Part of the Pride (4 page)

From an early age I realized I wouldn't be content just to look at my pets. I wanted to get to know each one, to build a relationship with it and to test the boundaries of how I could react to it, and vice versa. I wasn't cruel to them, just curious. I learned that each bird or animal was an individual. For example, in the pigeon
hok
I discovered the bird in the end box would peck my hand if I tried to take her eggs, but the one at the opposite end would sit aside and tolerate my prying, because I had a better relationship with her and she had a more tolerant nature. From this early age, I became an observer of note, and to this day I am fastidious about keeping notes and records about my animals and every aspect of their lives. I would study my birds and animals for hours on end. I was pretty good at sketching. I could draw a pretty good cheetah from an early age, even though I had never seen one in real life. So I started drawing my animals. I'd draw from life or memory and got help from photos in books. As I drew them, I understood them even more.

My sisters were interested in animals, but not to the same degree as me. My brother liked our pets, but was not as hands on as I was. I have never been one who can look at an animal and say, “That's very pretty.” Instead, I'd say, “I wonder what would happen if I touch you? If I could just get to know you a bit better perhaps we could do more together than just look at each other. Do you know me and recognize my voice? If not, I wonder if I could I form a relationship with you?” These were the questions I asked.

I used to talk to my pigeons. They knew my voice and they would come when I called them, which was very nice. I could bounce things off them, as well, and like the dogs and (sometimes) the cats, they gave unconditional love. The pigeons just wanted some food and a scratch on the head. “Kevin, come and get your dinner now,” Mom would call. “If you don't come now you can sleep with those pigeons.” Sometimes I did, as it was simply better to be with them in the pigeon house than going inside and being witness to the strained relationship that was developing between my parents.

I even tried to develop relationships with the goldfish, which were more my sisters' than mine. I wanted to be interactive with the fish and found the whole concept of keeping them quite amusing. I couldn't believe that anyone would be happy just staring at a fish in a bowl. I used to pat the water and I loved it when the goldfish would come and suck my finger. Eventually I learned that rather than my being able to commune with the fish, they were actually just trying to suck the tiny air bubbles that formed around my finger. I soon realized I'd never be a big keeper or trainer of fish.

I did, however, try and get my animals to do things. I was fascinated with those stories about bird trainers in America who could get their parrots to ride bicycles and perform all sorts of tricks. Before he died, I was able to teach J.R. the parrot how to do bench presses with a pencil.

My career choices as a child included bird trainer, veterinarian, zookeeper, or game ranger. Every young boy in South Africa wants to become a game ranger, but the closest I came to South Africa's national parks and private wildlife reserves in those days was listening to stories from other kids. The Kruger National Park is less than three hundred miles from Johannesburg, but it may as well have been on the other side of the moon as far as I was concerned. Boys would get up in class at show-and-tell and talk about seeing lions and elephants and all sorts of other wild animals in the Kruger National Park, or their family's visit to the pools at Warmbaths, which was considered the height of sophistication as a holiday destination for the people of Orange Grove. I didn't know anything about the wider Africa, with its wide open plains and thorny Bush-veld teeming with wild animals, other than what I'd read in a book or seen on television. To me, Africa was my backyard. When it was my turn to get up in front of the class for show and tell, I would say, “Well . . . err, I found a bird's egg.”

I changed my mind, though, about wanting to be a zookeeper after a visit to the Johannesburg Zoo when I was in grade one. Zoos in those days were pretty bad. The animals basically lived in concrete cages, and the first time in my life that I saw a lion, pacing from one side of its tiny enclosure to another, it was pretty uninspiring. That visit certainly didn't make me want to abandon my birds and bugs and work with big cats. I stood in front of the concrete pen and looked at the king of the jungle, and all I could think was, “Shame, man, what a way for you to end up.” I hated the zoo from that point onwards. It didn't go with what my little animal kingdom in Orange Grove was all about. There was no one, at least that I could see, who was interested in keeping that lion active and alert during his captivity.

While zookeeper was off my list of preferred jobs, I did start thinking that I would quite like to be a vet when I grew up, as I would get to play with animals and make some serious money at the same time. I did well at primary school and I was voted head boy, even though my parents didn't believe it when it happened. I was becoming a naughty child at home, although I maintained an angelic front at school. When I came home, all proud and puffed up, I told my folks the good news, but they accused me of lying. I persisted and they only believed me after they made a point of visiting the school and saw my name inscribed on the big wooden board at the end of the list of all the past head boys. After that, they were very proud of me. I think.

Despite my shiny public persona at school I still managed to get into mischief behind the scenes and out of hours. When I was about ten years old and well into my animal-liberation phase, I became concerned about the plight of some frogs that lived in a terrarium in the science classroom. A mate and I decided that it would be better if we set them free—that is, if we took over their custody until I decided the time was right to return them to the wild.

One Friday at the end of school, we helped close up the classroom,
but made a point of leaving one of the windows unlocked in the science room. We hung around until everyone had left, including the cleaners, then climbed up on to the window ledge and into the classroom. The following Monday all hell broke out and everyone was talking about the missing frogs. Some people thought they might have escaped on their own, but in the end the finger of blame was pointed at one or two environmentally conscious teachers, which my mate and I thought was hilarious. Back home we convinced ourselves that the frogs were living a much better life in a shoe box under my bed than in their purpose-designed terrarium in the science room. Unfortunately, I didn't give them nearly enough water and they died. It taught me an important lesson: just because an animal is caged, it doesn't necessarily mean that animal is neglected.

