and her body and she knew it. She tried to regain the attentions of men with make-up, hair dye and tight clothes. They were the candle and she was the moth. It was irresistible, an unavoidable reaction, the way a leg jerks when you bang the knee.
‘We went through the cycles. She would be faithful and reasonable and calm would prevail. Then they would start fighting and she would go off looking for attention until some man wanted something more and she would give in and sleep with him somewhere. Even in our flat. Once I came home from school in the morning, I can’t remember why, maybe I was sick. I had a key and I went in and heard them. My mother and Phil Robinson, the rich Brit who owned the hotel on the seafront. A hundred hotel rooms, but they had to come to our flat.
‘When she saw me she screamed, “Jesus Christ, oh, Jesus Christ, Marty, go away, go away,” but I just stood there staring until she climbed off and came and shut the door. Later, when Robinson was gone, she begged me not to tell my father. “He’ll just hit you again.”
‘That’s my history, Emma.
‘Poor white Afrikaner trash. Just like my mother said.
‘My father was a drinker of wine. That’s what the smell of wine really brings to mind. The sour smell of his breath when he was drunk and beat me because my mother had gone.
‘When I was thirteen, she left. My father beat me then because she wasn’t there. And because he wanted to make me “tough, so you can handle life and all its shit”.
‘He succeeded.
‘I’ve thought about this a lot. What he did to me. The biggest thing is, it takes the fear away. Fear of getting hurt. And of hurting. That was the important one. Feeling pain is something that becomes ordinary afterwards. You get used to it. But causing hurt, it’s like a thing that has to get out.
‘There was a karate club in Seapoint, in the Anglican church hall. My father sent me there. My problem was with control. I could never understand why we had to hold back, why we weren’t allowed to hit the other guy.
‘I looked for trouble. At school, in the streets. And I got it. I liked dishing it out. For the first time I was the one causing pain. Drawing blood. Breaking. It is like being outside of yourself. Or inside something else, another world, another state of being. Time stands still. Everything disappears, you hear nothing and you see nothing except a red-grey mist. And this object in front of you that you want to destroy with everything you have in you.
‘When I was in Matric, I beat up my father for the first time. After that, things went better for a while.
‘I wanted to get out then. Get away from him and from Seapoint. My karate sensei was a policeman. He wanted me for the police karate team. I joined because you have to go to Pretoria. It was far enough. They spotted me there and recruited me to be a bodyguard. I was one for ten years. One year with the Minister of Transport. He retired. Eight years with the white Minister of Agriculture. The last year was with the black Minister of Education.
‘My first year … The Minister of Transport was an incredible man. He saw me. He saw everybody. Maybe he saw too much – felt too much. Maybe that was why he shot himself. But I often used to think: why couldn’t someone like him have been my father?’
25
I talked to Emma Le Roux for four hours before Dr Eleanor Taljaard came to tell me to go and eat.
I didn’t tell Emma everything. I didn’t tell her about Mona.
I wanted to. I had the words in my mouth.
It’s a funny thing, letting all these monsters loose in my head. It’s an avalanche, a dry river after rain, a trickle, a stream, a flood that sweeps everything with it.
But when I came to Mona there wasn’t enough momentum, the clouds suddenly dried up. Mona of Pretoria. Mona of Muckle-neuk. A full-bodied woman four centimetres taller than me.
I sat there, next to Emma, and thought about it. The Mona Chronicles. I met her in the summer of 1987, one year after I became a bodyguard. She worked in a salon in Sunnyside and I had to have a haircut. She said, ‘Why don’t you let it grow a little?’
‘It wouldn’t help,’ I said.
I sat down and she put the number-one comb on the clippers and drew it back and forth over my head, without saying a word. I watched her while she worked. She had thick brown hair and a pretty face with rosy cheeks. Her skin was smooth and healthy. And her body. She was wearing a loose-fitting dress, but she couldn’t hide the generous curves of her breasts and hips. Her ring finger was bare.
She walked away from me to fetch something. A colleague made a remark, I couldn’t hear what it was. Mona laughed. It was a wonderful sound, musical, clear, genuine, originating deep inside her, and she surrendered herself to it. I followed the direction of the sound and saw how the laugh slowly invaded her body until the beautiful melody owned her.
When she was finished and had dusted and washed me off, I asked her what her name was and she said, ‘Mona.’
‘Can I take you out for a pizza on Friday, Mona?’
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Lemmer.’
She looked at me for two heartbeats and then she said, ‘You can.’
I picked her up at her flat in Berea Street and we ate in Esselen Street. Neither of us was much good at conversation, but it was a comfortable time, as if we knew each other. We were single-child city kids who had never grown up.
I remember she asked me, ‘Why are you so skinny when you eat so much?’
‘Exercise.’
‘What kind of exercise?’
‘Fifty pull-ups, sit-ups and push-ups in the morning, the same at night. And fifty kilometres a week.’
‘Why all that?’
‘For my work.’
She shook her head slowly. ‘Thank God I’m a hairdresser.’
I wanted to hear her laugh again. More than that: I wanted to conjure it up out of her, I wanted to be the reason the melody played, because it was the sound of happiness, of contentment, of everything that was good and right in the world.
I took her back to her flat that night and she invited me in and I stayed for nine years. I had to work to hear her laugh. I had to search within myself for a sense of humour, make room for someone who could be daft and light hearted, ready to joke or tease, because Mona’s laughter was not programmable. It was elusive and unpredictable, like the numbers in the state lottery. But when I hit the jackpot, the reward – to see her overwhelmed by joy – was great.
Mona changed me without knowing that she had. There is only so much room for baggage. If you bring in humour and light-heartedness, you must throw rancour and melancholy overboard. And then you travel easy. And light.
There were other lessons too. Mona accepted her own weaknesses with cheerful resignation. She was the one who tried to teach me that regret does not pay, we are what we are and there’s no sense in hiding that. It was only much later that I was able to master that lesson.
It was an easy relationship. She didn’t make demands, she just lived every day for itself. When I told her I would be away with the minister for three or four days she would genuinely say, ‘I’ll miss you.’
When I returned, her smile was real and she held out her arms and laughed happily when I carried her with some effort to her massive double bed. Then I would undress her and caress her wonderful body inch by inch, until desire flamed up in her, like a she-bear coming out of hibernation. Her body would hum and she would open herself up to me as if opening the doors to wonderland. When I went into her, her face showed intense pleasure without shame. I became addicted to that, as I was to her laughter.
With Mona nothing was conventional.
When I had to accompany the minister to Cape Town for six months the following February, she said, ‘I have to tell you something.’
