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 Sharpé 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 über-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 230^th 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 your 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 imagine going to a job interview with your wife as your chaperone? The next interview is worse. There is a test and I am told it is half stuff that I know, and half a problem solving aptitude test.

The test turns out to be mostly stuff I especifically said I had no experience with. And, the part that I was told it would be about, was non-existent. There is no aptitude test at all. The person giving the test does not have a clue what he is testing, so its all quite irrelevant. I had studied for two weeks, based on what he had initially told me the test would cover.

I look at the test. No one with any real understanding of computer programming would set a test like this. It’s just a list of arbitrary questions from the help files. The kind of information that if you really wanted or needed, you could just look up. It’s a bit like doing a test for an English professor by asking him “What is on page 100 of the Oxford dictionary?”

It’s the kind of test that you can only pass if you already have the answers, or if you had the combined memory of 100 programmers.

On the way back from this dead-end experience, she yells at me as we get lost in the city, and lose direction for the third time. “Are you completely useless?” she scowls. Our car is a rusted Uno. An Oriental drives past us in a New B.M.W. He is a child. I struggle to breathe over my increasing girth.

I think back to our first arrival. We were soon whisked off in the first few days by her father to open a new joint bank account together. I was told that I should put my entire inheritance in the account because the exchange rate is getting worse. As well as any other money I have in my other accounts, or any money I can get access to. What did that mean? I wonder. What other money?

But anyhow the value of the South African currency was not decreasing.. It had been improving steadily for years. Why a joint account? We already use our joint business account that your father told us to get, when we first got married. Modern convenience allows me to draw my South African money directly. It gets converted into New Zealand dollars by the Automatic bank teller. What’s the point? His idea is just a waste of time and money.

We must get another joint account. Its her Father’s instructions. Why? She doesn’t know. Ask him.

“Oh, in case one of you dies” he had said, “then there are no legal hassles.”

I had not touched my inheritance, it was for a deposit on a house. Why was he so keen to get me to spend all my money on anything as quick as possible? Just so that I would be so broke that I would have to work on his construction site? Ruin my life just to get another labourer? No-one had wanted to work for him since his arrival. No-one was desperate enough. But to ruin someone financially? Just like that?

I had applied to join the New Zealand Army as a Psychologist, rather than work under his lawless jackboot. I looked over to my pretty wife as we inched along the clogged highways of Auckland. She was biting her bottom lip. I squeezed her thigh, and she instantly smiled warmly at me. Pretty kisses in the bumper to bumper gridlock. Six lanes of people on their way to their lives. A dour old woman, slowly edges past us. Looks at me with emptiness in her eyes. I pull my tongue at her and make gross noises. My wife laughs hysterically. Even hell can be perfect laughter if you let it. I pull my tongue at more dour motorists, most don’t even see it. We are both having a great time.

“I’m not going back to Africa with you in March. I’m letting my air-ticket expire.” She has just been away with her folks for the weekend. An expensive skiing trip in the mountains. I was not invited. Someone had to look after the dogs, and I don‘t ski. Her eyes are fixed ahead of her when she says this. Almost as if she is hypnotised. She does not look at me.

“The new immigration rule says that by the end of June, if we are not accepted, then we have to leave anyway. We get kicked out of the immigration pool. So we’ll be together for our Fourth anniversary on the First of July.”

“OK” I say. We talk about it softly. I agree without airing the complaints welling up inside me. I just cannot take more arguing. The whole mess hardly seems to phase her. In the end she tells me. “So its your idea that we will split up.”

I can‘t believe her irrationality. “No, its your idea. I just pointed out that it would be cheaper then we would only have to pay for one air ticket, whichever way the immigration call falls.”

She is small. With the softest brown eyes. There is a small gap in one of her eyelashes. She has a quivering lip. “Its only three months. We’ve hardly been apart for five years. It would be good to spend some time apart.”

Absence makes the heart grow…

“You know what is going to happen.” I interject.

“What?” Her eyes are innocent and curious.

“They will change the immigration laws again.” I am surprised at how she had not seemed to see that.

