Becoming Strangers (17 page)

He smiled and kept his face straight ahead, concentrating on Bill as if he were his own child, at risk in the sea. He remembered his daydream about her.

'You are beautiful, Laurie.'

She smiled, cocking her head at first, with her eyes and mouth questioning—then they were steadied by the blossoming of comprehension. Her upper body rose and fell a few times and she did not blink. Before she could say anything he said suddenly, 'Can you help me?' He paused, 'I don't know what I mean by that.'

In front of him, on her knees, she put her fingers about his wrist and turned it over so that the soft skin over his veins was facing upwards. She looked at it, then she brought it to her lips and kissed it.

Thank you,' he said, feeling the mixture of the sun and the beer collide in his chest.

'W
ELL, YOU HAVE CERTAINLY GIVEN US
some entertainment, Bill. We needed it,' said Jan amiably when a dripping Bill joined them to towel off and put his shorts back on.

'You're right. A tense crowd yesterday. That's why I wanted to get out. They'll be an irritable lot tonight, burnt no doubt too.' He looked up at the sun, and sighed with pleasure as he drained his beer.

'My wife tells me you are a Christian, born again.'

'Now, do I look like a Christian?'

Laurie put her hand up to her brow to shield her eyes against the sun and to see him. 'But anyone may look like a Christian,' she said.

Bill sat down, adjusting his shorts a little as he did so.

'I am a Christian, indeed.'

Jan nodded. 'What does it mean?' he asked, then added, 'I don't mean to be rude. I was raised as a Catholic, so was my wife, but I don't think we'd describe ourselves as Christians.'

'Catholic, Protestant, Muslim...' said Bill. 'All of
that shite throws me, you see. I have my own relationship...! couldn't speak about the way another man believes.'

'But what does it mean to you?'

'I'll tell you.' He stopped for a while, considering the sea. 'It means trying to bring God into the centre of everything I do, to make him present, even now. Sometimes you're so heavy you can't make room or you don't make room and sometimes you're so light, you forget. You fail constantly and that's what I find so cheering, failing all the time. One of the worst.'

Laurie stretched her legs and lifted her face to the sun. Jan leaned forward, agitated and rocking, as if he were hungry.

'How can you know for sure? I never knew, not even as a child.'

'Well, it's different for everyone, isn't it. For me it was a miracle.'

Jan was sad suddenly. A face in a tomato, a cross in a potato, some sort of reported healing at Lourdes, all of the hopes of mothers with ailing children, women who might as well wish as pray.

'My wife, Jerry, now, how do I tell you this,' Bill swallowed. 'Let's begin with the truth of the matter. Me, born loser. Jerry, long-suffering, hopeful. Hoping to get me off the booze. Now I can drink and stop at a glass or two, but earlier in my life I could not. I was, and still am, a rotten example of a man. I can say, hand on heart, that beforehand, I'd not done a good thing just because it was a good thing, you know, no strings
attached. People had dragged me behind them in their kindness or I'd just been buffeted between people acting in their own best interests, thinking that it was me that had a plan. I went from Belfast as a boy, with my widowed mother, to South Africa, and God love her she dragged me behind her all her life.

'She was a smart woman. She finished her education pregnant with me, raised me and taught English at Queen's University, Belfast, supporting the pair of us on a pittance. When my father died—he was much older than she was—she took up an offer to go to the University of Johannesburg to teach and so I grew up in South Africa, from fifteen years old. She was the bright one, I could barely count the fingers on my fat hands although like most teenagers I thought I was hot stuff.

'She taught all day, the white kids, and in the evenings she went to the township, and taught there, the black kids. She was a good woman, God bless her. Her only weakness was nostalgia for the United Kingdom. In her later years she loved to have magazines with pictures of the Royals in. She didn't drink, apart from the occasional glass, she didn't smoke and if she ever took another man, I never knew of it. I can't remember her saying a clever thing, which you'd think she would being a University professor, but I certainly don't recall her saying a stupid one and that's something in a lifetime. Why, me on the other hand, blabbermouth!

