by Peter Rimmer
After a shower above ground at the end of his night shift, he liked to wear a clean shirt every day and walk the new streets of Johannesburg. There were so many people, so many horses and noise from the motor cars of the rand barons, so many women dressed in expensive clothes, so many shop windows to look into, so many dreams of wealth and power to be dreamed about. His blonde hair kept short and his face clean-shaven, the slate green eyes smiled at everything he saw. Without the hatred that permanently knotted the pit of his stomach he could have been a happy man.
On the surface, he looked like the man Madge had loved from the age of six, but hidden behind the good-looking man with the gorgeous smile was a man with a tormented soul. If there was ever a case for not judging a man by his appearance, Barend was the perfect example. Fortunately for them, no man or woman could look into the recesses of his mind, to what he was thinking in his head. Some of his brothers in the Brotherhood of Hate had some idea but even they would have run from the truth. If there was the devil in the form of a Greek god, Barend Oosthuizen was that devil, brooding, hating, planning revenge, and all the time smiling the outward smile of loving his neighbours more than he loved himself.
Over the years it had not once crossed his thoughts that his mother was in daily agony for not knowing where he was in the world. And only in his dreams did Madge come to him, and these brief dreams he put from his mind in the light of morning.
On the day the British had hanged his father they had warped the inside of his son's brain.
Sallie Barker had seen the clean-shaven man with the short blonde hair and slate green eyes sitting alone at the bar, the smiling eyes watching her going about her business. She never spoke to him but every time the slate green eyes smiled in her direction she felt a shiver run through her body as if someone had walked over her grave.
The Mansion House, though it had another name at the time and several afterwards, had been built on the corner of Rissik Street and Plein Street by Barnet Isaacs, or Barney Barnato as he was better known by his stage and pugilist name, soon after he had merged his diamond interests with Cecil John Rhodes, for money but more importantly, for a membership of the Kimberley Club, the first Jew to be accepted by the largely British institution. His grand house in Johannesburg, a monument to his foray into the goldfields of the Witwatersrand after enriching himself in Kimberley had been placed on the market soon after Barney Barnato drowned from a ship taking him to England. To Sallie, whether Barney Barnato had jumped or was pushed made no difference but the five owners after Barnato drowned were convinced the house was haunted.
By the time Lily White bought the great house she picked it up for a song which is what she had in mind anyway.
Barney Barnato was an East End Jew from the slums of London, a situation close to the heart of what once had been Lily Ramsbottom, the bastard child born in the industrial north of England near Wigan. To honour the name of a man who had worked his way up from the slums to be one of the richest men in the Empire, Lily had called her house of fun, the Mansion House, after the home of the Lord Mayor of London. Whether this put away the ghost of Barney Barnato or not, from the day the house was grandly renamed after all the refurbishing paid for without his knowledge by Jack Merryweather, with Sallie and the girls that had come up from Cape Town looking on with a certain sense of pride, never a ghost was ever seen again. A year after opening the best brothel in Johannesburg, Lily was rich. And with Sallie applying her new-found accounting skills, there was a pile of money in the bank. Good strong drinks and good-looking whores, women paid for handsomely, but only in the time of passion, was a combination that never failed to make money throughout the indulgent history of man.
There were four bars in the Mansion House and each charged a different price.
"You can't just cater to the very rich or the poor sod with a quid to spend on a Saturday night," Lily White had said during the grand refurbishing. "You have to cater for the lot but keep them apart, see. Man being so bloody conscious of his status, the rich will pay five times more for something to prove they're rich. Even the poor bloody miners will save up for a whore they really fancy and meantime we take their quids for booze. The girls charge rich and poor the same, only the drinks change price. In the top-class lounge we have an orchestra, in the cheapest a girl, if we can find her, on a piano. And you never know, a poor man today is a rich man tomorrow, isn't that right Albert Pringle… You get to use your brains in business."
