Two

I’VE STOPPED to pee and so notice, in the dust at my feet, a coincidental scattering of stones, most the colour of dried blood, bracketed by some whitened sticks. Mum’s phrase given roadside substance.

Sticks and stones …

Really, Mum?

Zipping up, I aim a closet kick at the nearest stick, one that appears more bone than wood, that’s how bleached it’s been by the sun. Then I hear an approaching car: the dusty Ford I’ve been distantly, intermittently aware of in my rear-view mirror.

It slows and I see its three occupants. They see me too, their blatant regard making me feel, as they glide by, that I’m being sized up. Older white man alone on the roadside, having just relieved himself. I’m familiar with the stories. Ambushes. Hijacks. People killed for the money in their wallet, their laptops, their clothes, their hire car. The astounding cheapness of human life in South Africa. And the vanishing car is old; poorly maintained, too. Never mind the colour of their skin.

I jump into my own car and turn the ignition. Oh, I’m back all right – in spades! Though, when it comes to being ambushed, what should I fear more? The present? Or the past?

I reach for the brake and, with it, another question. Can I really help the ghosts of that past, childhood self included, achieve peace, release, on the basis of one impulsive trip? Or – just as that trio might be doing, up ahead – will my ghosts continue to lie in wait for me? Continue to torment?

It doesn’t bear thinking about and so I try instead to concentrate on the present, each half-remembered tree and sun-burnished rock of it, now that Gauteng is behind me. The limitless sky. The dead-straight, if potholed road. That sense the country can often grant, of opportunity. Of opening up before you. Like treasure.

Until, that is, the sun starts to set, coalescing from fiery glare into a simplified red disc that slips, inch by steady inch, below the far horizon, carrying me back to a series of earlier October sunsets, which a twelve-year-old called Paul – Harvey, to his peers – had once scanned for signs that the world might be about to end.

 

St Luke’s wasn’t large: being privately run, it favoured exclusivity over size, a luxury denied its government counterparts. Yet, to a child, the main building nonetheless seemed substantial. Would it still? I wonder. You approached it via a circular drive where parents might park when dropping off or collecting their charges. There was a suggestion of lawn here, too, and some flowerbeds: Pheko’s domain. Then the bougainvillea-draped façade of a two-storeyed, rather old-fashioned brick building whose red steps led up to a double door of dark wood which, in turn, opened on to a corridor that ran the entire length of the building before leading you outside again, via a further set of steps that descended into the playground. Off this corridor, to the right, was the hall where assembly was held, meals taken and, once a term or so, plays staged and film shows arranged. To the left lay the headmaster’s study, the library, the sick-bay, the downstairs toilets and the kitchens. While upstairs, of course, were the dormitories – five in all – and showers and further toilets.

What am I forgetting?

The classrooms – again, five in all – are already accounted for, as are the tuck shop and nearby bell, whose function it was to regulate the day. But I realise I’ve left out the swimming pool to the other side of the main building from the classrooms; that and the wooden sports pavilion, focal point of the playing fields.

Anything else?

I home in on the hedged compound on the far side of the fields, where the live-in masters had their bungalows. There were four of these, each built of the same red brick as the classrooms, each roofed in green corrugated iron while their metal windows and wooden doors were painted purple, the school colour; all set around a small square of lawn, on which some toys happen to be lying. Two dolls and a scattering of miniature tea things: cups and saucers, a milk jug, a teapot. Stanford – one of the married masters – had two young daughters, clearly keen on playing house.

But I’m not in search of Stanford. It’s the unmarried Spier I want and so it’s through his purple door that my memory now speeds.

Although externally Spier’s bungalow was identical to the other three, internally it told another story; at least, his study did. His desk, for instance, was vastly more untidy than Stanford’s, or even old MacWilliam’s. It was also devoid of family photos. Nor were the books on his shelves all serious-looking hardbacks; he had just as many paperbacks, some with quite lurid covers, which he didn’t mind you taking down and looking at. In fact, he encouraged it and there was, on his untidy desk, a small black book for keeping track of what he’d loaned to whom.

His anti-library, he called it.

In addition, he wore his haphazardly combed, rich brown hair a good deal longer than the other, generally older-seeming masters. He seldom donned a tie or jacket. He rolled up his shirt sleeves and often had ink stains on his shirt fronts.

In short, he stood apart from his fellow teachers and, as a consequence, was thrilling to be with. If Paul had known the word, he might even have said Spier was subversive. But subversive wasn’t in Paul’s lexicon. Not yet.

