Karoo Boy (6 page)

– Voetsak, Oom Jan yells at the dogs and they bound away into the vineyards to bark at guineafowl and rabbits.

I imagine Chaka telling the boerbull and the Jack Russell stories of chasing seagulls on Sunrise Beach, and the farm dogs thinking: sassy sea dog.

– Bloody dogs, grunts Oom Jan.

He gives my mother a kiss as she steps out of the car.

– It is good to see you, Sarah. But I hope you are not going to go through with this Karoo trek of yours.

– Jannie, leave her be, says Auntie Tia.

She gives me a sloppy kiss on the mouth. Her mouth is always syrupy, as if she has just had a slurp of hanepoot. As soon as she goes around to hug my mother, I wipe my mouth dry. Then I remember Dirkie, and look up to see him watching me.

– Kom nou, jong, Oom Jan calls Dirkie.

Dirkie shuffles over.

– Hello, Tannie Sarah, he says.

– Hello, Dirkie. Don’t I get a kiss?

My mother bends her head so he can kiss her. Hope, seeing that the coast is clear, climbs out of the car. I can tell Oom Jan finds it odd that Hope should sit in the front. I imagine him thinking: Typical Capetonians. Full of liberal ideas: driving around with chickens on the roof and a hoity-toity hotnot up front.

Hope goes around to the back of the house, where she can drink tea from enamel mugs with their maid, Meisie.

We sit on the stoep, and Meisie appears with the tea tray of china cups and scones and gooseberry jam. Dirkie gazes out over the vineyards towards Paarl mountain, as if he has never seen the view before. You would think I was the dead twin. Oom Jan digs around in his pipe, and then taps the old tobacco into a potted oleander.

– I wish you wouldn’t do that, chides Auntie Tia.

– Tia made the jam herself, you know, chirps Oom Jan.

He is keen for us to see how his wife has adapted to farm life, giving up fancy things like bridge and the theatre for things that you can hold, like jars of jam and bricks of butter. Somehow, it comes out as an accusation of women like my mother who buy their jam and butter at Spar.

– Sarah, stay with us on the farm, says Oom Jan. The boy can go to school in Paarl with Dirkie.

Although Oom Jan knows that it is Marsden who is dead, and therefore Douglas in front of his eyes, it is an old habit of his to sweep away any doubt whether it is Marsden or Douglas by calling us
boy
.

– And me? Shall I be your concubine? my mother mutters, as if commenting on the view.

Oom Jan spits a mouthful of tea back into the teacup. Auntie Tia lifts her teacup to hide a smile. Dirkie is puzzled. I do not think they learn much English in Paarl. I am not keen to go to Paarl after all Dirkie’s stories of the headmaster, Ou Langhans, who canes you if your blazer is unbuttoned, or if your hair tickles your ears, or if your shoes do not shine.

– No, really, says Oom Jan. It is not right for a woman to go gallivanting around the bundu with a paintbrush. These are violent times, you know. You could end up with a panga in your head.

– Jannie, for God’s sake, Auntie Tia pleads.

After tea, we bundle back into Indlovu. Chaka’s panting mists up the windows.

– Totsiens, Meisie calls out to Hope.

Under my feet is a box of Merlot wine from the farm. I wipe the mist from the back window so I can see them wave at us. Oom Jan has his arm around Auntie Tia, and she looks like a reed beside a rock. His other hand is on Dirkie’s head. His hand says: I am your father and you are my son. This is your land and your destiny.

On the outskirts of Paarl we veer towards the mountain and climb the winding Du Toitskloof pass. Below us lies a patchwork of vineyards and orchards, and dams glinting in the sun. We swing around a corner and the road is full of baboons.

My mother keeps her foot light on the pedal as she weaves Indlovu through, so the baboons do not jump on the roof and rip the chickens out of their cage.

I have to wind up Chaka’s window. Kamikaze fool dog thinks he can take on a whole tribe of baboons. His barks chisel into my head.

Hope reaches for something to throw at the baboons. Whenever she sees a snake or rat or any wild thing she instinctively stones it. She does not care if it is a tobaccoroller or molesnake or any undeadly animal. There are no stones in the cubbyhole, so she flings a shot spool of Kodak film at the baboons.

My mother swerves to the roadside as there may be photos of Marsden on the film a baboon is sniffing. She hoots the horn to scatter the baboons, then reverses up to the cast spool.

