Karoo Boy (14 page)

Meneer de Beer drops his chalk. He bends for it and his tortoise-shell glasses slip from his bent-down head. He crushes the chalk underfoot as he fumbles with blind fingers through a fog of laughter.

An image surfaces out of the developing paper of my mind: Moses’s hands flapping in the dust, a hopeless reaching for his stolen pass.

Meneer de Beer’s glasses lie at my feet and I instinctively pick them up to hand to him.

I glance at Marika. She tongues the tip of her nose. She loves me not.

Then the glasses are in Meneer de Beer’s palm. In that instant before hanging them on the bridge of his nose, he squinches his eyes at us like a dazed mole unearthed by a dog. Then his eyeballs focus through the lenses and the class falls silent. He is the teacher again.

A crow pecks at its reflection in the windowpane, a waxy oilslick glint in its feathers.

– Thank you, boy, says Meneer de Beer.

Someone from the rows of desks behind me makes the sound of a plughole spinning water down, but quits when Meneer de Beer glares at the class. Joost sniggers and he is called to the front. Joost bends over the desk, his grey shorts spanning taut. Meneer de Beer chalks his cane. It is a custom of his, to prove his skill.

Each cut is a crack in my ears, the sound of Hope beating the dust out of carpets hung over the fence, the sound of distant shots.

A man falls in the dust of running feet. Before my father can blinker my eyes with his hands, I see red squirt from the man’s head.

A shudder runs down Joost’s spine as he stands and I know he is biting down the pain. Sure enough the cane leaves four equally spaced lines on Joost’s grey shorts. As he walks back to his desk he glares at me, as if I am to blame.

The bell goes for lunch and I gather my books and run out, confused. Hope has made a sandwich for me but I cycle home anyway, to escape Joost’s revenge and Marika’s teasing.

Hope is pegging out the washing, singing a song she used to sing when she tutuzela’d me on her back as a baby. I stand there under the pepper tree and cry with longing for something lost, while her song ripples through me. I feel sure I remember the cocooned feeling of being tutuzela’d. I wish I could crawl back into a fuzzy pouch and not have to decipher all the signals in the world around me.

Chaka stirs from his guineafowl dreams and bounds up to me, dock wagging and drool dangling. As we run up the steps, I hear Hope call after me.

– Master Douglas, don’t go inside.

I just laugh, thinking she does not want Chaka dirtying her waxed floors.

In the kitchen, beheaded fish swim in the sink. Their heads lie in a bucket. Marsden and I used to finger the fish eyes, but now I feel faint. I tug Chaka’s head out of the bucket. No doubt Hope will want to brew a soup with the heads.

Chaka growls as we go into the front room and I clutch at his collar. A black woman, naked below an orange turban, stands beyond my mother’s easel. Before my eyes adjust to the shade, the woman reaches for a cloth. Chaka barks and the hair along his spine porcupines. My mother lays her brush down in the groove of the easel. Chaka licks her hand and wags his stub. She gives me a kiss on the forehead. I feel conscious of the eyes under the orange turban.

– Dee, honey. Is something wrong at school?

– No. I just forgot a book.

As I go, dragging Chaka after me, I glance back to see the cloth fall. I glimpse a messy mossie nest of black hair down by her hips.

Outside again, Hope smiles:

– Ulungile?

– Ndilungile, I say. Sure I’m fine.

I am not in the mood for Hope’s Black Cat peanut-butter sandwich, so I cycle to the Sonskyn Kafee to buy a packet of Fritos chips. On the paving outside the café sits a club-footed man, begging. I fish out Hope’s peanut-butter sandwich. He reaches out his hands and says:

– Dankie, my baas.

As I go through the curtain of fly beads, I glance back to see the beggarman pulling the two thick slices of bread apart to study the inside.

In the café dark, as things slowly come into focus, I see the café tannie, her elbows on the counter. She licks her fingers to flick through the pages of a magazine. From behind her an old man stares out of the shadows, his skin as grooved as elephant skin. A fly drinks the liquid in the corner of his eye, but he ignores it. As I go out, Fritos in hand, his eyes follow me, though his head stays stock-still.

Outside again, the beggarman holds out the bread to me.

– Peanut butter is not for me, he says.

I have no choice but to take the sandwich back.