 

‘TWO DIE, SCORES INJURED,’ Spier was saying, reading from that Monday’s paper to the six boys sitting before him, ‘AS NEGRO-HATING WHITES RIOT IN AMERICA.’

He looked up from where he was perched, alongside a teetering pile of exercise books, on the edge of his disordered desk. ‘So what’s the background here?’ he demanded. ‘Who is James Meredith? Anyone?’

The General Knowledge Club met weekly, before supper on Thursdays, its hand-picked members being: Bentley major, Lombard, Horton, Strover, du Toit and Paul. An improbable grouping, though Paul had never thought to question why Spier had made the choices that he had. He was just happy to take at face value the fact that – for once! at last! – he’d been included. Even when, like now, he didn’t know the answer to Spier’s question.

‘No one? Really? Horton?’

Horton, mouth ajar as usual – some said because he enjoyed revolting people with his saliva-strung braces – just shifted in his seat; and then, lest Spier think for a moment that he did have anything to contribute, decisively shut his gaping mouth.

‘Strover?’

But Strover would only have read – if anything – the sports pages.

The pair most likely to answer Spier’s question were Bentley major and Lombard. Lombard because he was the brightest pupil in their class; Bentley major because he was both a class and a dormitory monitor. However, before Spier could turn to either of them, du Toit, who was sitting next to Paul, diverted the master’s attention by trying to slip Paul a scrap of paper on which he’d scribbled something.

‘Ah, du Toit!’ said Spier, with a darting smile. ‘I knew you wouldn’t let me down. Still, rather than trying to pass the answer to Harvey, why don’t you enlighten us yourself? Please, be my guest!’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said du Toit, surreptitiously pocketing his scrap of paper, ‘but it was Harvey who was trying to tell me something, so I wasn’t really listening. My fault, sir. I’m sorry.’

‘Heavens, Harvey!’ said Spier, smoothly transferring his smiling attention to Paul. ‘That’s too bad when, as we all know, du Toit here struggles to concentrate on things that don’t immediately concern him. You should show more consideration.’

Then, before anything further could be said, or implied, Lombard produced what Spier was after.

‘Sir, hasn’t he upset everyone because they don’t actually want him at their university? Isn’t that what the fuss is all about?’

‘At last!’ crowed Spier. ‘Though why do you say “their” university? And people have died, hey, Lombard. “Fuss” is perhaps too gentle a word. Ja, Bentley? You’ve been rather quiet this afternoon. Nothing to add?’

‘Well, sir, the university’s in what they call the Deep South,’ proffered the monitor. ‘Mississippi, I think.’

And so they were off, no longer bound by the booklined walls of Spier’s study, but at large in the outside world, a favourite phrase of Spier’s, who believed that only by transporting yourself in this way could you hope to understand home. Precisely the point, he liked to say, of general knowledge. The outside world. What you learned there to bring back. Though he didn’t always make the connections clear, preferring instead to have the club join the dots for themselves.

‘Right!’ he went on, settling more securely on his desk, an action which fleetingly delineated, within their casing of grey flannel, the muscularity of his thighs. ‘At the University of Mississippi recently, a black student by the name of James Meredith registered to study. Why is this news-worthy? Because, in the Deep South, they practise segregation. What we term apartheid. With me so far?’

Six heads nodded in dutiful unison.

‘And our James Meredith,’ continued Spier, ‘having brought a case earlier – successfully, too – against central government, questioning their right to stop him going to any university he wants, enrols in one where the attitude of the whites – being Southerners, Mississippians believe in segregation, most of them – has meant he’s had to be escorted on to campus under guard. The inevitable protests then became a riot, troops had to be called and so we get our headline.’ Holding up the paper he’d quoted from earlier, he opened it to an inside page. ‘We also get: Americans are bitter about the attempts of the Communists, particularly Moscow, to exploit the situation. Mississippi, they feel, has given the outside world a wrong impression of the vast strides made by the government and people of the country in resolving colour problems, particularly in the South. The Americans at the United Nations …’ Here Spier glanced up. ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘we talked about the United Nations last time? The Americans at the United Nations also believe that the firm and resolute action taken by President Kennedy to uphold the law which provides for desegregation throughout the land will show the Russians that the United States can be equally determined and resolute in dealing with international problems such as Berlin, Cuba, and other East-West difficulties.’

That must have been the first time Cuba was mentioned, though, since it was in such a baffling article, no one noticed. Paul wondered if any of the others had understood the piece better. Or picked up, as he had, on its use of the phrase ‘outside world’.

