Leopold Blue

by Rosie Rowell

  ‘Sex is the biggest lie.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘All that shit they tell you, that you have to really love someone before you “give yourself to them”. It’s a means of control.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Totally. Sex is basic animal mating, Madge. Sometimes it’s nice, other times not. The rest is all crap.’

  What did she mean ‘sometimes it’s nice’? I retreated to the cave and sat down on a rock. In the corner lay the charcoaled remains of a recent fire and a couple of empty beer bottles.

  ‘Having said that,’ Xanthe continued. ‘It’s all guys think about. It’s all they want. As soon as you give in, they lose interest.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, releasing a sigh. ‘Good to know.’

  She sat down next to me and leaned back against the wall. The sun broke through the canopy of leaves and shone directly on to the back wall, on to our faces. I closed my eyes, to find Simon staring at me from the inside cave of my eyelids.

  ‘Do you miss home?’ I asked, blinking rapidly.

  ‘Nope,’ she said. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I can’t believe my father sent me to this shithole and I miss going out and that, but not home.’

  Silence curled around the branches of the wild olive tree. ‘But what about your friends?’ I said.

  ‘Ja, I mean –’ She paused. ‘I’ve never been a big friends person. It just seems a bit … silly.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Take my mother. Her whole life is about her tennis and bridge friends and someone said this and now they haven’t been invited there. She’s a grown woman, for God’s sake!’

  ‘It’s all I ever wanted.’

  She turned to me. ‘That’s exactly your problem.’

  I smiled. There it was, spilled out on the dirt in front of us. My very big problem.

  The sun had slipped off the back wall. I knew we should be getting home, but I couldn’t yet move.

  She stood up and turned to face me.

  For a moment I thought she might apologise, then I realised she was bored. ‘Time to go,’ I mumbled.

  ‘So where is he?’ she asked when we reached the bicycles.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Marta’s boy. Simon.’

  ‘Overseas. Travelling.’ Due home soon, I thought, deciding not to mention that.

  Once we reached the tar Xanthe speeded up and rode alongside me. ‘If it makes you feel better, I will be your friend, Madge. But for the record, historically I’m not very good at it and I’m not making any promises.’

  ‘Lucky me,’ I said, biting the inside of my cheek to hide my smile.

  *. Natural shrubland vegetation of the Western Cape

  CHAPTER TEN

  The day after the article appeared – spread across a double page and impossible to miss – I arrived at school early. Juffrou du Plessis would be waiting, with all the righteous wrath of the Afrikaner nation. I’d rather she unleashed it without an audience. I was not that lucky. I had to sit in my desk and endure the stares and remarks of the rest of the class as they trickled in. While The Sunday Times would have done well to sell ten copies in Leopold, there was no doubt that everyone would have heard about it.

  Elmarie marched up to me. ‘My dad says, he says –’

  ‘I don’t care what your father says,’ I cut her off. ‘Leave me alone.’

  Xanthe was nowhere to be seen.

  Juffrou arrived, and made a point of ignoring me as she distributed a pile of excercise books. My palms were sweaty. There was a ringing in my ears. Juffrou was now at the top of our row. Elmarie and Esna turned around in anticipation. As Juffrou reached my desk, Xanthe appeared and sank down next to me, out of breath.

  ‘Jammer[*], Juffrou.’ Xanthe attempted an apology in stuttering Afrikaans. But Juffrou only had eyes for me.

  ‘The English Doctor has been busy.’ Juffrou’s voice slithered like a furious cobra.

  Xanthe looked from Juffrou to me.

  ‘Perhaps in England children are not taught the simple rules of community. Perhaps they do not feel pride in their town.’ She tossed my book down onto my desk. ‘Perhaps the English Doctor has forgotten what she owes to the people who took her in so many years ago.’

  As Juffrou marched on Xanthe started laughing. ‘What was that?’

  I shot Xanthe a warning glare, but she wouldn’t let it go. Adopting a heavy Afrikaans accent, she continued, ‘The English Doctor would do well to remember that Big Sister is watching.’

  Juffrou swung back around.

  ‘For the love of God, Xanthe, shut up!’ I snapped.

  After school I went in search of support. Marta and Beth were in the garden.

  ‘Did you see the article, Marta?’

