‘No, I’m not sorry the holiday is over,’ Dalena said with her mouth full of cake. ‘I got terribly bored on the farm. Nothing to do, no one to see.’
It was darker than usual, dark of the moon. We were devouring the chocolate cake Dalena had brought from home, flat on the linoleum floor between the two beds so that our crumbs wouldn’t fall on the sheets. Quietly, so that Miss Potgieter or a prefect wouldn’t hear us.
‘I’m crazy about doing nothing,’ I whispered. ‘And I don’t mind not seeing anyone.’
I ate the thick slice of cake out of my cupped hand as if I hadn’t seen food for days. I remembered the horror with which I’d stared at the hostel children that first evening in the dining hall. And now, half a year later, I had become equally greedy.
‘Well, occasionally I ran across someone I know at the co-op. Like old Hein. But he’s so depressed since he’s not allowed to see Jolene that he’s quite useless!’
Heinrich Minnaar wasn’t expelled from either the school or the hostel. His father must’ve used his influence, as Dalena had forecast. But his parents had forbidden him to have anything to do with Jolene. It was her fault, they decided, that their exemplary son had changed into a seventeen-year-old sex maniac overnight.
‘It can’t possibly work!’ I whispered indignantly. ‘That they’re not supposed to see one another! They’ll start imagining they’re Romeo and Juliet!’
My roommate shook her head.
‘No way, have no fear. In a month’s time it’ll all be over.’
‘Do you really think so?’
‘Yep. Jolene isn’t the type to suffer like a martyred Juliet.’ She licked the last crumbs off her hand and cut another chunk of cake. ‘At the moment she’s enjoying all the attention. But as soon as it blows over she’ll find herself another Romeo.’
Teenage love just wasn’t what it had been in Shakespeare’s time, I decided. I was so swept away by our setwork that I knew a great deal of it by heart. O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear! My Afrikaans tongue still stumbled when I tried to say the words aloud, but in my imagination I sounded like Queen Elizabeth whom I’d heard on Radio Today. My roommate wasn’t so easily swept away. Where’s the action? she wanted to know. Romeo talks so much it’s no wonder he finds it such an effort to get Juliet into bed.
‘I hear Maggie has invited Jolene to smoke in the toilets with her and her pals during recess! Can you believe it! A standard seven girl with –’
Dalena froze, her body tense, ready to jump into bed, cake and all. Our ears were so attuned to the almost inaudible shuffle of Miss Potgieter’s slippers that she had never caught us out. Miss Potgieter was the needlework teacher who slept at the end of the passage. Or didn’t sleep: according to rumour she floated up and down the passage all night like a bloodthirsty bird of prey, looking for victims. During the day she was a harmless old maid with fluffy blonde hair and a beaky mouth like a baby chicken, but every evening after lights-out she changed into a gigantic owl that snatched up whispering, reading, nibbling hostel mice with her claws and tore them to pieces. We waited motionless while she moved past the bedroom door. Dalena’s teeth were white in the dark when the danger was past.
I cut another piece of cake. Tomorrow I would hate myself again because I had so little willpower. But no one could bake a chocolate cake like Dalena’s mother – or rather, no one could bake a chocolate cake the way Dalena’s mother had taught her kitchen servants to do it.
‘How’s your brother?’ she asked out of the blue.
‘I think these days you know more about my brother than I do.’
Too late I realised that it sounded like an accusation.
‘Do you mind …’ She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, looked at the remains of the cake at her feet. ‘That he and I …’
‘Well, I don’t know … it depends on what you …’
‘Nothing,’ she said quickly. ‘We’ve done nothing … yet.’
‘Oh.’ I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed. ‘But you must’ve kissed, and stuff like that.’
She shrugged her shoulders. I didn’t know this shy roommate. Before she’d been like a treasure hunter only too eager to show everyone her prizes. Now she slammed the door in my face every time I showed any curiosity.
My brother told me even less. But he’d changed so much that I sometimes felt I was faced with a life-like wax model. Like the other evening when I found him next to the swimming pool, smoking a cigarette. Or that’s what I thought until I was overwhelmed by the odour. I felt as if I was trapped in a lift with a woman who had sprayed herself with too much cheap perfume.
‘What’s that?’ I’d asked, startled.
