“Put the phone off. Let’s dance,” he instructed.
His right-handed snatch was so fast that she didn’t feel her phone go. It was in his hands and he cut the call in one deft movement. His left arm was around her, his hand at the small of her back, controlling her centre of gravity, pulling her pelvis urgently towards him.
As her crotch collided with his, she felt it—unpleasant and unyielding as it was at this ugly moment—the thing urging him on, the madness that made no sense. She tried to withdraw but he was too strong, oblivious to her poorly concealed and rapidly growing revulsion.
“Please Neels, I really don’t feel well.”
“I can make you feel better,” he assured, his breathing ragged, the acrid smell of alcohol on it.
He’d pocketed her phone, allowing his free right hand to move swiftly over her body, seizing her breasts and then quickly round her back at her waist, searching for a gap between the layers of shirt and skirt.
“No Neels, my father is reeeally coming now, I don’t want him to see us.”
“He won’t see us.” His voice was urgent, the pitch rising sharply with his lust. “Let’s go to the hedge.”
His fingers had found the breach and in one smooth movement his rough, calloused hand surged down inside the skirt, under the elastic of her G-string and over the tailbone in between the melons of her buttocks.
She wriggled as strongly as she could, but his left hand held her expertly so that no matter which way she squirmed, he kept control over her.
“Don’t mess my clothes—Pa is a policeman, he sees everything.”
“I know your Pa is a policeman,” Neels reminded her, ignoring her implied threat. “I leave no evidence.”
“Please Neels… I’m really not well.”
He just laughed at her. The cushions of her buttocks either side of his searching fingers were turgid, solid with taught muscle, soft with luxurious skin, padded by femininity in the flush of youth.
Like a diviner finding the well, he sensed the humid blush of womanhood before he touched it. It drove him forward, madly and insistently.
She knew she dared not cry out for help; there was too much risk of social fallout if she did. All she dared do was make muted protestations, her voice thin and strained by efforts to squirm away, to defend herself as best she could in a brutal grip.
But Neels heard none of it. In his mind, her moans were passionate, passion that he confirmed by the slip and slide he found in her.
In the months of their relationship, they’d had many liaisons. At various functions on different farms, she’d been accommodating to his advances; she’d let his hands explore her womanhood.
He’d come to expect the indulgence.
She always felt hairless and smooth under his fingers and this excited him to a mild insanity. He’d never seen her in the light, but her fine silky body hair offered no suggestion of shaven stubble. This curiosity obsessed him. The other girls he’d been with always presented a gritty abrasion of hairs rolling under his fingers as he explored their curious folds to eliminate the false entrances. But Sonja presented an enigma he could not get enough of.
In past encounters, Sonja always seemed encouraging, opening up willingly; or that’s how he remembered it. But now she forced him to proceed with increasing effort that felt like a game.
Then, slowly, through the fog of booze and lust, the reality dawned on him that she was clenched as tightly as she could be, that what he presumed to be her uncontrolled breathing and staccato pants were the clutches for air that come with fear and tears.
She was crying.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” He retracted his hand and shoved her away.
“I told you, I’m not well.”
“Rubbish,” he said. “You’re talking shit. It’s something else ‘ne? It’s that black bastard... that prrrrretty boy! You’ve been pulling away since I gave him a little klap.”
His voice rang with outrage and Sonja feared for an instant that he’d open-handedly hit her. She cringed and he glared. He’d done it before; slapped. Not her but other girls.
She was snivelling and hating herself for it. She wanted to agree with Neels, say it out aloud. “Yes… It’s Dara and what you did to him. He is intelligent, decent, cultured. You are a brute that disgusts me! You are a coward to hit from behind and then throw me aside; bruise my arms that I had to hide from my family.”
She wanted to tell Neels the truth of who and what he was; a pig and a bigot. Not even a man, just a cowardly thug.
But too much rode on her blurting that out; there was just too much community intricacy.
Instead, to keep the things of her heart secret, she forced herself to protest as best she could, weakly. And the feeling of doing so soiled and degraded her within.
She knew all too well that Neels had an irrational grudge against the newcomer, a vendetta that was backed by the Dominee and others. That any defence of Dara, even admitting that she knew and remembered his strange name, would turn even her father against her and too many others with him.
That Neels was hunting Dara, stalking him like prey, was common knowledge by most of the town. They thought it quite entertaining to watch the hunt unfold.
That this foreign boy had touched her affections was not known by anyone.
That Neels had latched onto the truth, accusing her directly in this rage, was deeply unsettling.
These facts were a baying crowd of madness, crowding Sonja as she tried to back gingerly away from the maniac before her in the pale light.
To protect the newcomer from the outrage that would explode if she admitted any hint of it, she denied and denied, and she denied again the accusations that came streaming at her from Neels with a tempo and ferocity that made her legs buckle. As he drove himself into a rage over it, he walked steadily toward her. She backed away; his hostility increasingly laced with a barrage of curses.
“You want to fuck that little black bastard, ‘ne?” Neels’ voice was high in pitch and rising in volume.
