Out of Shadows (16 page)

“That's not true. I do.”

“Oh, sure.”

“I always did. I was just so scared of letting you down all the time because I've never had much to give.”

“Well, you've done a good job of that now.”

“I'm so sorry.”

“I hate you. I hate you both.”

It was like a bullet. He reeled.

“You don't mean that.”

“You want to bet?” I had to fire something at him because he was right, and he might have seen I knew that.

“Don't walk out. Talk to me. Please.”

“Leave me alone. Just . . . 
leave me
.”

I barged through the front door and my legs started sprinting up the drive. I couldn't stop, turning left and pounding the strip road like the day the men by the statue had come after me.

I ran as much of the kilometer to the cemetery as possible. It was easy to spot her grave, the one that was too fresh to have a headstone, and I went right up to her. Of all things, I was surprised at how much the earth had gone down and by the thick grass that was already growing over her.

I heaved agonized breaths. The clouds above were tight and heavy. I stood staring at her because I still couldn't find any words.

Then the rains broke. Huge, fat drops that pelted noisily to the ground. Only a few at first, then the downpour came. The pine trees hissed and swayed.

I swayed with them.

All I wanted was to be angry. I
was
angry. Not only about this, it was everything, there was so much that I didn't know where to begin, but most of all I just wanted her here so I could say it.

Thunder crashed. Beneath it I heard faint laughter and saw three piccanins sheltering, each perhaps six or seven and pointing at me as they flashed their white smiles.

“
What?
” I yelled, my voice drowning in the storm. Rivers streamed down my face and I couldn't be certain it was the rain. “
Why are you lot always grinning? What's so bloody funny?
”

I went to hurl a stone and they cleared off, but I fired it anyway because I needed to throw it at somebody.

By the time I left, the clouds had finished and rolled clear. I was exhausted and ready to go home.

As I turned into our drive, I spotted my old man pacing up and down outside the house. His steps were anxious and short,
and he held himself with his arms and muttered words over and over. His head shook and looked like a skull on a stick, his legs like fleshless pins falling out of his shorts. Where had he gone?

I was all he had now, I realized. I couldn't abandon him.

I moved forward, but as I returned to the only family I had left, Matilda appeared, despite the fact she didn't work on weekends, and she went to my old man and motioned for him to calm down. He did. She rubbed his forearms. Then she held him and kissed him in a way that was completely wrong and he let it happen. Nothing about it was right; it made my stomach churn.

I stopped again. My old man saw me and leaped back like he'd been given a shock.

He may have called out, he may even have come after me. I just started running again, the other way now, and toward town. I didn't know where to go or what to do.

So I called Ivan.

Ivan was lucky
because he'd turned sixteen and got his license straightaway, and his old man let him drive one of the farm pickups like it was his own. True to his word, he pulled up outside the hotel an hour later and hooted for me. I'd been in the bar ordering beers and smoking.

“Can I stay over?” I put my feet on the dash.

“Sure. What's up?”

“Just drive,” I told him.

“You're the boss.”

That was one of the things I liked about him.

He said he'd been going to Berg anyway that day to meet Pitters and Klompie at the movies. Now it was cool because we could all go together.

We met them outside the Kine 300 where
Beverly Hills Cop
was showing. It was the film everyone had been talking about, although I didn't know who the hell Eddie Murphy was, and then the stupid nanny in the kiosk screwed up and
gave me a seat on the other side of the cinema even though it was obvious we were together, and I had to go and sit right in the middle of a row of blacks.

“See you later, Jacko,” Pittman teased. “Better not share your popcorn. You never know what you might catch.”

The film was good but I got more and more pissed off with how all the blacks in the audience kept cheering and clapping whenever something big happened, like when there was a fight scene or when Axel Foley made the supervisor in the warehouse give him some cooperation. I didn't understand why they did that. Why couldn't they just watch like normal people?

