Serpent Crescent

Vivian de Klerk

Description

'A mesmerising, macabre tale told with acerbic wit!' - SUE NYATHI, author of A Family Affair, The GoldDiggers and The Polygamist

In the small rural town of Qonda, South Africa, the power and water supplies are unreliable, property prices are down, and citizens are slowly suffocating in the acrid smoke from the municipal dump. Recently retired English teacher Megan Merton has lived here all her life, most of it at No. 8 Serpent Crescent. So who better than this self-styled pillar of society to shine a spotlight on the decline and dysfunction, not to mention the dubious activities, past and present, of many of her neighbours. Nefarious deeds and bad behaviour deserve harsh treatment and appropriate retribution, if not consignment to one of Dante’s fiendish nine circles of hell. At least that’s what Megan believes – in fact she’s been taking matters into her own hands, unnoticed, for years. And now she has decided to write it all down, to shake all of the skeletons loose, and rejoice in the inventive punishments she devised and personally delivered to the wicked.

Then her neighbour Elizabeth Cardew, a lecturer in Classical Studies, suffers a stroke and Megan is entrusted with the keys to No. 9. While Elizabeth begins a long recovery at the local care facility, Whispering Pines, Megan relishes the chance to snoop. Curious as to ‘what a stroke victim looks like’, she decides to visit and see for herself.

A bond develops between the two women – one a cold and calculating sociopath, the other a courageous and lonely academic – something that takes both of them by surprise.

Vivian de Klerk’s sharp observations and brilliantly acerbic satirical wit make this multi-layered novel at once horrifying, shocking and poignant – and very, very funny.

Sujets

• General officer
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Pan Macmillan South Africa
• Date de parution: 28 février 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781770107502
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Serpent Crescent



For Chris and for Billy


Serpent Crescent
A Novel
Vivian de Klerk
PICADOR AFRICA


First published in 2022 by Picador Africa
an imprint of Pan Macmillan South Africa
Private Bag X19, Northlands
Johannesburg, 2116
www.panmacmillan.co.za
ISBN 978-1-77010-749-6
e-ISBN 978-1-77010-750-2
© 2022 Vivian de Klerk
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This book is a work of fiction. It is based on a wide range of personal experiences and observations. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Editing by Alison Lowry
Proofreading by Jane Bowman
Design and typesetting by Nyx Design
Cover design by publicide


ALSO BY VIVIAN DE KLERK – NOT TO MENTION (2020)
‘A cunningly crafted tale filled with cryptic clues as to the real reason why Katy has a toxic love affair with food; the sensuous language will leave you hungry for more. Vivian de Klerk ingeniously invites you to delve beneath Katy’s voluptuous folds into the depths of her psyche in this compelling debut, which will remain etched in your mind, much like the harrowing Herald headlines.’ – SUE NYATHI, bestselling author
‘Utterly compulsive. De Klerk delivers a slow drip of a story that is both beautiful and monstrous. I’ve never read anything like it.’ – MICHELE MAGWOOD, literary critic
‘A page-turner in the truest sense: chilling and masterfully crafted.’ – REBECCA DAVIS, bestselling author
‘Outstanding in its attention to morbid physicality, this novel explores the tragic irrelevance of a sparkling linguistic intelligence measured against raw emotional, psychological and physical need. The book is beautifully written, blending the parochial charms of Port Alfred, a seaside backwater on South Africa’s Eastern Cape coast, with a harrowing tale of cruelty, suppressed resentment and entropic dissolution.’ – LAURENCE WRIGHT, literary critic


Schadenfreude : (noun) the pleasure derived from another person’s misfortune. The experience of joy or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures or humiliation of another. Schadenfreude has been detected in children as young as 24 months and may be an important social emotion establishing ‘inequity aversion’.


