Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (3 page)

When he turned fifteen, Malcolm would go with my father on some of these trips: from time to time there was a double absence when I returned from school. And though I was deeply relieved that I
had never been called on to go too, I was jealous of my brother. He would return from these odysseys flushed and voluble, so eager to boast that he would even lower himself to talk to me. He would
come to my room sometimes, late at night when the light was off, and tell me stories about things that I could only imagine. ‘I drank red wine,’ he said once, ‘till I vomited out
the window of the Land Rover. Dad wouldn’t stop, he just laughed at me.’

And somewhere deep down in myself I longed to vomit out of windows too, to earn the laughter of my father.

Or the time he shot his first impala. ‘It wasn’t dead, it was lying on the ground, kicking. Dad killed it with a knife.’

I nodded solemnly, entranced and appalled. The knife was at my throat.

In the end I asked my father if I could go too. It was a rash, impulsive request, and after he agreed happily, swelling with pleasure, I was filled with bitter regret. But somehow the next
occasion came and went, and I stayed behind at home. I was learning the taste of relief and jealousy mixed together, a taste like ash. It was a taste that sprang quickly to my tongue whenever my
brother was around.

Malcolm was strong and splendid and mean. He behaved as though he was immortal. So his sudden death wasn’t just painful and tragic, but somehow against the natural order
of things. He died in 1986, when I was seventeen years old, in my second to last year at school. Malcolm had failed matric and gone straight into the army.

He was made for that uniform. He looked casually handsome, capable of heroism and brutality. And if he had died a soldier’s death, in a hail of bullets, or a purifying baptism of fire, it
might have been less terrible and terminal. But he died in an ordinary traffic accident, in an army jeep somewhere on a nameless stretch of road. A burst tyre, a skid, a ditch at the edge of the
tar.

He was given a military funeral. I stood between my parents – my father rigid with grief, my mother sedated – as the coffin, vividly draped with the South African flag, was lowered
into the ground. I jumped when the rifles fired. And the next week at school there was a special assembly in honour of my brother, after which the other boys came to shake my hand in grim
commiseration.

What I myself was feeling at that time I have no idea. I see events, and myself in them, from a distance. It is a story told by dolls or puppets, on a strange, unreal set. I do remember seeing
my father cry for the first time in my life – shaking, soundless sobs unleashed into his hands as he sat drinking whisky at his desk – and the feeling, though perhaps that came at a
different moment, that it would have been better if it had been me that died. There was the knowledge, too, that I was carrying a heavier cargo now, of guilt or transplanted hopes. And the dread of
failure.

I thought that the heaviness was mine alone, but none of us was the same. Malcolm’s absence left a larger void behind, which drew us ineluctably into its dark. In whatever secret place it
is that human lives are welded together, joints and seams had been pulled out of place. All the unhappiness that had been squashed down under a lid suddenly boiled over into open view.

Within four months my parents were divorced. My father kept his house and I moved out with my mother. I visited my father over weekends sometimes. Almost immediately he started to shack up with
a series of girlfriends, the first one being his secretary. It had never occurred to me that he might have lovers, not even on those long trips out of town, and I was shocked. But none of them ever
stayed long; some of them were replaced between one of my visits and the next. I don’t think he was especially attached to any of them and it took me a while to work out that it was a form of
mourning for my mother. They were all substitutes, each temporarily, glossily, inhabiting her space. At the same time he became over-solicitous and concerned about me – another kind of
substitution.

My mother also changed, radically and suddenly, but in the opposite direction to my father. She, who had been so devoted and submissive, threw off the role of wife as if it had been weighing her
down. ‘I feel like myself for the first time, Patrick,’ she confided in me a few days after we had moved out from my father. ‘It’s all been an act till now.’ And I saw
that she had undergone three very different incarnations in her life. The first was that of the photo on the wall at
Ouma
’s place: a little Afrikaans girl on the farm, with pigtails
and a missing tooth. Then came the young, pale wife, shorn of her past, eddying in a beautiful vacuum. The third, which started when my brother died, was the one that possessed her now.

