I guess our minds were on different things. We may as well have been talking to our own reflections. It was irritating.
The mother walked in just then and smiled down at both of us as she put her bag down on top of the credenza. She asked, her hands clasped delicately in front of her, “Do you boys want orange juice?”
We nodded, our legs unable to keep still, and stepped outside to sit on the stoep and wait. I noticed the lawn was freshly cut and flowers lined the fence. It was a typical hot day in Kasi. Everyone was outside in shorts and t-shirts but all I wondered about was the new boy in our midst, who seemed to have disappeared somewhere inside the house. I admired with a little bit of envy that he was wearing a scarf. Lelo and I sat looking towards the lorry, where other men from the street were helping unpack. The street was feeling more chaotic now, with all the neighbours having come to greet and help.
“They’re getting Sesi’s mother’s roses,” I said to Lelo, who responded, “You think she forgot about the orange juice?”
I remembered Sesi’s mother wearing garden gloves, trimming her rose bushes and humming a church song. They had gone to church every Sunday, attending the Lutheran church that shared a building with the Early Learning Centre. I wondered now if this new family would also be going to the same church, if the mother would be trimming the rose bush while humming church songs, if in fact they would be taking over Sesi’s family life as well. The thought made me feel the way I did sometimes when I watched Aus’ Tselane set the table for us and then disappear to her room that was attached to the garage outside our house. The feeling was heavy in my chest. It was like hearing a sad song or visiting someone in the hospital.
When the mother finally appeared, it was clear that she had gone to great pains to make a beautiful presentation. She stepped lightly, going sideways across the threshold, holding a tray with two tall glasses and a plate of biscuits. The glasses had yellow sunflowers on them, matching the sunflowers on the tray. A white apron hung over her neck with the words: You pour the wine / I’ll cut the cheese.
We stood up quickly to help but smiled and said: “Take a glass and sit.”
When we did, the boy appeared behind us, carrying his own glass of orange juice.
He was about the same height as I was—both of us shorter than Lelo, who was by then already quite tall for his age—and his skin was a darker shade than mine. His lips were fuller and his eyes larger. I thought he was pretty, in a way that girls are, not handsome in the way boys are. Both Lelo and I looked up at him curiously. He was such a strange bird, his every move fascinating. We waited to see what he would do next, if he would come and talk to us or go back in the house. He looked around as if he were searching for something, his eyes never meeting ours.
In a moment his mother said: “Diba, come and say hello,” his mother reached out her hand but he didn’t take it. Instead he went back into the house and re-emerged with a stool.
“Diba, this is Kabelo and Lelo,” she introduced us when he had put the stool down. “Boys this is Sediba.”
Around him his mother was fussing, I thought, and looked suddenly uneasy the way people seemed when they were new in school. The boy’s eyes went to the stool he had set down in front of us while his mother smiled nervously. Her lips parted and we thought she’d say something but then she decided against it and went back into the house. Now it was just the three of us, looking down at the ground. I wanted to ask if he’d be sleeping in Sesi’s room but thought he might find me too strange. But then he did the most unusual thing. Right there in front of me and Lelo, he sat down and crossed his legs.
I had never seen a boy sit like that. Lelo and I were still, our hands clutching the cold glasses in our hands. I suddenly got very worried that Lelo would laugh. It would be just like him to laugh out loud and make the boy feel embarrassed. I clenched my teeth and wished I could give him a sign, tell him to keep still, but I couldn’t think of anything. When it seemed like a very long time had passed and none of us even sipped from our glass or said anything, I looked over at Lelo and to my surprise found him seeming annoyed instead of amused. This was not someone about to laugh, like I had expected. I couldn’t say why but this made me panic even more. I said to Sediba: “We’re going to play now, do you want to come with us?” I wasn’t even sure if I wanted him to come, I couldn’t see him fitting in on our dusty street, but I thought asking was the friendly thing to do and I needed Lelo and I to leave.
I was stunned and downright mortified when Lelo spoke before Sediba had a chance to answer. His voice made me cringe as it sounded out contempt for the boy we had only just met.
He said, “Why do you sit like a woman?”
I was afraid the boy would disappear back into the house and tell his mother, who would then come out and admonish us in her impeccable, refined Setswana, but he didn’t.
The most astonishing thing to me was—and this is what I thought of a lot throughout the next few years—that instead of uncrossing his legs, Sediba shrugged, stayed in the same position, turned up his chin like he had done earlier and took sips of his juice.
Later when we were walking home, after we had politely thanked Sediba’s mother and carefully placed our glasses into their empty sink, I wondered if Sediba would want to be our friend. I wondered what sorts of games he liked to play and couldn’t quite see him getting dirty the way the rest of us did.
Lelo said, “I heard she is a hairdresser. She does hair in her house. Where do you think she’ll do it? In her bathroom?”
