Читать книгу Cult Sister - Lesley Smailes - Страница 12

PORT ELIZABETH, SOUTH AFRICA:

I am Tom Smailes’s daughter. My mother, Pat, really wanted me. They laughed after making love, while she stood on her head, to keep me in. It took her nine months to work out my name, Les at the beginning, les at the end, and L.E.S. as my initials. Lesley Elizabeth Smailes. She is clever like that.

My father was the centre of my universe. I loved him like I have loved no other. I loved his shortness and his strong-calved legs. I loved him carrying me on his shoulders. I loved his kind, blue eyes, his beautiful, wistful smile, his gentleman voice. To this day I still find bald men attractive. My dad, mom, elder brother Allen and I moved to Port Elizabeth when I was a baby after my father was offered a post in the English department at the local university. He was a lecturer and worked his way up to associate professor, eventually becoming head of the department.

He was also a political activist and spoke out against forced removals and other injustices of apartheid. His open face and controversial quotes sometimes showed up in the local newspapers. For this reason, our phone was tapped for years.

The stress of all of this eventually took its toll. He had an inherited cholesterol problem and had four major heart attacks over an eight-year period.

To make matters worse, he began drinking. The cupboard in his study became his ‘wine cellar’. He would sit down there or in my folks’ en-suite bathroom, marking papers and drinking into the early hours of the morning, going to bed with his crystal goblet. The mix of wine, anxiety and heart medication eroded his gracious and gallant personality. My vital, vibrant, healthy dad became stooped, skinny and small. No more long Sunday hikes at Sardinia Bay, no more looking for fossils or antique bottles. No more mountain climbing. He sedately played chess with Bobs instead.

Later my dad began an affair with one of his master’s students. When my mother found out about it, I was sent off to boarding school while my parents tried to patch up their marriage without me knowing anything. I am still not sure why only I went, and not the boys. The school they shipped me off to was Helderberg College, the Seventh Day Adventist school in Somerset West where they had met.

One December holiday I came home, arriving on the Sabbath. We all went to church in my dad’s orange VW 411 and then had samp and beans for lunch – my father had been raised in the Transkei and it was his favourite food. My friends, David and Lisa, came around afterwards and we went down to the beachfront.

When we came back home, nobody was there. My mom was a Life Line counsellor and she was on duty that day and, although my dad’s car was still in the garage, he was nowhere to be found. What was strange was that our dog, Lolly, was at home. Usually my father would take him for a stroll in the early evening. My mom came back, and she was worried. She thought my dad might have had a heart attack while he was out walking the dog and that Lolly had returned home by himself.

David, Lisa and I searched the surrounding veld until it was dark, but couldn’t find him. That night Lisa and I slept downstairs in the playroom just off the garage. In the early hours of the morning I heard a sound. I jumped up, knowing it was my dad. I pushed open the garage door and there he was – smelling of shit and vomit, smaller than small, clutching his crystal goblet in a brown paper bag. He could barely stand.

I woke my mother and somehow we managed to get him upstairs into a bath. After we’d cleaned him up, we put him into bed. He kept on repeating: ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil. He makes me to lie down in green pastures. The Lord is my Shepherd.’

The following morning we realised that my dad wasn’t just drunk – he was hallucinating. In an attempt to take his own life, he had overdosed on an enormous amount of pills. Mogadon and Serapax – tranquillisers and sedatives. He had been saving them for months in preparation.

Weeks later he told me how he had wanted to go out like a king. After his substantial samp and bean lunch, he’d taken his stash of pills and walked to the veld behind the municipal flats on the other side of our neighbourhood. With a bottle of vintage wine and his crystal goblet, probably watching the sunset, he had swallowed over 700 pills. How he managed to get home with his drug-shocked body and his crystal goblet intact we will never know. I would like to believe angels carried him.

Early on Sunday morning my mother called an ambulance. They took my darling daddy to hospital. He remained there for over a month – my entire Christmas holidays. He hallucinated for weeks. On New Year’s Eve my mom told me he was asking for a divorce. She finally broke the news to me about the affair he was having. His girlfriend was pushing for him to leave us in his sick and fragile mental state. By that time he was in PE’s state mental hospital, the Elizabeth Donkin.

My world fell apart that day. I went into a state of shock. I remember lying in a full bath at a friend’s house, looking up at drops trickling down the small, steamed-up window above me, wishing to cry, to die. I lay in the bath for hours. I went out with my friends that evening. It was hardly a New Year’s celebration. I had half a glass of wine and passed out under the table. Then I found myself in the toilet, retching and vomiting.

When the December holidays came to an end, I went back to boarding school. My dad only came home to collect his belongings. My childhood seemed to have ended. He went to stay with friends but later moved in with his 24-year-old student girlfriend, Penny.

I was expelled from boarding school a few months later. A group of us had gone drinking at a hotel one Sabbath afternoon and arrived back at campus in time for evening worship stinking of alcohol and cigarettes. One girl vomited in the parking lot. That evening we were all put into separate rooms and interrogated by the staff. We had all agreed that if any of us were caught we would not tell on each other. I was the only one who did not confess.

On Sunday I was sent to the basement to collect my trunk and told to pack. The next day I was put on a flight and sent home. The school had only notified my dad, but he was lecturing when my flight landed. So he sent his blonde, buxom girlfriend to pick me up. She took me back to their dark little apartment. It was strange to see my father’s favourite things in that place … his lamp, his books, my framed childhood drawing.

Later that afternoon, after sharing a bottle of red wine, my dad took me home. He dropped me off outside and didn’t come in. My gran and mom were stunned to see me. They had not been told of my expulsion.

How my dad had broken with the past. He took me out to a steakhouse even though we were vegetarians and bought us each a bottle of wine and a T-bone steak. He gave me money for the cigarette-vending machine. It seemed so out of character. Such a strange change.

My dad adored me. I had always been the ‘apple of his eye’, his ‘Darling Girl’, his ‘Fluff’, his ‘Dinky Cat’. But one night he told me that I was one of the three biggest mistakes he had ever made. These awful words swirled around in my head for years. Even though I can rationalise that he was sick and that he didn’t mean it, recalling this episode still reduces me to tears. He had, until then, given me a safe, secure, sweet and golden childhood.

Within a few months of me returning home following my expulsion, my dad was found in Victoria Park. Shot dead in his beautiful head. It was a Saturday in early October. The police arrived at our door to inform us of the news. By Monday local newspapers had a photo of him on their front pages.

His girlfriend had been the one to find the body. They had apparently had a fight that morning. His car was parked outside the park, a block or two away from the gloomy apartment they’d shared. Inside the car was a suitcase filled with the familiar clothes he had taken when he’d left us. If only he had just come home instead of going to the park, things would have been so different.

The next couple of years were a stoned blur. It became a coping mechanism for me to smoke as much weed as I could get my hands on. I promiscuously sought love and acceptance, experimented with other drugs and became only more confused, hurt and damaged as my teenage days rolled on. The Church seemed to offer a way out of all of this – a fresh start, a chance to reinvent myself. Is it any wonder that I grabbed this opportunity with both hands?