Karoo Boy (8 page)

I stand up again, so all the shaven-headed boys and green-skirted girls can see me, the boy from Cape Town, from another planet.

– This is Douglas, from Cape Town. It is his first day in Klipdorp High. I trust you will help Douglas find his feet, says Meneer van Doorn.

They nod, as if to say: Oh yessiree.

Three for girls.
The girls in green skirts just stare at me, curious to see a boy with the flickaway hair of a surfer.

Four for boys
. Fear darts down my spine as I sense the hatred towards me from shaven heads.

Meneer van Doorn’s voice rambles on, but I do not catch his words, as a boy spits the word
moffie
in my ear and jabs me in the ribs. I gasp with pain. Cape Town candyass, whispers another. I feel a pang of bitterness towards my mother for landing me in this backveld dorp where the boys and girls smell the sea in me the way wild birds smell the tameness in freed cagebirds.

My first lesson is biology, with Meneer de Beer. He is a tall man with tortoise-shell glasses that warp his eyes, like the melting clock in the jettisoned Dali print.

The others have come to the class with lizards in jam jars. Some of the lizards have lost their tails. I have never been in a class with girls or lizards before.

Under Meneer de Beer’s Dali eyes, the lizards are slit open to study the way they tick. The girls flinch, but the boys stick compasses into the quivering lizards.

The slitting of the lizards reminds me of a story Miss Forster read to us, of how two old aunts pluck the feathers out of a bird because it spied on them. Then they poke its eyes out. Then they cut up the bird with a knife. I remember the sound the finch makes as it is plucked, it pipes. But the lizards in Meneer de Beer’s class spill their insides soundlessly.

When the bell goes for break, I go to my locker to fetch my sandwich. The locker is wired shut, because I do not yet have a padlock. I unwind the wire, and take out my tuckbox. Hope has made Black Cat peanut-butter sandwiches for me. She knows I hate the way peanut butter clings to the roof of my mouth, and has made up for it by mixing it with honey. My favourite sandwich is cold Kentucky on bread, but there is no chance of that in this dorp, where there is no Wimpy, never mind Kentucky.

I leave my school books in the locker and wire it up again.

Though I am free to go home, I choose to stay in the schoolyard in the hope of finding a friend. I sit against the wall. Around me is a chaos of squabbling and clowning. I bite into my Black Cat peanut butter and honey sandwich and my teeth find something rubbery. I peel the sandwich apart to discover a dead lizard in the peanut butter. I feel dizzy and my skin is clammy with cold sweat.

I sit on the flagstones, staring at the lizard. There is a blurred scurry in the corner of my eyes. I look up to see boys closing in on me like fielders closing in on the last batsman. I look for a gap, but there is no escape. The boys drag me behind the bicycle shed. At the command of a lanky boy they call Joost, they yank down my shorts and underpants and bundle me into a wicker basket the size of a wine barrel.

– Carry him to the main road, barks Joost.

Through the weave of the basket, I see him walking ahead. He is the white hunter, his porters stumble after him.

I am the prey, carted down Palm Straat, then along Delarey. They drop me at the foot of the Boer War obelisk in front of the town hall, where a stub-footed beggar begs on the steps.

– Okay, boys, run, commands Joost.

I hear their laughter ebb as they run away. The beggar edges towards me, but before he reaches me a stray dog comes up to the basket and sniffs at it.

– Go away, dog, I plead.

He ignores me and cocks his leg to pee.

– Voetsak, hond, I yell in Afrikaans.

This time he bolts, and the beggar backpedals.

Dog pee drips through the weave onto my head. This has gone too far. I flick up the lid of the basket to see an old tannie peering quizzically down at me. She prods her walking cane at me as if I am a tiger wanting to escape. The cane digs into my ribs and I pluck the lid down and dog pee rains down on me.

– Shame for you, she cries out.

A jamboree of onlookers gathers and the bitter old tannie beats the basket with her cane. Eyes bore through the weave and the beggar unwinds a wire hanger, as if to jemmy open the door of a motorcar, and feeds it through the weave. Rather than be kebabbed on a wire, I will chance the stares and jeers. I lift the lid again. The cane swings down on my head and the beggar giggles. I want to run but my legs feel lame.

Then I see Hope in the crowd. She stands there, laden with Spar bags, eyes wide as cow eyes.

