something with its massive mandibles. The entire species has been memorialised in a permanent state of aggressive screaming. Because it was a perpetually violently predator, probably. But what if it was an existential scream, a Munchian scream even? Maybe the Tyrex was always hungry because it comfort ate, stuffing its face with woolly mammoths, hating itself the next day. Or maybe somewhere in that tiny lizard brain it was aware of the incoming meteor or whatever it was that killed the earth. Maybe it was running around and screaming in terror, the rest of the planet deaf to its unintelligible, raspy cries, like an environmentalist in the early 90s, prophesying the impending planetary meltdown.
Nobody knew how it lived, nobody knew how it died. We can infer, we can empathise and glamorise it, and put its mammoth bones behind the glass cage, and emblazon its alleged likeness on book bags and trendy restaurants, and know nothing of its world, its self. My missing father, my deadbeat dad, is the Tyrannosaurus rex of my personal historical timeline. Remembered mostly as violent and brutish, but also as an elusive and fascinating villain that I don’t know if I have the expertise or evidence to dissect, piece together and truly understand.
In the process of writing this, as I wade through the varied landscapes of my memory, I wonder: What have I re-sketched, what have I missed about my father? What have I gotten wrong about him, my family, about myself, about South African history, about the world, about everything? Does my dinosaur have feathers?
I was in my final year of varsity when my mother finally divorced my father, after acting for over a decade and a half in that dangerous dual role of his caretaker and his wife. Finally, in a moment of enlightenment, she realised that she did not need to prove her worth by saving a person who had no interest in being saved, and she kicked him out of the house. Nobody missed him. The reason she finally managed to leave him will always remain somewhat evasive, but he was becoming increasingly aggressive and my mom says she just reached a tipping point. A point she wished she had reached years before.
I had already left the house to study theatre, a choice nobody unfortunately dissuaded me from. I lived in a Stellenbosch residence that was the Afrikaans version of a white Episcopalian sorority with a Southern plantation aesthetic and a whole lot of Jesus devotees. I hardly saw my father during my varsity years, partly deliberately and also because he was mostly hibernating in his mangy corner of the house when I went home to do my laundry. When she finally left him, I felt happy for my mother. I had spent a significant portion of my adolescence enraged that she wouldn’t leave him, convinced that her leaving would prove that she loved us instead of him. But the divorce did not give me clarity, although I felt good for my grandparents, who no longer had to harbour chaos in their otherwise meticulously ordered home, and I felt especially relieved for my brother and sister, who would not have to spend their adolescent years as I did, covering up the presence of a mad and violent parent who lived like a fugitive of time.
After the divorce my dad and I texted once in a while. The interchange was irregular and sometimes obscure. But still, this was more communication than we’d had in the last few years when he lived in the house. I was older, I had had my own confrontations with depression and anxiety and my political understandings of the evils I would later come to understand as structural violence. I was developing an empathy, a curiosity about the strange antagonist of my childhood. Sporadically violent but sometimes unpredictably tender. Knowing that I would mercifully never have to come home to the mess of my father again meant that it was way easier to try to connect with him.
He understood that it was his responsibility to seek me out first. So every couple of months he would send me heavily loaded messages filled with book references, sprawling philosophical titbits curated especially for me. I was about 19, I considered myself clever and deep. I was an arts student learning about Godot and the Greeks. His strange literary references and poetically articulated thoughts appealed to my artistic ego and my burgeoning interest in existential crisis. So sometimes I’d message back. Once I sent a casual, tentative ‘What are you doing these days?’ He responded with a single word: ‘Pining’.
We saw each other a few times in this brief period during my late teens and met once or twice for a cup of cheap coffee. These meetings were scattered and erratic, and short. Of course I did not trust him. I just wanted to know him. Sometimes things seemed promising, but each time I got a little hopeful about the possibilities for real reconnection, I was reminded that this was naive and self-harming and harmful to the people I cared about. If I opened up a little too much, he would take advantage, artfully request favours, ask for money, demand things emotionally that I could not give. My father was not going to change. He was not going to heal, he was always going to hurt us. No matter if I needed more from him. No matter if I wanted more for him.
One day, perhaps the fourth or fifth time we decided to meet up, we were sharing a piece of cake. We were speaking about nothing in particular when he said, ‘You know, if it wasn’t for that day and your sister, things would still be OK.’ On the day my mother finally kicked him out of the house, he made it clear that he blamed my sister, then about 12, for finally putting the end to their mangled relationship. Never mind the years and years of his mental deterioration, neglect and abuse. I had no idea that, all these years later, he actually still believed this story. I thought that blaming my little sister was just a deflection he had conjured up in a moment of weakness and denial when he realised he was finally being given the boot. We had an argument, although I don’t think he took it very seriously because he still asked me for money for cigarettes when I asked the waiter to bring the bill. I had to pay.
We didn’t speak for years again after that. I thought it would be the last time we saw each other. It should have been the last time we saw each other.
About three years later, when I was 23, we reconnected again and I hesitantly introduced him to my partner Sarah. Upon realising that we were going to be so significant in each other’s lives, we thought it would be a good idea for her to be introduced to the man who so clearly lurked in the corners of our intimacy, the obvious source of my cloistered emotional unavailability and dissociation and perpetual anxiety – these quiet mental illnesses that to the untrained eye could pass for ‘quirky’ or ‘hard working’. Sarah is patient and committed to this purging of secrets, of shame and shadow. She is a lover of the light even when it is scorching and blinding. She made me want to let her know me. She needed to meet my father.
We all went for a drink in Long Street, at Neighbourhood, which has since closed down. Not too fancy, not too grungy. My father has not had a job in the past 20 years, I knew I would be paying. I was nervous. Sarah was wonderful. Although she has a different life story, she has been to similar places in her mind as he has. She saw him and perhaps understood the suspension of living between two worlds, the artistry of sanity, balancing on neurochemicals and memory, strained cords of brain and heart matter, the tightrope dance that leaves you always constricted, always on tiptoe, or dangling from the rope with bloody fingers, or falling straight down into the porthole to those other worlds or into the sinkhole of depression, then wrapping yourself between the covers to protect your porcelain frame, shattered into a million pieces from the agony and ecstasy of the fall.
We made polite conversation for a bit. He asked about my life, our lives, genuinely and with warmth. We listened to his stories about his life, about his goals, the social development projects he was allegedly busy with. There was nothing concrete or tangible in anything he spoke about. I can’t even say he was lying. Because I know how resolutely he believes his own stories.
Then he started passionately talking about how he had started his own one-man vigilante neighbourhood watch in the road where he lived. This story was unfortunately true. He was staying in his mother’s house in Belhar, where he had been relegated from the main house to the garage. Most likely for bad behaviour. He whipped out his phone and proudly showed Sarah some grainy pictures on the cracked screen, evidence of him apprehending an alleged burglar. I guess he was trying to impress her. She looked politely. In the blurry picture my father stands over a teenage boy like a trophy hunter with a fresh kill. The boy is on his knees, looking straight at the camera, his hands bound together with black masking tape.
My father used to get up in the