MISS HUNTER LOVES TO hit boys on the hand with her wooden ruler. Afterwards, you rub spit on your hands to cool them down.
Now Miss Hunter is up on a chair, yelling blue murder and waving her ruler, just because of a white mouse. The mouse is my mouse, Oliver Twist. He was meant to lie still inside my shirt pocket, but he got too curious and peeked out.
– Put the bloody mouse in a box, yells Miss Hunter.
I tip Oliver Twist into a square chalk box and shut the lid.
Then Miss Hunter swoops down on me. She nabs me by the ear and frogmarches me to the boys’ toilet. I think she is going to pull down my pants and beat me with her wooden ruler. Instead, she tells me to tip him in.
– Empty the box, boy.
– Please, Mevrou, don’t drown my mouse, I beg.
– Your mouse is dead, Pumpkinshoes. Don’t you be a hero now.
Plop, goes Oliver Twist, under the blue-tinted water. After a time, he bobs up, doggypaddling.
– Bloody vermin, Miss Hunter swears.
She yanks the dangling chain and he is sucked down the gurgling throat of the toilet. Just when I think Oliver Twist is gone forever, he bobs up again, his eyes black canna seeds popping out of his head with fear.
Again Miss Hunter yanks the chain. This time she jabs at Oliver Twist with her ruler, as a farmer dips sheep. This time he stays down.去
Though I will never forget Miss Hunter sheepdipped Oliver Twist dead, she teaches us some good things about dying:
The Egyptians fish your brains out through your nostrils and bury you alive with your slaves.
The Romans put a penny in your mouth for the ferry to the underworld.
The Kalahari Bushmen bury you in a hole, with your bow and a quiver of arrows to hunt buck in the world of the spirits.
One time, when Miss Hunter is called to the office, a boy called Spud unzips his pink songololo in front of the class. Spud’s head is full of potato and he is always up to no good. He still has his songololo out when Miss Hunter comes in. Her eyes flare and she jabs at his songololo with her wooden ruler. Spud hops from foot to foot. The hot-potato hopping is so funny we howl with laughter.
Then Miss Hunter holds his hand, palm up, and stings it over and over. Spud howls for mercy. Then she drags him out of the class by his sideburns. We stare out the window, empty our pencil boxes, flick through maths homework, anything to avoid each other’s eyes.
Spud never comes to the school again. I hear he was caught pinching Camels from the Cape-to-Rio Café.
In South Africa, if the police catch you redhanded, and you are under 18, they tie you down and beat you, just for pinching cigarettes. The magistrate says how many cuts you get and there is nothing your father can do to save you, even if he is big in the fruit-canning business.
– You see what comes of fiddling, Miss Hunter tells us, after Spud is caught by the police. First you fiddle, then you swipe cigarettes, then you smoke dagga, and then you rob the Boland Bank or join the ANC. It’s downhill all the way.
Lucky Strike smoked dagga, but he never swiped so much as a teaspoon from us. I wonder if Lucky Strike has run to Mozambique or Angola to join the ANC. Maybe he has traded his whittling knife for a gun. Maybe they have caught him by now and he is jailed with Mandela on Robben Island.
– Mandela and his Cuban friends in Angola want to hijack this beautiful country, Miss Hunter tells us. The godless Russians give them the tanks and aeroplanes. If it wasn’t for our boys on the border, the evil men would burn this school, rape your mother and your sisters.
She lets this foot-fiddling thought sink in for a moment, then goes on:
– Now that Rhodesia is going to the dogs, South Africa is the last white, Christian outpost.
That is why, when we go to high school, we will march on Fridays. That is why, when we leave school, we will go to the army. We will fight to keep our mothers unraped, our schools unburnt, to stay on the God-given land. Though Mandela is behind bars, the Cubans are still out there, lurking in the Angolan bush, planning the big hijack.
Miss Hunter flops to the floor while chalking the blackboard full. Kobus de Jong runs for the headmaster, Meneer Theron. Meneer Theron huffs in, steering poor Kobus ahead of him, sure that this is a schoolboy joke. But it is no joke. Miss Hunter lies there, stone dead, black hairs jutting through her stockings and her eyes wide, just like the time Spud had his songololo out. Meneer Theron shuts her eyelids. I wonder if he will put a coin in her mouth for the penny ferry, but he just covers her up with the dusty tablecloth.
Then he shoos us out of the classroom, into the schoolyard. While waiting for the ambulance to come across town from Paarl hospital, he gives us each a hiding for driving poor Miss Hunter to the end of her wits.
Though Meneer Theron blames us for Miss Hunter’s death, we are all made to go to her burial in school blazers, and look sad and sing sad songs for her. I am sorry we do not get a last gawp at her, the way it was with Grandmama Rudd. I wonder if they left her brain in. When the dominee goes on about how she is now in heaven with Jesus, surrounded by little children just like us, I wonder how Miss Hunter will get on without her wooden ruler. The dominee smiles at us, reminds us that Jesus said suffer the children to come unto me. Meneer Theron glares at us, as if to say: I’ll see you hang from the yardarm.
I wonder if Jesus’ heaven and the Roman underworld and the Bushman world of the spirits are the same place, or if every colour has a heaven, just as every colour has its own school. My mother told me: All loved things have a spirit, and go to heaven. I loved Box and Oliver Twist, so they would have floated up from their wells and drainpipes. Granny Rudd loved Grandmama, so she will be footing some poor dead boy up the ass. And, as it turns out, Miss Hunter was loved, for her son drove all the way down from Messina in the far north for her burial.
After the burial my mother cooks I&J fish fingers and chips to cheer me up, and my father lets me sip the foam off his beer. It’s a magic moment.