Zebra Horizon

by Gunda Hardegen-Brunner

  *

  With the play over I had to go back to school. Miss Pembleton was still sailing like a frigate through the corridors, Mrs Davies, the German teacher, still said zack zack, Katastrophe or verboten every 5 minutes, old Lettie was still swearing in 3 languages while pushing the tea trolley round about the place, and during Afrikaans Luciano still wrote fados and his vocabulary in the taal hadn’t improved one bit.

  Kim was still gated. “This damn solitary confinement drives me bloody nuts,” she sighed during the lunch break. “Last week I even went to the dentist to get out of the house.”

  Salvation came from an unexpected quarter. Mr Martin called me to his office and told me to prepare a speech about Germany and my exchange year, a real speech this time. “Your English has much improved, Mathilda, and if you need any help, I’m sure your classmates will give you a hand.”

  “I’ll ask Kim,” I said like a shot.

  “Yes, good idea. Kim has a gift for languages. She won the regional essay competition 2 years ago.”

  Back in Mr Green’s history class I sent Kim a note: Got the answer to your prayers. Mathilda. Kim sat 2 rows in front of me. I watched her unfold the paper, turn round and with an expression of total puzzlement, breathe “huh?” I left her to stew through the Treaty of Ryswick and then the bell rang. Kim wasn’t as enthusiastic as I had expected her to be. “Come hell or high water, my dad is never going to change his mind. To help you would mean I’d have to see you after school and that’s against his gating rules.” She sighed. “I won’t even ask him. He has said no too often.”

  After school Ma Jameson was waiting in the bakkie to collect her brood.

  “Hi Mathilda,” she said. “How are things going?”

  “Fine, fine. Life is lekker.”

  “It’s nice to hear that from a teenager for a change.” Ma Jameson could be quite cynical.

  “Except for one little problem,” I said.

  “Here we go, nothing’s ever perfect.”

  “Oh, it’s only a minor problem. Very easily solved. Mr Martin told me how to do it.”

  “That’s what a good school is all about,” Ma Jameson said. “Lots of kids would say that their headmaster is causing them grief and at Protea High Mr Martin is there to help you.”

  “He is the best headmaster I ever had,” I said winking at Kim. “My German headmasters can’t hold a candle to him.”

  Ma Jameson sighed happily. South Africans always liked to hear that they were as good as or even better than the rest of the world.

  “Not everybody agrees with Mr Martin’s methods,” Ma Jameson said. “But we’ve always supported him.”

  “Ja, he is really great. You know what he told me to do?” I gave her my best grin. “I’ve got to do a speech and it’s not easy for me ‘cause it has to be in English, so Mr Martin said the best thing I could do was to ask Kim to help me, because her English is absolutely fantastic; the whole province was proud of her when she won the essay competition, and I could learn a lot from her.”

  Ma Jameson’s expression changed from smile to tight lipped to smile again.

  “So I thought Saturday would be a good day to start,” I said quickly. Denzil had told me that he had ‘stuff’ to do on that day.

  Ma Jameson let fly an exasperated sigh. “I’m sure you know, Mathilda, that Kim is still gated and that she is not allowed to see anybody.”

  “Ja, but Mr Martin said that in the whole of South Africa Kim is the right person to do the job, and all we want to do is to work, so mebbe…”

  Ma Jameson burst out laughing. “You girls! You don’t give up so easily, do you?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s for a good cause.”

  “All right,” Ma Jameson sighed with a grin on her face. “I’ll talk to Kim’s father.”

  In the evening after the 7 o’clock news Kim phoned to let me know, that Saturday was okay with her dad. “Can you believe it? It took my mom only 5 minutes and he said yes. We’ll have a ball.”

  I had never heard anybody so enthusiastic about preparing a speech and I wondered if Kim was up to something. With her anything was possible.

  As I put the receiver down, Ludwig walked in from work. He kissed Julie, stroked the kids’ heads and waved to me. “Mathilda, before I forget it, I had a chat with James Leroux our Rotary secretary today. He would like you to give your speech to the club on the first meeting in May.”

  “Isn’t it amazing,” I said. “I just had Kim on the phone and she said that this coming weekend she can help me with my school speech. Now I can kill 2 flies with one klap.”

  Greta piped up. “There aren’t any flies ‘cause Mom sprayed the whole house today.”

  Julie and Ludwig chuckled.

  “I think what Mathilda means is that she can kill 2 birds with one stone,” Julie grinned.

