Out of Shadows (6 page)

And he jeered when he saw I'd taken a black one.

That evening, while we waited for the supper bell after chapel, Simpson-Prior was telling everyone that my old man was
making me stay at school for the half term. Nelson was back from training, and I yelled at Simpson-Prior in my head to keep his mouth shut.

“Where will you go?” Nelson asked when we were alone, as I knew he would. “Do you want to stay with me? My folks won't mind. We can go to the movies in town, have a laugh. It'll be fun.”

I stumbled over my words. Over by the table, Ivan was watching.

“Will you have to do training?”

“Yes, a bit. I have to train every weekend now.”

“Don't worry.” It was less complicated to lie, and it came more easily. “I'll see if I can get my dad to change his mind.”

Firsts lost the rugby
. Only just, but the two-point margin might as well have been a hundred because Prince Edward boys always thought they were far superior for a reason no one could remember. They mocked our supporters even before the final whistle, and teased us for having blacks in our school without actually saying those words. In the new era everyone had to have blacks, only that didn't make any difference, they still hated us so we hated them.

Our school prefects were furious and made us do an extra war cry before we could go.

Ivan's dad was in the parking lot by his pickup. He was a short, stocky man with big arms and a big belly, and a small Tobacco Farmers' Union hat on sun-bleached hair. His face was brown and coarse. He wore khaki shorts and
veldskoens
with no socks, with the red of a box of Madisons poking out of his breast pocket. With a spiked voice he told us to hurry and get in the back of the truck.

The late-June sky was pale and clear, and the air gnawed into our bare skin as we journeyed through the shade of the
capital's architectured valleys. The roads were rivers of noise and exhaust; school seemed so far away.

Mr. Hascott needed supplies and gave us ten dollars each to catch a movie.
Return of the Jedi
was showing at the Kine 400 so we went to watch that. Afterward Ivan had fun walking behind people and scaring them with Darth Vader noises.

As we left town, we stopped to get ice creams from the Borrowdale Dairy Den.

“Get me a Coke,” Mr. Hascott barked. “If they tell you they haven't got any cold ones they're lying.”

The Den was empty for a Saturday afternoon. Ivan and I sat at the counter and tried to give our order to the waitress, but she looked worried and couldn't concentrate. She had deep furrows stretched across her dark skin because of a white guy over by the window who was opening sachets of sugar and pouring them over the table. It was Greet.

I wanted to leave but it was too late.

“Well, well. Look who we have here. Still wearing the stripes, Jacklin? Let's check them out.”

For the last three evenings I'd been the star attraction in the showers, yet again, thanks to my latest trip to Greet's study. I'd made his bed with a crease. Now I did as I was told and lifted my shirt to uncover the mess across the bottom of my back. I didn't know if he'd meant to miss quite so badly.

It wasn't the worst he'd done to me recently. The week before I'd put a toe onto the grass and he'd made me stand against a wall and fired darts made from paper and six-inch nails through a plastic tube. One had just caught my arm. Before that, for nothing more than fun, he'd squashed me into a trunk, fastened the lid, and sent me skating down the stairs—the trunk had caught halfway down and flipped three times.

He grinned. I despised him and that grin alike.

“Piece of bloody art,” he said. “So what are you two girls up to?”

Ivan held Greet's eye. I wished he wouldn't. “Going back to my farm.”

Greet exaggerated his hand to his ear. “
Your
farm? Are you sure about that?”

Ivan said nothing.

Greet swung his legs out toward us and I felt sick.

“Let me give you a bit of advice, Hascott. When you leave here with those delicious ice creams that the filthy Kaffir over there has put her fingers all over, ask your old man what he plans to do when our great leader takes
your
farm. You'd better start paying more attention in class because you'll be getting nothing once Mugabe has finished with you lot. You'll have to get a proper job that requires brains.”

Ivan shook his head. “Mugabe won't take our farm. He's not allowed.”

“
Ja?
Are you sure?”

“My dad says so. Willing seller, willing buyer. That's what the law says, because that's what Mugabe agreed to at the end of the war.”