“I’ve had enough if they do. I can’t go on like this any more. My folks are just interfering with our life together. I went to an interview and they said ‘what have you been doing for the past year?’ I didn’t know what to say. If they change the laws again, I’m coming back. But you have to promise to come back here if they call us before July. Please don‘t leave me. I‘ll never ever love anyone but you. I never ever want to be with anyone but you. Please understand that.”

“OK. But this is the last straw. You can’t shift it again. You’re going to have to give up the house with the glittered ceilings and stained carpets, and go and live with your folks. We’ll both save a small fortune on the rent, and I’ll only be able to pay for the plane ticket, whichever way it goes, if we avoid rent for a few months.”

The look on her face is of disgust, like a baby tasting something bitter for the first time.

“I’m not living with him.”

“So how will we pay rent, and save for the flights?”

“I got a real legitimate job offer yesterday. Good pay it seems, so money problems should clear up when that comes through. But you have to come back if we are accepted before the end of June. I will only ever love you. I will never be with anyone but you.”

“But no more shifting the goalposts. No more extending the deadline. I’ve lost everything I have earned for two years. I cannot believe that you are trustworthy, if you try and change the agreement again. Marriage is a promise to keep promises. There is so little trust left between us. The marriage cannot take another broken promise. Where is the new job offer?”

“A coincidence”, she smiles wanly, “Next door to the ex-immigration official.”

“And I’m supposed to believe that is a legitimate offer? Can‘t you see that this is all a big scam, this whole bloody immigration thing?”

Nothing.

“Can’t you admit that I even have an opinion?”

“No. You don’t have an opinion.”

“Why are you being so blind to what is so obvious? Why are you being like this? Why? I do not understand? Why? Why? WHY?”

And she fixes her perfect brown eyes with the missing patch of lashes on me, and stares coldly through me. “Because people just die.”

XII

She can’t go back to the land where her grandparents died. A colleague of hers had also been attacked just before we left, while working in a rural area. Her unborn child had died after the attack. One of the people in her Anthropology project had been murdered in a fight over money in the ghetto just as her project was finishing up. Its true that South Africa can be violent. But most of that is localised to a few very poor areas. If you avoid them, you are as safe as anywhere else in the world.

However she would normally go to any lengths just to get into the danger spots. Now she was afraid to just visit Africa? Her grandparents had been parents to her. She had never got over their deaths. But to blame a whole continent for that seemed crazy? Maybe she just wanted to get rid of me. I had been taken for granted for some time now. Perhaps she was just pushing me away.

“You don’t have to go back. You can just let you ticket fall away. We can go visit your parents together next Christmas. When we have our immigration sorted out.” But comments like that are not made by someone pushing you away.

I had missed my grandfather’s 90^th birthday. I may never see him again. And my old dog is nearly thirteen. That makes him 91 in dog years. No, I cannot just let my air-ticket fall away. That would be silly. I have to see my family.

“Stay with me. Don’t leave me.” she says to me, in perfect, brown, sparkle-eyes.

“Come back with me to Africa.” I say to her. I hold her by her little finger. With my little finger.

“Then you have to pay another sixteen grand to make the immigration application from Britain if we apply from South Africa.”

“What?”

“That’s what the consultant says. That’s why I can’t come back.”

Its very confusing. I don’t want to spend this last bit of time together arguing, when I know I cannot win, as reason had lost its value. We take the journey to the airport. On arriving there in a swathe of goodbye tears, we find out that my flight is delayed for a week. A reprieve.

We take a ferry ride to a reputable tourist island. Its supposed to be the best place to live. I had looked for a house to buy here when we first arrived. That was before I found out that we were not allowed to buy a house. We separate as she goes on deck for a while, and I watch all the other people. Its unusual for us to separate like this. Some of the girls are quite pretty. People file past me. Then a long stream of pretty girls walks past. Blondes mostly, as they walk past me, the girls seem to get prettier and prettier. I wonder if there is a beauty contest on board the ferry because the girls are so unusually good-looking. The last one in the line is the prettiest by far, a tall brunette with wild uncombed witches hair. Her stride is bounciest, her breast unfaltering, and her lip is my perfect wife’s.

