Serpent Crescent

By Vivian de Klerk

In the small rural town of Qonda, South Africa, the power and water supplies are unreliable, property prices are down, and citizens are slowly suffocating in the acrid smoke from the municipal dump. Recently retired English teacher Megan Merton has lived here all her life, most of it at No. 8 Serpent Crescent. So who better than this self-styled pillar of society to shine a spotlight on the decline and dysfunction, not to mention the dubious activities, past and present, of many of her neighbours. Nefarious deeds and bad behaviour deserve harsh treatment and appropriate retribution, if not consignment to one of Dante’s fiendish nine circles of hell. At least that’s what Megan believes – in fact she’s been taking matters into her own hands, unnoticed, for years. And now she has decided to write it all down, to shake all of the skeletons loose, and rejoice in the inventive punishments she devised and personally delivered to the wicked.

Then her neighbour Elizabeth Cardew, a lecturer in Classical Studies, suffers a stroke and Megan is entrusted with the keys to No. 9. While Elizabeth begins a long recovery at the local care facility, Whispering Pines, Megan relishes the chance to snoop. Curious as to ‘what a stroke victim looks like’, she decides to visit and see for herself.

A bond develops between the two women – one a cold and calculating sociopath, the other a courageous and lonely academic – something that takes both of them by surprise.

Vivian de Klerk’s sharp observations and brilliantly acerbic satirical wit make this multi-layered novel at once horrifying, shocking and poignant – and very, very funny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Picador Africa
• Release date: Feb 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781770107502

Book preview

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Serpent Crescent

For Chris and for Billy

Serpent Crescent

A Novel

Vivian de Klerk

PICADOR AFRICA

First published in 2022 by Picador Africa

an imprint of Pan Macmillan South Africa

Private Bag X19, Northlands

Johannesburg, 2116

www.panmacmillan.co.za

ISBN 978-1-77010-749-6

e-ISBN 978-1-77010-750-2

© 2022 Vivian de Klerk

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This book is a work of fiction. It is based on a wide range of personal experiences and observations. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Editing by Alison Lowry

Proofreading by Jane Bowman

Design and typesetting by Nyx Design

Cover design by publicide

ALSO BY VIVIAN DE KLERK – NOT TO MENTION (2020)

‘A cunningly crafted tale filled with cryptic clues as to the real reason why Katy has a toxic love affair with food; the sensuous language will leave you hungry for more. Vivian de Klerk ingeniously invites you to delve beneath Katy’s voluptuous folds into the depths of her psyche in this compelling debut, which will remain etched in your mind, much like the harrowing Herald headlines.’

– SUE NYATHI, bestselling author

‘Utterly compulsive. De Klerk delivers a slow drip of a story that is both beautiful and monstrous. I’ve never read anything like it.’

– MICHELE MAGWOOD, literary critic

‘A page-turner in the truest sense: chilling and masterfully crafted.’

– REBECCA DAVIS, bestselling author

‘Outstanding in its attention to morbid physicality, this novel explores the tragic irrelevance of a sparkling linguistic intelligence measured against raw emotional, psychological and physical need. The book is beautifully written, blending the parochial charms of Port Alfred, a seaside backwater on South Africa’s Eastern Cape coast, with a harrowing tale of cruelty, suppressed resentment and entropic dissolution.’

– LAURENCE WRIGHT, literary critic

Schadenfreude: (noun) the pleasure derived from another person’s misfortune. The experience of joy or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures or humiliation of another. Schadenfreude has been detected in children as young as 24 months and may be an important social emotion establishing ‘inequity aversion’.

