The Ghost-Eater and Other Stories (20 page)

He studied the telephone on the side table. It did not ring; why should it?

He stepped across to the bookshelf and retrieved a blue folder from between a dictionary and a world atlas and carried it to an armchair and sat down. The folder contained an assortment of postcards and newspaper cuttings and handwritten notes and letters sent him over the years that he had kept for future interest. Birthday cards with handwritten messages, the gist of each the same every year. A note from an ex-girlfriend written in blue ink (
I can't say why it must be this way but it must. I can't help how I feel. X
). A printed email from a friend in London who had promised to write once a month but never had. A postcard with images of Barcelona sent him by his sister during her travels in Europe. An eight-page letter from a man he had sat next to and listened to talk for four hours about politics and Shakespeare and medicine on a bus trip from Durban to Cape Town. Newspaper articles that, browsing now, he wondered why he had kept at all.

A pale blue aerogram scrawled with news from his uncle during one of his annual three-month stints of work in England. He looked up from the folder of keepsakes in his lap towards the window. The downpour had weakened to a drizzle and from the gutters and the eaves came the rapid drip of water. Images came to him of his uncle's gravesite. The granite slab, the man's full name and his dates and the saving line of script engraved there, not for the one below ground but for those who had known him and remained behind. Alongside the grave a rutted dirt track pitted with stones and lined with fir trees leading away between the graves to join a tar road broken and crumbling at the edges. The gnarled bark of the fir trees either side of the grave. The cold air of the day he had visited his buried uncle. The conical height of the firs reaching upward like pillars of smoke. The pale pale blue of the sky.

 

 

From the car park outside the bar where he had spent the afternoon drinking with his friend he needed to turn left if he wanted to drive home. It was just past six o'clock and the sky held perhaps another two hours of daylight, one of the pleasures of Cape Town Decembers. The car idled, his mind open to whim. He felt adrift of every responsibility and expectation, uninspired by his freedom to choose what to do with another weekday evening. He turned right and drove down onto Rosmead Avenue, southwards. Navigating the back roads adjacent to the railway line, it took him a while to locate Plumstead Cemetery. He had been there once before, a fortnight after his uncle's death, to lay a bunch of red roses on the gravel of the gravebed as a favour for his grandmother who did not have the courage to visit the grave herself. This evening the high wrought-iron entrance gates to the cemetery were padlocked but the pedestrian gate was ajar. Cars passed on the road running the length of the north side of the cemetery and he sensed the incongruity of this fenced plot of land laid and tumbled with gravestones standing opposite modest houses and the kempt lives they contained. The avenues lined by fir trees looked all much alike and their numbering was inconsistent so it was a while before he found the avenue he was looking for and the gravestone below which the body of his uncle had been laid.

He had not joined his mother and father and grandmother when they had made the trip to the mortuary to identify the body. His mother had warned him not to come, a man of twenty-one years, telling him that he would be better off retaining in his mind the image of his uncle as he had always known him, brisk with health and fitness and provocativeness, than supplant it with the image of his body stretched cold, pale, and uncharacteristic on a metal tabletop. He had not agreed with her but neither had he accompanied them. At the time he had thought how a person anyhow daily absorbs images and stories from newspaper and television and internet that just as soon one wishes one had not taken in, an information-silt to nourish fears and fantasies and nightmares.

Now he sat on the edge of a concrete gravestone. He thought of his uncle's body below ground and the idea of a life discontinued. He thought of the discontinuity between a body consigned to earth and the contents of his estate distributed among family or sold or donated. He thought of the compilation of images of the man and his life each person who knew him would carry till these images attenuated to nothing or died with those who carried them.