We say goodbye at the airport - for the second time in a week. I give her an ornamental egg made of pieces of shiny blue-green-sea-shell. The pieces of the shell make the egg look cracked, like it is about to hatch. Its our nest-egg, I say. She loves it. Is very happy with it. She loves presents. I had managed to get her a few Christmas presents, cheap CD’s and things. She had been disappointed with them, but the little shiny shell-egg seemed to go down much better.

She kisses me goodbye and won’t stop kissing me, holding me tighter. My bottom lips is hurting, I wonder if it is bleeding, she kisses so hard. Eventually I pry her loose and turn and walk away or we‘ll never be able to part. She comes running back and kisses me again. We go on like this for most of an hour. She cries. I cried that morning as she ate the breakfast I made her. When she was not looking.

I remember the song that we played over and over again when we first hooked up, before we kissed, from the band called the ‘Smashing Pumpkins’, the title was “We must never be apart.”

XIII

The next time I saw her was just a few weeks later using a slow speed web-camera with poor quality and a terribly slow frame-rate. We chatted online almost every night. I would often get late-night strip-tease shows on web-cam from the other end of the world, which always ended with her pouting lips kissing the camera before it clicked off.

And we waited at opposite ends of the Earth for the final decision from the New Zealand immigration department. Our future decided one way or another, we had nothing to argue about, even her father could not change the decision. We cherished our daily internet meetings, despite all the hiccups in MSN messenger.

Its her birthday. She wants a website address. www.cyber-gypsy.net is her birthday present. She already has www.pixibain.co.za and pleads with me for www.pixibain.com as well. Please, please, please! How I wish I could touch her and not the telephone cable. Just give her a squeeze.

It heartened me to know that she wanted a web-address with my surname on it. I had begun fearing that she was going to break the agreement to come back by the end of June, and was just stringing me along. But she books her flight in advance for the end of June. She can cancel it if the decision goes towards New Zealand. Its not the distance that makes it better. Its not the absence that makes the heart grow fonder. Its that there is nothing to be forced to disagree about by her Father constantly giving her orders that directly contradict our agreements and our financial well-being. Under the guise of a life that is better, he had been trying to ruin me financially so that we would be dependant on him.

Then I would have to give in, and work for him. Her step-brother was working at a food shop when we arrived, and his constant maligning of the fact that he worked evenings, eventually resulted in him going to work on the construction site.

The South African housing market is booming. I have to put my inheritance into the land. It’ll be a decade before we can buy land down under. House prices have jumped 25% for each of the last two years. South African housing is increasing at the same rate as Hong Kong! If I had bought instead of persisting with their daft New Zealand plans, I would have made 200 grand profit in the last two years instead of losing everything. I have to buy now or never.

“Hi”

“Hey lover-puff”

“Guess what I did.”

“What?”

“”I bought us a house!”

“You so sneaky.” Is she is amused that I managed to actually spend my money how I wanted?

“Its an investment that can be rented out if the immigration decision goes to New Zealand, otherwise if we don’t get in by the end of June, then we can live in it, and do it up, add on rooms and things. Its got a big garden, and is two blocks from the sea. We can share the profit 50-50, when we sell it in five years time or so. Depends on what the market does.”

She starts decorating the bathroom full of mermaids and naked sea nymphs in her mind. From the other side of the world, across the vast dark sea. Where I cannot see. She can’t wait to see it. It’ll all be sorted out soon one way or another. Just a few weeks left.

XIV

About a week before the end of June when the final decision is to be made by the New Zealand immigration department, we speak on the phone.

Her voice is stretched thin along a wire under the ocean. “Even if the immigration does not come through, my father and I are making a separate special appeal to the immigration department to allow me to have residency status based on my never having seen my mother in my adult life…”

Oh no. Not again. The arguments are awful. I cannot believe she is risking the end of our marriage over a stupid piece of fictitious beurocracy. Her mother was in Cape Town and was more than willing to be with her. I never could understand, why she never had contact during her upbringing. Her grandfather had spoken fondly of my wife’s mother too, when he was alive.

