Blood Orange

by Troy Blacklaws

  The cold sea swallows me. I flap and pedal to the surface and the next wave dumps me on the sand. The shark is gone. I stare at my feet and hands, all the scot-free fingers and toes, and fill my lungs with air to cry.

  Vespa dreams

  SATURDAY NIGHT: GRANNY BARTER gives Zane and me Coca-Cola to drink while we gawk, gog-eyed, at the box. There is never Coca-Cola in our old, muttering, juddering Westinghouse fridge at home, unless Zane or I have a runny tummy, and then my mother gets a bottle from the Pniel Café and stirs the Coca-Cola dead flat to cure us.

  – If you leave a jammed, rusty nut in Coca-Cola overnight, the Coca-Cola will eat the nut loose from the bolt, my father tells us.

  Zane and I do not mind if Coca-Cola eats nuts and bolts, or rots teeth so we will end up with false teeth in our gobs like Grandpa. We love Coca-Cola and watch to see Granny pour to the same level for both of us. A litre of Coca-Cola fills four of Granny’s glasses and a bit. Zane and I always fight over the leftover bit till Grandpa calmly tips it into his rum.

  On their black-and-white TV I see James Dean dicing motorcars in Rebel Without a Cause and Gregory Peck hunting Moby Dick. But the best film ever on the box is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. For days after, I ride through the orchards on my bicycle, singing raindrops keep falling on my head. The coloured fruitpickers shake their heads at the sight of a white boy singing raindrops in the flaming Cape summer.

  While I ride my bicycle on the farm, or bounce a tennis ball against the garage wall, or lie on the garage roof, drifting to the sigh of the pines, I dream of being a film star like Paul Newman or Robert Redford. In my dreams I sip Japanese-umbrella cocktails in seaside cafés, somewhere in the wide jigsaw world, far away from Spook and Miss Hunter.

  Now, as we sip Coca-Cola, Cliff Richard and his chinas zoom along in a London bus.

  – I once went to a dance with Cliff Richard, chirps my mother out of the blue.

  My mother has told me of her nursing days, riding a Vespa along the Durban seafront, skirt and hair up high, whistling at the surfers, dancing on the beach. Even now, in her thirties, she whirls her skirt like the fanned tail of a peacock when she does the twist. Still, the thought of my mother, who talks to her flowers, flirting with a film star is far out.

  – Well, I didn’t dance with Cliff, alone, but he was there, with his band, The Shadows.

  I imagine The Shadows as black, flapping, shadowy moths.

  – I wore a pretty red skirt with white polkadots and hoped I might catch his eye. After all, I had good legs, says my mother.

  I see my mother with red lipstick, in a polkadot skirt, twirling red like a flame, scattering shadow moths to the wind. And Cliff Richard, swinging his hips close to her soapstone legs.

  – You went out looking like a Point Road whore, grunts Grandpa.

  – What’s a whore, Grandpa?

  He winks at me.

  – I’ll tell you one day, he says.

  – It’s a rude word and I never want to hear you say it, my father chips in.

  – Then how come Grandpa gets to say it?

  – Because Grandpa’s a zany old fool who drinks too much rum, says Granny.

  I have never heard her call him a zany old fool before and imagine Grandpa will spit his teeth out in a splutter of fury. But Grandpa just winks at me again.

  – So, did he ask you to dance? I nag my mother.

  Surfacing from memories of fanning skirts and stovepipe jeans, she says:

  – Who?

  – Cliff Richard, Mom.

  – No, he didn’t dance with me, or any other girl. He just stared into the eyes of one of The Shadows all night.

  I feel sorry for my mother as the moon chases our Peugeot 404 home along the Simondium road. If Cliff Richard had danced with her, things might have turned out otherwise. Zane and I would drink Coca-Cola instead of the Oros Orange you mix with water. We would have a colour TV and my mother would have a machine to wash the dishes.

  Sometimes, while washing up over weekends when Nana is off, my mother tells me never to give up on my dreams. By the way she says it I know that some time ago, somewhere along the way, the dreams of the flirting, miniskirt girl on the Vespa fell to the wayside.

