My Only Story. Deon Wiggett

      PROLOGUE

      There is something I witnessed the year I left high school.

      For a boy who dreamed only of being a journalist, it was the story of a lifetime. Trouble is, I forgot all about it.

      It would be more than twenty years before I remembered the events of that scalding, dreadful summer in the Cape Winelands. Before I thought to pick up the story where I left it.

      But first, someone had to die.

      1

      It is a Saturday when everything changes.

      I am at our home in Johannesburg’s leafy north. It is November 2017 and the start of the southern-hemisphere summer, so I celebrate in my usual way: smoke a couple of blunts; read a little; swim a little.

      I am an advertising copywriter for a small ad agency, which I own and should quite enjoy, but today in the swimming pool I am doing my best to forget it. It makes me anxious, like many things do.

      My husband, Riaan, is awesome and seldom anxious. And now he is off to the airport to go to San Francisco.

      ‘Why are you leaving so early?’ I ask as he kisses me goodbye. ‘You’re just going to have to sit around and wait.’

      ‘You mean there won’t be a big rush at the end, like when we’re together?’

      ‘It adds some excitement to proceedings,’ I say, as I normally do when Riaan is being overcautious.

      ‘Love you!’ he says, and hugs me.

      ‘Enjoy Silicon Valley!’ I say, and in a flurry of well wishes and interested cats, Riaan wheels out of the house on his business trip.

      I should be getting ready too as a sun-drenched afternoon slips away. I should phone my parents, and text Riaan something sweet, and, really, I should be leaving now for the same Mexican restaurant for the second night in a row. The restaurant is out of the way and average, but it is where the two halves of a divorced couple are hosting parties on successive nights – not out of spite, but sheer coincidence.

      I do not feel like average Mexican food, but skipping the second night would be a dreadful betrayal of Divorcee Number Two.

      I am now out of time to phone my parents. In real life, my dad is chatty, but on the phone he has the word economy of a man writing a telegram: ‘How are you?’, ‘How’s work?’, ‘How’s Riaan?’, ‘Here’s your mother.’

And then my mother comes on to take no conversational prisoners. In the next hour, she will bring me up to speed on her twelve fledgling olive trees, her challenging new quilt, and whatever her curious eyes have spotted in the past week.

      I’ll phone tomorrow, I have decided by the time I step naked from the pool.

      When I finally get into an Uber, I am thinking about the start of summer, and about making more informed choices from last night’s menu. I forget to text Riaan while he is still here.

      It is the final evening of my regular life.

      2

      Five days later, it is Thursday. I am back in my hometown in the Cape Winelands because it could not be avoided.

      I am wearing a suit, which I seldom do, and it is hot in the church and my tie is choking me. The Dutch Reformed Moederkerk in Stellenbosch is a grand place with stained-glass apostles and an organ large enough to hide several small children. I am sitting next to my mother and my sister in the front pew.

      Earlier, before we came in, the organist was playing Bach beautifully. But now an Afrikaans reverend stands in the pointy pulpit to say some phrases that are foreign and fully irrelevant to me. Everybody here knows what he is going to say. That my dad is dead at sixty-five. That this is part of God’s plan.

      None of this was part of my plan, and God does not exist, yet here I am standing behind a lectern in His house and talking about Dadda, who started dying when I was in the pool, and who was dead twelve hours later from an undetected but life-threatening ailment. I’d missed my chance to ever speak to him again.

      My opening line is fairly bizarre.

      ‘With many people, it’s easy to encapsulate their lives,’ I say in Afrikaans. ‘For example: Uncle Jannie was a quiet man who lived for his homing pigeons.’

      Somebody suppresses a loud laugh. It is the sound of my friend Nella, who has an involuntary reaction to the absurd. Dadda was the same. Large and kind and jolly, and insistent on cracking a joke whenever a situation became too serious.

      And so, for his funeral, I do the same, because he taught me that laughing helps you, and the people around you too.

I barely remember the rest of the service, other than the Beethoven at the end. I assume my aunt Esmé sat with us in the front row. I assume there was praying and standing and sitting. I cannot remember and I am okay with that, although I hope my other jokes were better than the homing-pigeon gag. I was broken and still breaking and dealing with a situation that nothing in my life had prepared me for. The horror was too much, so my brain took me away somewhere safe, leaving my body behind in a church in the Winelands to just get on and do what it must.

      But