'I worked for a small company installing security gating on windows and doors. I had a bit of luck, there was a lot of call for it in the 1970s when I was starting
off, and I copied into a notebook one day the names of the company's suppliers and some of their customers, then, the next year, I started up on my own with money from my mum. Bought a van, had a Nkosa chap help me out for peanuts and went door to door. Tutting and clicking, telling the black maid how those crazy motherfucker Nkosa could get in, if she was Zulu, and if she was Nkosa telling her how the Zulus would kill her in her bed. 'Course she would tell her mistress and give her my card. If they had gating I'd tell them it wasn't enough and if they didn't I'd read them their new religion. Fear was what we were peddling. I had ten or so teams of guys in vans with my name on driving round and round Sandton. It's a suburb of Jo'burg. You don't see one house that isn't a fortress. My work, most of that.

'Now, I was an alcoholic. I went drinking from my teenage years. Dropped Mum home after she'd done her teaching and went out into the sticks drinking with whoever, Boers, English, I didn't care, and then in my twenties I had the money to be the hero in the place, standing round after round at one crummy place or another. I had a drinks cupboard at work and I'd start the day with a good scotch. I used to keep a bottle of the same stuff in the glove compartment of the car. When I got pulled over by the police, I'd be sitting in the driver's seat, helpful as you like with the bottle in my hands. "Oh, Officer, you gave me a terrible shock, so you did, Sir, I just had to have a wee nip of this stuff." That way they couldn't tell how fresh the smell of
booze was. Aye, it worked a few times. Mostly they didn't care.

'I had a love affair with booze. I don't think there is a type of it I haven't tried. Even the stupid shite they make for young women or old girls, chocolate liqueurs and the like. See I tried it all so I could get other people who were harder pressed to love the stuff to find something they did like. I couldn't bear not to have the company. When I got my own house I built a pub bar down one side of the living room. I had the top shelf, the middle shelf too. And mixers on tap. I had a Union Jack over it and pictures of the Queen framed and hanging behind it. Oh, my old mum loved to have a wee sherry sat up at it. And we had parties round it. Expats all of us, former Rhodesians, South African English, all old soaks. We'd get so fucking pissed up, play military marches and pub songs. We'd finish up hanging on to the bar to try to stand for the national anthem, half-saluting, the men, the women crying.

'I met my girl, Jerry, through a friend who brought her along to the bar. Fresh from Rhodesia and a failed marriage. Forty and fine-looking. I was in my late thirties and a fat fuck. Shite-faced most of the time. Still she moved in with me and helped out at the office. Got me straight with a glass of gin in the morning. I'd be a shaking great jelly of a mess before it. Then she started on about me giving it up. You couldn't blame her. I nearly killed her several times in the ten years we were together. A few times we were driving and I passed out. Once we were in the Drakensberg Mountains and I fell
asleep, Jerry grabbed the wheel in time and I woke up and put my foot on the brake, one wheel over the edge of the pass. Jerry wasn't much of a drinker. Thank God one of us wasn't. She used to rant and rage and say I was a godforsaken you name it, she'd go to leave but she'd always come back. Because I needed her, I begged her to come back. She was a wonderful woman but I drove her to distraction. You see she really did want to save me. She shaved all of her lovely long hair off, to make a point like. She took my electric razor and left the hair in a pile on the floor. I went in thinking we was being robbed by a very casual bald-headed fellow, sitting on my sofa looking out to the garden. It was her. I'll never forget that sight. She had streaks of mascara down her face. The maid was sitting in the yard with her broom, not daring to go in there. "Will you stop now," she asked me, "will you stop?" I said to myself, the dear girl's crazy, I shall have to look after her. As is said, I never did a good thing from intention. There was me at the middle of it all. What I needed. Sure I gave her girls some money from time to time, Jerry's daughters that is, but that was to keep her close by. My old mum died and I put a nice grave up for her, showy, like a raised tomb, but that was for me, she'd have hated it.

'I had a heart attack aged forty-six. Struck down still cradling the smooth sides of the love of my life, that bloody bar. You should have seen the state of me. Huge I was, twice the size I am now even, I couldn't fit in a normal car which was fine because I had a luxury one. I couldn't take no more than a few stairs without stopping, wiping the sweat from me and wheezing for breath. She begged me when I came out of the hospital to see it as a warning. She chucked the booze away and converted the pub into a juice bar. God bless her, now will it be a papaya and ginger this morning, my love, says she, or shall we go o.j. and carrot mixed?'

