Be My Victim and other Strange Tales from the Cape (6 page)

Her instincts
told her what to do. She just walked away into the pale shadows of
the dream. Away from the evil coach.

When she woke
up the next morning she could only remember the part where the
coachman told her there’s room for one more. The rest of the dream
was sitting on the outer edges of her memory and she couldn’t
remember the details.

So she got up
and prepared herself for work. Outside on the rainy street it was a
typical Mitchells Plain winter’s morning with people rushing
through the lamp lit streets to bus stops, taxi pick up points and
train stations. In the township every part of life is dangerous and
one continuous struggle just to survive. In the iciness of a Cape
winter life is even more unforgiving.

At the town
centre she waited in the cold and wet amongst the other,
indifferent people, and then her taxi arrived. With this taxi she
will ride into town to her place of employment where she worked in
a jewellery store in Quay Road. This is a routine she follows every
morning for the last eight years now.

The taxi
quickly filled with people and when she had to get in she saw there
was one seat open.

And then she
saw him.

The same man
from her dreams. Intense eyes with dark rings around it that looked
as if he didn’t sleep for years. The thickest lips she had ever
seen on a man…and that pale black skin. This is what sin must look
like if in human form she thought to herself.

And then the
words rolled over his thick lips: “COME GIRLIE, THERE IS ROOM FOR
ONE MORE.”

The words made
the terror from the dream streamed over her whole body like ice
cold water. It was an intense dread that just wanted to make her
run as fast as she could. It was as if she was being pulled under a
stream of cold, dark water and not being able to escape.

She quickly
walked away from the man and his taxi and the town-centre.
Something told her to just go home and forget about the day.

That evening as
she sits in front of the television to watch the soap operas she
sees it on the news. Several minibus-taxis tried to cross a flooded
road near the golf course, but got swept away when a wall broke and
a rush of water came out. Everyone in all the taxis where
drowned.

As the camera
sweeps over the dead bodies she sees the pale skin black man
staring at the camera with his intense eyes wide open, even in
dead.

Wherever sin is
there is always room for one more.

In 1967 we
moved to a small village on the South Coast called Niewedorp. I was
only five years old, nearly six, and this whole “great trek” was a
huge adventure to me.

Now if I say
Niewedorp was small, I mean SMALL with capital letters. The
inhabitants living in that little village could actually be called
a family, because every day, everybody came into contact with
everybody else. There was simply no way that you could avoid
meeting everybody every single day in that village. The other thing
was the fact that every location was walking distance from any
other location in the village. I thought many times that it would
actually be possible to meet yourself in that village – that was
how small it was.

I quickly made
many new friends, both old and young, because everybody around
there was very friendly and talkative; and they especially liked it
when new blood entered their domain.

This is how I
met Jeffrey Donson. For the next two years he would be my best
friend. He was two years older than I, but despite this we soon
became best friends. I especially liked the neat stuff that he made
from pure junk, while he on the other hand was in love with all my
wonderful store-bought toys, which I, frankly, found a bit
boring.

For example he
had this old cotton thread reel. He put a bend wire into the holes
of the reel. On this wire – inside the reel - he wound some
elastic. So all you had to do was to wind the cotton thread reel up
and put it down and then that thing would ride on the ground out of
its own accord. To me this was pure magic - that such a neat toy
could be made from something I would have thrown away.

Jeffrey's yard
was full of stuff, mostly what other people would call junk, but to
me it was magical things that he and his father and brother could
change into something I haven't even thought of. Old bicycle
wheels, rusted zinc basins, old pieces of rusted fence wire, five
litre paraffin drums, smaller motor oil cans, old bicycle frames,
etc.

“All these
stuff will come in handy one day,” Jeffrey's father used to say
whenever he brought stuff like that to the yard from one of his
many wandering through the little village.

Jeffrey, Peter
and their father could take a five litre oil can, a plank and some
fish gut and within an hour you would have a guitar that one could
actually play tunes on. It was wonderful to watch them make stuff
like that and then also play a tune on it, to show that it actually
works. Before meeting them all that I had was bought in a store and
I never actually knew that one could actually make stuff like that
with your own hands.

So these pieces
of junk was in their sheds, on the roof of the shed and on the roof
of the pigeon pen. They just knew that someday they would be able
to turn it into something useful.

In the evenings
I would sit with them outside on their magical yard. They would
then make a fire in a 20 litre paraffin drum that Jeffrey's father
made some holes in. This wood-fire in the paraffin drum or galley
kept the cold away while we roasted sweet potatoes on the open
flames. And then I would listen to their stories. Although Jeffrey
was only eight years old, he knew almost as many stories as his
father and Peter.

These stories
were so interesting to me, that I only left that fire, unwillingly,
I must add, when my mother called me from across the road - where
we lived - and instructed me to come home immediately.

According to
Jeffrey's father the place where the village was established was an
assembly place for witches in ancient times. I never thought of
asking him where he came on his information, but at the time I
could see no reason not to believe him. He would then tell us the
terrible things the witches did over there in that coven of theirs,
one of which was catching children - like us - and roasting us over
a galley – like this very one – and then eating us with sharp
sticks – like this very stick that he is holding the sweet potato
over the fire with.

Many times, I
think he was just adding onto his story as he saw us believing him
and becoming more scared by the minute. It must have been great fun
for him, but sometimes it was really scary and I would look over my
shoulder into the darkness to see if one those ugly witches was not
approaching.

