ࡱ>    !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~Root EntryZ O2th1@ CONTENTS CompObjVSPELLING  !"#$d a table-mat, using both knife and fork. And stare at a blank wall. My plate in one hand, fork in the other, was causing no end of distress. You ll make a mess on the couch. But it was an old worn-out couch, a hand-me-down your father didn t want. I had to see the news, as there had been a skirmish in the Persian Gulf. However, the Gulf and global politics seemed irrelevant now. We had been in love for a few weeks. We d never kissed - on the lips. But I anticipated those sensual moments of goodbye, the mo      !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~      !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~CHNKWKS FTEXTTEXTFDPPFDPPFDPPFDPPFDPPFDPPFDPPFDPPFDPPFDPPFDPPFDPPFDPPFDPPFDPPFDPPFDPPFDPPFDPP FDPPFDPP FDPPFDPP FDPPFDPP FDPPFDPP FDPPFDPPFDPPFDPPFDPPFDPPFDPPFDPPFDPPant. I had tOBSERVING LOVE I Anything can happen at any time. Yet, life normally hums along slowly, even when love and fortune; and death and disaster are at stake. The moments which we remember afterwards - either the worst pain or purest joy - these are brief instances, interspersed by lengthy pauses of waiting, wanting, hoping, and biding the seconds of our existence. But, each seemingly insignificant instant, and every arbitrary gesture, or tone of voice, should be nourished and noted; for we never truly observe everything in our environment. Every little detail that passes us by, may be a vital clue that could enrich our lives with understanding. But what good is understanding if we cannot act on it? For, if we did act with real intent, with genuine curiosity - if indeed we were not only truly alert to our surroundings, but aware enough to take heed of what the details are telling us, and therefore have the gumption to act with intent, we could avert most of the disaster that plagues our ordinary lives. The key to this process of awareness, begins with careful observation. Yet, careful observation only becomes important to us, when the imperative truth slips beyond our grasp, without us noticing, until its almost too late. Observation and critical detailed truth, is our only shield against the rampant march of those that have no sense of ethics, against those that would use us for what they can, even under the guise of love, then dispose of us, as if we were commodities. II A brown-eyed girl is a delicate thing. Yet this pretty girl, was yelling at me uncontrollably. It was difficult to understand the protest. I had merely wanted to eat my dinner in front of the T.V. Her quivering pierced lip had insisted that supper had to be eaten at a table, with a tray anst delicate lips on my cheek. If I could just be kissed goodbye on the lips for once. But now, this screaming imp in front of me, was giving an altogether different type of goodbye signal. Love? Without a real kiss? Milan Kundera tells us that spending the night sleeping next to a girl is love. Sex is indifferent to this. We had slept together almost every night for many weeks now. So it was love then. And to end like this?  please stop yelling I say in what I hope is a calming tone. Why is it so important to eat at the table? I can remember the same argument in my family when, as a child, television first appeared in our lives during the seventies. My father had won the debate and we were all finally allowed to eat in front of the T.V. The family dinner ritual had finally been abolished, much to my traditional mother s dismay. It had been a hard won battle for liberty over domestic tyranny.  please don t shout , I ask. I look down at her tirade. I briefly consider giving in, and eating at the table, sulkily like a punished child. But freedom is a daily struggle that never rests, and the sooner we give in to tyranny, the harder it is to deal with later. So I take my plate and sit on the old buckled couch, observing the spectacle of the no-fly zone in Iraq. It was an uneasy  ceasefire with only a few missiles being fired, and it had been going on for quite some time. What end could come to this uneasy domination? Surely something had to give: A catalyst to either ignite the conflict further, or bring peace, or both. The Gulf couldn t go on like this forever, especially given the vast power difference between the sides. During the original Iraqi invasion of Kuwait which had sparked the conflict, the Americans had captured half a million Iraqi soldiers in the desert, then sent them home. So now what do you do?  Why are you fighting with me over something as trivial as where I eat my food? I say, trying to negotiate her ever increasing volume, and increasing pitch. But of course such a logical question only incited further ranting about  civilized behavior and amplified the volume even more than before. So eventually I stand up, my dinner cold and spoiled now, and I join in the fracas.  will you please stop screaming at me over & ! I consider just turning and leaving. Her trivial dinner rule was one thing, but the way in which I was being ordered to obey it, was more militant than romantic. I did admire the strength of her personality, but this sudden need to control my eating habits had come from nowhere. It had not been an issue when her house was empty, before the arrival of her Father s hand-me-downs. The fear, the fierce eyes. The sadness. Maybe just the animation of life. Perhaps the intoxication of her smell. Do I care? Do I care enough? Can I just walk away? She had already broken a wooden spoon on me while chasing me around the house and beating me with it repeatedly. I had been singing a song from the Crash Test Dummies, which went  hold me down and spank me, use a wooden spoon, but be next to me. After that she had decided it was better to beat me with the plastic egg-lifter as it was less likely to break on me. She had such anger in her, and the sting of the wooden spoon and now the spatula hardly bothered me much. She got such a thrill out of beating me, that I had laughed it off. But now the attack had taken a nastier, more sinister tone. From her considerable height disadvantage, she stands on her toes, puts her nose, almost touching mine, and shouts:  That wasn t screaming - THIS IS SCREAMING!! with wild bulging angry eyes. I instantly recall a crazed drama student who had screamed at me with a similar look on her face. She had left two long bleeding nail-scrapes down the side of my face, just millimetres from my eye. This is not on. I close my eyes slowly. slap. She is shocked into silence. It seemed as though it was the first time anyone had dared to stop her tirade. Had no-one ever taught her the boundaries of personal physical space? Now I felt like running for the hills as I fumbled with the awkward door handle. I really don t want this. She is sitting on the stairs now, her head in her hands. And the lavish whip of words that stung me with their sadness, crossed the gulf between us, and melted any cracks inside my heart forever as they coiled around my skin. She softly says:  please don t go&  III Old people are the most sacred people of all. They are treasure troves of words and imagery: living time machines to the past. The measure of a society is in its treatment of the elderly, for they preserve our ethic, our values. These values, whatever they may be, serve us in the long term. The elderly very often are our most direct contact with the first-hand experience behind these values. Perhaps Milan Kundera is right about love being about sleeping next to a girl. But I think I fell in love with her, when I saw her affection for her grandparents. Their house had that eternal fifties aura to it. The echoes of the past rang through the hallway like unseen ghosts. She had grown up here as a child. My wife was talking to her grandmother who