‘What do you think?’
He looked at me and gave me a twisted smile. Like Pierre’s, I thought.
‘Pot?’ My voice had been almost hoarse with shock. I’d thought they were joking about smoking pot. I might have believed that Pierre would do something like that – I could believe anything about someone who dared call his headmaster an old fart – but my brother?
‘Pot, dagga, marijuana, Mary Jane, Durban Poison …’ Simon giggled. ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’
I couldn’t recall when last I’d heard my brother giggle. And now he sat there with a dagga zol, I thought stunned, right in front of my mother and father’s bedroom window.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked when I could trust my voice again.
He simply shook his head and stared at the soggy piece of paper between his thumb and forefinger. Dragged hungrily at it, kept the smoke in his mouth with his cheeks slightly inflated and then slowly let it out. It was a cloudless winter night, warm as a summer’s evening in any other place, the sky milky with stars. The moon hung like a plump, ripe pawpaw above the highest trees.
‘It’s almost full moon,’ I said. ‘You’re probably in your werewolf mood.’
He hadn’t even smiled at my little joke.
‘The army fucks with your head,’ he said eventually.
‘Are you sure it isn’t Pierre who’s f-f-fiddling with your head?’ I asked before I could stop myself.
In the bright moonlight the side of his face looked like something carved out of wood, angular planes of high forehead, thin nose and hard chin. If he weren’t my brother I’d have really fancied him.
‘All Pierre wants is for people to think about things. And the army expects the opposite.’ He’d sucked the last bit of smoke out of the butt, the red coal dangerously close to his lips. ‘I was so sure of everything! Right and wrong, white and black, South Africa and the rest of the world. Now I wonder …’
He ground out the roach with the heel of his shoe, using unnecessary force. I opened my mouth, then closed it again. For a while we sat motionless.
‘What do you think of Dalena?’ I asked.
‘I wonder about her as well.’
‘Why?’
‘She’s dangerous.’
‘Dangerous?’
‘More of a danger to herself than to other people. The type who dives in at the deep end – without even checking to see whether there’s water in the swimming pool.’ He looked up at the moon and smiled slowly. ‘I like that.’
And then he started making soft little whimpering noises, his eyes still on the moon while the smile on his lips slowly disappeared.
‘Let me tell you about grief and the loss of a god,’ he whispered. To the moon, not to me. It had sounded like something Pierre would say.
The trunks of the pawpaw trees looked paler and thinner than usual, like the legs of old men showing under rolled-up trouser legs. I had been too scared to touch my brother.
Did other girls feel the same way about their brothers? I wondered as I lay looking at my roommate’s sleeping body. Almost like … being in love?
Perhaps it was only because he was the first boy I’d known. From the day of my birth he’d been there. I couldn’t imagine that he would ever not be there.
My earliest memory was of a Christmas Eve. I was unsure about anything that had happened before that evening, whether Ma had simply told me about it or whether I was confusing a photograph with a memory. But I remembered that particular Christmas Eve.
We had been driving home in Pa’s new Opel estate car after a visit to Grandpa and Grandma Fishpond, where the tree had hairy, silver decorations and doll-size candles in clip-on holders. I was five. Lovey and Niel had both been sleeping on Ma’s lap. (I don’t know how she bore it, but for about seven years she had to live with children who attached themselves to her body like ticks. Her seven fat years, she called them, because she was either expecting a baby or had just had one.) Simon and I squashed our noses against the back window and watched the car and the moon running a race. I hoped the moon would win but Simon said I was crazy, surely I could see the car was faster than the moon!
That’s the way we had been then, that’s the way we still were. It was probably the way we would always be. From his earliest years Simon had had more faith in engines than heavenly bodies. Even now I preferred a good story – even a far-fetched one – to the boring truth.
The round moon slid through the air next to the Opel, occasionally diving behind a transparent curtain of cloud before showing a shining face again. Like that game Ma endlessly played with us: Where’s he gone, where’s he gone, found him!
‘Bethlehem star, O, wondrous sight,’ Ma sang softly to one of the toddlers who had moved restlessly on her lap.
‘How does the moon manage it, Pa?’ Simon wanted to know. ‘To fly almost as fast as a car?’
‘He eats all the food on his plate every day,’ Pa replied.
