On 17 January 2012, just months after Frazier died, Ali turned seventy. The newspapers looked back on his extraordinary life and presented potted accounts of his best fights, usually including all three against Frazier. They also compiled lists of his wittiest adages and best-known rhymes. For the first time I saw both lines of the famous couplet: ‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, / his hands can’t hit what his eyes can’t see.’
Mainly though the press focused on Ali’s frailty, on how sad it was to see an athlete once renowned for his speed and grace reduced to a doddery puppet by Parkinson’s, but also how bravely he had fought the disease. Lesser men, they said, would have been in the grave long ago. Oh God, I thought, he’s on his last legs. The rare public appearance Ali made was not reassuring. When he attended a birthday party thrown for him in Louisville at the Center that bears his name, Jeff Powell wrote in the Daily Mail that it would not surprise him if this were ‘the last hurray’. At the end of the evening, which passed without Ali saying a single word, he was trundled away in a wheelchair. Also there in a wheelchair was his old trainer Angelo Dundee, still full of lip at the age of ninety.
The pictures were heart-wrenching: Ali with his head hanging, lips sealed in an unsmiling line, eyes narrowed, wincing slightly as if someone had raised a hand to strike him. He was not long for this world, as they say, and when he departed it, I knew, there would be an outpouring of commentary second to none. The obituaries were already written. They would only need tweaking. Anything I wrote about him then would be swept away like a twig on the flood.
If I wanted to write about Ali, I had to do it now. I was working to deadline.
Branko
Joe doesn’t make a good start at high school. I’m in Standard 8 when he arrives and it’s my duty to keep an eye on him. There’s some boisterous initiation of the new Standard 6 boys: the matrics chase them around on the rugby field and smear them with shaving cream. Strictly, initiation has been banned at the school, but this is good clean fun and no one pays it much attention, until some little tattletale goes crying to his mommy and she phones the headmaster. The matrics are in deep trouble. Porky Laing gets expelled but his dad sees a lawyer and next thing he’s back. Who was the snitch? Suspicion settles on Joe. I know it’s not him – I would hear all about it at home – but nothing I say can turn the tide of animosity. Maybe some of the boys who were at primary school with him are getting their own back? There he was an officious little monitor. He once told Donny Drummond to close his eyes during the Lord’s Prayer, to which Donny Drummond replied: Why don’t you close your eyes, you tit, then you won’t know mine are open. Donny’s brother Morris told me this story as if I had something to do with it. Joe’s know-it-all ways mean nothing at high school. Now he’s just another pipsqueak with no say in anything. Telling tales is an unforgivable sin and he gets sent to Coventry. His friends stop talking to him, even that miserable little shit with the gammy leg and the green hair who befriended him at the municipal baths. At break I see him mooching around on the pavilion with a book under his arm.
Ditch the book, for fuck’s sake, I tell him at home. You’ve got to start looking after yourself. You’re in the A stream with the eggheads, which makes you a doos by definition, and you’ve got to do stuff to make yourself popular. Find yourself a girlfriend before everyone says you’re a rabbit. Come second in the cross-country like Derek Gibbs, who also won a medal at the Maths Olympiad. Get caught smoking behind the bicycle sheds. Stop worrying so much about what people think. Look at Kevin Fowler, I say. He’s a kid in my class, smart as anything but completely out of control. He can’t stand being cooped up in a classroom. When he’s had enough for one day, he splits. After second break, we see him ambling up the gravel drive next to the hockey field and out the back gate, lighting a Chesterfield as he goes. Harry Casual. Actually Fowler is a bad example: soon after this he steals a box of Simba chips off the back of a delivery van outside the tuck shop and distributes all 144 packets on the playground. Robin Hood himself. He’s expelled and he doesn’t come back. Presumably his dad can’t afford a lawyer.
Anyway Joe doesn’t take advice from me. He keeps doing what he’s doing, head down, running on his own track. His eyes are open wide, as if he’s just been punched by Paul Skinner, but he doesn’t see how anything works.
