The Heart Is the Size of a Fist (2021)

   

“A call to speak out about abuse and an invocation of healing... It is the quality of the writing, and its sophistication, that lifts this novel above most narrations of childhood trauma.”

— Henrietta Rose-Innes, author of Nineveh and Green Lion

“A gripping and deeply moving story of emotional survival.”

— S.J. Naudé, author of The Alphabet of Birds and The Third Reel

The Heart Is the Size of a Fist is a story of a boy’s complicated relationship with his violent, but charismatic, alcoholic father. The son, Paul, recalls periods that his parents reconciled, followed by times of desperate flight with his damaged mother. It is also a poignant coming-of-age and a coming-out tale as Paul discovers his identity. And a story of brotherly love, as he seeks to protect from harm his estranged half-brother — the only other person who can call that man ‘Dad’. 

Finn and I started to sleep together early in the year we turned fourteen. It was a great relief to us once this happened, once this was normalised, because our friendship had been suffering for some months – for more than a year, really – from a kind of undefined malaise. We had been inseparable since we were nine, when I arrived in Oudtshoorn from up north, but since the age of about eleven a tension started to emerge. There was no single reason for this; it was a confluence of many things.

On Finn’s side, with puberty came vast love and fumbling lust for anything female, a more gregarious personality – or rather, persona – and increased frustration with his own family’s poverty. Finn wanted to date, to go to school dances, to get new clothes – none of this was available to him, not really.

On my side, the elation at my father’s absence meant the arrival of a strange psychological stasis. In hindsight I know this was depression – and its twin: anxiety. Existentially, this manifested in a loss of religious faith, which, in turn, fed my anxiety, and was, in turn, fed by my bafflement about all matters sexual.

And so, those months between roughly the ages of eleven and thirteen were dark and lonely indeed. Finn and I were misaligned, in terms of how we positioned ourselves in the world, about what we wanted from the world, and about the certainties about ourselves that we were cultivating. Although we remained friends throughout, we were not, until just after our thirteenth birthdays, as close as we had been before.

Even when we did become closer once again, we steered clear of trying to align our developing expressions or definitions of what was real and true. When we started to sleep together, neither of us considered the sex we were having, and the sexual things we were doing, as real sex – and certainly not as romance.

We did not view ourselves as lovers, and we were not in love with each other. We loved each other, sure, and Finn saw us and what we did together as the expression of close friendship: guys helping guys out. In fact, most of his narrative was about the girls he so devotedly followed, and desired. His attraction to them was genuine, obsessive, powerfully sexual, and to this day I do not think of Finn as anything but rampantly, demonstrably heterosexual.

As for me, I was in firm agreement with Finn: we were guys helping each other out. I was not, I can honestly say, ever in love with Finn. I loved him then and I love him today, still. I see him as a generous boy, then man, who helped me out, and who helped himself out. The one anomaly in this was the cuddling: after our teenage acts (brief, but intense, and infinitely repeatable, in a single night) we would end up, naked, glistening, one boy’s head on the other’s stomach, or lying next to each other, talking, arms touching, or flung casually across the other’s body. There was an ease of being and of being with each other that was extraordinary.

Finn and I did not really discuss sexuality itself. We both knew that he was more exclusively into girls than I was. We knew of my little boy-crushes at school. We did not discuss any of this, not because we were too shy, or too unsophisticated to realise where our definitional selves were heading, but because all of that did not matter. On our weekend sleepovers we were simply alive in an undefined space. Now, I suppose, I can redefine it as ‘queer’, but back then such labels and the search for categorisation just never occurred to us.

As what we were doing with each other, and our friendship, was outside of the regular world, the things that Finn and I did with each other were also not viewed as cheating – nothing changed in our rhythms and ways of being together when Finn or I found girlfriends. Finn had a new girlfriend or crush every two months or so, with regular overlaps. I had fewer girlfriends, maybe two during all of high school, but the nature of my relationship with girls was more profound than Finn’s. Finn was in love with girls and wanted to sleep with them; I was in love with them too, genuinely, but had little erotic inclination.

This, however, did not reduce my feeling of closeness to them, and I was, I think, not a bad boyfriend. I lusted after boys, though, although I had little desire to actually get to know them. Girls I loved and wanted to know; boys I did not care for tremendously, in terms of actual conversation. Later on, this would evolve into a vague asexuality towards both sexes; women remain so much more interesting to me, though: them I can know and want to know and be comfortable with; men, I am not so sure. Bisexual I am not, definitely, neither in equal nor differentiated desire or action; to me, the term is mostly useless. If you pushed me now, for classification, I suppose queer would be the word that gets the firmest nod.

None of this was close to clear, back then. At school, the objects of my affection were few in number – nowhere near as many as Finn’s. For a year I desired Margaret, the pianist, in grade nine. In much of the following two years I was smitten with Cara, so beautiful, one year below me, and during my last year of school I adored Emma. Contemporaneously, though, across all of them and until the age of sixteen, my most prominent and venerated crush was a boy called Hugo.