I nodded. “He would be old then, ready to collect his retirement fund and settle somewhere near Tzaneen with my mother and their car. He dared dream. I think he did in that picture.” I smiled, not with mirth but to keep myself from crying. “He dared dream,” I whispered, unsure of my own assertion.
“What happened to him?”
“He, um.” I cleared my throat. “He…soon after that picture was taken, hundreds of people were retrenched from the company; my father was one of them. He was a taxi driver for a while, then unemployed, then a street vendor, then he just did anything that was available.”
“Like the playwright you met.”
“Yeah.” I swallowed and looked out the window, blinking away the tears threatening to mar our conversation. “Anyway, what’s the monkey in the middle?”
“Nsuri?”
“What?”
“You shouldn’t feel sorry for him. At least he had that moment, the one in the picture, he had that broken smile,” he shrugged. “And he had you and your sister, and your mother.”
I cleared my throat one last time and busied my hands with straightening Matome’s blanket. I then poured more water for him and stood to straighten the curtain, to widen our view of the splendid garden outside. “You still haven’t explained what the monkey in the middle is.”
Matome smiled and shook his head. “It’s from back when I still worked as an engineer. We had to do compulsory eye tests every year in order to comply with safety regulations. One day,” he sat forward and clapped his hands together, “they brought the nurse to the production building so she could do our tests there, since that way, there’d be no loss in production hours. You know, safety first, but don’t compromise production – all that stuff.”
I nodded.
“Some of us were already done so we just sat in the control room while the rest of the guys did theirs. This guy – Lee – he was one of those tough guys who would tell you he’d been in a thousand fights and slept with a hundred girls. He was one of those annoying people. Anyway, he steps up and has to do his colour blindness test and animal pop-out blindness–”
“His animal pop-out what?”
“That’s the whole point of the story so be patient.”