At the far end of the semi-circle of chairs ranged before Spier’s desk sat freckled, red-haired Horton, mouth open again, moist braces on show. Next came stocky, sports-mad Strover with his air of unconscious belligerence – unconscious because he was, in fact, generally unbelligerent by nature, placid, even; in bovine terms, a ruminative cow rather than a raging bull. Then the keen, bespectacled form of Lombard, who appeared as if he might be grasping things. Then the baleful presence of neighbouring du Toit, whom Paul avoided looking at; and, on Paul’s left, the quiet yet watchful Bentley major, who was the next to say something.

‘So who, sir, is breaking the law?’ he asked. ‘If they have one law in the Deep South, but central government says differently, who is actually right, sir?’

Surprisingly, Strover had a view on this. ‘The government, silly.’

Lombard, however, wasn’t so sure. ‘But if you do things differently in your own state,’ he put in, ‘then wouldn’t you be breaking your own laws if you only listened to central government?’

‘Is there not a moral dimension here?’ probed Spier. ‘Some higher law?’

‘Well, sir,’ said du Toit, always a late contributor to their discussions, ‘there’s human nature. People all over the world, Pa says, want to stick to their own kind, and it always makes for trouble, he says, bad trouble sometimes, when people forget.’

‘Goodness!’ said Spier, who by this stage had quit his desk and was pacing the room. ‘So you’re telling me that your father —’

But here he was interrupted by Strover. ‘Sir, can we please just talk about the fight for a bit? Ag, can we, sir? Please!’ He meant of course the boxing match between Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson, something else to have come out of America recently. Something, too, that had been exercising Strover greatly. Why had it been so onesided? And what about that first round knock-out! Said to be the third fastest ever in a world heavyweight title fight. Unbelievable, no?

Then Lombard intervened, as he frequently did, with a knock-out all his own.

‘Sir! Have you seen the time? Supper in ten minutes.’

Spier consulted his own watch before moving towards the door. ‘Right!’ he said. ‘Vamoose! And please: more of an effort this weekend in reading the papers.’ He stood aside from the opened door to let them pass. ‘Okay?’

Usually du Toit led the exit charge, and with such alacrity that you’d be forgiven for thinking a fire had broken out, rather than their facing the prospect of, say, baked beans on tepid toast, glasses of milk and, if they were lucky, a pudding. Frogs’ eggs, maybe, as tapioca was called. But today du Toit held back and it was Bentley major, uncombed hair sticking up at the back, who exited first. Then Horton; strutting Strover; Lombard; then Paul.

‘You look pensive, Harvey,’ said Spier. ‘Everything all right?’

‘What, sir? Sorry, sir!’ said Paul.

‘Sad, even,’ mused the master, fixing him with the brownest of brown eyes. ‘Are we?’

‘Sir?’

Sotto voce, Spier – who’d put out a hand to draw the passing Paul closer – added, ‘Stand your ground, boy. Be your own man. And as for you, du Toit,’ since du Toit had by now entered the frame, ‘if you’re going to pass notes in my presence, try to do it without me seeing.’

‘Note, sir?’ said du Toit, affecting bewilderment. ‘What note?’

‘The one intended for Harvey,’ said Spier. ‘Still in your pocket, I presume.’

‘Pocket, sir?’

Spier’s hand shot out again, causing Paul to notice anew how the hairs on the back of it ran in a diagonal line from just above the thumb to above the little finger. Lushly, as on Spier’s bare forearms. ‘Hand it over.’

‘But sir …’

‘Chop-chop, du Toit, unless you want to be late for supper too.’

Du Toit hesitated, but only fractionally.

‘Die rooi gevaar,’ said Spier thoughtfully, perusing what he’d been handed. ‘Well, well! So you were listening the other week, when we touched on the Cold War and the West’s fear of all things red!’ He looked towards Paul. ‘Though why he wants you to ask me about the communists is beyond me. When he could just as easily, more easily, do it himself.’ He returned his gaze to du Toit. ‘Unless you’re thinking we could get into trouble for talking about these things and you wanted Harvey here to cop it? Did you?’

‘Sir?’

‘Because if so, I’d like you to remember, please, that what we talk about in General Knowledge can always stay within these walls. Between ourselves. This note, du Toit …’ he crumpled it into a little ball before lobbing it in the direction of his already full waste-paper basket ‘… is not only unpleasant, it’s also unnecessary. Got that?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said du Toit. ‘Sorry, sir.’ Followed by, moments later, as together he and Paul skirted the dolls and miniature tea things lying out on the grass, ‘Bloody Spier! Why do we have these stupid clubs?’

A question that in and of itself raised so many issues that Paul wouldn’t have known how to begin answering it, even if the bell for supper hadn’t then sounded, forcing the two of them into a risky dash across the forbidden middle of the playing fields.