The four lounges were equally sumptuous, with soft plush leather couches that oozed sex by just sitting in them and feeling the squirm. In a corner of each was a well-stocked bar, and a barman to listen to anyone's woes, dim chandeliers hung from the ceilings, red carpets, thick with pile, covered the floors. For summer there were overhead fans, for the ice-cold highveld winters there were two fires to each lounge, and a fire in each of the twelve bedrooms that lead off the corridors on the first floor up the broad stairs up from the ground-floor hall.
The old kitchen Barnato had designed to cook food to impress his new friends was put to good use in the downstairs dining room and the two private eating rooms for guests who did not wish to be seen. There was even a lift from the ground floor to the whores bedrooms, operated by a power plant imported from England by the previous owner, that only got stuck once in a while when the power plant failed. Most of the regulars preferred to walk up the stairs, some not even bothering with the bars and dining rooms, too impatient to get on with the job, remove their sexual frustration and get back to the more important job of making more and more obscene quantities of money.
Johannesburg, the most exciting mining town in the world, was booming for the rich. And so was the business of Lily White. As Albert Pringle was inclined to say when the three of them were alone after a busy day.
"Landed with our bums in the butter, what we did. Bums in the butter."
The fact that the operation was quite illegal had never crossed anyone's minds.
There is a quirk in some good-looking men which makes them like to pay for their women. In the more lavish spenders, the dripping diamonds on their wives, mistresses and whores are often in direct proportion to their ability to satisfy a woman sexually. Albert Pringle thought of them as 'wham-bam, thank you mam' and there were many of them at the Mansion House who liked to pay out money after their failure, as if to say 'I may be no good to you in your bed but I can still spit in your eye by paying for it.'
Others, like Barend Oosthuizen, liked whores for the simple reason there was no repercussion, nobody wanting your body and mind for the rest of your life after you had taken them to bed. It was probably a way of confronting his subconscious for running away from Madge, but this was so far back it never came into his conscious mind. One by one when he managed to save his money, Barend had paid for every one of Lily White's girls.
Sallie had watched the young man come and go through the months, had even seen the desolation in his eyes while he drank a pot of coffee in the corner of their cheapest lounge while he waited for the girl of his choice. Always the slate green eyes tried to search for contact with her own, but always she slid hers away. Some men, she had learned, she just did not look at or it gave them ideas. Being naïve back in Cape Town she had not known that rule with Herr Flugelhorne. She had foolishly thought you could look straight in the eye with a smile at an elderly cousin by marriage.
The word had soon spread that Miss Sallie was part of the management, that she had no price. The word had gone out in the mining town with the psyche of a mining camp that one of the rand barons had offered Sallie Barker ten thousand pounds for one full night. The girl had politely laughed, so they said, patted the fat old bastard's cheek, and asked him what he thought she was, putting a finger to her lips. The two had even laughed together. There were many such stories in Johannesburg of the rich and the poor but this one was true.
"You're a fool," Lily had told her. "He was drunk. Silly old fart would have given you twenty thousand."
"Then I'd have been a whore," Sallie had said sweetly.
"One day, Sallie Barker, you might just grow up to the facts of life, how women survive in a world full of nasty men. Never look a gift horse in the mouth young lady. That kind of money don't come around too often."
The Mansion House had been in full swing for a year and ten days when the club, as they liked to call it, was visited by a group of young toffs from England, out of daddy's way and out to have a good time at anyone else's expense. They spoke loudly in patrician accents. Not knowing their way around, they stumbled late at night into the miners' lounge and proceeded to make fools of themselves. They were all drunk. One of them climbed up on the bar and crawled along on his hands and knees barking like a dog, with the barman moving the glasses in front of him to stop them being broken. To begin with it was quite funny and everyone laughed. Being overbred and underworked, as none of them had ever had a job in their lives, they had no concern who they upset.
All might have been well if Barend Oosthuizen had not woken from a nightmare in the middle of the night. He had dreamed of Madge, a Madge floating away into the clouds of death calling him to join her in the afterlife. With the sweat of fear, damp on his chest, he had got up from his bed in his cheap lodgings in search of a woman to overcome his pain.
