Karoo Boy (19 page)

– So the blood stands out, he chirps.

– Work in twos, commands Meneer de Beer. One to hold the rabbit down and one to slice through the windpipe.

Rabbits are yanked out of the box by their ears, feet clawing the air.

I am with a girl called Talia. She too has picked out a white rabbit, with red eyes. When Marsden and I were small, my mother would come into the room on the first of the month, saying: white rabbits, white rabbits. She has not done it for a long time. Not since my father said: you boys are becoming too old to waltz into the bathroom when your mother is naked.

Talia scratches the rabbit behind its ears.

– Wonder if he has a name? she says, to herself rather than me.

I can tell there is no way she is on the verge of slicing him open. So it is up to me, the boy. I have tugged heads off pigeons, seen blood squirt from a man’s head and the bone of my finger peep through my skin. But, at the thought of slitting through the beautiful white fur, nausea waves through me.

I put up my hand.

– Douglas?

– I’m sorry, sir, but I won’t cut the rabbit.

– What’s that you said?

– I can’t kill the rabbit.

– You can’t kill an animal, yet you eat meat?

– I’m sorry, sir.

– Either you kill the rabbit, or you bend.

I hang my head.

– Look boy, I’m being cruel to be kind. In South Africa you don’t have the freedom to be a moffie pacifist. Maybe overseas, where they don’t care if you wear an earring or smoke dagga, but this is South Africa and we are at war. If you won’t kill a rabbit at school, how will you kill a Cuban on the border? Hey? And if you don’t pull the trigger, it’s not just your life but the life of your fellow soldiers you risk.

– Moffie, I hear Joost whisper. You won’t shoot but you’d suck McEwan’s cock?

How Joost has jumped from rabbits to cock escapes me.

– Bend then.

Meneer de Beer swings down his cane.

– Now, will you kill the rabbit or shall I go on?

Though I feel sick and know that Marika would be ashamed of me, I pick up the scalpel.

I tilt the rabbit’s head back by the ears, then slice into his windpipe. Blood seeps through his fur. His eyes glare and his hind legs jigger. I hold him down, until a shudder ripples under his skin and the lustre fades out of his eyes. Then I slit the stomach and the smoking guts slither out.

In Sea Point, the stitching on my amber-eyed, chewy-eared panda comes undone and the spongy stuffing tumbles out. My mother jams the sponge back in and sews it up again.

The classroom spins and I hear Talia scream across a misty beach before my head hits the sand.

Through flickering eyelids I see Meneer de Beer’s eyeballs warping behind the lenses of his glasses. Red deltas in the whites of his eyes.

– You okay, Douglas?

I nod. He gives me a notched beaker of cold water.

After school, I walk along Delarey to the Shell.

Moses jumps up from his beer crate when he catches sight of me.

– I am happy to see you, Douglas. Marika’s father was looking for you and there was fire in his eyes. He wanted to know where you had gone with his girl. I would not tell him. He cocked his shotgun. So I told him you had gone to Salem. I have been worried for you.

– He’s dead.

– I heard it on the radio.

– I saw him die.

– Au au, Douglas.

– I’m glad he’s dead.

– That is a hard thing to say.

– But how can you forgive a man who taught his daughter to hate blacks?

Moses stands there, wiping sump oil from his hands with a shammy.

– Maybe because he was a poor teacher, he smiles.

N
O BARKS TO WARN
me. Marika’s head is a silent half-moon floating at the window. My heart drums. I dare not move. Maybe it is just a phantom floating on the dark of my guilt. The one lit eye stares out of unbatting lids. There is no sign of feeling in it. She has come to cast a curse on me.

– Hey, Douglas, she whispers.

– I see you.

– My mother is sending me away, to boarding school in Pretoria.

– I’m sorry.

– Come out to the reservoir with me. To say totsiens.

– I thought you blamed me?

– Still, I want you to come.

I climb out of the window. Chaka, seagull-chaser, guineafowl-hunter, licks her legs for salt.

The town is sad and mute under a full moon. I chuck stones at Chaka to keep him from following us. A stone kicks up from the tar to nip his ribs. He yelps and slinks homewards in the tail-tucked way of tailed dogs.

– Let him be, Marika says.

But I don’t want to share her, not even with a dog. When Chaka glances round to see if I feel sorry, I mimic another throw.

