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. Smashed it completely.” 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.