Dreaming of Light

by Jayne Bauling

  With the deodorant, I buy a bottle of Pepsi. Then I walk to Kellar Park and sit there. I lift my shirt and spray deodorant under my arms. Then I drink my Pepsi very slowly, hoping this will be the day I meet a girl. Or even a real woman, only not too old.

  I don’t see any girls. Maybe the young ones are all at school, the older ones working. There are only a few men and women here, four altogether, and they take no notice of me. It’s a weekday morning so I suppose they’ve got their own troubles, like being out of work. One of the women is sleeping, a man is drinking beer from a plastic bottle, but the others just sit. I stare at a half-circle of mountains that are often busy with paragliders at weekends, but not today.

  I begin to wish I was walking in Wild Frontier country, or along the R38. I consider looking for tourists to guide to the gentle ravine where the most turacos and Narina trogons are, but in the end I just walk back up to Papa’s house.

  It’s earlier than usual when I get back, so Katekani isn’t busy with the cooking yet. She’s sitting on the bench outside my room. When I get closer and see what she’s doing – what she has done – my breath catches and for a moment everything stops.

  She is painting her sticks, decorating them with little red and yellow flowers. A green vine with leaves winds its way through the flowers. A painted stick leans against my bench, and she is just finishing with the other. Two other sticks, old and uneven like the one Aires has acquired, also rest against the bench, for her to use while the paint dries, I guess.

  She looks up at me and it’s as if she’s just waking up from a dream she’s been in. A good dream that she doesn’t really want to leave.

  “Wena, do you like them?” she asks me in a slow, sleepy voice. “My sticks?”

  “They’re nice. Pretty,” I add, and secretly I’m thinking that she is looking pretty again. “But why did you do it?”

  She’s careful, balancing the second stick against my bench.

  “I think . . . I want to have something nice. Beautiful. For when I go away from here and make a different life. Better than this life. Regile, I will always need my sticks, but that doesn’t mean I have to be ugly.”

  “You’re not ugly anyway.”

  The words sound clumsy coming out of my mouth. I feel heat rushing into my face, but they must be the right words because Katekani is smiling at me.

  It makes her look even prettier, never mind the smear of green paint on her chin.

  But then I get the same helpless feeling I had listening to Taiba last night. It’s as if Katekani and Taiba together are making me into someone else.

  Chapter 8

  Katekani waits nearly forty-eight hours before she’s sure the paint on her sticks is dry enough for her to use them.

  She hasn’t wanted to go down to town, so I’ve gone back to wandering around on my own, or finding shady places where I can lie and watch the leaves of trees. In a way, I’m making myself strong for when I have to go back into the mine. In another way, I’m weakening myself, because the leaves and the sound they make and the pattern of their shade are things that will fill my mind in the dark.

  The second day, when I go to fetch the recruits’ evening food, I see Katekani is using the painted sticks. They are bright in a room where nearly everything is a brownish colour. Bright against her dark clothes too.

  “What did Papa Mavuso say about the sticks?” I ask, quick and low, because I can hear him in the next room.

  “Nothing. He just looked and made a noise. Like this.” She makes a sound that begins in her throat and ends in her nose, making me smile. “He only cares if I do something wrong.”

  “Why is he so harsh with you? His daughter.”

  “With everyone. I don’t know.” She sighs. “I think it is from . . . disappointment. When he was a young man he worked in a mine. Legal. Then the mine was closed, men laid off. The same week, someone stole the money he was saving – stole it from right out of his bank account. Now he says doing things the right way is for soft fools.”

  Papa comes in then, so I don’t get a chance to hang around and look at the newspaper lying on the table. I see it’s from last week – the thick paper from Nelspruit that you have to pay for, not the thin, free Barberton one.

  “We do the exercise today,” Taiba tells me in the shed. “Aires, he cannot do. Even for us, the strong boys, is hard. But is good, Regile. Making me strong for when we go find Spike.”

  I don’t say anything.

