I turn my face away from him to stare at the tiger’s-eye river flowing by. Where it is deepest the water is almost black.
Two crocodiles have escaped from Safariland and found their way into the Berg River. It is in all the papers. Somewhere up or down river, they cruise through the murk and scum for the feet of lapping cows and yapping dogs.
Another way to die in the Cape.
Since I saw Jaws at the Protea Cinema in Paarl, I am scared of black shadows under the water.
My father told me a shark once jawed a boy a mile up the Tugela River. The shark should never have been there.
– That is irony, he said to me, being killed by a saltwater shark a mile upriver.
It is crazy to imagine a shark swimming a hundred miles up the Berg River from Saldanha Bay, just as it is crazy to imagine sharks lurking under my seat in the cinema. Still, I always tuck my feet up under me in the Protea.
The thing to do if a shark fins towards you, my father says, is to stay calm, not flap about like a wounded fish. If you see a mamba, act dead. If you see a lion, climb a tree. If an ostrich goes for you, jab a thorn branch at his eyes. And if you outfoot bulls and trick snakes and sharks, if you run fast and climb high, you may survive to see the world.
My dream of seeing the world beyond South Africa is like a honeybee that keeps homing in on your can of Coca-Cola and you get scared you might swallow it, for if it stings you, your windpipe clogs up and it’s bye-bye blackbird.
This dream zithers in my ears and I cannot flick it away or shake it off. I hear the zither through the din on the bus and through the drone of teacher voices at school. And just as the honeybee finds the ringpull-hole in the can of Coca-Cola and suddenly drops inside and sounds dizzier, so this dream wriggles up a nostril and niggles inside my head.
Stompie
EVERY MONDAY MORNING IN Paarl Boys’ High we file into the hall. The headmaster, Visoog Vorster, is feared for his run-up when he canes boys. While he tells us of God and other deep things, his fisheyes gander for a victim.
There is an unwritten law at Paarl Boys’ High that you look Visoog Vorster in the eye while he is up there, an invading viking in the bow of a ship.
At Paarl Boys’ High all laws are unwritten. You find out through hearsay, or by being caned for it, Lars told me.
While Visoog Vorster drones on, my eyes wander across the rows of grim teacher faces up on stage, to the honours boards bearing the names of Paarl Boys’ old boys who have gone on to play rugby for South Africa. The names go hazy, drift out of focus.
I am up at the dam with Bach, making a raft out of wine barrels. We pitch a tent on the raft to camp out on the water. Above the tent flutters the tattered, moth-eaten Union Jack that long ago lay on the coffin of Grandpa Rudd’s brother, killed in the war. During the night, water seeps into the barrels and into our sleeping bags. We abandon ship, and the Union Jack, having survived Hitler and moths and games of pioneers and Indians, sinks under the moon.
– You there, barks Visoog Vorster, jabbing his finger in my direction.
My heart jolts and I feel a sudden squirt of pee in my pants.
– You there, at the end of the third row, stand up.
Another new boy, scared white like me, stands up. Five hundred boys fix their eyes on the stumpy kid called Stompie. I’d rather run into Turkish gunfire at Gallipoli than change shoes with Stompie.
If Visoog Vorster is after your ass, Lars told me, you never get away with under three cuts. Three stinging cuts, drawn out because of the time Visoog needs for each run-up. Lars said he lets you choose from a row of bamboo canes on top of his cupboard before making you bend over his desk.
– What do you think you are doing, boy, looking around while I’m speaking?
Stompie sobs, but that just winds up Visoog Vorster.
– Wait outside my office and stop snivelling like a girl, he yells.
Stompie stumbles past frowning teachers, through a door under the photograph of the bald prime minister.
Having put Stompie in his place, Visoog Vorster calms down.
– You know, boys, Paarl Boys’ did not become the foremost rugby school in the history of this land by giving in to feelings. Discipline is what has made South Africa strong. Boys from this school, boys who may have sat in the very chair you are sitting in now, have gone on to govern this land. Think of it.
Visoog Vorster glances at the prime minister.
– You know this isn’t a country where things just fall into your hands like a ripe plum. You are not yet ready to understand politics. You have to leave that to us, who are older and wiser.
