Blood Orange

by Troy Blacklaws

  I jump out after Kala among the shacks. There is no bus stop, or sign to signal the shebeen. In the road a barber shaves a man’s head with a razor blade. The hair falls in curling peels to the dust. A cobbler, sitting on a box, cuts a car tyre into the shape of a sole. Vendors sell slabs of raw, fly-peppered meat on news paper. Hangdog dogs beg for handouts. Vivid oranges and tomatoes deck hawkers’ stands.

  Kala and I slink through back alleyways to keep out of sight of the wired-off police station up on the hill. The fortified white outpost reminds me of the Voortrekkers in their oxwagons surrounded by Zulu warriors. Instead of oxwagons, though, Casspirs shimmer in the sun.

  An old man with thirsty-leather skin and a white beard squints at me from the junkyard seat of a motorcar he has propped against the wall of his shack. He cups a bowl of soured milk in his hands, thinking, perhaps, that this is a sad place to grow old, amid gutted motorcars, mangy dogs flicking pesky flies from their eyes, and bald chickens scratching among rags and bones and tins.

  Rubbish swishswirls in the dustwind and collects in ditches or snags on barbed wire, like the random, painted graffiti on zinc walls:

  they piss on us

  MK is coming

  one boer one bullet

  My Minolta camera piedpipes kids out of alleyways. Soon there is a string of kids ragtagging at my heels. I shoot a spool of bobbing, shaven heads and gleaming teeth in front of the makeshift shops.

  Inside the shebeen it is dark and cool and the fat shebeen queen gives Kala such a hug he almost drowns in the folds of her flowing dress.

  Fortunately, she just shakes my hand and conjures a warm Lion beer for me.

  Kala introduces me to his chinas. They all give their names. The only name that hooks in my mind is Angel, a tall boy with a pink scar on his forehead in the shape of a Nike wing. I wonder if it was a fall, or a fight, but do not dare ask.

  The mute old men drink the sour beer in the murky corners, but Kala and his chinas drink bottled Lion and smoke ganja and tell stories of the tsotsi gangs, who knife you for a fiver if you stray onto their turf, and the way men sometimes vanish when they are detained by the police.

  You may be detained for 90 days without a trial, they tell me. It is the law. Then, if you survive and they have got no case against you, they let you go. But if you do not bow your head as they give you back your clothes, and if your smile is too cocky, or your step too jaunty, they just pick you up again half a mile down the road and put you away for another 90 days. So it goes, if the police go by the book. If they don’t go by the book, you are dead.

  – So what do you think of the township? they quiz me.

  – It sounds dangerous.

  – It’s okay if you visit with your camera, click and run, just like going to Safariland, chirps Angel.

  They all laugh.

  – But with the tsotsis and the police and all, it must be tricky to survive.

  – Hey, you get by, Angel winks at me.

  Again there is laughter and a clinking of beer bottles.

  – You want to know how I picked up this? says Angel, fingering his scar.

  I nod, but before Angel can tell his story, we hear a wild hooting and barking. We rush out of the shebeen to see a police van churn up dust. Squawking chickens shed feathers to the wind and dogs bolt. Doorways swallow blurred figures. Two policemen, one white, one black, jump out of the van, leaving the motor running. They batter against a tin door with their guns. When it does not open they kick it in.

  They come out dragging a man whose heels groove the dirt. His cry is inhuman, the whine of a butcher’s saw through bone. A comical sound to come out of a human mouth. A sound that, in a film, would make you laugh.

  But there is no laughter. And no man runs to his rescue. We stand in the long dusk shadows, and watch.

  They shove him into the back of the van and I hear the crack of his shins against the steel before he jack-knifes over. His face squashes up against the wire as the van roars into gear, kicks up spurs of dust, and guns out of sight.

  Through the drifting dust, you can still hear his whining cries.

  maryjane

  THERE IS A HAVEN in Paarl Boys’ High, apart from the projection room and Mister Slater’s classroom, and that is Miss Behr’s room. Skinny Miss Behr is my guitar teacher and her jasmine scent is sweet after the sweat and urine of the changing rooms and the chalk dust of the classrooms.