Patti LaBelle had barely started to “Stir It Up” to the end credits and I was getting out of there.

Pittman and Klompie came out with tears in their eyes.

“That was an
A
movie, man.” Pittman punched the air. “Haven't laughed so much in my
life
.”

Klompie also punched the air even though he looked stupid when he did it.

“And I tell you, when we head home, ‘we're not going to fall for a banana in the tailpipe.' ”

“ ‘So my advice to you is,' ”—Pittman breathed all over my face—“ ‘why don't you crawl back to your little stone in Detroit before you get
squashed
.' ”

Something snapped and I pushed him to the ground. Coins and Madisons flew out of his pockets and he jumped right back, nostrils flared.

“Hey!” Ivan got between us straightaway. “What's your problem?”

“I don't know.” Pittman rubbed his elbow and his ego. “Ask him.”

“Jacko?”

I huffed. “It was a shit movie.”

“Why? What was wrong with it?”

“I thought it was a stupid idea with a load of stupid yanks, and I didn't like the way that Axel Foley kept eyeing up the white chicks. Okay?” Ivan stared at me. From nowhere, I added, “Mr. van Hout would say the same.”

Ivan rolled it around his mouth before giving me a firm nod. He ruffled my hair, almost fatherly.

“
Ja
, you're right—kak movie.” He jabbed Pittman, but because it was Ivan it was okay and we were all friends again.

I gave in and called my old man to tell him I wasn't coming back for a few days. He sounded relieved, but then started stammering an explanation, and how sorry he was for everything, and where was I staying? I didn't know how to feel anymore and was tired of trying to work it out, and about halfway through it dawned on me I could easily make it all go away and put the phone down.

On Sundays the Hascotts went to the Country Club. Ivan was getting excited because he knew Adele Cairns would be there and he was definitely going to ask her out, and if she said yes then he was in with a chance of finally checking out those nyombies.

“I swear, they're huge,” he said as we drove in convoy behind his old man. “She's an absolute babe in a swimsuit.”

It was a hot day, and most of the kids were out by the pool while the mothers played tennis and the men sat around the bar. Adele was easy to spot. She was beautiful. She was in a red bikini, rubbing in oil and watching over her little brother messing about in the water, and I thought she was amazing. Not perfect, but that made her far better than the waxlike babes I'd checked in any edition of
Scope
because she was real. She wasn't tall and she wasn't short, and she had freckly pale skin and long brown hair, which she combed with her fingers.
She kept her arms self-consciously close to her chest, but if anything that just made her more alluring. Above all that, she looked kind, not barbed like so many other girls I'd met who thought they were pretty.

I felt a small stab in my chest—I was envious. I wanted someone like that. I only hoped Ivan wouldn't be able to tell.

He played it cool at first. We went to the bar and got Cokes, but as soon as we'd finished we were in the pool making a load of noise and splashing the
laaities
. Ivan made two of them cry, then play-fought me and ducked me for almost a minute, and when he finally let me up, spluttering like an arse, he was already off to make his move.

After a few minutes chatting they went inside and I was on my own.

I tried pretending I didn't mind and swam a bit more, then stood around the pool to dry off, but I didn't know anyone so I walked around the garden. In the end I just sat on the grass at the side of the Club where the workers were barbecuing steaks. One of them began talking to me, and when he asked about my mother and father I shut him up by getting him to
kife
me a free beer from the bar.

Ivan came back with a huge grin on his face.

“That chick gives.” He grabbed my beer and took a swig, although I didn't believe him because, from what I'd seen of her, I didn't think Adele Cairns seemed the kind of girl who gave quite so easily.

He looked about before taking out a Madison.

“Your old man's just there,” I warned. The men had been drawn by the smell of cooking meat.

“My old man's half cut,” he dismissed, but thirty seconds later he was thrusting the gwaai into my hand. “Say it's yours, he won't do anything to you.”

