No pets, no plants

The first time Kathy saw my flat she was both horrified and gratified.

"At least your interior decorating style proves that you cannot be gay," she said. "Only a very straight guy can live in such ill-appointed chaos. Where's your TV?"

"I don't own a television set, never have."

"How do you pass the time in the evenings without a TV? Not that I watch it much but I like to have it on when I'm working, with the sound off, just to distract me because the work is so finicky and so boring."

Kathy serviced and repaired musical instruments -- brass, woodwinds -- from home and apparently really believed in the therapeutic power of soundless, flickering images.

"Most of what's on is crap," I said, "and every time I've been somewhere where there was a chance to watch some TV my opinion has been confirmed. I'd rather read a book. Anyway, what's this about interior decoration and sexual preferences. Are you disparaging the way I've furnished my spot?"

 

"Gay men seem to have a better idea of how to put together a home, add little homely touches with colour and nice furniture and objets, but you've just got stuff and old stuff too. Everything is so uncoordinated that you must be a single heterosexual guy with no clue on how to decorate a place to make it look good. And all your paintings on the walls. Very egotistical I'd say, very full of yourself hanging up your own paintings. They're pretty horrible pictures, much like your mind I'd say and maybe that's why you like looking at your own paintings."

"I like having my own pictures around me. I'm comfortable with them; they make my place my unique place. Did you think I was gay or might be gay?"

"One never knows these days. You're such a pervert you could well like the boys. For all I know you might like having it put up your bum, or do you prefer putting it up a guy's bum?"

"What's got into you? You don't like the way we fuck? Doesn't the fact that we have sex prove that I'm not gay?"

"You could be one of those indeterminates who can't make up their mind if they prefer a bum or a fanny. It's a well-known fact that lots of men don't know what they want and they just think they want a woman until they get a taste of a man. Anyway, I don't know about you, you're a sly one. For all I know you go off cruising the gay clubs after you've seen me. You've never had a steady girlfriend, have you!"

That Kathy had ever doubted my heterosexual credentials came as a surprise. We'd been having a sexual relationship for almost six months, though always at her flat, and I was under the impression that my attentions to her had been a perfectly good proof that I liked having sex with women. Now, I refer to our thing as a sexual relationship rather than to Kathy as my girlfriend because that is how I saw the situation. I could not for the life of me think of Kathy as my girlfriend. That would give her a status in my life I did not want her to have. Kathy and I had sex, and every now and then we went out for drinks or a meal, but only when she put a lot of pressure on me or when I was feeling generous.

On the whole I avoided those small actions and tokens and pastimes that indicate a relationship. I did not want to have a relationship with Kathy but I did enjoy fucking her as long as it could be more or less on my terms and I did not want to be put in a position where I'd be asked whether I loved her because I did not exactly love Kathy. At best I liked her enough to tolerate her but for various reasons I was not going to spend the rest of my life with her and did not specifically want to spend more than a few evenings a week with her, or for that matter more than a few hours a night.

Kathy had applied a lot of pressure to be invited to my flat. She was tired of playing hostess in her bachelor flat and of me running off in the middle of the night, shortly after I had my orgasm. Kathy wanted to come over to my place, watch me cook supper for her, have a bath with me, fuck me and sleep over. Of course, after six months of "seeing" each other, it would have been most churlish of me to refuse to let her visit me at home and so I grudgingly gave in. I did not know that yet another reason for the visit was to determine to her satisfaction once and for all whether I liked girls or boys better.

"You know, it'd be nice for you to get a little dog to keep you company, greet you when you come home and go for walks with you. I used to have a lovely spaniel, Wolseley, after the car, and I loved him very much, he was a perfect gentleman. Always well behaved and fastidious. When he made a poo in the garden he used to do it in a hidden corner where no one could see him. I loved that dog more than I've ever loved any man and that's the truth."

"I'm so happy for you."

"You can scoff all you like. Wolseley was a noble creature. Faithful, steadfast and true."

"What happened to this paragon of a quadruped?"

"I moved into a room at this guy's house and he had bull terriers and he did not want any other dogs there, so I left Wolseley with the mother of an ex-boyfriend of mine and one day she phoned to tell me that Wolseley had been run over by a car and they'd gotten the Council to take away the body and bury it somewhere. I was in the hospital at the time with the meningitis and I was so ill I couldn't even get up to go there to speak to her. I felt so bad about Wolseley. There's never been another dog like him."

"That may be so but I do not particularly like dogs and I don't think it is a good idea to keep a dog in a flat."

"You can have a little one and they can be trained to wait until you get home to take them out to do their business. It'll do you good to have something that will love you no matter what and for you to have something to take care of."

