End Part The First

7.1

it would seem now that one must retrace ones steps,
seeking out the small moments
in order to work out where it all went wrong

it doesn't happen as a rape, a violent break-up
it happens in small doses,
you lose your ability to connect.

doubt that you were able once to find
things valuable in others

 

3.1.2

There is always back aways I can go. I have forgotten to tell you about VHS and the Royal wedding.

As it is mostly, there are two sets of cousins, mothers and fathers. The Allens’ are my mothers brothers set. And with the total involvedness of my Mom’s parents in our lives, the Allens, at the same high school, were a total part of our lives. We used to play in the big pine tree in their garden, getting sap covered, their slippy slide, Auntie Hilary used to cut my hair, in afternoons in her cigarette haze filled kitchen, while I amazed at auntie Flo’s elephantitis like calves. And there was always VHS.

While my father still preferred to hire a 16mm projector and show us Bud Spencer and Terence Hill movies on a sheet, the Allens always had the latest British comedy on VHS, duplicated in some back room of the video shop they some how had ties to. When I say latest, I mean, Kenny Everret, Benny Hill, Carry on movies. And they had the biggest TV. Me and Trevor were more friends than cousins and I slept over often. It was a girl who effectively ended that friendship. But before her. My early teens are a mishmash of movies that they would get on tape before they hit the cinemas. And while I loved the whirr of the projector and couldn’t resist the cinema and popcorn with my A class friends at least twice a month, I was constantly in awe of the sheer volume of movies and TV shows that the Allens pulled out of their hats on a regular basis.

We watched Diana get married at the Allens, they let us out of school for that day. Those years Later, when the news of her death came through at midnight to 61 Somerset Rd and me and Paul in shock found ourselves crying, I remembered the Allens, how far ago that was. And recognized in Paul, in his admiration for her death something that I would only understand after his.

By Standard Seven I had learned to separate my groups of friends. There were my Street Gang at home, the art class, and then My A class friends and My D class friends, two groups at odds, the first loved cinema, computers and Queen. The second, Violence, nightclubs, Depeche Mode. And while they ignored each other I flitted between.

One incident stands out in my mind. We have just finished the last day of Standard Five, from next year we will be a t high school. This last day of senior primary was a civvies day and we are leaving the school in high spirits. As we walk down to meet someone’s parents who are taking us to see “A View to A Kill” in Pinetown, I am with my then embryonic A class group. We pass two boys seemingly our age, who we don’t know. One of them is wearing a t-shirt that says “Frankie say SPASTIC”, so I say Hey, are you Spastic. The retribution is swift, within seconds I am on the floor and being slapped and then he is off me. Andrew Guilfoyle, who will become one of my greatest friends, walks off with Warren Hickey, someone I will desperately, to the point to inflicting abuse on others, try to impress. Childhood has ended.

2.3.2

William, my chubby pal, his father was a ships captain in the merchant navy. He called himself a glorified trucker but no matter, the uniform was impressive. He was a slim bearded man and his wife large and ranging in muumuus and other flowing garments. She stayed home, made pottery and Batiks and macramé and other 80’s design inspirations. She painted a mean watercolor, as long as it was of the same stretch of beach at Arniston, somehow that spot was dug deep into her soul. Later her body would fascinate me as a teen, fueled adolescent fantasies by the token of her husband always being away.

One December, me and Will, get a ride on the ship down to East London to stay with family friends in a caravan park.

The ship ride is awesome, a huge container vessel, we have to walk up a gangplank to get on. By some accident of timing the trip is soured by the fact that she takes on her bilge water at the same time as the Durban abattoir is dumping its rotting meat into the harbor. The weekend trip is sea sickness coupled with the stench of rotting meat. The highlight discovering that there is a swimming pool on the back of the ship. I spend that Saturday, jumping off the diving board, trying to figure out why, if I’m in the air, the ship does not move from under me and leave me to fall into the propellers vast and churning. I will it. It does not happen.

In that strange rambling caravan park, with its permanent trailers, wheels removed, creepers growing up, I meet a girl that I literally abandon William to be with, she has an older brother but I ignore him, tho he comes with us everywhere. We spend the holiday in the rivers tidal pools sandy bottom catching shrimp and setting them free. I try explain that they are basically sea cockroaches but Lee Ann is fascinated with their dirty pink casings. On the last Sunday afternoon, in the fading light, as we are leaving to get a ride back to Durban, I steal my first real kiss, with tongue and everything. I am on my way back home, to face the responsibilities of high school and I am now no longer a child.

I wrote many letters to her, tried to phone, but I was a super excited 12 year old, I must have either bored her or the limits of her trailer park imagination constrained her real emotions. The truth hurts, so I avoided it.

2.3.3.

According to my mother I once refused to leave a department store (John Orrs) in Durban at the age of six because my imaginary pet hedgehog escaped. It took the store manager an hour to find him. Once she heard that, William's mother started to call me hedgehog. And seeing as I had strange fantasies about her, I didn't mind when she ruffled my hair and said, "who's a little hedgehog then....."

END PART THE FIRST