Coming to grips with allergies

I just came back from a visit to the doctor. Things were going haywire in my life, in my house, in my family. My wife had urged me to take specialist advice before things got out of hand. She could see I was going bonkers.

I was hearing and seeing things that one shouldn’t be hearing and seeing. There was a constant buzzing in my ears and shadows flitting incessantly in the corner of my eye.

I was lying awake at night, oppressed by aliens.

The worst was in the deep of night, when I just couldn’t sleep. I named my demons, my jinns, the devils and devilinas who were tormenting my brain, and I pointed them out to her and called for affirmation. But my wife and family told me I was deluded — even when I linked the advent of the aliens in my brain to the probability of an invasion of the African continent by United States President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony ‘Blah-Blah” Blair. Against their better judgement, my family wasn’t buying it.

So finally I went to the doctor.

The doctor checked me out, threw radar signals in my ears, sucked blood from my veins, and finally told me that my problem was allergies. Plenty allergies. He said he had never seen anyone who was allergic to as many things as I was.

‘Tell me the worst, Doc,” I said to him. ‘ I can take it.”

So after running through an incredible list of things I’d never heard of, or had subliminally come to fear, whether I had heard of them or not, such as rhinitis, mattresitis, mattress mites, cats, dogs, hamsters, jellyfish, old books, DVDs, expired columnists, editors on the lam, fish out of water, pork on the hoof, and the very air that we breathe, he hit me with the big one.

‘You have an inherent allergy to bullshit,” he said, his eyes staring wide at me. He comes from Yugoslavia (remember Yugoslavia?) but that didn’t make any difference. ‘Allergy to bullshit,” he repeated, writing notes on the little pad in front of him on his desk. ‘It’s your biggest problem.”

‘H-h-h-how do I treat this, doc?” I whined. ‘If your diagnosis is correct, I need to get this out of my system before the next election. Otherwise I’m going to start killing people involuntarily and possibly end up in a court of law.”

‘Don’t worry,” he replied, ‘the law has been temporarily suspended. At least until we find out whether the two top representatives of the law of the land, the national director of public prosecutions and the minister of justice, both black chaps from the struggle, are actually in the clear, which it seems to me they now are, given recent developments.”

‘What do you mean in the clear, Doc?” I asked, trying to control the general shaking in my limbs. ‘What do you mean recent developments?”

‘Apartheid Agent RS452 has been identified,” he replied in his carefully clipped voice. ‘It is neither Bulelani Ngcuka nor Penuell Maduna. It is a previously unidentified white chick who now lives in England. The struggle is over. You should start to relax.”

How can you relax when you’ve got heebies and jeebies crawling up your spine as an inherited condition? This spy thing has been going on for years — or at least since the 1960s, before most of you were born. There have been so many spy allegations as a core part of how we waged the struggle that no one, not even the people in the struggle, knew whether they themselves were spies any more.

Everyone assumed that everyone else was a spy. It even became a cool way of identifying yourself: ‘Hoe’s it, spy?” Funny, but not so funny.

Fart next to a policeman and you were branded a spy. Breaking under torture at Marshall Square goes without saying. But speak your mind next to an undeclared operative of Umbokodo (the African National Congress’s former security wing) in Luanda or Lusaka and you’re toast.

So it’s easy to be a spy.

What is not so easy is to be paid for being a spy, to be registered and recognised as having been a spy, or to be thanked for your thankless work of spying if you really did it or are still doing it — even if nobody knows you were doing it, which usually they didn’t and probably still don’t.

Spying then, spying now and spying in arrears is a bamba zonke kind of world where anything goes. No one knows who is really pointing the fingers. The president and the head of the ANC, who has known a lot of spies in his time, stays mum, leaving it to his minions to fight it out among themselves.

The Office of Innuendo is tasked with dealing with it. The emperor sits it out in his palace and looks inscrutable.

But then again, innuendo, as I have said before, is the key signature that has replaced the honourable tenets of the Freedom Charter from long ago. Whoever leads the ANC nowadays is obliged to be the ultimate, impenetrable master of innuendo. Spying, being caught spying, or being caught with your pants down shaking hands with spies, is the ultimate, unanswerable condition of innuendo. The key thing is to survive it, or make sure the finger points the other way while you pull your trousers back up.

Innuendo turns politics into Nintendo — or, at best, karaoke.

So, anyway. We have an election coming up, which nobody is talking about, because the outcome is all pre-arranged.

Spies, non-spies, murderers, witch doctors, embezzlers, Fu Manchu artists and crooks will all be returned to Parliament, because there is no alternative. There will also be the odd saint trying to make his or her voice heard above the fray. But life will go on as usual.

And my doctor will probably go on telling me that it’s all about allergies in my head, and I should keep on taking the drugs.

And me, I will leap at them. Just to avoid going insane.