The wind was up and had strengthened to a cool breeze. Bright white cloud was curling over the Constantiaberg and the sun was just about to drop from view. Looking out over the cemetery he saw a grey-haired, suited man bending stiffly to arrange something at a grave. Further off, a couple stood together with the man's arm around the woman's shoulder. Along the access road through the cemetery a family group was walking at the pace of the old woman of their party. In the next avenue he noticed a bergie woman wander by with a shopping packet clinking with empty bottles which further down the avenue she laid by and there began a harsh off-hand speech to another settled in the lee of a broad headstone where they had made a rough encampment. It seemed to him a cemetery was a choice place for the homeless to shelter. A plot of land invested with material tributes of love and appreciation for vanished others, fenced off, undervisited, a place apart. He thought not of his uncle but the train of events that his death had put in motion.

 

 

It was September, a hot Saturday afternoon in the early stages of a friend's twenty-first birthday party in Somerset West when he received the phone call that brought him the news. He took his phone out of his pocket and stood up from his friends' scurrilous conversation and took his glass of beer with him out into the dry heat of the dirt car park and in the sun answered the call with a flippant greeting. He was in a loose mood but this abruptly tightened when his brother told him that their uncle had died a few hours earlier in a motorbike accident outside Oudtshoorn. He hung up and stood in the hot shade of a tree and felt weak and wordless. He had no desire to finish his beer. Laughter and music reached him from the restaurant but all that celebration seemed a vain and impossible distraction compared to this new reality.

A short while later he had driven to join the rest of his family gathered at his grandmother's house in Newlands. After commiserating with his grandmother, he had sat in the lounge and drunk some cold juice and in a small way joined the conversation about the particulars of the accident and his uncle's idiosyncrasies that would be missed. It was not a conversation so much as a tentative sharing of disbelieving and fond remarks, sound to fill the silence. Conversations about the funeral and the practicalities of tying up the estate and recollections of the man would occupy the days to come. Now it was enough to be present.

On Sunday he visited his grandmother again. In the kitchen he helped prepare some drinks and snacks for the unexpected visitors who had arrived to offer his grandmother their sympathy and support. A few times the phone rang and he answered it and was asked by the caller, a friend of his uncle's or grandmother's or a relative who had only just heard the news, to confirm and enlarge on what exactly had happened the previous morning on that sunburned strip of road outside Oudtshoorn. He told them what he knew: that his uncle's motorbike had collided at high speed with a minibus taxi which turned across his lane and that his uncle had died on impact and his uncle's girlfriend had died of her injuries a short while later and that the taxi driver had been injured and was in hospital. Each time, he sensed the caller's relief at being able to talk to someone towards the edge of the bereaved family circle who could open up about the details of the accident and the character of his uncle and how his grandmother was doing and where to from here. He drew a kind of satisfaction from these phone conversations that appealed to his insider's authority and he joined some callers in speculating about the accident, whether it was the result of the taxi driver's negligence and his uncle's well-known love of high speed that left no room for error and whether his uncle had been pursued by the traffic police at the time of the accident and what was left of the motorbike and which motorbike it was and how far down the road the bodies post-impact had travelled. But that afternoon when he returned to his garden flat and closed the door and lay down on his bed and listened to the wind thresh the branches of the trees outside, he felt cold sick self-betrayal at having spoken so brightly and easily with those callers about a death he sensed he should be taking harder than he was.

 

 

It was Monday mid-afternoon when he walked up the driveway of his uncle's property in Oban Road, the driveway gate standing open as it always did, thin brown conifer fronds littering the paving stones. Warm sunlight lay on the bricks of the driveway and in the air the noise of a lawnmower grazing in a garden up the street. His uncle's garden was unkempt, with twigs on the grass from a recent wind and weeks of leaves accumulated in the empty flowerbeds below the conifers and leopard trees. The curtains were drawn in the windows of the house.

He sat on the doorstep that faced onto the driveway. He had sat there countless afternoons before on days he had visited, hoping to find his uncle at home. He would wait sometimes for an hour or more and then realise that whether or not his uncle returned to the house from work or errands while he sat there was not important. It was pleasurable enough sitting and noticing the sounds of birds in the empty garden and the movement of clouds.

