Blood Orange

by Troy Blacklaws

  A dry berg wind breathes down from Lion’s Head and stirs up dust and paper and the distant sound of chanting. And, as in a dream, the tapdancer in St George’s Street slows his rhythm and the flowersellers hold out their proteas in silence.

  The chanting filters down from somewhere over the BoKaap until a human river flows down Wale Street and into the city and overflows onto the pavements of Adderley Street. At the head of the tide, fists wave and ululating women ripple their shoulders and swing their hips at the police.

  The riot police lean against their yellow vans in the sun. They lovingly pat their guns, grind cigarette stubs under black boots. Their dogs whimper, begging to be loosed.

  The human river dams against the wall of police and vans and dogs. Women whistle and jive. Men stab their fists into the sky. Thousands of wardancing feet slam into the tar.

  – Amandla amandla amandla, cry the fists.

  A paternal voice booms over the chanting and the whistles and stomping:

  – This is an unlawful gathering. You must all go home in peace ...

  His voice is drowned in crowing laughter.

  Eyes glow with the rush of baiting the regime – on streets the marchers swept or bussed to work on.

  My mind switches into slow motion as a head a few inches away from mine snaps back.

  And then, only, do I hear the pop of rubber bullets and the cries like blades scything through the air.

  I plunge through a mist of teargas and coldfear eyes. I feel pain sear through my head.

  I see, as in the dark of a cinema, marchers running like a herd of wildebeest towards the bank of a raging river. Looking back, they see Land Rovers coming after them. Bushmen trackers perch on the roofs and policemen gaze down the barrels of their guns. The hunted plunge into the river. Crocodiles and sharks glide in among the frenzy.

  Then I’m standing on the bank of the blood-suffused river. I turn to see Visoog Vorster and Maljan and the De Beer brothers coming after me. On the far bank Lucky Strike beckons to me. I dive in among the crocodiles and sharks to be jawed to death. But the water falls away, as if sucked down a plughole.

  I corkscrew down and down and down until a wind whisks me up and I see, again, our house in Natal far below. I see the old jacaranda and Tomtom at the backyard wire and Beauty jellying with laughter as she pegs up the washing and Jonas giggling as he rolls his Boxer tobacco.

  Lucky Strike jigs outside the kitchen door with Dingaan and Dingo, calling:

  – Fly fly fly, young baas.

  I fly as I have never flown before, over the rolling hills of Zululand and over the Drakensberg mountains.

  Across the Karoo, a scattering of sheep and koppies and windmills.

  Across the Hex River valley and over the Du Toitskloof mountains.

  Until I see our white, gabled house in the shadow of the Simonsberg: Zane and Langtand and Kala and Flip van Staden playing cricket under the pines, and Lars swinging on the gate across the road.

  I wish they would look up, but only Flip tilts his dead-fish stare at the sky as I fly by.

  I come to under stiff white sheets to see my mother’s black mascara tears and my father gaunt and drawn.

  – Thank you Jesus, my mother mutters.

  – You ran into a lamppost. You had your mother and me scared to death, my father says.

  Biko dead and Mandela in jail for their beliefs. Me, I run shit-scared blind, headlong into a lamppost. So much for the warrior.

  a dry white season

  A PARCEL COMES FOR me. The outer manila envelope has been ripped and taped up again with masking tape by the customsmen who check for contraband: Cuban cigars, dagga, Playboy, Communist books. Fortunately the paper underneath bears a Christmas motif of angels. They are, after all, Christian. The lady at the post office says: Sorry hey, it is just routine. I see the stamps of the Danish queen. It is the banned book I have asked Lars to send, A Dry White Season. If the police catch you with it you are for the high jump. I have just turned eighteen, which means I will no longer be beaten by the police as Spud was after stealing cigarettes. I will be sent to jail with hardened men, who have raped and stabbed.

  I cycle up to the reservoir, hide my bicycle in the peach orchards and climb the curving wall. I jump down to the dusty, weedy floor. Lizards scurry into cracks in the wall as I land. Now I am alone. Just pigeons in the bluegums eye me. I tear through the manila paper and slide out the Christmas-papered book. A Dry White Season, by André Brink. I am so aware of holding a forbidden, contraband thing in my hands, I half expect the police dogs to sniff it out and the police to vault the walls. My heart still aflurry, I open the book to discover a note from Lars. Enjoy. Skip the foreword, it gives the ending away. Love, Lars. A pity there is no cloak-and-dagger drama in his words. No tip on hiding the book, burning the evidence. Perhaps he has lived too long in Europe, too long beyond the reach of fear.

