Deon Meyer - Blood Safari

‘While I walked around Seapoint I would see other people. Tribes and groups sitting on pavements and in gardens and on balconies, all laughing and chatting. I would stand there like a child without a cent gazing through a sweet-shop window.

‘He hit me for the first time when I was nine years old. It was like a dam wall breaking.

‘He never trusted her, he always suspected something was going on. He hinted and accused her, but he never had any proof. She was too sly for that. But that night she was reckless. And he was drunk. He was standing at the window and he saw one of the Bardini brothers who had the ice-cream shop on Main dropping her off with his motorbike. He saw her kiss the man goodbye, how he held her bottom while they kissed. How she looked back at the Italian as she walked away and laughed. Then my father knew what she had done and when she came in he said, “And now you’re fucking the dagos?”

‘And she said, “At least they know how to fuck,” and he called her a whore and she threw an ashtray at him that smashed against the wall and he wanted to hit her. He went up to her and lifted his hand and she said, “Don’t you dare,” and he turned around and hit me on the side of my head and she screamed, “What the hell are you doing?” and he said, “Will you do it again?” and she said, “Damn you, what are you doing?” and he hit me again and shouted at her, “Not me. You. You are doing this.”’

I stopped talking, because I didn’t know how the fuck I had come to be talking of this.

‘I’m sorry, Emma.’

I shifted in the chair. I leaned forward. I wondered whether I could hold her hand.

‘I didn’t mean to go on like that …’

Her skin seemed to have become transparent. I could see the dark blue of her delicate veins.

‘But that’s who I am.’

With every beep of the machine her heart pumped blood through her arteries to her brain, where they still didn’t know how much damage there was.

‘I think I understand today. How it all fitted together. From that day on, my father hit me. A lot. And hard. The trouble with violence is that it begets more violence. In people, in communities, in countries. It’s like this evil you let loose, you can’t get the genie back in the bottle. But it doesn’t help to stand in the dock and tell the magistrate that it was your father who made you like that.’

I felt the hem of the hospital sheet. It was softer than I expected.

‘The thing that I could never understand, was why he didn’t hit Bardini. Why didn’t he go round to the ice-cream shop and drag the man out of there and beat him up? The answer is that my father was a coward. And that is one thing I swore I never would be.

‘My father’s strategy worked for a while. He told her if she didn’t want him to hit me she would have to stop whoring. She would behave herself for two or three months, but I don’t think she could live without the attention of other men.

Only as an adult did I try and piece together her story. I collected all the photos of her as a child and later ones with my father. I remembered what she used to say about her youth, when she was going at it with her husband. “Daddy loved me, Daddy adored me.” She talked about her father like that, the middle-class Englishman from lower Rosebank. He was a clerk in the provincial administration. She had been a pretty child. Petite, with blonde hair and large eyes. On every snapshot she was smiling cheekily at the camera, always conscious of herself. And smug.

‘They met at the garage. My father was twenty, with a dark fringe and brooding eyes. He had a girl in Parow, a serious relationship; there was talk of getting engaged. That, I think, was the start of the trouble. My mother wanted the attention of all the men and here was one she couldn’t have. She kept on until she got it.

‘By the time I was five, she wasn’t young and cute any more. I don’t know if it was the pregnancy or just the passing of time. Perhaps the souring of their marriage. At thirty she was tired. Worn out, and it showed on her face and her body and she knew it. She tried to regain the attentions of men with make-up, hair dye and tight clothes. They were the candle and she was the moth. It was irresistible, an unavoidable reaction, the way a leg jerks when you bang the knee.

‘We went through the cycles. She would be faithful and reasonable and calm would prevail. Then they would start fighting and she would go off looking for attention until some man wanted something more and she would give in and sleep with him somewhere. Even in our flat. Once I came home from school in the morning, I can’t remember why, maybe I was sick. I had a key and I went in and heard them. My mother and Phil Robinson, the rich Brit who owned the hotel on the seafront. A hundred hotel rooms, but they had to come to our flat.

‘When she saw me she screamed, “Jesus Christ, oh, Jesus Christ, Marty, go away, go away,” but I just stood there staring until she climbed off and came and shut the door. Later, when Robinson was gone, she begged me not to tell my father. “He’ll just hit you again.”

‘That’s my history, Emma.

‘Poor white Afrikaner trash. Just like my mother said.

‘My father was a drinker of wine. That’s what the smell of wine really brings to mind. The sour smell of his breath when he was drunk and beat me because my mother had gone.

‘When I was thirteen, she left. My father beat me then because she wasn’t there. And because he wanted to make me “tough, so you can handle life and all its shit”.

‘He succeeded.

‘I’ve thought about this a lot. What he did to me. The biggest thing is, it takes the fear away. Fear of getting hurt. And of hurting. That was the important one. Feeling pain is something that becomes ordinary afterwards. You get used to it. But causing hurt, it’s like a thing that has to get out.

‘There was a karate club in Seapoint, in the Anglican church hall. My father sent me there. My problem was with control. I could never understand why we had to hold back, why we weren’t allowed to hit the other guy.

‘I looked for trouble. At school, in the streets. And I got it. I liked dishing it out. For the first time I was the one causing pain. Drawing blood. Breaking. It is like being outside of yourself. Or inside something else, another world, another state of being. Time stands still. Everything disappears, you hear nothing and you see nothing except a red-grey mist. And this object in front of you that you want to destroy with everything you have in you.

‘When I was in Matric, I beat up my father for the first time. After that, things went better for a while.

‘I wanted to get out then. Get away from him and from Seapoint. My karate sensei was a policeman. He wanted me for the police karate team. I joined because you have to go to Pretoria. It was far enough. They spotted me there and recruited me to be a bodyguard. I was one for ten years. One year with the Minister of Transport. He retired. Eight years with the white Minister of Agriculture. The last year was with the black Minister of Education.

‘My first year … The Minister of Transport was an incredible man. He saw me. He saw everybody. Maybe he saw too much – felt too much. Maybe that was why he shot himself. But I often used to think: why couldn’t someone like him have been my father?’

25

I talked to Emma Le Roux for four hours before Dr Eleanor Taljaard came to tell me to go and eat.

I didn’t tell Emma everything. I didn’t tell her about Mona.

I wanted to. I had the words in my mouth.

It’s a funny thing, letting all these monsters loose in my head. It’s an avalanche, a dry river after rain, a trickle, a stream, a flood that sweeps everything with it.