No Turning Back (4 page)

A
pproaching the
pozzie,
they heard voices and the crackle of fire on the other side of the fence. Sipho was the last to squeeze between the broken planks. In the flickering light from the dancing flames, he immediately recognized the gang’s leader, Lucas. Vusi was there too, standing close to the fire with a prong in his hand. The smell of sausages made Sipho feel terribly hungry.

“Heyta, magents!
So, gentlemen, my sausages called your stomachs!”

Vusi’s voice sounded quite friendly. Lucas greeted them as well. He made no comment on Sipho being there. It seemed he was accepted. Another boy was sitting on the ground near the fire. Crouching down near him and stretching his hands out toward the warmth, Sipho recognized Joseph in his army jacket. Joseph lifted one hand and waved it toward him.

“So you came with Jabu! That’s good,” he said. His voice was slightly hoarse and slurred. In
his other hand he was holding something, which he brought up to his face. He took in a couple of sharp breaths. Then unexpectedly Joseph pushed the plastic bottle toward Sipho.

“Here,” he said. “Take some. You’ll feel nice. With
iglue
you won’t be cold, you won’t be hungry.”

Sipho put out his hand to refuse. “I don’t like it,” he said quickly.

It was a lie. He had never tried it. When the glue pusher had been expelled from his school, his mother had made him promise her he would never use the stuff. By some good luck his stepfather didn’t hear about the incident.
He
would probably have beaten Sipho just as a warning. That would have made Sipho so angry that he might have gone deliberately to look for some. But as it was, he hadn’t gone around with a crowd that “smoked.”

Joseph withdrew the bottle. A thin, wet trickle running down from his nose glinted in the firelight, until he roughly swept his sleeve across his mouth. After inhaling from the bottle again, he looked at Sipho through half-open eyes.

“It’s okay,” he said, pausing to cough as if trying to clear his throat. “But me, I’m having a good time. I have a nice, nice garden with lots of flowers. It’s sunny…and hot…and I can sleep the whole day.”

Tumbling over sideways, Joseph curled himself up and in an instant seemed to have fallen asleep. Sipho looked into the shadows, examining Joseph’s “garden.” The ground was rough and covered with tall grass except where it had been cleared. The fireplace was in the middle of the clearing. It was made of bricks covered with a metal grid, on top of which the sausages were now sizzling. A little distance away was a tree. It was difficult to see in the dark beyond the tree, but Sipho imagined that must be the part that the hoboes used when they came.

“Hey, new boy! Are you going to buy sausage from me? Only two rand each.”

Vusi called out to Sipho from across the fire. He was holding up a sausage on the end of a knife. Vusi had taken more than two rand from him at Checkers. If only Sipho dared tell him “You owe me that!” Instead he pulled out the change he had left in his pocket. He was not used to money coming in and out of his pockets like this. That morning he had started off in Hillbrow with less than two rand and here he was, after a day of earning and spending, with just over two rand left. Enough for the sausage! Tomorrow he would have to earn what he needed for tomorrow.

Biting off a small piece of meat to eat with each chunk of bread, Sipho savored the flavor
while listening to the news pass among the gang. Lucas and Vusi had gone to Rosebank. Lucas had wanted to buy new shoes, and by midafternoon they had each earned over thirty rand pushing carts, parking and washing cars. It must be some kind of fantastic place, thought Sipho, where people had so much money to pay
malunde.
Perhaps Jabu would take him there. He might even be able to earn enough to buy the little rhino!

“Do
malunde
sleep there?” he asked aloud.

Lucas shook his head. “The police swat us like flies in that place. They say they are keeping it clean.”

After eating, most of the boys lit up
stompies
except for Jabu, who pulled out a full-length cigarette. Grinning, he boasted how he had slipped it off a table at the back of the bakery. The manager must have been about to smoke it when they arrived.

“He’ll catch you next time!” said Thabo.

“Hayi!
No!” laughed Jabu.

The manager had been so busy that he probably wouldn’t be sure where he had left the cigarette.

