The end of the school year brings longer days, and summer hailstorms that are followed by a gorgeous blazing sun. It brings the chance to reinvent yourself, become someone new at the beginning of the following year. Then there is the seduction of large, ripe peaches; sweet-smelling apricots in all their orange-yellowish glory; sweet mango madness; and, of course, lush grapes hanging down from sturdy vines in people’s yards, providing shade and perfect green or purple bunches.
Girls kick off their shoes and tuck their skirts or dresses into the elastic of their panties, playing khati, legusha, and any other game you can play without leaving the street. Boys, on the other hand, are allowed to go. They kick off their shoes, roll up their pants and run away. They move through Kasi in groups, like lion packs hunting. What they do together stays secret for the most part—unless, like me you’re lucky enough to have a brother who trusts you and lets one or two secrets slip.
Marapong is on unusually fertile land for a location. This kind of land is rare because the point of most loc’shins was to build them where nothing much can grow. In those days the hill was like a jungle, with overgrown and surprisingly lush ground that turned green in summer and yellow in winter. We used to call that part nageng or “the woods,” although I should say that a more fitting translation would be “the wild.”
Before we moved up the hill to the Extension—“diEx”—the boys used to go swimming, and my brother brought details of the woods to me. He told me there were trees and overgrown weeds, strange fruit you’re not supposed to eat; and snakes. And there was also mysterious life there: a woman’s handbag, a pair of men’s pants. You would find love letters underneath some shrubs and a blood-stained sheet at the base of a tall tree. Things happened there that most of us couldn’t explain. I fed the details to my friends who didn’t have brothers who ran in the wild, and in turn we would weave elaborate tales of what happened up there.
When we were younger, before we moved, in the woods where the ground begins its sudden rise away from Kasi, just after the second main road, there was a large and rather deep hole in the ground. What you see there now are houses—mansions on the hill and the first double-storeys many of us had ever seen. But there used to be that hole. Just beyond the high bushes.
Well, the hole had been there for years, untouched except for the times when the rainstorms came and filled it with water so that it appeared—to the boys—to be a large, muddy swimming pool, which they called “the chocolate pool.” That was where they went to cool off during the arresting December heat. They would run like wild horses up the hill, tear off their clothes and hang them up neatly on the tree branches—because they were all township boys raised by mothers who taught them to fold their clothes and hang them up nicely—and dive into the pool. It was then that Basi learned to swim—and I would later remember this every time he won a medal for his skills in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
On these excursions, the boys told each other stories and jokes. They discussed the mysterious objects they saw in the woods and came to all sorts of conclusions. In fact, the first time I heard about sex was when my brother came back and told me that they had been walking up through a particularly heavily wooded area when they heard what he called “a woman’s cries.” I had at first been startled and asked if she had been hurt, but Basi smiled and said they were “happy cries.” The boys had warned each other to be quiet and had crouched behind a tree, and that was when they had seen a man and a woman. Naked.
“You’ll know these things as you get older,” Basi told me. He must have been twelve years old then, which means that I must have been eight. When I told my friends, we decided that there could be no such thing as “happy cries” when a woman was naked with a man. None of us would have liked it if a boy saw us naked, would we?
By the time my family had moved up the hill, my brother was older and there was no chocolate pool, only a big white house in its place. He still had fond memories of his long afternoons spent swimming with the boys from Kasi—much to my mother’s chagrin, because she wished Basi would stop having anything to do with the old boys.
“They’re not classy,” she would say, frowning at my brother, pursing her lips and angrily waving her arm in the air, her gold bangles like wind chimes in a storm. “We didn’t move up here and send you to the best school so you could keep walking around with . . . them!” She would throw her hand towards the window as if discarding some undesirable object outside.
Basi wouldn’t say anything, which I think made my mother feel desperate. Then she would repeat it and add, “Don’t you see gore a le tshwane na?”
Those were some of my mother’s favourite words: “We are not the same.” At these times she sounded like the noise of a passing ambulance. It was loud and hurt your ears, but you knew it would soon pass.
It was really all for nothing; I knew Basi would never let those boys go. It was like asking him to cut a limb off his own body.
“They’re my brothers,” he’d tell me when we were alone, hitting his chest with a fervour he’d never adopt in my mother’s presence. “They know me better than anyone will ever know me. Anyone!” he’d say with furious eyes glaring in the direction of the house, or looking into my eyes, as if daring me to refute his declaration.
It terrified my mother that he continued to cross the gulf between our old life and our new life. That he did it so carelessly made it that much more puzzling to her. She would suggest new friends, guys who went to the same schools as we did—private schools in town—whose families had moved up the hill or out to the suburbs. Often, after school, she would park our large red Mercedes in the parking area at the front of the school yard, and chat with Moabi’s mother or Themba’s father, exchanging stories about the joys and perils of owning a business (“Oh, I love that I can just leave anytime,” “Ah, helpers are so tiresome!”) or talking about our schools and the next rugby match. She would come back to us and gleefully say things like, “Moabi’s father would like it if we stayed at the same hotel when we go to Durban for the holidays. Akere you and Moabi can spend time together? Do what you boys like to do. Let’s see what your father says, nè?”