  ‘Juffrou Engelbrecht was almost in tears,’ said Beth. ‘She wanted to know who was this Bibi person who had written such lies about Leopold. She said Leopold would be tainted forever.’

  Marta sighed. ‘It was a shameful day.’

  ‘I know. How could Mum do it?’ I said.

  Marta stiffened. ‘It was shameful because it is all true.’

  Everyone knew about the article. The Dominee went on regional radio to denounce the article as hysterical propaganda by an uninformed and dimwitted foreign journalist. But we all knew he was talking about Mum.

  Our house felt battered, as if somebody had died.

  ‘Hendrik wouldn’t serve me in the post office this morning,’ said Mum on Tuesday. ‘Sonia du Plessis crossed the road when she saw me coming.’

  ‘It will blow over. These things always do.’ But Dad didn’t look at her as he spoke.

  ‘I don’t think it will,’ replied Mum. ‘They’ve always hated me. At last they have a reason.’

  ‘I thought you were going to change the names,’ he said quietly.

  ‘That’s not journalism,’ Mum replied, watching Dad. She watched him for the rest of the week. It was a side of Dad I’d never before seen. His skin seemed to hang off him, as if all his essence had been sucked out of him. This was what I’d been wanting him to do, to stand up to her. But instead of feeling triumphant, I felt worried.

  Mum didn’t work without Dad. I found her staring out of the window in the sitting room.

  ‘I can’t remember the name of the fabric your grandmother covered the sitting-room chairs with,’ she said, looking out at Bosmansberg. ‘Morris-something. I can’t even picture the room anymore.’

  Dad clattered into the sitting room on Friday afternoon. His footsteps kicked back the silence that had blanketed us all week. Beth and I were spread out on the sofa, watching an old copy of The Bodyguard. Mum was in the armchair next to us, pretending to read a science journal.

  ‘Look who I found lolling around in town!’ he said. Dad loved Fridays. It was market day in Leopold, when the farmers and their wives came to town. The wagon-wide Main Street became a slow-moving procession of ‘King Cab’ bakkies and 1970s Mercedes sedans. While the wives went to the bank and the post office and caught up on a week’s gossip, the men congregated up the hill at the Co Op. They stood about in solid khaki clusters, swapping news, as they collected feed or a new supply of cattle dip or tractor parts. Dad could spend all day up there.

  ‘Who did you find lolling around?’ I asked, because he appeared to be alone.

  Dad looked back, took a few steps towards the door then called out, ‘Hannes!’

  Beth and I swivelled back to Mum, in time to see the horror cross her face. All Mum’s speechifying about ‘fighting inbred prejudice’ and all people being created equal came to nothing in the way she reacted to Hannes. Hannes was Dad’s oldest friend, Dad’s favourite person in the world after us. He made Mum knuckle-crunchingly uncomfortable. Not that she saw him often: sightings of Hannes beyond the boundaries of his farm were rare. Other than Christmas and Easter, his visits to town were made only under duress.

  Hannes appeared, stooping as he negotiated the doorframe. With each passing year Hannes seemed to blend more with the land he farmed.
His skin, like dried-out clay, told of hot, long summers; his restless eyes of the worry of coaxing another harvest out of the tired ground. He was dressed, as always, in his khaki short-sleeved shirt, shorts and veldskoen. Instead of a watch he wore two copper bracelets on his left wrist. The skin around it was stained green.

  He stood next to Dad and blinked a few times in the shuttered light, fiddling with the hat in his hands.

  ‘Hello, Hannes!’ we chanted dutifully. He swallowed and nodded at us.

  When he turned to Mum, he blushed deeply and muttered, ‘Mevrou,’ into the carpet.

  ‘What a lovely surprise!’ said Mum, her voice too loud. I looked at Beth and bit my lip. On the TV, the music stopped. There was a single drumbeat, as Whitney Houston’s lower jaw dropped for her to deliver her final, heart-stopping chorus of ‘And I will always love you!’

  Hannes’ eyes widened in alarm.

  Dad stepped in to rescue his friend. ‘If you’ll excuse us, Hannes and I have an important business meeting on the stoep.’

  As soon as they were out of hearing, Mum said in a loud whisper: ‘That was odd, don’t you think?’

  ‘No,’ said Beth.

  ‘But he’s so quiet,’ Mum shuddered. ‘So painfully quiet.’

