Wednesday morning 27 December, just after 08h00, four days after Anne’s death. Jane, George and I sit under trees on the grassy slope behind the Muizenberg Bowls Club. It’s going to be a warm day and I’m already sweating, still grimy from the previous night without sleep. We’d been to the 7 Eleven for Red Bulls and cigarettes before we came to the grassy slope and now we wait for the Solly Kramer bottle store to open for trade so we could buy some beers before going to Anne’s house, “Malabar,” to look at the kittens she’d left behind. Jane and George each have a Black Label left over from the previous night but I don’t drink any product produced by the SAB Miller conglomerate and this means I must wait for the bottle store to open at 09h00 to buy a six pack of Windhoek Lager.
“Why didn’t she phone you when you were just two houses away?” Jane asks for the umpteenth time. She chug-a-lugs a Red Bull and puffs on a cigarette. She’s more cheerful than I feel. George lies on his back on the grass and says nothing. I’m not even sure why he’s there but it must have something to do with staying up all night drinking and schnarfing coke along with us. Jane’s husband and kids are at home, probably still sleeping the sleep of the just.
“Beats me,“ I reply, also for the umpteenth time. “I guess she hit the speed dial button on her cellphone or maybe it was just the old instinct of phoning Jimmy in her hour of need.”
Anne had died of a severe asthma attack in the early hours of 23 December and the last person she’d phoned to beg for assistance was her ex-husband, Jimmy, who lived at least ten minutes’ drive away. I lived two doors away from Anne.
Jane and I are both slightly hoarse and we continuously sniff to clear the sinuses. I have a dull headache to boot. My preference is to go home, take a bath and try to sleep but Jane’s mission is to check on the fifteen kittens in the backyard of Anne’s house. Jane wants to adopt one or two and I guess she wants to have a last look at the house where Anne had lived for less than a year.
For some reason we can\t go to the house where Anne had died and look at the fifteen kittens without ice cold beer and that’s why we’re lounging around on the grassy slope waiting for the bottle store to open. It’s mellow and strange because I’m not normally up at this time of day when I’m on leave, even in summer, and the same applies to Jane who usually crashes in the early hours after a long night’s drinking and sleep until noon.
George is much the same and I hear that he can sleep until noon on any given day. He hadn’t known Anne well, if at all, but might have met her once or twice during one of his previous visits to Jane and her husband. George lives in East London where he makes a living from sign writing. Once a year, over December usually, he descends on Jane and her husband, whom he knows from some shared past, and basically sponges off them for a month before returning to real life in East London. I don’t like George much. I think of him as a lazy and shiftless scoundrel but he’s also harmless, and I tolerated him when I’m his company.
I’d gone around to Jane’s house in St James the previous night in a blue funk, after spending time on my own after Christmas Eve when I’d been there for the traditional slap up festive supper but had left early, when the assembled throng started disappearing upstairs to cut lines. I did not feel like a party, had gone only out of duty and a sense of obligation to Jane and I certainly hadn’t been in the mood to hang around with a bunch of high people when I’d had hardly drunk anything and wasn’t about to do any drugs to enhance my downer mood.
It had been gratifying to wake up free of a hangover and fairly well rested on Christmas Day. I hung around at home until the evening of Boxing Day when I strolled over to St James to mitigate the sad, drained loneliness that was starting to catch up with me. I’d been sleeping at Anne’s house every second night to give the impression of a presence at the house to scare away any potential burglars or street people who might see a chance of camping out on the big front stoep. There was no gate or any other security to keep out the unwanted. I’d slept there the very first night after Anne’s death, in her bedroom, on her bed, and I was surprised to find that I could sleep well despite the happenings of the day.
The lame Border collie, Ben, was still in the bedroom too. He’d been brought upstairs when Anne found him with his terrible leg injuries and he’d lived there, on the top floor of the house, for three or four months while his leg healed. He slept on a blanket in a corner of the passage and crapped all over the side balcony that overlooked Muizenberg Park, but by and by, and especially on the nights when Anne was alone in the house, she sometimes allowed Ben to sleep in her room. He hadn’t budged from the room after her death except to eat from his bowl in the passage outside the bathroom, and to go have his daily crap. In a day or two Dan, Anne’s vet friend, would collect Ben and do what was necessary if no home could be found for the dog. I had no sentimental attachment to the crippled pooch.
The good thing about hanging around Anne’s house was that she had satellite TV and I could spend hours channel surfing, mostly hopping between MTV and VH-1, or maybe the Cartoon Network if something good like Tom & Jerry was on. The house was spooky late at night. The television set was in the front lounge downstairs and most of the house was very far away, particularly the single toilet in the farthest possible upstairs corner, close by the main bedroom. It was such a trek to pee, you could age a few years on the way. All kinds of strange sounds manifested themselves at odd times and if they were meaningless, they animated what would otherwise have been a dead space. There had been a rumour that the house was haunted, and Anne had claimed to feel the spirit, especially in her daughter’s bedroom, but I was too sceptical of such things to be spooked by the thought of a phantom watching MTV over my shoulder.
On Boxing Day night Jane phoned Aristide, her Congolese dealer in Muizenberg, who actually lived in the apartment block next door to me but did not sell drugs from his residence, and arranged to meet in the parking lot across the road from the Wipeout pub. I rode shotgun with Jane on the mission to buy a gramme of the best Aristide had to offer. He was a sweet young guy with a charming French accent. Jane always commented on how handsome he was and they had a kind of flirtatious thing going on. From Jane’s side it was little more than what she saw as harmless manipulation to persuade Aristide to give us a superior quality product and perhaps a little more than a strict gramme.
All through that night we sat in Jane’s kitchen drinking scotch and schnarfing the very good coke and we talked about Anne, her life, her death and so on.
“You could have been there almost immediately,” Jane said again. “Anne could’ve been alive now if she’d just had the sense to phone you instead of Jimmy.”
“Old habits die hard,” I said.
“She was just silly not to have phoned you,” Jane said.
“I guess she panicked and could only think of Jimmy,” I said. “Matter of life or death, you go for what or who you know. I’ve no experience of handling an asthma attack.”