was bed-ridden, and I was treated to world war two stories from her grandfather, Charles: Hunting Nazi U-boats while negotiating waves as big as mountains in the North Sea. Charles own father was an immigrant from Germany before the war, but would tell me no more about that. There had been  terrible conflict in his family. At that time many families in South Africa had internal conflicts, as the echoes of the Boer War, and The Great World War repeated themselves through the generations. My family had similar issues at that time. Charles had joined up to fight Hitler at age sixteen, two years younger than he should have been. His uncle had signed for him. I was then introduced to her grandmother. Thin and frail, she was only half-coherent. Sometimes clinging and friendly. It seemed sad that she needed daily care from a live-in nurse. She had wild and excited eyes, and at times became very happy, but over-aged and gaunt for someone hardly seventy. She reminded me of my great grandmother who had lived well into her nineties. I had been contemplating starting a masters degree in Psychology, specialising in neuroscience, and I noticed that the old girl did not have the mindset of most old people. Not old and doddering at all. Similar, it seemed, to someone who had taken too many drugs. I wonder what her prescription was? My own late grandmother had suffered terribly as she had been given contra-indicated medicines by various doctors. I pondered to myself the state of neurotransmitters in her brain. Her Dopamine and Serotonin levels must be abnormal. She had wide staring eyes. It was interesting that her particular brand of dementia was more animated and extroverted than any I could recall from life or from text books. Wildly alive, confused, switching between coherent comments that were quite slurred, and incomprehensible sounds. The old man is tired so we don t stay too long.  No matter what happens says Charles to me, as we leave with the most earnest of expressions,  promise me you will do your best to look after my granddaughter. He says this in a calm and protective tone. I had the feeling that I could trust him instantly.  Yes. I will, and you look after the old girl. I say. And immediately I can see the look of helplessness in his eyes. How he had tried everything. How her illness did not seem natural at all. And although I regretted that last remark a bit, as he clearly had looked after her his whole life; when I looked into his eyes, I saw the depth of care and feeling he had for her. And I saw the helpless hurt at observing her degeneration.  Thank-you for visiting them with me - I m sure its boring for you.  I d visit them anytime. They are really friendly people.  Someone is trying to murder them.  What? What makes you say that?  It s the nurse. She has put her photograph where mine was on the bookshelf. IV Its a coincidence that both our families were originally from the Durban area, 1000km or so from where we met and lived in Grahamstown: Xhosa territory, Mandela s country. So it was an odd feeling, returning to the suburb of my Godfather. We had left the Durban area when I was a child. Kwazulu-Natal, the land of Shaka Zulu. We snuck into her Father s house one night in Durban. This ended up with me receiving the most peculiar of dressing downs, in harsh, hushed tones from her. It seemed that no matter how lightly I walked, I was hissed at for stamping loudly. I would wake her father up she said. Her hissing was twice as loud as my walking, that s for sure. I had been warned of her father by her friends, and more than once, I was told  he is the worst person in the world , by all her oldest friends. So he turned out to be a friendly and unusual ally at pizza supper the next night. We had been talking about theft and ethics, and she had maintained that while it was wrong to steal from friends, it was fine to steal from large corporations. She had snapped at me to  stop my bleating when I had pointed out that civilized society was built on the notion of promise-keeping. I had felt quite downtrodden by her comment, her demeanour was cutting and harsh. But I did, in a sense, get rescued, when her father started telling everyone he possibly could to  stop bleating. She had laughed at this and it became the in-joke of the evening. At least she can laugh at her own mean attitude, I thought to myself. Her sniping had been easily countered with jest by her father. He s not such a bad guy. It must have been hard for him to be an only parent. Her mother had apparently walked out on them when she was just two years old, and never returned. Don t ever mention my mother to him.  Just don t bring us any lamb her Father told the waitress,  there s been a lot of bleating going on. The bemused waitress did not understand the jest at all. I thought I understood the joke too, at the time. She just wanted to be teased a little, I shouldn t be so serious all the time. Now that I look back at this conversation, perhaps I should have been a lot more serious. V The first time we met she was a gorgeous raven-haired first year student with cute Bridget Jones puppy fat, sun-tanning unashamedly next to me in her bra and shorts at the house of an old friend, a Palaeontologist. She was upset and felt persecuted by the girls at the residence. She had dreamt the walls were dripping blood, and been ostracized for this. But, then she brightened  All I want to do is go to London. London is the best. At that, I had shrugged my unemployed and disappointed shoulders in defeat, and bumped in to her again in Cape Town, four years later. I had been visiting a girlfriend who I had split up with because she had tried to get me involved in smuggling money out of South Africa into Sweden. This girl had been the common friend that we shared and we had gone out together with some other old Grahamstown friends now living in Cape Town. A random meeting up of old friends, it seemed. She had grown up since London. She now had on boots that raised her some six inches or more off the ground. She used my cell-phone to speak to her mother for the first time in her adult life. We went to visit her mother s house. It had a very pretty garden, and, literally dozens of cats. Three of us came with her as back-up: myself, as well as two girls from her university. It was a relaxed, unremarkable meeting. As she is saying goodbye I notice oriental symbols tattooed on her neck. What do they mean? Come visit me in Grahamstown, and find out. A few months later, I move back to Grahamstown, with an inclination to do a masters degree in criminal investigative psychology. Something I feel is very necessary in post-apartheid South Africa. By now she is a D.J. on campus radio, and I am invited to visit her radio show. She is having her nipple pierced live on air. I do my best to ignore the sight of the needle piercing through her nipple, and the spurt of blood. I can only wonder about this unbelievable spectacle. How can someone so refreshingly confident and mostly fun to be with, be so numb to pain? She looks at me with a massive smile on her face, between grimaces, and the occasional  ow! followed by a big smile. But afterwards I sense through this, such a longing need in her for love. Such a perfect smile. She would later tell me  I would have pierced my clitoris if I had not met you. on many, many occasions. I had arrived just in the nick of time. A girl I went out with some ten years earlier had more scars on her body than I could count. Some of them longer than your own hand. Suicide attempts or self-mutilation, who could be totally sure? Borderline personality disorder is the textbook categorisation. Victim of child abuse at a very young age. She was a sweet and friendly girl, the one with the shaven head and scars. So a live nipple-piercing was somehow refreshingly