night and testing to see what they can get away with. One of the boys hurtles around a corner and sets an expensive-looking vase rocking on its base. An Unknown mother shoots out an arm, sun-browned, gold-bangled, to stabilise it.
“Daniel! Grow up!” she hisses at the boy.
Be careful what you wish for, I want to warn her, but I don’t.
Shortly after Gabriel was born he contracted some kind of rotavirus, as young kids do, and I’d bitched about the lack of sleep to my parents. “Just remember. Small children, small problems. Big children, big problems,” my father responded. My epigram-laden, pipe-smoking father.
I glance at the growing problem that is my son. Peter hasn’t appeared yet, and Gabriel is leaning on the kitchen counter scowling into a glass of Coke. He looks like he is trying to compress his long frame into a small one, stands hunched, slouching, his shoulders rounded and his head hanging forward off his neck like a blotchy and too-heavy fruit. He looks on the verge of losing all control of his bones and his joints, and for a moment I wonder if this infrastructure might give way altogether, collapsing into a handful of pick-up-sticks that rattle to the floor. I want to berate him because a son should be someone who makes his father proud, is supposed to be a being who holds his head high and confronts the world face-on and is thrilled at the young blood that flows through his veins and the growing strength of his four intact limbs and his untarnished lungs and unscarred liver that process the clean air and the good food and the pure juices (Coke aside) that find their way into his body. I want him to be shaking a dry, firm hand with the adults. Want to watch him introduce himself with a smile and a strong voice and then stand around and join the banter with the confidence and wit that should be his. But Gabriel has nothing to give them, nothing to gain from them; to hide his thoughts in the sibilant bubbles of Coke is at worst a brief distraction, at best a temporary tactic for invisibility.
Meanwhile, Tracy has intercepted the aw-shame looks that the Unknown couples have been casting my way. She’s very good at this, distracts them with her oft-proven techniques, which include looking the women up and down sniffily and shoving her cleavage under the noses of the men. Barry drags us all away to the deck that looks out onto the galaxy of lights that define the Flats below, the lights of the little people, stretching to the black void of the ocean beyond. He has made a fire in a large steel contraption at the end of the deck. When its flames have calmed to coal, Barry will throw on steaks and chops. He may have a Maserati and a Cayenne in the garage these days, but Barry’s culinary tastes never really left home. He knows me well enough not to offer me a chair, but one of the Unknown husbands doesn’t and drags one up while exhorting me to sit as though I was a sick person, which leaves me with the choice of accepting the seat or cracking him across the shins with a crutch.
I sit.
In my wardrobe at home, standing in a corner, is half a leg. It has titanium bones and a skin of high-tech rubber that feels almost real but doesn’t, like the skin you feel and don’t feel when you do the old dead-man’s finger trick. I wore it for a while, or tried to, but I could never get used to the pain of my weight bearing down on the stump stuffed into the thing. Besides, my limp drew other kinds of stares, pretty much as a toupee might – does he have a leg or doesn’t he? Isn’t he too young to have had polio? Hobbling about on crutches with my trouser leg neatly folded up was, I reasoned, an honest way to declare to the world that yes, I am an amputee – I am not wearing new shoes, have not twisted my ankle, have not had a toilet accident – I have simply lost half a leg.
“You’re lucky,” the surgeon said to me when I came around after the operation. “We’ve managed to amputate at the knee, which is the best result for wearing a prosthesis in the future.” That was the first time I heard that I’d lost my leg; I didn’t feel lucky at all.
Barry pulls up more chairs so that everyone can sit. He’s that kind of guy – says nothing, just does something about the mutual discomfort of me sitting and everyone else standing. Unasked, he brings me a beer, a trendy boutique beer. It’s colder and crisper than the beers I brought. I try to relax and make a few comments that aren’t that funny but get the Unknowns laughing more than they should. One of the husbands asks what I do and I tell him that I’m an architect, and I can feel everyone weighing my profession against the fact of my missing leg, and then I feel their surprise that there’s no logical contradiction between the two. Everyone relaxes a little more. It’s not a seismic shift – the men don’t kick off their shoes and the women keep their tops on; it’s a miniscule exhale, a barely perceptible dropping of the shoulders, but I’m sure that greater things – peace agreements, multinational mergers – have rested on even smaller changes in the prevailing mood.
There’s a brief hiccup when more Unknowns – three, including the couple’s daughter, down from Johannesburg for the holidays – arrive late, having lost themselves amid the foliage of the suburb. The new Unknowns smile, awkward. But the rest of us exude an aura or a cloud of pheromones that reassures the newcomers. Which is just as well, because this time I’m the one staring, firstly at the daughter, who is sixteen and flawless, wearing a tiny silver figure nailed to a tiny silver cross that hangs between breasts I suppose I should not have been looking at, so I look at the mother instead. She reminds me of some famous actress from years back whose beauty was amplified by eyes that were ever-so-slightly crossed; I can’t help but notice a similar crucifix to her daughter’s trying to fight its way out of her cleavage. And then I try to remember exactly when it was that I stopped looking at daughters and started looking at their mothers, but I can’t.
Lynn leads the girl off by the hand to introduce her to Gabriel and Peter, who has by now emerged and is trying to interest Gabriel in some hand-held electronic device. Peter is shorter than Gabriel, much, and he’s podgy and bespectacled. With his pasted-down and side-parted hair, he has the air of a little old man – a professor or an accountant – but when he looks up at the approaching girl his eyes widen and his jaw drops. I hope that Gabriel will draw himself up to his full height and smile broadly and shake the girl’s hand, but instead he shrinks a little more, nods, pulls his fringe down further over his forehead.
We eat. We drink. We talk. The glances have now all stopped sliding towards the trouser-end that is folded over my stump. There’s no history with the Unknowns, no past indiscretions to gloss over, no rusty hatchets to keep buried under carefully chosen words. Easy. One of the Unknown wives says the word “fuck” and we relax more. There are no prudes here, we know. We are adults. We can swear if we want to. We can tell rude jokes and relate off-colour stories as long as we rubberneck first to make sure that there are no kids in earshot. I look over towards the kitchen counter to see if Gabriel is bending his ear in our direction, but Peter is sitting alone, fiddling with the gizmo in his hand. I’m glad Gabe can’t hear us, us old people telling boring anecdotes and swearing to try to impress – comfort? – one another.
We finish eating and fill the awkward time between eleven and midnight with more anecdotes, a few more drinks. I’m sure that Tracy has snuck open another button on her blouse, but I don’t care. Her eyes are glassy; she shouldn’t be drinking while on antibiotics, but. Then, midnight, more or less, because of course everyone’s watches and cellphones are out of sync and nobody is sure when the moment actually arrives. An illegal barrage of nearby fireworks settles the debate, and we wish each other all the best for the coming year, dragging the kids into the adult circle for a moment. Hugs and good wishes, goodwill glowing with sentimentality and alcohol.
Why are they so important now, these embracings and blessings? Why not on 5 January or 19 March or 27 October? I don’t know. It depresses me always, these happy, three-quarters-pissed New Year’s people, smiling with all their teeth hanging out and sloshing their drinks around, wishing total strangers whatever their Hallmark vocabularies can dredge up, hugging those of the opposite sex just a little too tightly, just a little too long. Celebrating what is to come, when all that is certain about New Year’s Eve is another stroke through the threescore-and-ten. It should be a mourning for the
