Karoo Boy

by Troy Blacklaws

  – Grazie, she says.

  – How come you know Italian?

  – My father is Italian.

  – Italian is such a musical language.

  This is something I have heard my mother say. She loves Fellini films. I grasp for Italian words but only pizza comes to mind. Then I remember gelato.

  – A word like gelato. You could say it over and over again just for the sound of it. But there’s no music in ice-cream. Maybe you could teach me Italian?

  – Okay. Zanzara is mosquito.

  – Zanzara?

  – Good. And a piovanello is sandpiper, and farfalla is butterfly.

  I wish I could stay forever, the damp from her bikini seeping into my shorts and the orange Beechie in my mouth and zanzara and other exotic sounds in my head.

  – Your hair is so blond from surfing, she says.

  The truth is, I rub lemon juice into my long hair so that it fades faster in the sun.

  – Your hair is beautiful, I say.

  I touch her frizzy ginger hair and she tips up her shades and stares her green eyes at me. I want to kiss the bare patch between her eyebrows, but the chittering girls from the train flock up to us and snatch Marta’s green eyes away from mine.

  I walk home barefoot along the tar. A fluke high tide has sent salt water over the sandbank into the lagoon. A dead seagull floats on the water and fish worry it.

  Zanzara zanzara zanzara zanzara zanzara

  My bare feet hopscotch along, dodging the cracks in the paving as Marsden and I used to do, long ago, when we still believed in manhole bears.

  hip hop

  skip and

  froghop

  springbok

  kangaroo

  didjeridu

  My name is Douglas. I am alive, though part of me, the me in Marsden, is docked. In one pocket I carry my father’s Zippo and pocket knife. In the other pocket small change mixes with orange coral seeds. Perhaps it is true of the seeds, that they bring good luck.

  I fall asleep whispering Marta’s name into my pillow.

  Green fish drift through swaying orange seagrass.

  My head flies off the pillow. My heart pounds. My mind ferrets after the sound that woke me, frantic to catch it, defuse its horror by defining it, naming it. But all hint of the sound is gone, skoon out of my head. All I hear is the familiar ragged volley of Chaka’s blunt barks, listlessly echoed by the other dogs of the neighbourhood.

  The floorboards, cool under my bare feet, creak like a yacht mast in the wind. The zebra skin on the wall brushes against my skin. My mother stirs on the orange sofa in the front room. From the lip of a tipped glass, wine seeps into the floorboards. A candle on the window sill has burnt to a stub, oozing wax over the edge. The incense joss has gone out long ago, leaving a trail of fish-shit ash. Yet the smell of jasmine lingers, a wistful afterthought.

  The kitchen door swings in the breeze, the moon glints off the lino. I sense that the sound came from out there, beyond the kitchen steps where Hope often sits and peels sweet potatoes into her apron at dusk.

  teaboxes

  I WALK DOWN THE road from Valsbaai station to the Zandvlei lagoon, the path Marsden and I always walked home from school. Two Thomas boys eeny-meeny-miny-moed. Mo cast like bread to the fish, leaving me to foot a flat Coca-Cola can alone along the tar. Alone, unchased, unhassled by my shadow brother.

  The clatter and clank of the can skimming the tar calls the bitter old monkeynut widow to her window.

  She eyes me, chews monkey nuts and spits the shells into the winnowing wind. Though I am hardly in the mood, I can tell she is waiting for me to play my part in the old ritual. I pick up a stone to chuck at the red postbox on the corner.

  – Joo got no respect for the neighbourhood, she yells.

  Her banshee yelling would kill us, Marsden and me. We would giggle all the way down to the lagoon.

  Muizenberg is full of old widows and the ghosts of faded men, their suits still hanging in mothball cupboards like shed snake-skins. After Dodi died in the Tote, my Nana was a mothball widow for half a year until she withered away.

  – She pined for Dodi like a widowed lovebird, my mother said.

  The window widow’s eyes follow me, longing for me to pick up another stone, but, as I am alone, there is no fun in it.

