by John Coetzee
“But why did Sipho say it will happen?”
I began to lose my rag with her. “Forget about it now please, Susie!” I said firmly, and that did the trick because not a peep came from her for quite a long time after that.
I was in bed when I heard Uncle Bert coming in from his shift later that night. I hadn’t been able to sleep yet because my mind was racing with anxious thoughts about starting at the new school the next morning, and because of the things Sipho had told me about Uncle Bert.
I heard my uncle and my mom exchanging a few words in the kitchen, where she was warming his supper in the microwave. He told her that he was taking some time off and was going away for a while. I heard my mom asking him where he was going, but he just made a grunting noise deep in his throat, which didn’t answer her question at all.
I fell asleep some time after that, and on waking up early the next morning, I heard my mom and Uncle Bert talking again.
“How long will you be away, Bert?”
“I don’t know,” he said brusquely. “A few days, maybe.”
“Well, it’s always advisable to know where one’s family members are, Bert,” I heard my mom say. “Just in case of an emergency. One never knows.”
Again he didn’t give her an answer, and a little while later I heard him going outside and his bakkie starting up; then I saw him driving off to goodness knows where. My mom shook her head and sighed wearily.
The next few days at school turned out to be even grimmer than I had expected, and I found it difficult to ignore the rude stares I got from some of the other learners. After a few bullies had sized me up, they began to taunt me in various ways to see what I would do. And one of the seriously muscled guys with a thick neck, hair shaved right down to the bluish roots in his skull, and a huge pair of ears, purposely bumped into me during one of the breaks. “Hey, why don’tcha watch where ya going!” he snarled at me.
I noticed a few of his co-bullies moving in closer, and I knew I wouldn’t have much of a chance if I gave him too much lip. “Sorry, I didn’t see you,” I told him.
“Well, wot’ve you got those flippin’ eyes in your head for, hey!” he bellowed.
“I said, I’m sorry,” I apologised again, stepping sideways to avoid him and going onto the playground where I saw Sipho standing alone, quietly eating his sandwiches.
“Hi, Rick,” he said when he saw me coming towards him. “What was all that about?”
“That guy with the big ears was trying hard to get tough with me.”
“You’d better not get on the wrong side of him, Rick. He’s the leader of those thugs and he can be quite dangerous, you know.”
“Well, he bumped into me on purpose.”
“Take my advice; don’t get too close to him or any of his gang at any time. By the way, they’re the ones who’ve been talking about going over sometime and beating up those so-called gypsies on the other side of the dam and getting rid of them,” Sipho added.
“Well, they’ve got no right to do that,” was all I could say.
“I wish I knew how we could stop them… but how?” Sipho said, stroking his broad chin.
And then once again I wished my dad were right here in Ashby, because he’d know what to do. He always knew what to do when things got tough. “Maybe you should tell your dad about their plans, Sipho,” I said.
“I suppose I could,” he said thoughtfully. “But I don’t want to worry him about things like that just now. We’ll just have to wait and see how things develop.”
To change the subject, I told Sipho that my uncle had gone off for a few days, and that made him raise his eyebrows. “Where to, Rick?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Hmm. Last time he went away for a while, he came back one afternoon with his bakkie loaded with some boxes marked ‘fragile’,” Sipho said. “I saw him carrying some of them into his garage. Then he covered the rest of the boxes again with a sheet of plastic and drove off again to somewhere else.”
The shrill sound of the bell put an end to our conversation. I was hoping to meet up with Sipho again after school that afternoon, but as I approached his house, I saw him leaving with his mother, who was at the wheel of a red Uno. I made up my mind to go and talk to the campers on my own and, at the same time, maybe to warn them about the threat to their safety.
That afternoon I took the pearl earring out of the drawer, put it in my pocket and again headed for the thin column of smoke curling into the sky. Taking care not to attract attention, I walked quietly until I reached the spot behind the reeds. This time I saw that it was the girl who was sitting at the camping table with a big book open in front of her. She was concentrating deeply while writing things down in a large, hard-covered exercise book. A little way behind her a few items of clothing hung from a wash line attached to the side of the battered caravan and to one of the ropes of the khaki tent, and not far from there a steaming three-legged pot stood over a heap of glowing embers.
I watched her writing for quite a while and when I cleared my throat, the girl’s dark brown eyes opened wide as she looked up and saw me standing there.
“Yes?” she said.
“Er… Excuse me. My name’s Rick.”
She put her pen down on the table, brushed a lock of shiny black hair from her forehead and looked at me suspiciously. “What do you want?” she said with a strange-sounding accent
“I’m staying at one of the cottages over at the power station. I’m… I’m just wondering whether you have maybe lost an earring like this,” I said, pulling my hand out of my pocket and putting my outstretched palm out towards her.
That made her eyes open wider. “Oh yes, it is mine. Where did you find it?”
I felt myself blushing. “Actually, I found it in the wardrobe in my room.”
I saw her well-tanned cheeks turning slightly pink. I didn’t want to embarrass her further by asking her how it got there, although of course I was bursting with curiosity to know.
“Oh, then you must be the family staying with Mr Bert Lawson,” she said.
