Karoo Boy (3 page)

Now Venus has gone back to the sea, among kelp lilting dark as shark shadows.

T
HE COLD BAY WIND
gnaws at my cheeks as I stand on the Valsbaai platform, waiting for the train from Simonstown.

Schoolboys in uniform play football with a tennis ball, scuffing their school shoes. Schoolgirls hold on to their wind-tugged skirts above bare knees and short white socks and black Bata sandals.

The girls think the boys are childish, chasing a ball across the platform. The boys are glad they do not have skirts that blow up in the wind so they are free to chase a ball. The boys and girls sometimes glance at me, standing alone in the cold wind. No doubt they think: There’s Douglas. Him with the dead twin.

But they glance away guiltily when I catch their eye.

Businessmen try to catch their
Cape Times
from blowing away across the tracks.

SOWETO SCHOOLS BURN
, the headlines cry.

There is a photo of a building in flames and the black gutted carcass of a bus in the foreground with schoolchildren dancing around it. In the distance you can make out the army trucks. The guns of the soldiers on the back of the trucks aim up at the sky, like the legs of a flipped-over insect.

The back page says there is a rumour of a rugby tour by the Pumas of Argentina. The All Blacks and the Lions do not want to play the Springboks, because of apartheid. Oom Jan says it’s because they are scared of being buggered up by the Springboks again.

At the level crossing the boom swings down and the motorcars jam.

I want to jump the tracks and catch a train going the other way, away from Rondebosch, away from school. Get off at Kalk Bay and dangle red bait to catch fish from the harbour wall.

The train comes into sight.

There is a scrambling for rucksacks and sport bags. A girl struggles with a guitar and sports gear and school books:

– Can I carry something for you? I offer.

Her cheeks tint.

– Okay, she says, and swings me her rucksack.

It is heavy. Full of biology and history books, no doubt.

– Grazie, she says as the train jolts on. I’ll see you, hey.

She goes to join other girls and I hear them call her Marta.

Marta, with her ginger hair twisted into pigtails, makes my head fizz. I wish she would sit beside me to fill out, colour in the gaping hole of Marsden gone. But she abandons me to the emptiness I border on, giving all the colour and life of her to the other girls. Her pigtails flick like flywhisks when she swings her head.

My cheek against the cold glass, I see the world through a zoom lens: foreground of yards and dogs and bicycles in a blur, and Table Mountain in focus. Without a jostle for the window seat there is no fun in it. My rucksack, on the seat beside me, does not mind not having a view, never nudges, never rubs against me.

I fish the dog-eared copy of
The Old Man and the Sea
out of my blazer pocket. Miss Forster, my English teacher from last year in standard six, gave it to me. Miss Forster who wore frocks so summery you could see the curve of her breasts when she stood by the window. Now she has gone to Amsterdam for good. Oom Jan says the whites who voetsak overseas are cowards. They suck the fruit of the land while it is sweet and then, when it turns bitter, they run. My father says exile is a hard road. They do not waltz off to London and Amsterdam and Tasmania on a whim. But Oom Jan snorts, and downs another long sluk of Lion Lager. Anyway, it is better that those who do not love South Africa go, Oom Jan reckons. My father says he should be open-minded. Just because you leave something behind does not mean you do not love it. Oom Jan says it is the folk with a British passport in the back pocket who are so open-minded, as they know they can bugger off when the pawpaw hits the fan. And so it goes.

The Old Man and the Sea
: Old man Santiago dreams of Africa, of white beaches and roaring surf. He tells the boy he has seen lions on the beach at dusk.

Maybe in Malindi or somewhere up the coast of East Africa you will see a lion on the beach, but in the Cape the lions have been hunted dead.

In his dreams Santiago smells the smell of Africa.

I wonder if he smells reeking kelp carried on the sea wind or the stink of snoek in the sun or the tang of bluegum or the dust snuff of a dirt road.

The school, a private school, is shaded by stone pines and islanded by a sea of fields. Among all the white boys are a handful of Indians, blacks and coloureds. This is why Marsden and I were sent here, instead of going to the all-white government school in Muizenberg. My father wants us to grow up colour-blind. Oom Jan says the kind of fancy black boys pussyfooting across the cricket pitch at a private school are not the same as the barefoot black boys on the farm, just as he says American negroes like Muhammad Ali are not the same as your African black.

