The Friends Who Never Left

Fishcakes and I met in line outside the primary school hall on the first day of school. We were six years old. For a long time after that we were the kind of friends who did everything together, a fair amount of it stuff neither of us should have been doing. Then I went off to Rhodes University, and he stayed.

“Fishcakes and Chop” is the story in Barking at Dogs about the December I came home from university and agreed to meet him and our old mate Chop for a beer. I’d been gone for four years by then. I was playing in a band and had political opinions I was keen to share with anyone who’d sit still, and I suspect I walked into that bar thinking I’d become somebody.

The Ladies’ Bar ponged of stale beer, and the barman, an old Afrikaner with a lamb-chop beard, sounded about a week away from a tracheotomy. Fishcakes had put on weight. Chop too. Despite this, somehow, they hadn’t changed at all, which wasn’t a compliment.

I’d love to say the afternoon was enjoyable. It wasn’t. I heard all about Chop being committed to Sterkfontein, a place they put the really broken people, and how there was a roommate, locked up for assault, due home any day now.

Sitting on that stool, I started remembering things I’d filed away. Fishcakes refusing to stop throwing punches outside Clouseau’s in Rocky Street after someone had cut him with a broken bottle. The bouncers at the San Lorenzo giving me a few kicks in the head because of something Fishcakes and Chop had done. Chaos followed those two around like a stalking junkyard dog, and it always seemed to bite me.

I say in my book that in the years I had been away, these two adolescents had aged on the outside, but hadn’t figured out that there was more to being an adult than freer access to alcohol and cars. It struck me that I was looking at a reflection of me in an alternative universe. Had I not left first, who knows what I might have become.

If you’ve moved away from your home country, I’d guess you know some version of that afternoon. You go back for a wedding or a holiday and sit down with people who knew you before you knew yourself. Within half an hour you’re nodding along to stories that sound alien to you. They simply no longer compute. The people who stayed kept going in the direction they were already headed, and you went somewhere else. Now there’s a whole ocean of experiences between you that nobody quite knows how to bridge.

Back then I had only gone as far as Grahamstown (now Makhanda), and I felt it. For most immigrants, it’s sharper still from London or San Diego. We yearn to see the old country but sometimes have a tough time connecting to the people we thought were closest to us.

I left the bar that day with a forced smile and a slap on the back and told them I’d probably see them next year. Fishcakes called after me as I walked away. I didn’t look back.

“Fishcakes and Chop” is one of thirteen stories in Barking at Dogs, out now in paperback.