innocent. It was more of an open and self-aware statement, than a subconscious psychotic desire. As our friendship evolved, we circumnavigated the country several times over a few months, and covered over 40 000 km in the first year, visiting every member of her family on the continent; and after witnessing the lows of live nipple-piercing, and sharing a tent where she threatened to hit me on the head with a condensed milk can, if I so much as touched her, we eventually bumped our lips against each other. The first bump may have been an accident but the second and third ones were less so. No one ever did claim first move. It was ironic that she had been walking around provocatively in front of me without clothes, at almost every opportunity for months, and yet finally, just the possibility of a real tender kiss had made her as shy as a virgin. A year or so after those first kisses, with my name in her hand, and her father s permission in mine, we found a castle and a beach and a priest, and we were wed. Her grandparents were too old to come to the wedding, but my 90 year old gramps made it, already in middle-age when the war broke out. He was captured by the Germans in North Africa in a rear-guard action, covering the retreat of essential British and American forces, and for most of the war he toured Europe courtesy of German and Italian tour-guides with automatic machine guns, barbed wire fences, and no sense of hospitality at all. But we visited her grandfather, Charles, after the wedding and gave them some wedding photos..  Fit old bugger he said when he saw the photo of my grandfather. It was a poignant moment, as we sat together and looked at the photo-album. Auntie Anne was there on that day. Her sister had died recently, and her whole body was  far too stiff . She had enjoyed the photo-album. Charles told me a story then. He used to be a boxer. One day a domestic worker got in a terrible fight with her husband. The husband had demanded that she go back to the Transkei with him and she had refused, and now he was forcing and beating her. Charles had decided to intervene and the result was, that after slugging it out with this guy all night, Charles had ended up knocking his teeth out on the garden tap. She finally did go back with her husband to the Transkei, however she did so without coercion, and her husband eventually got trained in boxing by Charles and they went on to be good friends. Out of breath now, and quite overweight, he gave us some cash as a wedding present. I bought a cricket bat with my bit. My wife kept imploring him to see another doctor, but he had seen  enough doctors. We returned to her father s house, and I am prompted to ask her father about her grandparents, as he had not even visited them for over a year. Why? Because, he was in business with two of his brothers, and the youngest one got fired for shirking. So in response, the youngest brother, Reigh, turns her father in for tax evasion, and moves in with the grandparents, who take his side in the ensuing disagreement. Charles had told me his reasoning. Firstly my wife s father should not have fired his own little brother, second he should have paid his taxes. And so Charles said he was not going to make a third mistake by agreeing with him. He had after all brought the whole thing on himself. If he was going to cheat, and skip taxes, how can he go and accuse his brother of shirking? My wife and her father s girlfriend prompt me to speak to him. They re old and he may never get a chance to see his own parents again. Don t you think its wrong that he won t talk to them? It takes some prompting, as I feel a bit shy and uncertain what to actually say. I venture to him:  um& your mother seems OK half the time - a bit like a bad TV reception - its like sometimes she makes sense, and sometimes not. He smiles slightly. I assume he is sensing that I ve been put up to this comment. He sits momentarily, with a distant look on his face. Then slowly says:  Do me a favour. If I ever get like any of those two, put me out of my misery. After that, I don t dare push it further. My question about her grandfather, unsaid on my lips. Shot down without even being heard. My wife asks him why he has not visited them for a year. He says he has. He looks at me sheepishly. Gives a nervous half-smile.  When? She asks. A while back.  You told me you hadn t visited them. They even said you had not been to visit them either. The nurse also said you had not. Why did you not tell me that you visited them? She looks at him with nervous eyes, and clenched teeth. He shakes his head, looks away, speaks no more on it, and heads upstairs making an arbitrary excuse. VI We return to Grahamstown, and she says she wants to move closer to Durban. We both like Port St Johns, and its position is perfect. Port St Johns is our next place of residence it seems. Its ideal as it s a good half-way point between Durban and Grahamstown. But those plans never bare fruit as in quick succession, both grandparents are dead.  Someone has murdered them. she is adamant. Eyes wide. Who could possibly want to murder such decent and friendly old people? The youngest uncle and the nurse are her suspects. He s the one that turned her Father in to the tax-man just for the profit because he was too lazy to work. The entire family inheritance has gone missing.  Its him and his wife. They were leaching off them the whole time. Can you imagine living with your parents at that age? But its his wife that made him do it. She is the tax-collector. They re all fat and greedy she tells me:  parasites. I remember back to when the grandparents were alive. She had been certain they were being murdered somehow, and not long after, they were both dead. Could they really have done that? How? Surely someone would notice something like that if it was true? We visit the youngest uncle and his wife and son. Her father however insists we have no reason to visit them. We visit anyway, she says she just wants to see her cousin, their young child. He is innocent after all, and has hurt no-one. She has to defend this point of view on numerous occasions, even getting angry with her father to make him back off. When I looked at them, the three of them together, they seemed incapable of such a heinous thing. The cousin seemed a sweet, sensitive and caring little boy. No evidence of abuse on him at all. I had looked for this earlier, because my wife had said that someone, who had whistled all the time, had abused her very badly as a small child. I was never allowed to whistle in case my head got bitten off by her. That had squashed our plans to be a rock 'n roll band. She never would tell me who abused her, though it was clearly someone in or near the family. It seemed unlikely that it could have been the youngest uncle, he was her favourite uncle when growing up. But she had also contradicted this by saying the youngest uncle had  bullied her when he came back from the army, after someone had held a hot clothes-iron to his head. The apartheid South African Defence Force, was notorious for such hostile acts between troops. I had hardly heard of anyone who experienced any aspect of it that did not have some horror story to tell. Yet it seems the word  bully is often used as a way of glossing over what is genuine life-damaging abuse. I had heard professional psychologists use this term to lighten the load on the shoulders of the abuser. This white-washing, however honestly motivated, makes it harder for the abused to feel justified in their outrage. It makes them feel like more of a victim, as the abuse is just dismissed as mere  bullying . The scars are on my wife though, were self-inflicted. The psychological result of genuine abuse. Not mere bullying. She had more piercings than could easily be counted. Tattoos and scarification. A pattern of the sun had been cut into her back by a knife, which had left a decorative scar. The typical white scar lines on the fore-arm were also easily visible. Yet, these three we had visited had nothing remotely like that on them, and nobody avoided each other, or flinched or seemed scared. Impossible, I thought to myself, they could never do such a thing. The coroner said that her grandfather s heart was twice as big as normal, and he had died of a heart attack. The poetic nature of the man with the big heart distracted me. I try console her,  you re in trauma I say.  