The Last Summer: Part 1

Continued from: Oh What a Night: New Year's Eve 1986 Part 3

It's a few days after that disastrous New Year's morning in 1986 I'm driving back from Durban's Addington beach with Carl - the newest "replacement" for my late father.

Carl is slender, all whip-cord muscle, skin deeply tanned and character-lined; he's impressed me with his quiet manner and his easy, almost lazy, swimming stroke that carves efficiently through the foaming surf; I like him but I know he won't last out the month.

Now driving back in his car we sit in comfortable silence, contemplating the sting of the grainy salt on our bare skin, the weight of the heavy clouds hanging in the sky like full cheesecloth, the taste and smell of the haze in the fading grey of the late afternoon.

Then something smacks the rear windscreen - like a rude slap across the back of the head - cracks striating from the center of the glass, then another heavy thud on the front panel, then another spray of broken glass at the front, a bump as the car goes over a brick.

I should realise straight away what is happening, but it takes a while to digest, so I sit there as if I'm watching it all on the six o'clock news while Carl weaves in an out of hundreds of people who have swarmed onto the freeway from both sides, arms raised with bottles and rocks, riotous faces grinning maniacally, hurling their projectiles and words with year upon year of stored-up anger.

Somehow we slip through the mayhem and I absent-mindedly watch it disappearing in the rear-view mirror, fading like the memory of a dream. By the time Carl pulls into our driveway I'm back to brooding: not about the empty chair where my father used to sit; not about the my mother's spiralling descent into madness nor my desperately lonely, frightened little sisters; not about the world that is threatening to explode like the bloated supernova that is the apartheid regime in its death throes. No, in my own madness I am brooding about Lauren.

* * * * * *

It all started more than a year earlier, back when my father was still alive, my mother still sane, the babes still content and my world still buzzing with potential and joie de vivre.

I had only just met the "new guy" Craig, so I was both surprised and perplexed when he turned up at my door in the dead of night, a shaking, forlorn figure silhouetted behind the late moon.

He said he'd been kicked out of home after a nasty argument with his step-father which had become physical; words were said that could not be unsaid, hands were raised, and Craig high-tailed it out of the driveway on his noisy 2-stroke Kawasaki, unbuttoned pyjama shirt flapping in the wind.

Craig had ridden straight to Trev's (Trev being the only friend he'd made since moving to town) but the lights there were out, the house under a blanket of quiet slumber, so after lurking awhile in the shadow of the giant avocado tree Craig decided to try his only other option - Trev's best friend, me.

As luck would have it I was still up, yawning and heading to the bathroom for a piss, so I let Craig in to my little apartment, pulled out the spare mattress and gave him a cushion while he mumbled his story apologetically, the unfolding drama starkly at odds with his off-hand delivery (but corroborated by his trembling hands).

Over soggy breakfast cereal the following morning Craig told me a little more about his life, his parent's divorce and his sister Lauren - with whom I would soon become acquainted.

I've gotten used to thinking of Lauren as a construct: a wishful projection of "what might have been", but for the slings and arrows that destroyed my family unit, cut short my youth and generally upturned the world in which I once lived.

But I think it is fair to remember that, for a very brief time, Lauren was a real, flesh and blood human being - a paradoxical mix of sophistication and insecurity, of empathy and feistiness, of deftness and awkwardness.

It was a few days later that Craig rang me to say that his sister was arranging a small dinner party and would I like to come: all my gang of 5 were welcome - one to match each of Lauren's friends.

I had just announced my bold venture into the world; I was leaving home and going to Australia - "going forever" I said, only half-understanding the consequences but so drunk with excitement and overconfidence that I didn't care; the world was at my feet and boy, it had better be ready.

I arrived fashionably late, nonchalantly negotiating my motorcycle through the automatic, cast-iron gates and up the long hill to Craig's and Lauren's stately family home, feet dragging at the sides.

I was riding a high - and nothing, it seemed, could over-awe me: not the fact that I was in surrounds that were, by comparison to my own modest home, palatial; not the fact that I was hopelessly under-dressed for the formal evening (I wore my loose calico shirt and torn jeans with a gormless bravado that I somehow pulled off); not even the fact that Lauren and her friends were the paragon of beauty, intellect and sophistication, especially by comparison to me - and my rowdy, scruffy mates (who, I noticed, were on their best behaviour).

Trev, with his swagger, Jim Morrison looks and hypnotic charisma, normally held court at events like this, however I quickly noted that he seemed to have met his match in Lauren's friend Jenny. Indeed he, Paul, Martin and Stephen seemed to have clustered around her like flies to an open pot of honey.

As attractive as Jenny was, my attention was instead drawn like a compass needle to Lauren. What clinched it wasn't her quiet elegance; nor her understated social, organisational and culinary skill; nor her slender, dark - almost Grecian - beauty (flawless skin, obsidian eyes and jet black hair pinned back like a single sheet of silk). Rather, as I was riding home the image that lingered in my mind, burned on my retinas like the afterglow of a light-bulb, was of how she had brought in her baby half-brother to say goodnight, lifted him into her arms and cuddled him, oblivious to us all.