  ‘Some people don’t need to talk,’ Beth said with a shrug.

  ‘What’s he doing in town, anyway?’ said Mum, getting out of her chair to peer out the window at them.

  I felt smug. ‘It’s perfectly obvious why Hannes is here.’ He was here under the direct orders of his big sister, on behalf of the Leopold community. ‘He is here to ask Dad to make you stop.’

  Hannes was Juffrou du Plessis’ younger brother. Although they shared the same high forehead and piercing eyes, in everything else they were complete opposites. Juffrou was a tormentor of the human spirit, Hannes was Leopold’s hermit. He understood the land better than any other farmer. He rattled off the names of indigenous plants as if they were members of his family. He could treat almost any ailment with one of his foul-tasting bush remedies. In an emergency, the farmers called Hannes before they called the vet.

  Marta passed us with a tray intended for the important business meeting.

  ‘Marta!’ said Mum, eyeing the full bottle of brandy, alongside the two glasses and large packet of biltong.

  ‘Special request from Mister Tim,’ replied Marta, avoiding Mum’s disapproving eye.

  There they stayed, Dad and Hannes, sinking into their deck chairs as the last of the day disappeared behind the house. We carried on with our usual Friday evening, eating fish and chips in front of L.A. Law, and then a video. Every now and then a low rumble of conversation or an eruption of laughter wafted in through the open window, but for the most part Hannes and Dad didn’t say much. Later I heard Hannes’ heavy footsteps through the house. I imagined him in his bakkie, slowly winding his way over the pass, and into the next valley, back to his sleeping farm.

  Dad didn’t make it out of bed until lunchtime, and that was only to stumble into the embrace of his favourite armchair.

  ‘More Disprin, Doctor,’ he croaked. ‘And Meggie, close those shutters.’

  ‘Why is it,’ said Mum, delivering the tablets and a glass of water, ‘that two men finishing off a bottle of brandy is seen as celebrating a cultural heritage in these parts, whereas if two women had to do that they would be publically flogged and driven out of town?’

  ‘Because, Wife, you don’t know how to drink brandy. If I were to sit you down with a bottle of brandy, you’d have started a revolution before you’d finished half of it.’

  Mum punched his arm.

  ‘I rest my case!’

  ‘What did Hannes have to say?’ Mum asked, feigning a casual tone.

  ‘Hmm? Oh, the usual. Farm, baboons, rain.’ Dad chuckled. ‘Tokkie van Jaarsveld saw a leopard up in the foothills. Twice. Haven’t had a leopard around here for ages. Someone needs to tell the spotted fellow to get the hell out of that valley.’ Tokkie was the largest sheep farmer in the area. He hated leopards.

  ‘I wasn’t talking about farming chitchat,’ Mum said.

  Dad stiffened. He turned to Mum, the silence of the past week revealing itself in a flash of anger. Or perhaps it was doubt. ‘You know very well what he came to say, Vivvy.’

  Mum looked as though he had slapped her. ‘I only meant –’

  But he held his hand up and she stopped mid-sentence. ‘Go phone your friend, Meg. Tomorrow we go to the mountains.’

  *. Sorry

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The dust cloud that had been travelling with us was momentarily so thick that it was impossible to tell where we were. As it settled, we found ourselves in a world of jagged rock and red soil and scrub bush. Clumps of gnarled and sawn-off boulder rocks littered the valley floor, stacked on top of each other, or balancing against each other at precarious angles, as though God had been building castles out of dominoes. We were in the belly of the mountains.

  Ahead of us a footpath cut into the landscape, snaking its way diagonally up towards the saddle of the hill. Beyond the dip of the saddle, far away enough so that it looked a deep shade of browny-blue, was sheer rock face.

  ‘This is it?’ Xanthe asked.

  ‘No,’ replied Beth from the front seat. ‘First we follow that footpath for about an hour, over the hill and down into another valley that looks exactly like this one, only flatter and hotter. That is it.’

  Xanthe looked sideways at me. The dirt track up to the fossil farm had been worse than normal. Dad drove our old station wagon over the dongas[*] and potholes as though it were a rally car, which meant we spent a fair amount of the trip airborne.