Basi would nod distractedly, then once he was home he would quickly be out of his uniform, into his jeans and running down the hill to see Kgosi, a boy he had been best friends with since they were small children in primary school.
Now, Kgosi may as well have been my brother’s twin. In laying down the facts as neatly as memory allows, I must state that they were unrelated and only friends. If you knew them, you would assume they were brothers and it would never occur to them to correct you—they were so close that calling them friends seems inadequate. They wore each other’s clothes (to my mother’s horror). They had similar facial expressions and a language that only the two of them understood. They used words that were strange to the rest of us, signals, handshakes, whistle calls (some of them practically songs, they were so long and elaborate) and they would turn the collars of their shirts up or down to tell each other something.
No surprise then that Basi and Kgosi were together when they saw the woman’s body.
3
IT WAS A SCORCHING December afternoon, six months after our move up to diEx. Basi was still in that phase where he was pretending (for our mother’s benefit, and only she believed him) not to be spending much time with Kgosi any more. He was like an undercover detective, watching our mother’s every move, asking her questions about where she was going and when she would be back so that he could time her departure with Kgosi’s arrival. He would phone Mabatho, a girl who lived two houses away from Kgosi, because Kgosi’s family didn’t have a phone; she would hang up the phone, run out to Kgosi’s house and bring him back to her house. My brother would phone a few minutes later (impeccably timed, he liked to brag), when Kgosi would pick up the phone. They would arrange when to meet and Kgosi would come up as soon as my mother had gone out. As always, Basi was di
ligent to a point where I could imagine him in the future working successfully as a spy.
But something happened that day that made my mother change her mind, and she turned back after Kgosi had already started walking up the hill.
Along with four other boys, Kgosi arrived too soon, and saw our mother’s car still parked outside. I was upstairs in my room, and I watched them duck behind a neighbour’s van as my mother took her time in the driveway. I was squinting against the morning sun that flooded through the window of my room, wanting to see who the other four boys were—but they all had their backs to our house as they hid behind the truck. All I could see were their neatly shaven heads and newly broadening shoulders, their clean clothes ironed and crisp.
To my left, in front of the garage, my mother slung her handbag over her shoulder and clicked her heels together as if to get rid of dirt—even though there probably was none, this was a long-standing habit. She examined the cleanliness of the car and then said something to Lolo, our sometimes driver and the man who had just washed it, and he quickly skipped over to open the gate. He always hurried when she asked him to do something—I think more out of respect than urgency. I hated watching him run like this. It made him seem a lot younger than his white beard suggested. But my mother always watched him with a look of contentment, satisfied, I suspect, that she was being obeyed.
She got into the driver’s seat, rolled down the window and yelled up at me. “Stop gawking at the neighbours. You’re making us look envious.”
Then she put on her sunglasses, reversed the big red Mercedes and drove out past Lolo, who stood holding the gate open. I had jumped away from the window at her instruction and worried about whether the boys knew that I had been looking at them. I ran to the bathroom to check on my hair, put on lipgloss, and took a minute to decide if my skirt was too short. I heard my brother’s voice, which carried from the area between the house and the back room up to the bathroom window.
He said, “Ma’gents,” which was how he and his friends greeted each other. Someone said “Heita!” and then the voices faded with their footsteps as they walked up to the gate. My parents had put in lots of pretty grey pebbles on the walk so that you always heard people’s footsteps coming and going—a sound I had always found reassuring until years later on the day it became terrifying to me.
I ran down the stairs, but before I could see who they were the six tall boys disappeared from sight.
The rest of the story I have heard from my brother. The short version is that someone—he can’t remember who—had suggested that they go and catch a football game in Kasi. Someone’s brother was playing, and Basi and his friends could pay to join and play for money. They had searched their pockets and found some money, added it up and calculated that if they doubled it in the game they could buy four diphatlho, a township delicacy that makes for a filling meal.
They were running as fast as they could through the woods leading to the main road in order to catch the game, when one of them almost tripped over a woman’s decomposing body, covered in maggots; nearby, a blood-stained white shoe could be seen under a bush. There was nothing else around but the clothes on her body.
At first the boys ran away. But then, one by one, they walked back to look, both horrified and fascinated. They then continued through the woods and across the road, and managed to reach the street where the game had been, not caring about playing and having lost their appetites, but excited to tell an eager audience of other young men about the body.
They were thirteen years old and I was nine.
***
“She’s no one. She’s from down there,” my brother often told me.
It was four years later and we still had no idea whose body it had been, but I had held on to my brother and his friends’ find obsessively—the way another child might hold on to a favourite fairy tale.