To skip the awkwardness of hanging around amid whispers and glances, I hide behind the cricket nets till the bell goes.
The Old Man and the Sea
is falling apart from being carted around in my pocket. I open it at random and read for the mood and echo of Miss Forster’s voice. The school bell calls me back from the faraway sea where sharks strip the old man’s fish to the bone. I have lost track of time. The timetable I was sent in the post says I have Mister Jansen, the history teacher, known for beating the hell out of the standard sevens because the sevens are always up to all sorts of high jinks.

I arrive breathless at Mister Jansen’s door, expecting him to yell, but he just flashes his tobacco-yellowed teeth at me.

– You must be Douglas.

He does not offer a word on Marsden. He just hands me my book and bids me to a desk right under his nose. His eyebrows are paintbrushes of hog hair.

The boys cast their eyes down at pencilled textbooks but risk staring at me when he turns to chalk the blackboard again. I wish I was handlining for fish in Kalk Bay or visiting Miss Forster in Amsterdam.

I walk down a shadowy alley in Amsterdam. In the pink light of a window I glimpse a red garter against white skin, before my father’s hand tugs at mine.

In my dreams it is Miss Forster dangling red bait in the shadows.

When the bell goes I am sucked into a river of schoolboys. I catch Marsden’s name, a float bobbing on the surface of a tumbling tide. Oliver weaves towards me, against the flow.

– Hey, Douglas, there’s a cool karate flick on in town. A few of us are going Friday if you wanna come.

I know it is his way of saying sorry about Marsden.

– Sorry. My mother doesn’t want me railing back out to Muizenberg after dark.

My mother does not want me to see karate flicks either. But this I do not tell him.

– Pity, says Oliver.

I get the feeling he is relieved.

The next class is with Skin. Though I know him from cricket, I have not yet been taught by him. He does not even glance at me, as if I have not missed a thing. As if he has not heard. He settles the class and says we have to read
The Great Gatsby
, while he plays a jazz record in the background. I do not have the book yet so he says I should go with him to the book room and I follow him.

The book room is a naked bulb and books stacked to the roof. I make out a few titles:
Catcher in the Rye
,
The Great Gatsby
,
To Kill a Mockingbird
,
Of Mice and Men
.

He dusts a copy of
The Great Gatsby
against his cords, and hands it to me.

– Douglas, I was dreadfully sorry to hear about your brother.

I stare at the dust smear on his cords as tears well in my eyes.

– I’ll miss Marsden on the cricket pitch. But I hope you’ll play on, in spite of everything.

– I want to play on, I sob.

My tears fall on to the cover of
The Great Gatsby
, a fiery tiger-skin pattern.

I mop the tears away with my sleeve.

– I am sorry about the book, I say.

And Skin reaches his arms out and holds me and I cry. His shirt is all wet with my crying. I want to cry against his shirt forever but part of me is ashamed about the shirt.

– Look, why don’t we take a drive down to Sea Point after cricket. We’ll see the sun go down from the Hard Rock, then I’ll drive you home.

– To Muizenberg? It’s far.

– We’ll go via Hout Bay. I love the climb over Chapman’s Peak.

– I don’t have my cricket togs along.

– You could catch up with
Gatsby
in the library, or watch the practice.

– Okay, I nod.

– Good lad. Give your mother a bell, so she knows you’re with me.

T
HE LIBRARY IS HAUNTED
by Old Shuttlecock, who stocks it up with books on Hitler and submarines. He is forever scuttling to the boys’ john, keys a-jingle, to run the keys under a tap. Then he swings them on their string till they dry. He scares the hell out of schoolboys with his jangling keys, and he resents lending out books to savages like us. Still, I risk running into the war-crazed Old Shuttlecock rather than have the boys gawk at me through the nets.

From a dark corner of the library I hear the distant crack of cricket balls against wood.

I open
The Great Gatsby
at random. Lines underlined in a wavy freehand catch my eye. I read of blue grass and yellow cocktail music and the earth lurching away from the sun.

When the ball stoned Marsden’s head, just in front of his ear-hole, I had the feeling the earth jerked away from the sun.

Now the earth floats unanchored in space.

