There's no way to avoid it, Jocelyn thought, as she stumbled through the crowd. All around her were people with lifeless eyes in pursuit of something. Was it happiness? A way out? She couldn't tell. But she knew that if she was to survive the ordeal, she'd have to leave soon. Except there was one more thing on her list that she needed: a gift for Mr D. She closed her eyes and steeled herself as her body and bag was jostled by passers-by, seemingly on similar, perhaps more important, missions.
Once again the question of why in the hell she was doing this was answered by an image in her mind of Mr D sitting on the stoep of his penthouse, squinting at the road below.
"If I close my left eye, all I see is black. When I open it again, my girl, I want to cry with gratitude that God has allowed me to see what I can see. You are out of focus, but at least I know you are there."
It started as an ordinary day for Mr D. He woke up, went for a shower, dressed and waited for his porridge and newspaper on the stoep. He felt something scratch his eye, so he rubbed it, which was possibly the worst thing he could have done. Years of washing his hands in petrol to remove the auto grease and dirt had desensitised him to the extreme pressure he was putting on his eye. The result was a burst blood vessel and blindness. He had to give up his one true love - cars - and tinkering under the hood.
"A car is like a woman," Mr D told her when she visited his workshop. "To keep her happy, you have to fiddle with her every day... And you have to know how to fiddle with her."
Far from being a dirty old man - apart from when he was up to the elbows in brake fluid - Mr D was the kind of person who respected acts of chivalry and reminded the boys in the workshop not to swear when a lady was present. When she left, however, it was open season.
Jocelyn kept still for as long as she could and thought about how she bemoaned her lot in life when Mr D had definitely been through worse.
"I met Buddy when she was fourteen and I was eighteen. My father had just given me a weekend job as a mechanic in the garage and during the week I went to Tech to study mechanics. I took the train every day for five years and then I got my qualification. The day after I graduated, my father handed me the keys to the workshop and said the business was mine. I worked night and day that first year - it was when I started washing my hands in petrol to get rid of all the dirt, which as you'll see still doesn't come out completely - and at the end of the year, I asked my accountant to show me the books. My accountant was actually my high school bookkeeping teacher, old Ollie Snodgrass. He was neat and accurate and I thought that if he couldn't teach me how to balance then he could bloody well balance for me." He laughed until his breath rattled. "I took a copy of that balance sheet to Buddy's father. They lived over on the other side of the Bay. I showed it to him and I said, 'I would like to marry your daughter'. He looked it over and did some arithmetic and I'm not going to lie to you, I began to sweat like hell. Eventually he nodded at me and said, 'Gut.' I think he used the German to scare me a little. Buddy and I got engaged that night and we were married six months later. Hell, and it was good. I loved her and I told her every day."
Usually at this point in the story, Jocelyn would have to hand him a tissue, which he would scoff at.
"We were married for twenty-four years when she got the cancer. My three sons and I were like an engine with a broken alternator. Stuck, and low on battery power. Well, I prayed to God every night that he would save her. If anyone can perform a miracle, it's Him. And at one point I believed our prayers were answered. I visited her in the hospital and all the tubes were gone and she looked at me and she said, 'You worried for nothing. The doctor says I can go home tomorrow.' We had such a wonderful time talking and laughing, and then I got the call from Roddy Garlick about his gasket, so I had to go. By the time I arrived on that bugger's gravel road out in the middle of nowhere, Buddy was gone. I remember so clearly seeing Roddy and saying, 'Open your bonnet, man'. And he said, 'I think you need to go to the hospital.' I said, 'What the hell you mean? I've just come from there. Buddy's fine; she's going home tomorrow.' I'm not going to lie to you, my girl, but when he told me that I missed it, I cried. I cried like the way I cried on the day my mother died. I cried like I did on the morning my father woke me up and said I had to get dressed in my Sunday best on a Wednesday because he was going to marry my stepmother. I cried more than when each of my sons were born. I think Roddy Garlick just stood there and didn't know what to say. But what can you say? Hell, when a man's wife is dead, there is nothing to say."
