AS GIRLS STAY AT bay, there is time for other things. I watch Bach shoot frogs in the dam. The shot frogs flip over onto their backs, tongues of white in the dark water. I go pigeon-hunting with Bach and Lars. Lars shoots them out of the pines with his .22. The pigeons flap to earth, a frenzy of feathers. It is my job to run up to the jerking bird and tug its head off with a quick twist. We pluck the birds, kebab them on wire to cook on a fire under the stars with the hiss of burning vinestumps and the hum of motorcars along the sawmill road and the shrill cry of guineafowl in the bluegums.
Lars has a pig called Steely Dan that thinks he is a dog. Neglected by his mother, Steely Dan was rescued by Lars’s father and given to their dog, Hella, who was in milk. So Steely Dan sucked dog milk from Hella with her pups, Fidel and Marx. He always comes bounding out with Fidel and Marx to bark at coloureds who run the gauntlet of Nero and Fango on one side of the avenue, and Fidel and Marx and Steely Dan on the other.
Just like a dog, Steely Dan digs down on a blazing day to lie in the cool unearthed sand below. Just like a dog, Steely Dan edges so close to the vinestump fire that stray coals singe his skin. It is around the fire with the dogs and Steely Dan and the kebabbed pigeons that Lars tells Bach and me about the police and the way that they killed Steve Biko.
– After being fucked around by the SB, the secret police, they chucked him half-dead in the back of a van and drove him from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria over dirt roads. The police said Biko starved himself to death, of his own free will. Bastards. Truth is, he died of a bleeding brain.
As the sparks firefly into the sky, I find it hard to believe such a thing can happen in South Africa, my country.
– Thing is, it all came out when this journalist dude, Donald Woods, fled to England with photos of Biko’s fucked-up body. And each time a man dies, the police tell another story: He hanged himself in his cell with his bootlaces. He fell from a high window.
A man’s skull cracking open against the tar, like a crab’s shell.
– He fell down the stairs.
(Farmboy on Christmas trips to bigtown Pietermaritzburg: I cling to my mother’s skirt, scared of catching my fingers in the steel comb teeth of the rolling steps.)
– He slipped on a bar of soap in the shower.
Slip on the Lifebuoy. Slip on the Sunlight. Another way to die in the Cape.