Beautiful Screaming of Pigs Read Free Page A

indoors together afterwards, arms around each other, luminous
with pride and effort.
    ‘Your heart,’ my mother warned, from above her sewing.
    ‘I know,’ my father gasped, one hand on his chest. ‘Where are my pills?’
    For myself, I don’t believe he had a heart at all, this swollen, implacable man with his shirts open to the belly, showing his gold chains and bracelets. Everything about him, even the
most casual details, was expensive but somehow cheap. I don’t know what smallness he was trying to compensate for, but he gave off an endless energy and size: he was loudly generous and
bullying and expansive. His voice seemed to come from some deep recess in him, always on the verge of insincere laughter, wreathed in the blue smoke of his Cuban cigars. He was full of tricks and
trinkets and finery. I had never seen him naked. His hands gestured hugely on the air. He was, by nature more than by vocation, a millionaire.
    I have never understood exactly what my father’s business was. But it had something to do with the stock market and, more recently, with pieces of property all over the country. He owned
plots of land here and there along the coast; he had entire blocks of flats in his name in Cape Town and Johannesburg. On the walls of his study, between the disembodied heads of animals that he
had deprived of life, were cryptic certificates framed in gold. One of these – a big, ordinary looking bit of paper – was the deal that had started his career. ‘The one that made
the difference,’ he told us, beaming. I knew I was supposed to be impressed, but it was just a boring sheet of jargon to me.
    Since that first big deal, my father had made a lot of money. As he never tired of explaining, he ‘worked to stop working’– by which he meant he was rich enough to retire. Not
entirely: but aside from the few hours each day that he spent on the telephone or at his unseen office in town, he was usually somewhere around the house, cleaning his guns, or wallowing in the
pool, pulling himself with huffing strokes through the water. But he didn’t look at ease in these long, idle hours. No, what he wanted more than anything was to be away, out of town, in the
bush somewhere, and it was often that I came home from school to find the house all empty of his presence, streaming with light. On such occasions my mother would be happier than usual. ‘Your
father is away in the swamps again,’ she would say, a small subversive smile flickering on her mouth.
    Or: ‘He’s gone to the Eastern Transvaal for some shooting.’
    Or fishing in the Transkei.
    She had long ago decided that these outdoor trips were too rough for her and opted to stay at home, with me and a squadron of servants. So he went off with a bunch of men for company, loud and
hairy and intense, like him. Most of them were people he did business with, for whom the savagery of nature was a metaphorical substitute for the world of money. They congregated at our home
sometimes, before or after these trips, wearing designer outdoor gear, drinking beer and braaing steaks on the lawn. They were, and behaved like, people in no doubt of themselves, laughing
unrestrainedly and slapping each other violently on the back. They had names that underlined their natures: they were Harry or Bruce or Ivan or Mike. There was Fanus, whom I had caught pissing in
the roses once. I was afraid of them and went out the back door to avoid them.
    When he turned fifteen, Malcolm would go with my father on some of these trips: from time to time there was a double absence when I returned from school. And though I was deeply relieved that I
had never been called on to go too, I was jealous of my brother. He would return from these odysseys flushed and voluble, so eager to boast that he would even lower himself to talk to me. He would
come to my room sometimes, late at night when the light was off, and tell me stories about things that I could only imagine. ‘I drank red