THE AFTERNOON BUS RATTLES along dirt roads.
Past fields where convicts look up from their hoeing to watch us go by.
Past barefoot coloured schoolkids walking the long torrid miles in clusters of lurid colour.
I sit with my knees up against the seat in front of me and my blazer draped over my head for shade. The bus rumbles on, and I focus on its rhythm and the vibration in my feet.
We stop. I lift the corner of my blazer to look out.
There is a rundown café, with a solitary petrol pump in front and a faded rooibos tea advert on the zinc roof, where you buy the newspaper and Simba chips, or Springbok bread and fresh milk.
Bicycles are propped against the finger-dirt wall below a window jammed with Koffiehuis tins and Koo jams and Silver Cloud flour and batcollar pink shirts that were in fashion in the sixties, maybe. A small coloured boy sits in the doorway. A cockroach crawls across his dirt-caked toes. The boy catches it and tugs its legs off, calmly, one by one.
At home the summer smell of mown kikuyu grass beckons me. I dump my schoolbooks, shed my school blues and greys, my fears of bamboo and big boys, and run out the yard and up the bluegum avenue. Overhead, blades of light spear through the bluegums. A red and green pheasant darts across my path, giving me a scare.
A tractor rattles by, fruitpickers standing in the empty fruit bins, as if they are to be canned and shipped overseas. They wave at me and yell: baleka, baleka. Run, run. And I run, out of the bluegum avenue, past the reservoir, and on through pear and peach orchards, through the stinging cicada sun, up to the dam on the slopes of the Simonsberg.
I kick off my Dunlop tackies and denim shorts and dive in, plummet down through the lukewarm surface layer into the icy depths, feel the usual sharp panic that I will be sucked down forever, and begin to fight the downward pull.
I surface, gasping for air, and float like an otter with the sun on my face. Again I feel the fear tug at me. The fear, ever since a coloured boy drowned in the dam, that a hand might reach up out of the murky deep and touch me.
I float there, between the blue of the sky and the green of bloated faces and scaly fish.
An Egyptian goose glides across the cloudless sky.
My mind rewinds the day I went kloofing with Bach and Kala and Langtand and Flip.
We followed a river through canyons so deep that the sun only lit the black water at noon. We climbed along the river-edge rocks and jumped down waterfalls into the deep, gouged-out pools below.
Amid the yells and laughter triggered by the cold of a black-water pool, it was some time before we realised Flip was gone. When Bach eventually dived him out of the black, he was dead, just freckles and wet white flesh lolling on a rock. Flip was too dead for us to try mouth to mouth. Besides, he had scum oozing from his mouth. Bach told Kala to run like blitz with his long legs for help, although we all knew there was none for Flip van Staden.
I held Flip’s rubbery hands and begged God to breathe life into him again. I hoped that Bach and Langtand would think I was just praying the kind of Catholic prayer that you see priests pray over dying heroes in films. With such prayers no one waits for the dead to leap up again. The priest just prays for the journey of the soul into the world of the dead. But my prayer was a Lazarus prayer. Every now and then I blinked my eyes open to see if Flip stirred, but his glazed eyes just stared into the sky, like the eyes of a dead fish. I heard a faint gargle as some trapped air bubbled up from his lungs.
I promised God: I will not argue politics with my father, I will skip out the sexy parts in Wilbur Smith, I will not finger through Bach’s dog-eared, banned copy of Playboy.
But still Flip’s hand flopped lifelessly.
– Forget it. He’s dead, Bach said to me.
Maybe he guessed I was praying for a miracle. Afterwards, my mother said it was beautiful that I had prayed to God for poor Flip van Staden’s soul. I did not tell her, or anyone, that I had not prayed for his soul, but for his life, and that God had not heard. Or, if he had, my faith was not pure enough after the Playboy images had become imprinted on my mind.
I shiver at the memory and swim ashore. The sand piping hot under my cold, bare feet. I run bare-assed along the dam wall to fetch my denims and tackies, keeping my eyes peeled for coloured women picking grapes in the vineyards. In the valley below, the white speck of our house, Champagne, glimmers white among the vines.
I run down the bluegum avenue again and detour through the peach orchards past La Rhône, the house of a girl called Jarrah.
For me Jarrah is the most magical word in the world. Jarrah is my bright yearning. She makes butterflies flit and dip in my mind. Sometimes she reads on the grass, in oak shadow, but she never glances up as I crunch fallen pinecones underfoot, like Tanglefoot the Red Indian.
Again I run by, again she lies under the oak, on her stomach, bare feet to the sky. Again I crunch pinecones, crack twigs, yet her head stays down, eyes glued to the book.
One day, after days and days of this Tanglefoot ritual, Zane comes home from playing with Jarrah’s sister, Shanna.
– Shanna said that Jarrah said you are sooo childish always running past their house, he chirps.
– I don’t care a jot, I mutter.
Just so. Tough as a cowboy. Afterwards I bury my head in my duckfeather pillow as the butterflies die.