  Later, when I’ve locked the recruits in and returned the key to Papa, I sit outside my room with my own food, listening to the evening birds. Katekani comes out to me and I see she has got the newspaper with her, her right hand holding it clenched to her stick, so that it flaps against the bright colours.

  At first I think she has noticed how I looked at it, but it turns out that she wants me to read something.

  “I don’t read so well,” she begins, “because of Babe only letting me go to school when he didn’t need me for anything in the house.”

  “I’m not much good either,” I say as she takes her place on my bench.

  “But I saw this name, you see?” Now I see that she is excited about something. “Look, Regile.”

  She’s pointing at a picture. Squatting beside her, I look at it in the grey evening light. It is of a man, not old, not young, wearing a red T-shirt that shows his powerful arm muscles. He is surrounded by what look like paintings, with lots of black and grey and red and orange, except that they seem to have other things stuck on to the paint – chips of stone, bits of barbed wire, curls of wood. They have an angry look about them, but the man himself looks calm and strong.

  “It is the same, isn’t it?” Katekani whispers. “The name? It’s that man Taiba talks about.”

  Then I see the words under the photo. Spike Maphosa, pictured at home in his Kabokweni studio.

  My heart is knocking and there is something happening to my brain because I can’t read the story properly. Some words or phrases jump at me – illegal mining, zama zamas, trafficking of children, forced labour, inhumane conditions. Others make no sense – barbaric, crusade, fund, foundation. My mind is hot and hurrying, jumping too much to let my eyes follow full sentences to the end.

  I look up at Katekani. “He’s real.”

  “Living in Kabokweni.”

  “That’s on my map.”

  “What will you do?”

  The question clears my mind of the mad thoughts – crazy spinning pictures of wonderful, impossible things that are the ordinary life of people who are not zama zamas.

  “Nothing,” I say, and now that my heart has stopped thumping it feels slow and full of rocks. “I won’t do anything.”

  “But Taiba?” Katekani’s voice is urgent.

  “We mustn’t tell him,” I decide. “We can’t let him, you know, get his hopes up.”

  “But Regile, he already hopes,” Katekani argues. “He hopes so hard, he believes.”

  “I’ve heard that called wishful thinking.” I hear how hard I sound, like Papa Mavuso.

  “Sometimes things can go right, Regile.” She sounds as obstinate as Taiba.

  “Never.”

  “Wena, think how good Taiba would feel to know he was right,” she urges. “Spike is real.”

  It’s just Spike for her now too. Her friend and Taiba’s.

  “Think how bad he’d feel, knowing the man is real but there’s no way he can reach him.”

  “If he gets away from here?”

  “Kabokweni is far. No, leave it, sisi. Taiba’s insane dreams are nothing to do with us. They’re his business. His sickness.”

  Katekani raises her flowery sticks to take her weight as she pushes herself upright and looks at me. Her eyes have a sort of fiery brightness, and I know she wants to cry.

  “The mine has stolen your soul!” She says it very fiercely, but with a wobble in the middle of it.

  “If we have souls to start with. It will steal Taiba’s too, in time – you’ll see. He’ll
stop thinking about Spike Maphosa because he’ll know this is his life.”

  “You!” she condemns me. “You’re not locked up, paid nothing. Not any more. You could leave, find other work, here or in Swaziland. But you stay, for money.”

  She makes that last word sound like something disgusting.

  For my mother, I correct her in my secret mind before making myself laugh, an ugly, mocking sound.

  “Think what you could do with such money, Katekani. Leave here and go and live that other life of yours, maybe? Except that it’s not going to happen, the same way that Spike Maphosa is never going to help Taiba and Aires.”

  “I can’t talk to you.” She’s turning from me as she says it, in a voice that’s suddenly small and empty.

  I watch her swing her way back to the house. It has grown so dark that after a few seconds I can no longer see the flowers and vines decorating her sticks. She is just a dark shape, moving away from me.

  The birds are all silent now.

