Son by Sonnekus Neil

Author:Sonnekus, Neil
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781920601904
Publisher: Jacana Media
Published: 2016-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

On Caring

* * *

As usual, it took me hours to fall asleep, meaning I overslept and was late and only thought of putting on a quartet, the eleventh, halfway to the capital. This somehow helped me focus on the old man and got me thinking about a creature I’d once met.

Oliver had also been a war survivor. He was the uncle of my first intense flame, B, at varsity and he had been in an explosion. After the war Uncle Oliver had walked into the Standard Bank for his first job interview, stopped, turned around and went home to spend the rest of his life having breakfast, lunch and supper with his mother. These rituals were interspersed with tea at precisely ten and three. He would also go for two walks a day, one in the early morning and one in the late afternoon. All the small seaside town’s dogs would follow Uncle Oliver on these walks. The rest of his day was spent reading the classics. Homer, Tolstoy, Dickens. That was it and at least my father wasn’t like that, I’d thought, but I wasn’t so sure anymore. All I knew was that he too would never stoop to talk to anybody about his problem because a) he would say there wasn’t a problem and b) those people spoke rubbish anyway.

Right now, however, I had something else to worry about as I got to the old man’s house at the end of the ultra-quiet second movement of the serioso: he wasn’t standing at the gates. And they were locked with a small chain. This got me fretting about his safety again. As a child I had spent sleepless nights worrying that he would die, but now I’d more or less accepted that he would “go” with nothing being resolved between the two of us. Why should it? If it hadn’t happened between my mother and I, who in many respects were closer, why then between him and me? But the thought of finding him dead in his back yard or kitchen was still not a pleasant one, so I parked outside, locked up, put my hand on one of the gates and swung over. That’s when I saw what had distracted him from waiting for me faithfully, worrying.

It came running towards me as soon as my feet touched the driveway: another canine nightmare, another dachshund, charging at me, tan ears flapping, barking as if I had just committed the most appalling crime imaginable. I shouted at the low bastard and took aim to kick its head through its delayed arse, whereupon it promptly lay down and proceeded to spray a neon yellow fluid all over itself and the paved rose bricks. The old man came out through the middle door, looking as pleased as pie.

“What the hell is this?” I shouted, distantly aware of the fact that not only was I adjusting my curses, but I was doing so in a way that sounded scarily like him.

“I’ve decided to call him Howfy.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.