The Boy Who Could Keep a Swan in His Head

by John Hunt

  The room had spontaneously erupted. Boom! Even Pal had charged out from under the telephone table, tennis ball in mouth, stubby tail wagging.

  Slowly the noise died down as a kind of normalcy returned. Everyone apologised to everyone, although Phen didn’t see the need. The odd chuckle or snigger still surfaced, especially when Zelda started hiccoughing. She sat up and arched her back. This tilted her breasts skywards. Uncle Edward followed their trajectory towards the ceiling. Mairead accepted the returned Marie biscuits onto the plate and noted only two were broken. “Nothing wrong with the rest. They can go back into the packet.”

  “Can I help you, Lil?” Ed extended a hand to Phen’s tilting mother.

  “Not much use at this angle, am I?”

  After she’d straightened her skirt and centred her belt buckle, she nodded to her son, who was still holding a broken biscuit in each hand. “Thank you. We all needed that.”

  “I can still smell that vinegar.” Mairead headed for the kitchen.

  The first to leave was Zelda. This was seen as something of a moral victory by his grandmother. It was, however, diminished by her first spending twenty minutes talking quietly to his mother. Phen watched the two women cocoon themselves in discussion. He was envious of their easy chatter, the way their whispers bonded them.

  As they talked, Mairead became more and more incensed. She emptied the dustbin, rattled the plates and washed the dishes in loud protest. She huffed and puffed to no avail. They were locked in a conversation and insulated from the outside world. The depth of this quarantine was made more obvious by Ed, who advanced three times, then peeled off as his presence went unnoticed. Mairead was somewhat mollified by Uncle Edward’s offer to drive her home. Although this too was spoiled by him then referring to Zelda as a “perky little thing”.

  Once they’d left, the empty room confirmed that magic, by its very nature, had to disappear too. It only worked because it went away.

  “Time for bed,” his mother demanded and implored at the same time.

  “Can I see him?”

  “Tomorrow, maybe. Remember what Laurel and Hardy said? He needs rest.”

  Phen hated himself for feeling relieved. In an act of feigned dissatisfaction and defiance, he moved into the lounge instead of turning towards his bedroom. He’d make his own decisions. Now that everyone was gone he could be the man of the house again.

  “Your embassy has just been in contact with me.”

  “Which one is that?”

  “The British. Yet you are indeed Gustav. Gustav von Abendroth.”

  “I am?”

  “Your family fled Nazi Germany in the thirties. Your father would not yield to Hitler’s fascist future. Having lost most of his industrial empire he escaped, with you as a young boy, to London.”

  “But what am I doing in Swakopmund?”

  “Part of that industrial empire included a diamond-mining concession on the Skeleton Coast. A concession your father thought was worthless. On his death last year, you became the executor of his estate and decided to check. Imagine your surprise when you found a working mine on what was meant to be a barren piece of desert.”

  “It’s coming back to me. I see the turning wheels of the headgear, large graders …”

  “Probably the last thing you saw before being struck on the head, dumped in the back of a truck and driven twenty miles across the dunes to be left to die.”

  “But who am I?”

  “You are not just Gustav von Abendroth, you are Count Gustav von Abendroth!”

  “I don’t know what to say!”

  “Maybe it is enough to note that life’s mysteries unravel in an infinite kaleidoscope of possibilities. Who knows what drives the passions of man? Right now, though, let’s celebrate that the greed of one was counterbalanced by the caring of another. If that wandering Bushman hadn’t pondered why tyre tracks crossed those of a gemsbok he was following, you would not be here today.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Now, I believe we should quench your thirst with something a little stronger than water!”

  12

  Anonymity

  /e’non’im-iti/ noun

  His mother had insisted on two full days before she’d allowed him in after the heart attack. Phen had made tiny baby steps towards his father and then found only a replica. His father was now made of wax. An effigy. He’d turned yellow and gummy as if his body was producing resin. Pasty yet peculiarly polished, a raised hand waved in recognition. He waved back.