“I've got news for you: Mugabe's a liar. He told people what they wanted to hear—anything, as long as it got him in power. Which means, stupid, he'll find a way to take your land. You think the war's over? Trust me, the blacks are still fighting, and they won't stop until they've kicked us whites out of our own bloody country.”

Something my father had once said came to me:
Britain claimed this land and called it Rhodesia. . . . It was anything but fair
.

I even opened my mouth but Greet sent my tongue scurrying back.

“You're just a fucking Pom, what would you know about anything? Shut it.” He chuckled to himself and took out his smokes. “I'm kind of looking forward to it because, once we've gone, the blacks will start fighting themselves.”

“It won't happen,” Ivan insisted.

“ ‘The whites will have to be culled.' Mugabe actually said that. Our leader. Has everyone forgotten that we've got a gook running our country? A terrorist. And terrorism is all a terrorist knows.”

He finally turned my way, but only to blow angry smoke rings at me.

“No use looking to your boyfriend here for sympathy, the Poms are on Mugabe's side. Now hadn't you better run along and show him your farm, while you've still got it?”

We ate our ice creams in the back of the pickup with barely a word, and Ivan ended up tossing his over the side with still more than half left, his appetite gone.

The road retreated in a cloud of diesel and the city shrank beneath the
msasas
and
kopjes
. His dad was going fast now. Occasionally a cluster of African huts appeared off to the side, where children stopped to wave; and at one stage, when it felt there was nothing but us and dry bush in the world, we overtook an old-timer pedaling hard on naked rims. He wobbled and nearly fell over yet still managed to flash a huge smile at us two white boys in the truck.

This didn't look like a nation still at war to me.

After more than an hour from the city, we left the tarmac and hit dirt. The tires rumbled over corrugated track and red dust swirled around the open cab and got in our eyes. We passed a sign that read
HILLCREST FARM
. We were on Hascott land but it was still another ten minutes before we turned between high-security fences and onto the edge of a green oasis.

The farmstead was an ornate, Dutch-style bungalow, probably over a hundred years old, robed in bougainvillea and with a raised veranda as wide as the house. The garden ran down a gentle slope, the borders of the flower beds carving
sharp, European order between bursts of wild African color. And right at the end of the lawn, a swimming pool rippled a reflection of the sinking sun. Beyond, miles and miles of brown-green
vlei
all the way to the hills.

Mrs. Hascott was on the veranda. She put down the book she'd been reading and leaned forward as though watching a train come into view.

“Howzit, Mom.”

“Hello, my boy,” she said in an accent that was harsher than I expected and pulled a sweater over her shoulders.

She might have been quite pretty once, with green eyes like Ivan's and jet-black hair, but closer up she was tired and drawn. She looked old before her time, and I wondered if that's what living through a bush war—out here, actually in the bush—did to you. I thought of my own mother and wished I was at home with her.

It was strange that she didn't get up to welcome her son, but as we climbed the steps I spotted her crutches. Only one leg found its way out of the blanket on her lap. I tried not to stare.

Mrs. Hascott got Ivan to give her a peck on the cheek then ruffled his hair. Ivan made a face.

Over by the gate, Mr. Hascott let out a strangled cry and slammed the door as he jumped back into the pickup. The very tall farmhand who'd been speaking to him had to jump out of the way to avoid getting hit.

“Where's Dad off to in a hurry? Luckmore done something wrong?” Ivan asked.

Mrs. Hascott sighed. “No. Trouble on the perimeter again, you know how the old workers like to make trouble. They're still bitter, but if they think they're going to get their jobs back they can think again. Now go on, don't be long. Dinner in an hour. The dogs are out, by the way.”

It was scant warning. The sound of barking erupted and a couple of huge Rhodesian ridgebacks came bounding around from the back of the house, showing their teeth. I stayed as still as possible while Ivan wrestled them to the ground and played with them until they yelped.

They weren't the only ones happy to see him.

“Mastah Ivan! Mastah Ivan!
Kanjani
.”