“That’s right. He’s my uncle. My mother and little sister are also staying with him.”
“What did you say your name was?”
“Rick… er… Williams.”
She smiled. “Oh, I’m sorry. I should also have told you who I am. I’m Inez Gonzales from Florida, USA. I’m at high school there and I’ve been granted a scholarship to study abroad for the duration of our three months’ summer vacation.”
“Gosh!” was all I could get out of my throat.
“I’m so glad you found my earring, Rick. My brother gave it to me a few weeks ago for my sixteenth birthday. He will also be glad when I show him I’ve got it back.”
“Your brother?”
“Yes, my brother Antonio. He is not here at the moment. He’s gone to the village to buy some groceries.”
“Are only the two of you living here, Inez?”
She nodded. “Just the two of us, yes. And we’re busy doing some very important research work here.”
“Gosh! Really?”
She looked puzzled. “Why do you sound so surprised?”
I felt my face getting hot. “Actually, my friend Sipho and I thought you were gypsies.”
Her laughter rang out silvery, like a bell. “Oh no, we speak Spanish. But don’t be mistaken. Antonio and I can quite proudly say that we do have gypsy blood in us from ages back. I suppose that’s why I like to do a bit of flamenco after a long day of doing schoolwork and helping Antonio around here – it gives me a really good workout.”
“Flamenco?”
“It’s a type of Spanish dancing the gypsies and other people developed many centuries ago in the southern parts of Spain,” she informed me.
“Oh… And what about that… that snake?” I added.
“Ah, so you’ve seen me with it, have you, Rick? It’s an African rock python. Your Uncle Bert brought it to us in a long glass box. I take it out for a walk practically every da
y to keep inquisitive intruders away from here. I’m quite used to handling pythons. I had a pet one at home, but I gave it away before leaving to come here,” she added.
A cute smile hovered around the corners of her mouth as she leant over the table. “Okay, Rick. My gypsy blood tells me you’ve been wondering how we happen to know your uncle, and how my earring got to be in your room – yes?”
I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so I put them behind my back and nodded. “Yes, as a matter of fact I have been wondering about that, Inez.”
“Ah, it’s better that I tell you then,” she said, smacking her lips. “Antonio is studying for his doctorate in Microbiology at the University of Miami. Your Uncle Bert and Antonio have been in contact with each other over the Internet for a long time, and as you probably know, your uncle is very interested in the threat of global warming and climate change. Well, so is Antonio, and he jumped at the chance when your uncle invited him to come over here and do some research work with him. Antonio applied at the University for a grant to continue with his studies online from here. Then we got my parents’ permission for me to come over with Antonio, and bingo – here we are!”
She took a sip of clear water from a plastic bottle standing on the table and looked at me again. “After we arrived in Ashby, we stayed in your uncle’s cottage for about a week. Then he rented this caravan and tent for us, so that Antonio would be able to do his research without any distractions. And I help Antonio with his project too, whenever he needs me.”
Doing my best to look intelligent, I said: “What kind of research is he doing, Inez?”
“I suppose you know something about algae, Rick?”
“Not much. But I suppose it’s that slimy green stuff one sees in the dam.”
She looked at me as if I was a dork, got up, disappeared into the caravan and came back carrying a big microscope, which she put on the table. Then she went into the caravan again and brought out a jar of green water. She put a drop of it onto a glass slide, which she arranged under the lens of the microscope and proceeded to focus on. “All right, Rick. Sit down and have a look at that and tell me what you can see in your ‘slimy green stuff’.”
I sat down on the camping chair, gazed into the eyepiece of the powerful microscope and was amazed at the things I saw moving around there: a cigar-shaped thing cruising among transparent green jelly-like blobs of all shapes and sizes; green strings with spirals inside them, which I could see right through; and a few other transparent creepy-crawly things with ultra thin, whiplike projections they were using to swim around with.
“Gosh, it’s like another world down there,” I exclaimed.
“It is another world all right, Rick. A microscopic world that can help to save our own big world one day,” she said in a way that reminded me of my eccentric Uncle Bert. “See those greenish blobs down there? They are single-celled algae called Chlorella. More than half their body mass consists of oil. Very valuable oil that can be used for making all kinds of products.”
“But they are so tiny. How can that little bit of oil in them be of any use to anyone?”
Her smile got the pins and needles tickling in my stomach again, just like the first time when I saw her coming out of the water in her black swimsuit, sleek and dripping wet from head to toe. “You’d be surprised. Very surprised, Rick. Get zillions upon zillions of algae cells together, squeeze them in a specially designed press, or whirl them around in a special kind of centrifuge, and you’ll be amazed to find out how much oil you can extract from them and what that oil can do for our industrialised world of today.”
I blinked. “What, for instance, Inez?”
She kept me in suspense while she carefully removed the slide from under the microscope and wiped it dry with a tissue she had taken from her sleeve. “I can’t tell you now, but you’ll be astounded at what can be done with the right kind of algae,” was all she said. Then she picked up the microscope and carried it back into the caravan.
There were so many things I wanted to ask her, but I felt all tongue-tied. When she came out of the caravan again, all I could say was: “Does that iron structure with the chimney at the old house have something to do with getting oil out of the Chlor… Chlorella stuff, Inez?”