  The oxygen mask seemed bigger now. It kept creeping up and covering his father’s eyes as if it had a mind of its own. Phen fiddled with the two bands of elastic behind his father’s head, but the plastic cone still pushed upwards, tilting his glasses above his eyebrows. “Leave it. I can’t see anyway.” The voice was the only thing left that was still pretty much the same. A little softer and raspier, it was definitive enough to remind him that somewhere in that yellowed husk lay his father.

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “A new heart would be nice.”

  Phen straightened the already straight bedspread and puffed up the extra pillows lying on the chair. He wanted to push back the hair that had fallen across his father’s forehead but was too scared to touch him. To feel the new stickiness of his skin. He looked ridiculous with a fringe yet Phen couldn’t bring himself to do anything about it. It would have to wait for his mother.

  “Failing that, you could refill my glass.”

  The jug was too heavy for Phen. Even using both hands, the water poured into the narrow glass too fast then gushed out, creating a small lake between the doily and the Mills Special box.

  “Vic Falls.”

  For over a year the yellow tin had been three-quarters empty. Although his father no longer smoked, England’s Luxury Cigarette had remained untouched at the base of the bedside lamp.

  His father began to battle for breath. Phen was afraid if he did anything else the facsimile in front of him would feel obliged to talk, so he just stood still and stared. There was no embarrassment. Silence turned the man on the bed into a body. There was shape and form but no life unless it spoke. The hiss of oxygen, a lullaby or perhaps a requiem. By the time Phen turned to go, his father’s hand had moved from his chest to his side and then, taking the arm with it, over the edge of the bed. He thought he heard snoring yet still lacked the courage to lift the hand and place it back on the white linen. The five fingers, white and limp, hung suspended as they called to the ground. Over dinner he and his mother didn’t say a single word. It was the only way to have an honest conversation.

  The next day, before first class, he stood next to Jimmy the Greek at the urinal. “Hey! Piss straight what, why splash all over my shoes.” Phen apologised. “What’s wrong? You more Sad Sack than usual.” He tried to explain while they zipped up, washed hands and dried them on the back of their shorts. “Attack of the heart. Can’t be good.” He punched Phen on the chest. “My mother say not enough olive oil in this country. Everything get stuck.” He dribbled his soccer ball out the door and down the corridor.

  The war between Adan Karim and Mrs Smit continued unabated. It was a mix of spontaneous skirmishes and planned offensives. She now referred to him as Ad-dumb. He, in turn, added an H to her T. “It’s Smit with a hard T,” she’d yell. “I understand, Mrs Smith,” he’d reply, and lisp the rest of his sentence. The speech impediment disappeared at break and returned like clockwork when he came back into class.

  “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing! And don’t think I’m afraid to send you to the headmaster’s office!”

  “Yeth, Mrs Smith.”

  Mrs Smit was short and plump enough to ensure that wearing a belt would only accentuate the roll that undulated around her waist. This was not helped by her insistence on wearing dresses that were a little too tight and generally of a material that clung manfully to her body. The belt, usually a gleaming gold with an ostentatious buckle, set against a black knitted wea
ve, started off too high anyway. The angrier she became, the more the shiny strap worked its way further north. It became a tidemark of her fury. The objective of the Leb was to get the belt as high as possible. On a good day it would be close to her armpits by first break, its inexhaustible rise stopped only by the conical ramparts of her bra.

  Phen didn’t understand it. The Leb had a pretend lisp and Jimmy the Greek scattered words across sentences at random, yet they were the two most popular boys in his class. They talked badly and didn’t care. He shrivelled in silence, saying nothing. He’d give anything to be like them. To talk, not caring how it sounded. He desperately wanted to blurt again. He had proof his words could rocket straight out and at great speed. However, the more he thought about it, the less his tongue behaved. He practised blurting in front of the mirror by talking nonsense quickly. But what kind of nonsense? So you had to think, even a little. And the moment that happened, his tongue would cower in the bottom of his mouth, his cheeks would fill with air and his lips would tremble. He stared at the stupidness, the spazness, looking back at him.

  “Mrs Smith?”

  “Smit.”

