She liked to leave people to their business—which I suppose is all right. It’s a trait I’ve never had. So, naturally when she walked out, I moved a few steps closer, sliding over the tiled floor in my school socks—the tiles were a light beige colour that the shop had called gold, but they never quite looked golden to me.
“Never, never! You must never . . . ” Mama was saying.
The front door slammed shut and I knew that Papa had come in.
“Basimane, our son,” she said but then stopped and I could hear her loud and desperate breathing.
I wished that I could see Basi then: where he was sitting; the look on his face. What had he done?
“I know, I know,” I heard Papa say. “Let’s all sit down. Sit down, Basimane.”
Oh, I wished I could be in the same room! My chest hurt from the heavy drumbeat of my heart. I wanted to go in and sit down too, but had to stay as quiet as a prowling cheetah near an impala. They could all go quiet and then I would end up not having heard anything.
“You knew?” Mama said to Papa.
He must have nodded because I heard the furious chiming of her bangles and then the thwat! of her hands coming down against her thighs.
“It was one visit,” Papa said.
Basi still had not said anything, hadn’t defended himself.
I heard Mama’s voice rise—“One!”—and then fall in a furious, low growl. “One?!”
“Dimpho.” Papa spoke in an even, measured voice. “I think once in a while it’s OK to help a friend. Kgosi couldn’t have gone alone, could he?”
“Let him go alone!” Mama screeched.
“Never.” Basi’s voice finally spoke out in his own defence—or Kgosi’s? “Never,” he repeated, his voice louder than usual but as clear and determined as ever.
More than the anger you could hear the fight in it. I knew—I had always known, hadn’t I?—that you don’t fight Basi over Kgosi. Two male lions in the wild? You don’t go near them if you know what’s good for you.
A cold, long silence fell over the sitting room—over the whole house—and I don’t know how long this would have gone on had Kitsano not phoned me himself at that very inopportune moment.
Although I’m not complaining, because when he said, “Are you OK?” I almost forgot what I had been doing.
“I’m OK. Family drama.” I tried to sound nonchalant but I think my voice was shaking both from what I had just heard and from hearing his voice.
“I just wanted to tell you that I’m looking forward to the dance.”
He was so polite, Kitsano; unlike a lot of boys I knew. Sometimes I thought that maybe he spoke English only after directly translating it from Setswana in his head. Most boys would have said, “OK, cool. I’ll see you.” But he said, “I’m looking forward to it.” And then: “I’ll have the most beautiful date.” My back tingled from that.
The most beautiful date . . .
Just then Basi marched furiously out of the sitting room and slammed the door to his bedroom. Slammed it!
Basi didn’t slam things—or hadn’t until then.
9
“HOW DO YOU KNOW when you’re in love?” I asked Ole when she came to our house the following Saturday morning. It was only three weekends before what would be Basi’s last weekend at home. Although none of us knew it then, did we?
Ole sat at the edge of the bath with her feet (in faded brown boots) stretched out in front of her. She was constantly adjusting her Dobbs hat. I glanced at her and realized that her hands always needed to be busy with something. She was always either smoking or adjusting her hat.
By the time she answered my question that realization had brought on another question: Was it possible that she was always nervous? I fidgeted a lot, and everyone knew I lacked composure. It wasn’t something that had occurred to me about Ole.
She said, “You act like a stupid person,” which might have stung had I not known her better. But I only felt a bit disoriented.
“I do?” I was standing at the sink facing the mirror with my gloves on, smearing more of my white relaxer cream into my hair. I turned around to look at her when I said that, blinking because my eyes stung from the cream.
She folded her arms rather tightly and lifted her shoulders, as if she were cold.
“That’s how you know. You know you’re in love when you act like a stupid person.”
I laughed and mixed in the rest of the relaxer. After I had put away the gloves I opened the bathroom window to let in some air. She took out a cigarette from her jacket pocket—a smart-looking men’s jacket—and pointed it towards me with a questioning look. I nodded and she led the way into my bedroom. My parents would not be home for a long time so it was OK to smoke.
In my room she stood leaning out the high window, her elbows perched on the windowsill and the cigarette in her left hand. Occasionally she would make a show of fanning the smoke. I watched her from where I was sitting at the edge of my bed and thought about something I wanted to ask her. I clutched at my red teddy bear, which Basi had bought me the year that I was ten and he was fourteen, when he had received a box full of Valentine’s Day cards and I had received two from Limakatso and Kelelo. He had bought me this teddy bear holding a big heart that said “i love you,” just to make me feel special.
I was nervous about asking Ole the question, since we never really talked about her and boys. Not really—not unless it was a joke. Casually, although I didn’t feel so casual, I said, “You’ve never been in love?” and then was immediately afraid I had taken it too far. From a distance I thought that I could see her body stiffen. I gripped the bear tightly around its feet and held it close and it seemed as if nothing moved for a very long moment.
She turned around and glanced at me and then she looked back out of the window and took a long drag on the cigarette.
I cleared my throat. “Because . . . then how would you know?”
