds. Then I write down the pin numbers on a piece of paper. We have four credit and debit cards. I take off my watch and give it to him. I give him our two iPads and a laptop. I am stumbling through a nightmare.

  My phone and the laptop are traceable.

  ‘Je peux vous aider,’ I say.

  ‘Comment tu fais ça? ’

  ‘On peut faire un plan. Je peux retirer beaucoup plus d’argent de ma banque en Angleterre. Mais ça dépend d’une chose, si vou
s êtes d’accord. Ma famille doit être libérée d’abord.’

  In fact it is impossible for me to get cash from my bank in the middle of the night but I am hoping to keep him interested after they have taken everything, so that they don’t kill us.

  We come back into the living room and place the phones and laptops and money and watch on a table. As the first man inspects what we have brought, I see Isaac coming down the steps, holding his teddy bear to his face.

  Isaac says, ‘Hello, Grandpa.’

  The gunman turns, startled. He fires at Isaac but misses. Nellie runs towards Isaac.

  ‘Hello, Grandma,’ he says, as Nellie grabs him, her back to the gunman.

  They are going to kill both of them. I move towards the man with the gun.

  Now I hear a voice, screaming. There is another man in the room: he has a dense black beard: ‘Ek is Retief. I am Retief,’ he shouts. ‘You people are dead.’

  Oh God, it is Jaco. He fires at least five shots, hitting both of the men in quick succession as they turn towards him. The noise of automatic gunfire in close proximity is appalling – a staccato promise of death, each deadly shot producing the same, lethal, report. Jaco shoots the two men again as they lie bleeding. One of the men is bubbling audibly from a wound in his throat. Jaco kicks him in the face – two teeth hang from his broken mouth. Jaco is in a frenzy. To my inexpert eyes the intruders look as though they are already dead. There is a terrible amount of blood, not just on the floor or the sofas but also on the walls.

  Now Bertil comes to the front door. ‘I heard gunshots,’ he says. Nellie rushes to him. But Bertil may have had a few drinks; it takes him a while to understand what has happened. I ask him to go back to Vanessa’s parents’ house and to call the security and the police from there. He goes off.

  ‘Jaco, thank God for you. You came just in time,’ I say.

  ‘No, only a pleasure, Oom.’

  I have no idea what he is doing here. I am shaking and disoriented. In my confusion I think Jaco must have appointed himself our guardian angel. He is still holding his gun.

  ‘Ja, I am sorry, Oom, I have been sleeping in your pool house for a few days while you was away.’

  I hug my cousin for the first and last time. I have to sit down. My legs have become loose, like a puppet’s, like Pinocchio’s.

  Isaac is serene. Perhaps he thinks we have been playing a game. But the rest of us – apart from Jaco – are trembling, shocked and horrified. Only Jaco is inured to the horror; he is drunk and elated. My legs won’t respond. I want to be sick. I throw up into a waste-paper basket. Lucinda is sitting, still tied, her eyes fixed lifelessly on the near distance. She is silent now. Lindiwe has freed herself and comes to help me struggle to my feet. I get some scissors from the kitchen and cut Lucinda’s cable ties. Lucinda is silent. I think that she will always blame me in some way for this cataclysm, this horror. But she says under her breath, ‘I’m all right, Daddy.’

  Nellie and I hug her as if to bring her back to life; Isaac, not wanting to be left out, joins in. All around us there are bloody fragments of bone and even a small section of hair and skin flung onto a sofa; the floor where the two men lie in a grotesque intimacy is awash with blood. A mohair Swazi carpet is soaked. Who knew that a human being harboured so much blood?

  Even in this appalling nightmare, Lindiwe tries to help Lucinda. She brings water and three Lemon Cream biscuits, and Lucinda eats them all as though she is hypnotised.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ Isaac says. ‘Can I have a Lemon Cream?’

  Contained within Isaac’s innocent concern is a message: it is that I will never see my beloved country again.

  GRINDA

  Four months later

  We set out from Stockholm into the Archipelago on a fine summer’s day. The ferry pushes away from the quay in front of the Royal Dramatic Theatre, where Greta Garbo studied. I love the view of the city receding and my spirits are instantly lifted by the cheerful, determined way the ferry strikes out for the island of Grinda. This beautiful Friday afternoon the whole of Stockholm seems to have taken to their boats and headed for the distant islands of the Archipelago.

  It’s a beautiful sight. But we are subdued. I see that our happiness has been fatally undermined. But Nellie has never uttered one word of reproach. She believes fervently that love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds. The Swedish relatives are arriving tomorrow for the blessing of our marriage. A happy occasion.