  I read the poem in the front of the book, by Mongane Wally Serote. It goes: It is a dry white season. I look up at the green gums brushing the blue sky and wonder how the world can ever be white. In Serote’s white world, a world bled of colour, the dry leaves dive. They do not bleed, just the trees feel pain. My mother would nod and sigh at the words, but to me it is puzzling. This is the first time I have ever read the words of a black man. I have heard the words of black men sung, but never seen their words on paper. All the signs, all the newspapers, all the books I have ever read were written by white men.

  I hide the photo of the woman with the Coca-Cola bottle in her, in the book. In for a penny in for pound.

  I rescue a Cape eagle owl from being stoned by a band of coloured boys. I call the owl Camus and feed him raw meat rolled in the rabbit fur I brush out of my angora rabbit. My father brings home birds that have been caught in traps in the vineyards. One day I find Camus on the floor, his feet in the air.

  pink flowers

  IN THE BLUE NOTE Café in Cape Town I write a postcard to Lars in Copenhagen while the softjazz Art of Tea plays on the jukebox. Love is monkey see and monkey do, go the words. As I write, I imagine Lars’s life as a blend of Jim Jarmusch and Neil Young and Steely Dan and endless filter coffees.

  Just a few days of freedom to go, I write, then I head out for Oudtshoorn. I am scared of what they will do to me when I tell them I will not carry a gun. What do they do? Do they throw you in the DB cells? Do they hound you, wear you down, till you beg to be given a gun?

  When the jukebox dies I look up to see a blonde girl reading alone. She is reading Out of Africa. Her cappuccino is empty and has left foamy rings against the white china to reveal that she sipped it slowly. How could I not have sensed her being there?

  With my heart in my mouth, I say:

  – It’s a beautiful book, don’t you find?

  She tips it to glance at the cover.

  – I read it in school in Danish and thought it might be fun to read out here, you know, in Africa.

  – You’re Danish?

  – Ya.

  – I’m just writing to a friend in Copenhagen. He’s like a brother to me. We lived across the road, not in Copenhagen but here. Well, not actually here in Cape Town but out there on a farm, over the Simonsberg. Anyway, we are like brothers.

  – Have you ever been to Copenhagen?

  – Me? God no. I haven’t been anywhere. I mean I’ve been hunting in Botswana. Not that I’m a hunter or anything. I’ve never been overseas. I haven’t even been to Robben Island.

  It is one of my father’s jokes, but it falls flat.

  London, Copenhagen: it’s all a hazy dream to me.

  – Lars, my friend, sent me a postcard of the harbour in Copenhagen with all the old boats and pastel houses and cafés.

  – They call it Nyhavn. Hans Christian Andersen lived there, did you know? I used to go down there after school to eat snails by the harbour.

  She laughs at my screwed-up face. Her laughter is a scattering of beads.

  – Not the snails you’re thinking of, but pastry sna
ils that wind round and round and taste mmmm.

  – Lars, he goes down to the harbour sometimes. Maybe someday he and I will drink a Carlsberg there and look for mermaids and I will say: Hey, you know I once met a Danish girl in Cape Town reading Out of Africa, which Karen Blixen wrote in Denmark, while I was writing to you in Copenhagen.

  – And not just a Danish girl, but a girl from Copenhagen.

  – Bizarre isn’t it?

  I am glad I used the word bizarre. It sounds philosophical.

  – Hey, are you free at all? Just for the afternoon, maybe. We could go to the gardens and get an ice-cream or something?

  – Sure, why not? But call me Zelda.

  My heart is a flotilla of butterfly wings.

  An old bag lady who carries her world in a rusty trolley sells us a bag of nuts to feed the grey squirrels in the gardens. They are so tame they brush against your fingers before darting away.

  – The squirrels in Denmark are red, Zelda tells me.

  We get ice-cream and Zelda heads for a patch of lawn where a sign warns: KEEP OFF THE GRASS. She flops onto the grass and laughs her scattered-bead laugh at me when I stall.

