Like it Matters (21 page)

And she smiles in this quiveringly righteous, oddly sexy kind of way—then turns and walks out the room and I hear her calling, “Hi! Welcome!” as I move off to the chairs.

I set my sights on one that’s got a lot of empty chairs around it.

I raise my eyes just enough to nod quickly to everyone who’s sitting there—only a couple of them are talking, one lady’s mumbling to herself—and I sit down and look at my shoes.

What the fuck’re you doing, Ed?

You’re a joke.

This is ridiculous and you know it.

And on and on, while the room fills up—most of the seats get taken, I hear more chairs getting dragged in—and whenever I look up a guy in a bright-pink wig and a push-up bra and zebra tights and high heels is staring at me.

Then all of a sudden there’s an American in the middle of the full circle, clapping his hands. It takes a little while but people stop talking and the punk kids are shamed into muting the music coming out their cellphones. The guy in the middle—in reality probably about twenty-five but looking about sixteen, curly black hair, sweating dark stains into his sky-blue shirt—tells us his name is Pastor Tom and he’ll be our leader today.

He says he can tell from the turnout that the Lord is with us today.

He says he knows it’s corny, but he’s got a football he likes to throw around at these things—and he jogs back to his chair, and sure enough, there’s a football lying underneath it. Painted red, white and blue in stripes. He says, “If you want to say something all you gotta do is call for the pass.”

For at least two long minutes, nothing happens. It’s a lead balloon and I can’t take the hopeful look on his face, and I just keep my head ducked low

Until eventually one of the helpers—he’s standing at the back next to the American girl who gave me sass earlier, I see now they’re both wearing the same
T
-shirts:

—he calls, “Ja, over here, Tom,” and Tom launches the ball over the crowd to him and he catches it and there’s lukewarm applause.

And then it starts. “Dag julle, my name is Shwayne”—

And who am I to judge? The guy’s got scars and prison tattoos on his hands and his neck, he’s got the right—

But his skin’s so good, so are his teeth, he’s obviously been clean for years and years, I doubt he even remembers anymore what it feels like to
want

And the speech is so thoroughly rehearsed, full of dramatic pauses and improbably ironic, moralistic twists—it’s the kind of thing they make you sit through in high school

But when he’s done, everyone claps. Pastor Tom even does this super-sincere slow clap that he extends for a little while after everyone else has gone quiet. “Thank you, Jesus,” he says.

“Ja, who’s next?” Shwayne says, holding the football above his head.

And then it goes round and round.

First it’s a working man, in orange overalls with reflector strips down the sides of his pants. “My name is Joseph. I’m good one hundred forty-three days now. Thank you, Jesus.”

Applause, and then he passes to Cliff who, the way he tells it, was a model citizen before the demon took hold and next he knew, he was naked on the lawn outside his ex-wife’s house and she’d turned the sprinklers on him.

Then to Francois, who started off with a few lines of coke on the weekends after he got retrenched, then slid from there

And then to Aziza, who whispers through a horrific story about how her uncle used to abuse her and then slip her roofies—she breaks down about halfway through, loudly, and I nearly do too

And then to Wathiq and then to Yaaseen, basically two good souls besieged by drugs

Another one like them

Another one

All of them scrupulously thanking Jesus—either all on their own, or else because Pastor Tom keeps prompting them with things like, “Can I tell you who brought you here today?” and “So who do you think can give you light on the dark road ahead?”

And then, while a thin guy about my age is deliberating about who to pass to, the woman with the stringy blonde hair who’d been talking to herself when I came in stands up and shouts, “Give me the ball! Give it
now
!”

And she gets it, and then launches into maybe the worst story I’ve ever heard in my life. She’s on her feet while she’s telling it, holding the football in her hands and talking to it like it’s
there
, it’s listening—

She had two daughters, once. Never a husband, but she had a boyfriend—and then one day, the boyfriend just drove over one of the daughters, reversed and drove back over her again, just out of the blue one day while she was opening the garage door at home. And that sent the woman on a bender and somewhere along the line she got raped, then addicted to pethidine, then unga—and at some point the other daughter ran off and joined a cult that turned out to be a snuff porn ring

And the story ends with her just screaming

And throwing the football down into the ground

And it bounces off at a crazy angle and skips over the floor and I’m still in shock and I can’t move my foot before the ball bumps up against it and rests there.

