Читать книгу My Only Story - Deon Wiggett - Страница 9

Five days later, it is Thursday. I am back in my hometown in the Cape Winelands because it could not be avoided.

I am wearing a suit, which I seldom do, and it is hot in the church and my tie is choking me. The Dutch Reformed Moederkerk in Stellenbosch is a grand place with stained-glass apostles and an organ large enough to hide several small children. I am sitting next to my mother and my sister in the front pew.

Earlier, before we came in, the organist was playing Bach beautifully. But now an Afrikaans reverend stands in the pointy pulpit to say some phrases that are foreign and fully irrelevant to me. Everybody here knows what he is going to say. That my dad is dead at sixty-five. That this is part of God’s plan.

None of this was part of my plan, and God does not exist, yet here I am standing behind a lectern in His house and talking about Dadda, who started dying when I was in the pool, and who was dead twelve hours later from an undetected but life-threatening ailment. I’d missed my chance to ever speak to him again.

My opening line is fairly bizarre.

‘With many people, it’s easy to encapsulate their lives,’ I say in Afrikaans. ‘For example: Uncle Jannie was a quiet man who lived for his homing pigeons.’

Somebody suppresses a loud laugh. It is the sound of my friend Nella, who has an involuntary reaction to the absurd. Dadda was the same. Large and kind and jolly, and insistent on cracking a joke whenever a situation became too serious.

And so, for his funeral, I do the same, because he taught me that laughing helps you, and the people around you too.

I barely remember the rest of the service, other than the Beethoven at the end. I assume my aunt Esmé sat with us in the front row. I assume there was praying and standing and sitting. I cannot remember and I am okay with that, although I hope my other jokes were better than the homing-pigeon gag. I was broken and still breaking and dealing with a situation that nothing in my life had prepared me for. The horror was too much, so my brain took me away somewhere safe, leaving my body behind in a church in the Winelands to just get on and do what it must.

But even as my brain keeps me at a safe distance, the shock of my father’s death has started to dislodge memories, like an earthquake exposing a chest long buried on the ocean floor.

Sigmund Freud says the brain is an iceberg: the part that sticks above the water, the only part we see, is our conscious mind. Even though this is inconsistent with my own imagery of oceanic chests, I will allow Freud his useful metaphor; we both agree that something hidden can come to the surface. If you prefer Freud’s metaphor to mine, you are welcome to use that instead – we are all about free will here.

On the ocean floor, the chest’s lid starts to lift. First, my brain calls up every single memory I have of my dad, insisting I update his status to ‘dead’.

For instance: it is 1984, I am four, and Dadda tells me to follow him into our suburban garden. He makes me stand on a rock, he gets down on his haunches, and he says: ‘You’re four now, you’re a big boy, it’s time I teach you how to whistle.’

I try to take in his lesson. Purse your lips just so; put your tongue somewhere; exhale determinedly, or something. I try, and then I try harder, but no sound comes out. I am embarrassed, because I am disappointing Dadda, but after a while, he hugs me and says: ‘Don’t worry about it; we’ll try again another day.’ And then he never suggests it ever again; I realise, now, because he saw I was embarrassed.

It is decades later, and I still cannot whistle. And the man who tried to teach me is dead, and the memory re-filed under ‘Things I did with dead people’.

But memories are chain reactions. One thought leads to another – it is like you cannot remember one thing without remembering something else first. For instance: now I am thinking about a family holiday in my last year of high school. We are in the Kruger National Park. Foreigners would say we are on safari; South Africans would say we have come to the bush.

It is 1997 and we are in a very small camp called Punda Maria, way up north, where the baobabs are. On the afternoon now stuck in my mind, it is blazing hot. There are twenty or so people in the camp and, like my parents, they all seem to be napping. Not me. I am on the phone.

This is not my phone; it is a pay phone. It is the only telephone for miles around – cellphones are pretty new to South Africa, and even if you have one, there is no reception in the bush yet. Beyond the fence is savannah with lions and leopards and horrible adders. This one phone line is the camp’s only way to communicate with the outside world.

I am talking to someone. We talk for a long, long time.

Dadda is awake when I get back to our unit.

‘Where have you been?’ he asks, and he looks irritated – well, that is what I thought back then, now I think he looked concerned.

I cannot remember what I said to Dadda – exactly who I told him I was talking to on the phone – but it was a lie and he could tell. He was upset and I was a sulky teenager, and we proceeded to have a big fight.

Why is my brain serving up this memory? And who was I talking to on the phone?

Of course, now that I think about it, obviously I know who I was talking to. I have always known.