THEME: KNOCK YOURSELF OUT
TITLE: Dear Zweli
Written by Phakamisa Mayaba
Awaiting a letter from a father you haven’t seen since your ninth birthday must be a tough ask on anyone, not least a sixteen-year-old. So I figured I’d be a dad for once and explain to my son the reasons for not having gotten back to him sooner. All night I’d spent mulling it over when it dawned on me I didn’t really have any. Work, work; it’s always work, isn’t it? I think you’re at that age now when you can pick up on a lie. Maybe – heaven forbid – you can spin a fine one yourself. So what do you say we cut the fluff and play open cards for a change?
Your last letter, my boy, was full of noteworthy curiosities. Though I’m hardly the sort of person who cries easily, man, your penmanship had me ruffling for an old Dylan record, just so that anybody who was around would know: Geez! The only thing that’d ever make this guy cry is music.
From the pages leaped at me the anguished torments of a child having to grow up really fast. With his mother (how is Kathy doing by the way?) putting in overtime at the hospital, his father miles away; the sheer idea of a normal family is, no doubt, missed on him. To be sure, dear boy, it’s a rough place to be in. Having to put up appearances; forging mom’s signature on the excursion indemnity form; lying about why your dad never picks you up from school; that your last oral presentation was of an imaginary dog you don’t really own because they have a strict no-pets policy at that haggard downtown apartment block which your mom can barely afford.
Judging by some of the stuff you’ve entrusted upon me, I can see where this is going but whether it will get there, only you will decide. You see, Zweli, in life you can be one of two people. Am I beginning to sound like a shrink? I certainly think so, so I’ll drop the serious, filial spiel for now. Vaguely, you mentioned a girl, Thembi, I believe is her name. Can’t tell you how you must have felt when you found out she has the hots for James, the chizboy? What I do know is that between rejection and jealousy cuts a fine line. So fine you’ll often don’t see yourself crossing it. Before you realise it, you’re clambering through the school corridors in designer greys and shoes. Your nose looks down on those of lesser acquisitions – even your friend Thabo who once welcomed you to this very school with a big smile, bigger glasses and an even greater character seems cumbersome to you of late only because he’s just not cool enough.
Your tie hangs loosely around the neck, shirt sleeves rolled high as you drag on a forbidden cigarette inside a forbidden shed somewhere on the school grounds at break time. You think you’re the proverbial turd and you’re probably right. A turd who has snuck into his mother’s room while she wasn’t looking, ruffled through her handbag and retrieved the last money inside it so that Thembi might finally see that you too could be cool like James. You too could be the one bunking school, slipping inside a liquor store and walking out bearing a bottle of liqueur that you, Thembi, and all the other cool kids will enjoy at a time when the ‘losers’ are bored in Ms Green’s-always-boring Maths class. “Cool” may be what you Insta kids call it, but to me it crumbles to a singular disaster: utter stupidity!
But who am I to pass judgement, right? Absent father! Some hotshot lawyer in a priestly gown, lying through his teeth in an effort to spare some guy who’s done some really bad stuff from doing hard time alongside other bad guys. So I lie – I’m sure your mother tells you so all the time – and I get paid for it. Hardly an honourable way to earn one’s keep but then again what job is without its hypocrisies? For what it’s worth, when I was your age, I’d often ask after my own father.
“He’s in the mines,” my mom would say, “digging for gold.” Every day, she’d continue, from sunrise till sunup, dad was taking a pickaxe to solid granite, ostensibly making his fortune. He was sunk way in the underbelly of the Earth, sweating, bleeding, heaving and I’d like to think that as he was plunging the drill, or wielding the pickaxe, in his mind, between the requisite accuracy, that in the rearview mirror he could still see us, his wife and kids. His family.
Yet, in the fleeting memories I vaguely have of him, he never seemed to have enough to buy me anything; I’d even have to lie to friends every time I happened to get a new pair of anything.
I’d tell anybody around that “My father bought this for me, don’t you dare touch it.” And act like I truly believed it; that my father actually took time from work, told to his colleagues that he was going to buy a copy of whatever it is that the kids were listening to in those days for his son.