I look around to see if anyone has seen me take bread from a beggar. Further along, two coloured girls swing a rope, while a third skips. I hear them chanting: beechie, chappie, bubblegum, lick my bum. Fortunately they are too caught up in the game to see me.

– But I laaik Fritos, says the beggarman.

So I part with my packet of tomato-flavour Fritos. I look at the dirt under his fingernails as he rips the Fritos open and know that there is no way I am going to eat the sandwich now, but my mother has taught me never to throw good food away. I get back on my bicycle, the sandwich in one hand, and cycle down the street towards school, eyes skinned for a dog that looks as if it might gulp peanut butter.

No dogs. Guiltily, I ditch it in a dustbin.

After school, I creep into my mother’s studio to look at the painting. The wet oilpaint glistens. Her nipples are black peaks on coffee-coloured koppies. Her stomach blends into dry, cracked desert mud, as if she has come out of the earth. I am tempted to scrape the surface, to see if the mossie nest is there: a sketched impression, under the layered mud of oilpaint.

Moses is pumping diesel into a dented old Bedford with the licence plate wired on and the windscreen spiderwebbed from a kicked-up stone.

Though Moses sees me, his eyes stay on the pump. He stops at 60 rands and 2 cents. It is not his style to tap fuel beyond the round number, even by 2 cents. I can tell by the way he shakes the last drops out of the hose that he is cross with himself. Some of the drops run down the dusty flank of the Bedford.

It is only after the Bedford has backfired a cloud of grey smoke and lurched back out onto the road that Moses turns to me.

– I waited for you all afternoon, young baas.

He has not called me young baas for a long time.

– I’m sorry. I was going to come but Marika came by, and I went swimming with her.

Moses drops his head and wipes his hands with his yellow handkerchief. He rubs his hands hard, as if they are stained with paint or blood. It makes me want to cry.

– I’m sorry, Moses.

An Alfa 2000 swerves in. The bucket seats are so deep that the man inside is dwarfed. My father drove an Alfa 2000 until Marsden and I were born. My father used to say: I could pack everything I had in the world into my Alfa. My Dylan and Slowhand records, my cricket togs, my surfboard on the roof. But having twins ended the freewheeling, happy-go-lucky days.

– Fill her up, the Alfa driver snaps at Moses.

– Yes, baas, says Moses.

I pick up my bicycle. I would like to tell him that the Cape Town dream means as much to me, but I know if Marika calls for me again next Sunday I will go with her. Besides, it is a pipe dream. He has no pass, never mind a licence. And how am I going to learn to drive when Indlovu rusts away in the garage and my mother hardly ever drifts away from her easel?

I find my mother at the kitchen table with Hope. I avoid my mother’s eyes out of guilt that I stole back to gawk at the painting.

But my mother does not pick it up. She is in a festive mood.

– Come, Dee, have some champagne. Lina wrote to say she sold one of my paintings for 400 pounds. Can you imagine it? Remember I sent a few rolled-up canvases to Lina? Well, she found a man on Portobello Road who wanted
Karoo Dusk
. Four hundred pounds he paid for it. And he wants to see more of my work.

She pours champagne into a glass and it fizzes over onto the tablecloth. Instead of reaching for a dishcloth, Hope just giggles. The champagne is from Oom Jan’s farm. Every day for three years the bottles are given a twist by black hands.

I sip champagne and keep it in my mouth for the fizz on my tongue. I can hardly believe anyone would pay for a painting my mother has painted. She is just a teacher who has abandoned the blackboard. Besides, the sky in the painting is the fake pink-orange dusk of a cowboy film and the windmill looks like a big flower. Still, my mother is on cloud nine.

– Lina says the dealer loves the untamed, aboriginal feel to it.

Well, that proves this Portobello man is crazy. He thinks the Karoo is the Australian outback.

My mother’s breasts dangle freely under her caftan. When she drinks I see tufts of black hair under her arm. It fazes me, as I have never seen her unshaven there, and I wonder if it means she does not care about being pretty anymore. I can’t imagine Miss Forster would let herself go. In my daydreams of Amsterdam, the cafés are brimful and the coffee never runs dry. Through the haze of voices and smoke Miss Forster’s mouth leaves red lipstick on the lip of a white espresso cup.

