Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Now say sorry to Japie Betzer,’ Frikkie Botha commanded.

  I rose to my feet. ‘Sorry, Japie,’ I said in a small voice. Japie nodded and grunted.

  ‘And that’s not all, tonight you go and see Mevrou who is going to make you wash your mouth out with soap because what you talking is blasphemy!’ Frikkie Botha turned and stormed off, you could see just from looking at his back that I was now the enemy.

  After Frikkie Botha had gone Japie Betzer and the other bigger boys demanded that Gawie Grobler hand the note over. Gawie’s nose was bleeding and his lip was split from the fight to get at the note in the first place.

  ‘Someone grabbed it,’ Gawie sniffed. ‘I haven’t got it anymore.’

  ‘You lying, hey,’ Japie said threateningly, and several of the bigger boys closed in on Gawie. ‘Hand it over, man!’

  ‘You can search me,’ Gawie protested. ‘It’s God’s truth, I’ll swear it on a stack of Bibles. Someone took it out of my hand!’

  ‘Open your mouth,’ Japie said. Gawie opened his mouth and Japie put his dirty forefinger inside and rummaged around. ‘Pull out your pockets’ was the next command. Gawie did as he was told. Still no pound note.

  ‘I’m telling you, man, I haven’t got it,’ Gawie sniffed back the blood coming from his nose. The back of his hand was red from wiping the blood away.

  ‘Take off your shirt and shorts,’ Japie said.

  Gawie soon stood naked in front of all of us. ‘I swear on my mother’s grave,’ he said, clearly upset.

  ‘You haven’t got a fucking mother,’ Japie sneered as he shook Gawie’s shirt and then his shorts. Still no pound note.

  It must have occurred to Japie that if he found the pound note he’d have to fight the two other big boys for it, because he turned around to them. ‘We going to search everyone, you hear? When we find the ten bob, we each,’ he pointed to the two bigger boys, ‘going to get two and sixpence and there’s two and six left. So all the small guys here get sixpence, even Voetsek because he saved us from Frikkie’s sjambok with his Union Jack story that he made up, but it’s still blasphemy.’

  My pound had turned into sixpence if it could be found, except that it might turn into a shilling because it was really a pound and not ten bob. Sixpence was more than I’d ever owned before the pound came into my life and a shilling was even twice that. You could get twelve suckers for a shilling, so maybe it hadn’t turned out all that badly after all.

  But then came the surprise. Everyone, even Japie Betzer, took off their clothes and we could search anyone we liked, but the pound wasn’t found. People started digging around in the mud and lifting any small rock or piece of wood that was lying around, but we found nothing.

  ‘I told you it was an old piece of paper that must have blown away,’ I said triumphantly, and I added accusingly, ‘but no-one would believe me.’

  Japie gave me a clip behind the earhole, fortunately on the opposite side to Frikkie Botha because he was left-handed. ‘Why do you only make trouble all the time, Voetsek, saying that about the Union Jack. You just a fucking rooinek, you hear?’

  There I was with a couple of thick ears and my first fortune lost, disappeared into thin air.

  That wasn’t the end of the Great Shiny-Feather Robbery because that night when I went to have my mouth washed out with soap by Mevrou, there on her embroidery table was a copy of Huisgenoot. On the cover of the magazine was this big picture of Janneke Phillips smiling and wearing a beautiful hat with four Black Orpington feathers sticking out of it. The words under her picture said ‘Die hoed wat die Rand Passfees Wedrenne gewen het. The hat that won the Rand Easter Show races.’

  Now I knew I was really and truly in the deep shit. The evidence of the robbery was there for all the world to see. The four feathers stolen from Piet Retief’s bum were on the cover of the biggest Afrikaans-speaking women’s magazine. This was long-cane Prinsloo territory and with Pretoria thrown in. I waited for the dreaded words to come.

  But nothing happened except that Mevrou made me wash my mouth out with Lifebuoy soap. ‘This is from Meneer Botha, Voetsek. He told me what you said about the beloved vierkleur, the true flag of our noble volk! Sis, man, you should be ashamed! Under that same flag they killed 27 000 Afrikaner women and children. So from me comes castor oil because the sjambok is just too good for you!’ I had to drink three big spoons of castor oil and I shit myself silly for two days afterwards. At the end I could hardly stand.

