My old man: Gerry Harper made sure his son didnt fall to the bullets of Belfast or to a life in the shipyards. (Facebook)
Tuesday night.
I’m moving like one of the walking dead as I stumble off the plane at Durban’s King Shaka airport. There’s a sense of déjà vu about the wall of wet heat, the exhaustion, the forcing of one foot in front of the other, the salt in the air. I suppose there should be; it’s the second time I’ve done this since Sunday.
In seconds after disembarking I’m soaked. Sweat pours off my head as I claw off the jacket I’ve been wearing because of a one-on-one with Democratic Alliance leader Mmusi Maimane in Jo’burg earlier in the day, the reason my return to Durban on Sunday night had to be repeated today.
I was still unpacking my bags on Monday morning when the welcome-back present — an 8am Tuesday interview with the Good Reverend in the heart of Sandton — arrived. I grabbed a jacket and toothbrush, kicked my bags under the bed and headed for the airport.
Not exactly the slow, relaxed, swim-punctuated reintegration into the working world I’d been hoping for after three weeks away, but Jozi is way warmer than where I’ve spent the past fortnight.
I’d also never met Maimane — I’d thus far only seen him on TV and received SMS messages from him warning me about the dangers of voting for the ANC — so there are worse ways to spend a Tuesday morning.
Clearly Maimane didn’t get my expletive-ridden responses to the SMSes, otherwise there was no way he would have sat down with me without having first exorcised the foul-mouthed socialist demons inside me.
Maimane, it turns out, is an okay cat. The Good Reverend is way more convincing in person than on TV. Maimane’s well prepared: full of facts and figures, funny, in a witty preacher kind of way. His answers are pretty direct for a politician, and there’s little fat attached to his responses. Maimane doesn’t balk at my question about never being president of the republic, endorses controlled cannabis when prodded and neither attempts to convert nor resurrect me, so I guess it all went pretty well.
But it’s good to be home.
This time last week I was sitting in the Great Eastern Bar in Newtownards Road in East Belfast, necking £2.50 Guinness pints and £2 Ding Dongs, as Bells is known in that part of town, with a blind man called Pat and watching the Liverpool vs Dortmund game while waiting for my man to come through with some of the city’s finest cannabis.
I’d ducked into the Great Eastern to wait out the deluge of freezing rain that had been hammering Belfast since Tuesday and to kill time while awaiting the go-ahead to head towards the Short Strand and pick up my bud.
There had been no real intention to drink, but the Great Eastern isn’t the kind of place to order a cranberry juice, unless it has a treble vodka in it, so one thing led to another and by the time I got the message to go ahead, I was pretty well oiled.
The Great Eastern is a heavy place. Inside it’s all dark wood, cheap booze and Liverpool and Rangers banners, 100% Hun territory. The locals are friendly enough though. I’m not black, Catholic or East European and I look like them.
Once they discover I’m from South Africa, they all have the same question: Can you carry?
Outside, the walls honour the dead from one side of the sectarian divide, some of whom took a bullet in the parking lot next to the Great Eastern’s side exit.
I’m in Belfast for the hardest of reasons. My father, Gerald Harper, died, two days short of his 84th birthday, so I’m here with my middle son, Small James, to bury him.
It was hard, but we got it done. Somehow.
Gerald was a top man, a cat with a sharp tongue and a warm heart, a brave man who went out of his way to make sure that I escaped Belfast, both its political violence and the school-to-shipyard sentence imposed on him, his father and brothers and generations of his family before them. I reckon I owe him my life, given my inability to follow the herd. I’d have been killed or gone to jail if I’d stayed there.
Gerald taught me the bulk of the things of value that I know. He had me reading before I started school. He taught me to think for myself, to stand my ground, to despise bullies, to laugh at myself.
The last time I saw Gerald was in a Facebook video call a week before he died. The old man was sick, but full of life, inquiring, as usual, as to when I was getting a real job. The next day he took a fall. Things went downhill from there and he was gone by the time we got to Belfast.
In some ways I’m glad — I’d rather remember him like that than lying stricken in a hospital bed.