  Miss Behr has an Egon Schiele sketch of a naked girl on the wall, a memento of her time in Vienna, and wears a black grandpa vest with tortoise-shell buttons and a long black skirt that falls down to toenails painted in glossy peacock green. I wish to tunnel up Miss Behr’s skirt and hide from yelling teachers and the fear of Baldhead Bosman’s plum and the gnawing envy of Slimjan’s writing.

  Miss Behr found out long ago that I am no Dylan, that I have no inborn rhythm, but still she lets me come. I listlessly pluck the strings while we talk about books and things. She studied music at Rhodes University before going to Vienna for a year. She tells me about Vienna: the trams, the coffeeshops, the opera, the Danube. As she does so she gathers her long skirt in bunched folds until her bony knees stick out. She has pink notches on them. I hope her skirt will go higher, but she lets it fall when she sees me staring. She reaches for my hands and clasps them in hers.

  – You know, you must go to the Grahamstown arts festival. It will be an oceanic experience for you.

  I beg my mother and father to let me go, that it will be oceanic.

  – Grahamstown is not on the sea, it is an hour inland from Port Alfred, my father jibes.

  – But I want to study journalism and Rhodes is the place to go.

  – Rhodes is so far, sighs my mother.

  – I just want to see.

  – Gecko, my boy, there are dangers there. Drugs and ...

  – Hippies, nods my father.

  It is the first far journey I, big boy, am to make alone. My father forbids me to thumb a lift, so I sift through the Cape Times and find a lift with a medical student from UCT.

  My father drives me to the rendezvous, the crossroads in Somerset West. My lift is an old painted hippie van brimful of students. The dogs go berserk in the back of the bakkie and my father nods itoldyouso.

  It turns out the only medicine the medical student has studied is herbal.

  – Ganja, kaya, grass, weed, boom, zol, doob, sweet maryjane, he intones as if he’s a Tibetan priest reeling out a mantra.

  The students drink Amstel beer.

  – Castle Lager is too macho. Too white South African cock-swinging male.

  So we go along the N2, Amstel in hand and Juluka at full volume. Though they offer me a drag of dagga, the weed is still too riddled with taboo for me. I remember Miss Hunter telling us dagga is one of the stops on the road downhill, before you end up joining the ANC. I remember Visoog Vorster giving a boy six cuts and then sending him packing for smoking dagga in the parking lot of the Protea Cinema. So I say no thank you and stay with the Amstel.

  In half an hour you are over the Hottentots Holland Mountains, a journey that took days by oxwagon, and drop down into the Elgin and Grabouw apple orchards. Then, suddenly, you are in the yellow wheatlands of Caledon. The country dries out and you feel as if you are on the edge of a desert.

  You pass through humdrum dorps: in each you see a police station, with the flag hanging listless in the heat and a mirage dancing on the hot tin roof.

  You pass a one-star Royal or Grand hotel with an off-licence and a flypaper bar. Names that recall pioneering colonial days, when travellers stopped for more than petrol and a piss.

  Coloured petroljockeys at the roadside BP and Shell garages lure you in with their flashy smiles.

  Roadside cafés under Coca-Cola signs sell you take-away pies and Simba chips.

  On the Port Elizabeth beachfront we park at a sixties roadhouse and watch seagulls flying into the wind without making headway.

  Between Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown the countrysid
e changes again. The scattered thorn and aloes and cycads, the clay huts and dongas and redearth anthills, give you the taste of Africa.

  A donkey cart on the road, drifting through the haze.

  Xhosa women in black turbans, carting firewood on their heads. Jangling copper bangles that blink in the sun, dangling long, beaded pipes from their teeth. Young girls selling cactus figs or pineapples piled in pyramids.

  Grahamstown is a snug, curled-up English hedgehog in the African veld. The Anglican cathedral at the foot of High Street dominates this town of church steeples and Victorian fronts. Beyond the cathedral I see the black township up on the hill.

  Captain Malan taught me in History that Grahamstown was originally a fort on the far, frayed edge of the Cape Colony. Beyond Grahamstown and the Fish River was the dark unknown of the wild tribes.

  In the High Street I hand over fifty rand, a cheap ride with the free Amstel and Juluka. A dry wind stirs up dust and paper behind me as I walk up High Street, past beggars and buskers and hawkers and milling students. After the uniform blues and greys of Paarl Boys’ High it is bizarre to find myself among earringed throngs in sandals and rainbow kikois.