  The Leb raised his arm proud and vertical. Mrs Smit tried to avoid him. She’d forced him into the front row and was now regretting that decision. His arm stayed thrust upwards like a beacon while the teacher pretended to search for something in her drawer. Phen sat directly behind him. The sharp hairs of his newly acquired brush cut needled the back of his collar. Having found a piece of chalk, Mrs Smit turned her back to the class and began to write on the board. The Leb waved his raised hand; the room snickered. Mrs Smit continued to write. The Leb folded a few fingers and gave her a peace sign. More snickering. The chalk continued to attack the blackboard. The hand turned one hundred and eighty degrees with the V of the fingers still in place.

  The gasp from the class was immediate and audible. A giant sucking in of air seemed to pull at their teacher. She paused for a moment. Biology class had barely begun. She had spent most of her break drawing a locust and was now labelling it. Between the head and the abdomen lay the thorax. As she finished crossing the X she feigned moving up to the antennae but instead spun around. The Leb revealed his most sincere smile and a hand full of fingers.

  “What?”

  “I showed my brother, who’s twenty-one, my history book. He disagrees with page seventeen. He says whites made coloureds. He says if you go down to the local hardware store and mix white paint with black paint you get the Coon Carnival.”

  “Coloureds make up their own ethnic group.”

  “But who made them?”

  “God,” said Hettie Hattingh, placing her Bic pen in the wooden groove next to the hole where the inkwell used to go. “He made everything.”

  “How long do locust eggs take to hatch?” asked Mrs Smit, pointing to a hole at the rear end of her drawing.

  Although Phen knew the answer was between six and eight weeks, he kept low. He was an expert at hiding and the Leb had allowed him to hone his craft. As Adan was the prime target he had all but disappeared by always being exactly behind him. The Leb was his shield and Phen was his shadow. By lowering his shoulders and stooping slightly, he copied his every move, ducking left and right as the blazer in front of him swayed to and fro. When the head in front dropped to read or write, so did his. They stretched in unison. Even the swivel into profile as he stared out the window was simultaneous. And the more incensed Mrs Smit became, the stronger his invisibility cloak grew.

  This allowed his mind to roam while his teacher Gestapo-ed from her raised platform. A little moustache was all she needed. Every time she raised her hand he secretly Sieg-Heiled her back. He brought in an oompah band, turned the biology textbook into Mein Kampf and goose-stepped her to the window when she checked how the haricot-bean experiment was going. He painted a swastika on her tightly wrapped arse and made her fart at the end of the lesson as she bent over to pack her briefcase. The Bavarians in their lederhosen all joined in, making matching rude noises with their trombones, clarinets and tubas.

  “You’re just outstretched arms and legs now, Sir Laurence,” Miss Delmont said five minutes later. “However, I hear Arts and Crafts are creating a masterpiece. Soon you will be the finest tree in all the land. Remember, from tiny acorns do mighty oaks grow!”

  Her Elizabethan bow, with one hand extended towards him, was so low all her hair fell forward in a red curtain. She paused in the position, almost tipping over and top-heavy. It was not far from a headstand. Just as Phen was about to panic, she whipped her neck back. He watched her hair open like a fan, then miraculously close perfectly behind her shoulders. Just like Zelda’s, her hair wasn’t something to tame, but rather to set free.

  “You,” she said, “will be the tree of life!”

  The school play was proving relatively easy to endure. Phen suspected that Miss Delmont might even like him. She noticed him in the way Mrs Smit dismissed him. He even liked her gentle teasing. She spoke to him without ever demanding an answer. Most of all he loved her ability to celebrate words with flowing arms, angled hips and pulled faces. When Miss Delmont begged that the ensemble F-E-E-L the words, she puffed her chest out, grabbed her heart from under her poncho and offered it to the cast.

  The perfect balance between anonymity and acknowledgement without a response being necessary could not last. It changed on the Monday of the third week of the new term. It came on the back of a strange weekend. The more Phen walked Pal, the more he felt Heb was there, the more he didn’t see him. On Sunday evening he’d stopped and sat on the bench next to the willow. He was convinced Heb was in the park. He could feel him. Grey mantled the horizon and began to move up the hill. By the time it reached him and turned the grass to slate, there was no one left. Even the pigeons had gone to roost, settled in for the night and silent.