  As far as the magazine cover went, I’d clean forgotten that neither Mevrou nor Meneer Prinsloo had known Janneke Phillips. While the cover was proudly drawing-pinned on the school noticeboard by Meneer Van Niekerk, not a single kid from The Boys Farm made the vital connection with Piet Retief’s missing bum feathers. To them, a feather was a feather, and as far as they were concerned, the world was full of black shiny feathers in hats worn by ladies.

  That still wasn’t the end of the matter. It was now school holidays and three days later when at last I wasn’t running to the shithouse every ten minutes, Gawie Grobler approached me. ‘Voetsek, why don’t I meet you maybe down by the creek where you always take your little dog?’ he said, and then added, ‘I’ll be waiting there after lunch, you hear?’ While he’d made it sound like a suggestion I had no option. He was two years older than me and you daren’t disobey when you’re at the bottom of the pecking order. Not that Gawie would have done anything, he wasn’t the physical type and won his respect because everyone knew he was the cleverest boy at The Boys Farm. Maybe I was getting nearly as clever, but, of course, that didn’t count. I forgot to say it was a Saturday and we had an hour off after lunch.

  I was surprised at his knowing about the creek and a bit worried. Kids always think they do things unobserved and me going down to the creek with Tinker was one of those things. If Gawie had said the big rock I would have been really worried. You see, that’s where I kept my growing library of Miss Phillips’ books. At first they went under my bed where we were allowed to keep things, then Mevrou found out they were written in English and all of a sudden she made a new law that said we could only have our schoolbooks there and three other personal things. Things such as your catty and a pocket knife if you had one, which I didn’t, and maybe a ball or a top or a tin where you kept things like marbles you’d won from the town kids or other things you’d found. There was also this rule among the boys that you couldn’t steal something from your own dormitory, and even people like Pissy Vermaak didn’t ever. ‘It’s like our home,’ everyone agreed.

  I had to find a new place to put my books and all the letters and her exercise corrections and marked essays Miss Phillips had sent me. It was quite a pile, I can tell you, and my library was growing week by week. So I went and collected some old paraffin tins and I put my books and papers in them and hid them under the big rock. Ever since what happened at the big rock everyone thought it was a bad-luck place and stayed away. Not that very many people went there in the first place. I had it all to myself and I gave it a new name, the library rock. If Gawie Grobler had suggested we walk to the library rock I would have been very worried.

  The part of the creek Gawie chose to go to was good. This was because the swimming hole was further down a bit and was the best place to catch platannas as well as shoot bush doves in the big blue gum trees. It was the place where I had found Tinker floating in a sack and it was a part people almost never went to. But Gawie, who was also a quiet type and very clever, must have observed Tinker and me going for walks. The reason he would have suggested we meet at this place was that he probably didn’t want the other kids to see me with him. The thing about me saying I liked the Union Jack better than the vierkleur had spread all around the place and I was an even bigger untouchable than before. I have to say this for Gawie Grobler, he tried to explain to everyone that I only said it to save them all from a certain sjambokking by Frikkie Botha. But people still said, ‘Never mind that, Voetsek still said it, and that’s because in his heart of hearts he belie
ves it, so it’s still blasphemy.’ Sometimes in life you have to choose your words very carefully, even when you have to find them in a hurry.

  When Tinker and me got to the creek Gawie was already there waiting. ‘Howzit?’ he said in English, much to my surprise.

  ‘Ja, goed dankie. Yeah, good thanks,’ I replied politely in Afrikaans.

  ‘I suppose you wondering why I asked you here?’ he said in Afrikaans, because I don’t suppose he spoke English very well, even though we’d both passed the exams. I didn’t reply. ‘It’s about your books,’ he said.

  The shock I felt was worse than the clout Frikkie Botha gave me at the water pump. The inside of my mouth had gone dry. ‘My books?’ I said at last, my voice close to a whisper.

  ‘Can I read them?’ he asked.

  ‘They English,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ he replied.

  ‘But you are an Afrikaner?’ I asked, puzzled.

