Embrace (37 page)

I said, of course I would. He nodded affirmation. I left the office, momentarily elated.

At night, after a session with the weights and panting in a pool of sweat, sleep again declined to fetch me. I tried to will myself into the dream of floating. It wouldn’t come. I felt cold, freezing. When I eventually awoke, I had dreamt I was holding something I couldn’t see. Something whose heart was beating against my enclosed palms. Then it started throbbing, like a pulse in my hands and I became frightened. Then, in the next picture it was Lena’s hands growing from my arms and then I was on a rhino s back falling into the sea and going down, down into black water, drowning with the rhino’s wild eyes sinking beside me and I awoke, sure I had been screaming. I wondered whether the dream had been in black and white or in colour. In the morning my head was thick as if I hadn’t slept a wink. When Uncle Charlie came in, calling,
Wakey, wakey, rise and shine, PT shorts, white vests, running shoes,
I was already long awake. Were it not for the dream recalled so vividly, I would not have believed I had dozed at all. Freezing during PT, my head throbbing, I fell behind the troop of runners. I vomited. Steam rose from the frosted yellow grass. The Senior at the back told me he’d walk me back to school. By morning choir I couldn’t stand up straight. I told Mister Roelofse I was ill. He sent me to sick-bay. Uncle Charlie said I had flu. I had a temperature and every lymph node was swollen. He inspected all the glands of my body and rested his palm on my inside thigh, then moved it up to my penis and asked whether that too was aching. I said no. He removed his hand.

Friday at dusk, after two days in bed, I wanted to go to the phone to await Bokkie s weekly call or to phone reverse charges. Uncle Charlie said the school had already phoned home. My parents sent their best wishes for my speedy recovery. Auntie Babs Theron visited from the farm. Bokkie had phoned her to come and look in on me. She brought a tartan-patterned tin of shortbread and sat on my bed. She asked me how I was feeling. I said I was fine. Even Auntie Babs, a woman Bokkie idolised for her dignified composure, the smartness of her home and her four well-mannered children, looked different. What was this woman or her kindness to me? She could not save me. Her generosity and charity meant nothing. I lay there wishing she would leave and stick the tin of shortbread up her cunt. Saying goodbye she promised she’d call Bokkie and say I was getting better. ‘Eat the shortbread, Karl. It will make you feel stronger. And phone me if you need me, okay? I’m just down the road. You can keep the tin.’

I had no desire to get better. I wanted to die. If I died they’d all feel ashamed of what they’d done to me. I imagined them at my funeral, weeping, loathing themselves for not loving me enough. And then, me rising from my coffin, to be welcomed like Lazarus into the arms of my father who would at last love me. My headache grew worse. At times it felt I couldn’t lift my skull from the pillow. I wished I had my antihistamine, for that, I knew, would make me feel better. I refused to eat. Sometimes flushed the food down the toilet. If I got sick enough they would be forced to come and fetch me. Beauty or one of the other servants brought me food. At least once I wept into Beauty’s arms, saying I wished I could run away and never come back. She asked what was wrong with me and I said I no longer wanted to be at the school, that I missed Dominic. She asked what she could do for me and I shook my head against the pillow, tears streaming down the side of my face.

If I didn’t eat maybe I could get anorexia nervosa like the Springbok gymnast Debbie Bingham. That would show them. I refused to read from the Bible on the bedside table. I knew what I was doing was a sin; I was not treating my body as the temple it was. I didn’t care; fuck God, fuck Jesus, fuck the Holy Spirit. I was going to hell and I didn’t care. My going to hell was Bok and Bokkie’s fault. And Miss Roos’s. Doos. I read
The Blue Lagoon
;
The Swiss Family Robinson; Twenty Thousand Leagues Beneath The Sea; Groen Koring
and
Die Goue Gerj.
There was some book — maybe the Jules Verne — with French phrases italicised in the middle of the English. It infuriated me that writers would leave entire sections of French in English books without saying what they meant. On that bed in sick-bay, I decided that if I ever wrote a play in English, I’d leave some words in Afrikaans so that people could feel what it felt like to get to an important sentence only to find it in a language they didn’t understand. If I, Karl De Man, had to learn French to understand some stupid English novel properly, others will just have to learn Afrikaans or stay in the dark for all I cared.