Serpent Crescent

1

where to begin

? I think I’ll just plunge right in and hopefully I’ll get to the point soon enough – no need to worry about the finicky detail of it all just yet. Charles always used to tell me I should calm down and take things one at a time. But how else do you begin your memoir if not by rushing at it headlong, and seeing how it turns out? Charles will play his part in due course, but there are many other characters, some of them nebulous, some vivid, milling restlessly on the margins of my thoughts, and I plan to write about all of them. I’ll probably get some of the detail or the sequence wrong as brain tissue is remarkably unstable. Every molecule around a synapse is replaced by the hour, and some by the minute, which is a bit depressing. No wonder I can’t remember everything accurately. But I’m going to give it a crack.

It’s time. Time to let it all out.

But ah, the aphrodisiac qualities of secrecy. These secrets are mine, all mine and mine alone. Unless someone eventually reads this, of course, which they won’t, and why should they? But still, there’s that worm of worry, a small, niggling fear of incrimination. I don’t fancy a jail term, not at my age. And so, just in case, I’ve labelled this file ‘Accounts Payable’ on my computer. Accounts payable. Things that people owe. That seems apt to me. Also, I rather like the idea of leaving this record of my life, all my achievements, up to chance. If someone does find it and read it, so what? I’ll be pushing up daisies.

My story is not about happy endings, or plots unfolding, by the way. Life doesn’t happen like that. Things crop up unexpectedly, and have to be dealt with. They can’t be rehearsed or corrected in the way writers usually do, cutting and pasting and rewriting until things are perfect. I don’t have the patience for that anyway. It’s off-the-cuff stuff, so it will be a bit random as I unravel threads of memory and knot them in amongst slight untruths – the inevitable consequence of time rusting the facts until they become unrecognisable, shadowy, ambiguous. No doubt I’ll wander off course now and then, but on the whole it should be quite interesting, I think. Hard to believe, maybe, some of it, but all true. You’ll see what I mean.

And I should add that there won’t be any fancy foreshadowing and suchlike. No writerly touches, no random but meaningful dreams – leaving them out will save me a lot of time – and no significant descriptions of the weather, nothing poetic like that, unless it’s really worthy of mention. I’m just an English teacher (retired), not a fancy academic with a PhD like my neighbour – Elizabeth Cardew, No. 9 – and look where that got her. Anyway, such originality would go unrewarded. Much more interesting, to me, are the hard, sharp edges of memory. The bits that scratch me, interrupt my dreams, insistently reminding me of what happened.

I’m troubled – just slightly – that wanting to write might be a little bit of latent hubris in me, pushing its way up from wherever I’ve been suppressing it all these years. Pride is one of the seven deadly sins but Dante didn’t allocate a circle of hell for it, so it can’t be that serious. Nevertheless it’s not nice when people boast about what they have done. Perhaps the

better way is to keep a lid on it, just write it all down in private.

I’m getting old rather quickly, I fear. Even though I’m only sixty-four, I’m better off than Elizabeth, who is four years younger than me, but you never know. I’ve noticed that my hands have started to tremble ever so slightly and my fingers don’t move easily around the keyboard anymore. The skin on the backs of my hands has become rough, speckled, like drops of Worcestershire sauce on a fried egg. I’ve also spotted the beginnings of

senile warts. They must have crept in, surreptitiously, while I wasn’t looking. They’re especially noticeable on my neck. Some of them are black, like moles, round and perfect against the whiteness of my unexposed skin; others are pale brown, some even yellowish, oblong and uneven, like the splashes from the random flick of some careless god’s paintbrush idly painting in his empyrean studio above. Unbeautiful, I’m afraid. I don’t like the word senile. It’s dank, dark and threatening. And the wart idea is even worse: seborrhoeic keratosis (I looked it up), greasy, crusty spots which seem to be stuck on my skin. Every time I look I find more of them: darkish brown oval spots, some turning black, slowly stretching like amoebas. It’s lucky my eyesight isn’t that good these days, or my sensitivity. I don’t think I could tell a genital wart from my clitoris.