As it happened, Pa Hascott wasn't interested in anything except getting away.

“There's trouble on the farm.” His voice was strained.

Ivan checked around for Adele.

“But—”

“Don't just stand there, man, get your truck.” He turned to his wife, who was swinging as fast as she could on her crutches. “Get a bloody move on, Gwyneth.”

We sped dangerously along the dirt road, Ivan just managing to keep on it as we slew around corners. I had to clutch onto the side of the door. At one stage his old man's brake lights came on but Ivan didn't see them and almost charged into the back of him—he'd been watching the tail of smoke rising in the distance.

“Jesus on a swing, they better not have done.” He gripped the wheel tightly while the dust cleared. “I swear to God.”

But they had, whoever “they” were.

We tore over the farm boundary. Ivan didn't care now, his foot was to the floor. He even caught his old man, and then overtook him when Pa Hascott slowed at the security fence to their house, where a mob of about thirty black men were singing and doing a menacing dance that involved jabbing axes and machetes into the air. The dogs were going nuts on the other side of the wire.

The gate didn't look as though it had been breached, but Ivan knew by then that the smoke was coming from the workers' village. He sped on.

I had to stop myself from hitting the windshield when the pickup finally skidded to a halt, tires digging in.

The stench of burning grass and plastic hit us immediately. The village was in chaos. At first sight only a few buildings were actually on fire, but they made a lot of smoke, and the men scampered around with buckets of water while the women were wailing in the central area where Ivan and I had
once played soccer. Mothers clung onto their children. Chickens and goats were running free.

“Mastah Ivan! They came!” I could just pick out the words from the excited jumble. “Those bad men came again.”

“They bring knives.”

“They bring fire.”

“Our homes! Those wicked Shona. Where is Baas Hascott, Mastah Ivan? You must help us.”

Before Ivan had a chance to speak his old man pulled up and they all went flocking to him. Ivan looked almost resentful.

“Where is Luckmore?” Mr. Hascott wanted us to tell him but, of course, we didn't know so he turned to the crowd. “Where is my bossboy?”

They didn't know, either.

“Those wicked people, they set our homes alight with fire.”

“I hear you, but
where's my head workman
? Where's Luckmore?”

The crying got louder.

Mrs. Hascott was helping a kid who'd cut her head and was bleeding all down her dusty dress.

“We have to call the police, Glen,” she told her husband.

Pa Hascott looked ready to hit someone. “I can't.”

“We must.”

“What's the bloody point? I recognized at least four of them up there that
are
the police.”

“You have to do
something
.”

While Mr. Hascott stood stuck, Ivan finally let out a huge cry and jumped back into the pickup, murdering the throttle; only his old man snapped out of it and stood in the way and Ivan had to slam on anchors.

“Where the bloody hell do you think you're going, my boy?”

Ivan kicked the door open. The veins on his neck stood out. “Mum's right.”

“Don't be so bloody stupid. You're staying here.”

“I'm getting the guns.”

“That's not the answer.”

“They're going to break into our
house
.”

“No, they won't.”

“And where the hell
is
Luckmore?”

“Most of that lot are high on beer and grass and itching for an excuse. Let them be and they'll go away. You know how they are.”

“No, Dad, I don't.” Ivan's frustration bubbled over. “They've never gone this far before. I'm getting the—”

Before he'd had a chance to react Mr. Hascott had gone up to his son, given him one around the face and whipped the keys from the ignition. The crowd hushed. Mrs. Hascott rocked on her crutches while the little girl darted back to her mother.

Ivan spat blood.

“You're staying here, is what. We all are,” his old man ordered.

Ivan said, quietly and icily, “When are we going to turn it around again and fight for what is rightfully ours? We can't let them keep pushing us around. We have to stand up for ourselves and shit back.”

“What are you talking about? We got through the war, we can get through this.”

“We
lost
the war. But we kept the farm. It's all we have left, and now you're going to let them take it.”