  The moon dogs the 404 home. We go past the Simondium Hotel, where coloureds cluster outside the bottle store on Saturday mornings to stock up on weekend jerepigo after a week of picking fruit in the sun. Swaying men bend under jerrycans of sweet wine, like the refugees you see on the box, their world on their backs. Past Weltevreden, where Lars’s father farms cows and pigs and where the moon paints abstract white patches on black-and-white cows.

  Lars, my Danish neighbour over the road in Lofthouse. My hero, five years older than me. He is half fish and half footballer, shoulders wide from butterflying around the dam, his calves the size of pawpaws from footing the ball into the goal for the Paarl football club.

  The 404 rattles across the railway line and past the sawmill, where Flip van Staden’s father saws hills of sawdust. Poor, shy, freckled Flip. Nesquik scattered on vanilla ice-cream.

  On we go, past Boschendal. The Cape Dutch gables ghost white against vineyards of black satin.

  It was on this sawmill road, running past Boschendal, that I once saw a coloured boy stone a river crab as it scuttled and scratched across the tar. He flung the stone like a schoolboy spinning a top and I heard the crab crack.

  As the 404 swings into the yard, the headlamps pick up Lalapanzi’s eyes and Dingaan and Dingo jerk awake and bark and jig in the glare, daring to bite the spinning tyres of the Peugeot, leaping back just before being run over. You would think they too had seen Rebel Without a Cause on Granny and Grandpa’s box.

  dodging death

  THE DOGS DODGE DEATH: biting the Peugeot tyres, catching snakes and seeking fights with the neighbour dogs. Lalapanzi dodges death running across the grass. The Cape eagle owl in one of the stone pines swoops down at her and sometimes snatches a flutter of cat hair. During the day Lalapanzi dozes under deck chairs in the yard, under the vines, under the Peugeot, anywhere where there is a roof so no claws drop out of the sky. She used to follow the sun. Now, in a neverending game of hide-and-seek, she darts from one den to another.

  Zane and I love to taunt Mila, until he drops his spade and chases us. We call him boy, although Mila is a man. With a family hundreds of miles away, in a mud hut in the Transkei, tending scrawny cows in the dongas and dust. Mila has an iron bed in the men’s hostel on the farm. At Christmas he gets a holiday and a Christmas box from us: a shirt for him, sweets for his children and a head-cloth for his wife.

  Sometimes we chat to Mila in a fanagalo mix of English, Afrikaans, Zulu and Xhosa. But most of the time he just watches us play cricket on the grass while he digs his hoe into the pine-shadow earth, where hibiscus and oleander spill colour.

  – Oleander is beautiful but deadly if you chew it, my mother warns.

  – Just the flowers? I wonder.

  – The leaves too.

  I tally up the ways to die in the Cape:

  Be killed by a falling bluegum.

  Be shot by the Russians when they come. (Russian Migs fly over Angola, just north of the border. In between there is just South West Africa. Just dunes and elephants and Hereros.)

  Be poisoned by oleander.

  My bicycle, a Chopper, is the reverse of a penny-farthing. The small front wheel is the cunning ploy of an inventor who wants boys dead. Whenever my eyes stray from the road and I hit a pot-hole the Chopper catapults me through the steerhorn handlebars.

  – You’ll be scarred for life, my mother cries as she dabs cotton wool and Fissan at my grazed palms and knees.

  My mother has this thing about scars. She even had the school doctor give me my yellow fever shots under my feet, instead of on my arms. The other boys laughed to see me pull my socks off for the needle.

  Zane and I cycle down the sawmill road to the Groot Drakenstein Games Club to watch my father play cricket. He bowls good spinners but is
too reckless with the bat. He hits two or three balls over the boundary for four runs, then hooks a high ball that is caught on the boundary. He walks back to the pavilion, smiling, bat tucked under his arm the way the monkeys tuck corn cobs. Smiling because he would far rather be caught than bowled.

  After my father is out, Zane and I play cricket too, behind the clubhouse, with Kala and Langtand and other coloured kids from roundabout. Or we play tennis on the sand court with threadbare balls and wood racquets. But the coloured kids watch from a wary distance when Zane and I dive into the pool for WHITES ONLY, though we all have mud between our bare toes, and hands sticky from the juice of stolen peaches.

