Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (2 page)

‘I want to talk to Ellen.’

‘I’m sorry, but she’s out.’

‘Out where?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not sure. With friends.’

‘When is she getting back?’

‘I really don’t know.’

‘Tell her Godfrey called.
Godfrey
. Be sure to give her the message.’

‘I’ll tell her.’

Afterwards she made me describe his tone, and repeat in exact detail what he had said. Although I was happy to play this game for her, I did feel sorry for him, this young man so very much in
love. She was seventeen years older than him, and of course I wasn’t much younger than he was. She’d got married to my father when she was only twenty. She was still studying drama
then, and he had just completed his degree in business science. They were an unlikely match, but my mother had fallen pregnant and one thing led to another. She dropped out of drama school at the
end of the year and became a wife.

Although she did try her hand at a few acting jobs over the years, she had never really had a career of her own. Her big role was the one she played as a housewife, a mother, a maker of homes.
She set about remoulding herself in the image my father desired. He was ashamed of her rustic Afrikaans beginnings, so she learned to speak English without an accent. She made it her duty to
acquire cosmopolitan tastes and values, which she picked up from the people and homes that were the new backdrop to her social life. ‘I grew up in a hurry,’ she told me bitterly. In
exchange, my father provided money and material consolations. We were raised in great style. I arrived in the world three years after my brother Malcolm. By then there was already no trace of that
earlier, other woman: Elsa de Bruin had disappeared and in her place there was Ellen Winter, who might have been born in Constantia.

In those years she didn’t smile much. I remember a composed, vacant, bloodless face, eyes wide and dark, with long lashes. And her hard mouth, with lips that were slightly too thin to be
sensual. It could have been a cruel face, but there was no cruelty in her. Not even the deep grief she later claimed to be feeling – grief for her lost other life – showed up anywhere.
Her moods were as level and blank as her face. She was very quiet. I would often come into the lounge, my father and brother out for the evening, to find her sitting alone in a chair, listening to
the ticking of clocks which filled the house like a kind of music.

‘What are you doing?’ I would say, disturbed at this vision of solitary waiting.

‘I’m sitting,’ she would answer. ‘Just sitting.’

I looked for tears, but her face was always passive. Nevertheless, on some level below words, I could sense her pain. I would run at her, butting her with my head, trying to jostle her out of
her frozen reverie. Sometimes I succeeded: she might get up with a faint smile and say, ‘Go and bath. We’re going out for dinner tonight.’ Then I would go and get myself ready and
meet her downstairs half an hour later, both of us dressed up, as if involved in some old-fashioned courtship. And this strange, chaste illusion would continue through the evening: in half an hour
we would be seated opposite each other at an intimate table, while waiters pressed menus into our hands, and a piano played softly in the background.

At times like these I was happy to be alone with my mother, brother and father elsewhere, all rivals for her affection removed. I believed I could make up for the lacks and absences in her life.
I would whisper my wishes across the white table-top, the candle flame bending to my breath. ‘Let’s go for ice cream,’ I’d say, ‘when we’re finished
here.’

‘All right,’ she’d whisper, dropping her voice in thrilling collaboration with my fantasy, ‘a big white ice cream, on a cone.’

‘And a movie after that.’

‘Yes, a movie,’ she’d say, falling into a contemplation that only just included me. Movies and ice cream were things that never occurred to my father; I suggested them for
exactly that reason. And we walked along the beachfront together, arm in arm, licking our ice creams in a kind of dazed complicity. My mother was white and long and cold, like any ice cream
cone.

When I was much younger she allowed me to sleep in her bed sometimes. These were extraordinary nights: half-waking, half-sleeping, I was stranded, it felt, in an acre of sheets. She lay at my
side, elegant even in sleep, one arm stretched out next to her. She would let down her hair before she went to bed and it lay strewn across the pillow: a pattern in black, one of the shadows that
the moon cast in through the window.

Once – only once – did she cry out in her sleep. A long and tangled moan that came out in pain: ‘Howard... Howie... what have you...
done... ?’