‘Isn’t the moon a woman?’ I wanted to know.
‘Who said so?’
‘Mamma.’
‘Oh,’ Pa said. ‘That figures.’
‘Li-ighting up the dark of night,’ Ma sang on determinedly.
‘Where’s the star, Pappa?’ I asked.
‘Which star?’
‘Bethlehem star. If it’s Christmas we must be able to see the star?’
Pa stuttered, speechless for a moment, something which didn’t often happen.
‘No, Matta,’ Ma said. ‘The star appeared only once.’
‘Just once?’
‘Only on that first Christmas.’
‘So I’ll never see it?’
‘Not the real star,’ Pa replied quickly. ‘That’s why we put a star on the Christmas tree every year.’
‘But it’s not the real star.’ I’d wanted to cry but I knew Simon would tease me if I started crying about a star. ‘I’ll never see the real star.’
I still wanted to cry when I thought about it.
A few months later I’d gone on a visit to my father’s parents in the Orange Free State with his younger sister. We travelled by train for weeks, or so it seemed, and stayed on the farm for years. The train journey probably took a day or two, the stay on the farm was some three weeks.
On Grandpa and Grandma Farmdam’s farm there was an earth dam in which a windmill with rusted iron legs stood like some strange, preening waterfowl. In Grandpa and Grandma Fishpond’s suburban garden, dwarfs with scarlet cheeks and green cement feet guarded the fishpond. I didn’t know why the dam and the pond had made such an impression on us. My mother said it was because everyone in this country had an obsession with water. How else? my father asked.
What I particularly remember about that holiday is that Ma made identical coats for me and my baby doll. As bright as the brightest red lipstick with collars of white fake fur which made me feel as beautiful as the picture of Delilah in the Children’s Bible. I never wanted to take off the coat again. I never wanted to stop travelling. But in the end it simply became too hot, and the train stopped at a station where my grandpa and grandma were waiting. What I also remember is that I watched the kitchen cat having kittens in a card-board box under the kitchen table. I couldn’t believe it. That they came out there. And my father’s sister hanging over the same kitchen table every morning with a white face and limp arms, and vomiting outside the kitchen door one morning. I don’t feel well, she kept repeating. I thought she was dying.
When Ma and Pa came to fetch us in the Opel, we took one of the small kittens home with us. He got the boring, unimaginative name of Farmcat and led a boring, unimaginative life until last year when a veterinarian mercifully killed him. Shakespeare said a rose would smell as sweet … but I didn’t really think so. If Farmcat had had a more original name, like those cats which that English poet wrote about for instance, like Mr Mistoffelees or Mungo Jerry, would his nine lives not have been more eventful?
My aunt wasn’t dying after all, I heard later, but was pregnant. The women on your father’s side don’t have easy pregnancies, Ma always said. Most women suffered, but some suffered more.
I didn’t know whether I wanted a child that badly.
‘I thought all countries were like ours,’ I said to Dalena at the back of the school bus. ‘I thought everybody lived the way we do here.’
She didn’t seem to be listening to me. She was reading an English paperback about a pirate abducting a noblewoman on a sailing ship. Probably full of steamy love scenes.
‘I mean, white and black separate, separate schools, separate churches, separate houses …’
The bus had stopped in front of a café on the only tarred road of a small village. All the children had got off to empty the café on a buying spree but Dalena and I had been on a strict diet for three days. We had brought a bag of apples to chew.
Opposite the café, on the side of the bus where we were sitting, there was a one-star hotel with a corrugated iron roof which hung over the veranda like the floppy brim of an old hat. There was a bar on the veranda where only white men were allowed – not white children or white women or black people of any age or sex – and round the corner in a dusty side street there was a liquor store for blacks. Under a tree with bare branches and scarlet flowers sat a handful of customers, most of whose clothes were ragged beyond belief. But it wasn’t their clothes which upset me on this Saturday morning. It was their faces.
Nearest to the bus sat a thin man and a girl who could’ve been younger than me with a crying baby on her lap. Their feet were bare and grey with dust, their eyes grey with something else, something more than liquor. But what it was I didn’t know. They didn’t look unhappy or rebellious or even happily drunk. Their faces were merely … empty.
