Karoo Boy (2 page)

Byron, the Xhosa gardenboy, abandons his digging to carry the armchairs across the kikuyu grass to the street kerb.

An old coloured man watches us from the edge of the lagoon. Perhaps he thinks: White folks are crazy. Before my eyes, a madam and her boy chuck good things out onto the street.

The debris from our front room gathers on the kerb, under the shade of the coral tree. There is the Morris chair my father tilts back to read the
Cape Times
. There is my dead grandmother Nana’s Singer sewing-machine. There my dead grandfather Dodi’s bentwood chairs from England.

My grandfather Dodi keeled over in a betting shop, after putting mucho money on the horse Jamaica. Jamaica was ahead when Dodi gasped and tipped forward, the beer glass slicing a half-moon in his forehead. Nana got the money Jamaica won for Dodi. She called it blood money. She split it for Marsden and me to inherit. Then she pined to death for him.

My father will not mind all the flotsam on the kerb. Nowadays he just goes from his outside study to the kitchen to cut himself a slice of bread, and back to his study. He never glances into Marsden’s room, or detours into mine. He pees outside, under the frangipani. He goes to bed long after my mother and I fall asleep. I see his rippled sheets in the morning. When he is in his study, he stares at the postcard of the Venus de Milo on the wall, and does not sense me at the door. I have to knock to get him to swivel his chair.

Still jammed in his typewriter are the words he wrote over a fortnight ago, just before we went down to the beach on Christmas day, on how the magic of the sangoma, the witchdoctor, survives in the townships, so far from the Transkei.

When the bones rattle in the sangoma’s hands, you instinctively

What do you instinctively do? Instinctively hold your breath? Instinctively believe?

Hope, in a hibiscus-pink pinafore, huffs past me. She has rescued Nana’s Singer from under the coral and drags it into the dim of her khaya, where the sun mirages on the zinc roof.

I peer into the murky khaya. Before my eyes focus, smells of Vaseline and Lifebuoy waft to me. Out of a frame on the news-papered box by her bed, her boy September peeks at me. He lives in Peddie in the Ciskei with Hope’s folks because Hope does not want him running around the townships like a footloose Langa skollie, a wild gangboy. No, she wants her September to learn the old ways.

Hope always tells us stories she hears from other maids: of old township folk baited by the skollies for bowing their heads to the whites all their life long. The old ones cower. For the young ones it is a joke. Hope rolls her eyes, as if to say this country is going downhill.

There is no school for black boys in Muizenberg, where Hope could keep an eye on September. So he stays up there in dusty Peddie. Hope sees him at Christmas when she rides the bus all the way up the Indian Ocean coast, through Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown, to Peddie. She says the ride is hell, as the bus is crowded and hot and slow. She always gives September a box of hand-me-downs from Marsden and me. Now there will be no castoffs from Marsden.

Everything is gone from the front room but the orange corduroy sofa, alone in the corner. The sofa is from the sixties when my mother and father came to the Cape from Kenya. Above the sofa is the ghost shape on the wall where the fake Dali hung: a clock melting under the desert sun. Under the sofa are the photo albums.

– If the house goes up in flames, my mother would say after a glass of red wine, rescue the photos, everything else can burn.

The sun floods in through the windows, as even the blinds have gone.

– Hey bro’, I say into the dust-dancing emptiness, and I think I hear my brother’s voice in the ripple of an echo.

My mother comes into the room and I swing around, wondering if she heard me.

– I am going to sleep on the sofa, my mother says.

What she means is that she is not going to sleep in the same bed as my father. I know she wants to let him suffer. I want to shout out: It was an accident. But I am scared of my mother’s new-found vigour, the way she briskly crosses the yard and calls:

– Come on, Dee, don’t just stand there in a daze.

I have a habit of standing in a daze. Whenever I play tennis doubles I stand at the net and the ball flies down the trams because I daydream.

Measure the net, a racquet, a head and two fingers (two fingers: same as the measure for my father’s Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey). Spin for serve. Rough or smooth? Marsden and I spin a coin for who serves into the sun.

I stand around. I am not much help.

Chaka barks at the inside things outside. What a game, the flowing of our world out onto the kerb. He cocks his leg to pee against a Masai lamp stand but my mother gives him a kick in the ribs. Chaka yelps and darts back into the yard. Out of sheer shame he drags his ass along the grass.

