Embrace (71 page)

When after forty-five minutes Uncle Gerrie had not shown up from the fields — I’m sure one of the tractors got stuck, Auntie Babs said — we took our leave and Bokkie promised to pop in again whenthey brought me back in ten days’ time. As I walked ahead to the car my mother whispered something to Auntie Babs. Probably, I realise now, that it would be Bok and not she dropping me off.

Where is he? I alight from the car and stand outside, looking at the cycads. Two nyala ewes tread carefully in the shade. I hoist myself onto the rim of the van’s pick-up and sit in the sun, watching the antelope.

I relayed to Bokkie the funeral procession in Pietermaritzburg, Ma’am in the black dress, aided by her twin sister and her daughter Jenny. The husband from whom she’s divorced. Soldiers, brass instruments and drums, flags and tears. Bokkie made clicking sounds with her tongue. Sounds of pity for Ma’am. The horror of a parent losing a child. Ja, Bokkie said, sounding like Ouma Liebenberg, she doesn’t know where it’s all going to end. What It and End she was talking of I had no specific clue, yet I believed the It and the End had to do with everything that was going on in the entire world: the onslaught of the Antichrist. The communist threat. The threat of poverty. The threat of losing our house. The threat of the Arabs. The threat of the Americans. The threat of the Dutch Reformed Church. Of permissiveness. Of narrowness. Of blacks. Of time. Of war. Of sex. Of age. Of parenting. Of childhood. Of middle age. Old age. Comets striking planet earth. Going deaf. Exposure. Revelation. Love. Everything in the whole entire history of the universe. I felt her gaze turning from the steering wheel to me. I glanced at her.

‘My child, I beg you to get your fingers out of your mouth,’ she said, casting her eyes momentarily back onto the road. ‘Let me see.’ Again looking away from the road and shaking her head at the sight of my fingertips: white, torn, uneven, flesh curling backwards, cuticles broken and upright, miniature antlers.

I thought you said you’d stop? Just like Lena, fingers always in her mouth. You both have the most beautiful hands, but you insist onmutilating yourselves. I just don’t understand it. It makes no sense. Can you explain it to me? You’re almost fourteen years old; have you any idea what it looks like when a young man has his fingers in his mouth the whole time? Like this,’ she says, looking back at the road and pulling her lips from her teeth, running her painted red fingernails to and fro across her clenched bit.

‘Nice? Hey? What do you think it looks like?’

‘Like a baboon eating watermelon,’ I said, and we both laughed.

‘Well, there you have it, Baboon,’ she said.

Lena and my nail-biting is a leitmotif that has run with our lives since each of us first started school. When I went to the Berg, Bokkie was convinced that learning the piano would force me from the habit as I would be ashamed of my fingers on the keyboard. Great was her horror when instead of quitting nail-biting I quit the piano. Once, in my first year, she had brought Juffrou Sang along to fetch me from the Berg. I had been taking piano for two months. While I was showing Juffrou Sang the school she asked me to play, to show how much I had learnt. I played a short piece on the auditorium’s grand and made about five mistakes in the space of fifteen bars. Juffrou Sang acted impressed, but Bokkie seemed wounded, embarrassed. When I announced later that holiday that I was giving up piano and going back to recorder, Bokkie looked as though I had informed her of someone’s death or of a rape. Or as if I had bitten her in the heel.

‘Why?’ Bok asked, his tone cautioning that I had better offer a plausible excuse. ‘Why do you want to stop?’ I said I couldn’t master a new instrument while I was trying to train for swimming. Sport was keeping me from music.

‘There’s no swimming in winter,’ my father said, his face expressionless.

‘There’s rugby,’ I said, and he nodded his head, expression altered to a mixture of hope and mistrust.