Both of them dying together must be terrible for you. But them being together their whole lives and dying so close to one another, is a beautiful thing. A perfect unity. Its what you and I speak about all the time. On many occasions, she had told me with sad eyes, how much she loved me, and that she wanted the two of us to die together one day. She feared losing me to death, more than to a conventional break-up.  I never had a mother she cries.  I threw a vase at the T.V. when I was a child. It s the only memory she has of being, Father, Mother, and daughter. The grandparents perfect family unity had not passed to her parents generation.  No one knew of my existence until the age of five. My father kept me secret from his own family. Eventually the army contacted them and they demanded to see me. After that, I lived with my grandparents. They were my real parents. And they have been murdered. It was the nurse, she had her picture in my place in the lounge. She s just a nurse. Why is her photo on the bookshelf if she s just a nurse? Her eyes are pain. I try hug her, and say  people die. People just get old and die. Its natural that people just die. She pushes me away, stares lividly at me, talking between clenched teeth.  Why won t anyone believe me? We were in the process of buying a new car from my brother, when news of the death of the grandfather arrived. I bought a laptop with the cash from the old car for our business. In retrospect, it was at this point, that she lost respect for me. She still loved me, it seemed, but nothing I did was good enough after this. Even though we had new stuff, which normally seemed to make her happy. She hardly ever cooked again, and was suddenly unenthusiastic about Port St John s or even moving to Durban. The sparkle had just gone. If ever there was a time in our marriage where it seemed perfect, it was those moments dreaming of Port St Johns, before the grim reaper took his toll, some three years after those first three kisses that neither of us initiated. VII Before that time, her father had visited us. His legal situation was terrible, none of his accounts and taxes add up. He buys dinner for all her friends anyway. A full round of at least a dozen people. She asks him if he is sure about this expense when his situation is so dire.  This he gestures at the dinner table  is nothing compared to my problems. He remains remarkably calm throughout dinner for someone facing bankruptcy or worse. Afterwards, she tells me that he owes millions to the government for tax evasion. He tells me:  Can you believe those bladdy kaffirs have got some clever Indian and his computer to find out that I own a whole lot of companies? I remember back to when I first met him. He had said to me:  Do you want to be the manager of a company? I was taken aback at that point, and answered  what s the catch? Luckily he had not taken it further. Here was plainly the catch I had nearly stumbled into. He had been shuffling money between companies in order to avoid tax, or some such scam. One day she becomes frantic. Her father and his girlfriend are going to live in New Zealand. But he is not allowed to leave the country, so they have to travel separately. Finally he manages to get out by travelling through Swaziland. Some time after that we are invited to visit New Zealand for three months  just to see if we like it. Her father is going to give her fifty grand because she lost out when the family inheritance was stolen. She is unsure about where he is getting the money to give her. She is vague,  something about a family trust. I say:  Well why don t you go on a holiday. I can t afford to travel to New Zealand.  No we both must go. The invitation is to both of us. They even said they will pay half our air tickets. That means your half, I must pay for myself, as you don t have a full-time job.  But you once said  Never let me go to New Zealand, all the people I have met form there are miserable drips. Remember? They just miss you. Go and visit them for a few weeks.  You don t really love me. She is always so sadly beautiful the way she says that. Its her favourite line. She sticks out her bottom lip, pierced in a perpetual pout, and I d have to kiss her mock-sadness away. She often stubbornly pouts and blinks like a toy doll when she does not get her way. Hypnotic cuteness. Betty Boop. But I had been struggling financially, I never seemed to come out with a hundred bucks at the end of the month. Since September 11, 2001, business had dropped off considerably, no-one had money to spend. Turnover had dropped to one third of the previous years. Things really take a turn for the worse, and she picks any little thing to fight over. She is irritable and complains that my job is not good enough. I m distraught as I m paying quite a bit for the new car despite the loss in income, and all she can do is complain that things are not good enough. She will say almost anything to provoke me at times.  Are you going to be a municipal worker all your life? You just treat me like your property. I m just your dogs-body. Why don t you just hit me like all men hit all woman. You already hit me before.  Don t be ridiculous, I bitch-slapped you once, gently, because you were screaming like a lunatic. And that was years ago, before we had even kissed. And I was the one about to leave. You know you were in the wrong. She brings it up time and time again. After her harping on it for a number of times, I say  And I would do it again if you screamed at me like that again. And I would expect anyone to slap me too if I acted like that. We smack each other for the cheek of it all the time on the backside a hundred times harder than that, and a dozen times each day. You had already broken a wooden spoon on me for goodness sake? Why bring that up now? Why are you being so ridiculous? Why are you trying to get at me? She clenches her teeth, and looks at me accusingly.  Because people just die. I feel vexed. Whatever I do, if I wash the dishes, she complains they are not washed properly. I get the domestic worker to come twice a week. Still she complains. I suggest we get her three times a week. She just looks at me, coldly thwarted, ignores the offer. But the arguments continue. Our friendships to other people and business connections start unravelling fast. A good friend s wife accuses her of trying to sleep with her husband. They refuse to allow us to visit again. I ask her,  What s all that about?  