The meaning of this remained unsolved; a secret buried beneath her white, moonlit face. She breathed softly as she slept. Too softly sometimes: I woke once in the night and thought that she had
died. I called and clutched at her with greasy hands, and cried when she woke up and cradled me in her embrace. ‘Were you afraid I’d left you... ?’ I didn’t answer. I
couldn’t find words to express what it would feel like to be alone in the house with Malcolm, and with Dad.

As I grew older she wouldn’t let me share the bed anymore. ‘You’re too big now,’ she said. ‘You’re not afraid of the dark anymore.’ It was never the
dark that had driven me to her, but I didn’t say anything. In any event, she no longer shared a bed with my father and her new one, in the spare room downstairs, was too small by half. So I
stayed in my own room above, emptiness all around, sensing her heat.

When my father was at home all trace of her affection went underground. She became formal and even polite with me. She would sit in the study at night, in one of the leather armchairs, keeping
her hands busy with tapestry or sewing or writing a letter. She murmured very softly when she spoke. Only by tiny signs – the brushing of fingers at the table, or a glance toward me in front
of the television – was I assured of her continuing love for me, expressed so wholly when we were both alone.

When I remember these scenes now it is a kind of emptiness I feel; and yet our lives were full. Full in the material sense, with objects and ornaments and opportunities for diversion. I had my
own room, with a bathroom to myself. Our house was three stories tall, carpeted throughout, the walls covered in expensive paintings, every table laden with china or silver, all of it real. My
father, that cultured boor, knew what to buy, though he took no pleasure in it; he was sending out coded signals of wealth and gentility. ‘I would rather go to India for the real
thing,’ he told us, ‘than buy a perfect copy in South Africa.’ His possessions shored up his precarious high standing.

He needed to advertise his sophistication, because it was entirely fake. His real love was for hunting. The walls downstairs were covered in animal heads. He had killed every one of them, he
would tell his visitors proudly, as he showed his collection of guns and rifles. He never tired of handling them, taking them apart and cleaning them, his hands more loving on those hard bits of
metal than they’d ever been on us. ‘With this,’ he would tell you, ‘I killed that,’ pointing to the head of a kudu above the fireplace. ‘And with this one, I
took that.’ An impala near the door. ‘This little baby brought that one down.’ A warthog, its bristles shining.

His proudest claim of all was the leopard in the entrance hall. Preserved in its entirety on an island of wood, teeth drawn back in a snarl.

As a boy I was horrified and fascinated by the leopard. I would lie for hours on the cool tiles of the floor, trying to look down its throat into the darkness it contained. I imagined my father,
down on one knee, holding steady while the leopard charged. It was a huge disappointment to learn later – from Malcolm, who had been there – that this wasn’t the way it had
happened at all. ‘We chased it for miles in the Land Rover,’ he said. ‘It was wounded, it couldn’t run properly. Dad shot it in a tree when it tried to get away. He
didn’t even get out.’

My father, for all his ornaments and paintings, looked as if he belonged outdoors. He was a fat and sweaty man, with brown hair cropped short and a neat moustache, stained at the edge with
nicotine. He had a heart problem, but he liked to smoke cigars and drink. He had blue eyes so pale as to be almost without colour. He would stare at me sometimes, with amazement or disapproval,
from those eyes, rimmed with resin and short white hairs, like the bristles of the warthog on the wall.

‘Why are you so small?’ he demanded.

‘I don’t know.’

‘You must eat properly. Do you eat?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ellen, does he eat?’

‘Yes, Howie, what are you talking about? You’ve seen him eating.’

‘Do you play sport, Patrick? At school?’

‘He doesn’t like sports, Howie, you know that.’

‘Nonsense,’ he bellowed, surging up suddenly onto his short and slightly bowed legs. ‘Come with me,’ he commanded, taking me by the back of my neck.

He took me, on that day and others, to the broad expanse of lawn outside. I would stand, trembling with a fear that I could smell in my nose, at the edge of the flowerbed. And wait. ‘You
must watch,’ he told me. ‘Watch it all the way into your hands. You got me? Don’t blink.’

And then he would hurl the ball: oval, dark, a dangerous shape of leather. It hissed toward me through the late afternoon, an embodiment of all that was most frightening to me, and all I could
never do: I dropped the ball. I turned my head in fright and it would glance off my blunt hands, spinning away into the flowers. ‘Sorry,’ I cried. ‘Sorry, sorry... ’

I ran to fetch it.

