Blood Orange

by Troy Blacklaws

  Another way to die in the Cape.

  If you survive the falling bluegum, the invading Russians and the deadly oleander, if you dodge bulls and sidestep bars of soap, you stand a good chance of being fanged to death.

  Zane begs me to play cricket when I want to be alone in the murk of my outside room with Camus and Dylan. He thuds a ball against the wall until I give in.

  Today, Zane just stands at the door until I look up from The Outsider.

  – Hey Zane, you OK? I say, my mind still on the beach with Meursault and his girl Marie.

  Meursault and Marie drink the sea foam and spurt it up at the sky. Meursault’s mouth burns with the bitterness of the salt. I know the taste of burning saltwater on my tongue. This scene with Marie, her face suntanned like a flower, is good. Till this moment the story is dull.

  – I dunno bro, mumbles Zane. I had this dream. You remember the way the big girls on the bus sat me on their lap ’coz of my blue eyes?

  – And the 50 cents you got for ice-cream if you let them comb your hair like a rabbit, I tease.

  He giggles.

  – Hey bro, you ever see a girl naked?

  – Naked? No. Lars tells me in Denmark the girls tan with no bikini top on. And in Amsterdam they sit naked in the windows.

  – No way.

  – I tell you it’s true.

  – Do you think we will ever go as far as Denmark, or Amsterdam?

  – I hope so. If we go, Country Joe, don’t forget the Fish.

  We cycle through the orchards behind Boschendal, where the geese hiss at us and chickens dart away to hide among the bamboo. Over the Dwars River. Past the coloured school. The afternoon kids at their desks stare dreamily out of the windows at the morning kids larking in the yard. There are too few desks and teachers for all the coloured kids of the valley to have morning school.

  We play tennis in shorts and tackies on the sand court of the Groot Drakenstein Games Club which the coloured barman rolls flat and hard. Between sets we dive into the frog-green pool.

  Bach bore the flak of hanging around at Paarl Boys’ High with an outsider like me. Maljan and the boys called him my nanny.

  – I don’t give a damn, Bach said to me.

  He imagined he was Steve McQueen. Nothing would faze him. Nothing ripple his cool.

  While Bach was around, no one dared touch me. Bach was as big as Maljan, the rugby prop, and Visoog Vorster was cross with him for playing football at the club in Paarl rather than playing rugby for the school. Visoog Vorster loved to mock how football players dived whenever a boot skimmed their shin, the way they hugged and kissed after scoring a goal, like homos.

  The rugby boys around us guffawed and winked at Bach, who everyone knew was a footballer.

  – I don’t give a damn, Bach would mutter.

  Then his folks sent him to boarding school in Pretoria, because of the shame. One night he was caught swimming naked with a girl in the school pool after a dance. Visoog Vorster wanted to cane him, but Bach would not bend. So he was kicked out instead. Not to bend for Visoog Vorster was the bravest thing I had ever heard of. Bach begged not to be sent north but his folks said the skinny dip at school was the last straw.

  He cried at the station in Paarl. It was the first time I saw him lose his cool. As the train pulled away, he called out to me:

  – Don’t let the bastards get you down.

  Now Bach is gone, and Lars is away most of the time, dodging his army call-up, foraying into the townships. The police called on his folks but they said they hadn’t seen him for a while. The police filled a cardboard box with his university notes and paperback novels, margins graffitied with his thoughts and the scores of Leeds United games.

  When he comes back to the farm, Lars parks Dirt in the vineyards. When you hear Fidel and Marx whine, you know he is out there, in the dark, weaving through the vines.

  My history teacher, Captain Malan, used to be an undercover policeman. He ought not to go by his title, but he enjoys the boys calling him Captain. He tells us it is natural, the ladder of race in South Africa.

  – Blacks were cursed by God to be hewers of wood, to work the land for the whites. Therefore they have not evolved at the same pace.

  I put up my hand.

  – But, Captain, if blacks have not evolved as fast, then how-come they run faster, jump further and box harder?

  Captain Malan taps his head.

  – Fact is, we outwitted them, he smirks.

  The class laughs at his wit.