  My mother sends me on my bicycle to Pniel to buy a loaf of Springbok bread from the Pniel Café: a nook of a café jammed full of tins of Koffiehuis and Van Riebeeck coffee, boxes of Joko and Five Roses tea, Jungle Oats, tins of tuna, bars of Sunlight soap, Lion matches, combs, tartan-handled pocket knives, tomatoes, bananas and bolts of cloth.

  Zane and I cycle through the vineyards and orchards to Weltevreden to frisbee dried cow dung at the cows, or to trap fat pigeons in the fodder bins. There, wobbly-footed calves suck your hand with sandpaper tongues until white drool drips from your fingers. Blind kittens litter the dark corners. Slimy piglets slide out of blood-specked sows. They lie still in the afterbirth in the sawdust, then fumble for milk. Through the stink of pig dung you get sweet wafts of udderhot milk and baled grass.

  Zane and Bach and I saddle the stone wall of the bull kraal and gawk at his shotput balls and tapered horns. When the bull turns away, we leap down into the kraal to jab his backside with a stick. Then we claw up the wall again as he reels and snorts and pitchforks his horns at us.

  One time I jump from the wall and dart in but slide on glossy dung, under the bull’s hanging balls. The bull stamps me into the peanut butter of dung and mud a few times before a Xhosa man vaults the gate and tugs the bull off me by his ring.

  Another way to die in the Cape.

  If you are a black boy you hardly ever see your father. He is far away, on a farm in the Cape, or down a mine in Jo’burg, or in jail.

  If you are coloured, you are bundled lock, stock and barrel on the back of a Bedford and dumped on the dusty, windy Cape Flats.

  Me, I am a white boy in Africa. Every night my father tells me: Bona wena kosasa, See you tomorrow. And all tomorrows, at dusk, my father’s dog-chased bakkie roars into the yard. He wades through the barking dogs and the stories Zane and I yap at his heels. Stories of pigeon-catching and bull-dodging.

  So my tomorrows have always ended in that hair-ruffled feeling that the Russians will stay at bay and the bluegum will bend but never fall, that my father will never be jailed.

  But tomorrow is another kind of tomorrow. It is my first day of high school. My uniform is laid out: grey shorts, blue shirt ironed by Nana. My Grasshopper shoes blink with the Kiwi wax Mila has rubbed in. Tomorrow is the first time I go to school with no juice bottle. High school boys do not drink out of juice bottles. My father has given me his fountain pen, and an inkwell of Indian Blue. High school boys do not write with pencils.

  Bulldog

  THE BUS FOR WHITES, bound for the school for white boys in Paarl, hoots at the barefoot coloured kids who stray onto the road. They whistle and wave after us.

  Flip van Staden and I, the two new boys, stand facing the big matric boys in the back seat of the bus. The matric boys are all seventeen or eighteen, giants to Flip and me. I hope not to cry as I did the time when Spook shamed me. High school boys do not cry.

  A boy who goes by the name of Hotrod lays down the rules of the game. We have to echo his words. If we don’t, he will make us suffer.

  – Don’t fool with me, warns Hotrod.

  I stare at his hard, scarred fist. He has inked the word Loverboy along his knuckles. There is no way I want to fool with him.

  – Say after me: My mother’s a whore.

  At the word whore there are hoots of laughter. Hotrod just sits there with a fat grin under his square Nazi-helmet haircut.

  Grandpa Barter had said my mother went to the Cliff Richard dance looking like a Point Road whore, but my father had said it was a rude word.

  I hear Flip stutter out the words:

  – Ek kan nie.

  – And you? Hotrod demands of me.

  All eyes are on me. Though I would mouth the rude words with crossed fingers, to escape Hotrod’s wrath, Flip’s stand gives me no choice.

  – I can’t, I mumble.

  I wish I could reel in the foolhardy words. All eyes switch to Hotrod.

  – Then you two must kiss Bulldog, Hotrod barks.

  The bus is a carnival of laughter as Bulldog is dragged to the back. She is wild-eyed and cursing.

  – First you, rooinek.

  I shut my eyes and lean forward to kiss her. Perhaps I shut my eyes because they always do in the Saturday night feature films on Granny and Grandpa’s box. Perhaps because the sight of Bulldog before me is not something out of a romantic film.