"Then I'd rather have a cat. You don't have to take them for walks and they bury their crap."

"That would be just like you to want an animal that just ignores you all day until it wants food. I bet it's because you want something you don't want to have to love and that won't pay too much attention to you either. You wouldn't know how to deal with the unconditional devotion of a dog."

"Hey, please, I just like cats better than dogs."

With Kathy I sometimes felt exactly like someone who was willing to put up with all kinds of criticism and cross questioning for the sake of getting leg over but otherwise cared not a jot for the other person or her opinions or likes and dislikes, much less her advice on how to run my life. Coming from Kathy such advice was somehow comical. She lived on her own in a bachelor flat with hardly any amenities – for example no stove or fridge – and without the animals she wished to foist on me. Her excuse was that she lived in a small apartment. Though my place had two bedrooms to her one room it was hardly ideal for pets, mainly because it was not on the ground floor and I wouldn't keep any animal that couldn't find its way outside and back at its choice. It would be as cruel as keeping goldfish or a budgie in a cage.

"What about some nice plants? Plants add a human touch, gives you a feel of a garden and you don't have to take them for walks except that you must talk to them nicely to make them grow happy."

"No use. A plant is just another thing to take care of. At the very least plants must be watered on a regular basis and even that is beyond me."

"Get succulents. They can last a long time with only a little water."

"Let me give you a for instance. Way back when I was living in my first Cape Town flat in Geranium Court, off upper Kloof Street, and I was going through the tough year of chemo-therapy and operations, one of my friends came to visit with her new born baby girl and she brought me a geranium pot plant as an apt gift, or so she thought. I put the pot plant in a window box just outside the main lounge window, with the vague idea of planting the plant in the window box. In the early stages I did every now and then remember to water it but later on, when things were getting hectic in my life and there were other things to worry about, such as making it through Christmas, I forgot all about the damn plant and then we also had an unusually warm early summer. By the time I remembered about the plant it was already dead from lack of water and care. I've never had another plant since."

"Then it's high time you stopped feeling guilty about that geranium and atone by getting something else you can keep in the room where you'll see it all the time and won't forget about it. Plants are good for your soul. I wish I could have a little garden."

One of the abiding memories from my childhood is how my parents forced me to help them in their garden in the house in Paul Kruger Street. My father would spend days trimming the hedge that bordered two sides of the property and I had to collect and bag the cut-off branches and leaves, or he'd mow the lawn with this push mower he had and I'd have to sweep up the grass cuttings and bag them, or maybe just weed the flower beds, getting hot, sweaty and dirty when I'd rather be indoors reading a book. I never did get to like this forced labour and I particularly resented it when I was told to stop walking around with a long face and to act as if I were enjoying what I was doing. Somehow my parents believed, or tried to make me believe, that by acting as if I enjoyed scrabbling in the dirt I would magically start to enjoy the unpleasant activity. This blithe stupidity infuriated me. If I loathed the gardening chores in the first place, how could I possibly persuade myself to act as if it were hugely enjoyable?

Of course, I wanted to point out this stupid and illogical approach but I did not say a word partly because I feared a clip around the ear hole for impertinence and partly because in any event I hardly ever shared any of my emotions or opinions with them, especially not emotions or opinions that contradicted their set petty bourgeois world view with specific reference to the role and place of children.

The same thing applied to religion. Late in my teens and after many years of Sunday school and one year of intense catechism when I was on the brink of the Afrikaner rite of finally becoming an adult member of my Dutch Reformed Church congregation, I had an attack of the moral fear of eternal damnation just in case God did exist and would therefore know that I did not actually believe in him or in the concept of accepting Jesus Christ as my personal saviour, and that I had never believed or paid much attention in church or Sunday school for as long as I could remember. On one fateful Sunday morning I would be expected to stand up in front of the congregation and solemnly swear that I believed in the teaching and dogma of the church and that I had given my heart to Jesus and I knew I would be lying if I said so. Somehow I did not want to lie on this issue.

At one time I thought I'd be found out during the personal interview with the minister who was coaching us in the final stretch, when he'd ask me the very same question as a rehearsal for the Big Day. After all, this minister was supposed to judge whether or not I was a suitable candidate for membership of his congregation. In all formal aspects of the matter I was an exemplary pupil. I did my catechism homework and could recite all the appropriate tenets and points of belief. On the surface I was a model kid, quiet, obedient, studious if a tad anti-social. A hell-raising teenage rebel I was not.