“Still,” Jane said “Still. “
I’d been the last person to see Anne alive. In the early evening of her death we went to the Blue Route shopping centre where she bought Christmas presents for her two children, who were with Jimmy, who looked after them every Friday night, and Friday night only.
Anne and I wandered around Toys R Us looking at this and considering that. To me it was just a big store full of stuff I hade no interest in, that perhaps would’ve unduly excited me when I was 10 years old but now, when I didn’t have children of my own and wasn’t about to buy toys for anyone else’s kids, it was an overstocked, overpriced confusion of colour and shape. There was just too much for me to absorb. Anne had more focus on the job at hand and was obviously and experienced purchaser of toys for a 9 year old girl and a 7 and half year old boy. It seemed that big and colourful would be a winning combination, whatever the toy was. Perhaps unfairly, I thought that Anne’s choices were intended to make her kids believe the gifts would make up for her general lack of attention to them throughout the year. They usually spent weekends together but during the week she almost only saw them in the mornings when she took them to school. Her habit was to go drinking after work, sometimes until the early hours, and to return home after the kids were asleep. They believed that she always worked late.
Another curious detail, for me, was that Anne paid for her purchases by cheque, even then a curiously old-fashioned method of payment and frowned on by many vendors because payment took a few days to clear and because one never knew whether a cheque would clear. I learnt later, when I was going through Anne’s business affairs in the process of winding up her estate, that she’d had a massive overdraft on her cheque account and that perhaps she shouldn’t have bought these expensive gifts to add to aht debt burden.
Anne also bought a small, plastic Christmas tree, the kind one has to assemble at home.
I was the designated bag carrier.
With the shopping done, we had supper at St Elmo’s. This was an unusual event for this year, not so much that we were at St Elmo’s, but that Anne and I were eating supper in a restaurant. Over the past 12 months we hadn’t even had lunch together during the week. When we went out, it was for drinks, and drinks only. In fact, over the many years that I knew her, we hardly ever went out for dinner together at night, and up to the end of 1999, if we were on our own, most meals in restaurants were lunch. We never really dated and activities like dinner and movie never happened.
Anne ate a proper meal but didn’t drink any beer, which was very uncommon for her. Usually, when we were out, she’d drink between six to a dozen beers. Tonight, she stuck to the bottomless Crème Soda, and didn’t even smoke as much as usual.
Anne’s mood was down and reflective and I didn’t quite know how to lift it, as I tend to mirror the other person’s mood. I was used to her carrying the conversation, most often lengthy, often obsessive, dissertations on her current matters and if she had nothing much to say, neither did i. I suppose this was symptom of how far from close we really were. I never had a problem finding something to talk about with Jane but I was more reluctant to share with Anne, as she was with me.
Two topics concerned her this night. One had been on her mind for a while and the other one was of more recent origin.
The first topic was the long-standing issue of Jimmy’s insistence that their children be placed in boarding school, like he he’d been at the age of 5, so that they could be looked after properly during the week. Anne wasn’t keen on this, and dully resented Jimmy’s attitude. The kids lived with her and slept at her house six nights a week, except for Friday nights. She also resented Jimmy’s utter refusal to have them for more than the one night, despite their joint custody, because he had other social commitments over the rest of the weekend. She, too, would’ve like to have other social commitments and not to have to take care of the kids or to arrange for a child minder (sometimes me) to watch over the kids when she was out. If she and I were out, it could obviously not be me, and on a couple of occasions she left the kids alone at home, locked in, while we were at the Wipeout pub about 150 metres on the other side of Muizenberg park. During the week, Anne hardly ever saw her children at night though she took them to school eery morning. Jimmy saw the children only once a week.
During the first half of the year, Anne had a live-in child minder who got the kids up, dressed and ready for school in the morning, collected them from school later and looked after them for the rest of the day, made sure they did homework, fed, bathes and put them to bed at night. By mid-year, the child minder, who by now also had a baby, simply didn’t return from her home at Botriver after a weekend off and never worked for Anne again. Anne didn’t replace her and had to make different arrangements for after school care, mostly getting them to stay at the home of a school friend who lived close by until she was home (and she then mostly did come home earlier in the evenings that she had once done) or, if I came home early and Anne still went out drinking after hours, I looked after the kids and put them to bed.
Jimmy’s simple solution for this challenge was to put the kids in boarding school so that he’d still have his one night a week and Anne would have only two, though these would still be weekend nights and still put a damper on her social activities over a weekend. In Anne’s mind, Jimmy was punting the boarding school purely to his own advantage, to soothe his conscience and not because it was also, as he pretended, to her benefit.
There would also be the extra cost of boarding school, which Anne couldn’t really afford.
Jimmy hadn’t brought matters to a head in this past year but Anne fully expected that the pressure from his side would increase in January 2001, as the new school year approached. She didn’t want to send her kids to boarding school but yet didn’t have a solution for the issue of their daily care.
The second topic was, on the face of it, more positive. She was anticipating starting a criminal trial, a legal aid instruction arranged for her by her colleague and, as I strongly suspected, lover, Jerry Abrahams, with whom she’d been having an extra-marital affair (he was the married one) since probably late 1999 but definitely from the early months of this year. There were many accused ant the expectation was hat the trial would run for most of the coming year and even at legal aid rates, the income would be a massive windfall for Anne, whose financial affairs were in a dire state, though, of course, I didn’t know it then. Not only could she expect to settle her existing debts, but she also hoped to be able to build her dream home on a piece of land she owned in the Misty Cliffs area of Scarborough, on the southern Atlantic coastline of the peninsula.
These trials were scheduled to run until they finished, however long it took, once they started and this would mean that four days of every working week would be given over to it for many months. Anne would earn a lot of money from legal aid but any civil practice she’d had, or wanted to have, would effectively be killed off because she wouldn’t have the time or capacity.