  I see a play by Athol Fugard at The Box. The play is full of rage against apartheid and my heart beats fast at the racy dialogue. This Fugard character must be very brave. If he was at Paarl Boys’ High, Visoog Vorster would cane him to a pulp.

  At the end of the play those around me jump up to wave fists and toyi-toyi, thundering their feet to the pulsing cry of Nkululeku, freedom. Though I still feel self-conscious giving a black-power salute, I nevertheless wish my teachers at Paarl Boys’ High could see me now: rooinek kaffirboetie on the barricades, jabbing my fist at imagined policemen and dogs and Casspirs.

  There is a foreign film festival at the Odeon. In the cold gloom of the pre-war cinema I warm my hands with a packet of hot soggy chips from the Tamboowallah Café and fall in love with Isabelle Adjani’s ebony hair on ivory skin.

  A guitarman plucks Neil Young in the dusky dagga haze of a basement pub. Some folk find they hear the music better lying on the floor, or leaning their heads against the wall.

  A girl with tumbling crow-black hair shares her glowing jay with me in a dark corner. In this smoky, bohemian, other world, the taboo fades. Before long I am well caned and things go all Dali on me.

  I focus on a gecko on the roof and imagine it too is high, just breathing in the smoke. The girl draws my hand in under her skirt. I rub the rim of her vagina under cloth, till the damp seeps through.

  Then she goes off to pee, and she walks upside down on the roof, skilfully, as if she has done it all her life. She leaves the glowing stompie of the jay in my hands. I am not sure if you stub it out or suck it till it goes out, so I suck it till it burns my fingers and I drop it to die in a hiss in the lees of a tumbler of red wine.

  When she comes back down to me from her walkabout on the roof, I am far gone. Again my hand snakes into the dark between her knees. She has lost her panties and her shaven vagina feels smooth and warm as a newborn, bald rabbit.

  Just then the world begins to reel. I plunge through blurred faces and jabbing shoulders and bared teeth, then I am on my knees barking the dog into piss.

  I wade back through the haze to discover the girl is gone, rabbit and all.

  Grahamstown station: I board the train bound for Cape Town. I yearn for the empty hours ahead, reading Steinbeck as the Karoo blurs by. The stone thirstland of telegraph poles and steel windmills.

  First class is rich white and third class is non-white. That makes me second class, in a six-berth cabin. Apart from me, there is this guy in black leather from head to foot, bound for Maitland, that down-at-heel white suburb of Cape Town that picks up dust from the flats.

  – Hey, my Maitland chinas call me Dippie, short for Dipstick.

  He reels off a litany of his motorcars and motorcycles.

  – I have an Alfa Spyder. Restored it all on my ace. But the most beautiful thing on earth is a Harley, tunes Dippie. So what’s your game?

  – I go to school. Paarl Boys’ High.

  I wonder if I will always have Paarl Boys’ High pull down my head like a shotdown albatross.

  – Hey, Paarl Boys’. I knew this chick in Paarl with big tits and the sweetest peach south of Bloemfontein, says Dippie.

  I dare not ask Dippie if he has only been as far as Bloemfontein, or if there are even sweeter fruits beyond.

  – Her old man jus’ rots in the bloody station bar all day. One time he comes home drunk as a monkey and grabs his shotgun. The bastard shoots my backside fulla birdshot as I jump outa the window. I tell you, my china, peach can kill you.

  We halt on some godforsaken, tumbleweed platform.

  Dippie rabbits on about the lure of peach, of how you want it again and again.

  – You know you gonna end up being shot at, or some bitch shunts in with her bags and your freedom goes out the window, lock, stock and barrel. But still you go after it. Crazy, hey?

  Through the window I see a sagging, unshaven old man saying goodbye to a young woman in red lipstick and spiked heels. Perhaps his daughter.

  She folds a ten rand note into his jacket pocket. She kisses his cheek, smearing red lipstick on his white stubble. Then she tiptaps down the platform without glancing back.

  When he comes into the cabin I see his jacket is threadbare and that one of the glass spheres from his glasses is gone. His breath reeks of booze. If the lipstick woman is his daughter, then she may be sending him south to another part of the family who will, I imagine, give him a shave and a meal and send him north again, another folded note in his pocket.