  During break, in the lee of the pump house by the school pool, I read books Lars lends me, like Death in Venice or Dangling Man. Sometimes it is lonely there in my outcast corner of the school. The loneliness began slowly: a whisper of kaffirboetie, niggerlover, a jolt in a crowd, a bag of schoolbooks dropped down a stairwell onto my head.

  Today I read Waiting for Godot while I chew an avocado sandwich my mother made for me. I cannot focus on Godot. I rewind the history lesson we just had. I wish I had thought of a reply to Captain Malan’s smug punch line: We outwitted them. I see now, in hindsight, how I played into his hands by focusing on the physical. I wish I had had a black poet, or novelist, at my fingertips. We read Wordsworth and Blake and all the English poets. We read Golding and Paton and Hemingway, and other white writers, but I have never read a word written by a black man.

  I discover I have turned the page. My eyes had gone on skimming the lines though my mind was not on the play. I do not worry to rewind, for Gogo and Didi are still waiting under the same dry tree. A shadow falls across the page. I squint up to see Maljan, eclipsing the sun. He is flanked by the De Beer brothers. Behind them, in silhouette, a scrum of other boys from my class.

  – Hey Gecko, we’ve had it with this kaffir-lover shit of yours.

  – Le’s just beat the hell out of the kaffirboetie, chorus the De Beer brothers.

  Maljan and the De Beer brothers pin me down and stuff avocado sandwich into my mouth. They laugh at my bulging hamster cheeks. A hand pinches my nose so I cannot breathe at all. I writhe under their nobbly knees and bony fists. Frantic for air, I spew avocado on their blue school shirts. The laughing dies.

  – Let’s just beat the hell out of the kaffirboetie, go the De Beer brothers again.

  But Maljan has other ideas and pulls out a red Swiss Army knife.

  – You have to learn that you can’t just run around thinking you are Gandhi.

  He folds out the corkscrew, twists his wrist, as if screwing it into a cork, or skin, then folds it back in. Then he flicks out the knife blade.

  – You forget this black shit, you hear?

  Maljan grasps a handful of hair like a Red Indian about to scalp me. He hacks out a gaping, ragged hole.

  – Now there is no nanny to come running.

  He walks to the edge of the pool and scatters my hair over the surface of the water. Then they go. My hair floats for a long time while I rub the threadbare hole at the back of my head.

  In the mirror in the toilets, it looks as if my barber had a jitter fit.

  Head buried under my blazer, I ride out the sniggers on the bus.

  Back on the farm, my mother is furious.

  – I’m going to call up the headmaster. This has gone too far.

  I beg her not to, as I know it will make my life unbearable at school if I am called a kaffirboetie and a rat too.

  bikini

  I SEE JARRAH AT the games club. She suns by the pool in a pink bikini on a sky-blue towel. Her blond hair is tinted creamsoda green by the chlorine. By now I know she thinks me childish, so I do not bother to butterfly up and down the pool. She unhooks her bikini top while she lies reading on her tummy. Zane dives in and cold drops of water rain on her back. She flinches, giving me an eyeful of forbidden skin, untouched by the sun.

  red rover

  PHYSICAL TRAINING AT PAARL Boys’: barefoot, shirtless boys in white shorts spinning out the rugby ball on the field below the white school facade and the row of ancient oaks. Weaving,
dipping, diving, shying the hands that fly after you. Flicking the ball out, to left or right, just before a hand touches you.

  Afterwards, I gasp as the icy shower water stings my grass burns.

  I become aware of a sinister stillness and wonder how long I have been alone. I turn the tap and reach for my towel, to discover it is gone. Instinctively, I cover my balls with my hands. At that moment Maljan comes around the corner. He fills his six foot four with a cocksure, cowboy machismo. His long arms fall lazily, in a John Wayne way.

  – Red rover, red rover, run over, he taunts.

  My heart bongoes against my rib cage as I go past him.

  I feel relief. His taunt was just bravado. But then, the sting of a flat, fanned hand across my back. I flinch, but still face forwards, sensing his desire to hurt. To turn around is to fetch a fist in my teeth, so I go on up the steps to the benches where the clothes hang on steel hooks.

  The other boys from my class stare ahead of them like zombies as they tie their ties and laces.

  From behind my flaming back Maljan hisses:

  – Pretty white ass you got there, for a kaffirboetie.