I had a personal concern with Anne’s commitment to the criminal trial. She’d see Jerry every day at the trial because he would represent one of the accused, and probably afterwards too, even more than they’d been together over this past year, and this would leave me out in the cold. Up to this point, being a fifth wheel on that particular wagon had already be a struggle for me and it could only be more difficult for me in the future. I’d already “lost” Anne to Jerry, but had been able to see a lot of her nonetheless, especially during the middle months of the year when Jerry was in Germany doing some PhD course. Now, the prospect was of seeing her very seldom. The other issue here was, if the children didn’t go to boarding school, that I might be called on more often to take care of them yet have this distant relationship with their mother.
At this point of the year, I’d already made my mind up that my relationship with Anne should come to an end. I’d pursued a stupid, useless and pointless infatuation for many years and it had prevented me from moving on and to seek love elsewhere and with someone else. If I wasn’t going to see much of Anne anyway, and she was involved with the affair with Jerry, I might as well make a clean break of it.
These two topics and my silent thoughts on them (though I did support Anne on her view of Jimmy’s proposal) didn’t make for an exhilerating evening of laughs.
On the way home, we passed a poster for a New Year’s Eve concert of Four Jacks & a Jill , a pop group that had originated in the old Rhodesia, had a major international hit with “Master Jack” and then relocated to South Africa, where lead singer Glenys Lynne pursued a solo career, in both the English and Afrikaans markets. We remarked on our ignorance that the band was even active anymore.
Back at “Malabar” I carried in the presents and the box with the Christmas tree. The presents were piled on a table and Anne asked me to assemble the tree, or actually the plastic construct that resembled a tiny tree. Once assembled, I stood it on the table too. I thought it was quite a sad little thing; so small, so artificial, such a desperate way of attempting Christmas cheer. Properly decorated it might look more festive but it would always be a pale imitation of the real thing.
I didn’t know what Anne wanted of me after this. She stood at the table, studying the artificial tree as if it were a thing of wonder, but perhaps she shared my thoughts about it. Previously, when we were alone at the house on a Friday night, she’d want me to sleep over for security, at least , she’d feel more secure. Once or twice, when we were both drunk, she’d be happy for me to share her bed provided I kept to my side, but on other occasions she expected me to sleep in one of the children’s beds. Tonight, she said nothing and gave no indication of what she expected. Often, it seemed to me, she left the choice up to me and was okay with whatever I chose to do, as it were immaterial to her whether I stayed with her or left.
She ask me to stay, so I assumed she didn’t care. in any event, if I stayed, I wasn’t keen on sleeping uncomfortably on a kid’s bed, especially when my own, comfy bed was two doors away. Anne’s downer mood also didn’t encourage me to stay because she may want to be alone, and I didn’t know how to lift her mood. Lastly, there was the issue of my intention to distance myself from her during the coming year and it would do no good to attempt to remain close now.
There was also an underlying anger with the frustration going with my increasing uncertainly over the nature of our friendship and whether I wasn’t just wasting my time spending so much time with her, when she probably hoped it would be someone else who wasn’t available because of his family commitments. It frustrated me that Anne wasn’t prepared to be open with me about her life and issues, except for some, and in particular her relationships. If we were just friends, the boundaries had to e set like that, and she shouldn’t expect me no more than a friend yet also expect me to, for example, be a father figure for her kids and help look after them when she wasn’t available.
Some months before, we’d met a woman called Jennifer at the Wipeout, who had all kinds of issues and was, amongst other matters, trying to pursue a matter against the Police arising from an incident at the Grahamstown arts festival a couple of years before. She claimed that some police officers raped her when she was stone drunk and sought justice. I thought she was one of those crazy, obsessed women I wanted nothing to do with but Anne had more sympathy and Jennifer latched onto Anne, to the extent that she invited mostly Anne, but me also, I suppose, and the kids to her own boy’s birthday party on 24 December.
Anne intended going but I wasn’t keen. I didn’t like Jennifer much and had no kids, obviously, and by this time wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be Anne’s companion either
Anne and I exchanged some desultory comments about this party. If I were going, I’d be gong with her and her kids, and so we made a tentative arrangement for a time to leave, but I had a mental reservation and had already decided that I wouldn’t go anyway.
I left Anne at about 23h00. As I walked out of her house, she was still staring at the Christmas tree and chasing away one of her cats who was rubbing up against her. She didn’t want the presence of the cat to aggravate her already difficult breathing. Perhaps I should’ve taken closer note of that portent and should’ve had the foresight to suggest that I’ll sleep over or at least hung around for a bit until Anne went to bed but I was tired and knew that she’d be mooching about for a long while yet, until she actually got to bed and I was not in the mood for that.
When nine o’clock strikes Jane and I send George off to the Solly Kramer’s across the street in the Shoprite mini mall to buy a six-pack of ice cold Windhoek Lager. On his return we crack the cans and toast Anne’s memory.
Amongst other things Anne was a prodigious beer drinker and she’d been the one who’d taught me to drink Windhoek Lager. This came about when I started hanging out with her socially, after working hours, after many years of a professional relationship that slowly morphed unto the kind of friendship we’d had when I first met her in 1986 and which died in 1989, partly because she was then newly married to Jimmy.
From 1997 we hung out together a lot after work did our rounds of the bars in central Cape Town. Initially, I drank Holsten. She drank Black label and then Windhoek Lager. Beer was Anne’s tipple of choice. I quickly realised that drinking Holsten, or actually many Holstens a night, was an expensive proposition because bars and restaurants treated it as an imported beer although it came from no further away than Namibia and charged a premium price for it. It made more sense to switch to the cheaper Windhoek Lager, which was also a product of Namibian Breweries but priced like a local beer.
I find it really strange, sitting there on the grassy knoll just after nine o’clock in the morning, to be drinking beer just like the down and outs who usually hang out in the park during the warm months of the year. Jane and George are at ease, smoking and drinking, while I feel a touch of middle class awkwardness and shame. My nasal passages are congested, my throat is raw and I have a dull headache. All I really want to do us to go home, have a bath and jump under the duvet. But Jane has a mission and it’s difficult to sidetrack Jane when she’s on a mission.
There’s something like fifteen cats and kittens living in squalor in the concrete back yard of “Malabar.” The two adult cats were Anne’s but had been living in my house two doors away until they bore their kittens. The one, the mother of the other adult, went across to “Malabar” on the night just before she gave birth while her daughter gave birth at my house and then carried her kittens one by one to “Malabar.”