Things brighten up when he gets six of the best for messing around in Industrial Arts. It’s the first time he’s been hit by anyone other than Dad, who bats our backsides half-heartedly with the palm of his hand. Visser, who runs the school workshop, canes juvenile delinquents for the police in his spare time (we’ve heard) and he brings his professional equipment to school with him. The boys who’ve been jacked with this cane have different ideas about it. Louis Ferreira says it’s the end of a deep-sea fishing rod. Dave Pratt swears it was specially made for Visser by The Blind in the workshop where they make the wickerwork baskets. Joe has no idea what he’s been hit with, it was all too shocking, but whatever it was it draws blood. I help him wash his underrods so Mom won’t find out. And I show him how to notch the cuts up on the inside of his school belt like a prisoner counting days. We wear our tallies like a badge of honour. But he doesn’t take to it and he doesn’t get jacked often enough to impress anyone. He just goes on making enemies left, right and centre, real and imagined.
He’s no longer scared of Paul Skinner. They’re in different classes now, thanks to the streaming system, but Skinner takes a big-brotherly interest in him (he assures me). He says it’s almost affectionate, which I find hard to believe. No, Skinner is no threat at all. But Gavin Cochrane has it in for him, he says. He wants to bliksem him. Cochrane is in Standard 7 but he looks like a matric boy. After school he brawls with bigger boys in the bluegum stand on the other side of Clifton Avenue and sends them home with their shirts ripped and their noses bloodied. Cochrane fancies himself as a skinhead. Most of us want to grow our hair long, but he shaves his short and goes around in blue-denim dungarees and thick-soled boots. He’s got a bad case of acne, and his velvety scalp, showing pinkly under the fuzz like the belly-skin of a puppy, makes his cratered red cheeks look more livid. If you say anything about these chorbs, you’re dead. Joe goes to the ice rink at Sterland on Saturday nights and one evening Cochrane pitches up there. Now he’s sure the skinhead is looking for him.
The following weekend, after Dad’s dropped Joe at the rink, he takes me there too and I sneak in and watch from the back of the stands. Cochrane is there, showing off for his inexplicably pretty, alabaster-skinned girlfriend, swerving in and out of the slower skaters, getting his dungarees wet to the knee, behaving like a tit. But as far as I can see, he has no idea Joe even exists. On the other hand, there’s a girl with black curls, looks like a Greek, who’s trying to attract his attention. She keeps drifting into his path on the ice. Why doesn’t he notice her? Skinny but pretty enough. An hour before Dad’s supposed to pick him up, he takes off his skates and leaves. I’m glad to get out of the rink, which smells like a freezer that needs defrosting, and I’m curious too. Where’s he going? Apparently nowhere. He wanders around Arcadia in his army-surplus greatcoat with his skates over his shoulder. My poor lost brother. When some Dutchman comes up to him and demands, Maak ’n las?, he gives him the last few coins in his pocket.
Joe
Mr Palliser the gym master was destined for better things. After languishing in our backwoods school for a year or two, he went off to teach tennis to private-school boys and their mothers. In the interim he did his best to prepare us for adult life. Jumping over the vaulting horse and chucking medicine balls around was all well and good, but if you wanted to produce upright young men who were at ease with the world, you needed to teach them the gentlemanly arts.
The school budget did not stretch far, so Mr Palliser borrowed a few pairs of boxing gloves from a club in town and got us sparring against one another in the gym. He found some fencing épées and masks and we each had a turn. Then it w
as shooting with .22 rifles at the range behind the rugby pavilion. And then the basic throws and holds in Graeco-Roman wrestling, as he called it.
It was a sensible strategy. We couldn’t sit still. The sight of a girl, the thought of her body under her school uniform, a glimpse of vagina and breast in the dictionary made us squirm with erotic imaginings. We were always hitting one another. Barry Davenport kept flapping his mates’ balls and no one put their hands in their pockets when he was around. The best way to get rid of all this energy was hand-to-hand combat, strictly regulated, and Mr Palliser obliged.
