Embrace (87 page)

‘Yes, Ma’am, it was only a joke.’

‘Why did you choose the name Oscar? Was it because you read
Dorian Gray
?’

‘Yes, Ma’am.’

‘Who told you to read Oscar Wilde, anyway?’

‘Aag, Ma’am. I just liked the name Oscar, you know, this silly thing of me becoming a writer, and Dominic chose Bach because he’s going to compose.’

She smiled and said, Karl, as remarkable a writer as Wilde was, there is no pride attached to the life of that man. He died in disgrace. Because of precisely the sort of thing I warned Dominic about. Why don’t you find yourself another role model, William, Isaac, Ernest, any of those. Then she looked at him with grave seriousness: ‘Karl, I in no way wish to sound disloyal to this school. This is my bread and butter. But, I want you to count your blessings that your voice is changing. This is an unhealthy environment for boys to be together. Very unhealthy. And someone like you, Karl, could easily go . . . either way in a place like this. Do you understand what I mean, or do I need to spell it out?’

‘I understand, Ma’am. And don’t worry, Ma’am, I’m too wise to be led astray.’

‘You’re strong, Karl. And talented. You’re the strongest fourteen-year-old I’ve ever taught. Truly, from all my years of teaching you’re one of only two or three I will always remember. Hold on to your strength and you’ll make it in the real world out there.’

After the meeting with Ma’am, and in spite of her saying he could have gone either way — a phrase that sucked like a leech at his brain — and knowing he had in some way behaved treacherously by speaking to her about Dominic, he had again felt the urge to write. The term’s quota of Afrikaans and English essays had already been completed, but he fell to trying to complete the statue piece. If only as a gesture of thanks to Ma’am. He could give it to her as a thank you for her unqualified support of him as a person. To show how he would never forget what she had taught him. When his statue project went nowhere, he returned to the orange poem, thinking he could just as well give that to her. But the poem still refused to yield more than a list of words which eventually ran to two foolscap pages. He again thought of his diary. Since the night with Mathison, worry had sat astride his thoughts in case the book were somehow discovered and what he’d written exposed. Badly wanting to keep the book, not quite wanting to destroy its contents, he decided to bury it. Along with some of his poems. From Matron Booysen he asked five or six plastic bags — to pack some of my books to take home, Mrs Booysen — into which he then carefully slid the diary and the poems, knotting each plastic Checkers bag before placing the parcel knot-side in the next. When everyone was in choir he took the parcel down to the dairy. From the shed he took a spade and went to dig a hole exactly halfway between the orchard’s only two almond trees. Satisfied that no one had followed him and none could see him behind the dense green foliage of a large pomegranate bush, he nervously dug to two feet, then placed the bright yellow package at the bottom before dumping the moist black soil and clay back into the hole. I will comeback and fetch you, I promise, he told the parcel as the hole closed in. Just wait for me, I will not forget you. No one will find you here. Only I will know your whereabouts and even of your existence. He covered over the disturbed soil with leaves and twigs, gave the place a last look so that he would remember the location, and saw that it was not at the precise halfway point. It was a little to the left, a little closer to the younger of the two trees. I’ll remember. I’ll come back. One day. Then he rushed to return the spade and attend the milking before he could be missed by either Mr Walshe or Lukas.

He soon felt himself part of the dynamics of the farm, milking, supervising rides, meeting farm labourers — faces he had known got names — and he and Mr Walshe related well. Without needing to be told, Karl understood that he was there in Lukas’s domain and as such there was no rivalry between the boys either in their work or for the affections of the farm foreman. All too aware of Karl’s passion for the horses, Lukas seemed deliberately to place the animals in Karl’s care while he himself focused instead on the dairy. When a number of the horses had to be shod, Lukas and Mr Walshe spent hours showing Karl how to clip hooves, how to heat the shoes, how to assess the depths of each nail, how to ensure that a horse was not hurt by touching a nerve. Karl kept an open mind, taking in new information like a sponge, executing his tasks with rigour, good humour and discipline. If he could learn this world, he thought, if he could become part of this rhythm for the last month of being there, he could forget almost altogether the other.