At first the two feline families lived behind a cupboard in the corner of the TV lounge. Anne moved them out to the backyard when she could no longer tolerate the pungent stench of cat pee and shit and Anne’s kids got fed up with picking up soiled newspaper.
The backyard is awful as habitats go. It’s small, had a cement surface and is boxed in by high walls. There’s not a patch of soil or a blade of green. There’s a storage room, piled with the dregs of the underfelt of wall-to-wall carpet removed from the house when Anne moved in. The cats sleep on the felt in the storeroom or hide there from the day time heat. During the day the kittens play on the cement. The adult cats can at least jump up onto the wall and get out once in a while. There was a heap of builder’s sand in the one corner for the cats to use as a kitty toilet and it’s already very smelly and unpleasant.
Jane and George each want a kitten or two and that’s the main purpose of the visit. I’m still looking after yet more of Anne’s cats who live in my place. Not all of them had moved over and the remaining one of them had given birth there too. In my case I want to get rid of cats, not take on the burden of caring for more.
The house is silent, eerie and strangely lit by the early morning sun. I had not yet started sorting out anything. The kids’ clothes and the Christmas presents had been taken to Jimmy’s house. The house is still in the state of chaos one could anticipate in any house Anne inhabited, though the chaotic mess had a lot to do with the children’s presence. The kitchen is the tidiest room in the house, mostly because it’s completely empty. A few months before her death, Anne had gotten people in to do the floors. They ripped up the Novilon and tiled the floor with handmade terra cotta tiles from a place outside of Wellington. The tiles were supposed to “settle in” for some weeks before being treated with, I think, linseed oil to preserve them for posterity and to give the tiles a natural look and feel. Anne didn’t get around to finishing off the floor, much like she never got around to spaying her cats, and had no furniture for the kitchen either – she’d planned on freestanding items – and so the kitchen remains elegantly pristine.
Before we enter the house I point out where I broke the window pane of the lounge’s front stoep facing window, so Jimmy and I could get into the locked house to attempt to save Anne. She had carefully locked and bolted the front door and Jimmy’s key wouldn’t work. He became panicky and was about to try to bust open the door with his shoulder when I remembered a cracked lounge window pane and completely broke it, opened the window latch, climbed into the room and unlocked the front door from the inside, saving Jimmy a potentially damaged shoulder.
The ease of access was a disturbing indicator of the utter lack of security at “Malabar.” No wonder Anne was often worried sleeping there on her own, even with the kids, despite the presence of Muizenberg police station directly behind the house.
We go upstairs to the main bedroom where Anne died. I point out where she had been lying when we found her, where the nebuliser had been and the cell phone, and the dog.
Jane sits down on the bed and sighs.
“If only she’d phoned you first,” she says.
The kitchen is at the back of the house and all the intervening doors are closed. It’s like walking into a maximum-security jail. As soon as I open the top half of the kitchen stable door, a swarm of cats and kittens rush to the door and start squealing. They charg into the kitchen when I fully the the door. I scramble back to close the door leading to the lounge. I don’t want 15 kittens roaming around the house.
Jane and George pick up kittens and coo over them while I put out food and fill the water bowls. The cats eat voraciously. Jane and George debate the relative beauty and other potential merits of the various kittens, to determine which ones they want. George wants only one kitten. For the time being it must live at Jane’s house because there’s no way George can take it back to East London. Jane had originally thought of taking only two kittens but she immediately sees three she must have and then spots Lucky, the runt of the litter, the kitten who’d almost died and had to be fed with a medicine dropper and who was about half the size of her next largest sibling. Jane has three cats already but her house and property have plenty of space and she has a big heart and can’t say no to Lucky, who has an unusual champagne colouring that makes her unique and beautiful.
We can’t take the kittens straight away. The purpose of the visit is only to pick the candidates for resettlement and Jane and George will return on some other day to collect their choice of new furry friends.
I’m expecting a couple of female friends of Anne’s to come around later that day to start clearing up her personal effects, her clothes, bedding, and so on. They’d told me they would bag everything that was still useful and would either distribute these items to the domestic helpers or give the stuff to charity. I could care less.
In the house I lived in, Anne and Jimmy’s former common marital home, there are wardrobes full of Anne’s clothes and personal effects, stuff she’d left behind when she moved into “Malabar” at the beginning of the year, and never came to collect. She clearly didn’t need the clothes.
Even the kitchen cupboards in my house are full of her crockery, cutlery, appliances. and the like. I’d been living in the house for a year feeling like a house sitter who was paying for the privilege of looking after someone else’s property.
The friends weren’t going to be cleaning up my place, only at “Malabar” and in due course I’d do my own sorting out and cleaning up.
Half the wardrobe in the main bedroom was available for my clothes and this must have been where Jimmy’s clothes used to be, and it didn’t bother or concern me that Anne had left so much of her clothes behind. When I started clearing out, I recognised a lot of items she hadn’t worn recently.
There were two suits, consisting of long jackets and ankle length skirts, Anne’d had made in Gauteng in 1997 and were designed to be worn in formal situations, such as acting as an assessor in criminal trials in the High Court, where her standard advocates garb of black or grey skirt, with blouse and black jacker, weren’t required. I’d forgotten about these suits because Anne hadn’t worn them for so long. The other clothes in the wardrobe did consist of many of those black jackets, blouses and dark skirts. In most cases the side pockets of the jackets had been distended, presumably from Anne’s habit of putting her hands in them. The oddest thing was how many asthma pumps and tampons I discovered in those pockets, as well as discarded, bloodied knickers Anne had obviously taken off at work or maybe when she was out drinking, when she unexpectedly got her period and stuffed into the pockets, yet never removed.
Anne was perhaps the untidiest person I’d ever met. Her room at Huguenot Chambers was always a jumble of attorneys’ briefs, Court papers, files, unopened envelopes. Legal textbooks and law reports, all of which covered every horizontal surface. Her car was in an even worse mess, with the area at the back full of childrens’ discarded clothes, books, school stuff, empty fast food containers and, not unusually, decaying fruit. Quite clearly, Anne hated tidying up. I used to tidy her room at Huguenot Chambers and when I lived close to her in Muizenberg I also regularly cleared out the clothes, detritus and junk from her car. It was like Sisyphus rolling the stone up the mountain.