The New Zealand immigration department makes its decision.

Our application does not make the cut.

Yippee.

Also, they have changed the rules again.

We have not been accepted, but we are also not kicked out of the immigration pool as we had previously been told. We are now allowed to carry on applying.

Gee. Who could have guessed that was going to happen? Why did they have to give the worst possible answer. The one that is going to strain the last brittle fragments of the marriage. I can tell that she is going to go back on her agreement. Its so obvious, she even admitted to it before the announcement is made.

Suddenly I get the inquisition. Whose name is the house in? Mine or my father’s she wants to know.

Its too complicated to explain, bonds, inheritances and such issues. “Both of ours. What does it matter.” I say.

She will only come back if I agree to sign a separate legal agreement to give her half the house, the moment we get divorced.

I’ve already said she can have half the profit. She wants exactly half the entire house.

We can get remarried in community of property, I say, then we both get half of everything. ‘She’ will think about it. A few days later, the answer is ‘no‘. I have no rights over her possessions and she gets not less than half the entire house, to be sold the moment of divorce in a separate legal agreement. Otherwise she is not coming back to Africa. She also now demands half of my salary as well.

I can’t believe what I am hearing. These are all her Dad’s unfair ideas. Coincided to time with the immigration decision, or rather, indecision. Even if I agree, he’ll just find a way to make it more unfair. Even if I agree to go back to new Zealand, I’ll never have another decision in my life. He’ll just be a bigger asshole than ever before. There is no work there other than as a labourer. Even her step-brother could only get occasional work through him. And he was never paid on time. Her step-brother had once told me “The only person that ever treated me worse than him, was my own father.” He also had the signs of abuse on him. Just before I had left, my wife had been piercing her step-brother’s nose. Without anaesthetic, and just a sewing needle. I could not watch.

I had spent nearly two years of my life with them, and had been treated as having no opinion or say over my future at all. Despite the two of us making many decisions that would have resulted in our financial and academic security, his decisions were simply corrupt with no aim of furthering any of our chosen careers. In fact, the extent to which all laws were broken and any concept of fair and ethical treatment had been ignored, had left us in a terrible situation. We could not account for over a year of our lives as far as our C.V.’s were concerned.

I stick to my ground. Half of the profit is more than fair. I can sense her father is just trying to put a wedge between us by interfering yet again in our mutually agreed upon decisions as husband and wife, and forcing us to break any agreement he can get us to. Since I had bought the house, his instructions had been more unfair and biased in her favour than ever before. Downright criminal blackmail actually. Why does she let him do it? Surely she can see what he is doing?

‘You don’t know who you are dealing with.’ she had said to me more than often, when I had asked her if she wanted me to tell him to stop interfering in our lives, face-to-face. He had been in the South African Police during apartheid, as well as a medic in the apartheid army. He had put more than half a dozen people in hospital with his bare hands. Or so the legend has it.

“Look we can’t discuss this over the phone. You’ll have to come back here to Africa, and once you start your new job you’ll need a new car, so you may as well sell the old Uno for the air ticket, and at least come and have a look at the house. We really need to talk face-to-face. If its too much hassle, I‘ll borrow the money for your air-ticket. Just come and visit for a couple of weeks to see the house I bought for us. Discuss this face to face.”

“Yes”, she says, “we have to discuss it face to face.”

The next day her answer changes. All I now get from her is that I have not given her a good enough reason to come over. And I must start making payments on her student loan as it is my duty as her husband.

“If you come here“ I say, “then for the price of two months payments on your loan, you can be registered for your doctorate for the entire year, and won‘t have to pay them anything. It makes no sense at all to pay back the Master‘s degree. it’s a total waste of money, when for only two months payments she can start a Doctorate. Pay 30 grand for a masters, or pay 4 grand for a doctorate, think about it.” She has to get back to me later. She needs time to think about it.

No. I must now pay the entire student loan for her masters degree in cash before she comes back to Africa, if I want to see her and discuss our future together.