  Still wet, I pull on my Jockeys. I am buttoning up my shirt when he thrusts me against the wall. A steel hook stabs me in the forehead. I fall to my knees on the cold floor, as if at the altar rail. I finger my forehead, gingerly. My fingers come away filmed in blood.

  Reaching for the hook, I pull myself to my feet. Blood dams in my eyebrows, drips into my eyes. I turn to face Maljan.

  – Listen, Jan. I don’t want to fight with you.

  – You don’t wanna fight hey? But I wanna fuck you up, you kaffirboetie. Your tutumandela shit makes me vomit, you know.

  He gobs up the slime from his gullet and spits at me.

  I wipe blood and gob out of my eyes.

  – Mandela Mandela monkeydela, he mocks.

  The other boys act is if they see no evil. At Paarl Boys’ High you stay out of a fight.

  Maljan jabs me hard in the ribs to provoke some resistance.

  – If you believe all this tutumandela shit, why don’t you stan’ up and fight for it, hey? You too much a moffie, hey?

  I stand there, head bent, holding my balls. Just then the bell goes.

  – You fuckin’ moffie. Maljan’s parting shot as he follows the other boys out, my grey school shorts in hand.

  Our next class is with Baldhead Bosman who canes boys who come late. Even Maljan is scared of him. Baldhead Bosman, who vivisects rabbits with the same cheer as he canes boys. He makes us study the squirming guts of the rabbit, clear as cogs in a defaced clock. Baldhead Bosman, who believes in plum.

  – Let me tell you boys, there is nothing like your plum for growing a good stick. I have tried out peach and pear, but I always come back to plum.

  I arrive late and bleary-eyed in white shorts between my striped blazer and grey socks. He tells me to bend. I bend over his desk. Under my nose, mice scurry through the sawdust of their cage. He jacks me with his plum and I jerk up as it stings.

  – Boys, there are some facts you can verify through experiment. One such fact is the pliancy of plum.

  Cawing laughter comes from the tiered desks.

  Again the plum swishes through the air. Again I jump up.

  Again the boys laugh. It is hard not to laugh at the sight of a boy being caned. The jackknifing over the desk, the jack-in-the-box jumping up to rub ass.

  – So the kaffirboetie is a highjumper, hey?

  I stand in front of him, rubbing ass.

  – The boys tell me you would let Mandela go.

  – Yes, sir.

  – You’re out of your head, my boy. If communists such as Mandela are free to run around, then this country is lost. You hear?

  I just hang my head.

  – You’re not to blame, boy. I like your spirit. It’s the cunning English papers that put subversive thoughts in your head. Is it not?

  – Maybe, Sir.

  – I thought so. Sit down, my boy.

  At break I see boys on the rugby field staring up at my grey shorts flapping in the wind atop a rugby post as high as a yacht’s mast. I stand forlorn on the edge of the field amid wild whistling and yahooing.

  Then, out of the blue, Fanie Viljoen, a boy from my class, tugs off his shoes, peels off his socks, and begins to climb the rugby post. The yahooing boys jeer him, hurl orange peels at him, but he climbs on upwards, like an islander shinning up a coconut palm. The post begins to sway but Fanie Viljoen inches up higher and higher towards my shorts.

  Boys chant: Moffie moffie moffie moffie ...

  In the school they say Fanie Viljoen is a homo because he goes for rides with Mister Sands to the Strand for ice-cream. I once asked Bach what a homo was and he said: A guy who sucks another guy’s cock. Oh, I said.

  I wonder why my mother and father never tell me such things. Sex is a taboo word in our house, but my mother did once give me D. H. Lawrence to read. Like a needle caught in a record groove, I lingered on the part where the gamekeeper puts forget-me-nots in the woman’s maidenhair. I love the word maidenhair for a girl’s love hair. It conjures up a mystic image of hair flowing lazy as sea grass under water.

  While Fanie Viljoen climbs up the rugby post I find I do not care a jot if he goes for rides with Mister Sands. All I know is he braves the jeers and the orange peels and runs the risk of being beaten up by Maljan just for me, rooinek kaffirboetie. We are moffies together, Fanie and I. Fanie because he rides with Mister Sands, and me because Maljan made me cry, because I read books instead of playing touch rugby at break, because I play hockey, because I do not fight back.

