Beautiful Screaming of Pigs by Damon Galgut Page A

‘or a one-race hostel?’ She was icily furious and I could see there was a scene coming.
    ‘Mom,’ I said. ‘Just leave it.
Why don’t you go and stay at Godfrey’s place tonight?’
    ‘This kind of thinking,’ she said, ‘will be history soon.’
    The bald man was going red, but the moment – and the scene – thankfully passed. ‘All
right,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and stay somewhere else with my boyfriend .’
    It took her a while to pack her overnight bag. Then she came and touched my cheek and said, very seriously, ‘Patrick. You don’t mind, do you?’
    ‘Mind what?’
    ‘Me going. You’ll be all right on your own.’
    ‘Perfectly fine,’ I said, but I wasn’t sure whether this was what she’d really wanted to ask. There was a weight to the little question that made us both feel
uncomfortable.
    ‘We’ll come and get you in the morning,’ Godfrey said. ‘Sometime after breakfast.’
    She started to say something else, but by then Godfrey was manhandling her, all angles and skin, through the door. She waved once, weakly, then I heard her renewed giggling floating up the
stairs.
    Abandoned in the passage, I felt suddenly desolate. That innocuous fluorescent light, those slippery tiles, were the shore of a strange foreign land. I heard the car start up below, drive off.
    I went to my room and sat there for a while. I knew that I couldn’t sleep, despite my tiredness. On the floor below, some UNTAG officials were having a party; I heard music blaring.
Outside, the lightning sizzled.
    Then – though I hadn’t planned it – I went to phone my father. It was after midnight and I woke him up, but I could hear he was pleased that I’d called.
    ‘How you doing, Patrick?’
    ‘Fine.’
    ‘The drive okay?’
    ‘Yup.’
    Then, because there was too much to say, we didn’t speak at all. In the pause, lightning flickered again; I could hear its burr on the line. I found myself saying:
    ‘Dad, she’s... ’
    ‘Is she with him?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They’ve gone now.’
    My father made a noise: maybe just a swallow, but it sounded like a tiny glottal cry. For an instant, joined by a thousand kilometres of umbilical line, the telephone united us both. I opened my
mouth to speak, but at that moment the storm broke outside. The phone went dead in my ear.

 
CHAPTER SIX
    I’d been posted to the border in April the previous year, along with thousands of others: a rankless, nameless number. After basic training I was flown in a Dakota to the
far north of South West Africa – now Namibia – and deposited at the side of an airstrip in the bush.
    Our camp was miles from any recognizable settlement. We lived out our lives between shades of brown: our uniforms and tents, and the colour of the landscape in every direction. For most of the
time that I spent in this camp we didn’t do very much except keep ourselves going. Most of us weren’t patriotic, but we were obedient. We were like a nomadic, inbred community, obsessed
with ourselves. Our tribe was the army, our secret rites and rituals were tribal: we made our beds, we stood inspection, occasionally we did PT under the eye of a bored corporal. For the rest we
lay around in the tents, playing cards, writing letters, telling jokes. An old scene, as old as the first village.
    We thought for a while that we would never see war. But there is a certain terror in waiting. Perhaps only I felt it so acutely: the ennui and aimlessness, in which the overpowering maleness of the place started to suffocate me. It was the first occasion in my life that I had been in a group of men, with not a single female face. More to the point, it was the first
occasion I’d been away from my mother for any length of time. It was like being with my father and his friends in an isolated hunting lodge, deep in the swamps somewhere, for months and
months and months. Except that it was only the officers and permanent force members who were older; most of these