* * *

At first I thought Elizabeth had simply disappeared. When the music stopped, and there was no more Beethoven or Mozart in the evenings, no more lights turned on, and no sumptuous smells wafting over from her cooking – I couldn’t understand it. Not that we were friendly, but still it seemed odd. Actually we were at school together, but I didn’t really know her back then and she was a few years behind me. What I remember of her is that she was a nice, well-mannered girl, who minded her own business, worked hard, got distinctions. She went on to university, got a PhD eventually, and apparently made quite a name for herself. By the time she moved into the Crescent she was a high-flying academic, a senior lecturer. I only discovered what her field of scholarship was (Classics, of all things) when she had regular clear-outs and I went through her trash. Judging from the stuff she threw out in her garbage I reckoned she must also be fluent in French, Italian, Greek and Latin – if one can be fluent in Latin. Heaps of old journals like Classical Studies and L’Année Philologique, containing

articles like ‘A Comparison Between the Early and Later Works of Aeschylus’ and ‘The Life and Times of Alexander the Great’. I read them, so I know what I’m talking about. It amazes me that people actually publish articles on that stuff; I quite understand why Elizabeth tossed them out. Like the paper in the Harvard Theological Review from 1937 (seriously!) called ‘Confession of Sins in the Classics’. Ancient Greeks and Romans have been doing this confessing for centuries, apparently. St Augustine of Hippo wrote thirteen autobiographical books, each called Confessions, in which he gave the details of all his sins. And they were written to be read out loud, for heaven’s sake (I found that out on Google)!

That was another sign that something was wrong: there was no fresh garbage from No. 9 for me to go through. Then the post started piling up – and disappearing, which meant someone was coming to collect it. But I was never at home at the right moment to go across and find out what was going on. Then the other day, after Elizabeth had been gone a couple of months, I caught a glimpse of a woman locking the front door but by the time I got to mine she was already driving off. In a great hurry, by the looks of it, her back wheel thumping into the pothole at the corner (served her right). Six weeks went by and then she was back. I recognised the car and managed to wave her down before she sped off. Turns out she’s Elizabeth’s sister, Daphne. I remembered her from school too. A nasty type. She used to pinch the younger children in the playground, really hard, and then run away, leaving them howling in pain, rubbing the reddened welts on their thighs or forearms.

Anyway, she told me Elizabeth had had a stroke, in her office at the university, and that she’d been summoned all the way from where she lives in Aliwal North, which is about four hours’ drive from here, to assess the situation. You’d think she was the one who’d been struck down, the way she went on about it. Moaning and complaining about how far she had to drive, and telling me what a terrible state her sister was in. Just lying there, first in a hospital bed and now at some place called Whispering Pines, staring at the walls, garbling nonsense and dribbling all over her chin. ‘No hope,’ Daphne sighed, ‘completely paralysed, probably never coming home.’ Then, before I could arrange my expression to commiserate, she said, ‘Such a burden. When I’ve got my daughter’s kids at home and my husband who needs me.’

The woman obviously didn’t have an ounce of compassion and didn’t give a shit about her sister. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d been pinching Elizabeth on the sly when she visited her. ‘It’s a long journey, you know,’ she said, ‘travelling back and forth between here and Aliwal North, and that road’s so dangerous in the dark. And now I must swing by the house, too, give it an airing, fetch the post, wait for the gardener to show up and give him instructions …’ Her voice was getting that whiny self-pitying tone and I was beginning to regret accosting her. And then she got an idea. Would I keep a check on the house, she asked, she’d give me Elizabeth’s keys? Also could I forward the mail to her in Aliwal North? Then she wouldn’t have to come so often. Bloody cheek! And then she casually added that she’d listed No. 9 with an estate agent and would I mind opening up and showing potential renters around because there wasn’t ‘a snowball’s’ (that’s how she put it) that Elizabeth was ever coming home and sooner or later she’d have to put the house on the market. She gave me her phone number, dropped the keys into my hands like hotcakes, and off she fucked into the middle distance. I haven’t seen her since.

