Blind Date at a Funeral Read online

‘That’s okay,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to.’

  But he insisted that I give him my address and I did so, on a little scrap of paper, thinking that he would lose it in about ten seconds.

  Needless to say, I had the resources to find more beer money. And my girlfriend and I had a great weekend in the Berg and I forgot about the old man.

  The scuffed and wrinkled white envelope arrived at my little flat in Sandringham, Johannesburg, one month later.

  In it was one rand, twenty-five cents!

  Yes, the old man did what he said he was going to do.

  I swear, at the end of every month, an envelope arrived with one rand and twenty-five cents in it. No note, no return address – just the money the old man had promised to pay me back.

  I was in advertising in those days and a little over a year later, I went back to the Drakensberg to shoot a television commercial with Sarel van der Merwe, the rally driver. It was for Jurgens caravans and he was towing the caravan through the Berg, showing how rough and tough those caravans were.

  The filming took place very close to where that old man had fallen off his bike and I decided to go and find him, to tell him that he didn’t need to send me the money every month because I was doing fine.

  I found out that he had retired from the hotel. They told me that he lived in the village near where I first saw him and they directed me to his place.

  My art director and I went to the man’s home. It was exactly what you’d imagine. A thatched mud hut with missing windowpanes covered in Spar plastic bags to keep the wind out.

  An old African granny with grey hair answered the door. She had a doek on her head that was tied under her chin like people used to do in the olden days when they had toothache.

  Inside the hut, the hardened mud floor was swept clean. There was a Primus stove, a galvanised tub with a bar of Sunlight soap in it, a rickety old table with a clean cloth on it, a little cupboard and a bed on bricks with white sheets.

  That’s all.

  It was spotless.

  The Sunlight soap was the only colourful thing in the entire place. I have such a clear vision of that bar of soap. I can see it in my mind when I close my eyes.

  Other than those few items, the place was spare.

  The woman was the old man’s wife.

  I asked whether he was around so I could tell him that he didn’t have to pay the money back to me.

  What she told me stopped me cold.

  The old man had died six months before and she had continued paying his debt.

  I was stunned. She had nothing. Absolutely NOTHING! Yet she was doing what she considered was the right thing. Paying their debt back as promised.

  She kept his word. She continued sending me money every month, despite the fact that her husband had died and she was poor.

  I told her I didn’t need the money and gave her a little more from my pocket.

  She was so grateful and would not stop hugging me.

  The Broom Dancer

  (Soundtrack: The Blue Danube by Johann Strauss)

  ‘Count backwards from ten for me,’ she said.

  I closed my eyes as she placed an oxygen mask over my nose and patted me gently on the head. The doctor inserted the needle into my arm. I flinched a little when I felt the dull ache and slight burn of the anaesthetic entering my body.

  Then everything went black.

  I surfaced in the recovery room but went back to sleep almost immediately. I vaguely remember being transferred to my bed but I was so weary and lame I couldn’t open my eyes.

  I was in a pretty deep sleep until a strange and rather uncomfortable sound tickled the edges of my consciousness.

  The sound scuttled around inside my brain, banging against the edges, irritating me more and more.

  I opened one eye, then the other, and at the foot of my bed, saw a thin old man in flannel pyjamas, waltzing with a broom on the polished linoleum floor.

  I thought I was dreaming or that perhaps the painkillers they had given me were making me hallucinate.

  I shook my head in disbelief. Waves of post-operative nausea from my knee surgery washed over me. I could feel the pressure of the full plaster cast on my leg but there was no pain. I was still in some sort of twilight zone and my nineteen-year-old brain could not quite connect with what was happening around me.

  The music accompanying the dancing man was coming from a small red transistor radio sitting on top of an empty hospital bed. The sound was tinny and hurt my head.

  The music faded and the man took a bow.

  ‘That was practice for the party tonight,’ said the man.

  A round of applause broke out.

  I looked around. There were six beds in the ward, including mine. All were filled with men of varying ages, except for the bed belonging to the dancer.

  ‘Wow. Where did you learn to waltz like that, Piet?’ asked a man in the bed opposite me.

  ‘I was mos a champion,’ said Piet, proudly. ‘Me and my wife used to dance sokkie all the time. But now with my krom leg …’

  Piet suddenly looked up, quickly hobbled over to his bed and climbed under the covers.

  All the other men in the room quickly busied themselves and pretended to be occupied with something or another.

  ‘Piet!’ said a stern voice from the doorway.

  ‘Ja, matron,’ he replied, sheepishly.

  ‘Stay in your bed.’

  ‘Ja, matron,’ he replied, again.

  The men in the room giggled behind their hands like little schoolgirls.

  A rotund guy in the bed next to me, with a big stomach and an even bigger moustache, noticed that I was awake.

  ‘You made it,’ he said. ‘I’m Taki. I’m a fat Greek.’ He guffawed at his own joke.

  All the other guys laughed too.

  ‘Howzit,’ I croaked.

  As I spoke I realised how parched my throat was. I only found out later that you have a pipe shoved down your trachea when you have general surgery.

