JUST WHEN I THINK I will never ever find a girlfriend, I am invited to a dance jol in Stellenbosch over the Simonsberg mountain. I am not invited to the sokkies in Paarl. Boys like Maljan the rugby prop do not want a rooinek around when they dance with pretty Afrikaans girls with names like Annemarie and Annelise.
A girl called Tara invited me. I find Tara pretty, with her red hair twined into pigtails.
My mother drives me into Paarl in the Peugeot 404 to shop for togs in Lady Grey Street. I choose a pair of docksides, my first-ever cool shoes, after years of wearing cheap Batas to school. I also choose a red denim jacket. My mother flips up the collar, stands back.
– You remind me of James Dean, she says. You know, you are on the verge of becoming a man.
On the way home in the chugging 404, I pray to God that Tara will fall for me in my red denim jacket and docksides.
My father ferries me over the mountain to the jol in his Isuzu bakkie. The bakkie smells of cow dung and wet dog, for my father ran Nero and Fango up to the dam beforehand.
Nero and Fango are the Cape dogs. The Natal dogs died. Dingaan died of tickbite fever. My father reversed a Land Rover over Dingo. Sometimes I forget Dingaan and Dingo died. It is as if they just changed shape and live on as Nero and Fango.
When we arrive at the dance, held in an old wine cellar, Pink Floyd is chanting: we don’t need no education. My father just shakes his head at the jarring music and Isuzus off, leaving me feeling gangly and edgy, giving off a whiff of cow dung and dog. While Pink Floyd barks at teachers to leave us kids alone, I lean against a wall, for all the world as cool as James Dean: thumbs hooked in my jean pockets.
Tara comes towards me in slow motion, red pigtails flicking, and a milky way of glitter on her forehead. She holds the hand of another guy, and as she reaches me, he pecks her on the lips. The peck, like a dog marking out his zone, is to tell me she is his. It is only then that I cotton on: she has not invited me to be with her, but just to the jol.
I want to run out and cry, but I stay in my James Dean lean and go hi, as if she is just another girl breezing by. Maybe this, this gaping groove furrowed out of my heart by a falling star, is how my mother felt when Cliff Richard did not have eyes for the local Durban girls in their flaring, dotty skirts.
– Have a good time, smiles Tara.
As they go, his hand snakes into her back jeans pocket.
I head for a pyramid of wine vats on the far side, hoping to hide in the murky shadows. First Jarrah and now Tara.
Maybe I will become a monk and never slide my hand into a girl’s jeans.
A girl dancing alone catches my eye. She has long wispy blonde hair to her waist, and from behind you may imagine she wears nothing but her Wrangler jeans as she lilts to Fleetwood Mac.
When she turns around, though, I know she is too beautiful for me, even if Venus blinds her to the smudges of base on my face and the fat hem in my hand-me-down jeans from Lars. He is so tall that my mother has folded the hem over a few times before sewing it up, instead of just cutting off half a foot of cloth.
This time I am sure the feeling welling in me, healing me, is love. I cannot bear the thought of suffering another unconfessed love, so I walk up to her. When I reach her, the words come tumbling out:
– You remind me of a girl with long hair floating under the ice, and she’s dead but she still looks beautiful and ...
My words peter out. Damn, I have just told a girl fizzing with life that she looks dead.
She dips her eyebrows in a V, as if to say: Woaahh, you’re weird.
– Will you dance with me, then? I plead.
She smiles at me and butterflies flutter again.
Unfortunately, just as I drift in to her, The Police begin to sing Don’t Stand So Close to Me.
But she’s so cool and just smiles at the irony and tells me her name. Alana.
I jiggle my docksides two feet away from her. Her hips seesaw before my eyes.
It turns out, I discover, that she also loved Catcher in the Rye and she too cried when the black boy is lost in New York in the film e’Lollipop.
I wish I was free to hold her the way the Afrikaans boys hold girls at their sokkies.
She does not go in for wild jiving. When a song ends she stands stock-still, glances around, waiting for the beat to kick in, or looking for better pickings.
Then, out of the blue, the deejay spins a slow song. I shuffle from foot to foot. Do I just sling my arms around her hips? I have never had my arms around a girl, never mind my hips against a girl. I hope she will give me a signal, but her eyes go all over the place, other than looking into mine.
So, I put my hands on her hips. There is a gap between her T-shirt and her jeans and I feel her skin under my hands. She turns to look deep into my eyes. We stand still as other dovetailed boys and girls float around us.
Just as I want to let go and run for it, her hipbones begin to shift under my hands. She butterflies her arms around me and dips her head on my shoulder. O God, let this dance never end and I’ll promise never ever again, ever to peek at Bach’s Playboy. I close my eyes and bury my nose in her hair. I feel her nubby breasts rub against my ribs.
Then the music is up-beat again and we begin jigging again, two feet apart.
I’m gaga about Alana. I follow her out when her father comes for her in his big white Benz. She gives me a kiss on the cheek and leaves me alone under the moon with her kiss tingling, lingering.