The coffee had been put at his small table when the barking dog fell off the end of the bar, cracking his head so hard on the floor everyone in the room stopped talking to look. With everyone's attention, the toffs wanted more drinks. Sallie, having made sure the one on the floor was all right even if his eyes were glazed, told the barman not to serve them any more drinks. Albert Pringle was out of the room and the barman unable to jump quickly enough over the bar. Whether it was the shock of being spoken to by an educated English woman in their own patrician accent or the thought that their upper-class accent was being mimicked, no one ever found out. The leader of the pack threw his full glass of wine in Sallie's face.
"You're a whore. Who the hell do you think you're talking to?" he slurred.
The speed with which Barend left his small table brought him up to the toff before the toff could haughtily turn and walk out of the club.
"You, sir, are a pig," he said. Which were the first words in English anyone had heard Barend speak.
Sallie turned in surprise by the words spoken in upper-class English, the red wine dripping down her face, her dark brown eyes looking briefly into the slate green eyes full of hatred.
The fight was no contest and so was the repercussion. The next day the Mansion House was closed for business and Barend Oosthuizen left Johannesburg for good, feeling well pleased with himself. Smashing up five English faces had given him the best feeling of his life. It was the start of his revenge.
The closure lasted a week. Like anything in life that is popular, legality never had the last word. With the mollified toffs on the train down to Cape Town and the boat back to England where it was hoped they would behave themselves, the Mansion House re-opened for business. It turned out the rand baron had not been so drunk after all. He was proud of Sallie and not only for not taking his money. And if money cannot buy influence, whatever can, they said in the streets of Johannesburg.
On the re-opening night, the rand baron invited Sallie out to dinner as his formal guest, treating her like any other woman of class. Sallie smiled sweetly and turned him down, memories of Herr Flugelhorne too vivid to trust any man.
Lily White heard the story of the invitation the following morning.
"Darling Sallie you are beyond redemption. You will die poor but please remember another piece of my advice. Not every man is a horse's arse."
"But how do you tell one from the other?"
"That is the trick. Woman's instinct."
"But when he tried to buy me for ten thousand pounds you called him an old fart."
"That was before he convinced the police we are a legitimate business."
"Who was the man who saved my honour? He'd always spoken Afrikaans before so I never understood a word."
"There's a strange story there. The police did find out. His name is Barend Oosthuizen, the son of General Tinus Oosthuizen, who was hanged by the British during the war for leading a Boer rebellion out of the British Cape Colony."
"Then how does he speak such good English?"
"His mother is English."
"Where can I thank him?"
"You can't, he left town."
"Why? They let us re-open."
"No one forced him to leave. They come and go in a mining town… My goodness, business is good tonight. There's nothing like publicity. We'll catch up on last week's losses by the end of the night. I had to send out for more champagne. Albert really is a darling. I've hired him an assistant. A rather large young man with big hands. A bit stupid but very strong. And he has a friend if we need any more muscle."
When Barend was twenty-two years old the odyssey had lasted five years and the fight in the Mansion House four years earlier long forgotten. There had been many more fights after the English toffs had their faces bloodied, and fights being mostly the same for Barend, like getting drunk, they had the habit of blending in with each other, their individuality lost. In many of the bar fights, very largely fights with Englishmen that he picked whenever he found the smallest opportunity, Barend was drunk and remembered nothing of the details, except the feeling of satisfaction.
The road to what he wanted had taken many paths after the policeman suggested he left Johannesburg before the English toffs laid a charge of assault. The two policemen that had visited his room were Afrikaners like himself and brought with them ten pounds they had raised among themselves in the Johannesburg police station. Being a badly paid and dangerous job, few of the British immigrants, even if they had fought in the British Army, sought a job in the South African police force. When the complaints had been lodged that General Oosthuizen's son had beaten up five Englishmen in a high-class whorehouse, jubilation had run through his fellow Afrikaners on the force.
To the Englishman with the swollen face, who had first complained to the British consul in Johannesburg, the police gave the assurance the criminality of the assault would be carefully pursued, to Barend they brought the ten pounds, a glow of admiration in their eyes and the suggestion he leaves town for a while.
Even without the rand baron who fancied Sallie, Lily White would have been allowed to re-open the Mansion House soon after the toff's train left Johannesburg central railway station.
