Out of Shadows (3 page)

When I went back empty-handed and tried to explain, Ivan snatched the plate. Less than a minute later he came back with a pile of thick white slices.

“You've got to put them in their place,” he said.

I didn't know if he was talking
to
me or
about
me.

Later, when we were getting ready for bed, Ivan came to our side of the dorm.

“Kasanka says I have to stop pushing you around,” he told Nelson.

Nelson looked scared. “I didn't tell, Hascott. Honest.”

“Good. So he shouldn't hear about me ripping up your bed, then,” Ivan went on, and pulled Nelson's sheets and blankets
until they were in a pile, looking at me as he did it. When I opened my mouth to say something, he cut me off with, “Relax, Pommie, it's only a bit of fun.”

Simpson-Prior laughed like it was something cool, but if he thought it would win him favor he was wrong, because Ivan destroyed his bed as well.

“See?” Ivan said to me, as if that proved he was right. “Just a bit of fun. Sleep well, girls.”

At nine exactly our light was snapped off and we were told to get our heads down. Two of the sixth formers, Greet and Leboule, menaced the dorm in the dark for a full ten minutes to make sure there was no talking, Greet knocking a hockey stick against the ends of beds. No one dared do or say anything. They were the top of the school, all-powerful; they could do anything they wanted, so we lay still and hoped they'd just go away.

Every morning, in the haze before waking, there was a brief moment when I thought I wasn't there, that I was far away somewhere else—at home, in England with my grandmother, anywhere. Those were the best moments of the day.

I wrote to my mother constantly, and almost all the letters started with the word “Please.”

One morning at the end
of our very first week, we were waiting for Mr. Dunn for the start of geography. He had told us all to go not into the classroom but around the rugby fields and into the bush slightly, over by Monkey Hill, where there was a special rock formation he wanted to show us.

Geography was the only class Nelson and I shared, and as we walked together behind the rest of the class he pointed out what I thought were patches of weed in the grass and told me to step clear of them.

“Why?”

Nelson bent low and put a narrow finger to something growing the size of a large coin, with two points sticking up.

“Devil thorns,” he explained. “Watch out for those. Tread on one and you'll know about it, it'll go right through your shoe. Hey, look! Lion ants!”

Close by, miniature craters had pockmarked the sandy ground, and Nelson snapped off a blade of grass and gently prodded the edge of one of the indentations.

“What are you doing?” I wanted to know.

“Watch,” he said. “You won't have seen these in England.”

The tiny grains at the bottom of the hole started to shift. I thought he was making it happen somehow, then suddenly they lifted in a mini eruption and something too quick to see darted out, grabbed the end of the grass from Nelson's fingers and pulled it down and into the sand. The grass wriggled as it went, as if trying to escape.

“That's so cool.” I'd never seen anything like it.

“
Lekker
, hey?” Nelson agreed with a smile.

“You didn't wait,” said another voice.

I smelled then heard Simpson-Prior coming up next to me. His feet landed too close to the lion ants and filled in all their holes, and Nelson got up and stood back slightly.

Simpson-Prior hovered accusingly, sweating. The brown grass was taking a particularly harsh beating that day, and even though the sky was full of clouds they seemed too afraid of the bullying sun to get in the way.

“I thought you were going to wait,” he said again.

When I didn't say anything he took my elbow and led me a few feet away.

“Sorry about that,” he went on, meaning the yellowing bruise that Ivan and De Klomp had taken turns in kneading into my arm the night before.

I hid my annoyance and made as if it was no big deal. Simpson-Prior had been caught whispering to see my work during prep and everyone in the study room had got a task for it. As far as Ivan was concerned it had been my fault.

“Hascott's right, we should have been more careful,” I said.

“That's not why he picks on you. He's only like that because . . . You know.” Simpson-Prior checked over his shoulder and made his voice low. “
Jislaaik!
You've got to be careful what you say these days. He's only like that because you're friends with that Ndube. He hates him.”