Actually I wasn’t too displeased at this turn of events. Having the keys to No. 9 means I can go inside whenever I please – and no one can accuse me of snooping. Mrs Stuart at No. 7 is probably having ten thousand fits. I’ve already been inside a few times and I must say the place is very tastefully furnished. There is some beautiful art hanging on the walls, a mahogany piano and a whole library’s worth of books in her study. I borrowed a couple and actually I have got quite interested in Dante and his Inferno, his nine circles of hell. Elizabeth clearly knows a lot about Dante. I already knew that, from some of the old lecture notes she tossed out. I kept one of the folders where she had all the circles neatly listed and gorily described, in English, thank goodness, not the original Italian. And then I looked up a bit more detail from Google – it’s amazing what you can find there. The more I think about it, me and Dante might be kindred spirits.

Today I’ve been humming a snatch of Beethoven’s 4th in B flat major that I used to hear Elizabeth playing sometimes, and it will not stop. It’s an earworm stuck there, in a groove of my brain, and variations on the theme interrupt the rhythm of my tooth-cleaning, my dish-washing, my digging in the garden. Et cetera. It’s driving me mad. The more I think about stopping it the louder and more insistent it gets. Writing helps distract me, but I’m restless.

Maybe I should go and visit Elizabeth at Whispering Pines, check her out for myself. I must admit I’m quite curious to see what a stroke victim looks like. Daphne’s description was perfectly horrible, but how bad can it be? And you never know, I might have a stroke myself one day. I prefer to know what lies ahead: no surprises, thank you very much. But in the meantime I should make a start on excavating the past.

Before I really get into things though, I think I need to disclose some basic information about myself: firstly, the (very minor) confession, which you’ve probably guessed already, that I go through everybody in Serpent Crescent’s rubbish. Most of it is boring trash – empty jars of face-cream, squashed pizza boxes beginning to smell putrid, scrunched-up shopping lists, used tissues and razors, you name it, it’s there, usually all mixed up together because there is no recycling here in Qonda. It’s how I keep tabs on people’s lives, what they are buying, how much they owe, that sort of thing. It fascinates me, and there’s nothing really wrong with that. And then there are the occasional gems that make it all worthwhile. Like Elizabeth’s old papers.

And secondly, I have one other very great weakness which is not even included in Dante’s list or, for that matter, in the seven deadly sins: schadenfreude. In Afrikaans the word is ‘leedvermaak’. (How interesting that English hasn’t filled this lexical gap with a word of its own, instead of this borrowing from German.) The closest I can come to it in English is the seldom-used word ‘epicaricacy’. It’s derived from Greek. It rolls nicely off the tongue. Epicaricacy. Pronounced epi-carry-kasee, with a slight emphasis on the third syllable. A beautifully rounded word, isn’t it? So basically what it means is that I am an epicaricacist (at least that’s what I think one would call someone like me, if they knew what I’ve been up to), someone who takes a perverse and morbid pleasure in witnessing the misfortunes of others, their troubles, failures or humiliation, most especially when they deserve it. It’s a righteous joy, an intense satisfaction, a gloating, gleeful sardonic pleasure. I’m sure you’ve got the picture. And I should add that I simply can’t help myself, most especially when I’m the one meting out the punishment. Ah. The delight of it is ineffable.

Of course I didn’t know it was rare to experience such feelings when I was very little, while I was busy wetting the bed and learning all the words I would need to communicate. I’ve still got the bed, incidentally; it’s in the spare bedroom. The mattress has retained a slight whiff of ammonia from those days, despite the ugly stains being covered by an under-blanket, two bedsheets and a nice duvet with a cheerful stripy design. I’m beginning to think that the smell of it is all in my head, and not in the mattress at all.