Instinctively, I pick it up, and start looking for someone to pass it to—

But no one’s got their hands out—

They’re all looking at me, they’re
waiting
.

I shake my head and I try give the ball back to Pastor Tom but he says, “Hi there, friend. What’s your name?”

I almost lie.

“Hi, Ed. This is your first time with us, isn’t it?”

“Maybe.”

“So then share with us, please.”

“No, thanks,” I say

And I might be imagining it, but it seems like the crowd grumbles a bit at me.

“You must,” calls out the American girl from the back of the room. “It’s part of the help process.”

Everyone claps.

“But I can’t go after
that
,” I say. “I don’t think anyone should.”

“Everyone’s equal in the eyes of the Lord,” Tom says. “Don’t be afraid.”

“I’m not
afraid
, I’m trying to be respectful.”

“Oh, come,” Tom says, and he makes praying hands and cocks his head to one side. “Don’t you have a story?”

“Ja, I do,” I say. “And if I tell it I might end up in jail.”

And, it’s quite thrilling—I realise I’m going to keep talking even if I don’t know what I’m going to say next …

“Anyway, it’s boring. It’s fucking boring. I mean, I know what’s wrong with me, of course I do. But it doesn’t stop me. Knowing it doesn’t stop me. Isn’t that fucking
wicked
, Tom? What kind of cunt made me that way?”

He half-closes his eyes and he tries to talk again, but I cut him off, it surprises me how violently I do it—

“Tom, I swear to god if you say something about bearing my cross or how Jesus died for my choices or something like that, I swear to god I’ll walk out of here and kill the first nun that crosses my path. Okay? Here, take this,” I say

And I give the football to a pretty cool-looking old guy in a Hawaiian shirt sitting next to me, who just says, “Pass” then hands the ball back to Pastor Tom.

“Fuck sakes!” I shout. “Why couldn’t I do that?”

“Because we know Rudi,” Tom says. “And we trust him.”

And so after me, all that happens is Tom struggles through a long, long prayer—I’ve curdled the crowd and I feel bad about it—and then everyone stands up and heads off to the tables in the back to load up on coffee sachets and sugar packets.

I leave very quickly, bumping into people on my way out because I don’t want to look up and meet any eyes

And then I’m outside, and the sun bouncing off the tarmac reminds me I’ve got a headache and then I head through the gate and up Greatmore Street, hearing the names of five different drugs shouted at me as I do the block—almost like I had a lot of friends on this street, and a lot of nicknames.

How’s that woman with the daughters going to make it up the road?

How does she get out of bed?

Shop, eat, put on clothes?

I reach the corner and my headache’s moved behind my eyes, and it’s hot, I’m sweating in my hairline and I can taste sweat around my lips. Main Road is crazy—it’s lunchtime rush hour, buses and taxis filled with schoolkids, all that precious cargo carried between so much glass and steel, through so much noise and peril—

I wait for the green man and I go find a bit of shade under the overhang outside the
KFC
and I stand there for a while and it’s good—all of a sudden things don’t have as much of a grinding edge.

My headache subsides, and when I pay attention again, I realise I’m staring at a bum lying in the shade under the overhang.

Wild beard.

Long hair.

Pale eyes, friendly kind of face—

Grow up, Ed.

You can’t let every rough old dude make you think about him.

Then, from nowhere, there’s this breeze, cool and feathery on my skin

And it’s so perfectly clear—

I know where I’ve got to go—

And I cross over Roodebloem Road while the red man’s flashing and I keep going down Main, past the fashion shops and the laundromats and the hardware stores and the secondhand car yards and the fisheries and the fast-food places, past men in overalls and reflector vests and schoolkids in their track-suits and bursts of pigeons and older kids smoking and kissing in alleyways and so many women in suits and headscarves smoking outside the factories, lots of them beautiful and shy to look at me, past people minding their shoes as they step into nice cars and drive off, past people with nowhere else to be but lying on the pavement under the sun—

All the way till I get to the cemetery out in front of Groote Schuur.

