I was nine years old when my uncle drove his bakkie, a pickup truck for non-South Africans, to a remote beach and stuck a length of hose that was attached to his exhaust pipe through the window of the car. He was in his second or third year of university at Rhodes in Makhanda, what was then called Grahamstown. He was studying fine art and from his early work you could see he was a talented painter.
One of my favourite stories about him comes from a drawing he did for my mom. It was a drawing of a pair of old boots. He had paid a homeless guy, who had caught his eye, to do a portrait of him but as he began it was the man’s boots that he fell in love with and so that was all he drew. The subject was not the first person to be angry with the endeavours of an artist but he did get a coffee and some shekels for his time.
As I understand it the length of hose was not a cry for help, my uncle fully intended to kill himself. His only mistake was to take his dog along with him. Before the deed he put the dog on the back of the bakkie so that it would not be harmed but man’s best friend knew that something was wrong and he barked and barked until a stranger heard the noise and came to investigate. Douglas was not dead but he was permanently brain damaged.
Over the Christmas holidays, about three months after the suicide attempt, we drove down to Makhanda to fetch his stuff. He was staying in a caravan. I don’t remember much about it except that inside the caravan we found a whole lot of art work that he had done. The pictures were disturbing to me. Endless prints of a misshapen man in lots of different colours. My mother asked if I wanted to keep one of the prints and I said no.
Once we had gone through his stuff we used the caravan to go on holiday in the seaside town of Port Alfred about 60 kilometres away. This decision seems a little odd to me now but then I thought nothing of it. It was one best holidays of my childhood. We met up with old family friends and spent every day on the beach. We went crab fishing on the Cowie River and I was the only to catch a crab. I was so proud. My dad taught me how to gut a fish and at the caravan park where we stayed. I played football with all the local kids whose parents worked in the area. I also watched the movie Caddyshack for the first time. We saw a penguin on the beach, my first. A dog thought my friend Richard was a tree or a rock and it lifted its leg and peed all over him. We thought it was funny.
Douglas doesn’t draw anymore. He tried but his art was not the same. He works for a friend of my parents fitting glass and he has girlfriend. The picture of the boots hangs in my mother’s house. I always wanted to ask him why he tried to kill himself all those years ago but I know whatever the reason I won’t like the answer.
I don’t know what happened to the caravan.