  ‘Ja, I know I can’t let anybody see. I thought I could read them with you when you go down to the big rock where you go and read by yourself.’ He paused. ‘We could go separately to that rock and then read together and talk about the stuff that’s in them, like we do with the Afrikaans books at school.’

  You could have knocked me down with one of Piet Retief’s tail feathers. Gawie Grobler had been spying on me all the time! He knew I went down to the library rock to read and no doubt also knew that’s where I wrote my stuff for Miss Phillips. Here I was all the time thinking I was safe. I remember sometimes Tinker would start to bark at something in the thorn bushes, but I always thought it was a bird or a lizard or something like that. There were all sorts of little creatures that lived around the library rock, sometimes the dassies, the rock rabbits, would come out and Tinker would get very excited. Goodness me, it was probably Gawie Grobler all the time. I didn’t know what to say. If I refused, which I didn’t know if I even had the right to do, I’d have him as my enemy and he was the one boy who had never given me a hard time. He’d also recently tried to defend me over the flag business.

  ‘I’ll pay you ten shillings,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘Ten shillings!’ Where would someone like him get ten shillings? He wasn’t even old enough to work on a farm during the holidays. Ten shillings was an amount more than any boy from The Boys Farm could have in the world that wasn’t first kept by Meneer Prinsloo until they left the place.

  He held out his hand and in it was a one-pound note. ‘It’s yours, the one that fell out of your pocket at the water pump but since then a miracle has happened to it. Finders keepers, hey?’ he said, reminding me of the rule that applied to everything on The Boys Farm.

  ‘Where did you hide it?’ I said, remembering the search and how we’d all been undressed and even dug up the muddy ground and lifted the stones and sticks lying about.

  ‘In my bum hole!’ he laughed.

  ‘You stuck it up there?’ I cried. ‘Up your arse?’

  ‘Ja!’ he giggled.

  ‘Didn’t it hurt?’ I said, starting to giggle myself.

  ‘No, it was only paper, but I was really scared, man! What if, when we were all standing naked around the pump, with my poep hole blocked with paper, I suddenly farted – it would have come flying out!’

  ‘And everyone would make a dive for it and it would be all covered in shit!’ I yelled happily. Then we started to roll around in the grass laughing and Tinker started barking and jumping all over us. It was the best laughing I’d ever done in my whole life. Eventually we stopped and I had to ask, ‘What was it like when you took it out?’

  ‘Magtig! That was the miracle! The ten shillings that fell out of your pocket had all of a sudden changed into a pound!’

  ‘And you went and washed it?’ I asked somewhat stupidly.

  ‘Ja, it wasn’t too bad, they made of stuff that’s not like ordinary paper and you can wash them and they don’t disintegrate, and the shit came off easy as anything.’

  There was a moment’s silence between us. I admired him greatly for his ingenuity but at the same time thought that, in the end, it was originally my pound that had disappeared up Gawie’s bum. But there wasn’t much use pointing this out to him.

  As if he read my thoughts he looked at me with a serious expression and said, ‘That’s why you getting your ten bob back, Voetsek. Because I put your ten bob up my bum where it miraculously turned into my pound.’ He tried to conceal his laughter. ‘So the other ten shillings that was made while it was in there belongs to me!’

  You have to admit that was clever talk. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Stick it up your bum again and see if two pounds come out! Then I can have my pound back and you’ll have your very own pound!’

  Gawie laughed. ‘Okay, we quits, but I’m still keeping ten bob. Have we got a deal?’

  ‘What? With the money or reading my books?’

  ‘Both,’ he replied.

  With a person who could make me laugh like we just did I felt obliged to say, ‘Yes, it’s a deal.’ I extended my hand. ‘Shake a paw.’ Gawie Grobler knew he had me over a barrel all the time anyway. He was in a position to do several things. Report the presence of the pound to Meneer Prinsloo with the consequences I’ve already outlined. Keep the pound for himself and I couldn’t do very much about it except to tell Japie Betzer that he’d had it all the time and have Japie beat him up and take the pound from him. On the other hand, I would rather have had Gawie own my pound and give me ten shillings than the horrible Japie Betzer taking the lot. Furthermore, Gawie could reveal the whereabouts of my library that was no longer protected by the dormitory ‘no-theft agreement’ and so would almost certainly be destroyed as a revenge for the Union Jack incident. Even at the age of nine I knew the books were far more important to me than the money. Ten shillings was a king’s ransom anyway, more money than I could possibly imagine because the pound, in the brief period I’d owned it, was beyond my comprehension and was well beyond my capacity to keep it safe. Even the ten shillings was going to present a giant problem that, right at that moment, I had no idea how to solve.