“How would you know what people feel when they’re in love?” Her voice was barely above a whisper but she didn’t look back at me. She just kept smoking and then tossed the cigarette out into our garden.
She had to be nervous because she would never otherwise have done that. My mother would kill someone if she found something so disgusting on her lawn.
Ole turned around to look at me. She rested her back against the wall and folded her arms around her. Her eyes looked at mine only briefly before they moved on to my dressing table.
“Deepest, darkest secret?” Her eyes darted briefly from the table to me and then back. She gave a short, forced laugh, like she had just made a failed attempt at a joke.
I didn’t say anything, knowing that if I said something wrong, she wouldn’t tell me anything.
“I’ve been in love,” she said without bringing her eyes back to me. “For sure.”
“For sure?” I was suddenly feeling rather bold and had to hold on to the teddy to stop myself from asking all the questions in my head.
“Not for sure like we say ko Kasi, like it means maybe.” She cleared her throat again and looked down at her shoes. “Ja. I’ve been in love.”
“With whom?”
She rubbed her face as if she were tired. She readjusted her hat, pulling it down so that it almost covered her eyes, and then shoved both hands into the pockets of her baggy pants while she stared at her shoes. Then she nodded slowly to herself before forcing a grin.
“Someone. A beautiful person.” She rolled her eyes as if she were mocking someone.
“Who?”
Ole threw her hands in the air with a dramatic sigh.
“Aaaggg . . . ! A girl! All right? A chick. Ngwanyana. Cherrie. Umfazi, or whatever you want to call her. A chick.” She walked over to my side and threw herself on my bed, where she lay on her back and pushed her hat forward so that it completely covered her face.
&n
bsp; I felt . . . awkward, yes, but a lot less uncomfortable than I would have imagined I would feel. There had been rumours. When we lived in Kasi people were always saying, “Ole ke sempatle mo banyaneng.” That’s what they would say about girls who preferred the friendship of boys: “She’s a don’t-look-for-me-in-the-company-of-girls.” The opposite if it were a boy. They’d shorten it to “sempatle.” It was quite simple and meant no harm—at least not to me, who was never called that.
This, this moment when Ole said it to me, watching her expression and seeing how exposed she probably felt, this made me wonder how I would have felt. Of course I didn’t know what to say, but being the fidgety person I am, I tried to make it all less awkward. Deepest, darkest secret indeed.
“Can you tell me her name?” I tried to sound upbeat.
I was rewarded when I saw the look of relief mixed with confusion on her face.
“What? Most people would say, ‘You’re gay?’ Not ‘What’s her name?’” She sat up and smiled at me. But looking suddenly serious again, she added, “That’s what people have said, anyway.”
My minor triumph was replaced with a tinge of jealousy. “You’ve told other people?”
“Just Miss Natalia, the guidance counsellor. She’s great,” she said.
“You could have told me, you know. I’m . . . I’m great! We’re like . . . like sisters or something.”
Ole moved closer to me and looked me straight in the eye. This time she sat up straight and clasped both hands in front of her.
“You love boys.” She spat it out like an accusation.
“So?” I was offended but didn’t really know why. I felt the same as when I was told that people only trusted Basi not to tell our parents what they did at the back of the shop. People didn’t know me that well, I wanted to say. But at the same time I couldn’t vehemently launch a convincing defence.
“You and your friends, Limakatso and Kelelo. Why do you think I’ve never come to sit with you when our schools meet for games? We see each other at galas and matches. Why do we only hang out at home?”
“I don’t know. You’re always reading—”
“Studying? Yes, all the time. I’m on a bursary, I have to pass.”
“And,” I sidestepped the money comment, “anyway, at school . . . with my friends . . . we only talk about boys a little bit,” I countered weakly.
Ole raised a questioning eyebrow. It was my turn to throw my hands in the air.
“OK!” I yelled. Then less audibly: “I have a thing for boys.”
We both laughed.
“And I thought you wouldn’t understand,” she said.
I was about to add imprudently that it was not entirely a secret, her romantic interest in girls. But my scalp was burning and I had to run to the bathroom to rinse out the relaxer. After I had shampooed it and was waiting for the conditioner to work I sat at my dressing table with my back to Ole, who was on to her second cigarette.
“I think I’m in love. Anyway. I think.”
She turned to me and said, “That’s nice,” without a hint of sarcasm.
“I think my brother’s also in love,” I added, turning to face her.
Here she turned her back to me and took a drag of the cigarette. When she blew out the smoke she said, kind of slowly, “With . . . Moipone?”
“I think so,” I said.
There was a long, silent moment before she said, “He’s not her type.”
I didn’t know what she meant, so I said, “But they’re going out. She’s going out with him.”
Ole sighed and then, looking at the floor, she said in a sing-song voice, “Then I hope he doesn’t mess it up.”
“I think he really likes her,” I added with emphasis.
Ole held her left hand with the cigarette out of the window and rested her right hand on the wall at face level, then turned to face me. Her tone was more than matter-of-fact. It had a hint of anger.
“Your brother likes a lot of things.”
“What does that mean?” I said indignantly, not able to look her in the eye. I suddenly had the urge to slap her and it was so unlike anything that I had ever felt towards her that it shook me a bit.