– Dee, you go for the film while I hold Chaka.

I gear myself for a shark-fanged baboon to dart from under Indlovu and jaw my hand. But I pick up the spool unscathed. I swing the door to. Chaka licks my ear as the grunting baboons home in again. My heart drums and I feel faint as we drive on up the winding road. I shall miss my father being around for when things get scary, like the time Marsden and I found a mamba in the yard.

Hope is all for stoning the snake and Byron wants to spike it with a pitchfork, but my father calmly lures it into a wine box and folds in the flaps. I have the box in my lap as we ride Indlovu out along the Strandfontein road to free it in the dunes.

My father would pick up in his bare hands the vleifrogs Marsden and I found in gumboots in the garage. He would catch spiders in jam jars and throw them out into the night. Like dark thoughts, the furtive furry things would find their way back after a few days. I wished he would kill them, as I never got used to the spurt of fear on discovering a spider in my cupboard.

Everything goes black as we are sucked into the mouth of a tunnel. The dark bears down and squeezes out any sea breeze still lingering in my lungs.

As we come out into the sun and drop down into the Hex River Valley my lungs fill with still, dry air. There are no fan-blades in the sky. The sun is a white eye. It sees all, like the glass eye of Bessie Malan.

Chaka’s slobber dries out and he pants bergwind gasps across my face. He gazes out over a landscape of stones to the edge of your sight, and dogs see far.

The dorps on the N1 go: Matjiesfontein, Vleifontein, Leeu-Gamka.

We head through a land of bald koppies and karakul sheep for a town called Klipdorp, in the far Cape, south of the Orange Free State border. Other than the picnic bays in the sketchy shade of bluegums every few miles, there is no shade.

A hawk drops out the sky to the parched earth. Then it flies up to a telegraph pole and tugs a string of lizard gut away from a flicking tail.

The road follows the telegraph poles, an unending echo of totems.

On long journeys, when Marsden and I were small, we would begin to fight like tomcats in a basket. My father would call out: First one to spot a lion gets ten cents.

We would sit still for miles and miles, eyes skinned for the telltale twitch of a tail among the Smartie-coloured cosmos. We never saw a lion, but my father would sometimes fork out five cents for an ostrich or a donkey.

At Beaufort West we turn off the N1 and stop at a BP.

– Fill up with 97, says my mother to the black petroljockey in a grasshopper-green overall.

He hooks in the pipe and Chaka goes bananas again. I feel ashamed that we have a racist dog. He loves Hope and Byron, but all other blacks are postmen or newspaperboys to bark at madly.

The petroljockey comes round to my mother’s window.

– Check oil and water, Madam? he says calmly, as if he is used to whitefolk dogs and their drooling fangs.

He twists open the radiator with a handkerchief from his pocket. He jumps back as rusty water fountains into the sky. Indlovu gurgles and hisses unhappily. The man fetches a can of cold water and Indlovu glugs a canful.

– I could shoot the bloody dog, my mother snaps.

We head for the N1 again, Chaka still barking his head off. My mother is so rattled by his barking that a big rig almost runs us down just as she steers onto the highway. The rig swings to avoid us. Indlovu screeches. The rig horn wails and it feels as if we will be sucked into the slipstream. There is a stink of burnt rubber.

Hope cries, my mother’s face is bleached and Chaka is dazed.

Behind us the petroljockey flicks his tip into the air and catches it in his hip pocket and I think of Bessie Malan’s eye in a deep tobacco-flecked pocket.

Chaka dozes off in my lap. My mother, regaining colour after the rig scare, tells the history of Klipdorp as we go along.

– Klipdorp is called Klipdorp because there is no river or mountain or kloof that landmarks it, just a pyramid of stones a pioneer digger from Amsterdam unearthed in his bid to find gold there.

Chaka farts as his legs jerk in his dreams of scattering baboons, or of catching seagulls that taunt him from the sky.

– Later they found out that, by some fluke, the digger’s pyramid was halfway between Cape Town and Johannesburg. Over the years caravans of drifters and fortune-seekers camped on the riverless flat, halfway between the fruit and the gold. So it became a dorp, Klipdorp. Then, one day, an old diviner’s fork danced in his hands. But the Klipdorpers laughed at him because any old fool could tell the earth under their feet was as dry as death. They doggedly oxed water all the way from the Zeekoe River for the rest of their lives.

Hope shakes her head at all this whitefolk history.