  For me, the world has become a slow, dull turning under the sun. My father’s typewriter gathers dust. Marsden’s room is a museum of unfingered things, of warping ricepaper and cracking waterpaints. My mother treks deep into her painted landscapes. Marta belongs to the parakeet girls, tossing glances like small change to my poorbox eyes.

  Down by the lagoon, on the footbridge Bessie Malan leapt from, a lone man handlines in baggy dungarees and straw hat. He is a character out of Huck Finn, fishing the Mississippi. He yanks the handline and a tiddly fish flinks against the blue sky. It flops onto the bridge, at my feet. The man stands on its tail and goes down on his knees to free the hook. His toes peep out of split tackies. He flicks the unhooked fish into a blood-smeared Jiffy bag full of shuddering, sardiney fish, too small to debone. He stands and wipes his hands on his dungarees.

  – Yello, my basie, he says to me, tipping his raggedy straw hat.

  – Hello. I haven’t seen you here before.

  – I’m here and there, my basie. I have been in the Roeland Hotel for a time. I tell you, life is sweet as hanepoot when you come out of jail.

  I feel a jab of shame that I have been blind to the sweetness of life since the ball hit Marsden, hard as a flying halfbrick. The sun pelts down out of a blue sky. Just one wink from Marta spins my head. To cheer me up, Hope cooks butternut and bobotie and sweet potatoes. In the end, my mother always comes back to me from the places she journeys to.

  The man picks up a cigarette stub and pockets it for the quarter inch of unsmoked tobacco.

  – Lady Luck is smiling on me. I feel it in my bones. You haven’t got work for me, my basie?

  – I’m sorry.

  – So goes it, he laughs.

  A hoity-toity lady comes tiptapping over the bridge. The fisherman gives her space, and she tucks her handbag tight under her arm. I wonder if she smells the Roeland Street jail in him, or if it is a tic of hers that all coloureds trigger.

  The fisherman mimics her hoity-toity walk, and I laugh.

  – Hey, maybe you can fetch me something to eat. A koek, or a semmij.

  – I can get you a sandwich.

  At home, Hope is crying on the kitchen doorstep. There’s nothing you can do when she cries, you just have to let her cry it out. I’ll have to make the sandwich myself. I fling the fridge door open and go for the Danish ham. I doubt they eat Danish ham in Roeland Street. I cut two thick slices of Springbok bread and smear them with butter. I slice through the ham, and my thumb. The knife is so sharp, I don’t realise I’ve cut myself until I see a drop of blood on the bread. I suck my thumb and it begins to sting.

  I wonder, as I suck the blood from my thumb, if he escaped from jail, or if they let him go. On Radio Good Hope you hear of escaped prisoners hiding out on the mountain, but surely they wouldn’t go fishing in the lagoon for all the world to see.

  My mother’s head appears over an Indian teabox. My heart sinks. Boxes mean change. Even dogs know that.

  – Dee, I can’t stay in Muizenberg any longer. This house is too full of morbid memories.

  – I don’t want to go.

  – Dee, your grandfather’s money is running out. I’ve found a cheap place in the Karoo, in a town called Klipdorp. Bessie will rent out the house and keep an eye on things here.

  I imagine Bessie Malan’s glass eye on the yard wall under the coral tree, keeping an eye on things. Perhaps the old coloured man will come along and pocket it and leave no eye to watch over the shadows of the dead and the exiled.

  – I’m staying, I mutter.

  – Bayview will be happy to have the books we don’t want.

  She chucks Homer’s Odyssey onto a pile of musty hardbacks.<
br />
  I hardly know my mother as she shifts boxes and piles up books. If I told her I wanted to pierce my ear, I doubt she would flinch.

  Hope is sniffling on the doorstep.

  – Ulungile? You okay?

  My words unleash a howl from her. I give up and walk back to the bridge to give the fisherman his ham-and-blood sandwich.

  For me the Karoo is another world: foreign, far, flat and bleak. No surfing, no Marta, no lagoon.

  He smells the sandwich.