He laughed and laughed and Jan and Laurie started to laugh too. George and Dorothy came back into view; they had been walking in the waves, barefoot, in half-drenched clothes. Dorothy was holding her skirts up and together, evidently cradling a collection of shells. Bill waved at them.

Ah, she was a marvel. She was my life,' he sighed and his chest heaved, 'she gave me everything.' He closed his eyes for a moment. 'I went back to the booze. I'm giving you the short version. It's hard enough to bear to tell it short. I went missing for an afternoon here and there. It was only the fact she didn't want to know that kept her from seeing it for a week or so, then she had to face it and we had a fight. I hit her. And the next day when I came to, she was in the bathroom, lying on the floor. The bathroom cabinet door was open, the pill bottle lids were off and she'd done her best, her very best, to make sure she wasn't coming back.'

Jan looked at Bill and seeing that his face was wet with tears that went unwiped, he looked down at his feet.

'Got her pumped,' said Bill, 'pumped her out, they did, but it was just too late. See I'd slept till eleven or so
and they tell me she took the pills in the early hours. She knew me, knew I would be unlikely to come round before lunchtime and my reliability as a drunk was the death of her.'

Jan started to speak but Bill put a hand on him to stay him.

'I was in the room with her when she passed away and knowing she was going, with the heartbeat weak on the monitor, hearing her fade, I just sat jabbering on about how I was going to miss her, how I couldn't live without her and so on and then it came to me, what about
her
? You big lump of shite, what about her? And remembering how she had a fondness for the beauty of the words in the Bible I said to myself, "Do something for her." And I picked it up, turned to the Psalms and started to read and then I asked God for His help, not for me, but for her because she believed. I didn't know how to pray so I just spoke, out loud, asked Him to love her better than I did. Suddenly the sun came into the room and a shaft of light went across her lower face as though the Lord Himself was bending over her kissing her and the light travelled slowly, caressing her body all the way down and I'm looking about myself and the window's a tiny little box and it's grey as you like outside on account of the height of the hospital buildings around. Like a fool, I'm turning, turning to see where the light's coming from and outside I hear this voice, in the hallway of the hospital, a man is walking up and down saying over and over "Jesus Christ" and you can't tell if he's cursing or praising, but it was a voice filled
with immanence, like he's hanging on to the Lord's coattails. The Lord took her right from me into His arms and she and He made sure I saw it, made sure I knew it.

'It was a miracle,' he said, after a while. 'I was an atheist, and then I was a believer.'

'Ask and you will receive...' said Laurie. 'Yes, I remember.'

S
TEVE
B
URNS WAS FEEDING THE FISH
down at the jetty, waiting for the Americans to come back in. He was also supervising the efforts of his staff to assemble tables for the beach barbecue that evening. The fish were thronging in the water, riding across each other to get at the pieces of white bread, like sardines in a snow-dome.

It was not important that one's ideas were very good or even exceptional, just that one had lots of them and made one or two happen, he thought. He would use this notion at the staff meeting. He turned his back on the fish, letting a hot dog bun fall whole. Take this evening's event, the mere fact that it was taking place was something. The guests seemed to be discontented this week, they couldn't relax. He had to provide entertainment, something that was rarely required. A boy came past him with buckets full of fruit, another followed picking up the pineapples and mangoes that had fallen on to the beach. There was a whole world of difference
between an idea and an event. Think, it could have all fallen apart so easily! They had not been able to find sufficient cable to extend to the turntables, so they would use a ghetto blaster instead and pitch this as a sort of teenage cutoffs-and-bare-feet affair. It would appeal to the nostalgia of his greying clientele. Jiving on the beach, necking in the dunes, waking down by the surf; with your wallet gone and someone's knickers in your pocket ... He grinned, remembering an adolescence he'd never had. His own had been hashed out according to the mood engendered by a bottle of cider in a field and a puff on someone's cigarettes at school or a pint of cocktail and a tab of acid at Poly He couldn't wait to get the fuck away from it all.