Pete ran as fast as he could, but he was struggling. His lungs refused to give him air. It was his own fault. But, then again, you only turn sixteen once.
It was pretty good. He’d invited twenty-or-so people and twelve showed up, not bad considering four of them came all the way from Dundee. It was just a shame Renate couldn’t come; well, he assumed she couldn’t come, or maybe she lost the invite – or maybe he wasn’t playing for the first team and therefore an abject loser in her perfect blue eyes. No, she must have lost the invite, or there was a family emergency. Her mom always seemed to walk around with a bandage of sorts; perhaps she had fallen again and Renate had to help with the chores.
His lungs felt like they were being passed through a grater.
Everyone seemed to have a good time, except Barend, who was unusually quiet. After the Dundee guys were picked up by their parents, three of the locals left too. He thought that the party was nearing its end, despite Belchie’s proclamation beforehand that it would be the party of the decade. Belchie went to Sarel Cilliers – or Donkey Tech, as the pupils from Dundee referred to it – the technical school in Glencoe, but the two of them and Barend had been friends since before they could spell the word “friends”; that said, Pete had serious doubts whether Belchie could spell it now. For Belchie, every molehill was a mountain. In his world, everything was the biggest, fastest and coolest, therefore Pete suspected his proclamation about the party was just another of his exaggerations.
After they thanked his parents and promised not to be back too late, the party moved to Belchie’s house, more specifically the small outbuilding his older brother called home. The same older brother who was in Johannesburg for two weeks. Belchie locked the door behind them and could barely contain his excitement. He unveiled a brown box with no writing on it. There were quizzical looks all round, and he lapped it up. The audience was his to surprise and amaze. He slowly opened the box to reveal hundreds of cigarettes, squeezed in like white-and-yellow sardines.
Not ready to lose his crowd to the cache of smokes, he waved everyone to the fridge in the corner. He held his hand on the fridge door and then flung it open with a high-pitched “Ta-da!”
The fridge was stacked full of Lion Lagers and there was one bottle of Russian Bear vodka in the freezer shelf. A few jaws dropped, and a collective nervous giggle filled the room.
Needless to say, the beer and vodka flowed, and a thick grey plume of smoke soon shrouded the room in murky darkness. With the music turned up and the laughter getting more and more rapturous, the six boys pretended to suddenly like alcohol and cigarettes.
Pete alternated between beer and vodka to neutralise the cigarette taste in his mouth; nonetheless, he was on his seventh cigarette and had even tried to inhale a few times. Barend appeared out of the cloud of music and smoke, his smile gone and his shoulders slumped.
“What’s up, man?” Pete asked.
“Listen, Pete, I ...” Barend started.
“What’s that?” Pete shouted over the music.
“Mr Theunissen asked me to train with the first and second teams after the holidays.” Barend spoke quickly, avoiding eye contact.
Pete frowned. He wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words. His best friend was standing in front of him, grovelling, desperate to find the courage to get this weight off his chest.
“He said year after year props get injured on tour, so he’ll need me ... in case,” Barend finally completed his unburdening.
An angry flash took hold of Pete through the beer and vodka. His ears were red already, but now he was boiling over. He took a quick sip of beer, looked at Barend, and looked away again.
“That’s cool, man. Very cool. You’ll have to fight off the chicks now, hey?” He got up and slapped Barend on the shoulder.
“Have we stopped drinking or what?” Pete shouted. This was greeted with a loud, approving chorus, except for Barend, who put down his beer and snuck out quietly.
Every shot of vodka and every Rothmans King Size chased vaporous waves through his mouth. He didn’t want to be sick again and ran a little slower in the hope that the feeling would pass. Approximately thirteen hours ago, around two in the morning, he had stood outside Belchie’s brother’s smoke-filled flatlet and thrown up beer, vodka, dinner and cigarette fumes. His cheeks had been cold and his upper body shook, but he felt feverish, sweaty, and tears jumped out of his eyes with every convulsive spew. He swore then, as he did now, that he would never drink again, and as certain as the sun rose in the morning, he would never, ever smoke again.
He couldn’t remember how he got home, how he unlocked the house, brushed his teeth, or even how he got into bed. But what he did remember was that he was ripped from the serenity of dreamless sleep with a cacophonous and deafening rendition of “Happy Birthday”, and rudely thrust into the nauseating reality of his sins of the night before. His parents sang with gusto, holding a large, wrapped present between them. Their faces swirled in dull colours against the backdrop of the most blinding and painful light streaming in through the curtains. A cloud of smoke filled his vision, but he couldn’t tell whether it was real or not. The sickening stench of stale cigarettes covered his pillow like a rug, so much so that he forced himself upright. The movement sent a roller coaster around his stomach, and for a few moments he was certain that he would cover his parents and birthday present in whatever was left in his gut.
Thank goodness he kept it in.
Even through his haze, he could sense the air of disappointment behind the cheerful singing and broad smiles. They knew. How much didn’t matter: they knew.
His hands were shaking like those of an old man when he opened the present, and if he’d had to answer his mom’s question, “Do you feel older?” his answer would most definitely have been “Hell, yes!” His birthday present was a brand-new Spalding tennis racket. If you used a hint of imagination, it looked a little like Ivan Lendl’s racket. The head was bigger than his old racket, and the grip was nice and solid. If he wasn’t about to die, he would have been very excited.
Thankfully, his good old dad stopped the joyous little get-together. “Right,” Rikus said before he and his wife muttered a few more indecipherables and left Pete’s room. It was only then that he realised that his bladder felt like a cracked dam wall about to break. He forced his legs off the bed and felt another wave of nausea descend. He got up, desperately searching for his bin, but decided instead to make a run for it. He did make the toilet – just. He threw up but struggled to contain his bladder while his upper body contorted, and splashes of urine darkened his shorts.
