Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [63]
Something is changing. He seems to be embarrassed all the time. He does not know where to direct his eyes, what to do with his hands, how to hold his body, what expression to wear on his face. Everyone is staring at him, judging him, finding him wanting. He feels like a crab pulled out of its shell, pink and wounded and obscene.
Once upon a time he used to be full of ideas, ideas for places to go to, things to talk about, things to do. He was always a step ahead of everyone: he was the leader, the others followed. Now the energy that he used to feel streaming out of him is gone. At the age of thirteen he is becoming surly, scowling, dark. He does not like this new, ugly self, he wants to be drawn out of it, but that is something he cannot do by himself.
They visit his father’s new office to see what it is like. The office is in Goodwood, which belongs to the string of Afrikaans suburbs Goodwood-Parow-Bellville. Its windows are painted dark green; over the green in gold lettering are the words PROKUREUR – Z COETZEE – ATTORNEY. The interior is gloomy, with heavy furniture upholstered in horsehair and red leather. The law books that have travelled around South Africa with them since his father last practised in 1937 have emerged from their boxes and are on the shelf. Idly he looks up Rape. Natives sometimes insert the male organ between the thighs of the woman without penetration, says a footnote. The practice falls under customary law. It does not constitute rape.
Is this the kind of thing they do in law courts, he wonders: argue about where the penis went?
His father’s practice appears to be flourishing. He employs not only a typist but an articled clerk named Eksteen. To Eksteen his father leaves the routine business of conveyancing and wills; his own efforts are devoted to the exciting court work of getting people off. Each day he comes home with new stories of people whom he has got off, and of how grateful they are to him.
His mother is less interested in the people he has got off than in the mounting list of monies owed. One name in particular keeps cropping up: Le Roux the car salesman. She badgers his father: he is a lawyer, surely he can get Le Roux to pay up. Le Roux will settle his debt for sure at the end of the month, replies his father, he has promised. But at the end of the month, once again, Le Roux does not settle.
Le Roux does not settle, nor does he make himself scarce. On the contrary, he invites his father for drinks, promises him more work, paints rosy pictures of the money to be made from repossessing cars.
The arguments at home become angrier but at the same time more guarded. He asks his mother what is going on. Bitterly she says, Jack has been lending Le Roux money.
He does not need to hear more. He knows his father, knows what is going on. His father craves approval, will do anything to be liked. In the circles in which his father moves there are two ways of getting to be liked: buying people drinks and lending them money.
Children are not supposed to go into bars. But in the bar of the Fraserburg Road hotel he and his brother used often to sit at a corner table, drinking orange squash, watching their father buy rounds of brandy and water for strangers, getting to know this other side of him. So he knows the mood of expansive bonhomie that brandy creates in him, the boasting, the large spendthrift gestures.
Avidly, gloomily, he listens to his mother’s monologues of complaint. Though his father’s wiles no longer take him in, he does not trust her to see through them: he has watched his father wheedle his way past her too often in the past. ‘Don’t listen to him,’ he warns her. ‘He lies to you all the time.’
The trouble with Le Roux deepens. There are