I would never sleep with him, he has a big head and skinny legs. The accusations from the friend and his wife continue, so I ask her again,  what happened, some misunderstanding? Did you just try hug him or something? But the answer is the same each time I ask:  I would never sleep with him, he has a big head and skinny legs. She tells me of another friend, the Palaeontologist who introduced us:  He did everything possible to prevent us getting together. She reminds me of this a number of times. Both these two friends I had known for all of fifteen years. They had both been there when we were introduced originally, as I write this, all of ten years ago. She overcharges a new website client of ours by three times what she should have. He never speaks to us again, and we never see the money we are owed, and lose the website contract. It was our local mainstay. Our local business reputation goes with it. The photography shop where she works, suddenly also no longer wants our internet advertising. They give no reason, they re using someone else now. Eventually we have no-one left to visit, and her temper tantrums worsen. Especially after she gets lengthy telephone conversations from her father. These go on for as much as two hours. Though often, I enter the room thinking that the conversation is over, only to find her hunched over the phone, unmoving, silently listening. I cannot hear exactly what he drones at her, but obviously she is not allowed to speak until she is told she can, because she would often not say a word for the whole two hours. After these phone-calls from the other side of the world, her mood is worse than ever, accusing me of being a chauvinist for not wanting to visit her parents.  Why don t you just hit me again. Like all men hit all women. She is shouting now. I cannot bare it anymore.  If you don t stop yelling at me, I will phone my parents and ask them to take me away. But this just makes her yell at me more! I warn her several more times but she does not stop her tirade about absolutely anything she can. I am beside myself. I threaten to phone my parents at least a dozen times, she does not stop. Eventually I phone my parents to ask them to come and get me. The reality sinks in, and this finally calms her down.  Why are you behaving like this? I venture in a soft voice. She stiffens, clenches her teeth, and looks at me  because people just die. She has no-one left from her family. Father, Grandfather and Grandmother, all gone. Only the mother that never visited her as a child.  She never visited me ever. It s the saddest thing I have ever heard. And I hear it often. VIII Physical illness and a soaring temperature attack her every second week. After a few days of perpetual vomiting, and some herbal remedy prepared by one of the last people sympathetic to us, the fever eases, and eventually passes. But after a while the hostility becomes even worse and more cutting than before. She derides everything and everyone, and implores me to  beat her again, like all men beat all woman. After a particularly bad screaming session, in a state nearing emotional breakdown, she tells me one too many times  Why don t you just beat me into submission? You always said if I yelled at you again like this you would hit me again. With my eyes closed again, and a prayer on my lips, I give her the gentle slap she asks for. I am desperate, we will never move beyond this argument unless it happens this way. It has the opposite effect to last time. Her mood sours further than ever before. She walks with hunched shoulders and takes on the air of someone who is taking a real physical beating on a daily basis. I watch her from a distance at the supermarket, and am shocked at her dowdiness, and slouched gait. I have to try something. My cathartic gentle slap has backfired this time. I ve made it all worse. Last time it seemed to give her cause to examine her own invasion of my space. Now she looks terrible. Her pierced belly button, and countless other piercings, scarification, and tattoos, are an awful combination of wound and trauma. We return home in silence.  Hit me I say.  As much as you want, I won t touch you back. She is uncertain at first, but when I say  I know you really want to, she climbs into me and eventually starts complaining that her hand is hurting. My punishment carried on for some time. I look at the red welts on my backside, and think. Was it her grandparents that did this to her? She walloped me for nearly half an hour. It was a really obscure experience. But, it is not working out as well as I had thought, as I am not really feeling it, and she is therefore not really satisfied. So she takes to me with a shoe, and I yelp and cry, and she laughs through her tears for the first time in ages. It did not hurt me. I pretended to yelp. But the tears on her face, that my cries brought, finally allow some emotion other than anger to surface. Her tears are real. It has worked! I am astounded at the change in her. She is happy and sparkles again, more than ever before. The shroud is gone.  Please can we go to New Zealand she says with shining loving eyes,  both of us. If we don t like it then we can come back. The visa is only three months. And I haven t been overseas for nearly two years. My father is not coping very well. He needs me. We can make money on websites. He is demanding that we go visit, and I won t leave without you. The work permits are arranged already, and her father s new wife will get web-site contracts for us with her connections. I am broken.  ok. She sparkles.  But we are going to have to save up for six months first. This going to be expensive. And if it doesn t work out after three months, then we come back. I can t afford more than that. She sparkles.  If you don t like it we can come back and do an English second language teaching course together, and go to Taiwan, where my friend Annie lives. IX We are alive again. We start writing adventure stories together about islands and volcanoes. It will be interesting to live abroad for a while. What have we got to lose? Its only three months after all. If we can t get decent work, then we can come back and do a quick English teaching course, and travel and teach in Taiwan. Or magical China. She looks at me with china-doll eyes. Her lip has lost its piercing now, and her nipple is long-healed. But the hole where the piercing was in her lip has left a dimple. And the prettiest pout ever says  I love you in a sing-song symphony that echoes still. Her lips turn to water as she quenches my mouth. Giving me her everything, giving her love, her pain, her salt. Holding on tightly. Like a limpet. A big picture is always made up of many small pieces of detail. Each is meaningless and insignificant if looked at on its own. And yet, we can guess the picture easily, even if half the detail is missing. This is how we solve jigsaw puzzles and cross-word puzzles. If we look at all the pieces, one at a time in turn, we will still not see the picture. We must have all the pieces together at once. Otherwise all we have is just a long list of meaningless unconnected detail. We only see how the small scenes, and seemingly meaningless drama of everyday life, make up a meaningful understanding of our relationships, when we look back in retrospect. After the fact. However, the cold facts and unpleasant arguments, we tend to push aside and out of our awareness. We want to think positive, and focus on the fun in life. Like the joy of travelling to an unknown country. Just forget about the arguments. Lets just not fight. But we hardly disagree now that I have relented to this single demand. It may appear, as I write, that she is domineering. But that seemed a small facet of her. For the most of the time, she had been caring, loving, and I felt warm and more alive than ever while with her. It was only occasionally, that she would steamroller me like this. So seldom in fact, that I hardly noticed the patterns her domineering side took at the time. These patterns should be obvious to the reader, as I have focussed on the detail that makes those patterns relevant, and I have for the most part skipped out the warm days playing with kittens in the sunshine, and the times we spent singing songs by Sublime and Rodriguez over and over together. For half the year we prepare and save cash, but as the time for departure arrives, she delays the date of leaving, week after month. Will not say why, or when we can leave. We ended up staying with my brother for three months of delays, before we finally jetted off