by John Coetzee
Sipho’s father gritted his teeth and shook his head forcefully. “You are wasting your breath, Mr Gonzales. After Saturday’s explosion while Mr Bert Lawson was on duty, the power station will now probably be shut down forever. Let me tell you, for the past six months my staff and I have been working like slaves to prove to management that this old power station can still operate for many years to come. But now all my work here has been for nothing. And you want to come and talk to me about some garbage like algae. You must be crazy, Mr Gonzales!”
Antonio was still desperately trying to get a few more words in to save the situation, but Mr Khumalo had already taken Sipho by the arm and called to me to go along with them. But I was still too overwhelmed by the scary experience I’d just had, so I said I’d rather stay for a while.
“What a terrible disaster, Inez,” Antonio lamented after Sipho, his father and Mr Powell had disappeared into the shadows. “This means all our work here has been for nothing too. We might as well pack up and go back to Florida.”
Inez sounded close to tears. “But you can’t give up now, Antonio.”
“What’s the use, Inez? How are we ever going to convince anybody in a place where we are called gypsies, devil worshippers and all other kinds of crazy things?”
She promptly interrupted him. “Listen, Antonio, I don’t want an infection to start in my arm. I’ve got to get this cut cleaned up as soon as possible. Where’s the first-aid box?”
“In the caravan,” he said, going off to fetch it.
Inez came up to me and put her hand on my shoulder. “You’re a real star, Rick. If it hadn’t been for you, that idiot would have thrown that flaming bottle of petrol at our caravan and set it on fire. And our laboratory equipment, our laptops with all our data on it, our clothes, our passports … everything would have been burnt to cinders.”
“That python really scared the hell out of me, Inez,” I confessed shakily.
“You did absolutely fine, Rick. I’m very proud of you, see,” she said, coming right up to me and giving me a kiss on the cheek, which made me feel alarmingly like I was rocketing off into outer space.
Antonio came back with the first-aid box. He cleaned and dressed Inez’s wound and turned to me. “That was a very brave thing you did with that python, Rick, but I can see you are still looking all shook up. I’ll make some hot chocolate for the three of us. Then we’ll walk you home.”
I felt much better after I’d had the warm, soothing drink, and on the way back around the dam Antonio broke the silence and spoke to Inez. “Okay. I’ve decided I’m going to talk to Mr Khumalo again about the algae as soon as I can get an appointment with him. But first we’ll have to find Bert Lawson because I’ll be needing his input to convince Mr Khumalo about what I want to tell him.”
Inez nodded. “I agree with you, Antonio. I’ve often heard you and Bert practising your presentation together. And I’m sure he’ll know how to convince the officials from a technical point of view when they come to visit the power station.”
Antonio turned to me. “Tell me, Rick. Do you really have no idea where your uncle could have gone?”
I shook my head. “He just drove off that night and he didn’t tell my mother or me where he was going.”
“Well, he can’t just leave us in the lurch like this,” Antonio said forcefully. “Rick, you have to do some good detective work for us now, and find out exactly where he is at the moment. It is of vital importance for the success of our project.”
I said I would do my best, though I had no idea where to start searching for my uncle.
When we reached the front gate to the cottage, both Antonio and Inez said a quick goodnight to me and hurried away home in the dark.
Chapter 7
When I entered the cottage, I was glad to discover that my mother and Susie were still fast asleep. I put my pyjamas on and got into bed, but as soon as I closed my eyes the whole drama started unfolding in my head again: the thugs attacking Antonio and Inez with their sjamboks and knobkerries; the one big fellow lighting the wick of the petrol bomb. And after I had fallen asleep the nightmare continued with full force. Again I felt the python coiling around my throat and chest, squeezing the breath out of me. Only this time nobody came to help me. The python squeezed and squeezed until it felt as if my last moment had come. I could feel it biting into my shoulder and shaking me at the same time. Then I heard my mother’s voice calling as if from somewhere far away. “Rick… Rick… What’s happening? Answer me, Rick!”
I managed to get my eyes open and saw my mother staring at me, her face a rigid mask of panic. “Talk to me, Rick!” she said, shaking me again.
After a few tries, I managed to get some words out. “Something… somebody was busy choking me, Mom.”
“But there’s nobody else in the room, Rick. I heard you shouting all kinds of things I couldn’t understand and I came to see what the trouble was. You must have been having a terrible nightmare.”
Only then did it strike me that I had, in fact, been having a horrible one. She bent closer over me and studied the side of my throat. “And where do those scratch marks come from, Rick?”
I didn’t know what to say. How could I tell her what had really happened without spilling the beans about the secret project Inez, Antonio and Uncle Bert were busy with? And hadn’t I promised Inez and Antonio faithfully that I wouldn’t tell anybody about it? So I had to think quickly. “I… I don’t know, Mom. It felt as if somebody was choking me, but it must have been me scratching my throat while I was dreaming.”
That seemed to satisfy her curiosity for the moment, and I was greatly relieved that I didn’t need to tell her about the terrifying incident at the camping place; otherwise she would have tried to stop me from ever going there again. She sat on the bed next to me and didn’t say anything for a while. Then, clearing her throat, she tried to put her thoughts into words as smoothly as she could. “Now that all these bad things have been happening to us, I know you must be very worried about our future, Rick. But don’t you go worrying yourself sick about it now, see. Things sometimes have a way of coming right somehow.”
