Page 18 - In a different register - Sample

look at it ............. can I touch it. Yes. It was reluctant. As she stroked, he seemed to like it. A white liquid began to come out. He jumped up: If you tell your parents about this I will kill them. Of course she never did - never could - tell them, but the complicit secrecy was exciting and left a residue of pending curiosity and terrain to be explored.Indelibly copied on her memory was the time standing holding her nanny’s hand outside the Post Office. Suddenly there was the explosive shouting of men and two white Post Office officials came out pushing a black man in a scintillating white shirt. They shoved him to the ground and began to kick him around the parking lot like a football. As they left him there the blood began to ooze out over the shirt and she heard his groans as her nanny harried her away. How can anyone say they never knew? A gnawing pain began to dog her. Not always honourably. Like the time in a cafe. A black man stood servile to one side while white after white after white was served. Eventually the cafe owner turned to ask her what she wanted. She knew she should say the black man had been there a long time, that it was his turn. She didn’t. For this and other sins of commission and omission she felt shame. How can anyone say they were not responsible? (All those who had taken some responsibility had had to pay a heavy price. Those who had not paid the price had not taken responsibility. Even after it was over they denied it.)She told him of how in 1976 she had watched black school children from her third storey office window in Adderley Street. Later the Argus showed pictures of children wounded with grape shot and shop owners complained about the damage to their shop fronts. That was when I left, Mary said. I ended up in London after having tried Brazil, the Caribbean (those islands that would have me anyway, since I was South African) the States and Canada. One has to stop somewhere and say: Thus far ..... Nothing is going to be perfect and home is not an option, so make the best of the loneliness, the ugliness of cement and dirt against an endless backdrop of grey: And a telephone system that defies the sanity of someone used to a slim Cape Town directory with telephone numbers referencing actual people. At least I obtained a work permit on account of an Irish grandfather.Shame. A complex mixture of betrayal and anger. Like the fact that her father never made it in the world of men. The world where men are successful and make money. Nothing could have been further from his mind than the material world. He lived in and for and through God alone. That no one else did, isolated him from family and friends alike. Even church acquaintances were less radical in their total dedication to God’s way. The irony was that he worked for the Bank. (In those days one belonged to The Company). He must have been the only person in the history of The Standard Bank of South Africa who asked for a demotion from sub-accountant back to being a humble teller as he had no interest in climbing the corporate ladder. He left management of the world to his wife. Thus when his wife turned fifty and decided on an about turn from being Superwoman running a home and a major corporation’s managing director (and that was in the days before Sputniks, remember), to becoming a submissive ‘wife’, obedient to God’s will, he failed to ensure a house in which to live while they waited to move to Cape Town. His daughter was in a rage at his insouciance (‘Reliance on God’, he called it), which for her demonstrated clearly his failure as a man. She stormed into the dark, monolithic Bank - bastion of the nation’s wealth - and went up to the open, wood-panelled, teller’s cubical where he stood counting money on the broad wooden counter over which customers would pass the time of day exchanging pleasantries. Loudly she poured forth a tirade of her grievances regarding his incompetence: How can you do nothing about finding a place for you wife? What are you doing about it? You can’t live in a bus shelter. It was to her credit that even as she did it she felt a certain grief that she should so humiliate him in public.Yet she was more like him than her mother. She had a passionate single mindedness for Truth. Since God’s Word - The Book - was his primary source of fact, it was hardly surprising that one of her favourite proofs about anything and everything was: The Book says ............. Of course she didn’t mean the Bible, as he did, but expert intellectual opinion, of which she was an inveterate consumer in the form of books.