We nod, as if to say, yessir.
He goes on to read the results of the weekend rugby and a dozen teams stand up in turn. One boy, Franzi, scored a hat trick. He is cheered and called up to the stage to shake hands with Visoog Vorster himself.
The day I stand face to face with Visoog Vorster, I wonder if I will be a Stompie and be caned, or a Franzi and be cheered.
Hall ends with the singing of the school song and Die Stem. We stand stock-still, heads cocked at the orange, white and blue flag.
– We will live, we will die. Us for you, South Africa.
Back at our desks, we chant Latin. Stop. There is a tok tok at the door. It is no mischievous tok-tokkie who runs away ha ha. It is Stompie, sobbing and squeezing his ass.
The teacher bids him sit down. He gives Stompie a handkerchief, tells him to wipe his nose, not to be so melodramatic, that it won’t kill him. Stompie flinches in his desk as if his ass is wired to a rat cage and the rats are gnawing the hell out of him.
A tap of the bamboo cane against the blackboard draws us back to our Latin.
– Amo amas amat amamus amatis amant, we chant in unison.
The bell goes and we stampede out.
As is the custom, Stompie jerks his pants down in the toilets. We gasp at the flaring red welts across his white ass. Stompie smiles. For us, Stompie, short-ass stub of a boy, is a hero.
Cat Stevens
ALL DAY LONG IT spins round and round in my head: my father is taking me to watch cricket at Newlands with him. I am over the moon. Zane, of course, is still too small, but I am thirteen and in high school.
As we drive out of the winelands and through the southern suburbs to Cape Town in my father’s dusty Isuzu bakkie, the Beach Boys wish all the girls could be California girls. From the way they sing, I too wish they could all be California girls, though America is still as far away as it was when man landed on the moon. The Beach Boys catch the feelgood mood you feel when everything in the world is just dandy.
Newlands: my father and I sit on a crowded grandstand and look out onto the floodlit pitch, where Orange Free State in orange want to bowl out Western Province, being us, in blue.
My father, the cricket fundi, deciphers the game for me. When Zane and I play we make up the rules, so I’m not into the ins and outs of cricket, things like silly mid-on and gully and googly. Still, it’s good to listen to him holding forth on a theme he loves.
Kirsten is batting and he sends the ball flying into the grandstand. All around us men yell Proooviiince with such gusto that it ripples their bagpipe beer-guts.
– Want a Castle Lager? my father offers, casually.
I just blush and nod.
My first beer. Bitter, but I do not care a jot. My father winks at me, his son becoming a man, and I grin like a jackass.
On the far side, a carnival of coloureds begins a Mexican wave. The wave surges around the field, and as it reaches us my father and I jump up. Empty beer cans fill the sky, then rain down on unlucky heads. The wave goes round and round, till it dies out at the boxes, where the rich feel this jack-in-the-boxing is undignified.
A coloured vendor with no front teeth carts an icebox on his stomach.
– Howzabout a lolly to make you jolly, he calls, flashing pink gums.
– Coloureds pull out their front teeth because other coloureds find it sexy, whispers my father in m
y ear.
This lollyboy is the casanova of Cape Town, for sure, with his eltonjohn shades and gone teeth.
– Howzabout a sucker to keep you wakker, he jives.
Men chuck empty beer cans at him, playfully. He ducks like a boxer, just shifting his head.
My father forks out small change for a granadilla lolly for me.
Now I juggle a beer can in one hand and a dripping lolly in the other.
After my beer and granadilla lolly, I join the string of wheezing, bantering men wanting to pee. One, ahead of me, pinches his fly and rocks from foot to foot.
Further ahead there is a line of beer cans on the peeing wall, as the men are forced to put them down for a minute to unzip.
When I am tall enough to reach up and prop a beer can on the wall, I will also be a man.
Back in the grandstand I am just in time to see a man run bare-assed across the pitch with two policemen after him. With his shaggy black beard he reminds me of Cat Stevens on my father’s record of Tea for the Tillerman. I feel a twinge of pity for him as he is as white and exposed under the floodlights as a rabbit in a motorcar’s headlamps. He runs blindly and falls over the rail, then is up again, hopping through the whistling crowd. As the policemen hurdle the rail the crowd turns on them, booing.