For the first time in his life, Barend found himself a hero. Ten pounds plus small change was a lot of money, more than he could have saved in a year and he decided to take advantage of his windfall. The thought of leaving Johannesburg and the lying all day on his side with a pick cutting out a seam of gold-bearing rock was not hard. He decided to look around the country they were shortly going to call the Union of South Africa. By the time the Union was declared with General Louis Botha its first prime minister in 1910, Barend had reached the port of Cape Town and was eyeing the ships and wondering where they were going.
Though he did not know it, as his mother had long ago stopped talking about her family to her son, his maternal grandfather had been a sea captain in the British merchant marines, travelling to all corners of the world for more than thirty years. The sight of all the ships in harbour brought out the sailor hidden in Barend's genes. After four weeks of brawling around the deck-side bars, he took ship as an ordinary seaman on a boat bound for the Dutch East Indies.
Though he had thought of the home he had last lived in with his father, he had not visited Kleinfontein, his father's farm confiscated by the British for his treason. He had not even visited the Franschhoek Valley or the people who had rebelled with his father to join the Boer army and fight the British, many of whom had gone home after the war. Only the general, Barend's father, had been tried for treason.
The ship was the MU Orange, flying the Dutch flag.
T
he next time Barend saw Africa it was then 1912, and the ship he had sailed on for six months, an old rust bucket of a coaster, called at the port of Walvis Bay in German West Africa where the captain signed him off with residual pay of two pounds, ten shillings and sixpence. The ship was British as mostly ships calling round the coast of Africa sailed under the British flag. For the whole of the six-month voyage, no one on board knew he spoke English. Most of the crew were Lascars from the East Indies where Dutch was the common language, a sister language to Afrikaans.
Barend Oosthuizen was twenty-two years old and as tough as teak, his handsome face burnt to the colour of light mahogany, only the slate green eyes testimony to his Caucasian ancestry. It is doubtful whether Madge or his mother would have recognised him.
With the remnants of his ten pounds, hoarded against the inevitable catastrophe which had yet to come, and the proceeds of his last voyage, Barend bought two good salted horses, horses that had been bitten by the tsetse fly and had survived the sleeping sickness. Both animals were used to the shaft of the small covered wagon but only one pulled at a time, the other following behind on a long rein. Barend was going back into the African bush but first, he was going up the coast to the Portuguese territory from where he had the idea of following a great river into the hinterland. From his father, the white hunter, he had inherited the gene that pulled him back into the bush. In the wagon, with a good supply of ammunition, he carried three guns; two rifles and a twelve-bore shotgun. He was going to live off the land. Unlike his father, there was not a book to be found in the wagon, not even a Bible.
With no great purpose in mind he began his journey up the Skeleton Coast.
For the first few days, he was unable to explain his euphoria. It was June and the nights were cold, with squalls of rain dashing his clean-shaven face during the day, pouring water off the rim of his big black hat with the wide brim and the pointed dome. The smell of the salt sea air was fresh but the smell of the sea had been in his nostrils for three years. The West Coast black mussels were huge, and some as wide as the palm of his hand, and cooked in their shells full of sea water sucked in by the live mollusc were delicious to eat. There were rock lobsters crawling out of the cold Atlantic to be picked up on the beach without even getting his hands wet. There were so many giant slipper oysters on the rocks at low tide he grew sick of eating them, he ate so many. And when he felt like meat, he saddled up the horse that was out of shaft that day and rode not a mile into the scrub desert to shoot a springbok, the buck so remote they had never seen a horse or a predator man with his deadly gun and had no knowledge to run away. The heart, liver and kidneys went straight on the fire, the rest of the animal, except one front leg, cut into strips and hung along the side of the wagon to dry in the sun, soak in the salty sea mist or wash clean in the squalls of rain. There was fresh water with which to fill his water barrels when he needed it, the water springs easily found by following the tracks of the jackals that preyed on the seals that honked and swarmed on the smooth black rocks, after filling their bellies with fish from the sea. There were gulls and eagles to sound music in his ears.