  I reached over and took a sip from the plastic cup of water that was on my bedside table. It burned all the way down.

  ‘I’m sorry you landed up in this ward,’ said Taki, with a hearty belly laugh. ‘It’s a bloody zoo.’

  And it was a zoo. It was like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Even though some of them were recovering from surgery and some were in there for other ailments and treatment, these guys were out of control.

  In those days, people were only allowed to visit for a couple of hours in the afternoon and in the evenings. Television was very young and there were no sets in the ward, so it was a matter of self-entertainment fuelled by the smuggled brandy that Piet’s son brought in.

  Taki owned a steakhouse, and during visiting hours, his family arrived with bags and bags of burgers and chips and his special monkey-gland sauce.

  Piet was a farmer from the Koppies area in the Free State.

  The other guys were from the ou Transvaal.

  I made pretty good progress during the afternoon and although I felt a deep ache in my leg, the medication worked! It actually made me feel quite euphoric.

  Everyone was so well behaved during visiting hours.

  Later that evening, the matron did her rounds and dimmed the lights. She paused at the door and glared at Piet, who gave her a sheepish little wave. A few minutes later, the giggling started, the booze came out and the fun began.

  It started with Taki passing around sips of brandy in little plastic pill dispensers. I had one gulp, forgetting how raw my throat was. My grimace garnered a loud chuckle from the men. I was a youngster and not a seasoned drinker yet, so one taste, on top of the pain medication, was all I needed.

  I sat with a perpetual grin on my face, watching Taki tell jokes and listening to the other guys share army stories and tales of female conquests, lust and other lunacy.

  Apparently the nurses were in on the soiree and popped in every now and then, with their fingers pressed to their lips, to shush the
guys when they got too loud.

  After the stories, we ate the smuggled-in crisps and colddrinks. Then Piet turned on his little red transistor radio, limped out to the middle of the floor and started dancing with the broom like he had done when I first saw him that morning.

  One two three.

  One two three.

  With eyes closed, he moved along the floor very gracefully. He dipped the broom this way and that as he turned and waltzed across the linoleum in his socks. He had a very sweet and innocent look on his face as he nuzzled the handle of the broom like it was a pretty girl with soft, flushed cheeks.

  In the low light from the bedside lamps, Piet seemed to glide across the floor.

  One two three.

  One two three.

  I noticed a hole in the toe of one of his socks and for some reason it endeared him to me. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but there was an underlying sadness in the way Piet, the wiry farmer from Koppies, moved. Even though he had a bad limp, there was something very beautiful and touching about how he danced.

  Taki leaned over towards my bed and whispered behind his hand. ‘This is a hell of a farewell party, isn’t it?’

  ‘Who is leaving?’ I replied, also in a whisper.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Taki.

  ‘You said this was a farewell party.’

  ‘Ahh, you didn’t know,’ he said, smiling at me broadly. ‘It was Piet’s idea.’

  Taki leaned closer.

  ‘He wanted a farewell party for his leg,’ he whispered. ‘It’s going to be amputated.’

  Found and Lost

  (Soundtrack: ‘The Long and Winding Road’ by The Beatles)

  She was crying when I first laid eyes on her all those years ago.

  She was sitting in the rain and sobbing so hard I couldn’t tell which were tears and which were raindrops running down her cheeks.

  She was perched, wet tissue in hand, on a low brick wall outside a café in Killarney, Johannesburg. I glanced at her as I walked past.

  Then I stopped and turned back.

  She looked so beautiful, drenched in her sadness, sitting there in the rain. Helpless. Hopeless.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘What would make you feel better?’ I asked. I could not think of anything else to say. She was really beautiful and that scrambled my brain.

  ‘A frozen Flake,’ she said.

  I looked at her, puzzled.

  ‘You know those Cadbury Flakes?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I like to put them in the freezer and then eat them frozen.’

  I burst out laughing and so did she. We talked for a bit and then she told me where she worked.

  I wished her a better day and I went back to work after getting coffee.

  Later that afternoon I scrambled from café to café and bought 100 Flakes. I boxed them up and had a friend drop them off where she worked, with a note that said, ‘I hope this makes you feel a hundred times better.’

  That was the beginning of a great relationship that turned into a wonderful friendship.

  She was so much fun.

  We would do crazy things like drive to Durban from Johannesburg for the day so that we could have a picnic on the beach. We sang the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack all the way there and back.

  She taught me how to ‘walk the dog’ with a yoyo.

  She taught me how to play ‘Heart of Gold’ on the guitar.

  We went dancing at almost every club in Johannesburg, from Barbarella’s to Ciro’s. From Plumb Crazy to Q’s. From Bella Napoli to Raffles.

  She liked to make out at the top of the water tower in Berea. And on the top of Linksfield Ridge, looking at the twinkling lights of Hillbrow.

  And, get this, on the Ellis Park rugby field in the middle of the night, which almost got us thrown into choekie. Not forgetting the Blyde River Canyon where she liked to climb under the waterfalls in the moonlight, which freaked me out, especially after drinking red wine.

  Just to qualify: this was making out only. She was not into doing the wild thing because she was going through a divorce.

