Double Negative Read Free

glass doors clutching serviettes like white flags. And then a woman in a plastic cape with half her hair in curlers, who looked as if she had risen from the operating table in the middle of brain surgery with part of her head missing. Everyone flapped about, outraged and delighted, full of righteous alarm. Model citizens. Along the façade of the building was a mural, a line of black figures on a white background, and this separate-but-equal crowd drew my attention. They looked on solemnly, although their eyes were popping. The masses, I thought, the silent majority, observing this self-important European anxiety with Assyrian calm. I took my cue from them. I went on nudging new paint into the cracks in the tar, cold-blooded, maliciously pleased.
    The bomb turned out to be a carry case of bowls left behind by an absent-minded pensioner.
    In time, Jaco’s stories got to me. I could laugh off the knowing asides on brainwashing and espionage, which were straight out of The Ipcress File , but the nightlife in Otjiwarongo was less amusing the third time around. It shamed me that I said nothing when he launched into one of his routines. Why was I silent? If I am honest, it had nothing to do with needing the money or enjoying the work: I was scared of him.
    When I was living in a student house in Yeoville, we had played a party game, an undergraduate stunt called ‘The Beerhunter’. A game of chance for six players. It was Benjy, I think, who picked it up on a trip to the States as an exchange student. The ringmaster would take a single can out of a six-pack of beers and give it a good shake. Then the loaded can was mixed in with the others and each player had to choose one and open it next to his head.
    Jaco was like a can that had been shaken. For all his jokey patter, he was full of dangerous energies, and if you prodded him in the wrong place, he would go off pop. He pointed the spray gun like a weapon. He was a small man, but he made a fist as round and hard as a club, spattered with paint and freckles. I could see him using it to donner me, the way he donnered everyone else in his stories.
    While this was happening, my parents acquired new neighbours. Louis van Huyssteen was a young public prosecutor, just transferred to Johannesburg from his home town of Port Elizabeth. He had a wife called Netta and two small children.
    The first thing that struck us about them was how much they braaied. ‘It’s a holiday thing,’ my father said. ‘When the chap goes back to work in January, it’ll stop.’ But they picked up the pace instead. ‘Perhaps they still have to connect the stove,’ my mother said, ‘or organize the kitchen?’
    That was not it. They simply liked their meat cooked on an open fire. Minutes after Louis came in from work, long enough to kick off his shoes and pull on a pair of shorts, a biblical column of smoke would rise from their yard, and before long the smell of meat roasting on the coals wafted through the hedge that separated their place from ours. The braai was an old-fashioned one fit to feed an army, half of a 44-gallon drum mounted on angle-iron legs, standing close beside the kitchen door. Often, Netta would lean there in the doorway holding a paring knife or sit on the back step with a bowl in her lap, and they would chat while he turned the meat over on the grill. Once I watched him pump the mince out of a dozen sausages, squeezing them in his fist so that the filling peeled out at either end and tossing the skins on the coals. And I saw her lift the folds of her skirt and do a little bump-and-grind routine to an undertone of music, until he pulled her close and slid his hands between her thighs. It sounds like I used to spy on them, I know.
    When it came to outdoor living we were not in the same league, but we had the patio and the pool, and my dad could char a lamb chop as well as the next man, so when my mother decided to invite the new neighbours