Opening her eyes and trying to drown out the Christmas music that was irritating more than upbeat, Jocelyn decided to soldier on. If Mr D could survive the death of two wives, she could buy him a kilo of biltong when all she wanted to do was go home.
"A year after Buddy died, I prayed to God for answers. I asked him for a wife, a friend and a mother for my boys. He kept saying to me: what about Enid? Enid, as you know, took over the bookkeeping from Snodgrass when he retired. I think he was eighty at the time. I trusted her implicitly. I only ever gave her one instruction and that was to never let my business go into overdraft. In twenty years, we never had. So one Friday, after my monthly haircut - I book them a year in advance, you know - I went into Enid's office down on the second floor and I said to her, 'Enid: I'm alone and you're alone. We should get married.' She was fifty years old - older than me - and she had never married. And she looked at me and said, 'I will marry you on the understanding that God will always come first in my life and you will always be second.' I laughed at her and said I could live with that. I also reminded her that she would have to keep working as the bookkeeper but that if she ever let me go into overdraft, I would divorce her. We were married in the Methodist Church - the same Methodist Church where I married Buddy and my father married my stepmother - three months later."
The queue at the biltong shop was long, and Jocelyn couldn't help but notice the unequal distribution of peppercorns on the ostrich offerings above the counter.
"My life with Enid was very happy and I tell you the truth, I never thought I would have that again. We were married for 26 years and then she started to forget things. The doctor told me it was Alzheimer's Disease. It's a helluva thing having to buy nappies for your wife. It's even worse when she doesn't recognise you. Seven years, that went on. I asked God why; why would He not just take her rather than let her suffer out her days in that horrible old age home where she was kept in a wheelchair in front of a TV. It broke my heart seeing her like that. When she finally died, I cried - not like I had cried for Buddy - but out of relief. Her nappies cost me five thousand a month and it was another seven thousand for the room in the home. I am a pensioner and all these expenses were eating into my capital. At one point I asked my son to liquidate some of my assets just so I could keep going. And six months after she died, my youngest son died. It was hell, man. Listen to me my, girl, I am eighty-nine years old. I'm blind in one eye and I am lonely. What have I got to live for? There is no joy, no pleasure in my life. You know, if I feel I am going off the deep end, I will walk down here to the square and pay someone to shoot me because what is there left to live for?"
She took the packet with the kilo of biltong and walked out of the shop. It was one of those existential questions Mr D had posed for himself - at eighty-nine - yet it was also one she grappled with daily. What was the point of life if all that it reduced people to was mall rats at Christmas, drunk on the need to spend money they couldn't afford to part with, while pretending to enjoy the endless office parties, dinner parties, carols and faux niceness from everyone wearing their Christmas Cheer Faces?
"It's taken me a long time to work this one out, my girl, but then time is something I have in abundance. I have finally worked out what there is to live for." He reached across the table and grabbed Jocelyn's hands. "It's this. It's you and me together on my stoep with our instant coffee and ginger biscuits. It's us talking - all right, me talking - and sharing. It's the fact that you care about me to drive an hour to get here and listen. I keep telling myself that this won't be the last one, if the fates allow." He laughed. "My real mother always used to say that. It took me a long time to realise it was from that song 'Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas' and not because she was superstitious."
Jocelyn placed her hands on the steering wheel and paused before driving up to Mr D's garage at the top of the building. She could see the trees growing in the yard of the penthouse and imagined him squinting down at the road from his perch on the stoep. The oil from the biltong had stained the brown paper bag on the seat next to her. She knew she should take it up to him and make his day merry and bright. Damn, all those carol lyrics were affecting her thoughts. The truth was that she knew this might be the last time she could visit him for a while. She remembered how he greeted her the last time.
"See you soon, my girl. If the fates allow."
They do today, Mr D, she thought. They do today.
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