  After what happened to us, I think that we are incubating something like a bacillus, something repulsive and untreatable. I see that, like my eager ancestor with his dreams of Eden, I had a naïve faith in my sense of being protected by my special understanding. I have spent many nights awake. In those waking hours I see my house drenched in blood, the walls spattered. The nights have become difficult for me. I have often had to move from our bed to a sofa or a spare bed. I must endure my personal torment and my regrets alone.

  Thank God for Jaco, our Caliban, who turned out to be our saviour. Who knows what would have happened if he hadn’t appeared? In fact I can guess all too readily.

  I have bought the family farm in Potchefstroom and put it in trust for Jaco. The trustees have evicted the cousins. Jaco’s children and his wife have moved onto the farm, to live in the old house where Tannie Marie used to read Pinocchio to me by candlelight. Jaco says he has given up drinking. His firearm licence has been revoked, however. Wynand survived being shot, and did not press charges, partly because I gave him some money to go away. He also had a few misdemeanours on his own record. For one, he was already married. Jaco says the children love the farm. They run around barefoot as often as possible, in the traditional fashion. Jaco is planning to buy Nguni cattle. They are tough.

  Nellie has hired the Grinda Wärdshus, which once belonged to the first director of the Nobel Prize. He bought the whole island and built the Wärdshus in 1906 as his holiday house. Nellie likes the idea of people coming from all directions by ferry. It strikes a seafaring note. It was here on Grinda that I was entranced by the celebration of Sankta Lucia. Lucia is also the name of our Lucinda; it means illumination. In mythology Lucinda is the giver of first light.

  Our Lucinda went back to California to see her ex-lover and to return little Isaac to his mother. We would have loved to have him live with us; it was heart-rending to say goodbye. He was calm, hugging us, saying goodbye, and at the same time giving the impression that he was ready for the next adventure. Lucinda insisted that he had to go back. She promised to bring him to see us if his mother agreed. To be honest, she said, his mother would be delighted to get rid of him. She wants to be in the game, although Lucinda didn’t tell us what game that might be. I hope it is just a figure of speech.

  Bertil is with us. He is still in touch with Vanessa, and he has been talking of going to Cape Town to see her, against his mother’s wishes. In four months he has grown and he has become very handsome. I see girls looking at him. I have a surprise for him: I have paid for Vanessa to come to the Wärdshus. She is already there.

  The boat stops briefly at Vaxholm – once the home of King Gustav Vasa – before we head out again. The flotillas of small and large boats are surging out to the islands, many under sail. I have the feeling that the Vikings would have had a similar sense of infinite possibility as they sailed and rowed out to the open sea on their daring and improbable voyages. The sea girdles and cossets the myriad islands and skerries, some so small that they are host to just one or two trees and a clapboard house – usually red – with a dinghy moored out front; others are bigger, clothed with fields and forests and blueberries. The eider ducks paddling inquisitively in busy flocks and the reeds in the shallows suggest that the Baltic is not very saline here.

  Nellie says she knows all the best places to swim on Grinda. They have been imprinted by her childhood memories. We will swim together. Perhaps she sees the immersion as being something like a baptism or a washing away of sins.

  *

  V
anessa is waiting at the dock as planned: a blonde, slender beach girl. Poor Bertil is startled when he sees her. They are too young to handle this level of emotion in public; Bertil kisses her perfunctorily. He looks at Nellie and me, expecting an explanation.

  ‘It was your mother’s idea,’ I say.

  ‘In fact it was Frank’s idea but I think it was a good one. Sorry, darling, if we gave you a shock.’

  Bertil soon gets over his discomfort. Vanessa takes his hand. Our luggage is ferried to the Wärdshus on a trolley. Vanessa and Bertil walk off hand in hand along a path that opens onto a meadow of wild flowers. The last time we were here I saw that the Swedes have an almost pagan regard for nature. Rocks and tumuli and groves of birch engage them. A small house near the jetty, which doubles as an art gallery, offers paintings of the island and detailed studies of wild flowers and a few pictures of Hydra in the Aegean Sea.

  Once we have settled in, Nellie leads me to a beach she remembers. First, it is obligatory to pick up Grinda Loaf at the store, she says. We scramble down through some trees to get to the beach and we swim in the warm, brackish water. Nellie’s swimming style reminds me again of my mother’s; it is graceful and measured. We lie in the early summer sun on the crescent beach eating Grinda Loaf. We are the only two people there. It is an enchanting place. It breathes good will and reason. Eider ducks swim by. They have a neat and bourgeois appearance, mildly quacking once in a while. Nellie says she wants to buy a cottage out here. But in my fickle heart I wonder if it wouldn’t be just a little boring. Perhaps I could learn to sail a boat or practise ice fishing in the winter. On the way back to the hotel we buy an ice cream, the best ice cream in the world, Nellie says. I tell her that no one forgets the ice cream they had in their childhood. I tell her about the Green Parakeet Café in Fish Hoek, which sold only three flavours of ice cream.