When I cleared out the black leather tote bag that was her signature (and only) handbag, I found more asthma pumps, more tampons and, most odd, many teaspoons. I wondered whether she stole teaspoons wherever she went.
Anne hadn’t slept much during the forty-eight hours leading up to her death but that wasn’t an unusual for her. She was a hard-drinking, staying-up-until-all-the-wee-hours kind of person.
On the Thursday before Anne’s death, she and I had drinks at the Five Flies in Keerom Street after work. I phoned her to suggest the drink and she was amenable but did warn me that it would only be drink, perhaps two, because she’d been invited to a pre-Christmas cocktail party with friends in Rondebosch. I went up to her room in Huguenot Chambers from where we walked to the Five Flies and found a small table in the pebbled courtyard just outside the room where the downstairs bar actually was.
The one or two drinks turned into more, as was usually the case with Anne and on the one hand I had not problem if she stayed, and pushed back her stated time for departure for the cocktail party, and on the other hand I had to keep an eye on the time to be able early enough to be on time for the last train to Muizenberg. Anne undertook to drop me at the station.
It was probably close to 19h00 when she decided she had to go, we returned to Huguenot Chambers to collect her car and we drove off. I’d thought she would take me to Cape Town station, but she said it would be better to drop me at Rondebosch station; it was close to where she was heading for dinner. After the drinks Anne was quite tipsy and as we drove, I had the odd feeling that she might just forget about the station drop off and take met along to the party as an unexpected guest. No doubt I could’ve been wrong about this but I thought it prudent to remind her of to drop me at the station, and it did seem to me that she actually did kind of forget about it, or was ignoring it, but conceded that se would drop me, and did so. When we parted, we made a vague arrangement to et together the next day too. Neither of us were working anymore.
Unfortunately for me, I waited at Rondebosch station for almost an hour before the next train came past. At one point I wondered whether a train would still come and, if not, how I’d get home. The wait was so long I had to pee against an outside side wall. There was no-one else on the station and there were ho restaurants, cafés or bars in the vicinity. I felt rather bitter at staying so long at the Fie Flies because Anne couldn’t have just the one or two drinks but I suppose it’s my own fault for not following my own schedule en leaving on my time.
I hadn’t seen Anne on the Wednesday before that but my guess is that, as usual by then, she’d been at the Five Flies for drinks with Joey Moses and friends, had perhaps managed to get six beers to take home so she could continue drinking in the privacy of her bedroom. Every now and then I’d go into her bedroom and find a couple of empty beer cans next to the bed, along with an overflowing ashtray, as if she’d sat up all night smoking and drinking. I never asked her why she did this but it seemed incredibly sad to me, to be that alone and to be unable to sleep. We never spoke about it.
On that Tuesday Anne had invited me out for drinks with her friend Lynne, and Anne’s kids, at Cool Runnings, a Jamaican themed bar in upper Kloof Street. I think I went up to Anne’s room at Huguenot Chambers straight after work, to meet her and the kids, but perhaps the kids were with Lynne, and from where we went to Cool Runnings.
There was a crowd of young women who knew either Lynne or Anne or both, but who I didn’t know. We sat on low, round stools around a low table and drank beer and ate some snacks. The kids had fries but the adults did not have much of a meal. Anne often did that: go out drinking in the evening and never eat anything.
We stayed there until about 22h00 before Anne, the kids and I drove to Muizenberg, where I carried the sleeping children into the house and upstairs to Anne’s bedroom where she tucked them into her bed. She and I then went out for drinks at the Wipeout pub until the early hours.
I was surprised that she’d let the kids sleep alone at home like that, even if he Wipeout was just 5 minutes’ walk away on the other side of Muizenberg Park. He house was no secure and had not alarm system. Anne was often scared, or at least apprehensive at sleeping there on her own with the kids yet tonight she was okay with leaving them there, for the sake of drinking in the pub. I could’ve objected to the risk but I was self-servingly happy just to be in her company.
It was the first evening we’d spent together in a while, after the unfortunate events of the weekend on which Jane had celebrated her 40th birthday in Du Toit’s Kloof. Though it was almost like old times, I was still slightly pissed off at Anne and taking the purpose and value of the friendship under reconsideration. It was not meeting my emotional requirements, had never done so, and more and more I was feeling used.
Ever since that 40th birthday bash, I’d increasingly come to the conclusion, much as I was infatuated with Anne and much as our history went back fourteen years or so, that it was not satisfactory and that I might as well go my own way and let her live her life; it would be better for me to stop yearning and sighing over a woman who was averse to spending the night in a pub with me but who was otherwise not interested in me.
Anne once jokingly told the assembled company at the Press Club, which then met at the Talk Of The Town restaurant in Burg Street, that I was the only childless man she knew who spent a fortune each month on child support, meaning the amount of money I was spending on her children for food, drink and other stuff, because she was often cash strapped and they were always hungry for sweets, chips, cool drinks, stupid games and little gifts from the local Checkers. Anne wasn’t wrong regarding the amount of the money I was spending on helping to support a household where I was neither parent nor lover.
After Anne’s death the kids went to live with Jimmy and my disposable income sharply increased.
The subtle irony of our last hours together was that I was desperate to spend some last time with Anne. She was planning on spending Christmas with other friends, perhaps, as had been her custom for a long time, go up to Johannesburg to see her family, and I would then not see her for a few weeks.
During that Friday morning I first phoned Anne’s office and was told that she hadn’t come in at all, and then phoned her on her cellphone. She was at home, rather tired because she’d come home only at about 06h00, had not yet been able to sleep but was hoping to have an afternoon nap. In the later afternoon I phoned Anne’s cell phone again and left a message because it was switched off.
I hadn’t really expected to hear from her at all, but Anne phoned me just after 18h30, by which time I was home from work, two doors away from her place. She said she wanted to go shopping for Christmas presents for the kids and said I could go with if I wanted.