Basi used to say, whenever I brought it up, “You mustn’t be grim.”
I had had a lot of sleepless nights after I first heard about it, wondering whose family she belonged to, who was looking for her (if anyone) and what had taken her there. I dreamed about her, putting many faces to a body that I had never even seen.
Basi and I also spent many afternoons in the back room talking about her. I remember clearly how those afternoons would go: I would be sitting with my back against the wall, hugging my legs and asking questions, and he would be feeding me details as easily as if he were reading from a script. I was like a dog taking scraps from a child who didn’t want his food.
One of these times was a particular Thursday afternoon, the day before a social at Basi’s school. Even before my parents had agreed to let me go I had lain in bed making mental images of the clothes in my wardrobe, deciding what would go well together. I had bought new shoes and I had plans to go to the salon, which was not unusual because this was something my mother, my brother, and I did every week.
Now, I have to say that I was one of those girls who had always been aware of boys. Remember earlier when I said I had checked my skirt and put on lipgloss before going outside to see my brother’s friends? That had been me from the time I was in crèche. Whenever my brother brought his friends home I would spend time in front of the mirror—just a little less time than I spent before going to school. I brushed my hair this way and that. I put on this dress, and then took it off to wear jeans, and then took them off to try a skirt, and then took that off and went back to the dress before deciding that the jeans were better. I know a lot of people only start this when they reach puberty, but I had been in front of that mirror and thinking about boys for as long as I can remember.
My friend Olebogeng—or as we called her, Ole—was different in that way. She didn’t understand what she called my “boy craze.” She would sit on my bed watching me change in and out of clothes, obsessively focussed on my hair, and we’d have variations of the same conversation.
She’d start with something like, “I don’t see what you see in so-and-so” (the name of the boy I’d been talking about all month long). “Honestly,” she’d say pulling her Dobbs hat further down her forehead, “boys bore me.”
I would look at her not-tight-enough jeans and her T-shirt (T-shirt!) and say, “Ole, I don’t understand. You never wear skirts, you never wear dresses and you complain about boys boring you.”
“My mother says the same thing: ‘They might notice you if you wore a skirt.’ Really,” she’d pick up a book, prop her feet up on the desk and, reclining on the chair, add, “wearing skirts would just encourage them.”
“Yes!” I’d laugh as I walked around in my bra, looking for a tighter blouse. “That’s the idea, duh!”
We would sit secretly at the window, looking out at the quiet road to make sure my mother didn’t find us blowing smoke out of her house.
“Boys are only fun as friends,” Ole would say. Then she’d look me up and down and add something like, “That bra doesn’t look comfortable at all. It has wires underneath. I’m happy with a sports bra. You should try them.”
“Just for sports, Ole,” I’d blow. “For. Sports.” I’d shake my head and watch her in wonder.
Boys are only fun as friends. Ole’s favourite words.
4
SO THERE I WAS, about two months before I turned fourteen, obsessed with the usual things (my hair, my clothes, the dead woman in the woods) as well as some new things (the school social and Vera-the-Ghost—I’ll get back to her later). It was the end of March and the season was changing. The air had lost its warmth and the earth looked barren; the colours of the trees had gone from bright greens to dry, ashen tones.
Basi and I were sitting silently in the back room.
The day before, two significant things had happened. The first was that at my brother’s urging, my parents finally agreed to let me go to my first social. We were at the table eating supper when I made yet another desperate attempt to convince t
hem. I had been relentlessly begging for permission for four weeks, ever since I heard about the social.
My mother had set the table beautifully, as always: the cutlery in the right place, the plates and glasses—“These are the most expensive wine glasses; you can tell by their weight”—set perfectly atop a white tablecloth with red flowers, red being my mother’s favourite colour. Even with a helper around, my mother preferred to set the table herself. She took special pleasure in having everything just right.
“Everyone’s going,” I was saying.
“Your elbows should never be on the table,” said my mother as she picked up a glass of wine, holding it delicately by its stem (“This is how you hold a glass properly”). Her eyes peered at me reprovingly from behind the rim of her glass. Her long and perfectly separated eyelashes rising.
“Sorry.” I pulled off my elbows and tucked them behind my back, shoulders pushed back in an effort to help my case.
“Why are you so excited to go and be around boys, Nedi?” said my mother looking down at her food as if she were talking to her plate and not me. “What is this? Adolescence?” She placed the glass down and smoothed the tablecloth with her long fingers. You could see her maroon nail polish glistening in the bright dining-room light. “Hmph!” she said, shaking her head.
Basi was quickly making his way through his second serving of potatoes. He was sitting up straight, his broad shoulders spread across the back of the tall wooden chair. He picked up a serviette from his lap and dabbed it perfectly at the corners of his mouth.
This Book Betrays My Brother Page 2