The gym class presented me with an opportunity. It allowed a bookish boy with normal hand-eye coordination to set himself apart from a Snoopy Siebert, who spent his breaks cracking open the new acquisitions in the library, one crisp page at a time so their spines didn’t break, or a Colin Deary-Me Favish, whose throat closed up if he touched the fuzz on a tennis ball. In this delicate company, I was a fine figure of a boy. Living with Branko had made me tough. He had absorbed the family creed of standing up for yourself more completely than I. The Blahavić clan doesn’t get into a barney for the hell of it, he said, we aren’t the Skinners, but we don’t let anyone push us around either.
In one of our Graeco-Roman sessions, Mr Palliser paired me up with Charl de Ridder. The mismatch made my classmates snigger. De Ridder was a large-boned, heavy-thighed boy with a disreputable air. He always looked as if he’d slept in his clothes: even his gym shorts and vest were crumpled. The first time he wrestled me to the mat, I felt the stubble on his chin and it reminded me of rough-housing with my father on a Sunday morning when he was trying to read the Express. De Ridder’s schooldays had not gone smoothly and he was two years older than the rest of us.
I was agile and stubborn. More to the point, I’d been to the rofstoei in the Pretoria City Hall with my brother Branko and my cousin Rollie, and I’d picked up a few tips. Not the stupid stuff, like flying kicks and headbutts that obviously required the cooperation of your opponent, but the basics like keeping a low centre of gravity and twisting out of a hold. De Ridder expected to make short work of me, and when he couldn’t pin me, he started to get angry. Rio Rivers had taught me that this was to my advantage. Mr Palliser must have been curious about the outcome because he let the match run on for ten minutes. De Ridder always had the upper hand, grinding his wiry head into my mouth, raking my calves with his horny heels, but he couldn’t keep me down on the mat. Finally, after he’d pushed me onto the wooden floor and taken the skin off my elbows, Mr Palliser called time and punched me on the shoulder to signal his approval. I wished Branko was there to see me give De Ridder a run for his money. He was always telling me to do this kind of thing, to stand up for myself.
In the changeroom afterwards, as I was lacing my shoes, De Ridder sat down on the bench next to me and began to tie an elaborate knot in his tiny necktie. In a small, petulant act of resistance to conformity, he had cut this tie into a six-inch stub and frayed out the silky edge. I thought he was looking for grief, but he wanted to pay me a compliment.
Ja Brainbox, he said, you’re pretty tough.
Thanks.
Another minute and I’d have had you. But well done hey.
Thank you, I said again.
You can moer Wilson.
Wilson. I glanced across at Wilson who was towelling himself down on the other side of the room. What’s his problem?
No man, he doesn’t have a problem. I’m just saying, you could moer him, if you want to.
Wilson was one of the bruisers of the school. He’d got into scraps with De Ridder a few times and always come second. I wouldn’t dream of picking a fight with him. Now here was De Ridder with the tale of the tape. He’d done the measurements, using himself as a yardstick, and on paper, he wanted me to know, I was the better man. The idea was flattering and disconcerting.
Just like Paul Skinner when he punched me in the mouth, De Ridder developed a soft spot for me after this. A few years into high school, the streaming system that had borne Skinner away into the backwaters of Industrial Arts and Business Economics carried him away too. We still saw one another in French, though, where he always came top of the class. This anomaly could be explained: he’d spent four years of his life in France, where his father worked in an aircraft factory. People travelled less in those days and his overseas sojourn gave him a unique status among his classmates. Even more impressive was the fact – could we believe him? – that he’d fucked a married woman, a Frenchwoman of course, slept with her actually, we still used that expression. Sex was completely normal in France, he assured us, even the schoolkids fucked like fish. We were still figuring out how to talk to girls, how to lay our hands on FLs, effies as we called them with counterproductive familiarity, and what we’d do with them if we ever succeeded. De Ridder had been through all that. When he slouched at the back of the class, with his feet hooked under the frame of the desk so that he could bounce it up and down on his knees, up and down, you knew he was thinking about the next married woman who would sit on his lap.