The Shell garage is deserted. I imagine Moses snoring on his bed, dreaming of the tokoloshe while the few surviving cats cruise the junkyard dark for rats.

The bell of the Dutch church chimes midnight.

It is a long walk to the reservoir but the night is magic: the stars blink like cats’ eyes, and the crickets chorus. A bat swoops low, loops around us, and flits away. A porcupine rattles its quills at us.

We lie under the mimosa, where memory of the day’s blazing sun lingers in the sand.

– I’m sorry you have to go.

– I will miss the horses, and the veld, and the reservoir.

My lip quivers as I squeeze back tears.

She sheds her dress.

– And I will never forget you.

She lies naked on the sand and tugs my head to her full, welling fruit and I suck it.

– It feels so beautiful, she purrs.

Under the mimosa under the moon I suck Marika’s nipples raw.

She wriggles out from under me until my head lies between her thighs and her lovehair tickles my nose. My tongue is the unbottled lizard on Muizenberg beach, darting into fissured rock. Then it is just me, burrowing wordlessly into Marika as she sighs and rocks her hips on the warm sand.

I spurt into the sand. Damp for the downunder frogs.

I
N THE CONVENT IN
Pretoria, the nuns forbid Marika to wear short skirts. They have burnt her snakeskin. They have blacked out words from her letter to me.

I zippo a sandalwood joss, and finger the seeds of the coral as if they are rosary beads, in the hope of conjuring up images of Marika in exile. The sandalwood smoke drifts out into the dark, where crickets chirp and distant dogs bark in fits and starts. I wonder if you could write out such music of chance. How would random chirps and yips and yaps look in tadpole notes?

I armadillo into a ball on the orange sofa.

I see her in the place where long skirts hide her knees, scratched and scarred like the knees of a boy. She bends her head under a crucifix. Then she hikes her skirt up, and tucks it in so she can ladder down from a high window. I see her legs long and luminous in the moonshine. When her feet touch the grass, she peels her skirt away and weaves naked through the jacarandas. Jacaranda flowers pop under her feet and stain them indigo.

W
HILE MISTER MCEWAN READS
Blake, I doodle a pencil house for Marika.

This is our house and this is Chaka. And this is the garden where Byron makes the flowers flower. Magnoliawisteriaoleander etcetera. And these are the kitchen steps where Hope peels potatoes in the sun. Come in.

This is the curtain I hid behind, the time my father wanted to beat me for calling Byron a nigger. Look at the motif of Chinese monks crossing arced bridges to an island of willows. Behind the willows fish heads and dead flowers kiss in a dustbin. See, up on the spice rack is a china dog. The dog eats milk chits. Each night Marsden and I fight over who is to put the chits out for the milkman. I call Marsden aasvoël to rile him and he calls me koggelmander. But you can tell he is sourpussed because I bagsed aasvoël first. After all, wouldn’t you rather be a lizardy koggelmander than a bald bird with stinkbreath?

Through this door is where my mother and father sleep under a fanblade. See, above my mother’s pillow a crucifix hovers on the wall like a dark, mothy insect.

And this is Marsden’s room. See his seagull sketches tacked to the wall, and this one of my mother’s toes painted red. On the sill, beside Tennessee the tortoise and jars full of porcupine quills and paintbrushes, is something I forgot: a grass straw the Masai punch through cow skin to suck hot blood. Beautiful, isn’t it? And, under the sill, a basket of tennis balls, and cricket balls with unravelling seams, and a frisbee punctured by Chaka’s teeth, and juggling balls. Marsden, you see, is a juggler, and an artist. My father says to Marsden: my boy, if you ever backpack through the world you can survive by juggling on street corners. What would I do to survive? Marsden reckons: Koggelmander, I juggle and you gigolo.

Sometimes I slip into his bed at night, spines and footsoles touching, turned away yet tuned in.

The hallway is rather bare, just a zebra skin on the wall. It grazed yellow speargrass in Kenya, until my Grandpa’s bullet bit behind the ear. You can see where it is patched. I had never thought of it, but you are right, it is undignified the way his legs fan out flat, as if in flight. When I was a child I was so scared of the buffalo head there, over the toilet door, that I rather peed out of my bedroom window at night. Can you see the holes in his horns? Like the holes woodworm bore into yellowwood kists.

