MY GOD, STRAIGHT OUT OF JERRY SPRINGER

Sunday morning, the crack of dawn. The roof glowed with a faint pink light, broken by shifting geometric patterns as the wind ruffled the branches of the tree canopy overhead. And what was that? Scuffling and hot breathing: 'Oom ...? Oom ...?'
I held out till about ten before cracking my first quart; and then I lay sipping it inside the tent, with the flaps wide open. Helga and Lettie took Spud for walks, dragging him around in the shafts of sunlight that pierced the canopy. Willem trailed after them, complaining bitterly. The same sunlight lay in a fresh haze out on the road. Piet was sitting in his deckchair sipping coffee, surveying the world quietly beneath his sagging awning. There was some sort of fuck the world motto on the front of his white t-shirt. Monkeys trooped about overhead. The males led in a serious and cautious manner, the youngsters shrieked and crashed about, chasing each other, and the mothers came last. There were tiny babys clinging to their stomachs. The upside down faces stared down at me, wrinkled and worried looking.

Pa slinked around and struck poses as he potted the monkeys with his BB gun. He was protecting us from their thieving ways. He had discovered that I'd been in security, and had decided that the the two of us shared a common understanding and should discuss life. I would come out the tent and we would stand there with our arms folded, watching the monkeys, and Pa would tell me about his desperate situation. He had an interview coming up with a security company, but he hadn't worked since he'd arrived at the camp after driving all night to avoid the cops - because he couldn't remember the last time his caravan had been licenced.
He was not happy with Dawie, he told me right off the bat. He had been forced by his wife to bring Dawie along. But Dawie too wasn't working; and Dawie was 'A beitjie ... jy weet ... hy verloor sy kop nadat hy n' paar beere in hom het. He does stupid things. But he's got no work, he's got no money, he smokes my cigarettes ... '
Pa was about six foot, and in his slinky way he looked like he could handle himself. But I got the feeling he was very wary of Dawie and Dawie's dark moods. Dawie drifted around the camp and sometimes stalked in for a few very measured words. He would clear his sticky throat, flaps whirring, and we would grope for a common topic - usually valves, and overhead cams, while I nodded shiftily. At other times I was him standing quietly off to one side, beside a tree staring at Pa and myself chatting - about him, Dawie knows! - or at teenage girls trotting past on the road, heading for the bathing beach with bright towels flung over their shoulders. With his big, pitted, scarred head held with a predatory stillness he looked like on of those ex-guard dogs you see at the SPCA. Beaten up Rottweilers you can't trust an inch, peering at you with groggy, twitching eyes, mean and haunted.
He told me this story about owning a dog like Spud. 'N varkhoindjie, ne? A good dog. He bite many kaffers.' But the neighbours didn't like the dog, or his Mom's boyfriend or someone kept on doing hideous things to the dog, pouring boiling water over it. So they took the dog to the end of town and left it there. 'Maar daaie hond was slim, ne, hy het huis gekom. He come home. so we take him further away, and we leave him, ne, and that is the last time I see that dog.'

I had agreed halfway through my second stout to take the kids down to the beach. And why not? Bits of pure blue blazed through the canopy. But the kids were so excited, and Pa came over to talk about life so often, and Dawie stalked in to share his muddy guttural thoughts on tortured dogs with such regularity, that it began to dawn on me: this was no ordinary trip to the beach.
'How many times have you been for a swim?' I asked Helga.
'No, only two times,' she said. 'This will be the second.'
One of the reasons was that Ma couldn't walk. 'Ma kry baai, baaie moeg,' Helga told me solemly. 'Omdat sy so vet is.'
'She's got a bad hip,' the older girls said.