This fazes me. I have never seen my mother hurt an animal before. Mossies land on her hands to peck seed, and goldfish swim through her seaweed fingers. She forbids Hope to flyswat the lizard-eating spider in the pantry. She forbade Marsden and me to shoot mossies, even though they are two a penny. When we shot pigeons on Oom Jan’s farm we hid them from her.

You can tell she is sorry, for she lets the blinds clatter to the kerb and calls Chaka to her. He slinks along the yard wall. No way I’ll risk another rib kick, he thinks. But he gives in to her calls, as dogs do, and she hugs him, the half-boxer, half-godknowswhat she picked out of a cage of bony, yipping pups at the dog pound.

Chaka licks her face and then spins around after his tail, which he will never catch, as it is docked. Fool dog chasing a lopped tail.

Then my mother comes over to me. She hugs me too and Hope melts at the kitchen door as tears fill my eyes.

– Oh Dee, life has gone all sour, my mother says to me.

Sour as milk left in the sun.

I begin to cry hard for Marsden dead and gone, and love gone too. But my tears turn to laughter because Chaka dances a giddy dance on the grass, biting at the wind. Crazy bobtail dog, always barking at seagulls and at the coloureds who walk by.

The old coloured man by the lagoon is still watching us, thinking maybe: What a carry-on for folks with a big brick house and grass yard and blackmama maid.

He wanders off with a Masai lamp stand in hand. It looks like the parasols the coloureds carry down Adderley Street during the Coon Carnival. Lips and eyes painted white and wide like the lips and eyes of a clown. Parasols jousting at the sky to the beat of the song that goes:
My geliefde hang in die bos, my geliefde hang in die bos, my gelieeefde hang in die bitterbessiebos.

My love hangs in the bitterberry bush. The love of my mother for my father hangs in the bitterberry bush. It is as dead as a lizard spiked on a thorn by a butcher bird. It died when the ball hit my brother’s head.

I pick up black-eyed, orange seeds from under the coral tree, among the tumbling relics of our front room. I pocket them because my father, teller of myths, told me they are juju seeds, they bring good luck.

– I want you to go back to school tomorrow, my mother says.

I do not want to ride the train without spinning a coin with Marsden for the window seat. I do not want the boys at school staring at me, the undead twin. But then I remember Mister Skinner, who coaches cricket. We schoolboys call him Skin for short. I know Skin will look into my eyes and say:

– Douglas, I’m sorry your brother is dead.

The other teachers will cast sorrowful glances at me and go on as if nothing has changed. I know this because of the time Drew Castle’s mother died when a tossed stone flew through her windshield. Skin was the only teacher who went up to him and looked Drew in the eyes and said: I’m sorry.

Cape Town is an unafrican Africa where spears turn into lamp stands, and elephants into foot stools. An Africa of dogs and cats and garden gnomes. Death catches you off guard, lulled by the tunes of Radio 5, or playing cricket on the beach.

So, I will go to school again. I finger the juju seeds of the coral, hoping they will ward death away from me.

I walk down along the Zandvlei lagoon as the sun falls behind the Muizenberg mountain, then jaywalk across the Strandfontein road, jumping a gap in the motorcars that bead along the tar.

The fisherman who sold fish on Christmas day is still dangling snoek and dodging motorcars, jaunty and cocky as ever.

The sea wind sweeps high-tide sand across the road.

On the far side of the half-moon bay the dying sun stains the Hottentots Holland Mountains a rusty orange. Coloured fisher-men beach their nets beyond Sunrise Beach, but my father is not there among the flocking seagulls and the fish flipping over like bluegum leaves in a breeze.

I walk on the beach, past the lemon and pink and sky-blue cabins.

There is my father, on the rocks where the beach runs out and the surfers ride the dusk tide. Above the rocks is the railway that snakes along the shore to Simonstown through St James, Kalk Bay, Clovelly and Fish Hoek. My father gazes out to sea, still as a cormorant watching the rock pools for a flicker of fish.