I went around to “Malabar” at 19h00 and we set off for the Blue Route Centre where we spent a lot of time in Toys-R-Us. Anne did the shopping; I hung around, gave my opinion of possible choices and carried the stuff she bought. The last purchase was a kit for a small, plastic, table-top model Christmas tree. Anne couldn’t remember whether she still had decorations and the little flashing lights for the tree, and bought some more lights.
Then we wandered around the centre looking for hobby shops (I forget why) but they were already closed for business.
We ate at St Elmo’s where we’d come to celebrate Dylan’s birthday in August. The most amazing thing about this supper was that Anne did not order any alcoholic drink but drank a couple of glasses of their bottomless soda offer, ate all of her pasta dish – usually she ate little and generally asked for a doggy bag, and did not smoke at all (this was well before the general ban on smoking in restaurants except in designated areas).
That Anne did not drink a beer, or even a Savannah, was not necessarily too unusual; every now and then she “went on the wagon” if she thought she’d been indulging more outrageously than usual. The truly strange thing was that Anne didn’t smoke any cigarettes. I’d seen Anne not drink alcohol in social situations before but I‘d never seen her not drinking and not smoking at the same time. It was generally the one or the other, if not both. Anne said she was tired and she did not indulge in any of her usual vices.
I drank a couple of beers.
On the way home we saw a poster advertising a Four Jacks & A Jill New Year’s eve party somewhere and we concurred that neither of us was likely to be first in the queue, or in the queue at all for that matter, for one of the “limited” tickets for this event. It seemed beyond sad.
When we got to “Malabar” I carried the bags with the presents into the front room of the house, opened the box with the Christmas tree, assembled it and stood it on the dining room table. It looked pretty damn sad and silly to me but then I never really got that thing about the so-called Christmas spirit. Anne had said she was tired and wanted to go to bed. I was tired too and not keen on staying there much longer. Halfway through the evening I’d suddenly started wondering why I was still doing this kind of thing, wandering around with this woman, kind of as if we were a couple, though we were not, doing something I had little interest in, and knowing that Anne was probably already involved in an affair, or had been, with a colleague of hers, and was intending to see that person over the Christmas period whilst I would be alone at home, looking after her house and her numerous cats and kittens. The utter useless futility of it all suddenly weighed heavily on my mind.
The kids were with Jimmy as was the custom for Friday nights. On previous occasions when Anne had been alone at home and we’d spent the evening together, I often slept at her house, either on one of the kids’ beds or, on the odd very drunken occasion, in Anne’s bed with her, together but very separate. This time around I was not keen on it; could no longer see a reason for torturing myself. If I were to sleep in another bed than hers, or if I were to share her bed but far away from her on “my” side of it, I might as well go home to my own bed and be alone in it in the comfort of my own home. I also wanted to have a bath before I got into bed.
I said goodbye to Anne who stood in front of the stupid, stunted little ersatz Christmas tree, shooing away one of her cats that was trying to brush up against her. Anne told the cat to go away because her chest was already tight and she didn’t want that condition to be aggravated by the proximity of the cat. That was so typical of Anne. She suffered from asthma but was living in a house full of dust mites and the like, had fifteen cats around her (though most of them had been banned to the backyard by then, after spending most of the winter behind a low cupboard in a corner of the TV room), and shared her bedroom with a crippled border collie dog whose leg was so wrecked that he couldn’t come downstairs at all. To top it all, Anne smoked and drank to excess, and stayed awake all night, and barely ate properly.
As I left, Anne asked me about a birthday party the next day that we’d been invited to. The party was for the son of a woman we’d run into at the Wipeout a couple of months before and whose sad story had moved Anne into trying to assist her to get justice and who I thought was a nutcase I merely wanted to avoid. I’d become involved because Anne was, though Anne and the woman had also kind of become buddies while I kept my distance. Anyway, both Anne and I had been invited to this party in Fishhoek, and earlier that day the woman had phoned me for confirmation that Anne, her kids and I would be there. She‘d been trying to get hold of Anne whose cell phone had been switched off. I mentioned this phone call to Anne while we were having supper at St Elmo’s, and that was why Anne asked me whether I was still going. My reply was that I’d go if she went – of course, how else would I get to the party in Fishhoek; I had no idea where the house was and one would need a car to get there – and when Anne said that she would go because her kids would like to go, I said that I would go too. I was not keen on going and in any event, it did not seem to me that Anne was very keen on me going with her, either, and had merely asked me out of duty and courtesy. My plan was to tell Anne the next day that I was no longer interested in going. Bit of passive aggressive behaviour on my part.
I then left. Anne did not ask me to stay. At the passage leading out to the front door I turned around and had a last look at Anne, standing with her back to me, still contemplating the Christmas tree. I said something like “Sleep tight” and walked out. I expect that Anne came to the front door a little later to lock and bolt it. Anne’s bedroom was upstairs, a long way from the front door and she wanted to be sure that the downstairs was secured if she were going to bed upstairs. Not so long before she might have settled into the TV lounge downstairs, hard by the front door, for all night viewing of whatever struck her fancy on DSTV – mostly boring yet immensely moving human interest movies on the Hallmark Channel -- but I guess she must have been really tired because she did apparently go up to her bedroom. Whether she slept I don’t know.
I went back to my place, had my bath, jumped into bed and soon fell asleep.
Around late January that year, on one fine Monday morning, Anne had her first serious asthma attack of the year on the morning she was supposed to take her son to hospital to have grommets inserted into his ears to relieve the constant ear infections he got. Anne landed up in hospital instead.
I’d slept over the previous night – we’d both gotten very drunk while sitting on the top balcony of her house, and I did not feel like stumbling the couple of metres back to my place and because the kids were there sleeping in their own beds, I collapsed next to Anne on her bed. She had not actually invited me to share the bed but she was already kind of asleep, so I just took my chance. Never touched her during the night but at least felt somehow good for having taken a step that was bold for me. The next morning Anne said nothing, and it was almost as if my unexpected early morning presence was taken or granted or ignore as if it never happened.
