The phone has been ringing right off the hook since last week’s report about our new beginning in the northern suburbs. This would have been gratifying if it wasn’t for the fact that most callers have been obsessed, not with what we’ve managed to do about our safety, but with two burning questions: did we get a new maid (one that wasn’t from Malawi) after we fired the old one, and how are we coping with the maintenance of the swimming pool?
These are both sore points. They are an uncomfortable reminder of the “ying/yang”, “them/us” territory we used to inhabit, and its lingering shadow.
The best way I can describe that “them/us” universe is to refer back to my first visual impression of the land of my birth after more than 30 years “overseas”.
As the massive aircraft began its final descent, the grey light of the alien Highveld dawn fell across the wintry world that was rushing up to meet us. We swept across some nameless white suburb, where every house had a double garage, manicured lawns, and, yes, the obligatory, dazzlingly blue kidney-shaped pool.
Then, as we swept lower, the first images of some equally nameless black township, mile upon mile of almost unrelieved dust, across which the millions of matchbox houses were strewn with genocidal orderliness. Somewhere down there, between these two worlds, were the people I was coming back to live with.
A week in the township, warm as the bosom of my instantly extended family was, proved to me that I would never regain the long-lost skills of that kind of jungle survival. Education had made me stupid.
At the same time, the thought of living in the north, behind those fortified walls, seemed out of the question. Politically speaking, it just didn’t seem to be part of the plan.
On the other hand, some of us had been living for many years among the “thems” of Europe (East and West) and America, and should have grown accustomed to this pastiche-Hollywood lifestyle.
Yes, but not quite. Hollywood is a pastiche of all sorts of other things anyway, and the poolside lifestyle of rich white South Africa was merely a pastiche of a pastiche. How do you get your head into that?
Besides, in the outside world we had chosen to huddle together self-consciously as exiles, rather aloof from the societies we found ourselves in. We weren’t planning to be around there for too long. We didn’t get sucked into bingo and Beethoven because we were going “home”, sooner or later. At “home” we wouldn’t need to indulge in such shallow cultural activities.
All very well, but now that we were home, what was there to identify with? Well, that first impression, through the window of the plane, just about said it all. There was not to be much choice beyond the pool-world and the other one.
So now we’re part of the pool-world. Obligatory accessories in the pool-world include the Maid, the Private Police Force, and the Barracuda.
And, yes, we did get a new maid. In fact we’ve had two in succession, but that’s a long story. The private police force is a necessary evil that we try to see as little as possible. But it is the pool, and the vicious Barracuda that lurks inside it like a serpent of the deep, that eats up most of our physical and intellectual resources.
I can admit now that a pool was not something that I had given much thought to during the first few decades of my life. It was only when a sharp, Sotho-speaking character driving a Mazda MX-6 came to test the water that I started to get a hang of how little I knew about it. He announced that the black, rubbery quality of the water was a little abnormal, and explained that the pool would have to be drained, chemically cleaned, and then refilled.
I had visions of a man in a wetsuit plunging in and pulling out a plug, releasing tons of water into a subterranean sewage system. Then I imagined it being refilled from a hidden, fold-out tap inside the pool. Nothing like that. The process was both simpler and more complicated, involving the manipulation of pumps and hosepipes.
Then came the endless juggling of lethal chemicals to keep the new water clean. The gardener (who had recovered by this time, by the way) had quite an amusing time watching me weep uncontrollably, my shoes ruined by pool acid and my chest thick with chlorine fumes.
But I got my own back when a rat got stuck up the Barracuda. How this happened I cannot tell, but after a week of failing to get it to wriggle, I took the whole apparatus to the pool shop. They looked at me like I was mad, and showed me the head of a rat sticking out of the machinery. Since they wouldn’t remove it, I had to delegate the task to George. It was a pretty foul business, but George doesn’t snigger at me anymore.
I think this means that I have arrived.
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