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.