The tone of her voice changed abruptly. “So, you really have been spying on us big time, haven’t you!”
I bit my bottom lip. “Sorry… I couldn’t help it. I was just…”
“You’re actually not supposed to be around here at all, Rick. You’ll have to go now. But thanks for bringing my earring. I appreciate that,” she added.
I quickly said: “There is something else I want to tell you about, Inez. A crowd of rough guys from my school, and maybe some of their parents, too, are planning to come with sjamboks and things to chase you and your brother away from here.”
Her eyebrows shot up on her forehead. “And why would they want to do that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because they also think you’re gypsies.” I nearly said ‘devil worshippers’ as well, but I decided to keep that to myself.
She pulled herself together and frowned. “Well, they’ll get what’s coming to them if they try any nonsense with us. Antonio is a black belt, and I know my karate quite well too. But thanks for telling me, anyway.”
“And thanks for showing me that green stuff, Inez.”
“Algae,” she reminded me.
“Oh yes, algae … Of course,” I said, again feeling like a dork.
We said goodbye to each other, and while I walked back around the dam two kinds of feelings started struggling for power, pulling me in different directions. The good feeling was that I had managed to get to know the girl and what her name was and what she and her brother were doing there – and that he was her brother! But the bad feeling troubling me was that I had messed things up by being too inquisitive about that structure and the chimney. If only I had kept my mouth shut about it, I might have been able to stay on a bit longer and maybe got to know her better.
As I walked along, another puzzling thought came into my head: what on earth do global warming, algae, oil and stuff like that have to do with each other? It was starting to seem like a lot of science fiction and it didn’t make sense to me at all. I began to feel really uneasy about it. Was she really telling me the truth or was she trying to bluff me into believing her strange story for other reasons?
Chapter 4
“You’ll never guess who I got to know yesterday afternoon,” I boasted to Sipho during first break at school on the following day.
“No need for me to guess, bro. There’s only one person who could possibly make you smile like that – it has to be that stunning gypsy girl,” he chuckled.
“Good guess, Sipho! Inez… that’s her name. And for your information, she does have some gypsy blood in her too. She speaks Spanish, she’s from the USA, she’s sixteen, and…”
Sipho grinned. “And did you get to meet her father, as well?”
“Father? Who says father? He’s her flippin’ brother, man! His name is Antonio and he’s studying to be a doctor in Microbiology – whatever that means.”
I told Sipho everything else I knew about the two campers, and he suddenly said: “Wait a bit. Not so fast, bro. That part about the algae and the oil sounds fishy to me. And why wouldn’t she tell you what that structure was used for? You know… that iron structure we suspect your uncle has something to do with – what’s the bet they’re up to something else?”
“What do you mean, Sipho?”
“Who knows what they might be up to? Manufacturing drugs big time, maybe?”
“No way!” I protested. “She’s not that kind of person at all, Sipho. But to be honest, I really don’t know what my Uncle Bert is up to, and I haven’t met her brother yet, so I don’t really know what’s going on with him either. All I know is that my uncle doesn’t want me to go to that place where Inez and her brother are camping, and I’ve been wondering about that too. Why is he being so secr
etive about everything?’’
“Well, if they’re making drugs, we’ll have to report all three of them to the police, won’t we, Rick? And the law will just have to take its course,” Sipho said, sounding like a judge who had already made up his mind about the case.
That really bothered me. If Uncle Bert were to be charged with something as serious as that, he could face imprisonment, and that would be disastrous for my mom, Susie and me. The thought began to give me the creeps again, so I tried to soften things up a bit as far as Sipho was concerned. “Maybe we shouldn’t jump to conclusions too quickly, Sipho. It wouldn’t be fair, would
it?”
Sipho shrugged his shoulders and decided to change the subject. “By the way, did you tell the girl about what those thugs at school are threatening to do to them, Rick?”
“I did, but she didn’t bat an eyelid when I told her about it. She said she and her brother are karate experts.”
“Then the two of them don’t know what those guys are capable of doing. They can be as vicious as a pack of jackals let loose in a chicken run. I’ve seen what they can do with those fists and knobkerries of theirs.”
“Yep, I can imagine it,” I said, chewing my bottom lip until it started to hurt.
“By the way,” Sipho suddenly said. “My father told me a group of Grade 12s from one of the posh schools in Johannesburg will be coming for a guided tour of the power station this Friday. Something to do with career guidance. I still haven’t seen everything there is to see inside the power station, and my father said he would get permission from school for me to go on the tour as well.”
“Do you think anybody else from our school will be going, Sipho?”
He shook his head. “No. Only the crowd from Johannesburg.”
I rubbed my chin. “Gee, I’d also like to see how a power station works, Sipho. Do you think your father will let me go too?”
“I’ll ask him and I’ll let you know, Rick.”
The next few days passed too slowly for my liking, but I felt great not having to go to school that Friday. The bus from Johannesburg arrived shortly after ten o’clock that morning at the main entrance of the power station, where Sipho and I stood waiting under one of the scraggly old peppercorn trees nearby.