  He sits on the bunk next to Dippie, who is subdued by the old man’s hangdog face. Eventually Dippie thumps the old man on the back so hard his teeth drop out.

  – Hey, Oupa. Howzabout I buy you a brandy, hey?

  At that, Oupa perks up, pops his teeth in, and shuffles after Dippie to find the bar.

  I pick up my book: Of Mice and Men. I am reading about Lennie dreaming of a rabbit farm, when a dogsick man stumbles into the cabin and lies down on the seat where Dippie and Oupa sat.

  He tells me he is a sheep farmer from somewhere out Matjiesfontein way and has just had his appendix fished out.

  – Do you want to see my scar?

  – No. Thank you.

  I fake a smile.

  – Don’t be shy, he tunes me.

  He goes ahead and bares his stomach. A black-footed centipede slants down to his zip.

  I smile feebly as I ride out waves of nausea.

  – It hurts like hell. I should still be there by the hospital but I escaped, he laughs, the kind of tee hee hee laugh of one who outwits another in comics.

  To prove he is suffering, he moans like a bleeding pig.

  – Know why I ran away?

  – The food?

  – Hell no.

  – The nurses?

  – No. My sheep. They lost without me.

  Dippie and Oupa come back to hit the sack and the sheep farmer uncovers his scar again. Not to disturb the farmer, they pull down the two bunks above my head. I am forced to abandon Steinbeck. I volunteer for the top bunk, to get as far away as I can from the dying man.

  A steward comes round with fresh sheets. A chorus of grunts from below implies only moffies need sheets on a train, so I lie on the bare bunk and shut my eyes so I can fall asleep to the lulling rhythm of the wheels.

  But it is tricky to drift off. Dippie on the bunk below me de-gobs his throat between drags on his Gunston fag. Oupa weeps and his teeth rattle in a glass on the sink. Not to be outdone, the sheep farmer whines every now and then.

  Then Oupa kicks off his shoes and I gasp for air at the tilted window.

  The train whistles through a dorp of jackal-eye windows and my romantic illusions of travelling by train blow out into the cold, black Karoo with Dippie’s Gunston smoke.

  warrior

  MY SCHOOL DAYS ARE over. I have time to explore
Cape Town during the long Christmas holidays.

  WHITES ONLY signs mark benches and beaches. Mandela is in his cell on Robben Island, across the seagull bay. But apartheid is fraying at the edges. In the streets of Cape Town you sometimes see a black guy with a white girl or a black girl with a white guy.

  And things change in other ways.

  French and German girls drop their bikini tops on the beach at Clifton and Llandudno to bare perky breasts to the sun. Sometimes, down a back street someone will peel out of the shadows, like a conscience, and offer you some grass:

  – Swazi, pure and cheap.

  Short summer skirts flutter by and flowergirls and fruitsellers gaily call their wares but I drag my feet through the swirl of life and colour. My long and bitter days at Paarl Boys’ High are through and I ought to feel that carefree summer mood flow through my blood:

  Languid days on the farm.

  The deep dark cool of the dam.

  Cricket under the pines.

  Tennis on the sand court.

  Beer mugs of Oros and ice.

  (Once a tadpole came through the pipes from the dam and my mother found it frozen in a block of ice in her g & t.)

  Reading in my room by candle. Moth wings burning in a spit of flame.

  Instead, a shadow hangs over me and clogs the air, for I have my call-up. I am to report to the infantry camp in Oudtshoorn in a fortnight. I had hoped I might be sent to the navy base at Saldanha where the Berg River runs into the sea. There I would still feel umbilically joined to the valley and the vineyards through the river. But no, I am to go over the mountains to Oudtshoorn in the Karoo, where the gawky ostriches scratch for stones in the dust.

  Tinsel and fake snow in the shops. Parcel-burdened shoppers look the other way when tattered streetkids tug at their clothes. It is crazy to think of Santa and his reindeer while the sun melts the tar.

  I wish I was free to skip the country on a Danish passport as Lars did. It is either the army or jail for me, and after all Lars’s stories of torture and flying from high windows, I am shit scared of jail.