By one o'clock the haze of sunlight out on the road had become sharp and heated. But with three quarts inside me I was in a Ghandi-like zone of total benevolence. I was ready for anything. Pa drove Ma down in his Fanta-orange Sierra, with sulphur-yellow fur on the front dashboard (I swear). A row of fluffy toys was glued across the fur. The rest of us walked. Dawie had discovered that he could haul Spud up into the air while Spud clung with his teeth to a stick. Spud could do this all day, and so could Dawie. Spud had never had it so good. He latched onto the stick and Dawie hauled it up, liked he was performing a curl in a weightlifting session, so that Spud's snout ended up inches from Dawies moustache. Then the two of them moved along like this - Spud growling and pawing Dawie's chest as he worried the stick, Dawie walking stiff legged, his back arched.
I was happily pissed, cracking smiles at everyone and blathering on. The family had made me feel good about myself - the special Oom. The kids had a happy preoccupied look about them, walking with their heads down, thinking about their swim. Stefaan shambled along, knock kneed, with that quiet inward quality of teenagers that makes them seem semi-invisible. He had wet and combed his fringe in a perfect line across his forehead. Every now and then he put a hand up to plaster it down. Dawie was still hauling Spud up. His forearms writhed with fiercely striated muscle, and he grinned with muddy surprise at the fun he was having.
Occasionaly Spud let go and went crashing onto his backside, risking compacted disks, a broken tail. But he was back for more in a second, his piggy eyes fixed on the stick, slathering happily. I was cringing, but I didn't have the heart to interupt their game. I imagined them both staring at me while I tried to explain - Spud with his trusting piggy eyes and Dawie looking groggy and haunted, their flaps turning in unison.

As we walked along the road, hemmed in by the tall scrub and trees on either side, I realised that every available parking space along the road had been taken. Cars were wedged into the roadside, their noses pressed into the scratchy succulent scrub. I saw Mercs and BMW's and Pajero's. This was evidently the beach to come to. People streamed back and forth, carrying cooler boxes and umbrellas and deckchairs. This mob must have been passing the camping ground all morning. But from inside the green groto the outside world had seemed dreamily quiet. I had seen the odd car flashing by in the sunlight, but not this seething crowd.
No problem though, since I was a vessel of benevolence. We met Ma and Pa in the packed car park, where the road terminated at the beach, and progressed past the lifeguard building. The amateur lifeguard dudes and their little blonde numbers lined the second floor balcony. They looked down on us and we gawked back, slowed to a mesmerised shuffle by this bronzed and bleached exotica - die mooi mense! They looked away with prim hair flicks and irritated frowns. The gnarly world can look but it musn't stare. Willem and the kids sensed this. They bobbed their heads and shot furtive looks from under their brows. Ma flicked the pretty boys and girls a single dark look and launched herself out over the sand with ponderous dignity, her sights set on the ocean. After what she'd seen, growing up with Dawie for a boet, surrounded by those hard manne up there in Lydebnburg ... these little toy people didn't impress her at all. They would dissolve on that hard baking plain. Dawie was also unimpressed by the dismissive cool on the balcony; or rather he didn't see it. Subtlties of rejection were lost on Dawie. He stared hungrily at the pert breasts.