together. We left most of our stuff with my brother, before being flung into orbit and ending up half-way around the world in New Zealand. Bush and his posse started flinging missiles into Baghdad, killing thousands, as we had butternut soup at a French restaurant on Auckland s North shore for the first time. X No work permits. But I can work illegally on her Father s construction site at minimum wage plus $2. I remember back to before we were married, and how badly and infrequently she was being supported by him while studying. I always had to help her out, with rent and groceries. Since our marriage he had offered nothing to help us, other than the comment:  You re on your own now, before withdrawing all his support. I wish he had left us alone. Luckily I manage to maintain programming software in South Africa via the modern marvel of tele-commuting. But the massive chunk that the money-changers take, drowned any sense of having money to spend on anything but the very basics. Some items, like medical or dental costs could inflate ten or even thirty times. To rent one bedroom was more than the cost of renting the five bed-roomed settler house we had once stayed in. Fortunately my wife has a miraculous tooth remedy that even fends off root canal treatment, so I avoided having to pay a South African dentist seven and a half grand for what would cost a couple of hundred bucks back home. The first morning I stumble into the kitchen suffering badly with jet lag and make a bowl of cereal, rinse the bowl and put it above the dishwasher, on the dish rack, as the washer is full of last nights clean dishes. Her father tells me later that the bowl I cleaned is a  half-job . Then suddenly realises that there is a dishwasher, and mutters that it doesn t work properly, so I should clean the bowl completely before putting it in the dishwasher. The second morning we are in New Zealand, we are awoken by a knock on the door and her father bursts into the room without waiting for an answer. He seemed disappointed not to catch us in bed together. I had put the spare mattress on the floor instead, as the bed he supplied had felt uneven. Both him and my wife kept insisting that the bed was fine, that I should sleep on it. But it hurt my back after ten minutes.  He sleeps on the floor just like a kaffir he mutters. The next day my morning greeting was:  Did you get up early today because you pissed in your bed? He had made the same remark, I remembered, when we had stayed over in Durban, a few years back. The dog kept pissing on the garage floor, despite being told at least a hundred times a day that he s  daddy s little boy in the strangest Mickey Mouse voice. Then being walloped lovingly for performing the daily urinary ritual. The poor flinching Sharp had been in quarantine for six months. Forty grand for pet transfer around the world. Four times the price of a human air ticket. I had pointed out to my wife how it was not quite the done thing to wake someone for ritual breakfast meals when they do not ask for it, especially as I mostly work at nights, being a computer programmer and author, and find such times quieter, and easier for intense concentration. Thus I sleep in the morning. And its astonishingly rude to open the door without being told you can, especially first thing in the morning. Even children understand that. Maybe its just part of the generation gap. But time for me is flexible. I prefer to sleep in the morning, and work at night. So he resorted to singing outside our door every morning in an off-key tone, the same two words over and over again.  Three Degrees, Three Degrees, Three Degrees. Between the fourth tenor and his three degrees and  daddy s boy we were awoken on alternative mornings at the crack of dawn with his constant bleeping car-alarm, which had to be turned on and off at least twenty times each morning. No exaggeration! It was broken, he said. Weak smile. Funny how it was only broken in the morning. Why  three degrees I ask her? He just laughs, and says it again. She walks away without answering. She looks distraught, is crying. I don t get it. She locks herself in the bathroom for ages. The electric garage door opened and closed at the slightest opportunity. The noisy grinding electric motor, just a few feet from my bed. At least five or six times each morning without fail.  Three Degrees. Three Degrees. Three Degrees. Thank goodness he didn t attempt whistling. I was sneered at because I did not keep the hours of  normal people. When I got asked by him if I walk barefoot because I am a kaffir, it came to a crunch. The two of us had been on an evening stroll, and we had sat looking at the stars, sitting together in a vacant construction site. I say:  We can t stay any more. Its been nearly three months, no work permit and, endless contradictory stories from the New Zealand immigration department. We had queued all day to have the door closed in our face, and suffered endless processing with no permit in sight. Her father will spend thirty-five grand for an English teaching course that costs two grand back home. He will do this even if she drops out of the course and does not finish it, just so that she can extend the visa for another six months. But I must use my inheritance to send for our stuff in the mean time.  For the hundredth time, I can t afford to spend my inheritance on getting your furniture sent around the world. That is money for owning a house. What about using your share of your inheritance that you were promised?  What inheritance? she looks at the ground.  The story about the family trust or something. Part of the reason we came? He said he was going to give you your share as it had been stolen. Remember? Nothing. I inquire with great concern.  Remember??  I don t know what you are talking about. If you go back, then you go without me, I can t leave now.  But you said three months.  Things have changed. SNAP. cut. Whatever& Lets just jump ahead after a nasty row. Half an hour of mutual frustration, not worth repeating in detail. I walk away. She is alone in the dark, so I hide behind a tree. After a few minutes, she walks past. I follow at a distance, make sure she gets home safe; but I can t return, I carry on walking into the night. Walking will do me good, I m starting to carry a bit of weight. Her father had remarked how I had resembled Reigh, the youngest uncle, who had a serious weight problem. There was something untoward about the way he said it.  Just Like Reigh&  , in three sing-song tones, softly to himself. I pointed this out to my wife as evidence that he was trying to get at me. Despite him obviously saying it, she refused to acknowledge he had. I know I have good hearing, but had he said it too softly to be heard, or was she just refusing to acknowledge his snide remark? She had been standing beside me, she must have heard him. XI But now I am alone. On the wrong side of the world. I picture a globe in my mind, with New Zealand stuck between the south pole and the vast Pacific ocean. Not only nowhere, but nowhere near anywhere either. It felt like I had almost slipped off the edge of the world. The last place to be inhabited by people. Well that s a local legend, if its not true. Who can say for sure? It certainly felt like it that night. For at least a week we argue. How am I going to survive? My computer programming contract cannot last forever, especially as I am on the other side of the world. We are both in agreement about one thing. We cannot live with her father. However, beyond that, we argued in the valleys and the fields, and we argued on the landing grounds, and on the beaches, and at the sea. She never did surrender. She will say anything to make me stay too. She does not want me to leave. And she sounds sincere, but then her arguments take a