The Obvious Wound

My present situation; trapped in a abusive situation.

The Obvious Wound

On Magnolia Lane there are eyes everywhere. They peer from behind twitching lace curtains. They glance from between the slits of black burqas and slide sideways in the brown shaven head of the drug dealer who holds up the lamppost at the corner of Highgate Road. The looks that limp or sidle or strut from these eyes slip around corners, defying the laws of light and sight; they creep into darkened curtained rooms; they see all; know all; perceive the hidden secrets of this blossoming suburb that was once an apartheid ghetto.

Chatsworth seethes with hidden secrets and dreams of vengeance. Generation old family and community feuds hunker down in darkened rooms and wait to pounce onto the quiet domesticity of its streets and bare bloodied fangs in some unspeakable and unexpected violence.

Two decades into the new rainbow nation I am still regarded as a novelty in this predominantly Indian area and can feel the looks that examine my white face suspiciously when I’m at the local Take ‘n Pay with David.


It was Sunday and almost midday when David eventually got out of bed. I had already cleaned the tiny ‘outbuilding’; David’s word, I would have called it a cottage or, even more grandly, a granny cottage, but I suppose that would be like calling the concrete yard a garden. ‘Outbuilding’ was probably the right word. I’d taken the carpets out and shaken them, dusted thoroughly because David was in the habit of running his fingers along the furniture and all hell would break loose if he found any dust, swept and then washed the dirty dishes that had been left in the sink the night before. While David is coughing up phlegm in the bathroom, I make the bed and tidy the bedroom that smells of fart.

When I’m finished I clean up after David, who has made breakfast for himself, heating up leftovers and leaving a mess as usual. The milk and butter is on the counter. He never returns things that may spoil to the fridge, just as he leaves clothes wherever he removes them and never lifts the toilet seat so that there’s always urine on it. On a few occasions I’ve forgotten to clean the seat before sitting down and ended up with a circle of piss on my backside. I wipe it off on David’s towel in silent reproach.

“Why should I clean up after myself”, David says if I dare to point out his untidy and filthy habits, “When I’m the only one working?” As far as he’s concerned I’m just a lazy bum who sits around all day doing nothing. “You’re a f*****g useless c**t; a user, a waster.” I think that David, who has never had a good command of the English language, uses swear words to camouflage the fact that his vocabulary is so limited. To David, I’m just an unpaid servant. I think of myself as being a slave; a servant would get much better treatment than I do.

We have lunch with David’s parents, who live in the main house. I’ve sliced and diced and chopped and set the table and after the meal I’ll be expected to wash the dishes while the family chats at the dining room table. I tried to conceal the disgust I felt for the chicken necks, giblets, gizzards and feet that were served in an over spiced chutney that contained no less than eleven green chilies. I knew this because I’d had to chop them. I got used to the food after the first few months and found that it really didn’t matter what the ingredients were because everything just tasted of chili to me. It overpowered the taste of any other ingredient and I’m beginning to think that it has permanently numbed my taste buds.

I’d tried to show some interest in the conversation but there were only a few subjects that were discussed by David and his parents: family gossip; the weather; how rich their minister was; the comings and goings of the neighbors that his mother watched from her window and, of course; food. The place was a food factory; everything was about food. Every social occasion revolved around it, they talked about it, shopped for it (endlessly, like addicts), compared the prices for every ingredient, prepared it, prayed over it, ate it, criticized it, never praised it and then began to discuss what they should have for their next meal.

Joshua’s mother; “I can’t eat-a potatoes anymore-a, they stick in my chest. The-a fella on TV says-a that green beans are good for your brains-a”, looking at me pointedly, “Disting has-a healing powers an all.” She has picked up a zealous TV evangelists accent and, mixed with her local dialect, everything she says sounds as though she’s casting out demons; ‘I curse-a this evil demon of ho-mo-sexuality in the-a name-a of the Lord-a.’

I never said much at these shared meals; in fact I hardly spoke unless spoken to. Only to Joshua’s father, who is as henpecked as I am, did I ever volunteer any conversation and then it was normally some comment on the weather, stating the glaringly obvious. “Its hot today, looks like it’s going to rain, it’s getting chilly - excuse the pun - in the morning now”. But what else is there to say?