  In retrospect, I’m glad it didn’t go further. Honestly. Because she was not ready for a relationship and I was a typical horn dog, and knocking boots would have ruined our friendship.

  We transitioned out of the pre-serious romance phase, back to the bestest friends era, which was great.

  I won’t lie. At first, I grovelled and begged and wrote her songs and sent her cute notes, trying at least to do it once. Just once. She did not buy all my countless, desperate reasons for why it would be a good thing to bonk me, so we became close, loving friends-without-benefits.

  We stayed very close until I moved halfway across the world a few years later and that’s when the relationship slowly faded away.

  We lost touch for a number of reasons. Trying to phone South Africa from a ticky box in America, in the mid-1980s, was almost impossible. You had to feed quarter after quarter into the phone and you only got a minute or two. You could barely say, ‘I still love …’ and the phone would cut off. And letters took forever to get back and forth.

  In one of her last notes, she told me she was moving to Cape Town. Her letters stopped soon after that. I found out she had a new boyfriend and thought he may have put a stop to her being in touch with me. At least that’s what my ego wanted me to believe.

  I thought about her more than often over the years but could not find her. I had so many questions, answers and memories to share.

  I did not know if she had changed her name or reverted back to another name. I searched and searched (before Google) but to no avail.

  For years I could not find her.

  Then lo and behold, after more enquiring and searching, thanks to the Internet, I found her.

  After a lot of soul-searching and sorting through my feelings and questioning the wisdom of my decision, I decided to go against the advice of some old friends. I went to see her during one of my trips back to Johannesburg.

  As often happens when the universe gets involved, it was a rainy day.

  I nervously clutched the flowers I had bought for her from an enthusiastic street vendor who was selling beautiful mums from old paint cans on the side of the road.

  I could not tell which were raindrops and which were my tears as I gently placed the brightly coloured flowers on her grave.

  I could have sworn I felt a hug and heard that mischievous little giggle of hers. But that may have been my imagination because I’m a hopeless romantic.

  The Recce Box

  (Soundtrack: ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ by Simon and Garfunkel)

  Some people have eyes that are very difficult to look into.

  Especially those steel-blue eyes that seem to gaze right through you.

  His eyes were so piercing and cold that I had to look away instantly. Which was probably a good thing, because he was a member of the Recces. Also known as the toughest, most ruthless military unit in the South African Defence Force.

  The Recces were rough and tough and ready. They could survive in the bush for weeks, living off insects and small animals. They ate creatures that you or I would not have eaten even if we were starving to death. They were trained to kill people and any other living thing that got in the way of their mission.

  The question I am sure you are asking is: what the hell was he doing that close to a Recce in the first place?

  The answer is: I had no choice in the matter.

  I was on a train to Pretoria via Johannesburg, from my army base in Potchefstroom.

  Most of the compartments were full.

  I finally found a compartment with one guy in it. Old blue-eyes himself. His name was Blackie Swart. A Recce who was headed to Pretoria’s 1 Military Hospital for a ‘rest’.

  Now when you hear about a Recce needing a rest, the word ‘bossies’ comes to mind.

  Only an idiot like me would be stupid enough to be
in there with a Recce who was going to Ward 17 (the psych ward) for a ‘rest’.

  Even the conductor brought Blackie Swart two coffees so he didn’t have to come into the compartment twice.

  Blackie didn’t say anything at first. He just sat there in his army browns, looking at me, and slowly and deliberately sandpapering a small wooden box that he held in his hands.

  And I just sat there, looking everywhere else except at him.

  At one stage I got so uncomfortable I decided to go to the bar and get a beer. I got up and before I could reach for the compartment door he looked at me and growled, ‘Sit!’

  So I sat.

  ‘Ja, I’m a Recce,’ he began.

  ‘I see,’ I said, pointing to the insignia on his beret.

  ‘I’m going to 1 Mil for some peace and quiet.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

  ‘No, it’s not very nice,’ he said.

  I swallowed hard.

  ‘They think I’m bosbefok,’ he said. ‘I mean I am, but not as much as they think.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Ja, I lost my temper a few times and … well … you know how it is.’

  Now I am sitting there, not knowing how to respond, and wishing someone else would come into the cabin.

  I was so damn uncomfortable I wanted to run out of there.

  ‘Er, what are you making?’

  I pointed at the box in his hand.

  ‘Oh, this?’ he said, holding up the wooden box.

  I nodded.

  ‘It’s a box,’ he said.

  Apparently he thought I could not see that it was a box.

  He held it up for me to see. It was quite beautiful. It was dark wood with an intricate pattern inlaid in lighter wood.

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Did you make it?’

  ‘Ja. My grandpa taught me how to work with wood.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said.

  He handed me the box. I turned it over in my hands.

  ‘Who is it for?’ I asked.

  ‘For me,’ he replied, not looking up.

  Neither of us spoke for a while, then he told me why he was making the box.

  ‘I have a lot of very bad memories from when we were fighting terrs in Angola and a lot of kak happened when I was in Zambia and Rhodesia.’