I felt scorching embers of anger burning in my throat. “How can you say things are going to come right, Mom? You said yourself there’s hardly any money left and that you might even have to go to jail because you won’t be able to pay that fine you got. So what’s going to happen to Susie and me if you are sent to jail?”
“Oh, Rick. Naturally I have been very worried about everything, so I’ve sometimes been saying things I don’t really mean. I know that jobs are scarce nowadays, but if the worst comes to the worst, I could sell the 4 x 4 to help us to survive until I can get a job in another town somewhere.”
What she said didn’t sound very convincing to me and I was tempted to stay home from school that day. But I badly wanted to know how things had turned out for Sipho, since his father had been so angry at the camping place the previous night. So I went to school bravely, but as I stepped through the school gate, I was aware of the hostile stares I was getting from some of the guys and girls on the playground. It was as if they all knew about the failed attack of the night before, and were planning to take revenge on me for barging into the scene and scaring them off with the python.
I saw Sipho coming through the school gate. Pretending to take no notice of the others, I went straight up to him and tried to sound casual. “Hi, Sipho. How’s life treating you today?”
He didn’t look me straight in the eye.
I stared at him. “Hey, what’s bugging you, Sipho?”
He pursed his lips. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but my father has forbidden me to hang out with you anymore, Rick.”
I was bowled over. “Why?”
“Because I was with you when those things happened last night. That’s why.”
“But it was you who came and called me to come with you to the camping place, Sipho!”
“Okay, whatever… But as I said, my father doesn’t want
me to be friends with you anymore, see.”
“I suppose it’s really because of my Uncle Bert, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” he said, trying not to look embarrassed.
The bell rang and without saying anything further, Sipho turned away from me and walked straight to the classroom without looking back. I stood staring after him.
I felt so devastated by his attitude that I spun round on my heels, went back through the school gate and stomped all the way down to the dam.
I ripped my school bag off my back, flung it onto the ground and sat down heavily on the concrete block to try and sort out the jumbled thoughts racing through my shattered mind.
Before going off to school that morning I had gone and thanked Mr Powell next door for saving me from the python. I had also badly wanted to go and thank Mr Khumalo as well for what he had done to save my life, but after what Sipho had told me, I knew that my chances of talking to him would now be zero. And the problem of Uncle Bert’s disappearance also came to gnaw at me again. Why was he being such a coward, running away from his work at the power station? I wondered. Then everything became too much for me to handle. A heavy feeling settled inside me and my mind just tumbled into a dark pit.
At last, when my thoughts slowly got into some kind of a straight line again, I found myself wondering about the algae. And the more I thought about Antonio and Uncle Bert’s project, the more ridiculous the whole idea seemed. How could those tiny, green blobs I had seen under the microscope ever be of any use the way Inez had described to me? How could a triangular structure of algae-filled tubes, which was so small compared to the gigantic smokestacks of the power station, have any effect on those fumes coming out at the top of them? It didn’t seem to make sense to me at all. Nothing made sense anymore.
I looked toward the opposite side of the dam and saw that there was no familiar column of smoke rising into the air as it usually did that time of the morning, and there was no sound from the generator either. The truth came to me then that Inez and Antonio had probably decided to go back to the USA after all. That also made me realise how much Inez meant to me. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing her, and I desperately wanted to go and find out if she was still there. But I was feeling so morbid right then that I decided to go home and fling myself onto my bed instead.
When I arrived at the gate of the cottage, Susie grabbed her doll where she was playing in an empty flowerbed and came running up to me. “Guess what, Ricky.”
“What, Susie?”
“I’ve seen Daddy,” she said, bubbling over with excitement.
That stopped me in my tracks. “Where, Susie?”
“He drove past here in a white car. I told Mommy about it but she says I’m ’magining things again but I’m not, see!”
“But you know that Daddy drives a red car, Susie – that old Volkswagen Beetle of his. So it couldn’t have been him who was here, could it?”
She stamped her foot a few times. “It was! It was! It was!”
“But why didn’t he stop here then, Susie?”
“I shouted to Daddy to stop, but he was already past and he didn’t see me. That’s why.”
Susie sounded so convincing that I started to believe her then.
My mom appeared with her eyebrows shooting up like two question marks on her forehead. “Why are you home from school already, Rick? What’s the matter? Are you sick?”
“I’m not feeling well, Mom,” was all I could say.
“You’d better go to bed then,” she said.
Quickly changing the subject, I said. “Listen Mom, Susie says she saw Dad driving past here.”
Her mouth dropped wide open. “Really?”
“Really, Mommy,” Susie intervened excitedly.
“Maybe you were just imagining it, Susie,” my mom said, shaking her head.
“I’m not ’magining it! I really saw him, Mommy… I really, really did!” Susie again protested heatedly.
Looking at my mom’s face, I thought I could see a glimmer of hope lingering there, but I wasn’t quite sure about it.