I shrugged and kicked a small stone, regretting immediately the dust that covered my shoe. Without answering him, I kicked another stone, this time out of some inexplicable anger that kept rising and rising inside me. Lelo continued talking. “He’s like a girl, neh? Why is he dressed like that and why does he sit like that? Maybe he spends too much time around women.” I noted that he said “women” instead of “girls” and I could see that Lelo had been just as unsettled by Sediba, because he was using words that made him sound older, more sophisticated. He was as uneasy as I was, but for different reasons. I didn’t care if she did hair. My thoughts were more on the boy than his mother. Why had he stridden past us like that, his head held high? And why hadn’t he cried? Why hadn’t he run back into the house sobbing? I had never known anyone who didn’t dissolve into tears when Lelo was irritated with them.
I didn’t understand anything going on in my body; there was this overwhelming need to hide.
Now I wanted it to be the week before, when Sesi was still there. There was something about Sediba that I wished I hadn’t known, that made me want to go back in time and not see it again. When we reached the middle of the street my friends were lining the bricks back up, getting ready to restart the soccer game. I stood there watching them, suddenly feeling too tired.
“I’m going home,” I announced and turned around and went to lie on the sofa in our sitting room where I watched boring daytime TV where people did nothing but talk, speaking English with American accents and declaring their love for each other. My mother was standing at the dining room window when I walked in, one hand on her hip. He nails were freshly painted a solemn burgundy. She didn’t turn around but told me to “close the door.” then pulled her lips in and folded both arms as if to shield herself from a cold drought.
“Who are they?”
“The mother is called Bonolo, the boy is called Sediba. I don’t know about the father.”
“She’s dressed like she’s going somewhere important. Who wears a bright dress in a truck?”
I didn’t know.
After months of dreading it, I was all of a sudden looking forward to moving up the hill, farther away from this new family, especially the boy.
***
In the following years Sediba remained somewhere in the background or right in front of me, but whenever we were at the same party or with the
same two or three friends, we avoided each other. At first I thought it went one way, that I was dodging him, but then one day we went on a Boxing Day picnic with the same group of friends and I noticed him also turning his back to me or looking away whenever I started talking. We had the same friends, so why didn’t we even speak? I grew very busy working at being as macho as possible, and he continued wearing fashionable yet not quite manly clothes so that I didn’t like the look of him—or told myself that I didn’t. Every now and then I would catch myself looking at his muscular legs when he was wearing shorts, or the way his jeans hugged his bum. Once I saw him lift his shirt and rub his stomach and caught sight of his navel. A little round dip above a startlingly smooth trail of black hair. That night, alone in my room, I couldn’t be rid of the image—my hand down and under my boxers just before I fell asleep.
And then it all seemed to go in a different direction between us.
In the middle of December, a little less than two months before leaving for varsity, two things happened to solidify my suspicions that a) I wanted more than anything to be a doctor and b) I was only attracted to boys.
I got early acceptance from UCT. My father ran in one afternoon—too early for him to be finished with his work—and waved his keys and a long white envelope in his right hand. On TV, Cliff Huxtable was complaining about his son eating all their food when he was not even living at home. I was bored. None of my friends had been at their houses when I called on them, so I was watching Bop TV, the satellite station with the American shows that showed black people. Black people laughing, black people reminiscing about Dr Martin Luther King. Black people talking about segregation—something that would never appear on the government-regulated South African TV stations. Bop TV was like an illegal secret. You had to hold the antenna just right to get it going.
My father was not someone who raised his voice very much but that day I had heard him shouting as he burst through the door, “You’re in! You’re in, Doctor Mosala!” He’d already opened the envelope and read the letter. It would be months into my first year in medical school before it occurred to me that I had never actually read that letter.
My mother’s car came hooting through the gate. She had often taken my school report down to old friends to brag, and I expected her to do the same with the letter.
“You’re in, my son! Another Doctor Mosala!” she pronounced and then, ululating, she danced through the door.
I was in, and at the historically white university too, where they admitted their first Black medical student only four years previously. My father, in his time, had gone to a Black university. So this was new and seen as a breakthrough of sorts. I watched my parents’ awkward embrace, their bodies coming apart too soon for the amount of exhilaration they had both just displayed. Neither came over to give me a hug. They reveled in their own pride only a few steps from where I stood.
I was in. I planned to go and never come back.
***
I had always been the child who was interested in illness and injury. I would follow my friends into their homes to watch as their mothers took care of a scrape or a bad cut, asking if I could help. The thrill that rushed through me when I saw a wound or looked through a microscope in biology class was matched by nothing else in my life at that time.
And so on a chaotic afternoon in December, when my friends and I were stuck at a music festival trying to find a way to get home after Sediba had just been cut with the sharp edge of a beer bottle, everyone knew who would volunteer to take him to get help. It wasn’t an especially gruesome cut, but I could tell it was would need stitches. My suggestion that I take him to my father brought everyone great relief. All we had to do was find a lift since the guy with whom we had come to the festival had disappeared.
Finally one of Trunka’s friends offered us a lift in the back of his van. I was the first one to climb in and held my hand out to Sediba to help him jump in. I remember even in that moment I didn’t look at him, keeping my eyes on the wounded hand, which was now wrapped in his t-shirt soaked with blood. Sediba had in fact been pulling Lelo away from a fight with someone who had smashed his beer bottle against a rock and was using it as a weapon when it had caught and sliced across Sediba’s palm.
