ONE BREAK BALDHEAD BOSMAN’S classroom is left unlocked. I steal inside and climb the high bookshelf ladder to see what secrets the out-of-reach volumes hide. On the top shelf I find fingerprints on the dusty spine of The Voyage of the Beagle. I slide it out. As the book falls open, a paper drops out and wings down to the floor. I climb down, heart beating hard, for Baldhead Bosman will kill me if he catches me red-handed.
The paper is a black-and-white photograph of a coffee-skinned woman on beach sand. She lies with her legs Y-ed open. She squeezes a breast with one hand. With the other, she holds a Coca-Cola bottle down there. Half of the bottle is in her.
I wonder why Bosman has a photograph of a Coca-Cola bottle inside a coloured or Caribbean woman inside Darwin when he is forever ranting on about the coloureds and the kaffirs wanting their hands on what the whites have and that one day it will be us and them and that if we do not learn hard it will be us down the mines and behind the plough and them sitting on the veranda with a cigar and coffee and brandy.
I feel sexy, so I pocket the photo.
Leon du Plessis and I work the projector when flicks, usually James Bond or Clint Eastwood, are shown in the hall on the last day of term. He is the film fundi. I just hand him the reels. Still, I love the dark of the projection room, where I can watch films, unseen and undisturbed by Maljan and the De Beer brothers. Leon and I play in the Boland hockey team. He is the one who shoots the goals. He dreams of being a fighter pilot. Me, I still dream of going overseas, of seeing the world, maybe writing a novel, one day.
I regret confessing to my father that I want to be a writer. He laughs.
– You’re always in your own little dream world, of writers and explorers. Maybe I should send you to Sunflower Home.
Sunflower Home is a home for daft kids, like Spud. I know he does not mean it, but it is true that I am a bit daft. I spill my milk as if I am a dribbling old madman, I burn toast, I toss my dirty socks in the dustbin, I let the bath overflow.
Almost every night at supper my father says:
– How many times must I tell you not to stick your knife in your mouth? One day you’ll cut your tongue off.
It drives him mad.
There is a tok tok at the door of the projection room. It is Mister Sands. He tells Leon he wants to talk to me alone. My heart beats because of the rumours of the rides for ice-cream. He just stands there in the flickering light, for a long time.
– I heard about your being caned. He’s a bastard, is Vorster.
I shrug, though I am amazed by his risky words.
– I share your misgivings about South Africa, he goes on, but this isn’t a free country where you can just mouth what you feel.
He steps forward, rests chalkdust fingertips on my shoulder.
– I’m sorry about the cane. If you have such restless thoughts, about Mandela, about injustice, you can always come and talk to me. You hear?
I nod. As I nod, I pray he will not want to go for an ice-cream with me.
He winks at me, then turns on his heels.
His fingers leave dusty afterthoughts on my blue school shirt.
There is another teacher at Paarl Boys’ High who stands out from the rest. Mister Slater, my English teacher, wears a panama hat and he never canes us. His words mesmerise me, like the tones from a snakecharmer’s flute. Under Mister Slater, I discover words have individual character and history, that flamboyant comes from the French for aflame, that window comes from the Nordic vindauge, wind eye.
Mister Slater tells us of Jung and other heroes: of how Oedipus wanted to outfoot his fate yet ran toward it, of how Odysseus outwitted the Trojans with a hollow horse, of the sirens who lured men to their death on the rocks. He weaves together mythology and adventure and hints of the unexplored world of romance. He reads us the part in The Grapes of Wrath, ripped out of the school library copy, about the priest who loves the girls.
– Censoring a book is a vandalising of art. Such people ought to be fed to the crocodiles.
After school Mister Slater crosses the rugby field to his Zephyr under the jacarandas, unlocks the boot and drops his panama hat into it before going round to the driver’s door to climb in. Pukka English.
There is a boy in my English class we all call Slimjan. There is Maljan the mad Jan, and Slimjan the clever Jan. He is so sharp at untangling metaphor and finding motifs for Mister Slater that I am bitterly jealous of him. He can track images filtering through strands of narrative like a Bushman picking up the blood spoor with his hawk eye. A drop of blood in dry grass. A bent twig. A hoof dint in the sand.
I want to beat Slimjan in English; after all I am the rooinek whose grandpa went to Oxford, and here is this boer boy with an uncanny flair for writing. Mister Slater says he is inspired by the muses. I wish Mister Slater would find my writing inspired, but he always writes in the margin:
Too pedestrian.
My writing walks, or plods, instead of flying like Slimjan’s.
Or: Too literal.
I have to unwind, let my imagination freewheel. But it is hard to unwind with Maljan wanting to beat the tutumandela shit out of me and Baldhead Bosman forever flexing his plum and the De Beer brothers lurking like wolves in the back of my mind.
For me South Africa is inescapably literal. As literal as a cane biting into flesh, as a steel hook in the head.