No one was allowed to visit. I would spread the flu virus and flu was to us in the Berg what the black plague was to the Middle Ages. When not reading, vomiting or flushing food down the toilet, I seemed to be crying. If Uncle Charlie came in I said the red eyes were from the headache. He gave me two Disprins dissolved in water.

It was as if a light beam fell into the room when Dominic waltzed in there, grinning and scolding me for being in bed when he had just returned from the trip of a lifetime. Back from Europe and Uncle Charlie had given him permission to come and visit. I sat up in bed and could not wipe the smile from my face. He brought me Toblerone chocolate and a lovely white and blue T-shirt that said ‘Gay Paris’ and a cassette of a new group called Abba. He fetched a tape recorder from one of the music rooms and played me the song ‘Waterloo’. He said the music was real schmaltz but it was fun and catchy and his mother loved it and he was sure I would too. He showed me photographs of when he had turned thirteen in Paris. He held up the T-shirt and grinned. He said his parents had bought us each one and did I know — and now he whispered — that the word gay was also a secret word for homosexual? I shook my head and said he was surely joking. He giggled and said no, that’s why his parents had bought the T-shirts. I fell back into the pillow and turned my face to the wall. How could this be happening? What had I done to deserve this? That the first present I got from Europe was something

I would have to hide in my cupboard; throw away and never let anyone see.

Dom sat beside me on my bed and asked what was wrong. I said I didn’t want to be there; I wanted to go and live with Aunt Lena and Uncle Joe in Klerksdorp. I didn’t want to be in the school if we weren’t in the same dorm. I did not say that I could not be friends with him, whether we shared a dorm or not and that the evil T-shirt from Paris proved everything Dr Taylor had said. I did not say that something terrible had happened while he was away, enjoying himself and his parents’ boundless wealth.

Then, instead of anything I had expected, Dominic said: ‘Karl, you are not really sick. You are homesick. And that is never going to go away. You must get up. You must pull yourself together. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. I am here.’ He didn’t smile, pored at me sternly. ‘It’s stupid that they’ve split us up, but there’s sweet blue all to be done about that. I’m here for you and I love this place. I can give you some of my love for the place. Get up, Karl, please. You are not sick.’ I cried, held onto him. I wanted to tell him what had happened while he was away; that he had no idea as to why they had really separated us. That Dr Taylor had said I could no longer be friends with him. But what would it matter?

‘Karl, promise me you will get up — for just one week?’ He sat closer to me, speaking urgently. ‘If you’re not better after a week, I promise, I will tell my father to tell Bok to come and fetch you. And if you stay, just think of it, were touring Malawi at the end of the year, it’s only three months away.’ Now he beamed, smiling, as he held my hand, trying to inspire me.

That night I prayed to God to let me live and to make me get better. I swore to live a Christian life, to become a good boy. Next morning the symptoms were gone. I told Uncle Charlie I was ready to go back to class. The six of us were again together, during break, down at the fort we were building at the river. And at night, I practised with my weights: I would not write plays or poems, I would trynot to act girlish and deepen my voice when I spoke, try not to use my hands, I would do everything to become the son Bok wanted. I would throw away the Paris T-shirt as soon as I left the school at the end of the year. But I was not going to give up my friendship with Dominic. Not for anyone or anything. Surely, surely, God, Bok and Dr Taylor would forgive me that one transgression? Within no more than six weeks I felt the sleeves of my black school T-shirts clinging a little tighter to my biceps.

Not long after Dademan’s funeral, a telegram arrived to say that Bokkie’s brother, Uncle Gert, had been killed when a rock fell on his neck in the mine in Klerksdorp. Silence and tears moved in to occupy the St Lucia house. In the sunny lounge, the kitchen and the bedrooms she swept, polished and shone, Bokkie was inconsolable. Now it was my mothers tears that drove me to a frenzy as I wondered how we could make her feel better. Uncle Gert’s death at such a youthful age — as well as the dramatic circumstances of the accident — should have had a greater effect on me than the loss of Dademan; yet, as much as I knew and understood my mothers love for her brother, and also had my own tiny recollections of him andTannie Barbara visiting with our cousins Kaspasie and Lynette in Umfolozi, my uncle’s death signified mostly Bokkie’s grief to me. I tried to feel my mothers pain, for pain of my own was shamefully absent. I was only sad when I thought of Tannie Barbara, Kaspasie and Lynette. Bokkie shed tears over the stove and I came and put my hands around her waist. She was devastated; she seemed frayed in a way not even time would recover. Her bottom lip trembled, the corners of her mouth drooped, her shoulders seemed to stoop as they shuddered, her blue eyes had turned into morbid red maps of grief. What would become of poor Kaspasie and Lynette; the mines didn’t pay decent pensions to widows, and how was Kaspasie to grow up without a father? And what about Oupa and Ouma Liebenberg: Uncle Gert had been their eldest child and only son. Now he was gone, taken in the prime of his life. And a parent never, never recovers from the death of a child. Fervently I prayed that I would not die before her or Bok, that Bernice and Lena would grow to be a hundred before they died because Bokkie would surely have to be dead by the time she was one hundred and twenty-one years old? Or was it a sin to think that Bokkie would one day die? Was thinking that the same as not praying that she’d live for ever?

