by John Coetzee
Uncle Bert spoke again. “Well, don’t just stand there, Rick. Make yourself useful and bring the luggage inside.”
The way he said that, again made me see red. Reluctantly I opened the back of the 4 x 4 and took my two suitcases out from between my mom’s and Susie’s things and carried them into the cottage, where the sickening smell of the power station hung in every room. I was on the verge of feeling really morbid and depressed again, when something jolted my attention. As I opened the door of the built-in wardrobe to hang up my clothes, I was surprised to see a pair of pink slippers lying in one of the dark corners of the wardrobe, and next to one of them lay an expensive-looking pearl earring set in gold. I was quite puzzled as to who the things belonged to, because everybody knew that Uncle Bert had been a confirmed bachelor all his life and that he would be the last person on earth to have a girlfriend living with him. I chuckled, but I didn’t want to embarrass Uncle Bert right then by telling him what I had found. So I left the slippers where I had found them and put the earring into the drawer of the small bedside table, just in case its owner came looking for it sometime.
After I’d carried all the things from the 4 x 4 into the cottage, I went outside again, and I heard Uncle Bert talking loudly to my mom in his greenhouse in the garden. “I only eat vegetables I grow organically, Maureen. Because they are the only kind of food one can trust nowadays,” he added, blowing his own boring old trumpet, as usual.
I decided to go and have a look to see if he had really succeeded in growing those enormous vegetables he’d told my dad about, and I peeped through the slightly open door. I felt quite smug when I saw that the pumpkins, the tomatoes, the beans and other veggies in there weren’t very much bigger than those my mom used to buy in the mall.
Having nothing else to do, I went back into the cottage and wandered around inside. But my heart plunged again when I saw there was no TV. Nor was there even a PC that I could use to go onto the Internet whenever I needed to for my school projects, or to play a game on now and then. Uncle Bert had probably installed the things for his own use in the garage, I reckoned. With that heavy, leaden feeling clawing deep into me again, I went back into the garden where, under one of the trees near the greenhouse, I saw Susie hugging her doll and crying softly to herself.
“What’s the matter, Susie?” I wanted to know, but she just turned away from me, sobs shaking her small frame.
I put my arm around her skinny shoulders. “What’s wrong, Susie? Did you hurt yourself?
She shook her head and a few tears made glistening pock-like brown stains in the sand.
“Well, what is it then, Susie?”
She managed to stop sobbing and whispered: “It’s Uncle Bert… I heard him telling Mummy that the world is going to come to an end soon. He… he said the gas from the greenhouse is going to ’stroy the earth, and when that happens, everybody on it is going to die.”
Feeling sorry for her, I pulled her closer to me. “Oh, Uncle Bert was just talking about something quite different, Susie. Nothing like that’s going to happen, see. So stop crying now and come wash your face.”
So Uncle Bert was at it again, I thought as I again recalled some of the things he used to say to me when I was about her age. Things that had upset me so badly that I had had nightmares about them for a long time.
She started sobbing again. “I don’t want to live here at Uncle Bert’s anymore. I want Mummy to take us home,” she bawled.
I stroked her silky, mango-coloured hair. “I’m sorry, but this is going to be our home for a long time, Susie. I’ll talk to Uncle Bert and tell him not to frighten you like that again, see?”
That seemed to soothe her because she stopped crying. I took her into the cottage and told her to put her doll to bed and when I went outside again, I heard Uncle Bert, still talking loudly to my mom: “As I said just now and will keep on saying until people listen, Maureen: global warming and climate change is a frightening reality we all have to face. If nothing is done about the devastating greenhouse gases spewing from the smokestacks of the power plants, the steel plants, the factories and from the exhausts of millions and millions of vehicles around the world, destroying our precious atmosphere in the process, we will all be doomed!”
I heard my mom sighing wearily. “Well, what can ordinary people like you and me do about things like that, Bert?”