I stand there, catch her smell in my hands the way my father shields a match from the wind when he lights his Texans.
I hear the deep growl of my father’s Isuzu. Dead on midnight. My father is always on time.
By the time my father shifts into fourth gear, the smell of cow dung and dog has chased away the traces of her scent.
– Had a good time with Tara? my father says as we swing into the corners of the Helshoogte pass.
– I hardly saw her.
– Did you dance?
– Yes, I danced.
– With the same girl, or a few girls?
– The same girl.
– Ah. I see.
He can tell I do not want to tell any more. That her name is a magic thing I want to roll around in my mouth all alone, until I am used to it.
I run up the bluegum avenue to the empty reservoir. I sit on the reservoir floor, feet folded under me, hoping the words will come to me. After a time of sitting dead still, a lizard comes out to bask. A blue dragonfly lands on my knee.
Beloved Alana. No. We did not go so far. A flutter of lips on my cheek does not make me her beloved.
O Alana. I would die for you. No. Sounds too much like Die Stem. At thy will to live or die, O South Africa. Dear Alana will do.
Dear Alana
You are the mirage of my imagination.
But I remember the sliding of bone under my hand. She was no mirage. Scratch it out.
Dear Alana
Thoughts of you fly through my mind.
Thoughts of you float. Thoughts of you flutter. Scratch out fly.
Thoughts of you flutter through my mind
like the wings of a
What kind of a bird? A hawk? Too wild. A dove? Too tame. A seagull. Ja.
like the wings of a gull
on a sea breeze.
Love Gecko
I dream of Alana day and night and wander around in a daze. My mother is cross with me for putting the Nesquik tin in the old whining Westinghouse fridge and the milk in the cupboard, so that the milk goes sour.
I forget to latch the door to the parakeet cage and the sky is flagged Caribbean blue and lime green and yellow.
The parakeets flap overhead, perch in the lemon tree, in the bluegum. They are a row of colourful pegs on Nana’s washing line. Maybe their wings are too feeble after being caged for so long, or maybe they are afraid of the sudden, unwired vast sky of freedom, but they do not go far. Instead, the wild birds zone in on our yard. The butcherbirds, drongos and crows sense the tameness in the escaped parakeets and swoop at them with gaping beaks and claws.
Zane and Mila and I catch a few parakeets in a butterfly net, but the rest, over fifty of them, are pecked, till they fall to earth, flecked red and quivering to death. My mother, scared of flapping things, watches through a window. I know how it hurts her to see birds die, and I, who let them fly, dare not look into her eyes.
My father comes home with a pink envelope for me. Zane snatches it and runs out into the yard. I have no choice but to tackle him and pummel him till he lets go. I run up the avenue to the reservoir to open the bent envelope under a sinking, mother-of-pearl sun.
Dear Gecko
I thought your poem was sweet. I thought you were sweet too.
Au revoir (that’s goodbye in French)
Alana
The French bit is a sign she loves me.
I want to ask Alana to see The Gods Must be Crazy with me at the Protea Cinema in Paarl, but I cannot see her jamming into the dung-and-dust bakkie between my father and me when she is used to a Benz. So I go on, riding the bus, running up to the dam, girlless. It is only in Wilbur Smith’s novels, in Bach’s tattered, fingered, taboo Playboy magazine, and in my dreams that I get a chance to discover girls. There is no chance of seeing them topless on the beach, as you may overseas, for the law forbids white girls to bare their nipples.
Whenever I visit Bach, I beg him to let me flick through his Playboy again. Forgive me God but I love to linger on the silky, butterscotch skin, the pink nipples, and the veil of hair hiding the forbidden, yearned-for, magic thing. I know guilt will gnaw at me afterwards. I know I will need to kneel in the cold, hard pews of St George’s before I sip the blood of Jesus again, as the blood of Jesus may kill you just like oleander if you are in sin. I know I will not look my mother in the eyes when she serves me my supper. Though I know all this, I still flick through the Playboy, my heart thudding, knowing the magazine is banned and that you can be caned if the police catch you, knowing Jesus-on-the-cross bends his head in shame.
Afterwards the images stay in my mind. A kaleidoscope of nipples and bellybuttons and parted lips. I whittle away the guilt by hurting myself. I skin my fists against the wall. I run barefoot through the orchards and vineyards (so stones and duwweltjies sting my feet), and dive deep down into the dam at night (when my fear of being sucked down into the murk is strongest). Before I go to bed, I kneel and pray to God: Dear God, save me from the women who come to me in my dreams.
But still they come. They come naked, like Botticelli’s Venus, and they beg me to do things to them. They beg me to tip Peel’s honey into their bellybuttons and lick it out. They beg me to drip a drop of the blood of a pigeon on their forehead. They beg me to sniff at their bottoms, as if I am a dog. But when I want to peck at their hips, they titter at my puny, puppy cock.