On Monday morning, after I’d made David’s lunch and woken him with a massage to his back, neck and head (if I don’t perform this obsequious daily duty David would get up in a worse mood than usual) and he had left for work, I sat in the tiny outbuilding and contemplated my situation. It was three years since my psychiatric condition and failed suicide attempts had resulted in the loss of my few remaining clients and the prescribed medication had turned me into a zombie. I was too pale, too frail and too male to find gainful employment.

The ache that I feel in my heart is not metaphorical, it’s an actual pain. It comes and goes; ebbs and flows, gently, like lapping waves on a spring tide sea. It’s difficult to isolate or describe because it mingles with shifting emotions that flow through and about me. I cannot say when I first felt it or how it arose; it seems to have always been there. It’s impervious to psychology; indulging my addictions does not dislodge it; abstaining from excesses does not remove it and prayer cannot dissolve it.

I had carefully examined all of the usual suspects; the yearnings for alcohol, drugs, gambling and sex; the genetic and physiological genesis of my depressed and manic cycles. But it was the obvious wound of my heart that I just couldn’t see, even though it was staring at me straight in my heart’s eye.

All I am trying to do at this moment is understand this pain; to survive this bipolar depression until it inevitably swings around to the more manageable and productive low key manic phase; without surrendering to the mind numbing influence of medication or the immobilizing and demoralizing fear of abuse. I tell myself half-heartedly; there is meaning and I will find it; there is hope and I will believe in it even if I cannot see it right now; there is purpose and I will accept that this moment is just part of my quest for wholeness. I remember a quotation from Ernest Dowson’s Non Sum Qualis Eram; ‘I was desolate and sick of an old passion’.

The love hate relationship that exists between David and I is a delicate, tremulous thing. It’s seductively beautiful and tragic; numinous in its fragile hypnotic melody. It’s suspended in time like a fly struggling to free itself from the spun web of a spider. It’s struggling for release only to become more entangled in this gossamer prison, while the spider watches; waiting to consume it in its surrender.

For me, the love component of this emotional duet is made up of echoes that reverberate through the years that now seemed timeless; first love; passions that had grown tired because of repeated enactments; memories of the moment I had met David and our first physical contact (how I had explored the boys body, like Livingstone snaking the Zambezi and discovering the Victoria Falls); the lie that had risen within me; ‘finally, I have found the one that I have been searching for, finally.’

The element of hate in this two part harmony; the song of our doomed love, came from the verbal, emotional and physical cruelty that I suffer at the lips, heart and hands of David.

The twenty years that separated us; years that we’d first regarded as ‘only a number’, had taken on an ominous form shortly after we began to sing this tragic love duet together. Each day seemed to further separate us, driving a wedge of another twenty four hours between us. While communication technology engulfed David and swept him along relentlessly to a point where he is now a slave to his Blackberry, I was alienated even further by being technologically challenged. I know what LOL means but the other acronyms are all mysteries to me; codes that I cannot break however hard I try.

I have never been good with foreign languages. While I fell in love with English at first sight and sound and caressed and fondled each new word that I learnt as a child, I had failed to master the hated and harsh Afrikaans that had been thrust upon me in my youth. It represented a ruling party that was determined to stamp out all forms of difference. And being different was the only thing I had, the only certainty left that I could cling to.

While David was following a path that promised friends and sex (for all I knew), I was falling back into a world where words were my only friends and lovers.

But age, language, abuse and ethnic difference aren’t what my pain is all about. The obvious wound that I had kept missing was that we didn’t really love each other at all. We never had. We had needed each other, each for our own reason, and had confused need with love. But it’s not really the same thing, is it?

Reviews

[StarNinja]

Poetic and Prosaic all at the same time. I'm not a big poetry guy, because things like stanzas and iambic pentameter just make the language feel so stunted and artificial, but this was actually well executed in my opinion. It's hard to describe what exactly it is but it works. Poetic prose. Very nice work. The emotional content of the story really came through, which is a tricky thing to do, but you nailed it.