– It was only after the Boer War, when the boers came back to farm, after years of warring against the English on horseback, that a drill was sunk into the rock and sweet water flowed to heal the land.

My mother chose Klipdorp because of an advert in the paper for a house going cheap in the charming, undiscovered Karoo. Before my brother died, my mother would study the ins and outs of everything beforehand. We never went on holiday without her reading all the guidebooks she could find in the secondhand bookshops in Long Street. Now she buys a house she has never seen, in the middle of nowhere. To hell and gone, as Oom Jan would say. All she wants to do is paint, and Muizenberg does not inspire her.

– Muizenberg is too European, she says. The Karoo is rugged and that’s what I want.

So, just because my mother wants ruggedness, we head deeper and deeper into the outback. I do not see the charm of this landscape of stone and dust and thorn.

After miles and miles of karakul sheep: Klipdorp. The digger’s pile of stones is long gone. No river or mountain to mark it, just a sign saying: Welkom in Klipdorp. It is the kind of white boondock town you drive through, dipping down to 60 for a few kays. You may stop if petrol is running low, or if the engine is smoking, or if you need to pee. Then you kick up to 120 again, following the tar through the bald veld, maybe catching a glimpse of the black shanty township a few miles beyond the dorp, out of cozy white eyesight.

Delarey Straat, the main road, runs as the crow flies through the dozy dorp.

Wind-pumped water fountains like liquid cacti on the front-yard grass. Fences blur as morning glory and granadilla wind through the wire.

Rhodes Hotel: a deep Victorian veranda and a gnarled, elephantskin oak, dropping acorns into the dry sloot.

Dutch Reformed kerk: the tall spire spears a blue sky. A bird flies from the spire, handlining a shadow along the tar.

A jail with barbed wire on the walls.

A bottlestore with big adverts for Castle and Black Label and Klipdrift. A man kips on the kerb in front of the bottlestore, his head under a floppy hat.

There is a thatched Anglican church with stone walls. It looks as if a giant dug up a sod of England and dropped it in the Karoo. The priest is in the graveyard, hosing the cannas, tongues of red and orange flame like the flames that danced on heads at Pentecost. The graveyard is not a restful place to lie, as now and then, randomly, a motorcar or lorry hurtles by.

Then the town peters out into desert again and Indlovu U-turns and heads back through town. This time I see the black man sitting on an upturned beer crate at the Shell, across the road from the Rhodes Hotel. He has the white seafroth beard of an old man and a teacup patch of bald skin on his head. He catches me staring at him and waves his yellow handkerchief at me. By the time I wave back we are quite far down the street and I am not sure he sees my hand wave, like the nodding head of a felt back-window dog.

We pull in at the Sonskyn Kafee to get cool drinks and ask for the way to 9 Mimosa Road.

Coloured kids play hopscotch on the paving outside the café. A girl with her hair in long stiff pippielangkous plaits hopscotches from square to square and, flamingoing on one skinny leg, reaches for the stone, while the other kids clap their hands.

There is nowhere to sit outside. It is not that kind of café.

By the door, firewood is bundled with strips of bicycle tube, same as you use to make a cattie to kill starlings. Strings of wine-gum beads hang in the door to keep the flies out.

At first it is hard to focus in the dark, but then I make out the café tannie with her hair tied up in a bun. Above her head are the cigarettes: Texan, Camel, Lucky Strike, Marlboro. Behind her are coffees: Koffiehuis, Van Riebeeck and Frisco. And the teas: Five Roses and Joko. On the counter are the newspapers, and Lion matches, and sweets: Chappie’s, niggerballs, Kojak lollipops. The shebang of colours and flavours, just as you find it in the Sea Breeze Café in Muizenberg.

It feels good to find such familiar things in a foreign place.

From the rattling fridge I grab a Coca-Cola for me and a Canada Dry for Hope. My mother does not drink fizz. She reckons it just makes you thirstier. She drinks gallons of tea early in the morning and stores up the liquid like a camel until her first gin and tonic in the evening. Indian tonic is bitter, but my mother enjoys bitter and spicy tastes, dry red wine that makes your tongue tingle, and mango atchar that stings your lips and burns your ass afterwards.

My mother buys firewood, a newspaper and Springbok bread.

– The house is not egzekly on the corner. There is a rugby field on the corner, and the house is by there, the café tannie tells us, her lardy white arm signposting the way, somewhere beyond the pinging pinball machine.