Be that as it may, it didn’t take me long to realise that my epicaricacy wasn’t normal, and that it wasn’t particularly acceptable in society at large. I didn’t know the actual word for it at that stage, I should add – I looked it up much later in life, wondering what to call that bundle of tendencies and strong feelings that drove me to do what I have done over the years. I certainly understood early on that it would be best to hide it. I learned this long before I got to school. But I’ll get to that later – that’s enough for now.

2

so the weather

today – it’s mid November – is mild for summer with a few skittish clouds. The sun is there. I won’t always do this, set the scene, because it could become a little bit irritating, but just this first time I thought it might help. I’ll start with where I live: Qonda. It’s a small rural town in the Eastern Cape Province at the southern tip of Africa, about 60 kilometres from anywhere. It’s off the main highways, so nobody ever comes here. The town is small and unkempt, with a population of approximately 40 000, but that is enough, I think you’ll agree, to make life very interesting. In fact I’ll be narrowing the focus to Serpent Crescent most of the time.

Serpent Crescent is not a nice name for a street – it causes ominous shades of green to snake through one’s mind – but Serpent it is. I like to think there may be some link to the Garden of Eden and original sin, but that’s just me and my fertile imagination. It’s a cul-de-sac of nine houses strung in a neat circle on the outskirts of town, and it’s where I live. Straat loop dood, the traffic sign says in Afrikaans, even though there are almost no Afrikaans speakers living here. But they aren’t far off the mark. Nine houses in a circular drive, numbered clockwise from 1 to 9. A curving brick path leads to each front door from the tarred road. Someone was trying to be a bit snake-like, I suppose, what with the name Serpent Crescent, but in the long run it just means a longer walk from the gate to the front door, which I don’t appreciate when I‘m carrying in a load of shopping.

I live at No. 8, right next door to Elizabeth, and I’ve been living here for most of my life, except for a brief period when we lived in Charles’ house at No. 15 Whitby Road – the one he inherited when his parents died. But I much prefer it here. It’s an average, nondescript house. All the houses in Serpent Crescent were built to the same design by some get-rich-quick spec builder. Standard two-storey homes with face-brick exteriors and nice wooden finishes on the doors and windows. Which is very demanding on upkeep, I’ll add: constantly needing coats of varnish. No. 3 (Dr Myers) and No. 4 (the Bradshaws) stopped bothering about upkeep long ago and their varnish is peeling off, which lowers the general tone of the neighbourhood. Very annoying.

Each house has its own front garden and then quite an extensive back yard, with nothing beyond the fences. I mean no buildings, just rough veld: low scrub and a few thorn trees and bushes. From my back door I can stare off into the distance, such as it is, my eye resting on the horizon – flattish terrain with just a few ups and downs to lessen the monotony. No trees, just low bushy scrub. No wild animals anymore either because the people who live in the township have long ago killed and eaten them. There used to be duiker, impala, bushbuck and warthog back in the day, anteaters and porcupines, they tell me. All good for the pot, hunted out one by one. The remaining animals got wise to it and scarpered.

Now we have thin bony cattle wandering through the town, their flanks covered in runny faeces. It’s got something to do with them grazing on kikuyu grass instead of proper pastures. It’s called urban farming: you let your herds loose to eat what they can find in the town – they graze on people’s gardens, if they can get in, and before you know it there’s nothing left. And we have even sadder-looking donkeys, which seem to reproduce at an alarming rate and will demolish an unwatched garbage bag with ease, swallowing whole plastic packets and spreading the muck while they munch through whatever they can find. It’s quite challenging because I’ve got to go through the garbage before the donkeys eat it.

Nobody does a thing about it, because the councillors are corrupt and have stolen all the money. The municipality is dysfunctional and they don’t enforce the by-laws. We are grateful that they do still collect the garbage – our day is Thursday – and they take it to the municipal dump and throw all the glass, paper and plastics together with defrosting chicken past its sell-by date and god knows what else. The dump smoulders non-stop, sending its toxic fumes for us unsuspecting citizens to breathe in when the wind blows from the west. It’s against the law but nobody cares here.