“No, Neels. Stop, please stop—look, there are people coming this way.”
The ruckus he’d caused had been heard from afar and a small group of fathers were coming to investigate.
“Wat gaan nou aan?” Neels’ father called.
“Niks nie Pa, niks… niks,” he assured his father with a bluff.
He embraced Sonja for the approaching men to see, and called an explanation to them, “Sonjatjie’s jaloers oor die meisies, ek gee net versekering.”
His blatant lie, claiming her jealousy of the other girls made Sonja want to retch. She wanted to shout her protest that she needed no reassurances or anything from this vile pig, but ancient cultural sanctions welded her mouth tight.
Neels’ father laughed. They were so close she heard one of the men scoff, “Women!”
With that the group of recently concerned fathers chortled their disdain for the silliness of this little girl, “Toe maar, Sonjatjie—niks te bekommer oor Neels nie, hy’s 'n gentleman.”
A ‘gentleman’ they called him; ‘nothing to worry about with him’. She wanted to shriek with hysteria, with laughter and tears at the insult, but she swallowed. “Ja, Oom, ek weet… Ek is sommer net belaglik,” Sonja agreed, twisting internally with disgust and frustration at hearing her own voice offering the cultural cliché expected of her, the echo of it assuring the men that she was being ridiculous.
Neels let her go and walked away a few steps in the tracks of the retreating men then turned and said, “Vang!” as he threw her phone to her.
She fumbled the catch in the dark and the handset clattered to the stony ground. Just then, the police van’s headlights peaked over the rise approaching the farm.
She picked the phone up and it illuminated in her hands. The device had cost her months of chores and it represented a thread of sanity, a pivot for ambitions that lay in the wide world beyond the village. The lit screen was cracked and she started to cry softly out of humiliation and frustration.<
br />
Taking a few moments to gather herself, Sonja straightened her skirt in the dark, wiped her eyes and walked slowly after the retreating silhouettes, heading in the direction of the parking lot where her father would shortly arrive.
She didn’t want her father to know about this. Neels was too cunning; even in his inebriated condition, she dared not challenge him among men. He’d swing it on her, the fathers and his friends would back him, and she’d be exposed for the legitimate liaisons she’d had with him in the past, liaisons that no adult in the community must learn. Her father would be disgusted and blame her for tonight; he’d accuse her of leading Neels on.
Besides, she felt ashamed and just wanted to leave this place without further delay. She wanted to shower and be in her own safe space.
More than that, her brother would be here soon. With one word of this from her to him, he had the physical capacity, the financial insulation, and the legal means to wade in and put Neels in his place or somewhere worse. But it would rip everything she knew and loved apart—her family and her community.
She had to simply absorb the insult of it all and contrive to avoid Neels for another few weeks. Then she’d leave Carnarvon to study in Cape Town and never have to face this unpleasantness again.
Within a few minutes, Andre was out of the parked van and his voice barked his greetings to the group of friends who were approaching him out of the dark. They all shook hands and slapped backs. The cavernous drone and throaty rumble of her father’s voice was unmistakable.
Neels had caught up with the men and Andre greeted him warmly and extended hearty congratulations on his birthday and new wheels. They’d laughed together, like a father and son might.
Then Andre saw Sonja approaching slowly, reluctantly; her shoulders rounded. Andre immediately broke and went urgently to her. He embraced her quickly and, for the first time ever, she felt instant revulsion. The feeling of those powerful arms around her so soon after her encounter with Neels made her want to retch.
Andre instantly felt her reaction; Neels saw it too.
“What’s wrong my darling girl?” Andre asked anxiously.
Neels cut in on her behalf. “She’s been feeling sick Oom … and also a bit upset, you know… so many girls here.”
“Ag my baby-girl. You’re so silly,” Andre kissed her forehead and she recoiled within.
Chapter 13
A delegation of politicians and global press was in town and Marsha’s keynote speech was upon her.
“There are so many aspects to this, so much I could potentially talk on,” she told the organizers. “I’m hard pressed to pick between topics. I could stick to my own narrow focus of hard-nosed science. The promised outcomes from this project are tantalizing and on paper, for all humanity into the future, and they outweigh the impact on this community many times over. But lives aren’t measured on paper. It’s a dilemma for me.”
“Don’t become so emotionally involved,” they told her. “It’s an ideal platform to direct the international spotlight onto the positive outcomes for local issues. Can you work something like that into it?” they suggested, and there was a clear instruction in that suggestion.
That evening she chatted around the communal table.
“I want to expand this beyond covering the local impoverishments, which I’ve been briefed to pursue. If I dig too much into that, I’ll feel obliged to also detail the stresses felt by the community, and that’s not what I’m paid to do,” she admitted. “This is about science, so talking about the details behind what we’re up to is unavoidable. It’s gonna be filmed for a global audience who know little about the underlying implications. I really want to make people who don’t care or think about science, to grasp the relevance of this project within the global cultural drift. I want the audience to realize that this is just one peak of a larger groundswell of cultural change.”
She turned in early and fell asleep thinking about it. When she awoke, her plan was ready.