  Beth was not happy. Instead of hers and Dad’s usual rendition of ‘Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall’, she had been silent the whole way here. Her sulk had started as Xanthe had emerged from the boarding house, wearing a pair of cut-off denim shorts and a T-shirt with a picture of a seemingly naked boy that said ‘Manic Street Preachers’. Tattoed onto the arm of the boy were the words ‘Generation Terrorists’.

  ‘What’s Manic Street Preachers?’ Beth had asked.

  ‘A band, obviously,’ I’d replied, although I had no idea.

  ‘Is it Christian?’ Beth continued, which was fair enough as there was a large crucifix hanging around the neck of the boy.

  ‘Not exactly,’ replied Xanthe.

  ‘Christian!’ I’d laughed loudly and then felt stupid at the silence that followed. I hadn’t fooled either Beth or Xanthe.

  Dad opened Beth’s door.

  ‘’What’s that smell?’ Xanthe asked.

  ‘Dust,’ replied Beth. ‘And heat and boredom.’ She turned to Dad. ‘I’m staying here.’

  Dad shook his head. ‘Not a good idea, Bethie. We’ll be gone hours.’

  ‘I don’t care. You can’t make me.’

  ‘True,’ Dad agreed. ‘I’m worried, that’s all. The other day Koosie up at the Co Op told me he’d got the fright of his life. He was checking on a broken water pump in one of his boundary camps. As he climbed back into his bakkie, his leg like so,’ Dad demonstrated, his leg hovering above the ground, ‘a tenth of a second away from putting his foot down, he stopped. And looked down.’ Dad looked at each of us in turn. ‘Under the accelerator was a cobra, thick as his arm, tightly coiled up.’

  We three stared at him in mute horror.

  ‘He reckons the bliksem[*] must have gotten itself curled around his front wheel, then managed to get up, through the carburettor and into the front cab.’ He shook his head. ‘Man, I hate snakes!’

  Beth was out the car. Dad looked back at me and winked.

  Xanthe fell into step behind him. Her long, skinny legs kept pace with Dad’s wide stride. They made me think of Simon. Not only would Simon listen as Dad pointed out a rock formation that was in no way similar to other hundreds we’d seen that day, but he’d remember from the previous trip the names and shapes of Dad’s beloved fossils. I tried to picture Simon in Europe. I tr
ied to picture Europe. Did you feel a different person after looking at an ancient castle or travelling the tube?

  Beth followed Xanthe at an infuriatingly slow pace. I brought up the rear, carrying the rucksack of sandwiches and juice. We had grown up walking these mountains on Dad’s ‘fun days out’. Each time we started up the path it felt like we were turning our backs on the rest of the world.

  A distance opened up between Dad and Xanthe, and Beth and me. ‘For God’s sake, Beth, hurry up!’ I ached to push past her, and stop Dad saying anything too weird. But Beth would have a fit if she were left at the back.

  We caught up with them at the crest of the hill. The next valley was flat and shallow. Rocky outcrops dotted the floor, home to dassies, wild cats and snakes. And fossils.

  We passed the shell of an abandoned bakkie rotted slowly into the ground. There was a farmhouse in the furthest corner of the valley. It was more of a hovel, its walls crumbling and the thatch barely covering the roof in places. A sister and brother lived there, Hetta and Fillipus Jantjies, with their rheumatic, mangy dogs and their milky eyes. ‘They’re like hobbits!’ Mum had breathed on one of her rare trips here. At least they wouldn’t have read the article.

  ‘Is this sea sand?’ Xanthe bent down and picked up a handful of white sand. She looked up at Dad.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ replied Dad. ‘You’re standing on a very ancient seabed.’

  Xanthe looked around at the rock-littered valley floor and surrounding mountains. ‘No kidding,’ she said.

  ‘The shape of the mountains – you see the way it looks gouged out – that was caused by a glacier that pushed through these parts 420 million years ago,’ Dad said.

  ‘Wow,’ said Xanthe, her head cocked to the side.

  ‘When it melted, it deposited the millions of tonnes of rocks it had collected up north right here, and its water formed meltwater lakes. These icy lakes were home to some extraordinary organisms, many of which survive today as fossils.’

  Xanthe stayed close to Dad as we descended into the valley, listening as he revealed the sacred mysteries of rocks. I used to think Simon feigned interest to show me up, but what was Xanthe doing?