3
Doubles
Two miners killed
Krugersdorp – Two African mine workers died after an accident in the West Rand Consolidated Mine near here yesterday. – Sapa
– Pretoria News, July 1971
Branko
Around the time Grandpa Blahavić came to South Africa, his brothers went to South America. If he’d joined them there, Joe says, we’d all be in Chile.
Bull, I say, we wouldn’t be anywhere. Grandpa might have had a son, but he wouldn’t be Dad. And that guy might have had children too, but they wouldn’t be us.
He knows I’m right, but he won’t shut up. We’d be beetling around in Antofagasta, he says, wearing leather pants and speaking Spanish.
Dad says Grandpa Blahavić wasn’t even planning to come to South Africa, he was on his way to Australia, but when the ship docked in Cape Town, it looked so beautiful he decided to get off.
Why didn’t he stay in the Cape then? Joe asks.
He knew people in Pretoria. That’s what immigrants do. They find some connection to help them out until they’re on their feet.
I’d have stayed by the sea, Joe says. Why come and live in the Transvaal where there’s no water?
There’s Bon Accord Dam, I say.
That’s not water.
Dad tells us that when he got his first car, he took his mother and father down to Durban. They hadn’t seen the sea since they left their island in the Adriatic twenty years before. His mother just sat down on the sand and cried.
In the late thirties, when Dad was a teenager, Grandpa decided it was time to join his brothers in Chile. They’d built up thriving businesses while he was still battling, and they encouraged him to come. It was beautiful, they said, almost as beautiful as Dalmatia. So the arrangements were made; they even applied for passports.
And then?
And then Hitler invaded Poland. Suddenly it wasn’t safe to go anywhere. There isn’t much to thank the man for, Dad says, but it’s a fact that if he hadn’t invaded Poland, we wouldn’t be here in God’s own country.
Joe
Hardly a day passed without someone at the gate looking for work. The women wanted to clean or do the washing and ironing, the men wanted to tidy up the yard. When they rattled the latch on the back gate or the door of the letter box, Mom went out and spoke to them from the end of the stoep. No, we don’t need anybody, I do everything myself. We already have someone to mow the lawn. Sorry.
Then one day a man who was not afraid of the dog came to the door. This was in the morning while I was at school and when I got home that afternoon Mom was still trembling. He came right in and went round to the back door, she said, and Cassie sniffed his ankles and trotted behind him down the driveway.
Usually when someone passed in the street, my dog would follow him along the fence,
snarling and snapping at the wire, and shaking long gouts of spit from his jowls.
I was sitting at the kitchen table eating a sandwich. Sylvie was there too, so it must have been a Wednesday, because she had Wednesday afternoons off when she worked at the Perm. Mom stood at the kitchen sink with her arms folded, pulling the housecoat tight around her and glancing out into the yard from time to time.
What did he want?
He’s very tall, she said, and he has a strange way of walking. His arms are like this – she stretched out her own as if holding a tray – and his head keeps very still. He’s been in prison. And you can see by his eyes he’s been smoking dagga. They’re yellow and wild. Your father should put a lock on that gate, you kids are my witness, how many times have I asked him.
What did you do, Mom? Sylvie said over a Marmite-smeared Provita cracker that was stalled halfway to her mouth.
I saw him coming in, thank God, so I ran to check that the doors were locked. And then I just waited in the passage while he knocked. Tok tok tok. My heart was beating so loud I thought he might hear it. If he’d tried to get in, I would have run out the front and gone across to Auntie Jilly’s. No point phoning your father. What could he do? But after a while the knocking stopped. I crept down to the lounge and there he was just closing the gate behind him, so Cassie couldn’t get out. Useless mutt. He wouldn’t harm a flea.
The Distance Page 4