I wonder if he will get away, or if the policemen will catch him and jail him with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island.
dead fish
THE AFTERNOON BUS RATTLES along dirt roads.
Past fields where convicts look up from their hoeing to watch us go by.
Past barefoot coloured schoolkids walking the long torrid miles in clusters of lurid colour.
I sit with my knees up against the seat in front of me and my blazer draped over my head for shade. The bus rumbles on, and I focus on its rhythm and the vibration in my feet.
We stop. I lift the corner of my blazer to look out.
There is a rundown café, with a solitary petrol pump in front and a faded rooibos tea advert on the zinc roof, where you buy the newspaper and Simba chips, or Springbok bread and fresh milk.
Bicycles are propped against the finger-dirt wall below a window jammed with Koffiehuis tins and Koo jams and Silver Cloud flour and batcollar pink shirts that were in fashion in the sixties, maybe. A small coloured boy sits in the doorway. A cockroach crawls across his dirt-caked toes. The boy catches it and tugs its legs off, calmly, one by one.
At home the summer smell of mown kikuyu grass beckons me. I dump my schoolbooks, shed my school blues and greys, my fears of bamboo and big boys, and run out the yard and up the bluegum avenue. Overhead, blades of light spear through the bluegums. A red and green pheasant darts across my path, giving me a scare.
A tractor rattles by, fruitpickers standing in the empty fruit bins, as if they are to be canned and shipped overseas. They wave at me and yell: baleka, baleka. Run, run. And I run, out of the bluegum avenue, past the reservoir, and on through pear and peach orchards, through the stinging cicada sun, up to the dam on the slopes of the Simonsberg.
I kick off my Dunlop tackies and denim shorts and dive in, plummet down through the lukewarm surface layer into the icy depths, feel the usual sharp panic that I will be sucked down forever, and begin to fight the downward pull.
I surface, gasping for air, and float like an otter with the sun on my face. Again I feel the fear tug at me. The fear, ever since a coloured boy drowned in the dam, that a hand might reach up out of the murky deep and touch me.
I float there, between the blue of the sky and the green of bloated faces and scaly fish.
An Egyptian goose glides across the cloudless sky.
My mind rewinds the day I went kloofing with Bach and Kala and Langtand and Flip.
We followed a river through canyons so deep that the sun only lit the black water at noon. We climbed along the river-edge rocks and jumped down waterfalls into the deep, gouged-out pools below.
Amid the yells and laughter triggered by the cold of a black-water pool, it was some time before we realised Flip was gone. When Bach eventually dived him out of the black, he was dead, just freckles and wet white flesh lolling on a rock. Flip was too dead for us to try mouth to mouth. Besides, he had scum oozing from his mouth. Bach told Kala to run like blitz with his long legs for help, although we all knew there was none for Flip van Staden.
I held Flip’s rubbery hands and begged God to breathe life into him again. I hoped that Bach and Langtand would think I was just praying the kind of Catholic prayer that you see priests pray over dying heroes in films. With such prayers no one waits for the dead to leap up again. The priest just prays for the journey of the soul into the world of the dead. But my prayer was a Lazarus prayer. Every now and then I blinked my eyes open to see if Flip stirred, but his glazed eyes just stared into the sky, like the eyes of a dead fish. I heard a faint gargle as some trapped air bubbled up from his lungs.
I promised God: I will not argue politics with my father, I will skip out the sexy parts in Wilbur Smith, I will not finger through Bach’s dog-eared, banned copy of Playboy.
But still Flip’s hand flopped lifelessly.
– Forget it. He’s dead, Bach said to me.
Maybe he guessed I was praying for a miracle. Afterwards, my mother said it was beautiful that I had prayed to God for poor Flip van Staden’s soul. I did not tell her, or anyone, that I had not prayed for his soul, but for his life, and that God had not heard. Or, if he had, my faith was not pure enough after the Playboy images had become imprinted on my mind.