I sat across from him on the truck floor, elbows on my knees and eyes looking in his direction but not right at him. I had never liked to look at him too closely or for too long, unable to see in him what I couldn’t see in myself. By then he had lived in Kasi for about six years, and we had managed to be very good about avoiding each other, crossing the road and looking the other way when the other came along. Even as we continued to run in the same circles, holding on to the same friends. Now here we were facing a forty-minute journey on the back of a bakkie with no one else to speak to.
“Do you know how to do stitches?” he eventually asked, his voice rising effortlessly above the noise of cars on the road. He looked rather calm, considering that he was shirtless and bleeding through a very nice piece of clothing around his hand.
I squinted against the sun, clenching my bum, trying not to show my nerves.
“Heh?” I was pretending to be deep in thought, acting like his question had just reached me. “Uh . . . no. No, I don’t.”
“Don’t you watch your father do it all the time?”
I thought: Actually with a little trust from him and some opportunity I would have you stitched up in no time, but I only chuckled at the thought.
Sediba, looking puzzled, shrugged and looked away.
When the silence started to feel like too much I cleared my throat. Now, I thought, I should say something.
“Does it hurt?” I tried.
Sediba shrugged and then slowly looked up at me, his mouth spreading into the most endearing smile I had ever seen, his eyes firmly on me and twinkling from the light.
“It hurts a lot, Jo!”
We both laughed. I felt the back of my neck go hot and I rubbed it with one hand.
“You look brave. You didn’t scream or anything, just pulled off your shirt and wrapped it around your hand.” As I spoke I mimicked him pulling off his shirt and wrapping it, and saw that the look on his face showed curiosity and intrigue. He’d thought I hated him and now realized he had been wrong.
His eyes were so gentle, his face carried so much kindness that I couldn’t help but fall into it.
After a brief moment of contemplation, he said, “You can’t cry around those guys.”
I shifted, looked him in the eye a bit longer now and smiled. We both knew what we were talking about and that none of our friends could find out that we were having this exchange. It was like huddling against the cold, this acknowledgement. I felt at ease, comforted.
We rode the rest of the trip talking about our friends—their ambitions, our admiration of Trunka’s hard work and how we could easily see him taking over his father’s tuck shop; we joked about Base sounding like that guy in Boyz II Men with the startlingly deep voice. But all that time, neither one of us brought up about Lelo.
We laughed a fair bit and by the time we reached our house I was sorry I had avoided him all those years and was only getting to chat with him now, weeks before I would leave for Cape Town and he for Tukkies.
Our driver held out his hand as if we’d had an agreement and I handed him ten rand out of my pocket before he zoomed off.
I sat on the edge of the bath and Sediba sat on a chair I had brought for him, his hand held over the sink, the blood dripping into it. I had my father’s brown leather bag on my lap, biting my top lip as I watched intently. My job was to hand my father his instruments as he meticulously worked his way through the cut, which looked much deeper than I had initially thought. My father had come to his door upon hearing me knock, wearing a t-shirt and having quickly pulled up a pair of jeans. By then I had already fetched his bag from the hook behind the door, its u
sual place in the spare room.
My father’s eyes stayed squarely on his work while Sediba’s were closed, his head resting against the wall. I gave myself full permission to look at Sediba’s body. He was being brave, trying not to wince with every prick of the needle. His lips were pressed together and his other hand gripped his knee, his nails digging into it. I noticed another scar above his navel, a smooth bean-shaped burn mark with slightly wrinkly edges and was embarrassed to note that it hadn’t been there about a year previously, the last time I had looked. Obviously he worked out—I had been with guys on the rugby field and had rarely seen such a toned torso. It took my attention away from the stitching and I was staring without knowing it. In my mind I traced my finger along the ridges of his defined biceps.
“Kabi?” my father was saying.
Startled, I looked up to find him holding out his hand. “I said cut the thread.”
Sediba opened one eye and smiled at me knowingly and I bit my lip, feeling mortified.
The day after Sediba was cut the two of us walked out of Trunka’s house at the same time but not actually together. As soon as we were out of sight from the guys he caught up to me quietly, looking behind him as though to make sure no one would notice. Hands in his pockets, he lowered his voice and said, “So . . . your father says the stitches can come out in two weeks.”
It took a lot of effort to look at him. I said, “Two weeks is a long time.”
“Yah, I can’t help my mother so much but . . . ”
“But it will heal.”
“It will, yah.”
When it was time for me to turn the corner and go up the hill he didn’t turn back, continuing alongside me. The sun had gone down by then but all of Kasi was up, drunken men mulling about, everyone’s attention on their music, their lovers, and their drink. As long as it was not our friends noticing us together, I thought, then it was fine.
There was nothing wrong with it, just two guys walking, chatting, but still I was glad it was dark, that people were too drunk to look, and that no one could see my hands go in and out of my pockets, my shoulders up as if it were cold when it was the middle of December. I was worried and convinced that if anyone saw us together, they’d know about me.
Such a Lonely, Lovely Road Page 2