I helped the kids dress and get their breakfast together. They came back to Anne’s bedroom to finish the dressing process and while I tied shoelaces and the like, Anne casually dressed in the same room, turning her back on us for modesty’s sake. I had my back to her anyway, for much the same reason, not wanting to be chased out of the room.
I said goodbye to the three of them outside Anne’s house as they set off in her little Uno and then I went back to my place to bath, shave and get ready to go to work. I was barely in my bathroom when there was loud knocking on the front door and then it was pushed open – the security gate was locked but the door itself couldn’t lock at that time -- and I could hear the boy shouting for me.
I went downstairs to open the door for the boy. Anne and her daughter were right behind him. Anne was pale and unhappy. She said she was having difficulty breathing and needed to use her nebuliser that was still in the main bedroom. God knows why she hadn’t taken it across when she moved to “Malabar” two doors away, in mid-January. Anne also asked me to move her car that was standing at the intersection with Main Road. I hadn’t driven a car for about five years by then but I could at least still remember vaguely how to do it and I managed to reverse the Uno and drive it back the few metres to park it in front of Anne’s house. I was sweating by the time I parked the car.
I went back to my place and found Anne and the children in the main bedroom where Anne was breathing through a nebuliser, highly agitated and anxious. Anne’s daughter had already phoned Jimmy to come over to assist. It seemed that Anne wanted to go to hospital for treatment and obviously wanted Jimmy to collect her because I couldn’t drive. At least, I guess Anne did not trust me to drive all the way to Constantiaberg Medi-Clinic, the nearest private hospital. Fortunately, it was still just after eight in the morning and Jimmy had not left for work yet and even more fortunately, he lived in an apartment about ten minutes’ drive away and he arrived shortly after my return to my place.
I had never dealt with an asthma attack before and I was praying that Jimmy would know what to do, as he had been married to Anne for more than ten years. To my surprise and consternation, it seemed that Jimmy was as helpless as I was except that he got it together to phone for an ambulance whilst Anne was getting visibly more upset and stressed and having more and more difficulty with her breathing. It took her a while and many gasps to explain that she thought an ambulance would be best since she would not be able to walk down the stairs to get to Jimmy’s car. She wanted some soft soothing music and I panicked because I had no such music at hand. Then she asked us to talk to her and that freaked me out even more since I could not think of anything sensible to say to a woman in the throes of such a desperate situation and at the same time I was wondering whether I was watching someone die from an asthma attack right in front of my eyes.
After a while I went downstairs to check for the ambulance and as luck would have it, the ambulance pulled up in front of Anne’s house just as I went outside. I ran up to them to direct them to my place and then they wasted some time in turning the vehicle around for an easy exit once they had Anne in the back. Only then did they go ibto the house and upstairs with a stretcher and brought Anne down. Jimmy and the kids followed in his car and I went down to the station to catch the train to Cape Town.
After work I stopped off at Diep River station, which was the closest station to Constantiaberg and walked to the hospital with some magazines. Anne was sitting up in bed and reading another magazine and said she was feeling fine again, after the treatment she’d had and a day’s worth of bed rest, and that she would be going home in another day or two. I bought her some chocolate at the hospital shop and we made awkward conversation about what had happened. I apologised for being so stupid and helpless about the whole thing, for being so absolutely clueless ion how to deal with the emergency. Anne was gracious enough to tell me that I need not feel bad about anything at all.
The route from Diep River station led to the rear entrance to the hospital and when I left I went out by the front entrance and immediately found myself walking a very roundabout route back. It was so roundabout that I ended up at Plumstead station after maybe thirty minutes of brisk and slightly panicky walking. The trains did not run until late anymore and I was scared I‘d miss the last train from Cape Town and would be stranded on Main Road Plumstead at night and without even the benefit of a taxi service. The walk from Diep River station was only about ten minutes; the walk back seemed endless. Fortunately, I made the station just in time to catch that last train home.
The next morning, I popped in to the hospital on my way into Cape Town. This time Anne was obviously a lot better. For the first ten minutes or quarter of an hour of my visit she virtually ignored me while she read the morning paper. When Anne finally spoke to me, she told me that there was a strong chance she could be allowed to go home that afternoon. The doctor would run some tests and if he were satisfied, he would let her out. I said I’d keep in contact with her to find out what the deal was. She was concerned with getting home because Jimmy was out of town and would not be able to fetch her from the hospital. I promised to try to make some arrangements with someone who could assist. I was thinking of asking Jane to fetch Anne. They were friends of a sort and Jane lived in St James anyway and it would therefore not be to much of a problem.
By late afternoon Anne could not yet tell me whether she’d be discharged that day. I said I’d come by anyway. I had phoned Jane but she was busy doing some heavy video editing in town and anticipated being busy with this job all night long and would therefore be unable to come to the hospital to drive Anne home. Anne said she would try to make her own arrangements.
When I saw Anne at the hospital she said that she had been discharged. She dressed and we went to sit in the hospital lobby where we waited for about 40 minutes for this friend that would be collecting us. Anne had not told me who it was. I expected on of her female friends but it turned out to be a colleague of hers, an advocate I‘d hear of but had never met yet. I was kind of upset about this since his presence suggested to me that he and Anne were better buddies than she had ever let on and I was particularly upset because she had not really shared any news of this friendship with me. I knew that he came from Oudtshoorn and had organised, or had been part of a group that had organised, a Millennium New Year’s party there in a sports stadium and that it had been something of a financial disaster and that Anne and her kids had attended the celebrations on their way back from Johannesburg where they had spent Christmas with her family. It had not seemed like such a big deal until the guy pitched up at the hospital and it became clear that he had visited Anne there earlier that day as well.
She jumped up and greeted him with a hug and a kiss, which is more than she had given me and we walked out to his car, the two of them in front and me following like some supernumary. I sat in the back of the car as well, mostly silent while they chatted away about all kinds of things. When we got to Muizenberg I almost decided to just abandon them when we got home but Anne had decided she wanted to go for a drink and almost off-handedly included me and if I was most reluctant to go with them, feeling superfluous as I did, I also did not want to appear to be spiteful by refusing. At the house Anne immediately took him on a tour, leaving me downstairs on my own for what seemed like an eternity. Once again I could have accompanied them but I had not quite been included in the invitation to “come and see my house” and I had of course already seen the house and it was not my residence and so I stayed put, listening to the two of them giggling upstairs. Eventually they came down and then Anne took him onto the balcony where we stood for a while looking out at the park across the road. They formed a pair, a small group and I was left out, on one side, suddenly jus the hanger on, out in the cold. It was here that I started top suspect that they were more than colleagues and a terrible jealousy took hold of me that never left me during Anne’s lifetime.