 

Still, I was sure that when I was confronted with this question in the quiet of the minister's study and my demeanour was open to the scrutiny of his piercing eyes and lifelong experience of such situations, he would immediately know that I was lying if I answered in the affirmative to the basic questions underlying my acceptance into the church community and that he would then quietly but firmly decline to allow me to proceed to the next step. I would not have to stand up in church to answer.

 

In the grand scheme of things I cared less about becoming a member of the congregation. My plan was to stop attending church as soon as I could get away with it and not have to answer to my parents anymore. Getting married in the church was not important to me and I could hardly see myself allowing any child of mine to be baptised in the church.

 

As far as I was concerned I stood well outside those social pressures and if joining the congregation was no more than a question of social peer pressure, there was nothing in it for me. Yet somehow I still took to heart the warnings not to take the Lord's name in vain, not to commit blasphemy and religious perjury by professing to a faith I did not have. I felt it would be wrong to agree to be accepted into the church if I did not truly believe in what I'd been taught to believe.

 

Maybe the church was more intelligent and perceptive of human frailty than actually to confront young people with the stark question of belief. Instead of the uneasily anticipated individual interviews with the minister, we were called into his study in groups of four and the Big Question was generally posed, and it seemed to me the man simply accepted that all of us were going to answer in the affirmative and he was not going to belabour the issue through direct, probing questioning of each of us. In the event it was easy to dissemble and if I did not quite pronounce a resounding yes, I also did not stand up to confess my lack of belief.

 

One small way in which I tried to mitigate my forthcoming sacrilege was to refuse to allow my parents to buy me a new suit for the great day. I already had a fairly new suit, maybe two years old and one that had only been worn to church anyhow, and so I settled for a new shirt and tie. In my town and in those days and amongst those people it was traditional for a boy to get a brand new suit in honour of the august occasion of his induction into the adult world. It was also a given that the girls got new dresses and, in those old-fashioned days, new hats. I felt that it would compound my sin if I stood up before the congregation in a new suit and fortunately my rational arguments against a new suit impressed my parents enough to keep them quiet after a token resistance on their part. As far as I knew I was the only boy of my catechism class who went through the ceremony in church in a suit that was not bought specially for the occasion.

 

In the period between the group interview with the minister and the big day in church, I went into a frenzy of prayer. On the one hand I prayed that God would give me a sign to make me believe in him, his son and the holy ghost and on the other hand I prayed that some miracle would occur to postpone the awful day, perhaps a sudden natural disaster. About a week before the Sunday in question I managed to get up some small measure of courage to tell my parents of my doubts. It was only in a general way, mind, a gentle suggestion, as it were, almost in passing, that I did not feel quite ready and that perhaps it would not be right for me to publicly confess to beliefs I was not sure of. My relationship with my parents had never been open and honest enough for me to be brutally frank about my total lack of belief and my utter lack of interest in acquiring such a belief.

 

To my quiet, despairing horror my parents did not agree with my contention that if I doubted my commitment I should perhaps rather not perjure myself before God. To the contrary, both of them, in a remarkable and uncommon show of unity, did their best to persuade me that belief was not a matter of the emotions but of a rational process of hard work and constant attention to detail. Like a successful marriage, the sacred love of Jesus was a process and not a gut feel. I was urged to go back to my Bible and to pray more and to ask God to guide me. This advice was kind of useless to me because I found most of the Bible profoundly boring and, once again, how can you pray for divine assistance from a supposed deity in which you do not believe in the first place?

 

Nonetheless I actually tried the praying thing for another week but in the end God did not speak to me or give me any clarity or infuse me with any shape, size or quantity of holy spirit and on the appointed Sunday I stood up there with my fellow catechists and answered the same questions they did and gave the same answers they did and was then welcomed into the congregation. One of my fellows was the son of the minister who tutored us and when the father came up to congratulate his son he actually kissed him on the lips. This gesture seemed totally unnecessary and gross since the boy was seventeen or eighteen and to my mind far too old for such a non-homosexual intimacy from another male, even his father. My father was one of the elders of the congregation and when the whole group of them came over to welcome us into their adult world, he came along and to my disgust and consternation he insisted on kissing me also. I flashed on the image of Judas Iscariot kissing Jesus on the lips.

 

That kiss in church was the last kiss from my father. The last time I kissed him was just over four years later when my mother made me kiss his corpse at the hospital where he'd been taken after his fatal heart attack at home. My mother and my sister both kissed my dead father's lips. At first I had no intention of following suit at all but my mother tearfully and firmly insisted that I say a proper goodbye to the man who had been my father, even if we'd been estranged, and I decided that this was not an occasion to refuse vehemently and to express my disgust at such an action. I bent over the cold body and barely brushed my lips across his forehead. There was no way I was going to kiss a corpse on the lips.