sinister racist tone for the first time since I have known her, lets call it afro-pessimism, and reserve racism as a specially privileged term for use on people more like her father. It makes no sense either way. She had many black friends in Africa, how come this sudden change? I am shocked. This is not her? This is not the most sensitive girl in the world, who loves and cares for every little mouse her cat killed. We had at least a dozen mouse funerals, with tears and everything. Tirade. Say anything, until he gets tired of your meaningless arguments that have no cohesion. Say anything. He ll eventually tire. That s what it feels like she is thinking to herself. I ll have to stay. The visas can be extended for another six months via some consultant who is an ex-immigration official. That should be more than enough time to get whatever work is available and its corresponding work-permit. To get a job offer, everyone tells you to get a work permit. To get a work-permit you must get a job offer. That s called a catch-22. Ask Joseph Heller. It seems that full immigration is the best way to secure such documentation. Anyway, we rent our own place. She insists on staying in the North Shore, even though it s the most expensive, and she had initially said we could live in the country-side when trying to get me to agree to stay on. We ll make more money here. But it costs more, and my money will not go as far here& By this stage I cannot risk more confrontation. My savings start to vanish very quickly. At least we won t be ordered to put the furniture back in its exact place, if we bump it out of place by an inch or two. So life might improve. I add up the jobs I have applied for unsuccessfully in the last few months: 98. We ll have to live worse than students on what I make after it gets chopped into less than half by the exchange rate, and rent is so expensive its just a joke. Sweetest kisses. Turkish delight lips. We ll have it sorted out by November, six months is plenty of time. She gets a job as a waitress in a coffee shop. Her new step-sister has a work permit, so no-one questions her at first. We live without furniture in a house with cream carpets and coffee-shit-piss stains all over. It has glittered ceilings. An oriental woman moves out of the house. The landlady is called Angela, she struggles to get the oriental woman to leave. The oriental woman uses an English name: Angela as well. She tried to get residency unsuccessfully, then lost the last of her money, some twenty grand, paying a consultant to get her a residency permit for Australia. He had not phoned for months. Now she had lost it all, and had nowhere to go. Back to Singapore? That idea gave her a worried look. Once she had gone, all that remained of her, were a pile of planks of wood in the garage and some half-built unrecognisable furniture. There was a telephone extension in the garage, so that she could build her furniture while waiting for that all important phone call. My ability to maintain a nocturnal lifestyle did not improve much. We were woken up at 8am sharp with the sound of wizzzz-rooooowwwwwrrr - from the oriental neighbours next door. More wood-working orientals! This one began his morning vigorously - wizzzz-rooooowwwwwrrr wizzzz-rooooowwwwwrrr - But after an hour or two, the frequency of wizzzz-rooooowwwwwrrr - diminished and by mid morning I could manage to go back to sleep until my  normal waking time. The humidity was too high during the day for work anyway, and the house on the other side, had nervous looking white South Africans, or Zimbabweans, who pretended not to notice anyone. The blaring grind of angle-grinder from that other  white African house on the block, stopped and started for about half an hour each day, and was so loud, and unpredictable, that concentrating on hacking computer code, was like trying to stack cards next to a gusty window. Luckily there was always the beach during the day, and the calm cool nights to concentrate enough for programming. The Orientals in the wood-sawing house moved out and more Orientals moved in. These ones hammered for an hour or two each day. They only lasted a few weeks before being replaced by some more Orientals who luckily had a quiet life or livelihood. I think it was about that time that the Eastern Europeans moved in up the road. As a family they landscaped and argued loudly until the garden took shape a couple of months later. Meanwhile my wife had been found out as having no work permit by her boss. She did not lose her job, but now instead of being a waitress, she seemed to spend more time on cleaning duty. I hoped that was the worst of it all. He was a creepy looking English guy, who could never seem to get past a quick nervous  hello before avoiding eye contact, and scuttling away. We celebrate her Master s Degree Distinction in Anthropology at an Indian restaurant. Each individual meal costs a week of groceries in South Africa. But it is nice. Makes her happy. I can afford to get her started on her Anthropology Doctorate in South Africa, but instead she prefers illegal cleaning duty in a coffee shop. I just don t understand it. She runs up to me eagerly, and hugs and kisses me when I visit at the coffee shop. With perfect zest and enthusiasm, and the softest yielding lips. I casually mention to her one day&  I met a guy today, he was selling strawberries, and I &   WHAT DID YOU TELL HIM? Don t tell anyone anything about us - just say we have been abroad for a while.  Even the landlady? I puzzle at her?  YES! , her eyes are furious cold.  Don t mention Africa at all, pretend we are locals, and the only way to get a job here is to buy one, so start making friends with people. I muse at the complete logical impossibility of befriending people without saying where you are from? Am I supposed to invent a new persona now? She counters this by telling me that its kind of a local tradition to buy a job and to get the work permit that way.  And I suppose that they give you a receipt for buying a job? As a guarantee? I cannot help the sarcasm. I look at her. She glares at me. I don t understand the urgency. Why couldn t we have gone to China and come back when the immigration has been sorted out? We can still go and make money, instead of this buying jobs to get a work permit nonsense. What kind of a life is that? Pretending to work at something that is meaningless just for a piece of paper? And for years on end? She tells me its getting harder to get into First world countries. I say  If you go back and get a Doctorate, and me a Masters Degree, how can you think its going to be harder for you to get in? With a PhD it will be a hundred times easier? She makes no sense. And I make no cents. I met one guy who hated Orientals almost as much as my wife s father-in-law hated Africans. He would get drunk and slap them for fun. As most of them were illegal foreigners, they had no rights to self-defence. One of the nicer New Zealanders, that guy. Seriously. But he was still no match for her father the ber-racist. Even though he could hardly get further from Africa if he tried, he was constantly making racist curses at every opportunity. Visiting for family dinner, became a test of jovial restraint. Luckily his favourite crime program interrupted the dinner ritual often enough. I remembered back to those first few months where as a guest I had been informed that as he pays the rent, he makes the rules, and that s why we have to listen to him and go to the immigration office when we says so, and have meals when he says so. We were only allowed one shower a day, because of the power shortage. Had he ever heard of the terms  Guest and  Hospitality ? I don t even bother to ask. November. Visas expire. She has to spend Christmas with her family as we did last Christmas with my family. Please excuse my sense of economy as I edit out the ensuing debate. How can I refuse her Christmas? Well, I say. January is the last, I just won t spend anything on Christmas presents for anyone. But come January I have no more money. My work is so thin now, my savings zero. We are surviving on fish fingers and frozen chips, and renting over-priced glittery ceilings with stained-cream carpets for the cost of buying two houses at home. Coffee-shop cleaning girl, and overweight computer hack. Sweet love. January. New Zealand immigration laws are being changed again. Her father will pay the  consultant , I am assured that I will not have to pay for any such consultancy. Her father will pay for everything. It s the same ex-immigration official who has thus far arranged our year-long  tourist visas to be extended beyond the normal three months. I remember the hollow wisdom of my words.  