‘I was so shocked when I heard we were different from other countries! I asked my mother what “apartheid” meant, when I was about seven or eight, and she tried to explain. It must’ve been tough to explain that to a child … almost as bad as “Where do I come from?”’
Dalena frowned but didn’t raise her head from her book. She didn’t even want to see the café, she’d said, because then she would start thinking about chocolates and sweets. And once she started, she wouldn’t be able to stop. With anything, I’d thought.
‘Then she said that was why other countries didn’t like us. And then it struck me! We were different from the rest of the world. It just didn’t sound right.’
‘Maybe the rest of the world is wrong and we’re right,’ Dalena mumbled, still not looking up.
‘Oh, bullshi …’ I shook my head. ‘Surely you don’t really think so?’
She dropped the book – at last – and looked at me. Yellow flecks in the grey and green of my brother’s marble. By this time I recognised it as a warning, like my mother’s tapping cigarette finger.
‘The rest of the world isn’t as different as they’d like to believe! There’s inequality everywhere.’
‘But there aren’t laws like ours anywhere else!’
‘Maybe we’re simply more honest than the rest of the world.’
I looked away, through the dirty window of the bus, at the expressionless faces under the tree with the red flowers. Another of the unfamiliar trees I hadn’t known when we came to live here. In the meantime I had tried to establish what this one was called, but it only added to my confusion.
‘Kaffirboom,’ Pa had said when I asked, but Ma said, no really, the tree must have a decent name as well.
‘It’s a kaffirboom,’ Pa said. ‘It has always been a kaffirboom and it’ll remain a kaffirboom.’ Or did Ma want to call it a native tree? Or a bantu tree?
‘Niel, bring me the dictionary,’ Ma said. ‘Your father is in one of his moods again.’ Was it his fault, perhaps, that Ma didn’t like the name of the tree? Pa had wanted to know. Was he Adam, perhaps, who had named the plants and the animals in the Garden of Eden? Ma bit her plump lower lip while she paged determinedly through the dictionary. ‘Aha!’ she cried triumphantly. ‘Kafferboom is translated as kaffir tree’ – (Aha! said Pa. Shht, said Ma.) – ‘or as coral tree. So it’s a coral tree,’ Ma said to me, having almost forgotten that it was I who had started this stupid argument with my stupid question.
‘No, no, no,’ Pa said, and raised his eyes heavenward, as in from-whence-cometh-my-help. ‘There’s a difference between a kaffirboom and a coral tree. A kaffirboom is a kind of coral tree but it’s not a coral tree.’
By this time Niel had taken the dictionary from Ma because he could see that it was one of those arguments that could last the entire evening. And Ma hadn’t made a meal yet and he was hungry, as usual. ‘Aha!’ he called out, as triumphantly as Ma a few moments ago. ‘Pa is right!’
‘Ohhh!’ Ma said and fiddled in her hair with her fingers as though her scalp was itching. ‘Men always stick together.’
‘No, hang on, Ma,’ Niel said. He’d looked up the Latin names. ‘A kaffirboom is E … ry … thri … na caffra,’ he read aloud, ‘and a coral tree is E … ry … thrina indica! So there is a difference,’ he said, obviously relieved, and asked when we were going to eat.
‘Clever boy,’ Pa said.
But Ma was like those Voortrekker women who threatened to cross the Drakensberg in their bare feet. She never knew when to stop. A week later she had, so help me, taken a book about trees out of the library. ‘Erythrina caffra,’ she announced crisply while dishing up, ‘is a coastal coral tree.’ I could hear with what an effort she kept the spite out of her voice. ‘The ordinary coral tree, which grows in this area, bears the learned name of Erythrina lysistemon.’ And she’d pronounced the strange words with such self-assurance that it sounded as if she had spent the entire day practising in front of a mirror. ‘Don’t argue,’ she warned, before Pa could open his mouth, and pushed the book under his nose. ‘Look at the photograph! Is that the tree that grows here or is it not?’
Ma always said that if you wanted to keep a man you had to pretend to know less than he did. But perhaps she and Pa had been married for so long that it had become too much trouble.
‘Just look at that bunch of drunks under the tree!’ Dalena said next to me. ‘What would they do if you suddenly gave them equality?’