As I said earlier, our little Crescent is a cul-de-sac in Qonda, and Qonda is an ordinary little South African town off the beaten track, hot and dry most of the time, although we do get a bit of rain now and then. It was a farming town originally. It sprang up over two hundred years ago to serve the needs of the local sheep farmers: first just a little railway siding, then the inevitable butcher, baker and maybe even a candlestick maker. Now we have a Pep Stores for the indigent, and Pick n Pay for the self-indulgent. And we still have a Royal Hotel – because Queen Elizabeth visited South Africa in the 1950s. She didn’t stop off here, needless to say, but her proximity must have been enough inspiration for someone to name the place after her. It’s quite an attractive building, reflecting the handsome logic of someone’s careful design, although some very nasty burglar bars, put on as an afterthought, ruin the effect.

The hotel is the only building in our town that has a lift. Sandra Davidson and I used to go up and down in it after school, on our way home, enjoying the silent weightless swoosh as we landed back on the ground floor, and then the dizzying pressure as we sent it straight back up again, testing the limits of the closing doors with our pencils and rulers. Until the manager, a tall, thin, officious little wanker with a narrow head and a superior air, called Bill Banks, pulled us out and gave us what for in no uncertain terms. Said the lift was for guests only, and who on earth did we think we were? He threatened to report us to our parents, and we got such a fright we never went back. But I’ve harboured a tiny flame of resentment ever since. Bloody Royal Hotel. Royalty, my foot!

I got him back eventually, Bill Banks. Years layer I sent a letter (anonymous, of course) to the municipal manager, and reported that I’d seen him urinating in Qonda’s public payphone cubicle. So unnecessary, I said, defacing and sullying a spot where many of Khayamnandi’s residents made their phone calls, or sheltered on their way home on rainy or windy days. Those poor people have to put up with enough of the ever-present stench of the overflowing buckets in their outhouses without inflicting Mr Banks’s urine on them as well. I doubt whether the manager ever followed up, but it gave me some pleasure anyway, bringing Bill into a small measure of disrepute. My preference would have been to go into his Royal Hotel myself and urinate in the corner of his ever-so-fancy lift, but squatting like that is awkward for females – our garments can get in the way of the natural flow of things. The lift is anything but fancy now, of course, and long since stopped working. I think they use it for storage.

There’s a liquor off-sales on the side of the hotel that used to have a metal grille down the middle, because blacks weren’t allowed to buy from the white side. They could buy the same alcohol, but there was no place for them to sit, and they didn’t get anything served to them in glasses. So they took their paper-wrapped bottles and sat outside on the pavement, feet in the gutter, sipping themselves into quiet oblivion while they dreamed of liberation. They’ve removed the grille now, but people still tend to stick to their half of the counter. They probably feel more comfortable that way, after all these years.

I’m drifting a bit, I know, but I did warn you. And there are a few more basics I need to get in place.

Our town used to be called Georgeville. Named by the British, in honour of King George V no doubt. But transformation set in soon after Mandela was freed in the 1990s and with the dawn of democracy the formerly disempowered took over the driver’s seat and Georgeville became Qonda overnight, after extensive and time-consuming consultations in which just about everyone opposed the name change for historical or economic reasons. It did have some brand value and Georgeville was written on all the maps, after all, but still they changed it to Qonda. Maybe it’s my epicaricacy that helps me understand their need for vengeance. It was time to get the white people back and calling the town Qonda was a first step. The Xhosa people felt a deep need to set things right and assuage the bitterness that had built up over a lifetime of servitude and injustice, and that was a first step at least, especially as it got underneath white skins something terrible.

Qonda was the name of a long-forgotten Xhosa hero, they claimed. He might have been a prophet, or maybe a warrior, but the trouble with oral history is that everyone makes it up as they go along, so you never know. The main point was, I think, that the word is also rather difficult for white people to pronounce: if you