  On Saturday morning I packed my reference books in my bicycle basket, and also my costume and a Linzer Torte I had baked the previous day. I was already nearly at the crossing with Baobab Road when I heard Ludwig’s earsplitting whistle. It was his way of calling Alpheus, the dogs, the kids when they got lost in supermarkets, and anybody else who was out of earshot. I stopped dead in my tracks in case he meant me. I turned round and saw Ludwig standing next to a hibiscus bush on the grassy sidewalk, gesticulating wildly.

  Phhh. Kim’s dad has probably cancelled the whole thing.

  But the reason for the whistle was that Julie had had a ‘brilliant’ idea. “I’ve just phoned Allison Jameson,” Julie said. “She’s prepared to take one of Doodle’s kittens, thank God.” Of Doodles kittens, 4 were still with us and my host mum was pulling her hair out trying to find good homes for them.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea to transport the kitten on the bike,” Ludwig said.

  “I guess you’re right,” Julie said. “I’ll give Mathilda a lift in the car.”

  Lolo grabbed Mrs Vleega and announced that the 2 of them were also coming.

  At the crossroads, where one turned into the north coastal road to go to Denzil and into the south coastal road to go to Kim, it started to drizzle.

  “Mom, switch the windscreamers on,” Lolo said from the back.

  A troop of monkeys came out of the bush and we watched them hopping along the fence poles. A car came round the corner. My heart nearly stopped. It was Denzil’s Chev. He was driving with a red haired woman sitting next to him. They were engaged in an intense discussion.

  What the hell is the ‘stuff’ he’s got to do today?

  Denzil drove past us. He didn’t see me. I told myself not to be silly. This woman looked like in her 40s. She could be Denzil’s aunt – or a neighbour. Mebbe he had to help her with something, like take the dog to the vet. South Africans were forever taking their dogs to the vet. But why didn’t he want to tell me that he was taking his neighbour and her dog to the vet?

  At the Jameson’s gate 5 enormous dogs were barking and wagging their tails. They followed us past the guest cottage, the horse stables, the workshop and the garages, all the way to the house. Julie parked the car next to the water tank, a contraption looking like a turret, overgrown with roses.

  The front door stood open and we walked into the Jamesons’ family room, a place Marieke and her crowd from the Kerk wouldn’t have approved of. There was a pool table, a bar stacked with booze bottles, piles of horse racing magazines and a chart showing the meridians with their acupuncture points on the human body – all stuff straight from the devil. Next door was a lounge with a big fire place, followed by an enormous kitchen, from which an endless passage led past bedrooms and bathrooms to a hobby room equipped to do anything from sewing to printing.

  Julie and Lolo, who had never visited the Jamesons before, were flabbergasted by all the animals occupying the place. A parrot whistled from a roofbeam, small dogs were growling from armchairs and 2 lambs and a hen with chicks were busy on the stoep. We shouted our lungs out to announce our presence, but there was no trace of any human being. />
  After a while, a maid with an empty wash basket ambled in from the stoep. She indicated with a generous, 300-degree sweep of the hand that the Master was ‘over there’. ‘Over there’ turned out to be the pigpen where 9 Jamesons, including Granny and Grandpa, were assembled around Justine. Justine was just giving birth to the 6th piglet of her litter. Kim was sitting on a straw bale grinning, participating in the general ‘oh how sweet’ and ‘aren’t they cute’.

  This whole gating thing of hers didn’t seem that bad to me.

  Julie, Lolo and Mrs Vleega left after number 8 had plopped out, its little schnorkel wiped by Grandpa, and was placed at a teat. After number 14 the after birth appeared and Justine feasted on it with great gusto. Kim announced to the rest of the family that she and I were going to do some intellectual work now and didn’t want to be disturbed. Pa Jameson nodded approvingly. We couldn’t start immediately though, because in Kim’s room a maid was kneeling on the floor brushing the carpet. Kim said it would be idiotic to stop her half way through the job and suggested we go for a quick swim.

  “Isn’t your dad going to explode if he sees that we aren’t working?”

  “Don’t worry about him. I bet you he is in the shed, oblivious to the rest of the world, fixing up his Land Rover. He wants to use it to go on safari in his old age.” She grinned. “At the moment it’s all dismantled. It will probably take him until he’s 100 to get that thing going.”

  At the pool a gardener was fishing leaves out of the water. Kim let off a yell. “I don’t believe this.” She tore the swimming pool net out of the garden boy’s hand and raced to the other side of the pool.” Look at that.” She scooped up a little chick that had fallen into the water. “Lukas, you are standing there 5 metres away from a drowning chick and you do nothing about it.”