I myself know all too well that quitting the piano had nothing to do with swimming. Even less with rugby. At best, the summer swimming season could be stretched to eliminate a few weeks of autumn rugby. The problem with piano, rather, was that it had not come as easy as I had imagined: sitting down, my fingers running up and down, no heavenly sounds emanated from beneath my hands through the strings. No, piano was like learning anything else. Moreover, there was Miss Holloway, her wheezing vulture breath — halitosis, Dominic corrected me — threatening to make me throw up. But even Marabou herself probably had little to do with it, for she taught the recorder too, anyway. The long and short of it is that I f could not concentrate on anything that needed to be learnt from scratch. Maths had gone well until we started fractions. Music Theory was fine because I had started learning it from Juffrou Sang, and those basics carried me through the Berg. Thank God Music Theory required only a pass/fail and I had managed by the skin of my teeth. I had the attention span of a mousebird when faced with new things I had to commit to memory. Reading, drawing, riding, writing, swimming and dreaming I can manage for hours, T thought. But I read something once, only, and, if I don’t get it, grasp it and commit it to memory, I find myself unable or unwilling to repeat. Only since Ma’am has been re-marking my essays, has been inspiring me to develop my talent as a writer, have I been willing to go back and rework, rewrite, reimagine, reconceptualise, redraft. I loathe Maths, I loathe rugby, I loathe the recorder, I loathe anything I cannot do well. I love reading, writing, drawing, swimming, riding. Beyond that the world, academics in toto, might as well not exist.

And I’ll bite my nails. Even in my sleep I’ll bite my nails.

We passed Midmar and spoke about Mumdeman’s retirement. About Mr Shaw, the wealthy Englishman from Durban North who had asked her to marry him. Then Bokkie told me that the Lategans had bought my East African trophies. ‘Just to help out a little bit and we were sure you won’t worry because it does help to keep you in the Berg.’ I didn’t respond. I glared from the window. The broken stripes m the middle of the road, flashing by, seemed to torment me. Ilooked out of the passenger window. I tried to see how I would paint the green hills of Howick and Merryvale as they glided by and not the Grants gazelle heads, the dick-dick, and the sable antelope that were what Dademan had left me. All he had to leave me. My inheritance. That’s it, my entire inheritance gone to the Lategans, the rich cunts who give Lena their daughter Anka’s old school uniforms. I wanted to cry, I wanted to scream: ‘How could you let him do it? How could you let him sell what was mine without asking me! Just like he sold Camelot, mine, all I had, without asking me.’ Seething, I felt my mother’s presence around me in the car. To keep me in the Berg! Fuck you, bitch! I was the one who told you and him, begged, begged — wept and made a fool of myself — that I didn’t want to go back to that school, that deformatory! When that fucken excuse of a father of mine had sworn that he was going to make it big; that I, as a child, should not worry about adult business, that I could go back to the Berg with a smile on my face. How I detested you, Father, looked up against having to face you when we got home. Cad, liar, fuck-up, smart Alec, bastard, cunt, poes, shit, kak, hoer, fokker, doos. And Bokkie, you useless, useless, mother. What do you do to protect me from him? Whimpering with that thinness of timbre just like Grandfather Liebenberg in those moments before he is about to cry. Again. ‘We were sure you won’t worry because it helps keep you in the Berg.’ I feel like slapping you. Feel my hands around your beautiful, useless neck. So, you do not want me to worry. But you must know that I will. Both because of what I know and because of what I don’t know but am wise enough and you know am wise enough to infer from between the lines, the noise that comes thundering through the interstices of your silences. You and he: tell me not to worry, but you know, ensure, already in the instruction, that I will worry.

All I wanted in that instant was for you to turn that car around and take me back to school. To Jacques. Or to Dominic. Yes, to Dominic. I didn’t care if I ever saw Jacques again. Liar, traitor. User. Bok. I wanted to go to the Websters and live with them in comfort.

With Dominic whom I trusted. Or I could live on the loose with Uncle Klaas. Anywhere. Anywhere where worry is elsewhere.

Like here. I walk up to the reception area, looking for Bok.

He is talking to Mr Reynolds. I browse the shelves. Go back out into the sun.

But for a few minutes around my arrival and the braai at Uncle Michael’s, Bernice hardly left her room for more than a sandwich at lunch and later for supper. She now has a desk in her room, so she no longer uses the dining-room table. Though already in the past having seemed to me in a world removed from my own, Bernice now was slipping away definitively. Bernice’s preparation for matric exams, I told Lena, is her ticket even further out of our lives. Bernice’s commitment to her studies, to trying to get a university exemption even though she will never go to university, I had found inspiring. There were days she came out with swollen eyes, as if she were worried sick or had been crying, and I wanted to comfort her, impart my knowledge to her, tell her that I would go and write the exams for her. It struck me as profoundly adult, to be studying for exams like that, to the exclusion of all else. For a day or two I was attracted to the idea of comrtiitting myself to my school work, getting As for each school subject, including Maths. Wiping Niklaas Bruin off the map. I saw myself sitting in Bernice’s old room, which will become mine once she has left the house. Unless of course we end up in a flat. Around me I saw bookshelves and pens and pencils, large ledgers and maybe even a typewriter. Then I realised it was not myself immersed in schoolbooks I was dreaming of, it was a vision of myself one day when I am a writer. I will be working like this, day in and day out, without taking a break. With a wife or a maid bringing in cups of tea or real freshly squeezed orange juice. Not the Oros concentrate I mix and top up with ice and quietly take in to my sister’s room.