“Plenty, Maureen! You’d be surprised at what can be done about it.” Uncle Bert was doing his best to convince her.
So I thought to myself, how typical of Uncle Bert! Out go his usual slogans – “Save the penguins”; “Save the rhinos”; “Save the whales” – and in comes a brand new one: “Save the world from greenhouse gases”! Sheesh! That really proved it, I thought. My dad was quite right when he had said Uncle Bert was some kind of a nut case.
At that moment I happened to see Uncle Bert’s lanky neighbour, Mr Powell, who also worked at the power station, looking over the hedge in a way that suggested that he had also heard everything Uncle Bert had been saying to my mom. I felt so embarrassed, I didn’t know where to hide my head. And while the turbogenerators in the long, grey building of the power station nearby whined dismally in my ears, I wondered how I was going to survive in this miserable dump called Ashby – without the faintest inkling of the crazy events that were about to get this sleepy little village to wake up with a great big bang.
Chapter 2
I didn’t sleep much that night. As a matter of fact, I felt quite groggy when I woke up early the next morning, which happened to be Saturday. I was still somewhere between sleep and waking when, with a sickening lurch in my stomach, it struck me full force that in two days’ time I would have to start at a new school. I’d have to get used to new teachers and new faces in class, and a new pecking order would begin among all those thugs, which would make my life a real misery. At first I felt like pulling the blankets over my head and curling up into a tight cocoon, but after a while I knew it wouldn’t help much anyway. So I decided to get up and go down to the dam just to sit there and stare into space while I tried to sort out the situation I’d been forced into.
With the stinky old power station behind my back and a light breeze blowing over the water from the west, it was a great treat not to be able to smell the fumes billowing from the smokestacks, tailpipes and other outlets around the huge, grey building. I walked a little way around the dam and sat down on a square block of concrete that had been there for ages. Picking up a handful of pebbles lying around the base of it I started to throw them into the dam, one by one, feeling more and more miserable by the minute, and longing for my dad. I missed him so much already, and I began to wonder if I was ever going to see him again, now that it was all over between him and my mom. And another thought struck me right in the middle of my forehead. Maybe my dad doesn’t even know that we’ve come to stay here with Uncle
Bert far from home!
I looked up again and, for the first time then, I noticed a thin, blue column of smoke curling up from behind the bulrushes on the opposite shore. It looked as if it was coming from a property where only a few lichen-covered walls were left of an old farmhouse that had once stood there. I had been over that way a few times on previous visits to Uncle Bert’s place, mainly because of an ancient walnut tree standing in what was left of the garden – and I do love walnuts.
While I was still wondering who could be burning something over there, I was about to throw another pebble into the water when the reflection, in the water, of someone in a khaki shirt and shorts caught my eye. I quickly turned around and, to my surprise, saw a chubby guy of about my own age standing right behind
me.
Adjusting his round specs that had slipped a little way down on his nose, he said: “You’re new here, aren’t you?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Well, sort of.”
He looked at me as if I was a complete dork. “That doesn’t make sense. How can it be ‘sort of’? Either you are or you aren’t new around here!”
I didn’t really want to talk to the guy, but I replied anyway. “Well, I’ve been visiting here a few times, but now it seems I’m doomed to stay in this crummy dump for the rest of my life.”
“Where in this crummy dump, if I may ask?”
I wanted to say “None of your business, dude”, but I didn’t want to be rude, so I pointed over my left shoulder: “My mom, my little sister and I are staying at my Uncle Bert’s place over there.”
His dark brown forehead puckered to a frown, causing his specs to slip down on his nose again. “Oh, at Mr Bert Lawson’s place? He’s one of the shift engineers at the power station.”
I nodded. “That’s him all right. Do you know him?”
“I know a few things about him, yes,” he said in a cagey kind of way, which made me suspect that he knew that something wasn’t quite aboveboard with my Uncle Bert. But his voice suddenly took on a lighter tone. “My father happens to be the manager of the power station. We’ve been living here in Ashby for six months now. By the way, I’m Sipho Khumalo,” he added, thrusting his hand out towards me.