A large African woman appeared at a side door. A simple floral dress hung from her enormous bosom, and the baby strapped to her back in a towel bounced as she danced and clapped cupped hands.

“Hey, Robina!
Kanjani
.” Ivan went quickly over to her. He seemed more pleased to see the maid than his own mother. “I've missed you, the food's even worse this term. What are we having?”

“Tonight you have shep-hedds pie, your favour-itt. I make it special special, number one.”

I was stunned. This wasn't an Ivan I knew. And the surprise went on when he took me to the workers' village and we kicked a football around barefoot with the little
piccanins
until it was too dark to see. When we left they danced around us, laughing and singing, “Bye bye, Mastah Ivan.”

On the way back he detoured us to the pool and produced some Madisons.

“You want a
gwaai
?”

I looked around nervously and said no. He fired up a match and lit his smoke, and then we sat in front of the blackness, the vague outline of the hills against a starry sky all we could see.

“Greet's an arsehole.” He took a big drag. The cherry glowed and lit his face, and in that moment I knew what he would look like as an older man. I shivered, perhaps from the cold.

“He's a bastard,” I said.

“That's because he hates you. I wouldn't take it personally,
he hates all Poms. Poms killed his brother.” Ivan spoke flatly. “That's how he sees it. In the war, gooks divided the unit his brother was fighting with, and they found him the next day pinned to a tree with his own cock in his throat.”

“Jeez . . .”

“A few weeks later the Poms signed the country over to the blacks at Lancaster House, when they should have been sending troops to help us.”

“I didn't know.”

“Well, now you do. And don't you dare tell him I told you. Greet's going to keep at you as it is. Don't haul me into it.” He took another long drag.

“Does your old man know you smoke?”

“You're kidding, right?” He pointed to his backside. “If he gaffed me he'd lash this so hard I'd have an arse for a nose and sneeze shit every time I got a cold.”

“Your old man beats you?”

“Of course. Doesn't yours?”

I didn't answer and pretended to swat away a mosquito that wasn't there, while inside I felt a strange swell of jealousy. My father didn't do anything.

Ivan lit up a second smoke with the first. I took one, too, drawing angrily and trying not to cough.

“He has this stick he calls Moses,” Ivan went on, “because he reckons he could part the Red Sea with it. He uses it on the workers, too. It's the only way blacks learn. My old man's good to them, but you've got to keep a firm hand.”

“Is that what your dad was doing earlier?” I asked, shocked. “Beating them?”

“No, that was the local blacks causing trouble. We only employ Matabele now, you see. That's my old man for you—Mugabe is Shona tribe and the Shona and Matabele have always hated each other, so my old man sacks our Shona workforce and goes all the way to the other side of the country
to get Matabele hands. Any chance to piss the government off. The Shona lot come back and stir now and again. Robina's Shona but she's all right, she knows her place. She looked after me and my boet during the war.”

“You don't talk about your brother much,” I said. Ivan strangled his cigarette with his fingers so I quickly changed the subject. “The war must have been scary, hey?”

Ivan came right up close. His eyes glistened in the light of the quarter moon.

“No, actually it was a laugh and a half. We couldn't stop creasing up the day Mum found a mine.” I was starting to wish I was stuck at school after all. “Listen. To what's out there. Listen hard.”

I did. There was nothing.

When I looked back, Ivan had gone as if he'd never been. I was completely alone. Then, in the distance, an eerie rustling. Perhaps cattle shuffling over grass. Whatever it was it was getting close. I strained and shapes started to swirl. A snapping twig. A feral grunt. I had to tell myself it was just a warthog, or something, because otherwise . . .

“Now remind yourself there are gooks out there,” Ivan breathed right into my ear. I almost screamed. “Gooks the color of shadows with guns and knives, who want to steal your land and think nothing of cutting a guy's dick off and making him eat it.”

He started back up to the house.

I trotted to catch up.

Dinner was around a large mahogany table too big for the four of us. Mrs. Hascott asked a few of the usual questions while Ivan's dad attacked his meal.