Back in the classroom, so far from Cape Town where the sea lilts to the mood of the moon, I wonder what happened to the crucifix. Maybe it is buried in newspaper in an unpacked teabox. Buried deep like the French book of black-and-white photographs Marsden and I found on the promenade, in one of the blue bins. Photographs of women with bare cowrieshell slits, or otherwise hidden under fuzz, and nippleskin rippled like apples that begin to dry out. We hid the book in Marsden’s sketch box. Then, fearing my mother would find it, we buried it under the pyramid of compost in the far corner of the backyard. Under weeds and orange rinds and potato peels and egg shells.

– H
AND ME THE MONKEY,
comes Moses’s voice from under the Volvo.

I scratch in the toolbox for the monkey wrench. I love the long Sunday afternoons at the Shell with Moses. It is hard to believe it is four years since I pedalled by for Coca-Cola.

The Volvo glints yellow, no longer a hobo, but a funky convertible. Just her square eyes betray another life.

– Here is the monkey, Moses.

– Ndiyabonga, says Moses.

I know it makes Moses feel good when I call him Moses after another week of being Jimmed. Fill up with 97, Jim. Yes, baas. Oh, and do check the oil and water, Jim. Yes, Madam. They do not know he has a brother dead down the mine and a brother gone north to Mozambique. They do not know he felt the sun on his face just one day a week for thirty years. For Moses South Africa was not braaivleis, rugby, sunny skies and Chevrolet, but pap and sour beer and football, and an endless maze of tunnels under the earth.

Moses comes up from under the Volvo.

– There, I fixed the diff. I just wish I could fix up the sadness in you. You cry for the girl gone to Pretoria.

He spits into his hands and rubs them.

– Pretoria. Sounds so pretty.

He gives a bitter laugh.

– Pretoria says you can work in Johannesburg. Pretoria says you must go back to the Transkei. Without the paper from Pretoria you are nothing. I have no hope now for a letter to come from Pretoria. Pretoria has no time for an old man who no longer goes down the mine. And now Pretoria wants your girl.

East of Klipdorp the sky colours red. A faraway rooster calls
yenkuku yenkuku
and Hope’s chickens cluck restlessly.

I cycle through the dorp, heading for the Shell. As I turn into Delarey I hear the deep
rrum rrum
of the Volvo motor.

At the Shell, Moses says
molo
to me and shifts over to the other side. He is wary of driving without his papers. I get in behind the wheel. As we go, Chaka barks at the Volvo’s tyres, until he drops away.

– One day we fuduka for good out of this Karoo, goes Moses.

– Fuduka, I echo. All the way to Cape Town.

I have one hand on the wheel, the other searches for a radio station. Radio 5 comes through clear as a record. Lou Reed walks on the wild side.

– And your cats, if we go?

– Ou Piet from the hotel will put out milk for them.

I tilt my head to suck in the cold wind that rapids over the windshield. On the dashboard Saint Christopher wades the monkey Jesus through the river.

Ahead a shepherd stands watching sheep graze the tall grass between the tar and the fenced grazing lands. From a distance he looks like a Masai with a long spear. Turns out it is just a long bamboo with a red handkerchief to flag cars. As we go by, he smiles pink gums at us.

Ahead a man waves in the street. Another shepherd? O Jesus, a roadblock. A policeman signals us to the side, where two other policemen gut the boot of a dented Datsun, while the coloured family cluster on the kerb. A little girl darts out from under her father’s hand to pick up a kewpie doll from among the things on the kerb. The doll has a twist of plastic hair. The father tugs the girl back out of the way of the law.

We are close enough to hear the policemen, to see the doll’s blue eyes.

– Kyk daar, jong, they so want to be white their kids play with white dolls, jokes the policeman with yellow arrows of rank on his greyblue uniform.

– Ja-nee, the unranked policeman shakes his head.

You would think the shadowless figures clustered under the zenith sun did not exist.

Through the murk of fear in my head, it dawns on me that I have never seen a black doll in a shop. Not in OK Bazaars or Spar, or any shop.

– No contraband goods. Jy kan ry, the father is told.

– Dankie, my baas, says the father, dipping his head.

He and his wife bend down to regather their scattered things.

Then the ranked policeman turns to me.

– Good day, sir. Your licence, please.