Karoo Boy (11 page)

– But in the compound at night the laughter of men who have escaped the black death another day is mixed with sad songs and the longing for women. When the revolution comes, the men joke as they rub away dirt with cold water: We gonna taxi to Hillbrow, drink Johnnie Walker on the rocks, see the girls shake their skinny white ass at us.

A gust of wind cartwheels a carton of Lucky Strikes down the street until a sackman spikes it. It reminds me of the way the skollies kill you in the township. Alleysharks hide bicycle spokes up their sleeves. You walk down an alley, whistling maybe, or just jingling the cents in your pocket. A spoke slides between your ribs like a blade through a watermelon. You may be tempted to laugh at the sudden blooming of a red rose on your shirt. So Hope tells it.

– My dream was not of whiskey and girls, but of Cape Town, sighs Moses. In my dream, I pick an orange, walk down to the sea and let cool water wash over my feet. I peel the skin, bite into the orange and the sweet juice fills my mouth. After a day in the night of the earth my Cape Town dream healed my dogtired bones.

The driver of a jam-packed taxi van calls out to Moses in Xhosa, all the while hooting at imaginary dogs. Without slowing down he twists his head around to keep Moses in sight, so the van runs blind. When the hub grazes the kerb, the driver swings his eltonjohn shades around to the road again. But just then a black girl goes by, swinging hips for all the world to see, and he twists his head to flick out a pink tongue through white teeth.

Cape Town. iKapa. Paradise. There is fruit and sand and sea, but the fruit farms lie inland. In Cape Town hawkers sell oranges by the sea, but the oranges come from Zebediela, up north. If you want to pick peaches or plums, Cape fruit, you have to dodge dogs and jump fences. It is even forbidden to pick up the fly-stung, windfall fruit. And, if you are black, you eat fruit on the tar kerb, as the beach sand lies beyond the signs that bark: Whites Only.

On the junkyard wall, jagged glass teeth glare in the sun like the cracked bottles on the walls of the Roeland Street jail in Cape Town. Roeland Street where, Oom Jan says, they lock up hoodlum coons. Roeland Street where jailbirds sing to the moon of sweethearts running around free:
My geliefde hang in die bos, my geliefde hang in die bos, my geliefde hang in die bitterbessiebos.

Moses fishes in his deep pockets for the junkyard key.

Across the road Ou Piet Olifant stands on the veranda of the hotel, squinting his eyes at the Xhosa man and the white boy through the island of oleander and the mirage haze hanging over the tar. Empty tables are decked with plaid cloths and pink plastic flowers to lure travellers in.

Moses unlocks the padlock. The barbed gate swings and basking lizards scutter into the gaping eyeholes of broken headlamps. The junkyard is a graveyard of dented, gutted motorcars. A stray cat combs against my leg. I see the nodes of its arched backbone through its fur.

Moses points out an old, boxy Volvo. It is sky blue, but in patches it is the colour of the sea after an eclipse, churned rust red by the moon. The roof is caved in and the tyres flat, the rubber cracked dry under the sun. The Volvo stares at me, through one broken eye and one good eye, a sad old hobo of a motorcar begging to be painted, tuned and ridden.

Moses grins as he flicks a key to me. It catches the sun like a spinning coin. Out of instinct I want to call out: heads.

– The key was in the cubbyhole, Moses says.

I look at the husk of a motorcar and think she must feel lonely, stranded south in this desert place, so far from Sweden and her whizzing youth. I wonder if she came over the sea by ship and if she ever wove along the banks of a fjord, dodging moose or whatever kind of buck they have in Sweden. I realise I know nothing about Sweden, other than fjords and buck. And Björn Borg.

The seats, once the cherry red of the seams, are bleached pink. Wire springs snake out of the gashed back seat. I imagine she feels ashamed of her leaking guts and rusted husk.

I tap a tune on the dashboard. And Abba. I almost forgot Abba.

– So what do you say? smiles Moses.

– She’ll do.

I can tell I have hurt his feelings.

– A coat of paint will perk her up, I add.

– Yes. And we can use the tyres from the jeep.

The jeep looks as if it was stamped to death by a rogue elephant avenging all the elephants who ended up as elephant-foot stools.

– I thought maybe we saw the roof off, Moses goes on. There has been no rain for two years. We just throw a canvas over at night.

