Embrace (22 page)

Dense forests of kelp swayed in the tide. Pieces of green and black stems, broken loose, washed up onto the beaches where we walked bent forward against the wind. The water was freezing. Nothing like Toti or St Lucia where one could swim all year round. We clambered up the rocks and sat hunched over rock-pools pointing out tiny fish, hermit crabs and knobbed seaweed I had never seen before. I picked up crabs and held them up to show him where they carried their eggs. He asked whether I wasn’t afraid and I said no, animals and creatures rarely harm you if they know you’re not going to hurt them.

‘How do they know your intention?’

I said they just know; they can sense it. I said I knew the sea and the beach from when Bok had been a ranger at Lake St Lucia after Umfolozi. But things did look different in the Atlantic Ocean, I said. Here were different kinds of starfish, brighdy coloured and patterned, which I lifted from the rock-pools to let sit in my palm.

And anemones, their tentacles long and stringy, ten times the size of the ones on the East Coast. I tried to stick my fingers in before they could withdraw into their tight-lipped cylinders. Running the tip of a finger along the tight folds of the slimy lips feels kinky, I said, and he asked me what I meant. I laughed and looked away.

A sea urchin. Its black spikes a pom-pom in my palm. He cautioned that I should put it down as it was poisonous.

‘If you hold it carefully, it won’t harm you,’ I said and unsuccessfully tried to get him to take it from me.

‘If that thing squirts poison into you, your hand will wither and fall off’

‘They don’t do it for no reason. It’s if they are stepped on or hurt or if they need to eat or protect themselves. It’s like porcupines,’ I said, ‘it’s not true that they shoot out their quills. They ruffle them out and run into whoever is threatening them and then leave the quills behind. They don’t shoot them out.’ I told him about Suz, when she got quills stuck right through her flanks and into her face. Bok pulled them out, but the poison still almost killed her. I knew, and Chaka probably too, that something was wrong one afternoon when she didn’t come running from the trail to meet us. There was no Suz when Bok came into sight through the bush that day and my heart sank. Had a leopard at last taken her? Or a lion? A crocodile? Before I could ask, Bok said she was okay. Motionless she lay across the donkey’s saddle bags, unable to wag her tail when she saw us. At night she slept beside my bed, all the while making small sounds while Chaka cried and yelped outside my window. I feared she would die. But within a day or two she had regained her strength, was back to her old self, running through the grass; chasing meerkats and warthogs, and barking at eland with Chaka and me when we were out of Bok’s sight.

‘What if the urchin thinks you’re trying to hurt it? It will sting you, you know that.’ I could hear he was teasing, patronising me. I didn’t believe for a moment that he was really afraid or concerned that the creature might cause me harm.

‘A little bit of poison won’t kill me! A scorpion once stung me and we just put some Scrubbs Ammonia on and I was fine.’

‘Oh, for the invincibility of childhood.’

‘I’ll be fourteen in October.’

I returned the sea urchin to its pool and we walked back down onto the beach, heading for the car. Waves licked up to where the sand was dry. The tide was coming in. The wind now in our backs. A few paces behind me I heard his voice:

‘Karl-who’ll-be-fourteen-in October, I love you.’

I turned and pulled a face at him. He laughed and asked whether he was embarrassing me. I shook my head; glad he had said it.

I lay on the bed searching for decent music while he took a bath. Nothing caught clearly, except Radio Good Hope and a few black stations.

After him, I went in and filled the tub almost to the brim. Water splashed over the sides as I submerged my body and head. What a pleasure opening the little containers and washing my hair with shampoo that was not from my cone-shaped Colgate bottle; unwrapping each little soap a different fragrance and new colours. It reminded me of our holidays in Klerksdorp with Aunt Lena and Uncle Joe. Two full-time maids — Ragab and Liesbet — kept the household going there and the bathrooms had bath salts, bubble bath and an endless supply of big fluffy towels. Ragab and Liesbet were superb workers and the mansion was always spotless and fragrant. Once, when Aunt Lena found a grime ring inside the bath-tub she called Ragab from the kitchen. Ragab insisted she had cleaned the bath and that perhaps one of the Brats had taken a bath. Aunt Lena told her to tell the truth or else face the sack. Ragab again insisted she had washed the bath, at which point Aunt Lena grabbed the hosepipe from the washing machine and beat the screaming and begging Ragab all the way down the passage. Lena and I laughed as we followed the two women. By the time they reached the lounge Ragab had wet herself and Aunt Lena instructed her to clean the mess from the carpets.