  I feel her lips against mine. Our heads are jammed together by hard hands. I am drowning in the baying laughter of the big boys. Her lips part and my teeth jolt against hers. The hands let go, and as my face flies from hers, she spits in my eye. I wipe her gob on my shirt sleeve.

  After Flip kisses her and she spits at him too, Hotrod lets us go. In my seat I hide my head under my blazer and cry. Damn Flip, why did he have to be a hero?

  This is my first kiss. It is sore and shameful. I can never undo it. Bulldog, eye-spitter, will always be the first girl I kissed. Serves me right for scaring poor, bony Sarah with the zebra silkworm on my tongue.

  Paarl Boys’ High: Flip and I join the other new boys herded onto the rugby field. We run through a tunnel of big boys who whip at our bare legs with their school ties. Then some boys are made to rub their balls against the rugby posts. Flip and I and others are given acorns. I imagine we will have to chew them. Instead, we go down on hands and knees and roll the acorns across the rugby field with our noses while the other schoolboys howl with laughter and the teachers drink tea in the staff room. Though the acorn rolling is slow and blind, the odd kick up the ass spurs me on.

  robbing God

  ON SUNDAY MORNINGS MY mother, Zane and I go to St George’s church in the valley, while my father stays to read the Sunday Times in a deck chair, and light the vinestump braai for lunch.

  Ahhh. My father’s braais. The tang of burning vinestumps. The hiss and spit of fat. The whine of begging dogs. The smell of cooking meat, which is the smell God loves.

  Inside the whitewashed church walls, the priest rubs his fingerless hand in his good hand, stained yellow by cigarettes.

  I stare at his knobkierie stub while he conjures up a sandalled, bone-and-blood Jesus wandering through the sands of my imagination. I no longer see God as a raggedy, bone-rattling sangoma, but as the lonely, skinny man on the cross.

  In St George’s, this Church of England so far south of England, coloured and white gather under one roof. Still, the whites of St George’s huddle together in the front pews, to drink the blood of Jesus from the cup before the coloureds do.

  There is a doddering organist who turns our reedy singing into a burial song.

  Out in the sun, a few miles up the road, my father is in his deck chair, one eye on the vinestump fire and the other on the Sunday Times bikini girl.

  At the words Draw near and drink the blood, the organist abandons a hymn halfway through the last verse and hobbles down the aisle. Our voices drift on rudderlessly. The way she goes hobble hobble hop, hobble hobble hop, tells you that all her suffering for Jesus is forgotten in the sweet joy of being first to kneel at the altar rail, first to lift her lips to the blood.

  The money plate comes round. A one-rand note flutters down from my fingertips. Then I dip my hand into the plate to finger out fifty cents change, to buy a Kit-Kat or Bar One at the Pniel Café afterwards. When I look up to see frowns, I sense I have done something ta
boo: fiddling out change from God’s money.

  When the priest tells us to go in peace and serve the Lord I run out and bury the fifty cents in the graveyard.

  While we English pray to God in St George’s church, the Afrikaans farmers of the valley gather at the Dutch Reformed church in Simondium, further down the road to Paarl. The deacons, in black and white, look like butcherbirds. A faint smell of mothballs and Kiwi shoeshine and Brylcreem is in the air. A domino ripple of nods follows the black-frocked dominee as he passes through his white flock.

  In the old days, when farmers trekked from far afield in their oxwagons and Cape carts to reach church for the monthly nagmaal, the gathering of the clans would be a whole weekend affair. There would be outspanned oxen and tents and camp fires and men playing jukskei with ox-yoke pegs and women baking melktert and koeksisters.

  But in 1979 in South Africa there is little to break the quiet of the sabbath. There is no cinema. No shopping.

  Sunday afternoon: Bach and I lie on the hot white pebbles on the banks of the Berg River and share our dreams. Bach wants to join the commandos and kill Cubans on the Angolan border. I want to be Robert Redford or Paul Newman and see the world at the end of the Atlantic where the Berg River runs to. Or, maybe, be Hemingway or Wilbur Smith and fish for wahoo in the Caribbean.

  Bach’s stomach is taut, and he has a patch of black ball-hair I am jealous of. He tells me about girls and sex, and that he once saw a coloured man’s bare ass bobbing over a girl in the pines up by the dam.

  – It’s like the pigs on the farm, he laughs as he skims a pebble over the water.