Chapter One: life is not fair

Dorothea was disappointed when Phillip was born. She’d longed for a daughter who’d realize her unfulfilled dreams and ease the pain of her unhappy marriage, but Phillip had arrived with an appendage that couldn’t be ignored.

Now, when the dark clouds of depression gather in the corners of Phillip’s room at night and seep like sweet molasses into his hollow heart, he imagines that he can hear her screams as he’s pushed from the warm safety and nurture of her womb, into the stark light of a cold and unforgiving world.

His mother told Phillip of her disappointment when he was young and he sat on her lap, feeling her breasts rise and fall as he cuddled into her. “There was a long moment after you’d arrived, when everyone held their breath because you were so silent, waiting for your first cry, and I prayed and begged God that you would be healthy and perfect and that it didn’t matter if you were a boy or a girl.”

In the darkness he thinks about this now, holding his breath, imagining everyone holding theirs. And then, when dizziness begins to engulf him, the sudden first rush of sweet stale air into his lungs and in his mind his primordial cry. A cry that still echoes in his ears it seems; a cry against the injustices of the world; against all that this world would do to him.

He was born a stranger; unwanted; with tainted innocence; an alien with a dangerous difference that would be his undoing.


Phillip remembers lying in his cot, as an infant, looking up at the beautiful and oh so tall figure of his mother. She is singing, a little sadly:

How much is that doggy in the window
the one with the waggily tail
how much is that doggy in the window
I do hope that doggie’s for sale

Dorothea picks him up in her arms and everything is warm and safe and smelling of lavender.

Psychologists have told him, over the years that it’s not possible for him to have such a clear memory of that early age but he clings stubbornly to his recollection of that moment because, for him, it represents an instant when he didn’t feel alone. When he was part of someone else and they were a part of him.

Phillip was a golden child with curly blond hair and blue eyes that still stare back with innocence and curiosity from photographs taken during childhood. He was always flashing an endearing smile, willing all who came within the scope of his magical, engaging influence to love him unconditionally.

In the first few years of his existence his mother doted on him. She gave him everything he wanted. She held him in his night-time fears and wiped away all his tears. She told him that he was gifted and special and that he would fulfil her broken dreams.

At Christmas the house was festooned with coloured streamers and balloons. There was a real tree hung with decorations that had been carefully packed in tissue and housed in boxes that were stored at the top of the camphor smelling linen cupboard. To this day the smell of moth balls brings back memories of Christmas as a small child. His father, dressed as Santa Claus, would chase him screaming to his bed in a terror of delight and he’d lie in that special sleeplessness that was only once a year, listening to the voices of his parents floating into his room from outside and the sound of Christmas carols, (Oh come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant).

He wonders when it was that those boxes of camphor smelling ornaments were left in the darkness of the linen cupboard. He cannot remember the year when the music ceased to drift from old 78” records and the innocent laughter of childhood grew still.

As a toddler Phillip chased butterflies, not wanting to harm them, wanting only to capture their brief, delightful expressions of beauty and freedom.
As he grew older he began to hunt them; stealthily lying in wait until, unaware of the danger, they landed on a full bloom and he’d pounce with his crude net made from a wire hanger and a discarded stocking and trap them. Then he proceeded to suffocate them by sealing them in a jar with a puff of cotton wool, soaked in pure alcohol, and pin their dead bodies to the corkboard that held his collection of the beautiful dead.

Daniel, Phillip’s father, was a hard working bread winner. He worked for the South African Railways, the government run rail services, as a crane driver, leaving early each morning and returning after Phillip was in bed. He didn’t see him much, and although he was kind to Phillip, the boy didn’t feel from him the same bond of loving possessiveness that he felt from his mother when he was small. He was a little afraid of him.

Outside the crane yard his father was a man of God, a prophet who preached fiery sermons of salvation and hell, healed the sick and exorcized demons from his flock with the laying on of hands. Daniel believed that he had been called to convert the heathen Indian population of Durban to Christianity.

It was his father who told him, when he was small and raging against something that wasn’t going his way, kicking his heels and crying out against the world, “It’s not fair, it’s not fair”, that he shouldn’t expect life to be fair; that, if he did, he would have a hard time of it. And now, when life repays his wrong choices and actions with pain and frustration and anxiety, he abdicates responsibility for these consequences by telling himself that it’s just because ‘life is not fair’.

Phillip’s father suffered from moody periods of dark depression that went on for days and sometimes weeks and the boy learnt to stay away from him when he was in these moods. On several occasions he went to what was euphemistically called a nursing home but was obviously a psychiatric sanatorium. Phillip visited him there once, with his mother, and has a vivid mental picture of the blank look on his father’s face and the emptiness in his eyes as he sat on a cool veranda, surrounded by a lawn edged by a forest of dark foreboding trees.

Phillip has another infantile memory, one that he has never told anyone. He’s naked in the bath with his father. He can hear his own laughter but cannot remember what it is he is laughing at. His father stands up and Phillip raises his head and is looking directly up at Daniel’s erect penis. He raises his hand to grab this unexpected and interesting new toy…and that is all that he remembers.

Daniel, on the other hand, has a detailed, crystal clear memory of that moment. He had been splashing water onto Phillip and laughing at the innocent and joyful giggling that was coming from his son. He stood up and to his surprise he had a hard on and Phillip had reached out his hand and grabbed it.

He heard a groan coming from deep inside himself, a groan that he recognized. A groan that terrified him. It took longer than it should for him to pull away from Daniel and step out of the bath.

Phillip had a dog called Wuffy, a small scruffy mongrel that slept in the kitchen. He was old and often unable to control his bowels or bladder through the night. His father would discover this transgression in the early morning and beat him mercilessly with a leather strap that hung from a hook on the kitchen door. Phillip would wake to the sound of the poor dogs screams and lie in his bed in the dark, crying for its pain, wanting to get up and rescue it but too afraid that he may find himself on the receiving end of that dreadful strap.