I sit.
In my wardrobe at home, standing in a corner, is half a leg. It has titanium bones and a skin of high-tech rubber that feels almost real but doesn’t, like the skin you feel and don’t feel when you do the old dead-man’s finger trick. I wore it for a while, or tried to, but I could never get used to the pain of my weight bearing down on the stump stuffed into the thing. Besides, my limp drew other kinds of stares, pretty much as a toupee might – does he have a leg or doesn’t he? Isn’t he too young to have had polio? Hobbling about on crutches with my trouser leg neatly folded up was, I reasoned, an honest way to declare to the world that yes, I am an amputee – I am not wearing new shoes, have not twisted my ankle, have not had a toilet accident – I have simply lost half a leg.
“You’re lucky,” the surgeon said to me when I came around after the operation. “We’ve managed to amputate at the knee, which is the best result for wearing a prosthesis in the future.” That was the first time I heard that I’d lost my leg; I didn’t feel lucky at all.
Barry pulls up more chairs so that everyone can sit. He’s that kind of guy – says nothing, just does something about the mutual discomfort of me sitting and everyone else standing. Unasked, he brings me a beer, a trendy boutique beer. It’s colder and crisper than the beers I brought. I try to relax and make a few comments that aren’t that funny but get the Unknowns laughing more than they should. One of the husbands asks what I do and I tell him that I’m an architect, and I can feel everyone weighing my profession against the fact of my missing leg, and then I feel their surprise that there’s no logical contradiction between the two. Everyone relaxes a little more. It’s not a seismic shift – the men don’t kick off their shoes and the women keep their tops on; it’s a miniscule exhale, a barely perceptible dropping of the shoulders, but I’m sure that greater things – peace agreements, multinational mergers – have rested on even smaller changes in the prevailing mood.
There’s a brief hiccup when more Unknowns – three, including the couple’s daughter, down from Johannesburg for the holidays – arrive late, having lost themselves amid the foliage of the suburb. The new Unknowns smile, awkward. But the rest of us exude an aura or a cloud of pheromones that reassures the newcomers. Which is just as well, because this time I’m the one staring, firstly at the daughter, who is sixteen and flawless, wearing a tiny silver figure nailed to a tiny silver cross that hangs between breasts I suppose I should not have been looking at, so I look at the mother instead. She reminds me of some famous actress from years back whose beauty was amplified by eyes that were ever-so-slightly crossed; I can’t help but notice a similar crucifix to her daughter’s trying to fight its way out of her cleavage. And then I try to remember exactly when it was that I stopped looking at daughters and started looking at their mothers, but I can’t.
Lynn leads the girl off by the hand to introduce her to Gabriel and Peter, who has by now emerged and is trying to interest Gabriel in some hand-held electronic device. Peter is shorter than Gabriel, much, and he’s podgy and bespectacled. With his pasted-down and side-parted hair, he has the air of a little old man – a professor or an accountant – but when he looks up at the approaching girl his eyes widen and his jaw drops. I hope that Gabriel will draw himself up to his full height and smile broadly and shake the girl’s hand, but instead he shrinks a little more, nods, pulls his fringe down further over his forehead.
We eat. We drink. We talk. The glances have now all stopped sliding towards the trouser-end that is folded over my stump. There’s no history with the Unknowns, no past indiscretions to gloss over, no rusty hatchets to keep buried under carefully chosen words. Easy. One of the Unknown wives says the word “fuck” and we relax more. There are no prudes here, we know. We are adults. We can swear if we want to. We can tell rude jokes and relate off-colour stories as long as we rubberneck first to make sure that there are no kids in earshot. I look over towards the kitchen counter to see if Gabriel is bending his ear in our direction, but Peter is sitting alone, fiddling with the gizmo in his hand. I’m glad Gabe can’t hear us, us old people telling boring anecdotes and swearing to try to impress – comfort? – one another.
We finish eating and fill the awkward time between eleven and midnight with more anecdotes, a few more drinks. I’m sure that Tracy has snuck open another button on her blouse, but I don’t care. Her eyes are glassy; she shouldn’t be drinking while on antibiotics, but. Then, midnight, more or less, because of course everyone’s watches and cellphones are out of sync and nobody is sure when the moment actually arrives. An illegal barrage of nearby fireworks settles the debate, and we wish each other all the best for the coming year, dragging the kids into the adult circle for a moment. Hugs and good wishes, goodwill glowing with sentimentality and alcohol.
Why are they so important now, these embracings and blessings? Why not on 5 January or 19 March or 27 October? I don’t know. It depresses me always, these happy, three-quarters-pissed New Year’s people, smiling with all their teeth hanging out and sloshing their drinks around, wishing total strangers whatever their Hallmark vocabularies can dredge up, hugging those of the opposite sex just a little too tightly, just a little too long. Celebrating what is to come, when all that is certain about New Year’s Eve is another stroke through the threescore-and-ten. It should be a mourning for the passing of time – just last week, just yesterday – when we were younger than we are now. And then Barry makes things worse and appears with an old six-string which he tries to tune as he walks towards us. I can see that the B-string is broken, hanging useless off the head of the guitar, but he’s not deterred and launches into “Auld Lang Syne”, appallingly, belting out the lyrics I’ve never understood. Tuneless, meaningless. I’m surprised that the neighbourhood dogs stay quiet, because Lynn, Tracy, the Unknowns all join in the discord. I can’t, can’t let go like that, though I envy their lack of inhibition, their willingness to howl along with Barry’s jarring guitar. A glance at Gabe tells me he can’t bring himself even to watch; like me, he’s cringing and wishing that Barry would reach the end of the song.
When he does, we all clap and laugh.
“More!” one of the Unknown husbands shouts. “Encore!”
Barry smiles a “no” and leans the old guitar against the wall. “Always leave them hungry,” he says. He sits down next to me. “Actually, it’s the only fucken song I know,” he mutters. Encore Boy gets up and walks over to the guitar. He isn’t that steady, I hope he’s not driving. He picks it up, holds it left-handed, strums, opens his mouth to sing, sees I’m the only one watching, puts the guitar down again, rejoins the circle around the dying fire. Lynn and the Unknown wives have begun clearing things up. Plates with chop bones that still have pink attached, boerewors ends, shreds of salad. I’m pleased to see that the clean-up has started; I’d like to go home. But Barry disappears into the house again and emerges with a bottle of tequila, making my heart sink. If the world accepted honesty, if we could just say what we were thinking, I’d stand up and announce that I’ve had enough, I’m heading for bed. But I can’t, of course: any words of departure would be understood to mean that it’s been a shit party and I can’t wait to leave, now that the formality of twelve o’clock has come and gone. The devil is in the unsaid bits, in the gaps between the words and the spaces between the lines. So I resign myself to sitting around for another hour or so, to swallowing a shot or two of tequila, having another helping of dessert, talking more. Which everyone else seems to be doing very well. Some of the Unknowns are in stitches over a common recollection. Tracy is leaning in to an Unknown just a little too closely while he regales her with God-knows-what, making her laugh. She’s easily amused by other people. Barry is handing around shot glasses. Beyond the glass doors, I see Gabriel and Peter and the pretty girl sitting on barstools at the kitchen counter. Peter is on the right, talking and gesticulating. I know that he knows that his physique allows him to be comfortable: he has nothing to gain with the girl, and therefore nothing to lose. She is sitting between the boys, her eyebrows raised and a hand over her mouth in amusement or shock – I can’t quite decide – as she listens. Her back is turned to Gabriel, whose only visible means of support are the elbows he’s tucked behind him