C
HAKA BARKS AND BARKS
. I yell at him out of my bedroom window, but he goes on barking. I jump out of the window, go around to the granadilla-entwined front gate. Chaka is barking at the dominee, the pastor from the Dutch Reformed church. I grab Chaka by the neck to still him.

– Good afternoon, dominee.

Behind me I hear my mother and Hope giggling over their champagne.

– Afternoon. I want a word with your mother, if I may.

As he mouths his words the tuft of a beard on his chin wags, as if he is a chewing goat. Chaka growls at the wagging beard, convinced it is some kind of ratty animal.

I go back to the kitchen, dragging Chaka behind me.

– The dominee is at the gate. He wants you.

My mother hiccups, goes to the tap, dips her face under the jet of water, and dries it with a tea towel.

– Keep Chaka inside. I shan’t be long.

Hope, out of habit, runs water into the sink for the glasses. I go through the kitchen to my room, shut Chaka inside and jump out the window. I edge around the house until I hear the dominee:

– It is not that I beg you to come to worship, but that you have some understanding for the way the folk think.

In my mind I see his tufty, ratty beard wagging.

– You see, it is expected of a woman in mourning to be, let me say, retiring. How are folk to make sense of the naked paintings when I myself find it hard to understand?

– But no one needs to make sense of them, my mother laughs. I paint in my own house and, if they are ever exhibited, it’ll be far away.

– But, lady, if you have to paint such, how may I phrase it?, such stirring pictures, can you not paint a white? Forgive me for being so frank, but you must know folk find it disturbing enough to picture naked skin under your brush, never mind bare black skin.

– Dominee, you send me a white girl from your flock and I’ll paint her naked white skin for you.

My mother has a cross edge to her voice. I peer around the corner to catch the sorrowful look of the dominee.

– You know, Mrs Thomas, a woman with your tragic story ought to turn to God, wags his chin.

– Dominee, a woman with my story ought to mistrust God.

– You know not what you say, the dominee whispers.

My mother spins her head to frown at me for eavesdropping. I duck into shadow. Damn. I wonder how she sensed it.

Facing the dominee again, she says:

– Dominee, I know what I feel.

She turns away from him, and then changes her mind.

– Dominee, what are the chances of a boy being killed by a cricket ball? Have you ever heard of such a thing happening? A fluke, a freak accident, one may call it. But when the chances are so remote of the ball hitting just the spot, the Achilles’ heel of the head, then you begin to wonder if it is not somehow miraculous.

The dominee winces.

– Madam, surely you do not accuse God of murder?

– Of which murder? The murder of his son? The murder of my son? The murder of the Jews? Of the children in Soweto?

– Well, I bid you good day then. No doubt you have suffered. I will pray for you, and for the boy. Perhaps for his sake you will not harden your heart forever against God.

– Good day, dominee

– Good day, Mrs. Thomas.

I
FIND A POSTCARD
on my pillow. My mother used to leave gifts for Marsden and me on our pillows after shopping: sometimes a box of Smarties, sometimes an Archie comic, once a Toto record we had begged for. She has not done it for a long time and just the sight of something lying on my pillow squeezes tears from my eyes.

It is a black-and-white photograph of James Dean, his eyes just peeping out of his jersey. The photograph is marred because the post office carelessly franked it. My heart skips a beat as I flick it over. It is from Mister Skinner. Why would old Skin write to me?

Dear Douglas

You are often on my mind. I would love to know how you are, out there in the Karoo. I imagine it is another world. Having lived in the city for so long, I am unnerved by such vast space. I am an incurable townsman, but you are young and can adapt. I never imagined, when I took you to the Hard Rock, that fate had another cruel act in store for you.

My tears blur the writing and I have to stop reading. I sit down on the orange sofa and flick the postcard over again to stare at James Dean. I wonder if he had an inkling, when the photo was snapped, that Death was lurking just down the road, waiting to leap out at his Spyder like a shark-fanged baboon, like a fiery-eyed tokoloshe?

I read on.

I still have an essay on Gatsby you handed in to me. It’s rather good. Maybe you will go on to write, like your father. Perhaps, one day, I will open the Cape Times to find the byline, Douglas Thomas, your name.

Yours

Philip Skinner

I fold the postcard and pocket it. I recall his feathery touch, and see now it was lust as much as pity. Lust snuffed out by the whistle of the Cape Town train. There is a tapping at the window. A pigeon pecks at his reflection.