There were occasional phone calls from her schoolmates. Stephanie called when she got back from London. Within minutes of Bernice being on the phone with our cousin, Bokkie was slamming down pots and pans in the kitchen, muttering, loud enough for us all to hear: ‘Wouldn’t say that lady was on the verge of writing matric exams.’ And after replacing the receiver Bernice came into the kitchen and said: ‘She only wanted to tell me about her trip.’

‘Stephanie’s so-called trip will not get you through matric exams.’ ‘We were also talking about my exams, Bokkie.’

‘What does Stephanie De Man know about your school work?’ Bokkie snapped. ‘She was a zero on a contract at school and now she’s trying to turn you into the same.’

And Bernice left quietly. Back into her room.

Sunning myself on the Alcamino’s bonnet. Still waiting for Bok, I wonder what Bokkie knows about Stephanie’s ‘so-called’ trip. Am I, after all, not the only one in our family who knows why she went?

Alette I saw only a few times. When I went to meet her and Lena and walk them back from the Pahla station. Her pieces for the Grade Five exam are tough but she’s in top shape and hopes for a distinction. I told her about the Schumann Dominic is preparing. She asked about the funeral in Pietermaritzburg and I spoke about the music we sang; that Mathison had cancelled our proposed debate on the French Revolution as a gesture of respect to Ma’am and because it bordered on bringing politics into schools. Lena said the old spinster Miss Hope told her she had seen me at the funeral. Then I told them about the prac teacher, Mr Loveday, who came for two weeks to stand in for Ma’am. How I had introduced myself to Mr Loveday as Oscar, and Dominic introduced himself as Johann Sebastian. And for a few days the whole class and thus also Loveday had called me Oscar and Dominic Johann Sebastian. After one lunch Loveday came back to class and told us he knew my name was Karl and Dominic’s was not

Johann Sebastian and he didn’t find the joke or the class’s complicity the least bit amusing. I told Alette that something had started happening in my reading: I now see that Wilbur Smith is entertaining. It’s like being in an adventure. But writers like Oscar Wilde, and John Steinbeck — you must read
Dorian Gray
and
East of Eden,
Alette — are genius. For they tell their stories in ways, in words, that you will never forget because they resonate with our own lives. Wilbur Smith is cheap and easy trash.

We said goodbye to Alette in Dan Pienaar and moved on to Bowen. Lena and I started speaking about Coen and Mandy, about how exhilarating that they’ve sold everything and are going to sail around the world. ‘Much better going for a few years than just for a week like Stephanie,’ Lena said. Clearly, she doesn’t know, I think, or else she would have let on then. While we don’t see Coen and Mandy often, we adore them. They “are with it, not old-fashioned. Uncle Coen once told us outright that he has had himself ‘fixed’ so that Mandy won’t ever get pregnant. It’s called a vasectomy and Bokkie says that’s the way of the future.

Lena spoke about how tough it was playing provincial softball. Softball was not a school sport, but she’s sure she’ll get full honours for sport next year. Next year is Standard Nine and she’s hoping that when she goes to matric she’ll be a prefect. When she asked whether I was coming to Port Natal next year I answered that I’d like to stay another year in the Berg. Without saying anything out loud, I could see resentment in her expression. ‘I won’t take Bok’s money.’ I said, ‘I’m ‘going to ask Aunt Lena if she won’t pay.’

And where do you think she’s going to get that kind of money?’ ‘From Uncle Joe.’

‘Do you think he’ll pay to keep you there amongst the moffies?’ He doesn’t have to know she’s paying.’

‘Dream on, Karl De Man,’ sounding too much like Bokkie when she’s angry with Bok and she drops the Bok and calls him Ralph De Man.

‘Aunt Lena,’ Lena continued, ‘can get hundreds of rands. Not thousands.’