So that meant that his father was my Uncle Bert’s boss, I realised. And when I got up to shake hands with him, I noticed that he was quite a lot shorter than me.
“Rick Williams,” I said.
“I presume you’ll be going to school in Ashby. What grade will you be in?”
“Grade 10.”
“Oh good! We’ll be in the same class then,” he said with a smile.
The way he said that made me feel a bit better, so I pointed to the thin column of smoke still rising in the distance. “Does that mean someone is living over there now, Sipho?”
He answered my question with a question. “What do you know about gypsies?”
“Gypsies? All I remember about them out of books is that they travel around in caravans, tell fortunes and sometimes go around stealing things from local people. Why do you want to know?”
“That’s roughly all I know about them, too,” Sipho said. “But since some strangers have been camping in a battered old caravan and a tent over there, the people in Ashby seem to think they’re gypsies and that nobody’s possessions are safe while they are hanging around here. Some of the people even think they’re devil worshippers – and I’ve heard they’re planning to chase them away with sjamboks one of these days.”
“Have you seen them Sipho? Those gypsies, I mean.”
He nodded. “I went around there towards sunset one evening and saw a yellow-skinned fellow with long, black hair and a very bushy beard sitting next to a caravan and playing some peculiar music on a guitar-like instrument. And nearby, I saw a girl swimming in the dam. That’s all I saw. But the other day one of the guys in my class said he’d seen the girl dancing with a snake.”
“Hey?”
Sipho smiled. “I think that’s a lot of rubbish, though. It’s probably just something that fellow had thought up to give him and his mates an excuse to go over there and beat the campers up, and chase them away. But according to the Constitution nobody can be evicted without an order of expulsion from the court,” he added in a smug sort of way.
“Jeepers, you sound like a lawyer, Sipho,” I exclaimed.
“That’s exactly what I want to become one day,” he said. “I want to study Law like my mom is doing. She’s doing it by distance education, but I’m going to study it full-time at university when I leave school.”
That made me feel rather uncomfortable. Just my luck that a potentially new friend who has come my way, happens to be a stuffy old brainbox, I thought.
“So, what are you planning to become one day, Rick?” he interrupted my thoughts.
I shrugged my shoulders. “I haven’t really thought about that yet.”
“My father always says everyone has to work hard towards doing something important sometime,” he said, sounding like a schoolteacher.
I decided to change the subject. “Listen, I feel like going to have a look at those gypsies. Coming along, Sipho?”
He said okay and we started off on the long walk to the opposite side of the dam. When we came near to the ruins of the old farmhouse, we stopped talking and began to walk very quietly.
“Look, there’s one of them,” Sipho whispered as soon as the dilapidated green caravan and a bushy-haired individual sitting next to it came into view. Stripped to the waist, he sat hunched over a small camping table, reading something and making notes from time to time, while the gold chain around his neck reflected brightly in the sunshine every time he turned a page.
A loud splash in the water behind a dense clump of bulrushes nearby startled us. Then I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw a sleek-looking, well-tanned girl in a tight-fitting, black swimsuit coming out of the dam. She was carrying a heavy bucket with greenish water in it, some of which slopped over the rim from time to time as she ambled along. Her shiny, jet-black hair hung loosely over her shoulders, and our mouths hung open while we watched her walking past the fellow and heading for the walls of the old farmhouse where the thin column of smoke was coming from. She was the most stunningly beautiful girl I had ever seen, and pins and needles kept tickling the walls of my stomach for quite a while after she had disappeared behind the broken brick walls of the old house.
Waiting to see if she would reappear, I heard the grinding sound of a vehicle coming over from the long ash dump near the power station on the other side of the dam. I didn’t take much notice of it, though, because I was hoping the girl would return.