“Nelson? Why, what's he done?”

“He hasn't
done
anything.” He smirked horribly. “He's just, you know . . . I don't know what it's like in England but you don't really make friends with
them
here. You will let me copy in tests, hey?”

A bee flew close by and he ducked and swatted like a madman. Some of the other boys from the class jeered at him.

“I'm always getting stung,” he explained to me proudly. “Once, when I was eight, a bee flew into our car and stung me five times and I didn't cry.”

“I thought bees could only sting once,” I pointed out.

He paused before shaking his head. “This one stung me five times.”

Suddenly the whole class erupted into commotion. I thought there were more bees but something rustled through the brittle scrub and I felt it move over my foot. By the time I looked, I saw the green markings disappear into the trees. I yelped and staggered backward into a bush just as Mr. Dunn appeared.

“Jacklin!” he bellowed. “What the hell are you playing at? I said
no talking
.”

The snake had slipped deeper into the leaves. It moved quickly, tail flicking. Everyone rushed around and talked at once.

“Where did it go?”

“What sort was it?”

“Must be a python,” Ivan declared. “We get hordes of them on our farm.”

“Or a boomslang. It looked like a boomslang.”

“Hey, Ndube. Catch!” Ivan shouted, flicking something snake-sized at Nelson and making him leap. Ivan and De Klomp cut him with laughs. “Jeez, it's only a piece of bark, you poof. Do one of your witch doctor dances, that should bring it out.”

All the while no one had noticed that Simpson-Prior was now a few meters away and moving stealthily through the tall grass. He stopped to break off a bit of tree, snapped the end so that it was forked, and then gently stabbed the ground.

“
Eweh!
Check it out,” he called.

We rushed over. He'd pinned the snake down, and we all jumped as it thrashed around, but as soon as Simpson-Prior put his hands to it and picked it up by the back of the neck it suddenly came over all calm—sleepy, almost, like it had been drugged—and gently coiled its tail around his arm.

Simpson-Prior's eyes glazed. He brought the snake frighteningly close to his face.

“Green mamba.” His cheeks glowed, and in that brief moment the usual drawn, tense expression had gone and he looked brilliantly happy. For no real reason I felt irritated by him, perhaps because for the first time he seemed less afraid than I was, and I wished I could be that happy.

“She's a beauty. And you found her.” He turned to me, and I felt guilty for thinking the way I was about him.

“Is it dangerous?”

Everyone laughed at me.

“Deadly,” Simpson-Prior nodded.

“Jeez, Prior, you are bloody
penga
,” Ivan said. “Kill it.”

Mr. Dunn agreed, but Simpson-Prior pleaded and asked if he could just let it go.

“Okay. But take it right out into the bush, as far away from the school as possible. And take that clown Jacklin with you.”

The other boys groaned enviously. I asked if Nelson could come with us but Sir said absolutely not.

Nelson was standing on his own, looking adrift and wilting under Ivan's gaze.

“Please, sir?”

Mr. Dunn rolled his eyes and nodded sternly.

“Hurry up.”

Simpson-Prior talked about snakes the whole way. I liked the fact that he was so enthusiastic but at the same time felt sorry for him because it made him even more different from most other boys, and anyone who's different in school will always be a target.

When we were far away, he crouched low and gently put the snake on the ground, readied himself, then leaped back. The mamba had already disappeared. Simpson-Prior laughed with relief.

“Did you check? How quick she moved? Lekker, man. And you found her.”

I think, though I can't remember for sure, that it was a green mamba that killed Jeremy Simpson-Prior. Certainly a snake of some kind. But that was much later, when he was a young workingman doing the thing he loved in a game park down in the low veld, long after he'd run away because of what we did to him. His death, at least, had nothing to do with us.

“. . . So I look down and this thing's going over my foot, and it feels . . . 
weird
 . . .”