‘Give it up, Dad. Don’t even bother.’

This from Malcolm, who would sit on the lowest step of the veranda. And laugh.

‘Leave me alone,’ I said, as much to my father as to him.

‘That’s enough, Malcolm,’ Dad said.

And kicked the ball at me. This time I caught it: by some chance it found its way into my hands. I tossed it carelessly back again.

‘Well done,’ Dad said encouragingly.

‘That was lucky,’ Malcolm whispered.

‘Leave him, Mal.’

I can still see my brother as he was on the step that day: sunburnt, sulky, his hair too long. He could catch any ball that was thrown at him. He was captain of his rugby team at school. He
couldn’t spell or do sums, but he had a rebellious spirit that couldn’t be quashed. He kicked stones, with his tie pulled down and the top button on his school shirt undone. He carved
his name into the wooden desk-tops in the classrooms and swore savagely and spat expertly sideways. He had a yellow mark on his first finger and thumb from smoking. He was my father’s son. I
was the impostor, with my mother’s dark eyes; while Malcolm had Dad’s icy stare.

The two of them played ball together on the lawn outside. It wasn’t an awkward exercise with them; it was truly a game. They practised passes and tackles, stitching lines of movement that
tied them invisibly together. Malcolm could kick and catch the ball on the run. Sweating, grimacing with pleasure, they would come back indoors together afterwards, arms around each other, luminous
with pride and effort.

‘Your heart,’ my mother warned, from above her sewing.

‘I know,’ my father gasped, one hand on his chest. ‘Where are my pills?’

For myself, I don’t believe he had a heart at all, this swollen, implacable man with his shirts open to the belly, showing his gold chains and bracelets. Everything about him, even the
most casual details, was expensive but somehow cheap. I don’t know what smallness he was trying to compensate for, but he gave off an endless energy and size: he was loudly generous and
bullying and expansive. His voice seemed to come from some deep recess in him, always on the verge of insincere laughter, wreathed in the blue smoke of his Cuban cigars. He was full of tricks and
trinkets and finery. I had never seen him naked. His hands gestured hugely on the air. He was, by nature more than by vocation, a millionaire.

I have never understood exactly what my father’s business was. But it had something to do with the stock market and, more recently, with pieces of property all over the country. He owned
plots of land here and there along the coast; he had entire blocks of flats in his name in Cape Town and Johannesburg. On the walls of his study, between the disembodied heads of animals that he
had deprived of life, were cryptic certificates framed in gold. One of these – a big, ordinary looking bit of paper – was the deal that had started his career. ‘The one that made
the difference,’ he told us, beaming. I knew I was supposed to be impressed, but it was just a boring sheet of jargon to me.

Since that first big deal, my father had made a lot of money. As he never tired of explaining, he ‘worked to stop working’– by which he meant he was rich enough to retire. Not
entirely: but aside from the few hours each day that he spent on the telephone or at his unseen office in town, he was usually somewhere around the house, cleaning his guns, or wallowing in the
pool, pulling himself with huffing strokes through the water. But he didn’t look at ease in these long, idle hours. No, what he wanted more than anything was to be away, out of town, in the
bush somewhere, and it was often that I came home from school to find the house all empty of his presence, streaming with light. On such occasions my mother would be happier than usual. ‘Your
father is away in the swamps again,’ she would say, a small subversive smile flickering on her mouth.

Or: ‘He’s gone to the Eastern Transvaal for some shooting.’

Or fishing in the Transkei.

She had long ago decided that these outdoor trips were too rough for her and opted to stay at home, with me and a squadron of servants. So he went off with a bunch of men for company, loud and
hairy and intense, like him. Most of them were people he did business with, for whom the savagery of nature was a metaphorical substitute for the world of money. They congregated at our home
sometimes, before or after these trips, wearing designer outdoor gear, drinking beer and
braaing
steaks on the lawn. They were, and behaved like, people in no doubt of themselves, laughing
unrestrainedly and slapping each other violently on the back. They had names that underlined their natures: they were Harry or Bruce or Ivan or Mike. There was Fanus, whom I had caught pissing in
the roses once. I was afraid of them and went out the back door to avoid them.