We went to the Wipeout for a few drinks and here also I felt very much like the fifth wheel on this particular wagon. Anne sat between us and just about turned her back on me and mostly just talked to him. After two beers I excused myself, much to Anne’s expressed surprise, as if she could not understand why I was leaving such wonderful company, and went home, slightly drunk and very morose and depressed by it all. I have no idea when they left the pub to go their separate ways and when I was in my bed I almost believed, or wanted to believe that he would be spending the night. It was only some time later that I learnt that he was married and had three children as well. Not that marriage has ever been an impediment to the drive for nookie.
For the next month or so I avoided Anne. It was not difficult. I stopped phoning her; she hardly ever phoned me anyway. We had different schedules. She took her kids to school in the morning and had to leave home at least at 07h45 to on time for school. I generally took the 08h05 express train and so I mostly heard her leave home in the morning while I was still shaving. The giveaway was the ‘beep-beep’ sound of the electronic lock of her car when she unlocked.
I usually caught the 05h15 express train home after work and got there at about 06h10 while Anne always stayed in town until much later, purportedly to wait until peak hour traffic had died down (or to work, as she told her kids) but if she often pretended to her children that she was working late, it was generally a case of hanging around in a watering hole and getting pissed before heading home. All in all, therefore, our paths did not cross unless one of us made an effort to contact the other and especially in that last year of her life Anne made little effort to keep in contact with me and if I did nothing, there was nothing except for a few coincidental meetings in the road outside our respective houses.
Something that struck me only after Anne’s death was that we never once had lunch together that entire year in stark contrast to the previous six years when lunch was a regular event, even if only once a month, and sometimes even major events at that. Often lunch became liquid and extended well past my official lunch hour and then I usually went back to her chambers for coffee for the rest of the afternoon on the premise that it was better not to go back at all than to be seen to come in very late and perhaps slightly tipsy after lunch. In that last year of Anne’s life I lived next door to her and somehow this closeness precluded lunch, which had been the customary interface for so long. Now I could see her in the mornings when I sometimes got lifts into town with her, or maybe in the evenings when I joined her for drinks before she gave me a lift home, and then late in the year when her live-in childminder ran away and Anne had to be home earlier than usual, I often spent the evening in the company of Anne and her kids watching TV. I saw much more of her than I’d been accustomed to before and I guess this somehow made me reluctant to ear lunch with her as well. On the other hand, this reluctance to have a midday meal with Anne could have been rooted in my suspicion that inevitably she was having lunch with her colleague and would have preferred me to be elsewhere. Not that I had any shred of evidence for believing that she was actually having an affair but it was true that she was spending a lot of time with the guy at least during working hours, and that for a brief time they were also seeing each other a lot after work for drinks and the like. After that one terrible episode where I truly and unequivocally felt like a superfluous appendage I had no intention whatsoever of spending any more time in their company for feat of again feeling like an unwanted and unwelcome guest they merely tolerate in their presence out of politeness.
On the Thursday before the Easter weekend I attempted to see Anne since I had not seen her for a while; neither of us had made an effort. I found her via her cellphone and she said “they” were sitting on the stoep of the Holiday Inn on Green Market Square and had apparently been there for most of the afternoon. “They” were a bunch advocate colleagues of Anne’s and one attorney. The others were all friends of this other guy and were all Coloured. By the time I got there they were all tipsy after what appeared to be a long afternoon’s drinking – I think it was Court vacation and none of them had much to do. I joined in and had a few drinks too. By and by the discussion turned what they would do later on and there was a sudden consensus that there would be a braai at the house of one of the crew out in Rondebosch East, just on the other side of the M5 from the Kenilworth Centre.
One by one the others left. Anne and I stayed on for a few more drinks before heading back to her chambers to get her car to go home to Muizenberg where Jimmy would drop the kids, whereafter Anne would go to the braai, although she kept telling me how tired she felt. I had never been directly included in the invitation to the braai and I was unsure whether I was meant to go, particularly since I knew this guy would be there too and that would mean I would once again be a fifth wheel. What was more, the other people would be Anne’s colleagues, if not friends, nut I would not know them at all.
Along the way to Muizenberg, I gathered from Anne’s talk and planning or the braai, and especially what to take with, that I was kind of included in the braai invitation, at least to the extent where Anne apparently took it for granted that I would be going with her and the kids. At home Anne hustled the kids to get in the car since we were already late – we didn’t even change out of work clothes – and made a quick stop at the 7 Eleven to get some meat for the braai, and headed back to Kenilworth. Anne was drunk and should not have been driving at all.
I’d thought that the directions we’d been given to get to the party were clear but it turned out that Anne had heard or remembered them differently than I had. The only recollection we had in common was that the place was close by Kenilworth Centre, except that as far as I was concerned it was on the other side of the M5 and Anne thought it was on this side. We drove around a bit aimlessly until she phoned her hosts and received better directions. So Anne was driving under the influence and talking on her cellphone at the same time. When the directions sank in, she realised that we were going in the wrong direction and immediately made a U-turn with a blithe disregard for other users of the road, with the result that she turned right in front of a few cars who hooted and flung obscene finger signs at her.
We did make it to the party after all, in one piece, and found a group of people who were all buddies and some of them were colleagues of Anne’s but for the most part they were strangers to me and I had to make a bit of an effort to fit in and hung around the edges of some of the conversations for a while before I relaxed into things. The major surprise of the evening was that I met Anne’s colleague’s wife and kids. Given the apparent very close friendship I supposed that the man was single yet here he very much had a wife and family of four kids, and even more surprising, Anne seemed to know them and was on an ostensibly good footing with them.
No comments:
Post a Comment