The other house I loved was the one I had been in only twice, the second time just a few weeks earlier on tour: it was the home where Dominic grew up and where we’d stayed with the Websters. What classy people Dr and Mrs Webster were, I thought. Both had university degrees and Dr Webster had studied in the United States. Their house in Saxonwold was set on an enormous piece of property that sprawled down to a small lake at the bottom of the garden. The Websters had a speed boat for water-skiing and inside the house was a separate room with nothing except a snooker table. They had thousands of books, whole walls covered from floor to ceiling, as well as the biggest collection of record albums I’d ever seen. Amongst the Websters’ albums of modern and contemporary music were a few I knew, as Mrs Webster liked the music I had grown up with. Dominic said his mother was as sentimental in her tastes as I was. But most of the Websters’ collection was music Dominic had had to tell me about, much I’d never heard of. He said that many of the albums were from the mid-sixties when his parents had still been socialists — a concept I researched from the dictionary — and Dr Webster had had long hair: Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Miriam Makeba, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Aretha Franklin, Donovan, The Beach Boys, Mercedes Sosa, Pablo Milanes, Janis Ian, Kris Kristofferson, The Monkees, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong.

The houses where I felt at home were where you could fill the tub and then pull the plug, not places teabags had to be used twice, where you were not shouted at for dripping syrup while spooning some from the jar, where you didn’t get told you wanted everything you laid your eyes on. Because most of what you wanted was already there.

Jacques had pulled back the cover and top sheet. He lay on his back with his hands behind his head, eyes shut, listening to the radio. From around his waist the towel had fallen open. I thought he had done it deliberately, that he was pretending. I stepped closer to the bed. The motionless eyelashes, the rise and fall of his chest and stomach said that he had indeed fallen asleep. His damp black hair lay in slithers on the pillow and against his upturned wrists. One arm was diagonally below his chest; his legs slightly apart: white, skinny and also covered in a haze of black hair. For the first time in daylight, I saw his penis, limp and pale in the pubic tangle that ran up to his navel. Head to toe I took him in. He was like something from a book I had seen; like Christ or one of the men in the black and white photo romances Bokkie prohibited us from reading. I had gone stiff and stood waiting, wondering what to do. When I looked at his face again he was staring back at me. His eyes ran down my chest and tummy and stopped where I knew there was now a dear bulge in the towel draped around my waist. He smiled and told me — no, asked — whether I would not drop the towel: ‘Sal jy nie die handdoek laat sak nie?’ Holding my breath, I lowered the white fabric. I walked over to the bed and stood, facing him. Half raised on his elbow, he lifted himself and took me into his mouth. His other hand went around my buttocks and for a while he rocked me. Then I was on the bed; on top of him; my face between his legs; taking him into my mouth; afraid I might choke feeling it grow harder as the head moved through the foreskin; inhaling the smells of soap and moss. His tongue ran from my scrotum backwards. I gulped, almost bit him, closed my eyes. Stubble, sharp and rough like sandpaper, grazed the skin of my scrotum and buttocks. Nothing I had known — ever — felt as good as that. Every nerve of my body, it seemed, came together there and his tongue had found me out. It was too much to bear. I pushed him away, lifted myself off him, keeping my lips around his penis. I moved my head up and down, taking in as much as I could without choking. In an urgent voice he told me to stop, but I continued, refused to remove my mouth. I found his hand and placed it between my thighs.Then I feltit, suddenly, a rush into my mouth. I held it there, not breathing. I wanted to spit it out; feared it could be poisonous. That I would die. Then I felt the burning in my own loins, shudders in my lower body. I had to breathe. I swallowed. Felt it burn down my throat. I lay thinking that mine had probably been over his face or chest. I held onto his skinny white ankles. When I opened my eyes I watched the stiff organ slowly draw back into itself, leaving a silver drop hanging where the foreskin had now drawn into a tiny flower, folded into a closed anemone. “Long Legged Woman Dressed in Black’ was playing on the radio as drowsiness began to overcome me. My tongue ran around the inside of my mouth. It was impossible to know whether at the back of my mouth I was tasting or smelling or, both at once, unmistakably, the scent or after-taste of salted almonds.