  After nearly five years on The Boys Farm I had my first real friend. He still couldn’t be seen with me except when we were marching to and from school, and even then he had to be careful, but we were to spend many happy hours reading and discussing books together and he started doing all the same homework Miss Phillips sent me. After a while I wrote to her and asked if Gawie could also send his work and Janneke Phillips graciously agreed, although I would later realise that this must have placed an extra strain on her own workload. The next two years were the happiest I could remember. Still plenty of sjambok and Mevrou, but that was nothing compared to the loneliness that didn’t happen anymore.

  Now I know you’re thinking about that pound, because unfortunately Gawie’s bum didn’t poep it out in two separate notes. He now shared the same dilemma as I had originally stumbled onto, how to turn one pound into two ten-shilling notes without someone noticing that two kids from The Boys Farm were walking around with a fortune in their pockets. We discussed every possibility and the most appealing one was to go to Mr Patel at the Indian shop on the edge of town because Meneer Prinsloo had once said that you couldn’t trust him as far as you could throw him, and he’d steal the gold out of your teeth. We reckoned that he was somebody who wouldn’t tell, because Indians don’t have the same God, or maybe not even a God, so they didn’t care if you’d stolen the money and wouldn’t ask questions. What’s more, we didn’t have any gold in what Doctor Dyke with his horse pliers had left of our teeth.

  ‘But Mr Patel won’t just do it for nothing,’ Gawie reasoned. ‘Remember, he’s unscrupulous.’ It was a word we’d just learned in the new book Miss Phillips had sent and I’d looked it up in my dictionary. It means having no scruples, so then we had to look up scruples. What it said was ‘a regard for the morality or propriety of an action’. And we knew the ‘un’ in front meant it was just the opposite. So that was a perfect word to describe Mr Patel, the I
ndian whose shop was called Patel & Sons so his sons were probably just as bad as him. I must say Gawie looked a bit smug because he was the first to use the new word. Later in my write-a-sentence-from-a-word-found-in-the-dictionary lesson I wrote, ‘Mr Patel is an Indian who owns a shop named Patel & Sons and is unscrupulous.’ Miss Phillips wrote back and said she didn’t like the sentence because it insinuated that because Mr Patel was an Indian he was unscrupulous, and that this was a racial slur. She asked, ‘What evidence do you have to prove your point?’ So then we had to look up ‘insinuated’.

  ‘We’ll just have to buy something small,’ I said. ‘Like a sucker each, that’s only a penny.’

  Gawie frowned. ‘But then we wouldn’t have our ten shillings each, only nine and elevenpence.’

  I could see his point. That missing penny had the effect of somehow reducing the fortune in one’s mind. ‘Ja, but we’d have a whole sucker each,’ I said. My thoughts went back to Mevrou Booysens at the Impala Café and the kiss I’d got from Marie, and the red sucker and the pineapple one. That had been about two years ago but I hadn’t done a lot of kissing in the meantime, none as a matter of fact.

  ‘Maybe I’ll buy two,’ I said rather grandly. ‘A red one and a pineapple, it’s better than green.’

  Gawie thought for a moment. ‘You know how I gave you ten shillings for nothing because it came out of my bum, Voetsek?’

  ‘Yeah?’ I said suspiciously, not seeing his self-proclaimed miracle quite like that.

  ‘Well, to say thank you to me, why don’t you buy two suckers and give me one and I can still keep my ten-shilling note?’

  ‘You’re cheating me, Gawie!’ I protested.

  ‘Ja, I know, but I have to hurry up and get rich and you two years younger than me, man! You can easy catch up.’

  I agreed to buy him a sucker from my ten shillings as I hadn’t really thought much about becoming rich, and besides, it’s not every day you can make a grand gesture and have a new friend at the same time.