Beautiful Screaming of Pigs Read Free Page B

wine,’ he said once, ‘till I vomited out
the window of the Land Rover. Dad wouldn’t stop, he just laughed at me.’
    And somewhere deep down in myself I longed to vomit out of windows too, to earn the laughter of my father.
    Or the time he shot his first impala. ‘It wasn’t dead, it was lying on the ground, kicking. Dad killed it with a knife.’
    I nodded solemnly, entranced and appalled. The knife was at my throat.
    In the end I asked my father if I could go too. It was a rash, impulsive request, and after he agreed happily, swelling with pleasure, I was filled with bitter regret. But somehow the next
occasion came and went, and I stayed behind at home. I was learning the taste of relief and jealousy mixed together, a taste like ash. It was a taste that sprang quickly to my tongue whenever my
brother was around.
    Malcolm was strong and splendid and mean. He behaved as though he was immortal. So his sudden death wasn’t just painful and tragic, but somehow against the natural order
of things. He died in 1986, when I was seventeen years old, in my second to last year at school. Malcolm had failed matric and gone straight into the army.
    He was made for that uniform. He looked casually handsome, capable of heroism and brutality. And if he had died a soldier’s death, in a hail of bullets, or a purifying baptism of fire, it
might have been less terrible and terminal. But he died in an ordinary traffic accident, in an army jeep somewhere on a nameless stretch of road. A burst tyre, a skid, a ditch at the edge of the
tar.
    He was given a military funeral. I stood between my parents – my father rigid with grief, my mother sedated – as the coffin, vividly draped with the South African flag, was lowered
into the ground. I jumped when the rifles fired. And the next week at school there was a special assembly in honour of my brother, after which the other boys came to shake my hand in grim
commiseration.
    What I myself was feeling at that time I have no idea. I see events, and myself in them, from a distance. It is a story told by dolls or puppets, on a strange, unreal set. I do remember seeing
my father cry for the first time in my life – shaking, soundless sobs unleashed into his hands as he sat drinking whisky at his desk – and the feeling, though perhaps that came at a
different moment, that it would have been better if it had been me that died. There was the knowledge, too, that I was carrying a heavier cargo now, of guilt or transplanted hopes. And the dread of
failure.
    I thought that the heaviness was mine alone, but none of us was the same. Malcolm’s absence left a larger void behind, which drew us ineluctably into its dark. In whatever secret place it
is that human lives are welded together, joints and seams had been pulled out of place. All the unhappiness that had been squashed down under a lid suddenly boiled over into open view.
    Within four months my parents were divorced. My father kept his house and I moved out with my mother. I visited my father over weekends sometimes. Almost immediately he started to shack up with
a series of girlfriends, the first one being his secretary. It had never occurred to me that he might have lovers, not even on those long trips out of town, and I was shocked. But none of them ever
stayed long; some of them were replaced between one of my visits and the next. I don’t think he was especially attached to any of them and it took me a while to work out that it was a form of
mourning for my mother. They were all substitutes, each temporarily, glossily, inhabiting her space. At the same time he became over-solicitous and concerned about me – another kind of
substitution.
    My mother also changed, radically and suddenly, but in the opposite direction to my father. She, who had been so devoted and submissive, threw off the role of wife as if it had been weighing her
down. ‘I feel like myself for the first time, Patrick,’ she confided in me a few days