about that.”
Schoolgirls with one baby, perhaps two, are another matter. In the Western Cape alone about seven thousand girls between twelve and eighteen fell pregnant in 2010.
The more I ask around town, the more improbable Parker’s story sounds. But there’s talk of a guy who pretended to have some mental disorder or other, and now gets a disability pension.
Some of the people I ask say they’ve heard of the young woman with six children, but then refer me to someone else who may be able to tell me exactly who she is and where she lives. Then they, those people who may know, refer me to others who may know. Eventually this brings me to oom Jan Stassen’s house in De Beer Street. I’ve been told he knows everything there is to know in Touws River, but even oom Jan just rests his heavy hands – hands that have punched tickets on the trains for over thirty years – on his silver garden gate and says: “Hell, no, my friend. This is the first I’ve heard of her.”
Oom Jan was a train conductor until the railways forced him to go on early retirement. He looks down the street. “They say you only cry twice here in Touws River,” he says, as if that will explain everything. “The day you arrive and the day you leave.”
It’s dark by the time I leave for Laingsburg – oom Jan agrees that tomorrow is their AllPay day. He knows because his brother-in-law lives there and he gets a disability grant.
3.
From a distance, the Lord Milner Hotel looks like a passenger liner that has docked for the evening at Matjiesfontein, on the stretch of N1 between Touws River and Laingsburg.
It’s dark by the time I pull up in the parking area outside the hotel. A uniformed porter comes to help me take my things from the bakkie. Yes, he confirms, it’s AllPay day in Laingsburg tomorrow. When I ask how he can be sure, he’s almost indignant: “They come past here every month, Meneer.”
In my room there’s a brass bed, and on the bed, two lollipops, one red and one pink. I empty everything I’ve accumulated in the course of the day from my trouser pockets and put it all on the dressing table: coins, till slips, the wrapper of a Snacker bar. When I’m on the road, more so than when I’m at home, it’s a grim battle against chaos, in my head and even in my pockets and luggage.
In my shirt pocket I discover a serviette from Parker’s restaurant in Touws River. On it I’d written: No gathering. No sitting. I’d seen the words written on the window of one of the shops in the town.
I throw the serviette and the slips in one of Ma’s old Tupperware containers – she’d written her name on the lid with pink nail varnish – which I’d brought with me. Then I switch on my laptop and search the internet for statistics on government grants, listening to the whooshing of car and truck tyres on the N1. It sounds like the sea on a stormy night.
The hotel has a shop with a shelf full of second-hand Afrikaans books: Etienne Leroux, Abraham H. de Vries, Opperman, Krog, Toeks Blignault, Kannemeyer. There’s one I’d completely forgotten about: F.A. Venter’s Werfjoernaal.
In January 1960 my wife, Herman, Elizabeth and I left Johannesburg in a second-hand green Chevy and drove to a farm on the border between Kenhardt and Carnavon to go and live there. The last time I read those words I was at school. With us, we had Patch, a half-breed cocker spaniel, Pootjies, a half-breed-I-don’t-know-what, and Vaaljan, a purebred Siamese.
I seem to remember seeing an old copy of this book on Pa’s bookshelf in Ventersdorp, but I buy it anyway. It’s a book I’d like to have on my own shelf; it describes a rural lifestyle I know so well.
The Laird’s Arms Pub is near the shop. I walk over. Seated at the counter are two guys: one in a Ferrari jacket he may have bought from a China shop because the seam under the arm has come undone. The other is drinking something that looks like a Bloody Mary.
The hotel was built in 1899 and the bar is an authentic old British pub, complete with a dark wooden counter, wooden floor and piano. I hoist myself onto one of the bar stools and open Venter’s book: After twenty-two years in cities – Johannesburg, Cape Town, Pretoria, Windhoek – we wanted to be farmers and to be free … I struggle to concentrate. The guy in the Ferrari jacket is telling the one with the Bloody Mary about the time he gave a woman and her dog a lift to Worcester. It seems the dog was sick and she wanted to take him to a vet. When they got to Worcester, the dog died in the car.
“I said to her: ‘Come, let’s throw the dog away.’” The Ferrari jacket’s seam opens wider as he gesticulates. “But she said: ‘Are you crazy? This dog’s going home with me. I’m going to bury him in my own backyard.’ So I said to her: ‘Hey, I want to do some shopping first, man.’ She said: ‘Go shop. I’ll wait in the car with my dog.’ When we got back that afternoon, the dog stank so much you could have got high, my bra.”
Next door, in the dining room, a bell rings. Dinnertime.
But first I phone Pa. These days he goes to bed early and I know he’ll be wondering if I’ve found a place to sleep for the night.
He picks up almost immediately: “I was going to call you, son. Have you heard the news? They robbed the bank in Pofadder.” Pa’s voice is weary, as if the robbery has affected him personally. “Can you believe it, hey? Now they go as far as Pofadder to rob. It’s because the police’s hands are tied. They do just as they please, these young tsotsis …”
They, they, they. Pa with his unrelenting “they”.
“You say you feel as if you don’t know the country any more. Let me tell you, son, I don’t see any hope for us. We’re going the same way as the rest of Africa. One of these days we’re going to become another Zimbabwe …”
I listen to him but don’t respond. After a while, I say goodnight and hang up. Even I find it difficult to believe: a robbery at the bank in Pofadder!
The dining room is next to the bar, opposite reception. As I enter, I step into a memory from long ago.
What’s happening here is an old-world ritual. One I haven’t been part of for a very long time because you don’t find old-world hotels like this with dining rooms like this any more. Nowadays small-town hotels are turned into lodges and their dining rooms into steakhouses or à la carte restaurants.
There’s a sideboard against one of the walls with an arrangement of dried proteas on it. It stands there like a shrine to good manners. All the tables are covered with white damask tablecloths and all the settings are identical: a sideplate, dinner plate and wine glass. To the left of the dinner plate are two forks, to the right, a knife and a fish knife; above it, a soup spoon and a dessert spoon; all of it, without question, Royal Sheffield silver. A butter knife lies at an angle on the sideplate.
A waiter in a red jacket escorts me to my table and pulls out my chair. Frans, says his name tag. All at once it feels as if Pa and my late Ma are with me and the three of us are sitting in the dining room of the Commercial Hotel in Daniëlskuil on a Sunday after church.
A tender feeling of nostalgia descends slowly, like a curtain, over the reality of bank robberies and AllPay days.
First I pick up the stiff, starched napkin perched like a small boat beside the butter knife on the sideplate, unfold it and drape it across my lap – and almost immediately it slips onto the floor. Almost instinctively, my hand reaches out and takes half a slice of white bread from the small plate in the centre of the table. Then I lift the domed lid of the silver dish next to