I looked away. FNLA Forges Towards Luanda, announced a newspaper poster in the café window. I had heard on the radio that white Angolans were leaving the country at an average of 500 per day. I heard that counting-out rhyme in my head again. Eeny, meeny, miney, mo …
The schoolchildren were beginning to get back on the bus with chomping mouths and plastic bags full of goodies. We were on our way back to Black River after playing hockey and rugby against another school. All our teams had lost but no one really looked upset about defeat except Mr Botha, the Afrikaans teacher who drove the bus and coached the rugby first team. We called him Mr Locomotive because he was always puffing on about the wonder of the Afrikaans language. And the miracles which the fifteen players in the rugby first team could achieve if they would only have faith.
The pride of the school, Mr Maritz called the rugby first team. I looked at the boys around me, their ungainly bodies in black tracksuits – ‘Black River High School’ in large, gold letters on each back – their wet hair and their chewing mouths. And for a moment (a brief one) I almost felt sorry for the headmaster. A school had to have something to be proud of. And whichever way you looked at it, Black River didn’t have much.
‘If they had equality,’ I muttered with my eyes on the people under the tree again, ‘they probably wouldn’t look the way they do now.’
Surprised, Dalena looked up from her book.
‘What’s your case this morning?’ she asked, frowning. ‘Or is it just the wrong time of the month?’
‘Shame,’ Suna said. ‘Look at poor old Hein. I feel so sorry for him.’
Poor old Hein was sitting diagonally opposite us in the bus. He looked like a thundercloud among the smiling faces around him.
‘I’d look like that too if I’d played that badly.’ Dalena stared crossly at the packet of Smarties in Suna’s hand. ‘Even a blind guy would’ve been able to get that last ball across!’
‘It’s not his fault that the first team lost, Dalena,’ I said. ‘They all screwed up.’
‘And he at least had an excuse for playing badly,’ Suna said. She shook a handful of Smarties on to her palm and selected the brown ones, one after another.
‘What excuse?’
‘Oh, come on, it’s obvious that this whole Jolene thing has freaked him out.’
‘So, why doesn’t he do something about it?’
‘Why are you so hard on him, Dalena?’
‘Because he’s a coward! Because he’s been sitting around for weeks doing nothing!’
‘Shht!’ I whispered anxiously. ‘He’ll hear you!’
When Suna had eaten all the brown Smarties, she popped the rest into her mouth in a disinterested manner. Dalena took an apple out of the plastic bag and savaged it with her teeth.
‘What can he do?’ Suna asked. ‘He’s not allowed to speak to her, he’s not allowed to –’
‘Who says he’s not allowed to speak to her!’ Dalena almost shouted. ‘Why can’t he speak to her? If he was really crazy about her he wouldn’t pay any attention to what a bunch of grown-ups say!’
‘Shht!’ I warned again, but they ignored me.
‘It’s easy for you to talk!’ Suna thrust another handful of sweets into her mouth. This time she didn’t even look at the colours.
‘All I’m saying, Suna,’ Dalena said, sighing, ‘is that you must be prepared to fight for what you really want. If he wants Jolene so badly, why hasn’t he got the guts to do something about it?’ She was quiet for a moment. Her large mouth quivered as she fought the temptation to say something bitchy. Then she succumbed: ‘Although I still don’t understand what he sees in her.’
‘Well, I feel sorry for him.’ For a moment Suna stared at Hein, who sat with his head leaning against the window. His eyes were closed as if he were asleep. He had heavy, dark eyebrows and long, dark eyelashes but the skin of his eyelids was so white that I could see the thin blue veins beneath. ‘I hear Pine has asked Jolene to go to the rugby party with him tonight.’
‘Pine?’ Dalena and I asked simultaneously, stunned.
‘Pine.’ Suna shook her head in a measured fashion like an old woman bearing tidings of death.
‘And I’m sure she agreed,’ Dalena said when she had regained her breath.
‘Pine is not the kind of guy one says no to,’ Suna said, as if we didn’t know it.
I threw a casual glance over my shoulder. As usual, Pine Pienaar sat right at the back of the bus, a black bear against the light which fell through the back window; the guy with the biggest head, the broadest shoulders and the hairiest chest in the school. Evidently also the oldest guy in the school because he’d plugged grade one and was now spending a second year in standard nine.