  On his way out he found a single partially deflated water wing next to the pool. Phen wore it like a bracelet before hooking it on the corner of the sign stating that picking flowers was punishable by law. Convinced he was being watched, he spun around like Mrs Smit at the blackboard. No one was there. Instead, a dog broke through the bushes and trotted across a bed of marigolds. Their sturdy stems and firm orange centres bounced him on his way. With one ear up and one down, he recognised his old school escort. The dog stopped, lifted his chin and stared at him. Phen looked back slightly intimidated. The broken tail rose momentarily to emphasise their past familiarity. Pal acted as if he didn’t exist at all. The two dogs stood facing each other, neither one acknowledging the other’s presence. Eventually, the mongrel continued on his journey. He passed within inches of Pal, the kink at the end of his tail almost hooking the spaniel’s ears. Uninterested, Pal stared forward.

  “Snob,” said Phen.

  He bent down to put the lead on. By the time he looked up, the other dog had gone. The too-short legs attached to the too-long body had disappeared. Phen presumed he’d taken a short cut by burrowing through the privet hedge. On hands and knees, Phen stuck his head into the foliage and found nothing. Not willing to accept that a dog so clumsily put together could vanish so effortlessly, he began to whistle for him. The breathy, reedy notes barely made it out his mouth. Pal stayed motionless at his feet, scornful and detached.

  The next morning Phen waited for the dog of many parts to walk him to school. The night before, he’d stretched out on his bed, stared at his macabre clown and decided that was what the animal had been trying to tell him. He dawdled outside Duchess Court and then pretended to hang around for Jimmy the Greek. There was no one there except a huge rock pigeon that cooed insistently from a jacaranda tree. The non-arrival of the dog made him uneasy. He could feel his confidence drain as every step brought him closer to school. The hole in his stomach was getting larger and heavier. He pulled his grey shorts up and his underpants down. He tightened his tie and straightened his cap.

  Standing next to his desk, waiting for permission to sit down, Phen realised this was no false premonition. The
morning school bell had barely stopped ringing when he knew he was in trouble. Mrs Smit gleefully read from a note delivered by the school secretary. Ad-dumb Karim would not be at school today as he was attending his grandfather’s funeral. The gap between Phen and his teacher was now wide open and unprotected. He was in no-man’s land, vulnerable and fully exposed. Ripped from his secret hiding spot, he was suddenly presented in full light, naked and on display. Mrs Smit looked at him as if for the first time, and smiled.

  “Sit!” she said.

  As one the class dropped to their seats, moved behind their desks and folded their arms. Buoyed by the precision of their obedience and the empty chair in the front row, Mrs Smit smiled again. It was the knowing grin of a woman who felt she was back in control. She sensed that without a ringleader, their courage was thin and easy to break. She spun the globe on her table absent-mindedly, playing for effect, enjoying the tension she was creating. She stabbed it with her finger and suddenly the world stopped.

  “Alaska!” shouted Hettie Hattingh.

  “Not geography yet.”

  Hettie bowed her head in apology. Kobus Visser let out the smallest of snickers. Mrs Smit turned her head serpent-like to the trapped boy with the broken leg. His cast was no longer white and was now covered in bad drawings of cowboys shooting each other with penis-shaped pistols. Anxiety filled the room as she slowly moved towards him. He tried to make himself smaller by sliding under his desk; the solid tunnel of plaster of Paris would not allow it.

  “Al-as-ka.”

  She turned it into three lyrical, almost whispered words. Yet each one was a nail she intended driving into him. Her belt was still relatively low although her heavy breathing was already sending it slowly upwards. Mrs Smit was now so close to Kobus Visser he was forced to stare into her belly. She tapped his encased leg then allowed her fingers to play it like a piano.

  “It is the largest and most sparsely populated state in America. What else can you tell me about it?”