  Katekani has taken the newspaper away with her. I’m glad. I might have tried to read the Spike Maphosa story properly later in my room, using my battery lamp or one of the candles from the pack in the room.

  It would have weakened me again, I know, thinking about a man who cares enough to help the child zama zamas out of the mines and into new lives or away home to their own countries. A man who is like a saviour, a hero.

  I try not to think about him or Taiba. I don’t want to feel bad about not saying anything.

  But the bad feeling squeezes its way in while I’m still sitting looking at the stars – so big and bright up here in the dark mountainlands, but not as clear as you see them in winter.

  What if I did tell Taiba? That’s all I would do, and it would be for him to decide whether to act or not.

  Yes, but what if he did act? Of course he would try. What if a miracle happened and he somehow got away from here? How would he manage out there with his bad English and no siSwati?

  I’d have to go with him.

  I can’t.

  Does that make me a coward? No! I’ve chosen my way, I’m a zama zama.

  I’m also feeling bad about the fight with Katekani, and especially the thing I said about a different life not happening for her.

  I sounded like Faceman. Or Papa Mavuso.

  All these thoughts make it difficult for me to sleep. I keep waking thinking I’m back in the mine. There’s also something that’s not a dream because I’m half-awake when it happens, but I seem to be running and Taiba is running beside me, up the busy R40 to Nelspruit and on to Kabokweni. I’ve only seen the first part of that road, where it leaves Barberton, so the road I’m seeing is probably nothing like the real thing, except that I have heard it’s steep, with many bends.

  ***

  The bad feelings are still with me in the morning. I decide I need to do something that will stop me from thinking too much, so I go down to Barberton and hang around waiting for visitors who want to take the ravine walk. I can keep Spike Maphosa and Taiba and Katekani out of my head if I’m busy concentrating on spotting birds.

  It’s not a good day. An old couple agree to let me go with them, but I can’t show them any birds and the man spots one for himself, not a kind I know. They only give me two rand.

  Another younger couple drive to Fernlea House. They say they don’t need me to walk with them but I can watch their car. I think they’re worried about the baboons damaging it. When they come back they give me five rand.

  No one else comes. Seven rand out of the day. That’s all.

  When I get back to Papa’s, I can hear him shouting in the house. Katekani must have done something wrong, like making his tea too weak.

  I’m almost at my room when I hear Katekani scream. I stop. Now Papa is shouting again, and in between and under the shouting is Katekani’s voice going up and down in fast, frightened bursts.

  Then she screams again, and this time she goes on screaming.

  I turn and run to the house.

  When I get there, Papa is punching Katekani with his hard fists. He is bent over her because she’s cowering on the floor. She can’t get away because she has lost her grip on her sticks.

  As I arrive, Papa kicks one of them away to the other side of the room. Katekani is sobbing now, and somehow that’s even worse than her screaming.

  “Papa, please!” I shout. “You must stop!”

  “– and these stupid sticks.” I don’t think Papa even knows I’m there. “Ugly painted sticks –”

  He picks up the second stick and I think he’s going to hit Katekani with it, but he brings it down hard on the edge of the table. It breaks, not into two pieces, but enough that the wood bends and is torn open in a gash so that it will never support even Katekani’s light weight again.

  Heat like a boiling fog fills my mind, seeing that and hearing Katekani crying.

  “Stop!” I say it very loudly, and my voice sounds like a man’s.

  I think this is when Papa notices me. He throws the fractured stick away.

  “Do you know what this rubbish girl has done?” he roars at me. “No exercises today, so I don’t see any of my recruits outside. I go to the shed to see if the leg boy is getting better, and that other one who is growing sick with that cough . . . No need for me to count them. The leg boy’s talking friend – gone! This no-good girl let him run away when she took the morning food.”

  He lifts a foot to kick at Katekani while I’m still thinking – Taiba, gone!

  “No. It was me.” I shout it out without thinking. “I did it. Last night, when I took the food.”

  It stops the kick, but I can see from the way he looks at me that he doesn’t believe me.