  – It’s because everyone obeys the signs that no one is free in this country, she says.

  So I join her on the grass but I feel self-conscious, as if all the strollers and hobos are looking skew at us. She hitches up her tartan dress, like a schoolgirl wanting to skip a rope, and bares her legs to the sun. She tells me she is staying with her father who is some big shot in the Danish consulate and has a larney flat in Hout Bay over the mountain. She hardly ever sees him.

  – Shall we picnic on the beach at Hout Bay? go her pink ice-creamed lips.

  – Sure, why not?

  All deadpan. But, inside, there is a flurry of butterfly wings again.

  We pick up two bottles of red wine, a stinking wedge of Brie, a long baguette, and jump on a bus that winds around the peninsula.

  Past the lighthouse at Geen Point.

  Past the Hard Rock Café on Beach Road, where The Mamas & The Papas are forever California Dreamin’ as the seagulls bob and dip in the wind.

  I am on cloud nine as I look at the sunlight on her straw-blonde hair. I have never felt so alive and all my senses are on edge. I am aware of Zelda’s smell.

  – Loulou, she tells me.

  The late afternoon sun dances on the water through the Camps Bay palms. I was once tumbled by a wave in Camps Bay when we first came to the Cape. Sand filled my mouth and saltwater stung my eyes and I didn’t know where the sky was. My father fished me out.

  Another way to die in the Cape.

  My legs sweat against the red vinyl seat where they jut out of my khaki bermudas. To get my skin off the seat I rest my knees against the back of the seat in front, just as I did all those years on the bus to Paarl. Zelda copies me. I lean against her to catch a glimpse of the rocks down at Llandudno and the wine bottles in my rucksack clink cheerfully.

  We hop off the bus in Hout Bay where the road winds down from Chapman’s Peak. The beach curves from the road to the harbour, where fish-laden trawlers chug in. Once, with my mother and father, we bought fresh snoek off the boats and watched the green-dungareed fishermen gut the fish so their stringy insides spilt into the dusk. Then the fishermen flung the oozy spill into the harbour for the gulls and the sharks.

  Zelda and I find a bench between the car park and the sea. The car park is deserted but for two lovers in an orange VW Beetle with a surfboard on the roof. Once again I feel self-conscious, as I did on the grass, for the Beetle lovers create a mood.

  I dig out the Kenyan kikoi Lars sent me from Nairobi, on his way to Copenhagen. I fold it out on the sand as a picnic cloth and find stones to keep the corners from peeling up in the breeze. As we have no corkscrew I bang the cork down into the bottle.

  The sea is bathed in the orange glow of dusk. Time stands still like those afternoons in Natal when the air was luminous and tinged with green after a thunderstorm and the world was on the verge of something profound. I feel a longing to kiss Zelda deeply and pray to my lonely God, and to the Bushman-god moon over Noordhoek, and to Venus born out sea foam, that Zelda will fall for me.

  I comb my fingers through her hair and she tilts her head towards me. I kiss her forehead and her eyes, edging ever closer to her until my lips touch hers.

  A bakkie of yahooing boys kicks up the dust of the parking bay. They wolfwhistle at us and at the Beetle lovers. A beer can bounces off the roof of the Beetle. Then the bakkie goes. The Beetle lovers, rattled by the clanging can, head for the harbour lights.

  Alone on the beach, our lips touch again. We kiss deeply, the ebb and flow of the waves a soundtrack to the surge and lull of lust. Her mouth tastes of girl and wine. Loulou mingles with the smell of mist off the sea. My fingers follow the nodes of her spine down to the line of her panties, and rub her there in a slow pivot. She reaches for my other hand, still on the wine bottle. The bottle tips and wine colours the kikoi red.

  Zelda holds my hand to her breasts. Through the fabric under my palm I feel her nipples go hard. I hardly dare breathe, fearing the spell will break.

  – You like my hills? Zelda teases.

  – Zelda, I want to stay among your hills for always.

  Zelda falls back on the kikoi, her hair in the sand. She wiggles her hips to free her dress and lift it over her head. The flicker of distant headlamps plays on her skin. I want to let her breasts fill my mind as they fill my mouth, but guilt and the fear of cruising beerboys linger like stray dogs in the shadows just beyond firelight.