– Come on then, Skin calls.

He is in his cricket whites. His hair is ruffled and his pants are stained red from rubbing the ball.

I pack the book into my rucksack and follow him out into the schoolyard. Oliver stands by a tap with a cluster of other boys who are splashing their faces and laughing. The laughter fades out as Skin and I go by. They look at their shoes and murmur to the teacher: ’noon, sir.

– Afternoon, boys, says Skin.

I can tell by the jaunty skip of his walk that he loves being the schoolmaster, being called sir.

– So, how’d you get on with
Gatsby
? Skin wants to know.

– I just dipped into the story, I tell him, conscious of the boys’ eyes on us as we follow the curve of the cricket pitch to where his sky-blue Peugeot convertible is parked under the stone pines.

A flicker of feeling, maybe hurt, crosses his face.

– You need to give it time, he says.

For a moment, I am not sure if he means
Gatsby
or Marsden. But he goes on:

– His writing is magic, you know. You really get a sense of the time, the jazzy, feathered flamboyance of it all.

– I felt it a bit, I say, knowing teachers get wound up about the things they teach.

I recall a line about girls gliding through a sea-change of faces and I want to say something about the gliding but I am not sure I understand it. Instead, I remark:

– I liked the yellow music.

– Oh. You picked up on that? That’s one of the magic things Fitzgerald does. Mixes the senses, so you hear colours and see sound.

It makes sense to me, as the sea smells turquoise, and red is the sound of a tomtom drummed by blurred hands.

Skin is happy about the yellow music, and he begins to whistle as he fishes for keys in his red-stained pocket. Behind me I hear the laughter of the boys pick up again.

Just as my father would, he spits in his handkerchief and wipes insect flecks from the windshield. Yellow flecks like flicks of a paintbrush. Then he draws the hood back and we climb inside.

We drive along De Waal Drive under Table Mountain, the distant cablecar house on the flat top like a tickbird riding a hippo’s back. I look down on the scar of District Six, the skysigns of the city, and the cranes and masts of the harbour beyond.

Skin scratches through a cubbyhole full of boxless tapes.

– Ever heard of Miles Davis?

I know he is the jazzgod. My father would sometimes listen to jazz at night when he was writing: the tapping of his typewriter blending with the tinny tunes and the zinging of crickets and the far, fuzzy hiss of the surf. But I say no to Skin, as I sense he wants to feel he is initiating me into jazz. He fiddles with the dials and the music comes like a wave. I imagine the seals in the harbour far below tossing their heads towards the mountain and the sinking sun to catch the swooping sound.

Along Orange Street squirrel palms fountain green against the brick and tar. Then we glide downhill on Buitengracht, past steep, cobbled BoKaap Streets: Church, Bloem, Pepper, Leeuwen. The Moslem BoKaap: glimpses of giddy houses, a Malay mosque props up a blue sky, virgins’ eyes hide behind black mosquito veils and the milky beards of old men flow into white cloth that drops from chin to sandal. From up here lions once gazed down on herds of zebra and straying Hottentot cows.

We jika into Strand Street. Under a date palm, a coloured man sells aeroplanes and windmills made out of wire and Coca-Cola cans. He stares toothlessly at us, as if Miles Davis is riding in the back seat with his trumpet tilted at the sky. We curve around the foot of Signal Hill and then drop down to the sea at Three Anchor Bay and ride on Beach Road, past Boat Bay, to Sea Point.

All the world is out jogging or cycling, or just perching on the railings to squint at the sinking sun while seagulls coast above the rocks. A young black man on roller skates weaves through a row of Coca-Cola cans, dodging skipperke dogs and bitterlemon lips pursing out from under straw hats. You can tell the dogwalkers think: This black is too cocky. Does he think he’s on Venice Beach or something?

There is a lucky gap in the parking bay just this side of the Hard Rock. Miles chokes out. A black man in khaki shorts and an unbuttoned, flapping shirt jogs up to us.

– Hey chief, can I wash your car, chief? he goes.

– What the heck, alright. But mind you don’t scratch the paint, says Skin.

– Sure chief, goes the washerman, all teeth.

His whistle stabs my eardrum and an old man comes hobbling up behind a Spar trolley. In the trolley are two buckets of murky water.