Bernice, Simba and I went with Bokkie to the St Lucia Hotel to call Klerksdorp. We stood outside the tiekiebox while she spoke into the receiver, dragging on her Rothmans. When the stack of ten-cent pieces piled on the directory shrunk too short, Bokkie stuck her hand out with a one-rand note and gestured with her wet red eyes to Bernice to run to the store and get more change. From outside the call-box we tried to follow the conversation but Bokkie was crying so much, it was difficult to know what was going on. Then there were long silences in which she only nodded her head or spoke so softly we couldn’t hear from the outside of the glass. Simba whimpered, sensing my mother’s tears.

‘Shocking,’ Bokkie said later that night as she retold the telephone conversation to Bok: ‘Gert was struck by the rock and the kaffir right beside him lived. Not a scratch.’ And so the story was passed down of how if the rock had fallen only a few inches to the other side Uncle Gert would have lived and the kaffir would have been killed. I tried to visualise what it must have been like underground in a gold mine; deep, dark, cold, wet. And then, while Uncle Gert and the kaffir were drilling for gold, how the rock came loose and broke his neck and he died instantly. I preferred the idea of being prepared for death; what if I were to die now, with the reams of sins I committed every day and the deposit box overflowing with secrets? I would go straight — no questions asked — to hell. I would have to resist my boredom in Sunday school. Learn to mean the words recited in theweekly Sunday school verse — instead of just saying them with expression so that I’d be better than the rest of the class.

We three kids prayed together for Kaspasie and Lynette. They were now all Tannie Barbara had left in the world. I undertook to behave myself and not disappoint my mother again; to protect her from all worldly pain. Not since Bernice’s near-death experience with the mysterious poison had I seen my mother like this. Lena asked whether Kaspaas and Lynette couldn’t come and live with us because they were now half orphan. Bokkie said that they still had their mother and they’d stay with her in Klerksdorp: ‘How would you feel if Bok died and someone took you away from me?’ A question that ended the conversation and left Lena looking guilty and me nodding my head. Accusingly.

Bok and Bokkie would drive up to the funeral. We would remain behind, as we couldn’t leave school for such an extended trip. We wanted the Pierces to come and stay with us but Bokkie said we’d lost our senses if we thought she’d allow any such thing. Mumdeman, still waiting to be transferred from Charters, would cross by boat every afternoon to come and take care of us. Bok and Bokkie drove off in the Peugeot, the roofrack stacked with impala biltong, pineapples, bananas, papaws and avocado pears for the Liebenberg family. I had filled two empty canfruit bottles with shells and sea water for Bokkie to take as gifts to Kaspasie and Lynette.

‘That’s two,’ said Bernice, after Bokkie and Bok had left.

‘Two what?’

‘Death comes in threes. First Dademan, now Uncle Gert. Who will be next?’

‘If we re lucky . . .’ Lena muttered and cast her gaze on me.

‘Don’t say that! Lena!’ Bernice reprimanded. ‘Death is no joke. What if something happens to Bok and Bokkie’s car?’

. I could scarcely sleep at night from worry about my parents on the road. I remembered the time Bokkie’s cousin Coen had come to takeus for a holiday in the Transvaal. It may have been when Bokkie went for the ear operation, because Bok and the girls were at the Godmillows house and why else would we have travelled in two cars? Near Pongola a kudu jumped across the road and Coen’s white Fiat was a write-off. None of us was injured, but we could all have been killed. I worried about Bok and Bokkie striking another kudu, this time being killed on impact. Till the next day when Mumdeman returned from Charters and said Bok called from Klerksdorp to say they had arrived safely.