Home is where the boomslang is

Only a moron goes on holiday to Durban in February – the one month in the year when the council has to mop up puddles of melted people at the end of each day. I, apparently, am nothing if not a moron.

In my defence, this was to be a working holiday of sorts. Contrast being one of life’s more piquant spices, pleasure is generally best combined with a dash of suffering. So I would use the opportunity to visit my 82-year-old father. That would take care of the suffering portion.

Old people are a pain. If you are old and reading this, I obviously don’t mean you. I’m talking about other old people. Who aren’t you. Thought I should clear that up before you start writing, hands trembling with frailty and outrage, letters to the editor.

My father has lived in the same house since I was four years old. Like a kangaroo rat, he is happiest when in, or near, his burrow. Actually, he’s more of a Komodo dragon. Either way, my father is endemic to Durban North.

On the rare occasion that I visit, my father lets me use my late mother’s Yaris. I’ve noticed that this makes my sister anxious. I suspect he quietly put it in her name after my mum died but they can’t let on because they know I’ll make a scene and accuse him of favouritism and threaten to burn the house down unless I get fair and just compensation.

The problem with not having lived in your home town for 20 years is that when you do go back, your family still thinks of you as young and reckless. When my father gave me the keys to the Yaris, I got a lecture from him and my sister about not driving like a maniac. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not 40 any more.”

Right now, I’m in my lair on the north coast, slumped on the couch with a battery of cheap fans arranged around me in a Zulu pincer movement. It’s not helping. It only makes the hot air angrier. I fetch a beer from the fridge and by the time I get back it’s warm.

I don’t know how Durban people get anything done in summer. Maybe that’s why the eThekwini municipality gives the impression of being the headquarters of an organised crime syndicate. It’s too humid to actually work. Nobody wants their Louboutins pooling with sweat. Fraud, money laundering and routine corruption can be accomplished quite comfortably from inside an air-conditioned office.

By the third day, I could feel my muscles atrophying. I needed to get out. I had already visited the superannuated paterfamilias and peculiar sibling, who has moved back into her childhood bedroom and inexplicably assumed the role of matriarch, and the stress of a second visit could easily kill me.

If the stress didn’t get me, something lurking in the garden certainly would. That might be the wrong word. You could call it a garden when my mother was still alive. Today you need a machete to make it to the front door.

Nobody has seen the pathway in years and the trees are alive with snakes. The walls, inside and out, are stained with monkey paw prints and mongooses have the run of the house. The pool I once swam in as a teenager has degenerated into a health hazard. My father, who has a long white beard and cuts his own hair, calls it an eco pool. If you had to dip your toe in the water, you’d be wearing a prosthetic foot within a week.

Sighing heavily, I peeled myself off the couch and drove like a maniac to the beachfront. I rented a bicycle and set off for the harbour entrance, which increasingly appeared to be several hundred kilometres away. The humidity was peaking at around a million percent as I passed North Beach’s strip of culinary atrocities masquerading as restaurants. For those with food poisoning or cardiac issues and can’t afford an ambulance, rickshaws are there to trundle you off to Addington Hospital.

The clock at the South Beach lifesavers’ building is permanently stuck at 11.30. I think it happened when the whites-only signs were removed. Even the clocks were shocked into silence.

Racing through the four gears, I reached the end of the promenade and headed down the pier towards the port. There weren’t many people around. I was dehydrating fast and knew if I didn’t get something to drink soon, that would be the end of the road for me. Suddenly there it was. Music, tables with umbrellas, people drinking beer. Behind a security fence. I found the entrance at the end of a dirt road, dropped the bike and staggered to the bar.

Instead of urgently providing beer-to-mouth resuscitation, the barman said he couldn’t serve me because I wasn’t a member. I considered swimming into the harbour and climbing aboard a passing vessel. Panama? Fine. They’ll give me a beer.

Then, a big oke sporting multiple tattoos went to the toilets. I followed him and when he came out I prodded a fifty into his hands and asked him to buy me a beer. It made me feel both underaged and homeless. He shook his head, took me by the arm and escorted me inside.

Too weak to fight him off, I allowed myself to be led to the bar.

“Barman,” said the brute. “This is my brother. Give him whatever he wants.”

Carboloaded to the point of incoherence, I was about to set off when my phone rang. It was my sister, asking me to come to the house right away. Father was having trouble walking. “Aren’t we all,” I said.

By the time I had cycled back to my car, driven to the house and hacked my way through the undergrowth – a boomslang down my shirt and a monkey on my back – I was exhausted. I told my sister she needed to call an ambulance, then collapsed on the lounge floor. The paramedics seemed to think my father’s need was greater and ordered me to help carry him through the jungle, down the stairs and into the street. That nearly killed me, too.

At the hospital, a doctor with multiple piercings and the bedside manner of a 14-year-old drama queen ignored me and made a fuss over my father, even though it was obvious to anyone with a proper medical background that I was the one in need of drugs.

Anyway, there was nothing wrong with the old malingerer. Well, nothing apart from a bit of cancer. He was home by evening, covered in mongooses and shouting at me for not fully appreciating Shakespeare’s genius.

Two days later, I came down with a hacking cough and a throat full of razor blades. I must have picked up something at the hospital and blamed my father entirely. Over the next week I lost my voice and very nearly my mind, eventually flying back to Cape Town with a bubbling chest surrounded by people who glared at me as if to say it would be my fault if they died of coronavirus.

I doubt I shall go on holiday again.

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