No, there’s no chance in hell that he’ll ever drink again.
His battered body was dragging him past the row of identically constructed houses of Dannhauser’s New Extension. The sun was low and the air cool. The awfulness had stuck around all day, and even now, in the late afternoon, it was still present. Mercifully, the smoke-haze had evaporated by the time Sunday school finished. What didn’t help was that he saw Rudie – for the first time in weeks. Thankfully, only at a distance.
His mom had cooked a feast and he tried his best to eat some of it, even though he just wanted to lie down and die. One way or another, he managed to survive the day and now he was trying to run off the last few remnants of the misery.
He thought about Barend, the best guy he knew, and how he had treated him. He had been so angry that his best friend was promoted to the second team that he hadn’t even realised he’d left. What kind of friend was he?
And then there was Rudie, that Satan drifting in and out of his life. Why couldn’t he just have stayed away today? It was his birthday!
Guilt and anger raged in his beer-battered body as he ran next to the fishing pond. Barend and Rudie intertwined so much that at some point he saw just one face: Barend’s, but with a yellow moustache and that demonic laugh.
When he reached the top of the hill, his legs were shaking and his lungs were fighting hard to catch up. The sun lingered above the mountain-etched horizon like a blood-red cricket ball, staring at him, like it wanted to say something. He wanted to say something too; he wanted to say that he hated himself, hated who he was. He wanted to tell the sun that there was no point to any of this, none whatsoever. He was an oxygen thief, for the past sixteen years. Would anyone even realise if he wasn’t there any more? A drop of water on the road, dried up by the first sun?
Pete closed his eyes. He let the cool dusty air fill his lungs and shut the world out. “Pete, I mean, baas Pete,” Petrus interrupted his moment of self-loathing.
“Jeez, Petrus, you’ll give me a heart attack!” Pete swallowed hard and his eye started to itch. He couldn’t believe Petrus had run up to him without him noticing.
“Sorry, sorry, baas.” The black guy squirmed in front of him with twitchy toes and hands flapping at his sides.
“Call me Pete,” Pete said, turning back towards the mountains, lifting his head and taking a deep breath.
Pete only caught a glimpse of Petrus’s surprise. There was a long pause as Pete closed his eyes and let the soft autumn air fill his recovering lungs. The silence lingered.
“Pete,” Petrus said with uncertainty. “I was wondering ... I haven’t seen you for a long time, so I was wondering ... if maybe you’ve seen her? The girl?”
Pete smiled. When Petrus said “girl” in his strong Zulu accent, it sounded like “ghel”.
“The ghel, I mean, girl?” Pete said.
“Yes, you know ... her.” This time Petrus’s “her” sounded like “hair”. But Petrus’s accent soon evaporated from his mind, as Pete’s thoughts took him to her, standing with the broom in her hand, one perfect strand of black hair stroking her flawless skin.
“Yup.” He had tried everything to put her out of his mind, but at the same time, he suspected the only thing that might do that was one of Rudie’s bullets.
“I went to Naidoo and Sons.” Pete paused. He saw Petrus’s eyes bulging, willing the information out of him. He realised that this was the first time he had spoken about his visit out loud, and to an actual person.
“She was there, working in her dad’s shop.”
“Was she okay? Did you speak?” Petrus was struggling with Pete’s protracted answer.
“She was okay. We only spoke for a second, but I managed to ask her if she was okay. She looked—” Pete stopped just before the word “beautiful” leaped off his tongue.
“She looked?” Petrus asked.
“Um ... she looked fine, healthy ... she looked normal ... you know: okay,” Pete said.
“Good.” Petrus let out a relieved sigh. “I was worried; eish, I was so worried. It’s all I’ve been thinking about.”
Pete mulled over Petrus’s words. His last couple of months had also been consumed by her and that night. There was a kindness to the breeze now, and he recognised it instantly; it was hearing the secrets locked in the dungeons of his heart aloud, and hearing them echo in someone else’s voice.
“It’s my birthday today,” Pete said.
“Sho! Happy birthday.”
Pete didn’t know why he had said it; perhaps it was the overwhelming relief of being able to loosen the iron grip of his painfully kept secrets.
“How old are you?” Petrus asked.
“Sixteen. Sixteen bloody years old.”
“Me too!” Petrus cried out.
“It’s a crazy age,” Pete said. “We’re old enough to join the army, you know – war, kill people, die for your country – but too young to drink, drive, and even to vote for that same country that will gladly offer you up as cannon fodder.” A small grin curled in the corner of Pete’s mouth.
They chortled for a few moments.
“Are you in Standard Eight?” Pete asked.
“Yes. You?” Petrus said.
“Yup.”
A few moments elapsed as the conversation dried up and they stared at the sun seeking shelter behind the mountains before the night took over.
“Right.” Pete couldn’t believe he used his dad’s term. “I need to go, my mom ... you know how it is?”
“I know it well, same here,” Petrus said. His gaze was fixed on the ground around his feet.
“If ...” Petrus started but stopped himself, and fixed his gaze on the setting sun again. “If you see her, please ... say ... say ... say, I said hello.” Petrus looked like his eyes were trying to shoot down the words he had just spoken.
“Um, yeah, well ... if I ... Look, I don’t go to town very often, but if I ... I’ll see,” Pete said. He watched this black guy standing in front of him, his age, but so very different, pretending to stare at the setting sun, but looking like his own skin made him crawl.
He peered in the direction of his home and forced his sore muscles into a trot. After a few metres, he stopped and turned back to Petrus.
“See you,” he said, and ran home in the hope, however strange, that he would see Petrus again.