I went to my room and lay on my bed, thinking about my dad. Surely it couldn’t have been Dad whom Susie had seen; otherwise he would have stopped here at Uncle Bert’s cottage. Didn’t we matter to him at all anymore? my confused brain complained. But as my dad often used to say: strange things have a way of happening when you least expect them to. And that was when I heard a car stopping at the gate.
“Daddy!” I heard Susie yelling outside, after I heard the car’s door opening and closing.
I jumped up from my bed and ran outside, just in time to see my dad picking Susie up, throwing her into the air like he used to do when I was her size, and catching her on the way down.
“Dad!” I shouted as I sprinted up to him and, after putting Susie down, he gave me a tight hug.
“Good to see you again, Rick,” he said, his brown eyes twinkling and a broad grin stretching out from either end of his neatly trimmed, light brown moustache while he rubbed our heads in turn. Then he gave me a quizzical look. “Hey, but aren’t you supposed to be at school at this time of the day, Rick?”
I felt my face getting hot. “I decided to bunk today, Dad.”
Susie piped up: “Are you coming to stay with us forever, Daddy?”
For a moment it seemed as if he was at a loss for words. Then he patted her head and said, “I’ll come and visit you as often as I can from now on, my little girl. And next time I come, I’ll have a big surprise for you, see?”
“I see you’re driving a brand-new Polo, Dad,” I said, looking at the dazzling white vehicle standing in front of the gate.
“That’s my new company car,” he said, with pride shining all over his face. “I’m working for a big chemical firm now.”
“Daddy, why don’t you come in and talk to Mommy? Please come and talk to her,” Susie intervened.
He patted her head softly. “Another time, Susie. I’ve got to get back to the power station right now.”
Just then my mom appeared in the doorway, and she looked totally taken aback.
“Hello, Maureen,” he said.
Her “Hello, Mike” hung in the air like a huge question mark attached to it.
My dad cleared his throat. “Have you any idea where Bert is, Maureen?”
She seemed at a loss for words, so she just shook her head.
“It’s very important. I was over at the power station just now to see the manager about maybe getting an order for some chemicals, but a meeting was in progress and I made an appointment for later. Then while leaving the office I bumped into Tom Powell, and he told me about Bert’s sudden disappearance.”
“Well, Bert has caused a big explosion in the power station, and…”
My dad quickly interrupted her. “Listen, Maureen, Tom Powell told me that nobody is to blame for the explosion at the power station.”
My mom looked puzzled. “But everybody’s been saying that Bert is to blame for what happened.”
“Well, according to the investigation into the explosion, the inspectors have found that a high-pressure steam pipe of one of the boilers had blown. That was all,” my dad explained. “Tom Powell told me that metal fatigue around a welded joint had caused it to crack and burst like that. It was just very fortunate that nobody got badly scalded or even killed by the jet of high-pressure steam blowing like crazy out of the pipe.”
“I don’t really understand much of what goes on in power stations,” my mom said. “But Bert has been acting very strangely lately, and now he’s gone off to goodness knows where to hide himself.”
Quickly taking advantage of the silence that followed, I chipped in. “Does it mean that the power station won’t be shut down after all, Dad?”
“I don’t know anything about that, Rick. I hope that won’t be the case, though, because that’ll mean that my chances of getting any orders for chemicals here in future would be nil,” he said, looking at his watch. “Listen, I’ll have t
o go now. My appointment with Mr Khumalo is at eleven. And after that I’ve got to do a sales call at one of the big sawmills near Nelspruit.”
Then, out of the blue, Susie suddenly popped a knotty question. “When are you and Mommy going to get married again, Daddy?”
My dad gave a few embarrassed coughs, and my mom just pretended that she hadn’t heard what Susie had said.
After giving Susie and me a quick hug in turn, my dad waved at the three of us, hurried to the car and sped off back to the power station.
It felt great to have seen my dad again, but I realised that the chances of my mom and my dad ever making up after what had happened when we were still living in Nelspruit, were almost next to zero.
Later that afternoon I was very surprised to see Sipho coming to where I was sitting in the garden, trying to get some homework done.
“Um … Hi, Rick,” he said awkwardly.
“Hi, Sipho,” I said, wondering what he had come to me for, since we weren’t supposed to be friends anymore.
He cleared his throat. “I’ve got good news, Rick. If it’s okay with you, we can now be buddies again. My father isn’t angry with us anymore about the thing that happened that night at the camping place.”
“How come, Sipho?” I said.
“When my father came home just now, I heard him telling my mother that your Uncle Bert wasn’t to blame for the explosion at the power station.”
“Okay, I already know about that,” I said. “My dad came to the cottage this morning and I heard him telling my mom about it.”
“Your uncle will be getting a letter to say that he can come back to work, but nobody knows where he’s gone off to. Have you heard anything from him yet?” Sipho added hopefully.
“Nope. He’s just disappeared into thin air.”
Sipho gave me a thoughtful look. “Strange. I wonder why.”
“Search me, bro,” I said.
“By the way, what made you bunk school today?”
“It’s a long story, Sipho.”
“Okay, but I haven’t got time to listen to it now in any case. Will I be seeing you at school tomorrow?”