‘How can you plug grade one?’ I asked crossly. ‘I wonder if it’s true.’
‘What did I tell you, Mart?’ A self-satisfied smile spread across my roommate’s face. ‘Jolene is not the type to play Juliet-Juliet!’
‘If only poor old Hein would stop playing Romeo-Romeo,’ I sighed.
‘If either of you says “poor old Hein” again,’ Dalena hissed through clenched teeth, ‘I’m going to beat both of you about the head with this bag of apples.’
‘Shame,’ Suna giggled. ‘I would’ve liked to do something to help him, Dalena. That’s all.’
‘Well, why don’t you do something, Suna?’ Dalena’s eyes had a dangerous glitter. ‘Why don’t you go and talk to him?’
‘I can’t just …’
‘Why not? There’s a seat open next to him. Or do you want me to ask him to come and sit here?’
Suna gave me a nervous look.
‘Do it,’ I said, to my own surprise, as though the devil in Dalena had infected me too. ‘I dare you, Suna.’
Even so, I was astonished when she got up and sat down in the empty seat next to Hein. Suna, who thought she had the biggest pimple problem in the Western world? Suna, who stared at her feet when a boy even glanced at her?
‘Hi,’ she said to Hein who had opened his eyes and was staring at her with as much amazement as I was.
Her voice was high with tension. ‘Would you like a Smartie?’
He frowned, making his eyebrows look even heavier, and shook his head. Suna giggled in embarrassment. Poor Suna, I thought, poor, poor Suna!
‘Now that’s what I call guts,’ Dalena gasped, breathless with admiration.
‘Unless you have brown ones left,’ Hein said unexpectedly.
‘Oh, gosh, no,’ Suna giggled again and shook a handful of sweets on to her palm. ‘They’re my favourites. I’ve eaten them all.’
‘Mine, too.’ He looked down at her palm, coloured by the sweets, and slowly smiled. ‘But if you can’t get what you want, you might as well take what you can get.’
London
16 December 1992
My dear Child
When I was a teenager, ‘Streets of London’ was a heart-rending song which took me away from the dull streets of Black River. Today they were a terrible reality, as reality probably always is.
My son and I took the Underground to Knightsbridge where we walked around Harrods with tearful eyes and red noses to admire the Christmas windows. It was snowing. Not the kind of snow that makes sentimental suckers like me dream of a White Christmas, but an unromantic, icy, urban rain immediately trampled by thousands of feet into a mud-coloured slush which turned every pavement into a deadly slippery slide, so that I had to take tiny, mincing steps while the toddler with me pulled impatiently at my hand.
My breath was white in front of my face, like those thought bubbles in the comics Niel used to devour long ago: Prince Valiant, Batman, Mad. I stopped in front of a window, a vision of silver stars and big, golden angels, because I didn’t want to think about relatives. Not just before Christmas when the sentimentality of the season could change even a snow-white mood into a mud-coloured mess.
My son plucked impatiently at my hand. He knew the windows were no more than hors d’oeuvres. The real feast waited inside the famous building.
What can be said about Harrods’ toy department in the Christmas season? That it can change even a model child into a caricature of capitalist greed? And the most exemplary mother into a potential bank robber, cat burglar, aircraft hijacker – anything to get her hands on enough money – anything to satisfy her child’s unbelievable covetousness?
My child climbed on to the lap of an English Father Christmas and whispered a long list of wishes into the ear of a middle-aged stranger. I looked away, ashamed of my child’s shamelessness. And even more ashamed because I wanted to give him everything his heart desired.
Later, when he was staring in enchantment at a miniature city of multi-coloured Lego blocks and moving trains, I wondered whether he would remember anything about this visit. My own memory only goes back to my fifth year, to that Christmas Eve in Pa’s Opel, but my life was probably so boring that there was nothing else to remember. Surely my son’s life couldn’t be boring? Confusing, I admit, without a father in sight and with a mother who no longer knows where she belongs. But surely not boring?
That was all that kept me here, I realised in that toy heaven this morning: the blind belief that my son would be happier here than there. If my eyes were to be opened, I might as well pack my bags.
I hope you’ll have a happy Christmas, my dear child. (Choose any colour you like. Just not white.)
Love
M.