Call It Dog

A Season in Paradise

 

I find him in Empangeni. My father lies on his back at the edge of the sugar-cane valley, one arm under his head, the other flung out, fingers plaiting scrub and yellow weed flowers. The camera next to him is shuttered and blind. He squints at the wavering sky, which moves with heat if not with wind. Empangeni rises behind us: tin shanties glint through the sugar-mill smoke and dusty tracks cross the red hills to mark mission churches, now crumbling. In front of us, the green swarm of cane stretches to the horizon.

 

‘When did you get here?’ I ask.

 

‘Just now.’

 

I stand over him, waiting. We’re quiet, at right angles to each other. I close my eyes and lift my face to the sky as though hoping to feel rain. But the early-morning sun burns through my eyelids, red light suddenly inside my head.

 

‘How did you know I was here?’ I ask. The heat touches my shoulders and chest, a blessing.

 

‘I read your stuff online. By Jo Hartslief in Johannesburg, South Africa.’

 

He speaks in a British accent, mispronouncing my surname the way they all do. His would be no easier for them, the rolling r of Roussouw something only the Welsh would be able to attempt. ‘The articles were good,’ he says.

 

His compliment surprises me. ‘Thanks.’ I look down at him, the sunspots fading from his skin and clothes as my eyes adjust to the light.

 

‘Well, not too bad anyway. A bit “human interest” for my liking.’ He doesn’t move to put air quotes around the term, and he doesn’t need to. ‘Too many interviews with crying refugees.’

 

Lying down, my father’s belly slopes up from his ribcage. I wonder if it will hang over his waistband when he stands up. He’s grown a beard, which is red and grey in patches, and his nose has been broken since I last saw him. It’s hooked now, but at fifty-three, he’s too old for it to be handsome.

 

Before I can decide whether or not to get irritated, he asks: ‘Were you staying near Alexandra?’

 

‘No. I’ve been going into the townships with Tumelo, the photographer I’ve been working with. He knows where to go.’

 

‘He’s good,’ he says, nodding his approval. ‘He’s taken one or two nice shots.’

 

Tumelo’s a war correspondent and has been taking photos much longer than my father has. I sometimes search stock-photo libraries for the pictures my father takes – of steaming bowls of pasta and sauce, moist slabs of cake. I want to ask how his slathering shoe polish onto raw meat and frosting grapes with hairspray qualifies him to judge, but I know better, even after so many years.

 

‘Most of the other journalists out here from overseas, it’s obvious they’re staying in nice hotels in Jo’burg,’ he says.

 

I too have been staying in a nice hotel in Jo’burg, spending the money my grandmother left me on swimming pool access and a queen-sized bed. But I haven’t been able to sleep in it.

 

‘And using copy from the news wires anyway, getting the local photographers to do all the difficult work for them,’ he scoffs. This is something he’s always banged on about, that photographers never get enough recognition. I don’t let on that I agree with him. ‘But your stuff is different.’

 

‘Thanks.’ I wonder how long he’ll let me have this.

 

‘Of course you’d be stupid enough to go there. They warned the press that it’s too dangerous, especially for a woman, and of fucking course you went anyway.’ He looks at me for the first time, his eyes triumphant slivers in the glare. ‘I hope those kaffirs roughed you up a bit, put their pink hands all over your pasty skin. That’d teach you.’

 

I gather fistfuls of my skirt at my sides to steady myself against what I know is coming. ‘Teach me what?’

 

‘That you can’t just come back here after so long and still know how it is – how bad it’s gotten – or how to stay safe.’ He turns his frown back on the sun. ‘You can’t come back after ten years and have it be your home any more.’

 

‘I never said it was.’

 

‘I bet they only picked you to come out here because of your surname. That and the nostalgia for swimming pools and Mandela that you whip out when you’re trying to be exotic and interesting.’

 

I force myself to breathe in for four counts and hold it just as long. But my voice wavers with the heat that has come to my face nonetheless. ‘You don’t know why I came out here, or what happened when I was in Alex.’ The words are wet. And he can hear it, has always been able to tell when he’s scored a point, even over the phone. In spite of myself, I want to tell him about the fires, the bloody blankets on the side of the road. That before I left london two weeks ago on assignment for a magazine, I’d called a few of my other contacts to see if they’d be interested in a series of articles about corruption and cronyism in South Africa. When the riots broke out, I was a cheap source of copy; ‘already in-country’ was how they put it. But I know that my father doesn’t care about how I ended up in Alex, and if I try to explain myself to him he will have won. Right now, I want to hurt him with something trite and true. ‘You have no idea who I am.’

 

He looks at me and smiles, his forehead moving upwards with the force of it. ‘If you’re anything like me – and I know you are – you probably need a cigarette right about now. Why don’t you sit down?’

 

Before I can stop myself, I straighten my shoulders and neck to stand taller. My father laughs.

 

‘When did you dye your hair?’ he asks.

 

My hand wants to make a hiding place for my fringe, but I will my fingers to be still. ‘I dunno – two years ago?’

 

‘Don’t ask me – I dunno the answer.’ He watches a hadeda hang in the air above us. It drops lower, lazy with early morning. Its feet rake the cane leaves before it lands near the old Mercedes I rented in Durban.

 

‘Red doesn’t suit you. And you’ve gotten thin. Too thin.’ He waves his hand at me as though wiping a mirror. ‘Did you do all this for that boy?’

 

I think he means Dan, the only boyfriend I’ve ever told him about. ‘No.’ I broke up with Dan long before I changed my hair.

 

‘For a girl, then.’ I wonder if he’ll flick his tongue through the V of his fingers. He’s done it before. ‘Did you let your underarm hair grow out so you could dye that as well?’

‘Yeah. I stopped wearing make-up too – oh, and I burned all my bras.’ He doesn’t react and I keep going, even though I know better. ‘And of course I hate all men and only listen to Ani diFranco.’

 

‘Who’s that?’

 

I shrug. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

 

‘Every time I see you, I wonder if you’ll look like your mom,’ he says, his eyes on me again. ‘But luckily, my genes were stronger than Karen’s.’ He laughs again.

 

‘Look, Nico, what do you want from me?’ I hope the name hurts him. ‘I have to get back and, you know, do my job.’