Lets teach English for six months or a year and come back next year with some cash instead of going broke. Well its next year and now we are broke. Just wait for February. I look down at my shorts. I am now truly fat! I have not had new clothes since arriving. The exchange rate makes it ten times the price, and for crap quality. I stitch my shorts together, and walk more and more each day, and just get fatter. Its absurd. Probably the rubbish food I think. The bread here stinks. I have to hold my nose walking through the bread section of the supermarket. The immigration rules have been changed again and we must wait until March. She tells me that I must spend my inheritance to move our stuff to New Zealand, and that  everyone in her family says I should now pay her student loan. Absurd becomes ridiculous. I had initially suggested working instead of taking the loan. Her father agreed to furthering the loan and undersigned it. And now, after everything, after I say I have no money left come January, now they expect me to pay it? I ll pay for the Doctorate then you don t have to pay back the loan until that s over. Then you can earn the money to pay it back yourself easily. We can do that when we have to go back to Africa in March. When our airplane tickets expire. O.K. She agrees, we ll have to do that as she is tired of the whole mess as well. Finally some sense from her. I suppose its been nearly a year. She has tried hard. I respect her tenacity. She is such a little fighter. Just never gives up. As much as it has hurt me, I admire her never-say-die spirit. She loves me. She just needed to spend some time with her folks. She fights with them often enough now, for the novelty to have worn off. I visit her at the coffee shop. She runs up to me and hugs and kisses me with her usual bouncy enthusiasm. She kisses and kisses me again and again. Despite all the rubbish, the love feels so true, so unhindered, that its easy to forget that we have had no viable future for a year. At family dinner, he sits directly opposite me. As I arrive he is glaring at me horribly. If ever someone gave me the death stare, that was it. Just because I believe a PhD is a better angle than paying back a loan? No-one has ever looked at me quite as menacing as that before. I can hardly eat. The student loan people are harassing her, and her father cannot pay the money from his account because of his tax issues in South Africa. He ll pay me back, once I use my money from my account. However, once I lend him the money to pay the loan, he quite simply refuses to pay me back. Its my duty to pay it, is his response. Her whole family says so. Is that theft or fraud, I wonder? She is in a bind. She pays me back in two dollar coins and five dollar notes. Tips and illegal minimum wages. She pays back about half of it eventually, but then we need to pay rent. I cannot ask for more from her the next month, she has less than I. Meantime the family go on skiing trips  that cost thousands . I am made to feel like I have grossly insulted everyone because I won t ski as I am having great trouble breathing the high altitude. He is such an asshole. Why do you listen to him? He just wants me out the way to make it easier for you to immigrate. He is trying to make us fight. That is why he stole that money from me to pay your loan. Do I have to destroy him? Is that the only way we can be free from him? She looks at me silently. Unmoving. Blinks. Blinks again. Is she saying yes? I repeat myself.  Do I have to destroy him? She says, in a sing-song voice  you don t know who you re dealing with. And casts her eyes around, almost as if he is listening.  He found out everything about you before we married. He wants me to sign a legal document to say I ve never met my mother. She looks away. I say to her:  That would only be of value if I am out the picture. If you divorce me. Then you get automatic residency in New Zealand as you have no contact to South Africa. Can t you see what he is doing? Why do you let it happen? No anwer, but shortly after that, I am hit with his next salvo. The  consultant wants more money. I must pay him this time. I am astounded that she can say this. Her father can pay, she says, but he wants me to,  just to see how serious I am. The only thing I am serious, is seriously broke. I refuse to go to the meeting with the consultant. She goes alone. Comes back in tears. Says: If I pay the consultant, she definitely will come back with me in March before the airplane tickets expire, to visit South Africa. Even if the immigration goes ahead. That comment felt strange. That was never in doubt. But I relinquish on it. I just can t take more arguing. I say, that I will loan her the money, but that she has to pay it back to me, as I refuse to put my own money in the hands of a corrupt ex-immigration official. At least my honour remains partly intact. Meanwhile she has worked her way up from cleaner, and the coffee shop makes her a legitimate job offer. Then they retract it. Rumour at immigration is that the coffee shop is paying people under the table. At about my 230th job application I get two real interviews for real programming jobs. Yet neither of those that interview me knows anything about computers, never mind software, or programming for that matter. The first interview is with an ex-policewoman from Zimbabwe, She reminds me of this curious fact at least three times in the hour and a half interview, an interview that does not involve any computer questions at all. She asks how long have I been looking for a job in new Zealand? Since the beginning of the year, I say. (I had stopped looking over the holidays, and did not want to seem desperate.) She tells me that once a C.V. has been around for a while, then if you have not been hired, its unlikely anyone will do so, as people recognise you, and avoid you. New Zealand is a small country. That s nice to know, I say.  What is my wife doing? she asks.  She has a job offer at a coffee shop is my answer. She does a psychometric test on me and determines that I am not suited to programming computers. I find it odd that I have been entrusted to write financial software that channels millions per year, but I am told by someone without any computer experience, that I will not fit in to the New Zealand computer clique.  You say your wife is working at a coffee shop.  No, I said my wife had a job offer at a coffee shop. What is this? Some kind of B-grade TV-Police interrogation? She has seen through me twice now. Both times she may have had that information already. She is new on the job, I remember her saying. The recruitment agency that set up this interview sounded like a place for young people, not a place where I would expect to find a middle-aged ex-Rhodesian Police-woman. I must call her every week, she tells me. Yeah, Right. My anxious wife awaits. She was so keen, she wanted to sit in on the interview. Can you i