It obvious that even if I pay it, that won’t bring her back, then the next demand will be put on me, then the next one. They have lied and changed stories so many times. Never once seeming to consider how it is affecting me. And they are doing everything illegally, from working, to smuggling money, to his tax stories, and as for that consultant and those so-called job-offers. What else are they up to that they have not even told me?

“Stop being ridiculous. You can’t just do that.” is all I can say.

Then her comments go like this “I am coming, I’m just not saying when.” One week.

“How about we meet up in Australia in two years time?” That suggestion, just stung my soul.

“You will never come back to New Zealand with me to visit again if I go back to Africa.” she says. I make a plan to go to New Zealand straight after teaching in Taiwan. I make the comment because it makes financial sense, not that I expect it to be taken as seriously, as wasting my money on bribes that get me nowhere is the only idea that has been offered by them. And buying a job? There was a joke story in a comic I once read called 2000 AD, about jobs being bought and sold in a socially backward future based on an oppressive state. It must have been inspired by New Zealand.

“I cannot come back in case you kidnap me.” And this? What does that mean?

“If I come back, then I am getting a gun.” At first I try and disagree, but it is pointless.

“If you so much as lift a hand against me, I will kill you in your sleep.” She is just trying to chase me away. Why is she saying these ridiculous things??

“I will only come visit you with back-up.” Back-up? What? Back-up???

Somewhere in the midst of all this nonsense I grow weary and say to her “Divorce” in exasperation.

“Divorce?” she squeaks back at me, genuinely hurt. I can feel her little girl tears. Why did I say that? I love her!

“Of course I don’t want divorce, but I can’t keep going on like this. Maybe if we get divorced we will save the friendship. Maybe the two of us need to divorce the institute of marriage. Your demands and comments just don‘t make any sense. Its downright rubbish and you know it. We had an agreement, the basis of our marriage was that agreement.”

Her reply: “It was just an agreement.”

I say all these meaningless things in confusion and pain and torture and loss of anything else to say. I suggest turning to Islam, so I can get a second wife to keep me company while she spends the next two years or more of her life in New Zealand, cleaning toilets and somebody else’s children’s backsides, trying to get residency of Australia, a country she has never even been to. I’m being sarcastic, though she actually sounds amused at this.

And I must meet up with her there in two years time???

She cries: “I love you. I will never love anybody else.” It sounds real. It feels real. Why?

I’m told I’m just being lazy. I can always work on her father’s construction site. I think back to when I was first nearly talked into that one. It had dawned on me that doing one or two days physical labour would be a good way of earning money and losing weight.

Then his comment: “Your first three weeks wages go towards paying for your tools.”

She had a strained smile on her face. Clapping her hands together like a little girl, jumping up and down. “My daddy and hubby working together, how cute.” The look on her face was impossible to describe. But it was not cute. More like a forced grin between clenched teeth. Everything about her body language seemed to say ‘NO!” When she said ‘How cute’, the tone of her voice was riddled with trepidation. What future can there be in a construction business when he is not even allowed to own land? His business is in his new wife’s name as well. He must be so lividly jealous that we could be a happy couple in our own house together, while he has lost everything, except an ever decreasing pile of cash.

“Its not our house, its you and you dad’s house. If you throw me out in two years, you won’t give me half the house. I have to have a separate agreement, to secure my future.”

“What about my security for my future? So you can just take half my house for no good reason? You get half my property when your father decides you must divorce me, and yet I am offered nothing in return.”

That is just black-mail. Why not just say it: “Pay me or we get divorced.” I think to myself.

“Lets get remarried in community of property then” I suggest. Even that would be a big risk. But still her answer is no. She gets half my property in advent of divorce, and I get nothing. A new separate legal agreement, if she comes back to Africa.

But no matter what I agree to, it makes no difference, he will find a reason to break the agreement. Its been the story of my life for the last two years. If he wants the divorce so badly, let him have it. If she can’t stand up to him, now, she never will. My life will be hell unless I let her go. Obviously he wants her with him that badly. I just cannot live like this. My future will never be certain, the financial demands will just get more ridiculous.