She said that she had finally become a real person, but who she really was remained a mystery out of reach, even to herself. As if through the years of her marriage she had been holding herself
painfully static, my mother gave in to motion. This was obvious on a physical level: she was constantly restless, looking around her, moving about. But her condition ran deeper than this. She threw
herself with wild abandon into different fads and movements, and then discarded them for others. She took up diets, she played with different styles of clothing, she joined clubs and societies for
two weeks at a time. She ate only red meat for a while, then became vegetarian. She joined Greenpeace. She campaigned for animal rights, standing in the rain on street corners with placards and
grisly photographs. And from animals she moved on to human beings: for the first time in her life she became passionate about politics. One of the things she held against my father was his
patriarchal brand of capitalism. She joined the Black Sash, the End Conscription Campaign, the Detainees’ Parents’ Support Committee. She became rabid and incoherent on the subject of
the Crossroads carnage. I listened – at first with amazement, later with resignation – to the rhetoric of liberation.

I realised quite soon who the real victim was. Taking on the cause of this group or that, being vocal at meetings at rallies, she was actually making a plea for herself.
Look at me
, she
was saying,
I’m here, notice me
. And as time went by she began to look like one of the dispossessed and vanquished on whose behalf she was supposed to be fighting. Gone were the
dresses and makeup of her wifely years. In their place came jeans and
takkies
and T-shirts emblazoned with slogans and patches and dirt. I had never seen the skin of her face before, with
its subtle blotches and mottlings. She didn’t shave her legs and armpits anymore. She put on weight, then lost it again. In the end she came to resemble, uncannily, the staring, maimed dog in
the anti-vivisection poster above her bed.

Along with these changes, of course, there were lovers. A lot of them, not all of them male. She changed partners almost as often as my father did, but her motivation was entirely different:
while he was genuinely in mourning for her, my mother never looked back. There were hippies and solemn accountants, radicals and students. The only type that never passed through her bed again was
the slick businessman that might have reminded her of her ex-husband. No, that was the past; and the future was defined purely by how enthusiastically she could give herself to everything she had
never done before.

It wasn’t long before drugs entered the picture too. I was too alarmed by now to follow the development of this scenario. It started with marijuana, the smell of which filtered out of her
room from first thing in the morning, but rapidly progressed to all sorts of other, more dangerous chemicals. Usually these were taken in the company of her friends, the odd, transient characters
that were always drifting in and out of the house in those days, like a kind of vapour. But on one occasion I came home to find her alone, lying naked in a comatose trance on the floor. I shook her
and shook her, but it was a long time before her bony face stirred and lifted, whorls of shadow clinging around her eyes. In that moment our roles reversed: she became the lost child, holding on to
me, desperate for consolation and meaning. I could only cradle her in revulsion and pity.

In the morning she was better. She squeezed my wrist at the table and said, ‘Hello.’

‘Hello.’

‘What we both went through last night. Thank you, Patrick.’

‘That’s all right,’ I said, though it wasn’t.

‘I’m glad, actually. It’s brought us together. Pulled the walls down a little. We need to get all the inhibitions and bullshit out the way. We don’t need secrets from
each other.’

‘Yes,’ I said, but I wondered then whether people don’t need their secrets. Lives are meant to be separate and apart; when the borders break and we overflow into one another,
it only leads to trouble and sadness.

My father, who had never been so separate and apart from her before, was watching all this from a distance. He questioned me about her whenever I saw him. He did this in a cautious, roundabout
way, not wanting to seem too interested. ‘And your mother,’ he would say, after he’d asked me at laborious length about myself. ‘How’s she doing?’

‘She’s all right, I suppose.’

‘She doesn’t look all right to me. She looks unhealthy.’

‘Really,’ I said. ‘I hadn’t noticed.’

He stared at me for a moment, then down into his whisky. He poked reflectively at his ice with one finger. ‘That guy she was with when I dropped you,’ he said. ‘Is she seeing
him?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I answered, and probably it was true: by then she would have chucked him for somebody else.