The five-minute warning for Lights Out had rung. Most of the dorm were in their PJs and on beds while I was still buzzing with words tripping off my tongue. I must have told the story four times that evening and I didn't mind one more in the slightest. Nelson was by my side, and Fairford and Lambretti and the Agostinho cousins listened intently, while Simpson-Prior waited for the part that involved him.

“. . . and I swear, it checks around at me like it's going to graze my leg, one time.”

I was even talking like everyone else.

“Meanwhile your
machendes
have shrunk to the size of a couple of peas,” one of the Agostinho cousins heckled.

“And let's not even mention the chocolate runway in your
gudds
,” Lambretti rabbit-punched me. Everyone roared.

“Shut up, guys,” I said.

This was great.

A missile flew across the dorm. A shoe. Ivan was standing by the door.

“You girls stop shouting,” he breathed heavily. “I could hear you squealing from the top of the stairs.”

Everyone went to their beds but Ivan didn't move.

“You're sounding like a Pom again.”

“Sorry, Hascott,” I said.

“Greet wants tea. He wants
you
to make it for him.”

“Why me?”

He threw his other shoe.

“Because it has to be someone's turn and I told him it should be you.”

Over the last six nights, some random boy had been selected to make Greet's tea, and at least three of them had come back crying.

“Get a move on. Two cups.”

My stomach bunched and loosened as I stood up to go. It was a comfort to feel Nelson at my side, coming with me, but Ivan blocked his path.

“Where do you think
you're
going?”

“To help,” said Nelson.

“Greet doesn't want
you
touching his mug. He wants Jacklin. Only Jacklin.”

Greet's study was right at the end of the sixth-form corridor. The gloom seemed to thicken the farther I went. His door was open, and as the kettle filled the seniors' kitchen with steam I could hear voices over a watery cassette player trying its best with Def Leppard or Van Halen or someone like that.

When the tea was made I stood at the door and dutifully
lowered my head. Leboule was in there, too, swinging a bat and practicing cricket strokes. Greet himself lay on his bed in the far corner, waving his stick in the air as he broke wind. Above his head, the green and white of the Rhodesian flag clung belligerently and illegally to the wall next to an equally dangerous poster of a white soldier with the words
RHODESIANS NEVER DIE
. It was the only decoration Greet had given his room other than a dozen or so empty Castle lager cans along a shelf instead of books.

A fire crackled. It was January, the middle of summer, but I didn't dare think anything strange about having a fire going.

Greet spotted me first.

“At last.” He pointed toward the mantelpiece. “Put them there.”

The heat of the fire pushed against my trousers as I got near. The smell of wood smoke was strong. There was something mixed with it, and out of the corner of my eye I could see the red of a pack of Madisons peeking out from Leboule's pocket.

Leboule hit an imaginary six. “Who are you?”

“Jacklin.”

“First name?”

“Robert.”

“Serious? As in
Rroh-bett
? Like our
grrreat Mist-ah Mugabeh
?” he mimicked. “Your parents must have hated you. Are you a Pom?”

“I was born in England, but—”

“In that case I loathe you. Get out.”

He turned his back. Defensive shot.

I put the mugs down and turned.

“Wait,” Greet called before I made it. He was holding out his hand. My heart thudded. “Do you expect me to fetch it myself? Bring it to me, you queer.”

One was a Haven School mug, the other was brown and
had a picture of a white family looking over a huge dam with
KARIBA
above it and
RHODESIA IS SUPER
underneath. I'd seen Greet drinking from it before and took it to him. He looked pissed off that I'd got it right.

“Think you're clever, hey, squack? How am I supposed to take it if you're holding the handle? You want me to burn myself?”

“No, Greet.” A tremor had come into my voice.

“Then hold it. Like this. With both hands.”

The warmth spread into my palms and quickly became heat as Greet teased.

“I'm not thirsty yet, go stand by the fire. Nice and close.” He lay back against his pillow. His stick started to swing again. “So you're a Pommie.”

“I was, but now I live here.”

“So? You're still a Pom. In what way do you think you're not a Pom, Pommie?”

Of course, I didn't know.