Double Negative Read Free Page A

over to break the ice, a pool-side party was the obvious arrangement.
    Jaco and I worked on Saturdays – we could get a lot done in the afternoons after the shops closed – and the braai was nearly over when I got home. Usually I flopped into the pool to wash off the sweat and dust of the day, but the Van Huyssteens’ sun-browned kids were splashing in the deep end. The toddler could swim like a fish. Her brother, who was a few years older, was dive-bombing her off the end of the filter housing. They looked unsinkable.
    I remembered my mother’s remark, some personal history gleaned when she went next door to invite them over: ‘They used to live near the aquarium.’
    By the time I had showered, the girl was asleep on the couch with the damp flex of her hair coiled on a velveteen cushion. The boy was reading a photo comic, lying on his back on the parquet near the door, where I used to lie myself when I was his age, keeping cool in the hot weather. Brother and sister. They made the house seem comfortably inhabited. I was grateful suddenly for the parquet; my dad was making money in the craze for wall-to-wall carpets, but he couldn’t stand them himself, said they turned any room into a padded cell. Stepping through the sliding doors on to the patio, I paused to feel the heat in the slasto on my soles, enjoying the contrast, and thought: perfect. A perfect summer evening. A breeze carried the scent of my mother’s roses from the side of the house, moths and beetles made crazy orbits around the moon of the lamp, the pool water shifted in its sleep like a well-fed animal, breathing out chlorine. The sky over the rooftops, where the last of the light was seeping into the horizon, was a rare pink. The seductive mysteries of things as they are, the scent of the roses and the pale stain in the west ran together in my senses.
    I can picture myself there, long-haired and bravely bearded, in patched jeans and a T-shirt. The smell of that evening is still in my clothes.
    My parents and their guests were talking, and you could tell by the sated murmur of conversation, the outstretched legs and tilted heads, that the meal had been good. My mother had put something aside for me, although there was so much left over it hardly seemed necessary. While I was helping myself to salads, I heard Netta ask for the chicken marinade recipe and my mother fetched an airmail letter pad and wrote it out for her. The recipe was a sort of family secret – it had been devised by Charlie, my Auntie Ellen’s houseboy – but it was shared often and eagerly. Usually, Charlie’s idiosyncrasies were part of the rigmarole of handing on the secret, but tonight my mother made no mention of him at all.
    My father and Louis were hanging around the braai, as the men must, and I joined them there with my heaped plate. My dad had a little cocktail fridge from the caravan set up on the patio and I fetched a Kronenbräu from the icy cave of its freezer. The dessert was already on the coals: bananas wrapped in foil. Louis had commandeered the tongs. As he turned the packages idly, the smell of cinnamon and brown sugar melted into the overburdened air.
    For a long time the talk was about children, the neighbourhood, the new house, the quality of the local primary school, things I did not have much to say about. I busied myself with the food, drank the beer too quickly, fetched another one. My father told Louis about the new wall-to-wall carpet lines and the problems in the factory with the union. ‘But enough shop talk,’ he said, and moved on to the caravan park in Uvongo where they’d spent their last holiday. It was the height of luxury: there was a power point at every site so you could plug in your generator. ‘The newer vans are moving to electricity. One of these days gas will be a thing of the past, you mark my words.’ Then they argued playfully about the relative merits of the South Coast and the