– Au au au, Douglas.

My words are all ajumble. I am no tiger from the jungle. Just a scared boy with lemon-juiced, dogpee hair. Hope pulls the doek off her head to cover my dangling thing. I sense they find it distasteful, her doek on my white-skin snake. As if it is cocky of her. She puts her arm around me. We cross the street, my ass bare as a Kalahari bushman’s. The wolf whistles make me want to scoot.

– Walk with your head up, says Hope.

We turn the corner by the Post Office and I skedaddle.

Halfway across the rugby field by our house, I step on a devil thorn. I hop on one foot while I pinch it out of my heel. It burns like hell. I hop along lopsidedly, my songololo ajiggle. As I reach the fence dividing the rugby field from our yard, the fence I wired up to keep Chaka in, I see the barefoot girl with the gypsy hair on a bicycle.

She, barefoot girl, now in black sandals and white socks, reads on a bench in the schoolyard in the shade of a plane tree. Some of the seeds have fallen and split under soles, spilling a film of fluff on the stone paving. There is a circus of skipping and tagging and jostling going on around her. But she is still, as if the shade of the plane anchors her.

I stand and stare at her. Her eyes jerk away from the book because a horsefly or something stings her calf. Through the laughter and babble I hear the smack of her hand on her skin. She spits in her hand and rubs it in. I wish I was close enough to see the speck of blood. Instinctively I look around for a Muizenberg lollyboy on a bicycle. Ice is good to take the sting away, but there are no lollyboys on bicycles in Klipdorp. Before I can think of another plan, she is lost inside her book again.

I walk past her, fingering the seeds in my pocket. I whistle and swivel my head as if the schoolyard is full of exotic things: flamingos and macaws, instead of bricked-in kids. As I reach her, I chance looking down. Her head is bent. She wears rubber bands in her hair like Marta, not pink but green to match her school gym. The hem of her gym has been let out. It is a bottle green while the rest of her skirt is faded to olive green. Between the lip of her skirt and the book is a shadowed gap. The book is bird-winged in the wedge of her knees. It has the red blur of a library stamp on the edges. I catch the title from the top of the page she is on:
Born Free
.

And then I am past her, my heart drumming and my head giddy. I look back at her and know she is in Kenya, running with lions on the beach sand, lions old man Santiago dreams of, countries away from me and the other kids in the school. I wish I could follow her there and run with her and the lions, the sun flaring in her gypsy hair and the Indian Ocean salt on her skin.

In my mind, she runs in Marta’s watermelon bikini. Or in green panties. In the short time I have been at Klipdorp school I have discovered that girls have to wear green panties to match their uniform. Green hairbands, green gyms, green panties and no lipstick or mascara. Boys may wear underpants of any colour because they zip up, but girl’s skirts flip up in the wind like Marilyn’s.

Another thing I have discovered is her name. Marika. Magic.

The bell goes and I have Meneer Bester for PT. He played rugby for Natal in his time and has a skew, flat nose. Nowadays he spends the summer by the pool with his shades on. He chucks a waterpolo ball into the pool, then parks off in his deck chair. Now and then, he randomly blows his whistle, maybe so the classroom teachers will think he has a hard job.

In the water I am as fluid as the rugby boys are on land. Like a penguin, so swift in the waves after an ungainly plod across the sand. But this only deepens their mistrust of me. They do not pass the ball to me and I end up swimming alone under water, coming up for air at the wall and sinking again to swim another length under water. As I glide, my stomach skims the tiles and I yearn to stay down forever, cool, enveloped, time-warped.

The platanna frog is clever. He knows we are going to shoot him when he comes up, so he stays down till we give up. Dirkie reckons a platanna slows his breathing down, or breathes through his skin.

Under the water, skimming the tiles, I feel as if I can breathe through my skin.

I come up to find the pool deserted. Meneer Bester’s deck chair flaps in a gust of wind. I am late for Meneer de Wet’s class and I am suddenly scared, as my father is not there to chase fear away. He has sailed to Malindi, or maybe Mombasa, and may still sail beyond the horizon of memory.

Marsden, my frogkiller brother, steals back among the black pines of the past.

Meneer de Wet has a hooked nose and darting eyes. He reminds me of the buzzard on the roof.