  Fanie Viljoen reaches for my pants while the pole sways and, instead of dropping them, drapes them over his head before sliding down. When his bare feet touch the grass, he walks over with my shorts, my shame, in his hands and casually flicks them to me. Boys wolf-whistle as if a girl breezed by.

  fee fi fo fum

  – THE HEADMASTER WANTS TO see you, Baldhead Bosman tells me. Regarding subversive thoughts. I’m sorry, but I felt it my duty.

  I recall Stompie’s striped ass, and I reel as I stand up. I feel the eyes of my class bore into me. I stumble as I go out, and Maljan laughs. Bosman hits him over the head with the spine of a book.

  The school was never so dark and cold. I want to run for it, thumb a ride to Cape Town harbour, and jump on a cargo ship bound for England. England, where teachers do not beat boys and where, as Grandpa Barter tells it, you may stand on a tomato box in Hyde Park and say the queen is daft without even the pigeons bothering to flutter.

  Visoog Vorster’s door looms in front of me. I tok tok, tentatively.

  I hear a bass rumble. I open the door to the room steeped in myth. Sure enough, there is the row of bamboo canes on top of the cupboard. My ass tingles at the mere sight of them.

  On the desk a platoon of fountain pens stands at attention. Visoog Vorster’s face looms through a cloud of cigar smoke.

  – Mister Bosman sent you?

  – Yes, sir.

  – You’ve been sent to me before?

  – No, sir.

  – A first offence. I have heard from Mister Bosman that your head is full of politics.

  He spits out the word politics. He makes it sound as if my head is teeming with vermin.

  – No, sir. Not just politics, sir.

  There are the ass-wagging women in Bach’s Playboy who weave their way into my dreams. There is the daydream of being a writer, like Hemingway, or Wilbur Smith. There is the wish to be as long and lithe as Lars is. There is the yearning to see my Grandpa’s England, where you eat fish and chips out of a newspaper. But I can tell none of this to Visoog Vorster, who wants my head full of chalk and rugby.

  – Come now, if I let you off this time, will you rid your head of such nonsense? You’re here to enjoy school, not carry the world on your shoulders, you know.

  For a moment the deal he offers is sweet. I get off scot-free and all I have to do is forget. F
orget Biko’s bleeding head. Forget Mandela behind bars, time grooving furrows in his forehead. Forget the fallen pomegranate heads, oozing red juice on pavements.

  – I’m not sure I can just forget, sir.

  – Well, I’m sorry, but in that case you’ll have to bend.

  He stands up, dwarfing me. I imagine he will cry: Fee fi fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. Instead, as if offering me a range of lollipops:

  – Which cane shall I use?

  – I don’t know, sir.

  All the canes look as if they will sting hard.

  – Well then, I’ll choose for you.

  He reaches for a long cane and bends it, head to tail. Then he swings a few mock lashes in the air. Swish, swish, swish goes the cane.

  My teeth jibber. My knees jelly.

  – Four cuts. And to think you might have walked.

  Visoog Vorster smiles tobacco-yellowed fangs as I, unbidden, drag my feet to his desk and bend over it. It confirms the fame of his method, means he will not have to teach me my part in this ritual.

  My shorts pull taut across my ass. I wait for the swish of the cane. When it comes, I gasp.

  The sting is worse than a wasp sting. It is like being stung by a jellyfish, and the sting of a jellyfish can make a man cry. It is like all the times I grazed the skin off my knees, in one searing rip.

  And then there is the gap.

  The gap when time chewing-gums out as I wait for the next cut and fight the instinct to rub my ass, or to cry. Lars told me, crying just makes Visoog Vorster cane harder.

  The next cut falls on the same raw, raging place.

  – Oh, Jeeezuz, I cry out as I grab my ass.

  Visoog Vorster prises my fingers away with the cane, as you might poke at a baboon spider or a scorpion with a stick.

  – No rubbing. And do not bandy the name of the Lord about.

  I bend again and clutch at the far rim of his desk.

  The third cut falls on fresh skin. I somehow cling to the desk to keep my fingers from flying to my flaring ass.

  – Good, says Visoog Vorster. I am not fond of melodrama.

  The last cut falls on wounded skin. I shoot up, loosing a banshee yell: yaai yaai yaai. I hop from foot to foot.