I flinch. I am becoming like my mother, who could not bear to look when Byron, the gardenboy, hacked off branches from the coral tree when it reached too far over the lagoon road.

– So, you can see her on the road?

A hobo Volvo, jazzed up as a beach buggy on jeep wheels, bopping down Delarey with a black man and a white boy up front, and on the backseat a crazy bobtail dog biting at the wind.

– Ya . I can see her.

– Kulungile. I have only Sunday afternoons for working on the car. I need to sand it down and paint it and fix the engine. It growls but does not catch. And when you get your licence we drive down the N1 to Cape Town.

– But four years is forever.

– Forever for a boy, but years go by like river fish for an old man.

I
DROP FROM THE
window sill and hold my breath. Chaka does not stir. Just a cluck from the coop and the distant din of tin lids as the dustmen empty the bins on Delarey Straat. It is still dark, but there is a hint of mussel-shell pink and blue in the east. Fish-scale dew glints in the grass.

On the far side of town I hear the cargo train go
uloliwe uloliwe uloliwe
. This is the time Moses stirs to unlock the pumps. This is the time Marsden and I, rattled out of sleep by the milkman’s clinking bottles, caught some waves before school.

Marika’s backyard borders on the veld, miles and miles of bare veld. She climbs over the barbed wire, like a boy. Two horses graze the wet yellow grass. They lift their heads and stare at us, their jawbones shifting, as Marika walks up to them.

I hang back. Dirkie taught me to ride on the farm, but I am wary of horses: the way their nostrils flare and their muscles twitch randomly under a sleek hide, and the way they toss their heads to flick flies away from their wild black glassy eyes.

Marika whistles and the horses come to her. She combs her fingers through the mane of the patchy horse and rubs the hard bony ridge that runs down from his eyes to deep nostrils snorting smokily in the cold air. Foam from yellow teeth comes off on the white rugby jersey Marika has on. It has the number nine sewn on the back. Some rugby boy must have given it to her. I am jealous. I wonder if she kissed him.

– Climb on, she says.

At her words the front feet of the patchy horse do a skittery dance. Marika whispers into his ear, a sound like the wind murmuring through bluegums.

– Are you sure he’s tame?

– Come on. You’re not scared, are you?

– It’s just that I’ve never ridden bareback.

– As long as you’re not scared. Horses smell fear, you know.

– I know.

I smile at Marika, and at the patchy horse, hoping she will not see, and he will not smell, my fear.

– What’s his name?

– Rogue, says Marika. Come on, before the sun comes up.

I hoist myself up on to Rogue’s back and almost go over the other side, but Marika catches my foot.

– Good. Just hold on.

The muddy horse has wandered away. She whistles for him.

– Hey, River, come boy, she says.

He comes to Marika. She reaches for his mane and swings herself fluidly onto his back.

I focus on sending happy signals to Rogue, so he does not throw me.

– You don’t need to steer. Rogue will come after River.

She clicks her tongue a few times, as if rattling off a string of Xhosa words, and her horse begins to run. Then Rogue, with much sneezing and farting, jerks into a run. I cling to his mane and dig my heels in. I am joggled to and fro on his back, my ass coming down hard on his backbone. This has none of the poetry of the cowboy films. I would be glad to trade for a longboard, or a bicycle. Marika heads for an anthill and hurdles it. I brace myself for the jump, but at the last moment Rogue sidesteps and I am flung forward. I loop my arms around his neck.

– Whoooa whoooa, I call to him.

I am as scared as the time I braved the baboons for the Kodak film. I feel Rogue’s shoulderblades under my hips and I sense how vulnerable I am compared to this animal rippling under me. I feel my hold slip. I know I am going to hit the earth hard. Rogue tosses his head to shake me off and I fall in a blur of tinted sky and pounding hooves and smell of horse. A hard thud and the world cartwheels and all I think is: the hooves, please God not the hooves against my head.

Then the sky is still and I feel nothing.

I hear Marika calling out:

– Douglas Douglas

Her head is upside down in the space of sky above me. The sun paints her skin orange. There is fear in her eyes.

– Douglas. You alright?

She scoops up my head into her lap. My shoulder begins to hurt.

– I’m fine.

– Jesus. I thought you said you could ride.