“Nothing. I hope they’re happy.”
I stared at her back for a long time, just watching her smoke. When she didn’t turn around, I walked out to go and rinse my hair.
10
IT WAS ONLY THE NEXT DAY that I had a chance to speak to Basi about Moipone. Those days, finding him felt like chasing a rabbit in the woods. If you blinked you would miss him.
Now, it had never been disputed that my brother was a very good-looking young man. Sometimes, when he passed a glass door or caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror, his eyes would go up and down, taking in his full frame. His eyebrows would rise in a flash of surprise, as if he couldn’t quite believe the perfection himself. But then he would compose himself in that very quick, skilled way that he seemed to have trained himself in, and if you hadn’t been looking carefully from the start you would have missed it. I never missed it.
“He got my good looks,” Mama liked to say, looking in wonder at her boy.
I envied the good looks. So I watched him too, sometimes in awe.
There were the high cheekbones that are the family trademark, the long nose that he got from my father and not the short, small one that I got from my mother. (She disagrees.) There are the full, darker-than-his-face lips and the slightly sticking-out ears that girls at my school told me was a big part of his charm.
I watched him from the doorway of his room that Sunday morning. He looked like someone getting ready for a big event—smoothing an eyebrow, pulling at the shirt, flicking fluff off his jeans—and the strangest thing struck me. He didn’t seem so sure of himself. There was no delight at his own image. Instead I thought: He actually looks unsure. My shoulders drooped involuntarily.
“What is it?” I asked. I must have sounded concerned because he quickly got hold of his senses and, well, feigned contentment. And then, as he usually did, Basi fell into a sort of ease with himself, the way he could do in an instant, like a soldier commanding himself to stand at attention. He turned to me and that easy smile came and lit up his face.
“Heeey, Nedi, my Nedi,” he said, rubbing his hands together like he was getting ready to work with them. “Howzit?”
“Basi,” I said, “you have to go to the shop today. Papa—”
He waved away my concern. “I’ll be at the shop. Just a little later.” He was talking to his reflection. “I just have to go and do something ko Kasi, OK? I’ll be there.”
“Papa said . . . ” I started, emphatic. “He said he wants us both there for the tills today when the staff go home early for Sunday lunch. He needs some help.”
Basi seemed not to have heard. I waited, watched him turn for a moment to scan the room with his eyes and then turn back to the mirror for one last look.
“Basi?” I walked in and lay on the bed, on my stomach.
“Heh?”
“Moipone’s very pretty.”
He turned to me quickly, threw the brush on the bed and put his hands in his pockets. His grin was wide and satisfied.
“I know! I know. She’s . . . ” I thought he would say “a beaut,” but his mind seemed to drift off and his face took on a more serious look.
“She’s what?” I didn’t know why my heart was racing.
“She’s . . . something,” he said, pensive and nodding slowly. “She’s really something.” Then he was looking around the room again, eyes searching. Finally, he located his cologne, a bottle of strong-smelling liquid our aunt Lele had bought him the year before for his birthday. Which he had never used. He and I had once joked about it, saying that it made him smell like the ocean. Which was the point, since it was called The Beach.
I pulled at my tiny
ponytail. “You’re wearing that?”
But he barely heard me. He sprayed it on his hands and then smeared it on his neck, something we had seen Papa doing many times. Basi smelled it, and then held up the mostly full bottle and examined it. The scent was overwhelming. But he wasn’t convinced. He lifted his shirt and sprayed a little more underneath it. The mist sprayed upwards, hit his chin and went directly into his nose.
We both coughed and I waved my hand in the cloudy air.
“What are you doing?!” I coughed some more, just to make the point, while he moved to open the window.
“Too much?” he said, the bottle still in his hand, forefinger threatening to press.
“Uh . . . yes. Yes, I think definitely too much.” I reached over and slowly took it from him, exaggerating my movements as if I were taking a gun from a madman—which sent us into a fit of laughter.
“OK, Basi,” I started, putting the bottle down. “You haven’t been at the shop as much as you’re supposed—”
“I know.” He spoke softly, reassuringly, with both hands on my shoulders. “I’ll be there.” There was that no-worries grin again.
“If I get there before you—”
“Nedi, relax.”
I put up both hands to indicate that I was letting that go. Then I went and sat on his bed.
“OK, now . . . What was Mama angry about last week?” I thought that he would stiffen up and make excuses but instead he laughed!
“Oh, that!” He brushed it off with a wave of the hand.
“Yes, that. She was so angry. What happened?”
He came to sit down next to me on the bed and shook his head.
“OK. I went to the jail and—”
“The jail?”
“Yes, the jail.” He was serious and unmoved by my shock. “I went with Kgosi for a visit.” He turned to face me, his right palm resting on the bed and his left palm on his thigh. He looked all pensive and businesslike when he assumed this posture. “Mama was upset about the jail and then she was upset about the fight last week.”
“When you came into the store with cuts and bruises?” I said, pointing an accusing finger. “And you wouldn’t say—”
This Book Betrays My Brother Page 8