The old gate, the frilly one that opens onto Main Road, has a padlock on it so rusted you’d never get a key in there. But just a bit further down from the gate, I see a bit of the hedge’s been flattened, and the fence’s had a couple of its metal stakes broken out. Someone tried to patch it up with chicken wire but now that’s also broken

And it’s easy to duck through.

The light is harsh in the graveyard, clean and hot, and blinding when it bounces back off the headstones. The light feels wrong—too factual for a sacred place. Some of the headstones are big and ornate and they’ve got beautiful things carved on them, but mostly it’s very sad—unwatered, unkempt, the graves swamped with packets and newspaper and bits of metal and glass and bright pieces of plastic, takeaway containers and whatever else the southeaster whips in from Main Road.

I think,
Not even if you were a ghost and you were buried here.

You wouldn’t visit.

And I start to feel it, for the first time, the full weight of knowing that—unless they just sent him up a chimney—my dad probably ended up in a place that looks just like this, probably worse.

Would they even have been able to put a name on the headstone?

Like I’m running to be sick, I search and I find an unmarked grave—a rough concrete slab that might’ve had something etched on it once but not anymore—and I kneel down in front of it and I start to cry. Bitter tears, violent sobs—

And the sun’s coming off the dust and my vision’s swimming and I’m either going to throw up or I’m going to say something, I’m going to shout something

And then—

The same way a
TV
station can suddenly appear out of hopeless static—

An old, old memory starts playing through …

It’s my tenth birthday and it’s the long summer holidays. My dad’s been coughing for months but obviously he hasn’t seen anybody about it—and then that day he wakes up and he’s so weak he can’t talk, he has to scrawl me a note saying:

His room really smells like a sick person and I can’t stand it, I go and wait barefoot in the road for Doctor Benyon to come. He was the good doctor in town—we only saw him sometimes; if we were just a bit sick we’d go somewhere else—and he comes in a hurry, with a fat leather satchel on his shoulder and pens and syringes sticking out the pocket of his shirt. I follow him inside, right to the door of my father’s room.

“You can come inside,” he says.

“No, thanks,” I tell him, and he goes in and I sit outside the door and lean my head on the thin wood and listen.

In the beginning, only Doctor Benyon talks.

But he must’ve given my dad something on his way in, because soon after my dad revives, and I can hear his voice, also there, muffled and buzzing on the wood against my ear.

Now I hear it again, and I know what it is—
his voice is full of drugs.

But at ten years old it just sounds thick, and strange, and so unfamiliarly calm that I worry he’s never going to be the same again. The doctor barks and barks at my dad—basically trying to humiliate him into improving his health, giving him a long list of stuff he can and can’t do, what he should and shouldn’t eat. I run to my room and write down everything I can remember.

The doctor leaves and I go into my dad’s room. In a way, he looks like shit—he’s pale and drawn, it looks like he’s got two black eyes—but what I can’t deal with, what’s scary, is how happy he looks. How serene. And he’s talking in soft, warm sentences that his eyes follow as if he can actually see the words flowing out his mouth and swirling in the air around the bed. His hand’s heavy on my head, his fingers clumsy in my hair.

He passes out soon after and I lie on the bed next to him and start doing this weird thing I did a lot when I was a kid—well, I’d go through spells of doing it a lot—I curl up in a ball and bite the tough skin on my shoulder, not breaking the skin, but keeping that pain prolonged

Until I wake up with a bruise and go find my dad. He’s milling around the house—just acting like everything’s normal. His old voice is back. He doesn’t want to talk about what the doctor said and when I give him the note I’d made he just throws it in the bin and tells me, “He already gave me pills. They’ll work.”