We didn’t have to wait long before she came back again carrying the bucket, and from the way she swung it, it was easy to see that she had emptied it somewhere. This time she stopped next to the man sitting at the table, and spoke briefly to him. I couldn’t understand a word of she was saying because it was a strange, foreign-sounding language. A mischievous look suddenly gleamed in her dark-brown eyes, and her hand shot out and teasingly ruffled his hair before she ran into the water again.
Sipho tapped me on the shoulder and motioned with his head that we had better turn back.
We did that, and I only spoke again when I was sure that we were well out of earshot. “Wow, what a babe!”
Sipho grinned. “A bit too old for you, brother. And it looks like she’s already got a boyfriend, doesn’t it?”
I tried hard to sound casual. “She could be about our age, I reckon, and that guy you think is her boyfriend, looks as if he could be old enough to be her father.”
Sipho’s teeth gleamed behind his dark brown lips. “You hope.”
“Tell me honestly, Sipho. Do you really think they’re real gypsies?”
He shrugged his plump shoulders. “I wouldn’t know.”
“I wonder what language she was speaking.”
“Sounded a bit like Italian to me. But I’m not sure.”
“Well, they look harmless, anyway,” I said. “But I wonder what they are up to and if there are more of them camping out there.”
“I wouldn’t know that either,” said Sipho. “I only hope the people from the village and those guys at school won’t really do the things they were boasting about.”
As we walked along, the droning sound of a vehicle again came from the direction of the long ash dump.
“That sounds just like your uncle’s bakkie again,” Sipho remarked.
Shielding my eyes with my hand, I could see that in fact it was his dark blue vehicle, travelling slowly over a difficult stretch of road over that way.
“Your uncle sometimes drives over to the place where the power station dumps the coal it can’t use. He collects a load of reject coal there from time to time and drives off to somewhere else with it.”
“I wonder where he takes it to,” I said. “I’ve never seen any coal lying around at the cottage.”
“To be honest, I’ve also wondered about that, Rick. But I’ve been wondering about something else he does too,” Sipho continued solemnly.
“Such as?”
“I can se
e his cottage from our house through a gap in our split-pole fence. When he’s not on shift at the power station, I can see sparks while he’s welding something for long stretches at a time in front of his garage at night. Then I see him loading something on the back of the bakkie and driving off towards the swamp on the other side of the dam.”
That made me curious. “What kind of load is it, Sipho?”
“I don’t know what it is because he usually does it at night and sometimes, when the moon is bright enough, I can see that the load is always covered with plastic sheeting.”
“Oh, my uncle always has some kind of project on the go, Sipho,” I said, trying not to sound too concerned, because if it happened to be something that Uncle Bert was doing illegally, I didn’t want him to get into trouble with Sipho’s father.
We walked along in silence, and when we reached the concrete block where we first met, Sipho said: “Well, I have to go now, Rick. See you at school on Monday. Ciao!”
“Ciao,” I said. I watched him going off. I felt relieved to have met someone I could maybe become friends with, and the gloom that had been hanging over my head since I left my home town began to lift slightly. But then I thought about what Sipho had said about Uncle Bert. What was my uncle up to? I wondered. And that reminded me about that pair of pink slippers and the golden earring I’d found in the wardrobe in the cottage, which puzzled me even more.
My mom was busy vacuuming the cottage when I got back. Susie was contentedly playing nearby with her doll, as usual, and talking to it as if it were a real, live person. Only much later in the morning did Uncle Bert turn up, looking exhausted, his hands, face and overalls black with coal dust. He walked into the cottage, and I heard him showering for quite a while before going over to the garage in his moth-eaten brown dressing gown to get changed.
Later on, while the four of us were having lunch around the table, my mom did her best to be friendly and chatted about all kinds of things, but Uncle Bert didn’t have much to say throughout the meal. Sitting opposite her in a fairly clean blue overall he had put on for the afternoon shift at the power station, he seemed lost in his own thoughts most of the time.
