I SENT OUT FIFTY CVS BEFORE I GRADUATED. I got two interviews. I only went to one, at an all-girls’ school in the southern suburbs. When I walked into the headmistress’s office for the first time, I saw her lean back in her leather chair and smile to herself as much as at me.
‘Mister September,’ she said, and gave a small sigh of relief, the way she probably does at Christmas when the last relative is packed off into the last car on the twenty-seventh of December. And why shouldn’t she have been relieved to see me? I am small and clean-shaven and highly qualified, a lateblooming and unthreatening twenty-three. I am, in short, the polite sum of my Bushman forebears. I teach English and History, which is to say, I teach young people how to live with themselves and the world. The fact that I got this job, at this school, and that the young people will grow up to be women – some of them already have by the time I get them – is incidental. I always think of // Kabbo, who could have been me, six generations back, jailed for stealing the cows of the new settlers, but turning his tongue to translation. // Kabbo, who called himself Teacher, but whose name means Dream.
At parent–teacher meetings even I bang my knees on the underside of the wooden tables while I wait with my markbook. The furniture is made for children. The parents I need to see are the ones who never come. Most of them are overly interested, clutching their handbags. ‘Mister September,’ they say, making my title – common on the Flats – sound like a caption from a calendar. Or, if they are men, are moustached and overbearing stepfathers, announced by their aftershave. They show their teeth and say, in a joke that is not a joke, ‘You teachers. You have such nice lives. All those school holidays.’ I can live with this: I can endure four hours in the evening, once a term, smiling and nodding and eating a surreptitious sandwich with my mouth carefully closed – because I can go home again to my new flat, to my clean, empty bed and my most expensive possession, the thing I bought with my first salary cheque: Claim to the Country. The book’s pages are thick, the photographs clear, its covers a shield from those parents. I study the alphabets recorded by Bleek and Lloyd: I touch the pictures of // Kabbo, and the people who might be mine.
We males, all six of us on the staff of fifty-five, each got our own key to the men’s bathroom. I half-wondered if they had considered doing the same for the five black teachers. No one ever told me if there had been an incident to precipitate this turnkey system: it just was – as were so many things the girls railed against: the silence in the cloisters as they moved between classes, the skirts that had to be two fingers below the knee (and were measured, precisely, in surprise checks), the laminated passes that allowed one student in the toilets at a time.
The floors of the school bathrooms were still covered in the pale green linoleum the old government liked to lay in all its institutions, in hospitals and schools and offices – wherever you might be reduced to a number on a page. The bathrooms themselves had windows, but were still dank and dark as dungeons. The schoolgirl sorrows of a century had made the moss grow in the grout between the bathroom tiles. They reminded me of the Dutch cavern-prisons below the waterline of the Castle, where I took the Grade Eights on their History trip. Water will wash away most things, but the fungus grows. On the inside of nuclear reactors there is blue-green algae, the start of the new Creation.
We lived underground lives in those bathrooms. I spent whole Assemblies there. Often it was just ten minutes alone I needed, or else some levee would break: the other teachers looked at me as if I might smash the windows and turn on the taps, flood the cloisters with impropriety. I thought of // Kabbo imprisoned at the Breakwater, of all the nomad criminals, thieves, who shouted at the foreigners, ‘Why do you not stay in your own land, where the sun sets? Why must you come here?’
Because I had no office I also sometimes spent breaks in those bathrooms with the girls, one and two at a time. They were often shaking or curled up into themselves like fists, stealing time from home and choir and swimming pool, legitimate extra-mural activities that dictated where they could be. They told me stories; they wept. I sat on the cement until the chill numbed my thighs and the bell went. They would have to splash cold water on their faces to make the swelling go down. I remembered // Kabbo on the endless stairs of the treadmill next to Breakwater Prison, // Kabbo who heard the beatings inside its walls. The bell marked the beginning of the race: after it rang I would have two minutes to dodge to the staffroom, two minutes to scald myself with tea from the urn and bolt the institution pellets – wet, dry, wet, dry – before I sprinted back upstairs to my classroom. There I would choke on the Freedom Charter, on scansion, on Roger Bannister and his four-minute mile.
The bruises that I saw in the locked bathrooms were, of course, secret. They were visible when the girls sat in their desks and their long skirts crept slyly up – before they remembered and pulled the fabric back down over their knees. Those marks were snapshots of lives I cannot imagine now. I spent my days trying to stuff those bruised girls with irony and pentameter, as if they didn’t already know how to mark beats. I am ashamed that I had to ask them for their homework.