Thanks to the family situation, which was deteriorating, I never really wanted to go home at night. I became so hooked on releasing things that I took it to ridiculous extremes. Not content just to set free our existing stock of birdlife, I took to raiding nests with a friend after school. We'd take out baby birds which I would raise with the sole intent of later releasing them. When I think back on it I realize what I was doing was horrific, but I loved birds so much I wanted to be part of their lives—even the wild ones'. I climbed an aloe and found a common turtledove's nest. There were two babies, and I remember thinking that if I took one then there was no way the mother could reject the other. In my young mind, I was doing good by raising one of the birds and then letting it go. The problem was that my zeal to raise wildlife—indoors—slowly started taking over our suburban home.

My brother and I used to share a bedroom. While his side of the room was always neatly organized and spotlessly clean, mine was a mess. I'm neater these days, but once my brother moved out, my
birds, snakes, dogs, cats, bugs, and I took over. Mom and the twins and I came home from a night out and there was an officer from the local security company waiting for us outside the house.

“Your burglar alarm went off. There's been a break-in,” the man said. He looked at us and his face was set like granite. “Don't touch anything when you go in as the police are on their way to take fingerprints. Prepare yourself for a shock. The house has been ransacked and one room is far worse than the others.”

Nervously, we followed Mom and the guard into the house, expecting the worst.

“It's actually fine,” Mom said to the man, trying to hide her embarrassment after a brief inspection of our home and my room, which looked like it had been ransacked. “Everything's just as we left it, including Kevin's room.”

My room was a mess, I admit it. Within that mess, I had a growing collection of grasshoppers and locusts, which I kept under my bed. Even though they were right under my bed, the chirping noise of locusts, outside on summer nights, used to terrify me. I could never work out what kind of monster was making this incredible racket just beyond my window. My father found out I was scared of the mystery noise and one night he took me outside and told me it was just a little black cricket that was responsible. We couldn't find one in the dark, and I wasn't completely convinced, but when I heard the same sound screeching from within a box under my bed, I realized my dad wasn't talking rubbish.

Even though he had his problems, I think my dad had a good job, especially when I was much younger and we once went on a holiday to the mountains. I'm sure some people overseas think that everyone who lives in Africa has a small army of servants, and while we had a maid when times were good, when things changed at my father's work we had to let her go. Mom would have to come
home and clean the house and as Dad's drinking got worse, she was under increasing stress.

Things might have been going bad for Dad, but he was still our father and he was a strict disciplinarian. When we were naughty we would get lashed with his thick leather belt. It was his tool of choice and it was effective in getting one of us to talk when no one had owned up to a crime. It sounds harsh, but that was the way things worked when I was growing up.

My brother Gareth was a Goody Two-shoes who always had his nose in a book. I used to read books about birds and animals, but he was into everything, including fiction as well as nonfiction. He studied hard, and these days he works as a veterinarian in the UK. Me, I was the naughty little runt of our litter, with a knack for getting up to mischief and bleeding all over the place.

Gareth and I used to fight like cats and dogs. Although he was four years older, I was much more physical and feisty than him. He was always finding ways to show how much smarter he was than me, and how superior he was. He would taunt me, telling me how he was going to end up as a vet, while I was no good at anything and would come to nothing. We'd end up in full-blown fistfights. I don't remember it, but my friend Dave still tells the story about the day he thought I was going to kill Gareth. I can't even recall what started the fight, but it was one of those real Hollywood punch-ups that went from our bedroom into the lounge room, then into the kitchen and finally out into the front garden. There was a heavy old brass weight in our room and apparently I had taken this out of the house with me. Dave said he had to pull me off Gareth as I was about to bash his brains in with the weight. I guess I was in such a rage at the time that I later blanked it out.

I wasn't only curious about animals. I was just as curious about how different mechanical sorts of things worked. One thing that
fascinated me was the toilet. I guess all little kids are interested in this funny thing that people make jokes about and I wanted to learn how it worked. One day, when I was still quite small, I decided I would take a peek inside the gurgling thing at the back of the toilet that made all the noise after you flushed. I was able to slide the heavy china lid off, but I wasn't quite strong enough to lift it clear. It slipped from my hands and landed on the bowl. The whole thing, lid and toilet, was smashed into pieces.

When Dad came home from work, my brother, the twins, and I were all lined up and told to drop our pants and bend ourselves forward across the big kitchen table, where we used to eat our meals. My dad unbuckled his belt and slid it from the loops on his trousers. He ran the tap in the kitchen sink until it was half full. We could hear what he was doing, and knew why, though none of us dared to turn and watch as he dipped the leather belt in the sink full of water. Wetting it, we knew from painful experience, made the lash of the belt sting even more. We could hear Dad's footsteps on the kitchen floor as he began parading up and down behind us, while we waited there, quivering.

“Right, who's responsible?” he asked.

“Well, it couldn't have been me, Dad,” I piped up. “I mean, I'm not strong enough to even lift the top off the toilet.”

My brother and sisters all blamed each other, but in the end I convinced Dad I was too much of a weakling to have destroyed the toilet and the rest of them all ended up in the shit. I was naughty back then, but later I became a monster.