The Road of Excess. Ingrid Winterbach
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lets it go. The less he knows, the better. He doesn’t want to get too mixed up with this woman. Just now it’ll be him who has to give her a lift to work every day.
“I do a bit of work for the trade unions,” she says suddenly. “For the Clothing Workers’ Union.”
“Office work?” he asks.
“Yes,” she says. “I organise like a bomb. Help with the books. Send out fliers. Arrange fundraisings, public appearances, and so on.”
She seeks and finds a peppermint in her bag.
“Do you believe in miracles?” she asks.
“No,” he says.
“What a pity,” she says.
They drive the rest of the way in silence.
After she’s done her shopping at the Spar, and he’s been to the post office to fetch a package from his elder daughter, she asks him if she can pay a quick visit to the butchery next door to the Red Dolphin in Queen Mary. She wants to get some bones for tonight’s soup, and quickly give someone a message at the Red Dolphin.
He waits outside, in the car. She emerges from the butchery with her packet of soup bones, then goes into the Red Dolphin. It’s a bar. He’s never been in there. A bead-curtain hangs in front of the window. Inside the window, an advert: Barmaid wanted. Would this woman be going in there now to apply for the job? He doesn’t think she stands a very good chance.
After a while she comes rushing out the door, almost running. “Drive!” she says, getting into the car in a huge hurry.
He reverses. “Drive!” she says. “They didn’t see me getting into the car.”
As he turns right into Queen Mary (now Siphiwe Zuma), she looks over her shoulder and pulls out a pistol.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he calls out.
She ignores him. “Let them come,” she says, “I’m ready for them.” She sits, bent forward, elbows on her knees, pistol in hand, the barrel upside down.
“Put your seatbelt on,” he says.
“Whatever,” she says.
She keeps glancing over her right shoulder.
“Put that damn thing away,” he says.
“Wait a bit,” she says, sinking deeper into her seat.
“What the hell did you get up to inside there?” he says.
“Drive!” she says suddenly. “The bastard’s behind us!”
In the rear-view mirror he sees a red bakkie racing round the circle.
“Turn down here!” she says, grabbing the steering wheel with her left hand so that his car takes the turn with screaming brakes. “To the cemetery,” she says, “we can still shake him off.” She’s sitting at an angle. The pistol lies against the backrest of her seat. “Drive this way,” she says. He follows her directions, past the far end of the cemetery, past the crematorium, so fast over the speed humps that their heads knock against the roof of the car, left up Fenniscowles, straight down Brettonwood, up again in Oliver Lea. At last, the red bakkie’s no longer visible in the rear-view mirror.
By the time he comes to a halt in front of his garage, his legs are shaking.
“You owe me an explanation,” he says.
“Thanks, man,” she says. “In the fullness of time.”
“That’s the first and the last time I give you a lift,” he says.
“Don’t forget your Lotto ticket,” she says, digging in her back pocket. She puts the ticket on the dashboard. “Your gateway to paradise.”
“Paradise lost, rather,” he says.
“Lives there who loves his pain?” she says, unperturbed. “Who would not, finding way, break loose from Hell, though thither doom’d? Thy wouldst thyself, no doubt, and boldly venture to whatever place farthest from pain, where thou mightst hope to change, torment with ease, and soonest recompense, dole with delight, which in this place I sought.”
She stares ahead of her, lighting up a cigarette.
“Well, well,” he says. “Did you ever! Milton?” (He recognises the lines of verse, half-recognises them, quite incidentally, from his mother’s studying of the poem when he was a boy. She used to read parts of it out aloud to him and Stefaans.)
She ignores his question and gets out, packet of soup bones in one hand, cigarette in her mouth.
“And why do you smoke if you’ve got asthma?” he asks through the open window. But she’s already turned away from him, making her way home.
“It’s the last time you catch me out so easily,” he calls after her.
She makes a slight gesture with her hand but doesn’t turn around.
What do we have here, he thinks. John Milton! Paradise Lost. The Mafia’s appropriation of Milton? What’ll Stefaans say about this?!
*
From his marriage, which lasted twelve years – an especially unhappy connection – two children were born, two girls: Eugenie and Laura. Two lovely, lanky children. Both with clear eyes and a deep blush just below the skin. The elder, Eugenie, dark and troubled. The younger, Laura, with a paler complexion and fairer hair, a more even temperament.
Since her teenage years, and since the divorce, he and Eugenie have not been able to find a way of getting along comfortably. He feels she’s more like him than anyone else. As she got older, they increasingly found themselves locked in conflict. Over time, she showed less and less patience with him and his way of doing things. She accused him of not being a good father. She feels he failed her emotionally; he was irresponsible and selfish. He put his art above his family, is her feeling. As far as that’s concerned, she’s probably right. But it does not mean he didn’t love her, always, even if his love did feel mostly hopeless and inadequate. For a long time she remained reserved in her dealings with him. Unforgiving. He never blamed her for this. He felt that he deserved her criticism and her rejection. Recently, however, she’s been milder in her censure. She is less defensive and not quite so tentative in her contact with him. As always, he finds her disarming, even when she’s at her most critical, her most prickly. It breaks his heart to think about her as a small child. Big head, skinny limbs, large fleshy hands and feet, and sad eyes. That she had to harden her heart so, and become fierce for the sake of self-preservation! As a child, she was terrified of snakes, and of fire. A spirited, impulsive child.
Laura studies the secrets of algae and feels responsible for the preservation of the planet – rather than his, or anyone else’s, emotional welfare. She lets less of her inner life show than her sister does. She steeps herself in botany; she seems to find her refuge in algae and mosses and fungi, whereas Eugenie, more introspective, seeks her salvation and security in relationships. Relationships and literature.
His ex-wife did not marry again; his children never had to share with a stepfather the feelings they had for him. She was, and still is, a good mother to them – reliable and involved. When the girls were still living with her, he never worried about them the way he does now. As the years passed and they became more independent, his fears for them grew rather than lessened. Will they be able to look after themselves well enough? And then there’s the matter of a woman’s lot in this country. If something had to happen to them – something violent. Unbearable, unthinkable thoughts, too terrible to endure for even a second. And once he dies, and their mother too – if something should happen to them, what then? These are thoughts that overwhelm him in the middle of the night, in the early hours, when his resistance is at its lowest.
In the same way, he worries about the welfare of his two brothers. Stefaans, who descended into darkness and was lost for so long, and Benjamin, so successful on the surface, but whose battle against the