Blind Date at a Funeral Read Free

note, no return address – just the money the old man had promised to pay me back.
    I was in advertising in those days and a little over a year later, I went back to the Drakensberg to shoot a television commercial with Sarel van der Merwe, the rally driver. It was for Jurgens caravans and he was towing the caravan through the Berg, showing how rough and tough those caravans were.
    The filming took place very close to where that old man had fallen off his bike and I decided to go and find him, to tell him that he didn’t need to send me the money every month because I was doing fine.
    I found out that he had retired from the hotel. They told me that he lived in the village near where I first saw him and they directed me to his place.
    My art director and I went to the man’s home. It was exactly what you’d imagine. A thatched mud hut with missing windowpanes covered in Spar plastic bags to keep the wind out.
    An old African granny with grey hair answered the door. She had a doek on her head that was tied under her chin like people used to do in the olden days when they had toothache.
    Inside the hut, the hardened mud floor was swept clean. There was a Primus stove, a galvanised tub with a bar of Sunlight soap in it, a rickety old table with a clean cloth on it, a little cupboard and a bed on bricks with white sheets.
    That’s all.
    It was spotless.
    The Sunlight soap was the only colourful thing in the entire place. I have such a clear vision of that bar of soap. I can see it in my mind when I close my eyes.
    Other than those few items, the place was spare.
    The woman was the old man’s wife.
    I asked whether he was around so I could tell him that he didn’t have to pay the money back to me.
    What she told me stopped me cold.
    The old man had died six months before and she had continued paying his debt.
    I was stunned. She had nothing. Absolutely NOTHING! Yet she was doing what she considered was the right thing. Paying their debt back as promised.
    She kept his word. She continued sending me money every month, despite the fact that her husband had died and she was poor.
    I told her I didn’t need the money and gave her a little more from my pocket.
    She was so grateful and would not stop hugging me.

The Broom Dancer
    (Soundtrack:
The Blue Danube
by Johann Strauss)
    â€˜Count backwards from ten for me,’ she said.
    I closed my eyes as she placed an oxygen mask over my nose and patted me gently on the head. The doctor inserted the needle into my arm. I flinched a little when I felt the dull ache and slight burn of the anaesthetic entering my body.
    Then everything went black.
    I surfaced in the recovery room but went back to sleep almost immediately. I vaguely remember being transferred to my bed but I was so weary and lame I couldn’t open my eyes.
    I was in a pretty deep sleep until a strange and rather uncomfortable sound tickled the edges of my consciousness.
    The sound scuttled around inside my brain, banging against the edges, irritating me more and more.
    I opened one eye, then the other, and at the foot of my bed, saw a thin old man in flannel pyjamas, waltzing with a broom on the polished linoleum floor.
    I thought I was dreaming or that perhaps the painkillers they had given me were making me hallucinate.
    I shook my head in disbelief. Waves of post-operative nausea from my knee surgery washed over me. I could feel the pressure of the full plaster cast on my leg but there was no pain. I was still in some sort of twilight zone and my nineteen-year-old brain could not quite connect with what was happening around me.
    The music accompanying the dancing man was coming from a small red transistor radio sitting on top of an empty hospital bed. The sound was tinny and hurt my head.
    The music faded and the man took a bow.
    â€˜That was practice for the party tonight,’ said the man.
    A round of applause broke out.
    I looked around. There were six beds in the ward, including