With the fire dying down, Sipho felt the cold night air seeping in. However tightly he folded his arms and squeezed his legs together, the cold sneaked into him. When Jabu passed him his
cigarette, Sipho took a puff and for a couple of seconds enjoyed the warm smoke swirling around inside his head. He was pleased with himself that he didn’t cough. Shutting his eyes for a moment, he felt how heavy they were, but could he sleep when he was so cold? And if he was feeling this cold now, how did
malunde
manage right in the middle of winter?

“Lucas! The blankets are gone!”

Jabu’s voice came urgently from a corner of the plot dimly lit by the dying fire. He had lifted up the cardboard they used for bedding to get the two blankets they had hidden that morning. Lucas began the questions. No one had been back to the
pozzie
during the day. Vusi shook Joseph, but he was still too dazed to make any sense. It was unlikely that he knew anything. It was far more likely that one of the hoboes had taken them and that was why they were not around tonight. When the thief came back, the blankets would already have been traded and no one would be able to prove anything.

As the gang settled themselves down together on the cardboard, Sipho listened to other tales of theft.

“I was fast asleep and they cut my pocket! And that time I had ten rand!” Matthew complained.

“Ja,
when you sleep, you don’t know anything,”
said Thabo. “One time I was feeling cold so I woke up. But it was too late. My blanket was already gone!”

“You have to sleep on top of your blanket. Then it’s safe,” added Jabu.

Was Jabu serious or joking, Sipho wondered? It was harder, however, for him to know whether to believe Vusi’s story. It was about how an old lady he always helped at Checkers had given him a blanket at Christmas. Sipho just couldn’t imagine Vusi helping an old lady.

“But then the policeman came and made me give him the blanket,” continued Vusi. “When I asked him why, he said I must be a thief to have such a nice new blanket!”

Everyone agreed that as
malunde,
anything bad could happen to you and there was nothing you could do.

Sipho lay near the edge of the cardboard, his head resting on Jabu’s shoulder and his body curled up against him. Except for Joseph, who was still lying fast asleep by himself, the gang lay closely against each other. Sipho had placed himself, though, on the opposite side of the heap from Vusi. It made him uneasy to think of someone with a knife lying so close to him. Before long the chatting had stopped. Listening to the sounds of breathing, Sipho wondered if he
was the only one still awake. The cold clutched at his toes and back, wherever it could get hold of him. Was it possible that Joseph really didn’t feel the cold because of
iglue?
Was that why Matthew and Thabo had been sniffing it too? Matthew lay close to him now. If he stretched out his hand he could touch him and find out if he was still awake. He could ask to try just one sniff to see if it worked…But what would Ma say if she knew?

Lying among the small heap of
malunde,
on a plot of open ground, with nothing between himself and the wide, black night sky, Sipho was suddenly overcome with the thought that Ma
wouldn’t
know. He wasn’t going to see her again. He had run away. He had no family anymore. The tears began trickling down his face before he could stop them. Wiping them away with his sleeve, he held his breath tightly to stop any sobs. He didn’t want anyone to see or hear.

But someone did know. Someone was shuffling up to him and then pushing something into his hands in the darkness. Sipho jerked himself up, and Jabu groaned softly in his sleep.

“Quiet, man! It’s only me! My nice dream went bad. A car came to knock me, then a snake came to eat me, and when I ran, I was swallowed by a big hole,” whispered a husky voice.

It was Joseph. The thing being pushed into
Sipho’s hands was the bottle of
iglue.

“The first night is always bad. Me, I was only eight and I was crying all night because my ma, she didn’t want me anymore. She said the social worker must take me away. But I ran far so they couldn’t find me. Then a boy at Park Station gave me
iglue
to help me sleep.”

Joseph settled himself down next to Sipho. Without stopping to think anymore, Sipho put the bottle up to his nose and took a couple of sharp, deep breaths.

“Take some more, man!” whispered Joseph.