Once he had an idea. Laying a comradely hand on my shoulder, he said: ‘I’m going hunting in Zambia next week. You want to come along?’

I mused on this for a while, then said: ‘No, I don’t think so, thanks.’

‘What do you mean? You’d enjoy it, Patrick. You should give it a try.’

I paused to savour my cruelty. ‘Killing things isn’t my idea of fun.’

He blanched with suppressed anger. ‘That’s not the point, and you know it. It’s about being outdoors, under the sky... ’ He shrugged. ‘Why am I explaining? Malcolm
didn’t need it explained.’

‘I’m not Malcolm,’ I said.

We changed the subject then and talked about inconsequential things. But both of us knew that we’d skirted close to the edge of a very deep abyss. I didn’t visit as often after that
and he stopped asking me about my mother for a while.

He’d kept Malcolm’s room preserved almost exactly as it was when he’d died. The bed was always made up, the curtains opened in the morning and closed at night, as though my
brother was away on a short trip and might return at any moment. On the walls and table were perhaps twenty or thirty pictures of Malcolm, a whole chronology of his life, from being a fat scowling
baby to the sulky young man in uniform.

Then I went to the army myself. I went reluctantly, too young and unsure to face the alternatives. I had no real idea of what lay ahead; just a sense that it was utterly at odds with my nature.
But I thought that the sooner I went into it, the sooner it would be behind me. I didn’t know at that time how certain experiences are never past, even when they are behind.

My mother wrote to me, long self-obsessed letters in which she only sometimes remembered to ask me about myself. She talked about the journey she was on, the journey to discover herself. I was
losing all sense of who I was by then, but I didn’t know how to give voice to the gathering absence. Instead I wrote short notes in reply, terse accounts of military life, and then stopped
writing altogether. But she didn’t seem to notice. She went on with her monologue. She was trying her hand at acting again, ‘the creative life that marriage killed in me.’ But she
wasn’t confident enough, or there wasn’t enough work, and she only ever landed a few little parts here and there. She was battling for money. So when an old friend, installed in a
lecturing post up north in Namibia, invited her to come up to the academy to fill in for somebody else for one term, she accepted immediately. It was a change from the usual, she said, and she was
a junkie for change. She went to Windhoek to teach drama, and that was how she met Godfrey. And that was why we were making this particular trip now, into the past – hers and mine.

I woke to the sound of a pig being killed. I sat up rigidly in bed, not moving till the noise suddenly stopped. Then I got up and dressed and went outside.

I had forgotten this about the farm. Its calendar runs on slaughter: Tuesday morning, the pig; on Wednesday, a sheep; on Friday, a goat. In between all these, at arbitrary times, any number of
chickens meet their fate. All of this death to support human life: the flesh goes into our bodies, to keep us alive, to keep us going.

Animals are killed in different ways. There are specialized methods according to which each one meets its end. When I was younger, my mother had brought me up here for weekends and holidays, and
I had watched many of these executions with appalled fascination. Chickens had their heads chopped clean off with an axe. Goats and sheep had their throats cut. They were led out to a patch of bare
ground below the stable, where they were pinned down to the ground, their heads were pulled back and their arteries opened. What horrified me most was the mechanical indifference of the killing,
the impassive face of the man who held the knife, which contrasted obscenely with the panic of the dying animal. Chickens were the most frenzied: they ran around insanely, spouting blood. The sheep
were the most docile. They stood almost stupidly as they bled, watching the world fade away.

Pigs were a different matter. The pigs had their legs trussed up and were rolled onto their backs. Then a thin filament of iron was pushed into them, into the heart. It was, it is, a highly
skilled task. In all the years of my childhood I had only ever seen one man doing the pigsticking: Jonas, old even then, his face all shattered with lines, who would come out of his room, bent
forwards as if with the inordinate weight of his duty. He prodded a little with the tip of the metal rod, divining the exact spot, the heart. Then, like a picador, he would throw his frail weight
behind it as he drove it in.