  “You’re soft.” The words have a hissing sound. “She has already told me everything that she did. How that boy with his mouth said he must go and find that man Spike Maphosa – because this piece of trash told him what it said in my newspaper. She helped him.”

  “I made her,” I say, but I know it’s a mistake changing my story – my lie.

  “Soft,” he hisses again. “Telling me lies for this ugly, useless girl. When I’ve done so much for you, let you walk free, sent your money into Swaziland for your mother . . . You thank me like this. I can’t trust a liar. From today you don’t touch the shed key. I lock, unlock. You and this rubbish daughter – you only carry the food. You were like my son. You have hurt me. Betrayed me. Like those people betrayed me when I was still soft like you – the mine people and the bank people. This is your last chance here, you understand? That boy with his mouth won’t make it far by himself. He won’t find the way to Spike Maphosa in Kabokweni. He’s even more of a foreign fool than you Swazis. If I don’t see you here, I will know you have gone to help him. You know I have friends in the police? I will tell them you stole from my house, you and the Mozambique boy. I will show them Katekani and say you abused her. We will catch you before you get anywhere near Nelspruit, forget about Kabokweni. Now get out of here. Come back when it’s time to take the food.”

  I look at Katekani, not sure what to do. In my head I have a picture of myself picking up the unbroken stick and lifting it over Papa’s head and neck, bringing it down hard with all my zama zama strength.

  “Yes, go,” Katekani lisps and I see that her lips are starting to puff up from Papa’s fist. “Please, Regile, my brother.”

  She’s looking at me and her whole face is urgent and serious, as if she’s willing me not to make any more trouble. Not now, I think she means, because there’s something else she seems to be telling me. I’m just not sure what it is.

  “You shut up,” Papa orders her. “Start with the food now. It should be cooking already.”

  I know Katekani wants me to go, but before I do, I pick up the unbroken stick. I think I should help her up, but when I move to do it, Papa’s face grows dark and ugly.

  “Go!” he shouts.

  “I can do it, Regile,” Katekani says in her ruined voice.

 
She wants me to go, so I do, leaving the stick near enough for her to reach. Outside my room, I see the two old sticks she used while the paint was drying on the others. They’re lying under my bench. I pick them up and go back to the house.

  Katekani is alone, starting the cooking. Papa is in the other room, talking on his cellphone, it sounds like. Maybe to his police friends, telling them the story about stealing and abusing Katekani.

  “Here,” I say, leaning the sticks against the table.

  “Ngiyabonga.” She keeps her voice low, a sad sound.

  “Are you –”

  “Later,” she says, still in that low voice, but firmly.

  So I leave her alone and go and sit on my bench. I feel so strange, angry and confused at the same time.

  Soft, Papa said.

  Yes, to rush in and try to stop him, try to take the blame for what Katekani did. Interfering. Making their business mine. Soft.

  Yes, but in the middle of my anger at everyone – Papa and myself mostly, but also Taiba and even Katekani – there’s a small good feeling of rightness about what I did. It’s a bit like gold trapped in dirty rock.

  My thoughts jump to Taiba. I shouldn’t be surprised that he has gone. He was determined.

  Already I’m thinking of him in the past tense. I know this will be the end of him. He won’t make it out there. Not on his own. Certainly he won’t make it to Spike Maphosa in Kabokweni. The most likely thing is that he’ll be picked up as an illegal, held somewhere and eventually deported. He could also be attacked by locals, or fall in with other syndicate men and get trafficked again before he even understands what’s happening, sent back to mine work, or worse.

  When I take the food in to the recruits, with Papa waiting outside with the key, I look at Aires. He looks no different, so perhaps Taiba has convinced him he’ll be back for him with Spike Maphosa.

  Taiba Nhaca with his high hopes.

  I’m surprised to discover I’m feeling sorry.

  Later, sitting on my bench with my own food as usual, I see Katekani coming towards me. She’s using the painted stick that didn’t get broken, and one of the old ones.