As she took to the podium, her heart fluttered. She hated the limelight but saying what she had to say was more than merely going through the motions of duty to the job, it had become an imperative in her mind.
“There is a prejudice,” she began, “a prejudice that in Africa, the world need only focus on seeing that the bare basics get delivered; elementary education, some food staples, maybe clean water and a little low-grade energy to keep the natives from becoming restless.
“I think that, in large measure, this stems directly from the charity drives of our recent past. What they did was reduce Africa in the minds of the world to a basket case; ripping up the Hollywood image of Tarzan and jungles and replacing it with dusty, fly-ridden malnourishment. The entire focus became fostering a continent-wide subsistence.
“When one stops to consider it from this perspective, it’s hard to imagine a more outdated colonial view. We, liberal and socially sensitive as we think of ourselves, recoil in horror from this reflection of ourselves.”
She paused a moment to assess the audience’s mood—she had their full attention.
“This project, the SKA, is the big break for Africa. At the very least, it is a chance to become a world leader in data storage and management. Imagine, if you can, Africa and South Africa as the leader in the storage and management of data. Because, no matter what, with the inevitable needs of the SKA to manage and store vast data in ways we cannot even understand at this moment, the onus falls to us to find a solution—a solution that will be commercially used in countless other industries. I’m painting for us a picture of Africa… Africa! Of Africa leading the world in data technologies, with all of the commercial opportunity and upliftment that this implies; teaching the proverbial man to fish.
“This project is not going to hand out food stamps. Instead, we will give something so much more valuable. We are simply going to force Africa to rise to a challenge that some may think impossible.”
Marsha had delivered the message that was expected of her, and she saw the tilting of heads and squints that betrayed skepticism creeping in. She had anticipated this and had the antidote ready for delivery.
“Half a century ago, there was nothing to distinguish between the two Koreas. They were both impoverished, peasant societies living—yes, like the image of Africa—subsistence lives. The tragedy that became North Korea is too well known to depress you with, but the miracle of South Korea that took the high road and grasped the challenge of educating its people—that must be our beacon. In practical terms, what transpired for Korea is that, today, half of us are driving Korean cars and using Korean electronics.
“The overwhelming message from Korea is that they didn’t do all of this by waiting for something from outside to be given to them; they didn’t do it by clinging to an ideology. They did it through education and through investment into technology.”
Marsha looked about; the body language of the skeptics was changing and she was winning them over. So, she pursued that tack for a few more minutes, urging the politicians and luminaries in the audience to get behind the project, to see the blue-sky potential of it. To see the unknown opportunities that developing new technologies inevitably deliver, opportunities that can’t be planned, and opportunities that just arise when breakthrough science unfolds.
She then swung the direction of her speech and expanded on the need to come to grips with the broader and more global social and societal elements of change.
“None of us alive today will see the distant future, yet we care about the survival of our species even though the atoms of our own mortal remains will return via microbes or incineration to the earth.
“It is curious that we care about the future. Why should we care if we are mortal, just a bag of chemicals that returns to the earth to become other things; to become nitrogen in the grass for cattle, carbon for new bodies, and water in new rainfalls?
“Yet we, alive today and every generation that went before us, have been universally concerned about how things wi
ll turn out long after our consciousness is no more.
“Of course, we will leave behind the legacy of our decisions and attitudes. We will leave our DNA in our children—but that is not us… we will be gone. This sort of dry scientific objectivism is often attacked by mystics who hope to claim a point in favor of a deity and an afterlife. Well, I protest. Let me categorically say that we care just as much—maybe more—because we understand the fundamentals and improbability of life and sentience, and that understanding sharpens our appreciation of it.
“I would argue further that science-based thinkers are even more intrigued by the future and want the best for our species and biosphere because we grasp how impossibly rare our earth and the life on it is, in the vast frigidity of space.
“Of course, biologists will point out an additional factor that is not obvious to the layperson: that we are concerned because survival of that which makes us, our DNA, compels us to care. In the same way, it is our DNA that ultimately compels us to breathe, to eat and to seek pleasure, and reproduce.
“In a very real and tangible way then, survival of our species is written through natural selection into the very fabric of every living thing. After all, those lineages that failed to impart to their protégés this peculiar objective of caring about the future, simply did not see their DNA prosper as ours has.
“Put more plainly, the genes that didn’t care about the future got out-competed by the genes that did care. And each one of us here, present, healthy, sane and not entirely psychotic, carry them in abundance. The non-carers went extinct—we are not them. The few psychopaths who don't care, who slip through, are simply noise in the statistical probability.”
There was a mild disturbance in the audience as a mobile phone rang and the owner squirmed to retrieve it from a pocket without standing up; he extinguished the embarrassment quickly.
“So… we care about the future, that is inherent in our genes.
“For better or worse, because we’re moving rapidly into a highly technological age, humanity and our economy and therefore our stability's future is now deeply tied to understanding the nature of the very-very small—the quantum world—and the very-very large—the cosmic one. In our mundane, everyday lives, we sit at the boundary between these two extremes.
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