After a while he stepped up to the door and opened it with the spare key he had obtained from his grandmother's house, setting off the warning squeal of the burglar alarm. He tramped down the passageway to the computer pad to enter the code to silence the noise. In the sitting room, he drew open the curtains and opened the peeling metal-frame windows to let in moving air. The burglar bars in the windows mapped squares of sunlight onto the brown carpet. Beside the faded green armchair lay two folded newspapers and on top of those some motorbike magazines. The remote control for the TV lay centred on the right armrest of the chair, pointing at the opaque screen in the corner of the room.

He went through to the kitchen and opened the fridge and cupboards to scout for something to eat. He opened a can of beer that he found in the fridge and took from a drawer of the freezer a packet of salted peanuts, its top end fixed with a clothes peg.

From the kitchen he wandered down the corridor towards the bedrooms, the floorboards creaking underfoot. The spare room was immaculately tidy, the bed tucked and smoothed for its next occupant. In the main bedroom the doors of the clothes cupboards stood ajar and a pair of socks and underwear lay crumpled on the carpet at the foot of the chest of drawers. On the bedside table, a luminous yellow light blinked on the telephone answering machine. He looked at the digital display, mulling a mouthful of beer. He let the message play aloud: a woman named Charlene phoning just to say hi, just to chat and find out how you are and how things are going, I hope you're well, it would be lovely to catch up over dinner sometime soon.

In the sitting room he sat for a long while on the poorly sprung couch facing his uncle's favoured armchair. Drinking the dead man's beer and eating his peanuts, he sat facing the space where the grey-haired man used to sit and eat his frugal lunch and dispense his advice which brooked no contradiction. He put aside the packet of peanuts and set the empty beer can on a coaster on a side table. Up the road, the lawnmower had ceased its noise and now there was just the occasional loud rush of a car accelerating up the street. He sat on the couch and gazed at the sunlight all parcelled out in blocks on the brown carpet and for all the bracing recent knowledge of his uncle's death felt dimly as if nothing had changed, nothing at all could change if one just sat calmly enough in this room.

 

 

The funeral was set for Thursday afternoon. His mother had relayed to him his grandmother's suggestion that he, the youngest nephew who had some talent for writing witty birthday poems, say a few words about his uncle, who by all accounts was a ‘character'. He spent Monday morning at his desk jotting ideas onto paper: recollections of his uncle's habits, expressions, achievements, behavioural tics, values. He had no difficulty evoking the man from his memories and spent hours of the next two days talking aloud these disparate impressions into the confident shape of a speech. For security, on the morning of the funeral he wrote some keywords onto a piece of paper and put that in his pocket and at two o'clock left the house to walk in the windless sun of a flawless spring afternoon the short distance to St Thomas's church in Rondebosch where the funeral would take place.

Since the news of his uncle's death he had not properly cried or felt more than a vague sense of loss. He felt tears should have come more easily than they had: on the Monday and Tuesday night it had taken some bottles of beer and maudlin music to bring the tears, after which he had felt a bit better but still disappointed, as at a brief drizzle from thunderous rain clouds.

As he sat in one of the front pews of the church, his mind was not on his emotions but the words he would have to speak when the priest called on him after the reading and hymn and song and sermon. Save for the occasional wedding of a cousin he had not sat through a full church service since he was sixteen and preparing to be confirmed in the Anglican church up the road from his old family home. He had dropped out of that confirmation course because none of the facilitators was able to give a satisfactory answer to his questions about certain passages from the Bible. The confirmees had been encouraged to ask questions but while others' questions were politely tentative, more obedient than serious, his own were more deep-reaching and found no convincing answers.

Sitting now in a church in Rondebosch, he listened to the priest speak about death as something enabling a higher life in a world beyond. His mind moved in a different direction to the priest's consoling words. He sat in trance of fresh amazement that he and others could live as if death were not a ubiquitous reality. He felt a tight scrunch of emotion at the thought of its absolute finality. His mind baulked and he narrowed his gaze on a vase of flowers that he realised must have been prepared specially for the occasion. Flower-arrangers, priests, life-insurers, undertakers – who else works the edges of others' grief? From the front of the church the priest spoke his name and he rose as if he were another person and walked up the steps to the lectern and turned to a church full of faces and a waiting microphone.