Sipho sniffed again, until suddenly his head felt quite light, almost dizzy. He didn’t like the feeling but lay down, resting his head again on Jabu’s shoulder. With Joseph now on the other side of him, he felt warmer. It was good being close to somebody else. Joseph’s mother hadn’t wanted her son, and his own ma didn’t care about him anymore. But now he was remembering how good it used to feel when as a very small boy he had slept alongside his grandmother. Her bed had always been so warm. Well, now he was a little boy once again with someone taking care of him, and he and Gogo were together in a warm place, floating, floating…

S
ipho woke up with someone shaking him. For a few seconds he was startled, not knowing where he was. He was not on his mattress between the packing-box table and the stove. Instead of the dimness of the shack, light was attacking his eyes. Instead of his mother urging him to get up, in a soft voice that would not disturb his stepfather, it was Lucas silently shaking the boys who were still sleeping. Although the sun was up, the hard earth was still cold beneath the thin cardboard, and Sipho’s whole body was stiff. No one spoke much as they prepared themselves for the new day, slowly stretching their limbs and crossing to another corner of the plot where a small bush served as a toilet. Boys sat smoking their
stompies,
waiting for the sun to sink into them. Sipho rested his elbows on his knees and his head on his hands. The night before his head had felt so light; now it felt terribly heavy. Was it the effects of
iglue?
Surely not. He had only had a little. He
must be getting a cold. If he had been at home Ma would have taken a few drops of oil from her special little bottle and rubbed it on his chest and back to help him breathe. He closed his eyes, trying to shut out the picture. He was aware that Joseph was half sitting, half lying, also holding his head in one of his hands. Was he feeling bad too, or was he just trying to remember his dream garden?

Sipho wasn’t aware of any signal but, without anyone saying a word, the gang got up as if part of a single body, even Joseph. Jabu and Matthew stacked the cardboard in the corner of the plot before following the others toward the gap in the fence. Once out on the pavement they walked in the opposite direction from the one in which Sipho recalled coming the night before. A few cars were parked in the road, but apart from a man carrying a package and a couple of figures walking ahead of them in the distance, the street was still quiet.

The boys’ silence was only broken when they reached a wire fence alongside a railway siding. No railway workers were in sight.

“It’s fine,” said Lucas. “Let’s move!”

Slipping through a hole between the fence and the ground, the boys made their way to a tap at the back of an old brick building. Removing a loose brick, Vusi produced a piece of soap. It was
passed to each one in turn as they ducked their heads under the water.

That seemed to bring people alive. When it was Jabu’s turn, he came out from under the tap shaking the water off his head and sending a flicker down his body. Sipho was reminded of the puppy Gogo had got him. Once, when he was meant to be watering the garden, the farmer’s son, Kobus, had got him to turn the hose on the puppy. They had laughed at the puppy’s surprise and how it shook itself afterward. But ducking under the tap himself and feeling the icy cold shower hit his head brought Sipho firmly back to where he was…and his own head, which was still hurting.

More awake now, the gang began chatting on their journey up to Hillbrow. By the time they had reached the top of the hill, they had split into twos and threes. Sipho walked with Jabu and Joseph, stopping with them to exchange greetings of
“Heyta, magents!”
and “How’s your
scheme?”
with
malunde
who had spent the night in Hillbrow itself. Most of the talk was about a high-speed car chase in the middle of the night, but the cars had roared away and no one knew what had actually happened.

The rest of the day, and those that followed, took on a similar shape to Sipho’s first day with the
other
malunde.
They got money “parking” or washing cars, pushing
amatrolley
or “asking money” from motorists and customers from the restaurants, movie theaters, shops, and clubs. Sometimes they did odd jobs for shopkeepers, although there were some whom it was wiser to avoid. Sipho heard about sleeping children having cold water thrown over them or being beaten when found in a shop entrance. But the man with the droopy black mustache, selling jeans and T-shirts at Danny’s Den next to the video games shop, didn’t fit that picture. When he saw Sipho he greeted him and after a couple of days asked if Sipho would sweep his floor, giving him one rand. The next day Sipho was asked to help unload and unpack a delivery of shirts.

“You’re quite a smart boy, you know,” the man said to him, paying him two rand this time.