He moved, turned his body to face head down next to me. He did not speak; just ran his hand through my hair, stroked my cheeks with his fingertips.

I asked him how old he was and he told me to guess.

‘My father started going grey when he was about thirty. We used to pull out the grey hairs and he’d give us one cent for every one. You’re going grey, so you must be about thirty or forty, I don’t know.’

‘Thirty-three.’

Mungo Jerry’s voice died away and the
peep-peep-peep
signalled time for the news. A woman’s voice said that the schools around Soweto had once again been set ablaze by black children. The police had been forced to shoot. Statistics on deaths were not yet available. The entire township had been cordoned off and Prime Minister Vorster had declared a State of Emergency. Jacques muttered something about ungrateful savages and sat up to turn the radio off.

‘Is it okay... to —’ I whispered, embarrassed, and could not complete the thought.

‘To what?’ he asked, smiling down on me.

I quickly shut my eyes, then opened them and blurted, ‘Is that stuff I swallowed poisonous?’

He laughed, still looking at me where my head rested on the pillow. He shook his head and whispered, no, it wasn’t poisonous. Then he was down there, again, his tongue everywhere. I thought I would faint. With hands on his ears I brought him back up to me. He lifted himself and lay with his full weight on me, and kissed me. There was a damp spot where his hair began to curl in his neck; both my hands were there, pressing his face into mine. I whispered for him to put it into me, and he said he couldn’t, that he didn’t want to hurt me. I said it wouldn’t hurt. While we kissed he began to push with a finger against my anus; trying to slip it into my rectum. My body resisted, seemed to contract. Pain stirred in my lower back and abdomen. It opened, slowly, until he could slide in a finger; then two; moved them around; asked how I felt and I just nodded my head. With my legs lifted over his shoulders, I could feel his penis now against my anus. He whispered that I should try and relax. My eyes closed. Gently, he began to push and withdraw. I could feel myself open. At moments I wished him to stop. An excruciating pain; but then, for moments again, pleasant. He asked whether I was all right. I nodded, my head thrown back in the pillow, unable to speak or open my eyes. I was impaled; I could not move; as if every atom of will had been drained from me; that nothing mattered except what was happening in that moment everywhere and nowhere in my body. I was gasping through my mouth; not sure whether I could take it. When he moved too deep, pain bolted up my spine, exploded in my skull; he asked whether he should stop. I shook my head. Now there was a remarkable, overwhelming feeling of lightness, as if I were composed of only air, grounded only where he was inside me. The longer it continued the more I could move; my arms came back to life, brought his face down to mine; I kissed him. Tears ran down my cheeks; dammed into my ears. He stopped. I opened my eyes, saw the fringe tumbled across his forehead; frowning. I nodded for him to continue. I started crying. Again he stopped, but I clasped my legs to his back, urging him to go on. When I sobbed he covered my mouth with his hand. From behind my closed eyelids and through my tears I saw the world slowly break apart into millions of new colours, and I wondered for weeks afterwards whether I had perhaps lost consciousness, for just a few seconds.

Later, lying curled up against him, he again asked me whether I was all right.

‘I loved what you did to my starfish,’ I whispered.

‘Your what?’

I giggled. He had no idea what I was talking about. I flopped over on my back, embarrassed at having said it. Smiling with my eyes shut.

‘What star?’

‘My bum, I liked what you did.’

‘Your starfish!’ He sputtered and laughed in my ear, saying I was too clever for my own good. He went into the bathroom. Now I felt that I was drenched in sweat, as though I’d just got out of a lukewarm shower. I let my fingertips crawl around my anus, certain there would be blood. Nothing. I sniffed. A waft of shit. Lifting myself I checked the sheets. The brown smudge made me squirm. The toilet flushed and I dropped myself onto the mark, hoping he would not discover or suspect what I was hiding.

I moved the orange leaf to the top of the page so that once the book was shut only the tip was visible. Rain was again thundering down on the roof, leaving me wondering whether there may have been a cloud break. I stepped onto the chair and reached to the top shelf. I slid the encyclopaedia in between B and D. I looked up and down the balcony; peered over the balustrade into the auditorium. No one in sight. I stepped down and ran along the passage.