  When a cold wind blows in off the sea, we go up to her house. The house is modern with French doors to the balcony. On the glass coffee-table lie French books of photographs of nude women against rocks and driftwood. I peek at the photographs while Zelda makes filter coffee in a coffee machine. I think of my folks’ untaboo books: Roberts’s book of birds and J.L.B. Smith’s book of fish. I think of the way that we always drink Van Riebeeck instant coffee on the farm. A teaspoon flippantly tipped in, instead of this slow seeping through paper, this gurgling and spitting, that goes into making good coffee.

  Zelda dims the light and we kiss on the sofa between sips of coffee. When I want her breasts again, she leads me up to her room. She undresses in front of me. I love the fleeting moment when her dress hoods her head, turns her into a headless Greek sculpture, skin toned stone white under the glaring bulb. And though I had her nipples in my mouth on the beach, I stare in wonder at the floating pink flowers.

  Then she dives under the blue cover.

  – Aren’t you coming in? she teases as her face surfaces.

  An echo of my mother calling me to jump into the cold sea in Gordon’s Bay. It’s fine once you’re in, is my mother’s line. I switch off the light to undress, but you can still see by the moon. I am glad she left her panties on so that I do not have to stand there stark naked in the moonshine.

  Again I suck her nipples. She floods my senses as if she is colouring me in recklessly, going over the lines.

  Then, instead of staying cool and letting my tongue drift down to her vagina, I tell her I have to go away to the army. Desolation overcomes me. She holds my head to her breast until her skin is wet with my snot and tears. It changes the mood and we end up just holding. We promise each other to meet again one day in Cape Town or Copenhagen and that it will be beautiful again.

  dust time

  BLOOD ON THE TAR. A vulture drops out of the blue. The bald bird lands on the edge of the hot tar and flaps and jerks towards the dead sheep. The bird glances up and down the road for the death machines that beat along the tar from out of sight to hell and gone. It darts its pink neck into the raw and then flicks its blooded scalp up again.

  Still no motorcars. Only the parched land and the road scarring through it and a steel windmill that sucks up water from under the bone-dry earth and a farmhouse: a distant blot on the veld like a tick on a drought-ravaged ox.

  I stand in the shaft of
shade of a road sign that stands out stark as a totem against the blue sky. The vulture blinks a beady eye at me.

  A truck comes into view. The vulture hobbles off. I step out of the shade to cock my thumb. The truck, bound for the killing yard with a cargo of deathrow sheep, jars to a halt.

  Sheep and I jam together on the back, under the flaming sun. The trucker chucks me a can of lukewarm Lion.

  Barrydale. Ladismith. Calitzdorp. Further and further away from the valley of Groot Drakenstein, where the Simonsberg drinks the blood-orange sunset, and fruit-laden tractors clang down the bluegum avenue. Ever deeper into the arid, sheep-piss Karoo.

  I arrive at the barbed gates. This side of the wire: the garden gnomes and swings and swimming pools of the free. Beyond: the dust drillyard and brick barracks of my fears. I am, again, the schoolboy on the bus walking towards Spook and his crocodile teeth. The earth tilts. I reel under the wilting orange, white and blue flag.

  – Hey you. You lost or something? chirps a soldier in the shadow of a tall box. The kind of box you see in postcards of London with the guards in red jackets and black bearfur busbees.

  From the box I can just make out the sound of cricket on a radio. As my freedom goes, other folk in South Africa play cricket or surf or dive into cool water.

  – No, I am not lost. I got my call-up.

  – Well, come through. The colonel is waiting for you with koeksisters and a cup of tea.

  I smile faintly at his bitter joke and walk into the camp with my yellow scubabag biting into my shoulder. As I reach the drillyard, milling, hippie-haired boys from Cape Town are herded into rows. A stumpy, hairy-armed man yells at me from the gaping hole under his walrus moustache:

  – Hey you standing there like a blerrie fool.

  – Me?

  – Ja you. Fall in with the other baboons.

  I join the ranks of the other dazed boys and see my fear in their eyes.

  – I’ll turn you from a tribe of baboons into a band of men hool kill or be killed for Sowefrika. I gonna be on your bek day and night.