He senses me near him. For a moment there is the old spark in his eyes, as if I may just be my brother and it was all a dream. But he sees it is me and, in seeing me, sees the boy he killed. His eyes swivel out to sea again. He combs his fingers through my hair, but it is not long before his hand goes limp on my head. I know that he is somewhere out there beyond the surfers, beyond Seal Island. I want to call him back but all I do is stare at my feet in the rock pool, at the way the water warps my feet so they jut out skew from the end of my legs.

As I stare, a face falls into focus and Marsden stares back at me.

– Douglas, I am going away.

I flinch. The face in the water fades. An empty black mussel gapes at my toes.

– Where will you go?

– I’m not sure. Maybe east.

I see my father sailing east along the coast as far as Malindi, where Bo Hansen will put him up. Maybe he will pick up the novel he began when he and my mother lived in Kenya. He always dreamed of being an author, but with Marsden and me on his hands he never had the time to write for himself, just for the paper.

When Marsden and I were nine my father was sent to London for a year by the
Cape Times
to report on the hippies who stood outside South Africa House in Trafalgar Square, chanting for freedom in South Africa. We lived in Camden, close to the zoo and Camden Market and the reggae-coloured barges on the canal. But when I think of England, I always think of the sun-flared day when we rowed on the river at Hampton.

My father at the oars of the skiff, Marsden and I trailing our hands in the green water. No fear of sharks, just ducks and swans to throw stale bread to.

Then we came to Muizenberg, to the house on the lagoon, six thousand miles south of Camden. Every day for years my father railed into the city to edit on the news desk. Then, a year ago, when Soweto fired up, he gave up editing to freelance. He wrote about the gangs in the townships, about the bergies, down-and-outs who camp under canvas or tattered beach umbrellas on the mountain slopes, about the hobos, who kip under newspaper in parks, maybe kipping under my father’s stories.

And he wrote about the Crossroads squatters. One time, Marsden and I went along to Crossroads shantytown with my father. He wanted to photograph the police bulldozing down the shacks. I saw mothers gather their world in bags and give their children rubbery chicken feet to gnaw on. I saw men jab futile fists at the police. I saw shacks tumble down under bulldozers.

Though my father was forever out hunting stories or typing them up in his study, on Saturdays he was free to watch Marsden and me play cricket. When we played in the Boland he drove us out there in the grey tailfinned Benz: Indlovu, Xhosa for elephant.

Indlovu rusts in the salty wind, but my father always loved her. He rode her with one hand on the wheel, whistling the tunes on Radio 5.

Coasting along the Strandfontein road to Stellenbosch: the sun glinting on the Benz star up front, cool salty wind rivers in, my father taps a beat on the dashboard with his fingertips. Creedence Clearwater or Fleetwood Mac or The Beach Boys floating out the windows, mingling with the smell of the sea.

Feet in a rock pool. Limp hand on my head. No music floating out to sea. Just my father and I, so still a sandpiper flits by a few feet away. It halts, wagtails for a moment, and then flits on again.

– Who will watch me play cricket?

I wonder if he still dreams of me playing for the province. I spend most summer afternoons after school caged in the cricket nets while others surf or cruise the downtown cafés or go to the flicks in Rondebosch. I am good at batting but when I field, my eyes drift, and I gaze up at Table Mountain, some days moody grey, some days tinted the ochre of fired clay. My mind is not focused enough for me to make it in cricket.

– From now on you have to play for yourself, Douglas.

A stone’s throw away a coloured man catches an octopus among the rocks. He holds it up to the sky and it ropes around his arm. With a flick, he turns it inside out and dashes it down on the rocks. He gathers the squirming jelly fronds and flings it down again and again to pulp its rubber flesh.

– I have something for you.

In his hand is his Zippo lighter and his Swiss Army pocket knife. Marsden and I always fought over who would get the Zippo and who the pocket knife when my father thought us old enough for knives and fire.

– You’re a big boy, Douglas.

I had always imagined I would be over the moon if he ever gave either to me, but I just pocket them. I stare out to sea and recall the myth my father told Marsden and me on the Kalk Bay harbour wall, of how love came out of the sea.

The blood of Zeus dripped into the deep water beyond the breakers and mingled with the sea foam, and Venus was born. Dolphins fed her and held sharks at bay. When she was a woman with mango breasts, she waded ashore onto the sliver of beach in Kalk Bay harbour and sent the Kalk Bay whalers so crazy with longing they flung themselves from Skeleton Rock.