Beautiful Screaming of Pigs by Damon Galgut Read Free Book Online Page A

eventually emerged she was wearing make-up and perfume, two things she had sworn on principle never to use again after she’d left my
father. She simpered and twirled around for me to see. She had on a green skirt and sandals and a white blouse. Around her neck was a string of pearls that I dimly remembered my father giving her
after he came back from an overseas trip somewhere. And it was only after we had crossed the yard to our car and were driving through the sultry streets again that I noticed she had shaved her legs
– another broken covenant.
    Though full night had fallen and there were clouds in the sky, the heat was unbroken. ‘God, it’s unbearable,’ she said, dabbing at her neck with a hanky. The headlights in the
car were erratic and at night she always crouched over the wheel alarmingly, as if in preparation for disaster. As we went she pointed out places of interest on either side: ‘the
administrator general’s house,’ she told me, ‘the police station... that’s the way to the airport... ’
    Godfrey wasn’t a student anymore; he worked for SWAPO now. We were going to fetch him at his house, which was in the township. The view I could see from my hostel room window included the
road we were on now. There was a clear dividing line where Windhoek came to an end and Katatura began; as we crossed over this line I said to her, ‘Are you sure you know where we’re
going?’
    ‘Of course I’m sure. I’ve been here hundreds of times. You don’t have to worry, Patrick. It’s perfectly safe, I promise you.’
    I’d visited perhaps three or four townships in my life. A few times, when I was small, I’d been with my father when he drove one of his workers home. But those trips were distant
memories and belonged anyway to another point in history: before 1976, before Soweto happened. In recent years, of course, the townships had become war zones. These days the soldiers that
weren’t sent up to the border were sent to the townships instead – a different sort of border. Somebody from my matric class at school, a boy I hadn’t known very well, had been
killed in one of these township battles.
    Although they were usually invisible, the townships were always close by. They encircled our cities like besieging battalions. They were always just out of sight, over a rise, behind a hill,
discharging smoke and noise and a daily cargo of flesh. Buses and taxis came in and out, trains rattled in their guts. The newspapers at night carried stories of the terrible things that happened
in them. We’d made them what they were, then despised them for what they weren’t. They were a negative print of our lives.
    Godfrey lived in an untarred little street, with tiny houses clustered close together like clams. There were no pavements, no lights. We swerved around a group of boys playing soccer in the
gloom, who seemed utterly uninterested in us, then passed a horse that was ambling aimlessly, and pulled up at a house like any of the others. There was a warm breeze stirring as we got out.
Perspiration pricked out the line of my spine. I followed my mother through a lopsided gate, across a dusty yard, to a tin door. As we were about to knock a skeletal dog came running at us, but it
was tied to a chain and couldn’t come close. Only after it jerked up short did it start to bark – furiously, manically, but somehow without passion.
    The door opened suddenly. Godfrey was a short, squat figure in a red T-shirt emblazoned with a SWAPO slogan. He looked completely impassive, but then suddenly smiled at my mother and put out a
hand to squeeze her arm. Just that: the small gesture of greeting; and I remembered what she had said about how cold he was. But the effect was tender, and when he shook my hand I could feel how
much soft warmth came through his big fingers.
    ‘Come in,’ he said.
    I followed my mother, who followed him, into a small kitchen. The walls and floor were bare concrete. There was a