I used to take them aside and try to talk to them about Childline, about the possibility of moving away from home, but they only looked at me gently and started sentences, ‘But my mother is sick …’ and, ‘I am not afraid for myself, but my sister is only seven …’ Their soft eyes made me want to vomit, to expel the evidence from my system. It was not the ripping of their tissue that appalled me: it was their acceptance of it, this careful balancing of the load. I always hoped that these beaten girls would fight, but I know why they didn’t. How do you struggle against the people who call themselves your mother and your father, who say they hurt you out of their love?
The woman at Childline sighed and told me over and over that I had to take photographs of the girls’ injuries. We needed evidence if the cases ever went to court: we had to prove that they were being abused beyond what is termed acceptable parenting. Like a mortuary technician I peered at the girls, their swellings and splittings, verified various shades of black and blue. Sometimes it was only the simple print of a hand, the fingers reaching out like rock art; sometimes some other instrument had been applied to their bodies. When I asked them how the bruises happened, they would rustle and shy away. They looked down at the dead garden of the linoleum, searching for clues. ‘A hairbrush,’ they often said, and grinned lopsidedly at themselves. They were embarrassed by the mundanity. They understood the clichés of beating.
A hairbrush. It made me think of all those Victorian ladies who must have once been students at this school, hushed in the cloisters, hurrying to class. How they must have sat at future dressing tables, letting down their hair in waves before their husbands. They are trapped in that bathroom forever: they must have cried there too as the taps slowly leaked, the rusty tide always at the high-water mark. Some of them must have known Lucy Lloyd in her suburban high-necked dresses, must have recognised her strange diacritics.
One Tuesday in the August of her last year of school, a girl stood in the men’s bathroom with her back to me. She was taller than I was, and her limbs were women’s limbs. My arms hung at my sides. How could I shatter the thing between us with the flash and click of photography? We were utterly, utterly decent: her friend stood by with her arms crossed and her face set into an older pattern. And we were utterly, utterly indecent: the back of the girl’s neck gleamed like crockery, like porcelain, something to be thrown in rage against a wall. In another universe she would slide her clothes off for happier reasons, and for a more deserving man. But that year it was my turn. My hand sweated where it held her pink plastic camera.
Her eyelashes fluttered and she shuddered a little as she turned around and unbuttoned her tunic: it was always winter in the men’s bathroom. She shrugged her top down, wincing as the stiff muscles stretched. There were baby freckles on her shoulders and her bra was very white, washed by the knowing hands of the other women in the house, the ones who must have seen the bloodstains.
That Tuesday there were only two black bruises spreading on her spine, a bubonic butterfly the size of my open hands. I remember that she had been sitting very straight in her desk so that there would be no contact between her backbone and the wood.
I took the photographs. For a moment I couldn’t remember how: her camera was a foreign object in my hands: I was as confused by it as // Kabbo had been when the Lloyds first stood him against the wall with the other translating prisoners, before he learned to pose.
But our hands have their own memories. I focused on her naked back. I pressed the greasy button under my thumb. It was done. She struggled back into her dress and buttoned it up again. There was nothing on the outside to show what lay beneath the blue nylon.
I wondered what the people at the Kodak shop thought when the pictures emerged from the machine in their endlessly perforated strip, ready to be cut into squares, packaged in envelopes, labelled with my name and the order number. Did they nudge one another and wave the photographs around their room that smelled of chemicals? It kept me awake: not even my lovely book was a comfort.
I went to collect the photographs. I kept them at home for Childline. Then I gave the girl the negatives in a plain brown envelope, the same kind that the school uses for their quarterly reports. I told her that I would help her when she was ready to testify.
She was never ready. She wrote her preliminary exams. Her results were good. Finals came and went, and I have no doubt that her good marks allowed her to escape the small prison of her household, with its endless treadmill. The jailer must have been sick to see her go.
There were other girls with bruises. At the beginning of the next year – with its textbooks and assemblies and new uniform checks – another envelope came for me. It was addressed via the school and miraculously intact.
Inside it were the negatives, close-ups of an unknown girl’s back, the studs of her spine and the bruises overlaid on it, the edge of a uniform that would be the colour of the sky when it was properly developed but for now was only brown. On the back of one photograph was round, childish writing: I am at Stellenbosch. I even understand the lectures! Thank you for everything you did. She had dotted the ‘i’s with little hearts.
I thought about keeping the photographs, but the idea of preserving that hurt bothered me. I ripped the images up into tiny violent pieces, and then I burrowed them deep into the dustbin outside. I don’t want to remember her. I want to remember // Kabbo, the dead translator of his dead race, and I want to remember Lucy Lloyd, the white lady who survived to publish the transcriptions, who gave them flesh and sent them out into the world.
But what I want to remember most is that it’s not the evidence that counts, after all. It’s the living with it.
You teachers. You have such nice lives. All those school holidays.