I shiver at the memory and swim ashore. The sand piping hot under my cold, bare feet. I run bare-assed along the dam wall to fetch my denims and tackies, keeping my eyes peeled for coloured women picking grapes in the vineyards. In the valley below, the white speck of our house, Champagne, glimmers white among the vines.
I run down the bluegum avenue again and detour through the peach orchards past La Rhône, the house of a girl called Jarrah.
For me Jarrah is the most magical word in the world. Jarrah is my bright yearning. She makes butterflies flit and dip in my mind. Sometimes she reads on the grass, in oak shadow, but she never glances up as I crunch fallen pinecones underfoot, like Tanglefoot the Red Indian.
Again I run by, again she lies under the oak, on her stomach, bare feet to the sky. Again I crunch pinecones, crack twigs, yet her head stays down, eyes glued to the book.
One day, after days and days of this Tanglefoot ritual, Zane comes home from playing with Jarrah’s sister, Shanna.
– Shanna said that Jarrah said you are sooo childish always running past their house, he chirps.
– I don’t care a jot, I mutter.
Just so. Tough as a cowboy. Afterwards I bury my head in my duckfeather pillow as the butterflies die.
James Dean
JUST WHEN I THINK I will never ever find a girlfriend, I am invited to a dance jol in Stellenbosch over the Simonsberg mountain. I am not invited to the sokkies in Paarl. Boys like Maljan the rugby prop do not want a rooinek around when they dance with pretty Afrikaans girls with names like Annemarie and Annelise.
A girl called Tara invited me. I find Tara pretty, with her red hair twined into pigtails.
My mother drives me into Paarl in the Peugeot 404 to shop for togs in Lady Grey Street. I choose a pair of docksides, my first-ever cool shoes, after years of wearing cheap Batas to school. I also choose a red denim jacket. My mother flips up the collar, stands back.
– You remind me of James Dean, she says. You know, you are on the verge of becoming a man.
On the way home in the chugging 404, I pray to God that Tara will fall for me in my red denim jacket and docksides.
My father ferries me over the mountain to the jol in his Isuzu bakkie. The bakkie smells of cow dung and wet dog, for my father ran Nero and Fango up to the dam beforehand.
Nero and Fango are the Cape dogs. The Natal dogs died. Dingaan died of tickbite fever. My father reversed a Land Rover over Dingo. Sometimes I forget Dingaan and Dingo
died. It is as if they just changed shape and live on as Nero and Fango.
When we arrive at the dance, held in an old wine cellar, Pink Floyd is chanting: we don’t need no education. My father just shakes his head at the jarring music and Isuzus off, leaving me feeling gangly and edgy, giving off a whiff of cow dung and dog. While Pink Floyd barks at teachers to leave us kids alone, I lean against a wall, for all the world as cool as James Dean: thumbs hooked in my jean pockets.
Tara comes towards me in slow motion, red pigtails flicking, and a milky way of glitter on her forehead. She holds the hand of another guy, and as she reaches me, he pecks her on the lips. The peck, like a dog marking out his zone, is to tell me she is his. It is only then that I cotton on: she has not invited me to be with her, but just to the jol.
I want to run out and cry, but I stay in my James Dean lean and go hi, as if she is just another girl breezing by. Maybe this, this gaping groove furrowed out of my heart by a falling star, is how my mother felt when Cliff Richard did not have eyes for the local Durban girls in their flaring, dotty skirts.
– Have a good time, smiles Tara.
As they go, his hand snakes into her back jeans pocket.
I head for a pyramid of wine vats on the far side, hoping to hide in the murky shadows. First Jarrah and now Tara.
Maybe I will become a monk and never slide my hand into a girl’s jeans.
A girl dancing alone catches my eye. She has long wispy blonde hair to her waist, and from behind you may imagine she wears nothing but her Wrangler jeans as she lilts to Fleetwood Mac.
When she turns around, though, I know she is too beautiful for me, even if Venus blinds her to the smudges of base on my face and the fat hem in my hand-me-down jeans from Lars. He is so tall that my mother has folded the hem over a few times before sewing it up, instead of just cutting off half a foot of cloth.
This time I am sure the feeling welling in me, healing me, is love. I cannot bear the thought of suffering another unconfessed love, so I walk up to her. When I reach her, the words come tumbling out:
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