That his son mattered.
But one night he came back unannounced, heaving and frail. A week later we buried him in a cheap coffin, not so much a tombstone to immortalise his memory.
I don’t mean to depress you, Zweli, in recounting this woeful yarn, only to say, sometimes a lie is more palatable than the truth. Some things are far more beautiful in how we perceive them than in how they really are. And so when you write about your friend, James, how “in” he is with the crowd and his big brother Tony who speaks tsotsitaal and gets all the pretty girls, I’m happy and worried in the same breath because I see exactly how this is fated to end even though I can only speculate as to how it began.
In Tony’s company you probably feel like the most important person given how he dotes after you. He calls you “kid” and that satisfies a longing for brotherly or, for that matter, fatherly affection, something you’ve never really known. Pour another one for the “kid” he instructs his aides when your glass of beer is spent. “Let the kid have the first puff” when a joint is rolled. He calls you aside to his private room, walks you up to a safe concealed behind a glossy portrait of a duck-walking Elvis Presley. He punches in a few keys and the vault opens. There are gleaming watches, bracelets, gold cufflinks and stacks of money – enough, you think to yourself – to buy a dozen cars. Of those he has plenty in his five garages and you can have them too someday. But there is a snag – there always is – some pound of flesh to be surrendered. Nothing comes easily in this world. But so you can start out small and work your way up, he tells you.
James, along with an older spiv will show you exactly how it’s done tonight. They’ll pick you up somewhere secluded and you’ll be sure to wear black. Your car with no plates and tinted windows will cruise casually around the city. The vigilant eyes of the spiv will yell James to a screeching halt and that’s your cue to leap out the back, approach the car that’s idling at the intersection and point a gun at the driver. Simple as that; like taking candy from a baby. Of course the maiden attempt will go just according to plan – that’s because the car you thought you were hijacking is actually one of Tony’s and the driver is not as unwitting as his expression lets on. He’s just a prop in Tony’s vast organogram, another dramatis persona in this exciting, elaborate tryst in the underbelly of a play where everything looks easy as the audience who applaud, and swoon but altogether harbouring no ties with the actors who happen to be sweating yet are none the wiser before them. But they’ll lull you into thinking you’re a badass, toasting to your courage at a party with the coolest people, and girls who look like they’ve just stepped off a pageant runway.
“Welcome” Tony will announce, “now, you’re one of us.” And there’ll be champagnes popping and glasses clinking. And next time, you’ll scour the city again and maybe you’ll be lucky once more. But the more often you succeed, the slimmer your chances of always getting away with it become. Maybe you’ll be so good as to be worthy of a promotion. But again, a promotion only means your chances of getting out alive are just that much slimmer too. You know way too much to simply hand in the gun and walk out the front door. Now that you’re up the ladder, your name does the rounds and eventually some policeman catches its scent and starts sniffing at your spoor.
You don’t yet know it but you have shadows following you. They loom after you long enough to anticipate your next move. Then boom! Gotcha! These guys always get nailed Zweli. Always. And when you’re standing before the stern-faced judge, you think Tony will be there invoking those brotherly declarations you guys would make when you were hijacking cars that went along the skit of; “I die where my brother should die.”
Not in this lifetime old chap; here you are just another dispensable rag, plenty more out there to trample on. By the time you’ve come to your senses, you’re lying on a fleabed, in a 4 by 4 cell, all alone. Thembi is out there looking ahead to the rest of the life ahead of her. The one every kid deserves, even you. Tony doesn’t even bother thanking you with a visit. Your mom is in tears whenever she summons the strength to see the person who broke her heart forever. And what else can she do, son, except lie that your father is a lawyer when in fact he is nothing but a prisoner who wallows in his cell fighting every day in the hope that his son will turn out not the same way that he did.
Yours, Truthfully
Your Father
PUBLISH’D AFRIKA Magazine Facebook Short Story Competition is funded by the National Arts Council, Department of Sport, Arts and Culture and Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme 3
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