  “I didn’t see it, Miss Kim,” Lukas said with a vacant look on his face.

  “Hells bells, what’s wrong with your eyes, man? Wake up a bit.”

  She chucked the net on the ground. “The chick’s still alive, mebbe we can save it. Let’s take it inside.”

  “Acute hypothermia, poor little thing,” Granny diagnosed.

  Grandpa lit the gas stove, took the bird in his hands and warmed it up over the flames. “It’s speed that counts,” he growled.

  “Don’t roast the little blighter,” Granny warned.

  “I know what I’m doing,” Grandpa moved the chick up and down. “So Mr Lukas didn’t see anything, eh?” Grandpa shook his head. “These blacks have astounded me all my life with their lack of peripheral vision.”

  Within less than 10 minutes the chick was sitting on a hot water bottle in a basket. Granny put a dishcloth over the basket and the chick started to make little noises.

  During lunch the whole conversation turned around the runners for this afternoon’s horse races.

  “I didn’t even know you had horse races in South Africa,” I said. “Isn’t gambling totally illegal?”

  “Ja, This is one of the crazy things in this country,” Pa Jameson said. “Gambling is against the law. If you want to go to a casino you must go to Swaziland or Lesotho or the homelands and we haven’t got a lottery either, but the government for some reason, has never banned horse races.”

  “And the day they do I’m going to emigrate,” Grandpa got up. “I’m leaving for the race course in 15 minutes.” He looked at his watch. “Today I’ll put all my bucks on Golden Harvest. Who is coming?”

  As soon as Grandpa’s car was out of sight Kim said: “Everything is going according to plan. I was sure they’d all shove off to the race course. Freedom at last!”

  “Gee Kim. What are you up to?” I asked.

  “Nothing extraordinary really. I just want to get out of this bloody prison for a while. I thought of taking the horses for a ride on the beach.”

  I looked out of the window. At the bottom of the slope the hazy expanse of the Big Southern Ocean shone in an enticing blue. “Mmh, I guess that speech can still wait a bit.”

  “Of course it can.”

  “Just remember that I haven’t got a hell of a lot of riding experience,” I said.

  The maid came in to clear the table.

  “Sophie, just go and tell Lukas to saddle Tinkerbell and Skye, please,” Kim said to her.

  Sophie waddled out.

  “Now let’s quickly get the glass eye,” Kim got up.

  “What glass eye? What for?”

  “You’ll see,” Kim grinned.

  I followed her to her parents’ bedroom. She took a key out of a flowerpot and unlocked a drawer containing other keys, a revolver, a broken silver bracelet and a glass eye with a light blue iris.

  Now I’ve seen it all. If you want to go horse riding the first thing you get is a glass eye!

  We went back to the dining room and Kim placed the glass eye on the table. “Here we go.”

  “What are you putting that glass eye on the table for?” I was totally amazed.

  “It’s for Sophie,” Kim said.

  “But Sophie’s got her own eyes.”

  “This is a special surveillance eye,” Kim grinned. “Sophie thinks it’s watching her while we are not here. Without that glass eye she’d drink our booze, pinch our sugar, put her feet up and not do any work.”

  Tinkerbell was a 15 year old mare, who knew how to slide down the sand dunes on her bum and enjoyed a little laid back gallop in the spent waves. Kim rode as if Skye was an extension of her own body; she had started to ride at the age of 3. When we arrived at the far side of the bay my muscles were aching, and when we got back to the Jamesons’ place the insides of my knees were raw. I could hardly get off old Tinkerbell’s back.

  “This is terrible,” I groaned hobbling towards the house. “And it’s going to be worse, ächs.”

  “I always thought the Germans are tough as hell,” Kim said. “And now one gentle ride on old Tinkerbell takes the steam out of you.”

  “Boetie, I must have used muscles I didn’t even know I had. My whole body is sore. What I need is a hot bath. My gran says that helps to take the surplus lacto acids faster out of your system.”

  “Oh, all right,” Kim said. “And while you are in the bath we better start on your speech, otherwise we’ll get nothing done.”

  We got comfortably organized in the ‘girls’ bathroom’. I lay up to my neck in hot water, and every now and then I stretched a hand through the layer of jasmine scented foam to grab a piece of Linzer Torte or some other sustenance. Kim was sitting on the toilet a writing pad on her lap, shlurping chocolate milkshake and taking notes. Doodle’s kitten snoozed rolled up on a towel somebody had thrown in a corner, and the parrot whistled from the roofbeams.