Serpent Crescent



1
where to begin ? I think I’ll just plunge right in and hopefully I’ll get to the point soon enough – no need to worry about the finicky detail of it all just yet. Charles always used to tell me I should calm down and take things one at a time. But how else do you begin your memoir if not by rushing at it headlong, and seeing how it turns out? Charles will play his part in due course, but there are many other characters, some of them nebulous, some vivid, milling restlessly on the margins of my thoughts, and I plan to write about all of them. I’ll probably get some of the detail or the sequence wrong as brain tissue is remarkably unstable. Every molecule around a synapse is replaced by the hour, and some by the minute, which is a bit depressing. No wonder I can’t remember everything accurately. But I’m going to give it a crack.
It’s time. Time to let it all out.
But ah, the aphrodisiac qualities of secrecy. These secrets are mine, all mine and mine alone. Unless someone eventually reads this, of course, which they won’t, and why should they? But still, there’s that worm of worry, a small, niggling fear of incrimination. I don’t fancy a jail term, not at my age. And so, just in case, I’ve labelled this file ‘Accounts Payable’ on my computer. Accounts payable. Things that people owe. That seems apt to me. Also, I rather like the idea of leaving this record of my life, all my achievements, up to chance. If someone does find it and read it, so what? I’ll be pushing up daisies.
My story is not about happy endings, or plots unfolding, by the way. Life doesn’t happen like that. Things crop up unexpectedly, and have to be dealt with. They can’t be rehearsed or corrected in the way writers usually do, cutting and pasting and rewriting until things are perfect. I don’t have the patience for that anyway. It’s off-the-cuff stuff, so it will be a bit random as I unravel threads of memory and knot them in amongst slight untruths – the inevitable consequence of time rusting the facts until they become unrecognisable, shadowy, ambiguous. No doubt I’ll wander off course now and then, but on the whole it should be quite interesting, I think. Hard to believe, maybe, some of it, but all true. You’ll see what I mean.
And I should add that there won’t be any fancy foreshadowing and suchlike. No writerly touches, no random but meaningful dreams – leaving them out will save me a lot of time – and no significant descriptions of the weather, nothing poetic like that, unless it’s really worthy of mention. I’m just an English teacher (retired), not a fancy academic with a PhD like my neighbour – Elizabeth Cardew, No. 9 – and look where that got her. Anyway, such originality would go unrewarded. Much more interesting, to me, are the hard, sharp edges of memory. The bits that scratch me, interrupt my dreams, insistently reminding me of what happened.
I’m troubled – just slightly – that wanting to write might be a little bit of latent hubris in me, pushing its way up from wherever I’ve been suppressing it all these years. Pride is one of the seven deadly sins but Dante didn’t allocate a circle of hell for it, so it can’t be that serious. Nevertheless it’s not nice when people boast about what they have done. Perhaps the better way is to keep a lid on it, just write it all down in private.
I’m getting old rather quickly, I fear. Even though I’m only sixty-four, I’m better off than Elizabeth, who is four years younger than me, but you never know. I’ve noticed that my hands have started to tremble ever so slightly and my fingers don’t move easily around the keyboard anymore. The skin on the backs of my hands has become rough, speckled, like drops of Worcestershire sauce on a fried egg. I’ve also spotted the beginnings of senile warts. They must have crept in, surreptitiously, while I wasn’t looking. They’re especially noticeable on my neck. Some of them are black, like moles, round and perfect against the whiteness of my unexposed skin; others are pale brown, some even yellowish, oblong and uneven, like the splashes from the random flick of some careless god’s paintbrush idly painting in his empyrean studio above. Unbeautiful, I’m afraid. I don’t like the word senile. It’s dank, dark and threatening. And the wart idea is even worse: seborrhoeic keratosis (I looked it up), greasy, crusty spots which seem to be stuck on my skin. Every time I look I find more of them: darkish brown oval spots, some turning black, slowly stretching like amoebas. It’s lucky my eyesight isn’t that good these days, or my sensitivity. I don’t think I could tell a genital wart from my clitoris.
* * *
At first I thought Elizabeth had simply disappeared. When the music stopped, and there was no more Beethoven or Mozart in the evenings, no more lights turned on, and no sumptuous smells wafting over from her cooking – I couldn’t understand it. Not that we were friendly, but still it seemed odd. Actually we were at school together, but I didn’t really know her back then and she was a few years behind me. What I remember of her is that she was a nice, well-mannered girl, who minded her own business, worked hard, got distinctions. She went on to university, got a PhD eventually, and apparently made quite a name for herself. By the time she moved into the Crescent she was a high-flying academic, a senior lecturer. I only discovered what her field of scholarship was (Classics, of all things) when she had regular clear-outs and I went through her trash. Judging from the stuff she threw out in her garbage I reckoned she must also be fluent in French, Italian, Greek and Latin – if one can be fluent in Latin. Heaps of old journals like Classical Studies and L’Année Phil ologique , containing articles like ‘A Comparison Between the Early and Later Works of Aeschylus’ and ‘The Life and Times of Alexander the Great’. I read them, so I know what I’m talking about. It amazes me that people actually publish articles on that stuff; I quite understand why Elizabeth tossed them out. Like the paper in the Harvard Theological Review from 1937 (seriously!) called ‘Confession of Sins in the Classics’. Ancient Greeks and Romans have been doing this confessing for centuries, apparently. St Augustine of Hippo wrote thirteen autobiographical books, each called Confessions, in which he gave the details of all his sins. And they were written to be read out loud, for heaven’s sake (I found that out on Google)!
That was another sign that something was wrong: there was no fresh garbage from No. 9 for me to go through. Then the post started piling up – and disappearing, which meant someone was coming to collect it. But I was never at home at the right moment to go across and find out what was going on. Then the other day, after Elizabeth had been gone a couple of months, I caught a glimpse of a woman locking the front door but by the time I got to mine she was already driving off. In a great hurry, by the looks of it, her back wheel thumping into the pothole a