Devil's Valley Read Free Page A

Tonder; and if I were to abscond for a couple of months to do research in the Devil’s Valley I had little doubt that in my absence he’d settle so tightly into her own little devil’s valley that once again only his toes would stick out. That was the end of my project. But at the time I thought it would be only a temporary setback. If you ask me, every person has a rat inside, a rat which keeps gnawing away and which you must feed if you hope to survive, otherwise it consumes your fucking guts. And the Devil’s Valley was my rat. I was going to feed it. But for thirty years nothing came of it, until there wasn’t much left to consume in me.
    Comes Out Red
    That is, until Little-Lukas Lermiet appeared on my horizon a few months ago. The occasion was a day-long seminar in Stellenbosch on ‘History and Reporting’, to be introduced by Professor Hardus (Twinkletoes) van Tonder, Head of the Department of History, D. Litt. et Phil., S.H.I.T., Dean of the Faculty of Arts, as well as Vice-President of the South African Academy of Education, Arts and Science. My presence, as member of a panel on Investigative Journalism, was either pure coincidence or fate, depending on the paradigm, I think that is the term, you use. Our editor was called away on an important mission requiring all his attention (something to do with his wife’s investments), the news editor was otherwise engaged (he has a friend with a box at Newlands), two others who’d been approached were not available, which was how yours truly, well down the pecking order, came to be delegated at the last minute.
    This kind of seminar is not my line at all. Do I still have a ‘line’? I have no idea any more what I’m doing in journalism. Cynicism stains one like nicotine. There was a time…but forget it. Compromise is the name of the game, until you swallow your last lump of self-respect like the vomit of a bad hangover. Right up to the eighties there were moments when in a flush of misplaced romanticism or something I still thought I had a ‘role’ to play. You go out on a story to Old Crossroads or the KTC squatter camp, you look on while police set fire to the shacks of people who refuse to move elsewhere; you see a child, sent by his mother to the corner shop for a half-loaf of bread, run down by the cops in the yellow van, who then jump out to shoot him execution-style. Then you go back to the office and file your story with the news editor, a shithead ten years younger than yourself, who draws red lines through most of it and tells you to rewrite the piece. Anything you give to that cunt is like a fucking tampon: it goes in clean and comes out red. And when you object, he blows his top and tears up the sheets. You try to protest. He looks you in the eye and asks, “What are you trying to do, Lochner?” You tell him, “I was there, sir.” He says, “For your information, this never happened.” And after the incident has been repeated three times you give up trying. You cannot resign either, because jobs are scarce and you have a wife who has Joneses to compete with and two kids at varsity, so don’t rock the boat, buddy. When you shave in the morning, you look past your own image in the mirror, pretending you’re not here. You feel like a whore on the point of retiring, but she’s already got AIDS and all she can still hope for is to infect a few more fuckers before she croaks.
    Fucking Symposium
    And then they have the bloody cheek, on a Saturday you planned to spend working on your Cortina and watching rugby on TV, to pack you off to a fucking symposium on Investigative Journalism. Look, if you have to, ask me about crime statistics, and I’ll be happy to oblige. Last year: an average of three murders an hour, a rape every twelve minutes (or, considering that only one out of every thirty-five is reported, one every twenty seconds), an armed robbery every five minutes, a case of child abuse every ten minutes (but of course even fewer of these are