I assumed leadership of the group. In my day I'd worked as a professional lifeguard on the Durban beaches, and the family seemed to sense I was on familiar turf. Ma fell in behind me and we trooped out onto the garish sunstruck stage, with its brawling mass of umbrellas and deckchairs and glistening flesh giving off sickly whiffs of coconut oil. I have sensitive eyes and skin, which normally starts to protest at this stage; and there is my rather well developed fear of social gatherings. Yet I discovered as I floated over the hot sand that I was properly frotted. I was immersed in thick golden light. I seemed to be looking through one of those dream eyeballs in a movie - the kind where the middle is a ball of magnified clarity and the edges sort of stream away in blurred rivulets ... yes, let me see. Over there was the sea, sparkling from a million merrily oscillating little dents. Further out towards the horizon pure white cumulus clouds formed towering, sharply defined masses in the cerulean sky. Closer in a glittering salty haze hung over the shrieking mob of bathers being pounded by the shorebreak. Further out again toy green waves reared and thumped down on a sandbank at the backline.
It was all too, too lovely. In fact it was too much. It made my head reel. I needed to focus on pariculars. I looked around as we moved through the crowd and saw heads lift and eyes slide behing sunglasses. They were looking at Ma, who really was a big woman, lumbering along behind me like a stately herbivore; and at Pa, who really did look horribly horny, grinning cheesily at everyone, flashing rotten teeth. I discovered that my super-vision had a tendency to lock onto objects now, which wasn't good. It made me dizzy. Better to trawl my gaze around smoothly, taking in particulars, but without dwelling on them for too long. Yes. Up ahead a nicely chunky young thing, about nineteen or twenty, lay on her back in a lime green bikini. As we got closer, threading our way between towels and heads and feet, I saw that her milky, suety skin was mottling into pink romboidal patterns as a prelude to really going red and burning ... the tent this morning, those shifting, geometrical patterns on the roof ... most of the women here - I trawled my high powered beam around and my God, the beach was full of good looking women, with lovely rounded bums, and breasts to make you giddy - most of them had one knee raised to shelter their little mounds from hungry male eyes. Not the chunky young girl though, lying alone on her fluffy yellow towel. She had both knees down, her crinkled bonnet jutting up unashamedly. A little slot bisected the plump fullness - the faintest furrow where the lime green lycra was sucked inwards. With my beam I saw that all around men were sneaking looks at this lusciuos mound, helplessly, like bees drawn to honey. Their girlfriends and wives sat and read magazines - Cosmopolitan, on this beach - and if they looked over towards this girl they did so with grim lines around their mouths. Young hussy! And my God! Look at this grisly group trooping through our midst, straight out of Jerry Springer. The one in the lead seems to be stoned, peering around droopily, like he knows something. Can't he have gone around everybody?

In my benevolent state, lost in small lucid detail, I found I had blundered right into the middle of the throng, without thinking ahead and picking out a decent course. Now there was a minefield of bodies and towels and umbrellas and cooler boxes to get through. I looked behind me and Jesus, Ma looked massive. The kids stared at me doubtfully - even they could see an easier route to the sea, where the crowd shrieked rythmically in time with the breaking waves. Pa was sweating and sweating and grinning and grinning. Dawie looked hard and dangerous, like a gaunt rouge lion amongst a herd of sleek antelope.
I hung a sharp left at the next turquoise towel, careful of its protruding puffy male head - a florid moon with raybans resting on it. Then another right at the red and white striped cooler box, beneath the lemony yellow umbrella. Colours were coming to me soft and vibrant now; and there was so much light on this beach, blazing down, bouncing off the sand, that even the shadow beneath the umbrella had a bluish light of its own.
After the umbrella a skittering left around a family frozen in mid-conversation, the kids with their mouths hanging open, staring behind me; tip-toeing between them and a row of feet on the other side. One of the pairs of male feet was turning crimson under tufts of black hair. As as ex-pro, I know about these things. People wear shoes all year and forget how virginally white their feet are. They get third degree burns just sitting in the sun! I would warn people if I saw a pair of these pasty feet starting to go ... I almost did this now, this guy's feet were already past the blistering stage, the black hair was going to get horribly matted when the blisters popped ... I actually stopped for a second and my eyes travelled up the hairy legs, past the mauve baggies with the yellow floral print, up the oiled and sweaty pink chest, coming to rest on the sweaty pink face, with its eyes fixed on me incredulously: what the fuck are you looking at China? I actually had my mouth open, about to start explaining to this guy the dangers of foot burn - and why not, for God's sakes - when I realised what a pissed thing this would be to do, in front of all these momentarily staring people, with their little plots of beach staked out. The family was relying on me. I looked behind me and yes, they were frozen in mid-stride, peering at me with dumb trust. Pa was sweating and sweating and grinning and grinning. Surely I was going to get to the water sooner or later ...