She kisses my eyebrow and picks grass out of my hair, like a mother monkey searching for ticks on her baby. I realise I do not know the word for a baby monkey. Monkey cub? Monkey kid? Monkey pup? I hear bubbles making a warbling music in Marika’s stomach.

On the kerb, by our gate, Marika stares scared eyes at me as if my eyes might roll up white inside my skull as a doll’s do when you tip it back.

– You sure you alright?

– Ya, I’m sure.

What I am not sure of is whether to kiss her or hug her. After lying with my head on her lap, it is now too casual just to say: so long.

– You should hug me, says Marika.

I hold my arms loosely around her. My face is in her hair and her hair smells of green apples. Thoughts of Marsden and my father begin to filter through strands of apple hair and I bury my head in deeper in the hollow of her neck and squinch my eyes to keep tears from coming.

I see Marsden on the beach, surfboard under his arm, turn to me and his skin is orange in the sun coming up over Hangklip and his teeth white as a cuttlefish or a seagull’s breast. Then my father walks out of the sea mist. He puts his arm around Marsden’s shoulders and says: the thing with you, Douglas, is your mind wanders. How will you ever play cricket for the province, if your mind wanders?

– Hey, I hear Marika’s voice through layers of hair and memory.

I let go, feeling foolish and ashamed, and wish her goodbye.

– Totsiens, says Marika. She kisses me on the eyebrow again.

Halfway across the road she does a hopscotch hop, skip and jump. Then she turns to see if I am smiling.

And I am.

M
ARIKA AND I WALK
down Delarey Straat to the Shell garage. Marika is in shorts and dirty white Dunlop tackies she has drawn blue daisies on with a pen. Butterflies dance in me as I wonder how Moses and Marika will get on, and what she will think of our rusty old junkyard Volvo.

When Moses catches sight of us, he stands up from his Black Label beer crate and pockets his yellow handkerchief.

– Ah, kunjani, Douglas. I see you have a friend. Kunjani, miss.

He bows and Marika twiddles the hem of her shorts. It is the first time I have seen her unsure.

– My pa does not want me to talk to blacks. He says blacks smell, and they rape white girls if they catch them in the veld. That’s why he does not want me out by the reservoir.

Moses bows his head. I feel like burrowing under the earth.

– But I’m not scared, says Marika.

Moses tilts his old, scrubby head and looks deep into her eyes. I look up and down the road, hoping a motorcar will turn in for petrol, but nothing happens. Across the way, Ou Piet Olifant sits on the steps of the Rhodes Hotel, his head under a newspaper.

– Well, that is a something, Moses nods.

I sigh with relief.

– You okay? Marika asks me.

– It’s just the sun. I need a drink. Do you want a cooldrink? A Coca-Cola, or something?

– A Fanta.

I fiddle in my pocket and find a coin among the coral seeds. One rand. As I go over to the icebox, I hear Marika say to Moses:

– You do not smell bad. Only of tobacco.

Moses finds this funny and laughs as he tips up a box for her to sit on.

– You know, my father does not let me drink fizzy drinks ’cause he thinks it is rude for a girl to burp.

I hear Moses laugh again.

I come back, ice-cold Coca-Cola and Fanta in hand, to find Marika sitting on the Black Label beer crate, sunning her bare legs. I remember Bessie Malan ranting: It is a crying shame the way the government lets blacks look over the railing at the white girls in the Muizenberg pool. No wonder they run around raping them. I wonder if Bessie changed her tune after the vagabond jumped the railing of the footbridge to save her. And I wonder how Marika can go on about blacks raping one moment and then kick off her Dunlops in front of Moses the next.

They laugh. I wish I had kept Moses to myself. I tap my Coca-Cola three times before tugging at the ring pull. Moses winks at me as I mimic his trick. Marika glugs down the Fanta in one long gurgling, gulping go. She burps, then flamingoes on the can with one foot. She taps the sides of the can with her fingers and the can concertinas flat. She picks it up and frisbees it over the jagged sharkteeth glass of the junkyard wall.

– Cool, hey?

– Cool, I say.

Though Oom Jan can crush a Coca-Cola can in his fist, I have never seen this trick before.

– Where do you come from? Marika asks Moses out of the blue.

– I come from the Transkei, Mandela’s land.

– Did you ever assegai a man?

– Zulus stab with an assegai. Xhosas throw a spear. But I never killed a man.

– Pity, says Marika. I want to know how it feels.

– Who would you want to kill?