They arrived, panting painfully, at the main building to find the plump form of their science master at the top of the steps, overseeing an orderly entry into supper. A separate line for each class.

‘Cutting things a bit fine, aren’t we?’ Botma remarked as, still panting, du Toit and Paul filed past him. ‘Lucky it’s not Mr Stanford on duty, or it might have been detention.’

‘Sorry, sir,’ said Paul. ‘We were …’

‘Delayed by Mr Spier,’ said du Toit, ‘in General Knowledge.’

‘Aha!’ chuckled Botma. ‘Knowledge! Yes, well, not for nothing do they call too much of it a dangerous thing.’

The table at which Paul sat for meals was also du Toit’s, though, since the latter occupied a place near the head of it, Paul was always separated from his nemesis by the bulwark that was du Toit’s club: Horton, Strover and Lombard from General Knowledge. Plus Labuschagne, Kintock and Slug, who weren’t at all in Spier’s circle. Which meant that after Botma had said grace – a few hastily intoned, barely comprehensible Latin phrases – there was little chance of discovering more about du Toit’s mysterious note. Rather, it was business as usual as Paul’s plate ran a familiar gauntlet from one club member’s hand to another before finally reaching the table prefect who, despite not being a special friend of du Toit’s, still contrived to dish Paul a little less than anyone else.

Or was he imagining that Eedes always did this? His mother would have said so. And his father. Get a grip, old fruit.

If only he could! Eyes pricked by the threat of yet more tears, Paul stared unhappily at his baked beans while all around him boys begged each other to pass the bread, the jam, not to guts the milk, to keep their elbows tucked in and what about that first round knock-out! Hey?

After supper came the lesser ordeal of prep, which also took place in the hall once the tables had been cleared by the army of uniformed women whose penultimate task of the day this was, their last being the washing-up. As a result, prep was underscored by a specific aural accompaniment: pens first, scratching on paper; then the percussive footsteps of the master on duty as he paced the hall – still Botma who, as the only master to smoke a pipe, which he kept, when not clamped between yellowing teeth, in the pocket of his jacket, stank as he passed you by; and finally, from across the corridor, a faint, essentially melodic counterpoint – the clink of crockery, the slushing of water, the ‘music’ made by the distant voices of the washers-up. The maids didn’t sing as such as they went about their last task of the day; but their talk, being in a language foreign to Paul, nevertheless existed for him only in terms of its rise and fall, just like the notes of a song.

If du Toit had wanted to bother Paul now, he’d have had his work cut out. So it wasn’t until after lights-out that the day delivered its coup de grâce.

It was unseasonably warm and the middle blind had been left open, allowing the star-speckled patch of sky opposite Paul’s bed to absorb and disperse his worries. Du Toit and Spier. Not belonging properly. Sout-piel. Rooi-nek. Rooi gevaar. The prettiness of the stars outtwinkled mere words. Sticks and stones. Perhaps his mother was right.

Then, all at once, something, someone materialised by his bedside. A suggestion of sleek blond hair. Sharp white teeth.

Paul looked quickly sideways to see if Bentley major had noticed. But the monitor was asleep.

Stomach tightening, he twisted round again.

‘What?’ he hissed. ‘What is it now? Here to call me more names? Or tell me again how pathetic you think my parents are? Just because they’re English.’

The shadowy form didn’t move. Nor, to start with, did it give anything away. If there was an expression in the eyes to indicate what the shadow was intending, Paul couldn’t decipher it in the gloom. Only the halo of hair. That glint of teeth. A sense of urgency.

Then suddenly the face closed in on him, as if wanting, as his mother still did on occasion when tucking him up at night, to … But how could that be? Du Toit of all people!

‘What?’ repeated Paul, voice all squeaky. ‘Say it!’

Then a rushed whisper, like wind passing through loose grass, ending with, ‘An ou’s allowed to change his mind.’

Although the initial sequence of what had been said hadn’t come out so clearly, Paul still grasped what was on offer. And by the club’s captain too! When usually, or so he’d always been led to believe, it was du Toit’s right-hand man whose task it was to invite new members in.

‘Why?’ he asked, voice squeakier still. ‘Has something happened?’

‘There’s space,’ murmured du Toit, pulling back at last, ‘is all. And I already know, because you’ve already told me, how much you want it. No use pretending you don’t.’

The shadowy face was back where it had been to start with, some feet away – although this didn’t stop Paul’s heart from continuing to race as the club captain quietly re-stated his surprise invitation against a backdrop of glittering stars.

‘Well? Will you, or won’t you, Harvey? Don’t just lie there.’