Then Peter
would add on to tell that he actually saw one of those witches one
evening when he went to the shop over the little ford.

"How could you
have seen one if they lived so long ago? All of them must be dead
by now."

"Witches never
die," was all he said in a very dramatic tone.

What made these
stories even spookier - and thus more enjoyable - was the fact that
there were no electricity in the whole village. These stories were
then always told by a light that flickered and gave motion to all
the darkness around one. Small innocent little things would
suddenly become huge monsters without form, which danced evilly
against the walls or on the ceiling.

In those days
it was just normal not to have electricity. It was only in the
cities and the super-rich people in the rural areas who actually
had electricity. But strangely we never missed it, because all our
stuff worked without any electricity.

We even had a
refrigerator that work with paraffin. We were one of the very few
families that had a fridge and many people asked my mother to keep
their perishables in our refrigerator. We further used oil lamps
and candles to illuminate our house when the sun went down in the
evenings. We also had this special lamp that was as bright as any
electric light. It made such a hissing sound when it was on,
because it work with paraffin that came out under pressure.

To cook our
food, we used the Primus stove or our wood burning stove.

And this is
where the story really starts:

For to keep the
stoves going, we needed wood. That is something that couldn't be
bought in a shop in those days, so we had to go to the nearby
forest to fetch our own wood. We did this about once or sometimes
even twice a week.

Being friends
with Jeffrey thus automatically put me in the wood gathering group.
Jeffrey's father also brought wood for our house at the request of
my mother, and this actually made me an official participant in the
whole wood-gathering expedition.

Gathering wood
was actually a very enjoyable experience and also very simple. All
one needed was a good axe or a saw or both and a wooden cart. If
you didn't have a cart, you could simply bind the wood that you
gathered together with a piece of string and carry it home on your
shoulder or on your head. It was easy and most importantly
free.

It would be me,
Jeffrey, Jeffrey's father, Peter and the dog, Rex…and a huge push
cart, that Jeffrey's father build. This cart had four huge bicycle
wheels and could even be steered with some ropes. It was all very
neat. Sometimes I would sit in it while the others pushed me and I
steered the huge cart through the rough forest pathways.

Jeffrey and I
would gather smaller pieces of wood, while his father and Peter
used the axe and saw to gather bigger pieces of wood. The dog would
run around, his tail wagging and making it seem as if he was
hunting wild animals, but not being very successful.

Jeffrey and I
would at the same that we gathered wood, also explore the
forest.

It is difficult
to describe that forest, because one had to be there to really
understand what it was like. In the first place when one entered
the forest you could feel that it was alive. Not a spooky kind of
alive, but a real invigorating alive with leaves rustling in the
wind, dried branches crackling under your feet, little insects
everywhere and birds singing invisibly in the trees. Silence in
that forest was always filled with millions of little noises like
that. Sometimes I even imagined that I could hear the giant trees
sucking up the clear water from deep beneath the earth.

Then it would
take that water, through thin veins by capillary action high up
that tree up to the topmost branches and leaves. When one looked up
one could see that some of those trees went up forever and the only
thing stopping them was the bright blue of the sky. There were
places in the wood where there were so many high trees that they
blotted out the sun and it was a bit dark there. But the strange
thing is that it never felt spooky, because even there one could
feel that the forest was there as a protector, as a benevolent
organism that was there to protect and help us.

And that fresh
forest smell is something that stays with one forever. Eucalyptus
and Oak and Silver Birch and the Maple trees.

There were lots
of rabbits in that forest as well as some squirrels. We also saw
some tortoises, but I was scared of them, why I don't know. We even
saw a gazelle one day, but he saw us before we saw him and was gone
in a flash, without even making the leaves rustle.

And then the
little footpaths. I always wondered how the paths came there, but
Jeffrey told me that it was made there by people from the olden
days. I accepted that answer. When we were in the forest I tried my
level best never to think of the witches, that his father told us
about. My wild imagination assumed that this would be a place for
them to gather.

But the strange
thing about those little footpaths was that it was always an
adventure to explore them, especially if it was one we didn't use
before, because one never knew where it would take us. As a matter
of fact sometimes these paths took us to wide open spaces in the
middle of the forest. When we stood in that open space, the forest
would look like a huge round wall around us.

There were
times when we came upon toadstools that was arranged in a perfect
circle in the forest. Jeffrey's father would then tell us to avoid
that area, because the devils danced there at night. Even I really
didn't believe him, but for safety's sake stayed away.

The feeling of
that forest really was something that would stay with me my whole
life through. The next year when I went to school in the city, I
could tell lots of stories about the forest in the mornings at NEWS
TELLING time, in class. My teacher loved it, because it was totally
different from the stories the other children always told. These
children didn’t have the privilege of growing up in a rural village
– like I had.

In any case, it
was on one of me and Jeffrey's exploration journeys in the forest
that we discovered the house.

We drifted off
the usual footpath and away from the cart and the others and
started following our noses into the forest, knowing it would be
easy to find the others again.

We found a path
that was a bit wider than they usually are and just followed it.
This footpath gradually chanced into a chalky white-yellow path. We
walked along this white-yellowish footpath seeing how our feet
became white with the fine dust of the path. I really don't know if
it was chalk or what it was.

It was only
later that we found out it was sulfur or brimstone.

The area
gradually changed from a bushy area to a huge open plain with huge
mounds of the same yellow-whitish material the footpath was made
of. There was also this strange achromatic smell in the air. And a
strange whistling wind blowing making the white stuff swirl in the
air.