  An hour later Kim put the pen down. “Here we go. I’ve just…” She let off a yell fit to make the window panes rattle and jumped with a major leap off the toilet.

  “Pirate! Where is that blooming parrot?”

  “2 spoons of sugar in the rooibos tea,” Pirate croaked from the top of the cupboard.

  Kim leapt to the bathroom door and threw it open. “Outside you useless bird and you better hurry up.” She ran to a shelf, grabbed a feather duster and waved it in the parrot’s direction. Pirate screeched like a metal cutter and disappeared into the passage.

  “You know what that bloody parrot did?” Kim resumed her seat on the toilet. “He shat right on the notes; the paragraph about Berthold Brecht and Hermann Hesse.

  “D’you think it’s a sort of sign that one should change it?”

  “No ways. We are not going to make more work for ourselves just because of some parrot shit. Are you nervous about that speech or what?”

  “No, not really…mebbe a bit…but a long shot from how I felt a couple of months ago when Mr Martin first asked me to do a speech.”

  “Your English is much better now.”

  “Ja, and I’ve got the benefit of real stage experience.”

  “Good,” Kim said. “I reckon we’ve done enough for today. How are your muscl
es?”

  I shifted around in the hot water. “Much better.”

  The dogs barked, a hooter went.

  “The clan is back,” Kim said.

  Car doors banged and everybody outside was talking at the same time. Jamie was the first one in the house. “Kim, Kihim.”

  “We are here,” Kim yelled.

  Jamie stormed into the bathroom, 3 of the big dogs hot on his heels. “Guess what happened.”

  “Uh…Golden Harvest got disqualified and Grandpa lost all his bucks,” Kim guessed.

  “No no no,” Jamie shook his head vehemently.

  “Grandpa won the jackpot,” I said.

  “How did you know?” Jamie stared at me.

  “Oh, it’s written on your forehead.”

  “Huh?” Jamie looked in the mirror but he couldn’t see much because it was all steamed up.

  “Jamie man,” Kim said, “why do you always take the…”

  2 shots went off in the passage. The dogs went bananas. Kim dropped the writing pad. I swallowed a mouthful of foam. Jamie roared with laughter.

  “Calm down girls, they are only opening the champagne. We already had some at the race course.”

  “So you are not taking the piss out of us?” Kim looked at her brother. “Grandpa really won the jackpot?”

  “He won the Pick Six,” Jamie grinned.

  “How much?”

  “Have a guess.”

  “Uh…1500 Rand,” Kim speculated.

  “Naaaah,” Jamie shook his head.

  “2157,” I said.

  “Nope, but you are getting closer.”

  “Come on, tell us,” Kim said impatiently.

  Jamie put his index finger on the mirror and wrote: 11.364,26.

  “Gee, that’s a big one,” Kim gasped from the height of her throne.

  “Hey girls,” Grandpa trumpeted through the house. “Where are you? Come and celebrate with your old grandpa.” He stormed into the bathroom, a bottle of sparkly in his hand and the rest of the clan in his wake. “Have some bubbly.” He passed me the bottle.

  “Grandpa, for a lady you could pour it into a glass,” Jamie said.

  “As far as ladies are concerned most of them like some privacy in the bathroom,” Ma Jameson observed from the door. “Come on Grandpa, leave the girls alone.”

  “Ah…pardon me…uh, I hadn’t even noticed.” Grandpa frowned. “Just as a matter of interest Mathilda, what are you doing in the bath anyway – with all these plates of food around you and sheets of paper all over the show?”

  “Uh…writing a speech. Hot water…uh… stimulates the circulation in the brain.”

  “You modern kids,” Grandpa shook his head. “All I know is that booze stimulates the circulation in the brain; so keep the bottle and get out of that bath fast, because we are going to have a major celebration.”

  “Really Grandpa, where?” Coral asked.

  “Hm,” Grandpa scratched his chin. “First I thought of a larney place like the Blue Dolphin Hotel, but on second thoughts I reckon we would have much more fun at a real down to earth place, like the German Club. Ja,” he grinned all over his face, “lekker beer and an ordentlike Eisbein and Sauerkraut, and there is always that oompah band with that fat trombone player blowing his false teeth out.”

  “And me?” Kim said meekly. “D’you think I can also come?”

  “Of course you can, my girl,” Grandpa said with spirit. “If your father has any objections I’ll disinherit him.”