Yet, even as he worked at milking the cows, enjoyed the sense of achievement at having cleaned cribs and mixed feedtroughs alongside the workers, he had to acknowledge to himself that he had the blues. Now he thought that the words ‘to have the blues’ that Bernice and Stephanie had explained to him were inappropriate. It was more like being inside the blues, rather than the blues being inside him. Even as he rode, worked and spoke to the men and Lukas around him, theendless sky and mountain ridges pressed down on him, sometimes so hard that his field of vision seemed narrowed, hulled in a focus of grey mists. A darkness came over the world from inside the sunshine, then, threatening to suffocate him as if he were being systematically encompassed by everything around him in a grip he thought he would never escape. Of this he told no one, and no one could have suspected what was happening. For he continued to talk, to joke, to pretend interest in all that was happening and being said around him on the farm and in class. Only when he was alone did he allow himself to be pressed down, to let go of pretence, to take the full impact of the heaviness. One day he seemed to become hypnotised by the motion of his hands sliding down the teats of an udder: the tss, tss, tss, tss, of the milk squirting against the silver metal bucket between his legs. From then on he looked forward to the task of milking even at the moment he awoke in the morning. At times in the middle of a class discussion or conversation over lunch, he realised he was not hearing a word or a sound from the boys around him, instead he heard the tss, tss, tss, tss of the milk’s jetting rhythm against enamel. He now wanted to be in the dairy more than he had ever wanted to be on horseback. The sound of milk hitting the bucket, the thought of himself astride a bench looking at his greased fingers massaging the teats, appealed to him as if the simple task was the only thing of value left in his world.

Then, miraculously, for a few days a week, the world would again look light and beautiful to him. He would awake in the morning and the ominous pressure from the sky had abated as if it had been but a dream and he would know it was gone at the instant — even before — he opened his eyes. On days when with luck or fate on his side his favourite subjects and lessons arrived in those window periods, he felt himself again passionate, excited, playful, even ready to love. He ventured to Dominic’s music room, fooled around on horseback, went swimming with Bennie, competing to see who could do more than a length underwater without surfacing for a breath. If this can last, hethought, I will be fine and I will still come to something in the world, I will paint something spectacular, I will write an unforgettable poem. But then, just as suddenly as the sun had risen on a different day, the thick clouds rushed in and he again barely saw the mountains, the colours. Am I sick, he wondered. What is wrong with me? Is there a diagnosis other than the blues and a treatment other than death? He was no longer afraid that Bok and Bokkie would come to hear of Jacques. No, he seemed to fear little, but then little seemed of interest to him anyway. The world did not so much pass him by as oppress him. There seemed little to live for. Yes, this is what’s wrong, he thought. Trying to stay alive is all a terrible waste of time. I want to die. At night, in these moments, he lay in bed thinking about the tam-botie seeds in his toilet bag, wondered how long it would be before they took effect. Whether it would be a painful death. Knew it would. He dwelled on Bernice in Mkuzi. Vomiting up bile and blood that resembled pieces of raw meat. Saw her again as she was when she came out of hospital: a yellow, shaky praying mantis. But he had to ensure that he could not be found and saved. He would scream in pain, he knew. As she had writhed like a snake wounded by the wheel of a car. He could do it in the bathroom, take his pillow to muffle the cries. Or on a Saturday afternoon, when everyone was at the river, he could sneak to the stables or to the farthest part of the orchard, above Second Rugby Field, and do it there. If only he still had the key he could do it after lights-out anywhere in the veld and they’d take days to find him. How long would it take for the poison to work? This was his only question. These thoughts were unlike the flights of fancy which he had had in sick-bay after the Dr Taylor holiday. In those he had sort of died while still being able to attend his own funeral, there still somehow alive to watch people grieve and to smile a bittersweet smile at them, as in doleful remorse at the memory of how they had treated him they fell upon his grave clawing at the red soil, weeping. Then he had feared hell, for he knew, to kill yourself was the surest one-way ticket to eternal damnation. But now it wasdifferent. Rather than think
beyond
death, his thoughts of swallowing the jumping beans stopped at the moment of their effect. Of completion. That was all he could imagine. He had slipped into the world like an overeager bird, Bokkie said, and now he wanted to slip out with the same haste. Beyond that moment of exit was the big oblivion into which the dark clouds would finally descend and take him away. Out of Bok’s testicles into the shaft, out of the glans into Bokkie’s womb, out of Bokkie’s vagina into Arusha, out of Tanzania into the Republic of South Africa, out of South Africa into the where and what of death. But that every out had to have an in no longer mattered. He wanted out of the world, no matter what its concomitant in. With everything over and gone he would not have to worry about anything that had concerned him here, ever again. Least his own funeral.