Sipho smiled, both at the coins and at the compliment. Mr. Danny Lewis, of Danny’s Den, puzzled him.

In between the business of getting money and food, there were various ways to pass the day…riding carts…mock fighting…or, if they had small change to spare, playing video games and gambling on
tiekie-dice.
At other times, they just sat watching the rest of the world go by. Each day was different, yet the
same. To eat, you had first to get money. And every night the same bitter wind gripped Sipho’s bones, stopping his cold from getting better.

On his second day Joseph told him where he could buy some
iglue
for himself. For a couple of days he resisted, remembering the terrible way his head had ached. He wasn’t sure whether it had come from his cold or from
iglue.
But when he couldn’t get to sleep at night and lay awake shivering, he was tempted. He tried to imagine he was floating away in a warm bed, but it was no good. On the fourth night, the wind was even sharper, making the fire struggle to keep alight. Sipho tapped Joseph urgently on the arm as they huddled down on the cardboard preparing to sleep.

“Please, give me
iglue.
I’ll get more for you tomorrow,” he promised.

In his pocket he had a few small coins he had begun to save for the little wooden rhino. He would use those and the money he got at Checkers in the morning.

This time he didn’t even stop to think of Ma’s words before bringing Joseph’s bottle up to his nose. His eyelids closed, and everything around him in the
pozzie
—including the other boys and the biting night wind—began to fade away as he sniffed in the fumes. But now something else seemed to be staring down at him. It was up
there in the sky, getting bigger while he seemed to be getting smaller. The thing was white, with a black dot in the middle. It was an eye. Slowly a shape grew around it. When he saw the two horns and small ears, he knew what it was. The head of the little rhino. Except that it didn’t seem so little anymore, looming high above him as he felt himself shrinking smaller and smaller. But its one eye still looked so very sad, as if it was lost. Sipho drifted into an uneasy, restless sleep.

It was Jabu who stopped him from going into the shoe repair shop the next morning.

“My friend died from this stuff,” Jabu told him sharply. “We found the bag on his head. We took him to the hospital but he was already finished.”

Overhearing Jabu’s story, Joseph dismissed it roughly. “Your friend was stupid. You must use a bottle, not a bag.”

Sipho saw the anger flash across Jabu’s eyes. For a moment it seemed as if he might hit out at Joseph. But he lashed out with words instead.

“Hayi, Bra
Joseph! It’s you that’s stupid!
Iglue
is making you sick and you can’t even see. Did you forget about Jeff?”

Joseph sucked in his cheeks as if he was thinking of what to say. Then, folding his arms, he shifted his gaze upward, as if into space. He
remained silent as Jabu told Sipho about a boy from another gang who had died with his head in a garbage can while looking for something to cool his throat. Word had gone round afterward that Jeff had pneumonia because his lungs were damaged from
iglue.

Jabu spoke so forcefully that it took Sipho by surprise. “If you owe him, give him money, Sipho. Don’t buy
iglue
yourself. It’s no good!”

“But it helps me sleep when I’m cold. It makes me think I’m in some nice warm place,” said Sipho.

“You need a jacket, not
iglue, buti.
I can take you to Rosebank and you can get enough money to buy one, even today.”

Sipho hesitated. Jabu’s offer was kind, and it made him think. While most members of the gang were taking the stuff—and Joseph more than any of them—he hadn’t seen either Lucas or Jabu with
iglue.
It was one thing to sniff a little of your friend’s supply and quite another to go and buy it yourself. But here was Joseph, who had been friendly to him, waiting now for him to do just that and return his favors. Joseph’s face had no expression as he leaned against the shop front, but Sipho knew he was listening.

“Give him his money and let’s go,” said Jabu.

It was a test, and Sipho was right in the middle of it. He hated tests. He never knew the
right answer. Putting his hand in his pocket, he pulled out all his coins.

“Take this,
buti.
I want to check out Rosebank. Will you come?” he said to Joseph.

Joseph leaned his head back and looked at him coolly. Then he shrugged and put out his hand for the money before turning his back and entering the shop.