– You’re the new boy in town, he says, but I cannot turn a blind eye to such disregard for time.

He bids me to bend over his desk. My hands rest on piles of unmarked essays. Two cuts. Just a friendly reminder.

To keep from crying I reel off all the sea fish I can think of: hottentot geelbek kabeljou galjoen snoek dassie zebra zeb

I
SIT ON THE
veranda of the Rhodes Hotel with my mother. The floor is waxed a deep red, as if stained by ox blood. My mother sips her gin and tonic and fans herself with the menu. The skin under my knees sticks to the pink plastic chairs and I feel beads of sweat run down my calf into my sandals. My mother frowns at me when I slurp up the last of my Coca-Cola through the straw. My slurping is the sound of a cappuccino-mixer in a café. I finger out the block of ice and put it in my mouth. If I were alone I would bite the ice, another thing my mother hates. I just let it melt in my cheek.

Across the street is the Shell Garage. The black man who waved the yellow handkerchief at me the day we came to Klipdorp is there, sitting on the same upturned beer crate. His eyes pan as cars go by, as if he is watching a game of tennis. The afternoon sun slants down on his white hair and he mops his forehead with the handkerchief. There is no shade under the canopy that juts out over the pumps from the garage building. I imagine it is still hot enough for the petrol to flame without a match.

A Ford bakkie pulls in, with four black men standing on the back. The petroljockey jumps up, pockets his handkerchief in the ass pocket of his faded red overall. He is nimble for an old man. The name sewn in yellow on the back of the overall is
Jim
. He touches his forehead to greet the white driver, who is alone up front in the cab. Then he goes around the back of the bakkie to unreel the petrol hose. There is upbeat banter as Jim fills in the petrol. I catch the Xhosa word:
ewe
.

The black men are all in the blue overalls of farmboys, but the youngest of them has unbuttoned the top of his overall and tied the sleeves around his hips. I see the grooves of his hard, washboard stomach. The young man does a gumboot jig on the back and the others all laugh at his jaunty antics. The white man bangs the window, and waves his fist at the young man, as if to say: Don’t you get too cocky, boy.

The young man bows his head, turns away, then widens his eyes in mock fear for the others to see. They kill themselves again. The white farmer, sensing he is the butt of the joke, climbs out of the bakkie and stands there on the bulky legs of a rugby prop, his veldskoens apart. He wears one of those khaki cowboy hats with a fake leopardskin band around the brim. The laughter dies, like shot-down birds. I can just make out the black of a comb, sticking out of his long socks like a scorpion wanting to crawl out of a crack. My father always said to me: You can tell an Afrikaner a mile away by the comb in his socks.

The bulky farmer swings his fist at the young man, who tugs his head out of range like a boxer. The farmer loses his footing for a moment and his leopardskin hat falls to the tar. The farm-boys avert their faces in shame. Jim picks up the hat and dusts it off with his handkerchief. The farmer snatches his hat out of Jim’s hands. I feel awkward witnessing this with my mother beside me. It is the squirmy feeling I get during a sexy scene in a film when my mother is watching with me, that I am partly to blame for what is happening on screen.

– Men can be such bastards, my mother says.

I had thought it was a certain kind of man who was cruel, but my mother’s words make me feel there is something in all men that is shameful.

Then the farmer digs out his wallet, curved from sitting on it in the bakkie all day long. He licks his fingers before counting out the rands. Jim fingers the buttons of his hipbag, like the buttons of a trumpet, to give the man change. There is no tip for Jim. The farmer taps a pipe against the sole of his boot, so the dead tobacco drops out. Then he bites the pipe and climbs back inside the bakkie. The diesel motor catches and throbs deep.

The farmboys wave to Jim as they go. He gets an old Castrol tin and uses cardboard as a brush to sweep the tobacco into the tin. He empties the tin into a bin with a swinging lid, and then settles on his beer crate again.

The ice in my mouth is now melted enough to swallow it.

– Do you think you’ll be happy here? I ask my mother.

I am thinking of her painting, and whether she will find the inspiration. She puts down her gin and tonic and sighs:

– Dee, I can never be happy again. Perhaps there will be moments of happiness, but there will always be the pain.

I too feel the undertow of pain tugging at my feet, drawing me down to shadowy, kelpy depths.

– Aren’t you at all happy now, with me?