Dominic seemed to find his friend’s altered state excruciating. After the success with his exams the occasion arose that he again wanted to come to Karl’s bed. His suggestion was met initially with resistance and finally with a flat refusal. At first Karl told him to wait a few days, but when Dominic insisted, Karl told him that that part of their lives was over. That he had outgrown the pleasure of being in bed with another boy.

‘What’s going on, Karl?’ became a refrain, at least once a day, from Dominic. ‘Why don’t you ever come to my music room anymore? Why don’t you draw anymore? Why can’t we be lovers anymore?’ All of which Karl deflected, saying in different forms and with different words that things change, that relationships alter, that boys turn into men. And Dominic looked at Karl and said: ‘People don’t change so suddenly. Circumstances do. What’s changed?’

‘For one thing, I’m leaving this school and you’re staying.’

A few days later Dominic announced that his family would be emigrating to Canada. That he would be attending piano classes with a professor at the University of Toronto. He said his parents haddecided three months earlier but had kept it from him from concern that it could influence his concentration. And then when a discussion of the coming Parents’Weekend arose, Dominic asked whether Bok and Bokkie were staying on the farm and Karl had said no, they were not coming because Bernice was writing matric and he was staying at school for the weekend.

‘Why don’t you come with us? My parents are staying at Champagne.’

‘No, I want to stay here and do some Latin. I’m falling behind.’ ‘You’re lying, Karl. You’re feeling sorry for yourself about something, aren’t you? Cutting off your nose to spite your face. Well, come back to me when you decide to stop your shit. And you’re welcome to join us for the weekend. My parents would love it. And I would too.’ The discussion was left at that, but Karl silently resented Dominic. Hated the way the Websters could throw around their money, live as though they were in control of the world, able to dish out cash and charity as the whim took them. On a day when Karl again awoke feeling the joy of the world around him, he returned to Dominic’s music room. He said he would very much like to join the Websters. Dominic, perhaps taking this as indication that all was again well, put his hand on Karl’s shoulder and tried to pull him close. Karl recoiled. He asked Dominic to stop, to promise that he would never do that again.

‘No,’ Dominic said, ‘I will not promise that. I’ll wait till you decide you want to come back to me. And you will, I know.’ But I didn’t, Dom. I didn’t come back to you and now I won’t. It is all gone and flying off with you in the Clemence-Gordons’ plane later tonight or tomorrow morning depending on the weather. And then I now try and picture you after all these years, in the snows of Toronto where you must have fallen in love with the splendid university and the green landscape without fear. Fallen in love, like falling pregnant. Why did we call it fall, Dom, like you’re hurting yourself? And did you do what I could not allow myself to imagine then: fall in lovewith another boy and when you became men did you live in a Montreal apartment and speak French? And were you bourgeois and happy? Bourgeois. How I too wanted to be that word, Dom. More than almost anything in the world.

For five days Karl and Lukas stayed in the Berg when the Mass choir went off for the Johannesburg rehearsals. The school was empty and Lukas moved from G Dorm to F beside Karl to sleep in Fat DuToit’s bed. With Uncle Charlie also away, the two of them took showers for as long and as often as they chose. They stayed for hours in the steam of the Junior showers where they had to go as the hot-water geysers in the Seniors’ bathroom had been turned off. On the long shower floor they skidded, shooting themselves from wall to wall. Then they scrubbed again to clear off the clingy fragments of red floor paint that had come off on their foot soles and white buttocks.