  – Ham. Hey ay ay. I tol’ you Lady Luck is smiling on me.

  dog’s eye view

  MY FATHER HAS GONE, beyond Seal Island, beyond the horizon. Now the rest of us trek out, away, from. My mother is behind the wheel. Hope rides shotgun beside her. I am in the back with Chaka.

  My mother steers left into the Strandfontein road in my father’s old Benz, Indlovu. She drags under the loaded roof rack and the full boot. The orange corduroy sofa is to follow us by rail.

  Chaka juts his head out the window to bite at the wind, and slobber hangs from his jowls like frogspawn.

  Hope reckons she is glad to escape the Langa skollies before they fill her windpipe with Omo and, besides, Peddie is not as far by bus.

  My mother’s face is a mask but I know she is churned up inside, as the gears catch with a cry of steel teeth as she goes into third.

  Hope’s chickens kick up a racket on the roof, caged behind my grandpa’s crocodileskin suitcase so their feathers are not plucked by the wind. Chaka barks madly, the gears grind and Hope cries ayeee ayeee ayeee because she will miss the Cape, even if skollies run free.

  We drive past Sunrise Beach. There is a hard sea running ashore. The beach is clotted with seagulls in the sand. They sense a storm is coming.

  Vygies flower on the dunes and root the dunes down in the wind. Cows stray over the dunes into the road. Their eyes are wide with wonder as a dog’s head yelps by.

  Bye-bye dunes, beach, sea. Bye-bye brother. Will you still visit me in the Karoo, or will it be a place devoid of shadows and reflections? Bye-bye Marta. I wonder, would you have let me kiss you if the parakeet girls had not come?

  We cross over the N2 and see coloured men walk along the roadside, bent under jerrycans of Friday sweet wine.

  Thunder rolls and rain begins to fall hard. Zigzags fire the sky over the Simonsberg. Two avocadoboys huddle under a flipped-over wheelbarrow, like a twin-headed tortoise. A Xhosa mother with her child tied to her back stands under a stone pine, risking the skyfire to keep her bundled child dry. Chaka hides down behind Hope’s seat and whines in fear of rumbling gods.

  As we drive through Stellenbosch the rain dries up and the light is an unearthly green. The water sloots of Dorp Street over-flow and the road is a shallow river. A Camel carton floats by my window, chasing akkerdoppies.

  I wish we were coming to live in Stellenbosch, rather than crossing the mountains into the desert. From here you can still catch a ride down to the Strand to surf after school in the afternoon, but once you go over the Simonsberg and down through Pniel into Groot Drakenstein, it is another country.

  In the coloured town of Pniel we pull up at a petrol pump to fill up for the long trek ahead.

  In a Pniel café, I ask the coloured tannie, the café auntie, for a can of Coca-Cola, please ma’am. She throws in a banana for free, for the English boy.

  I switch to Afrikaans:

  – Dankie, tannie, vir die piesang.

  Coloured girls titter at me from the shadows where dried boerewors hangs among bananas, a rainbow of hairclips, cheap tartan-handled pocket knives and long bars of blue soap. An Indian mynah caws at me and the girls titter again when I hop away from the cage.

  Back in Indlovu, I tell my mother.

  – It’s sweet, but rather unusual, for a white boy to call a coloured woman auntie, my mother reveals.

  Groot Drakenstein: fruitpickers are blurred specks of colour in the rows of vines. My mother turns up the dirt road to Oom Jan’s farm to tell them we are trekking out to the boondocks.

  There used to be whispers in Cape Town that it was moonshine that made Auntie Tia, my mother’s sister, give up the fizzing life of theatre and cafés she had in Cape Town, for a dull life in the Boland with a boer.

  Once, driving back to Muizenberg over the mountain, when the folks thought Marsden and I were dozing in the back, I heard my mother remark to my father: I wonder how such a bull of a man makes love to a woman. My father laughed, and said: Maybe you dream of it? Through squinted eyes I saw his hand snake past the gearknob towards her lap. My mother giggled. My father glanced in the rearview mirror and caught me peeking. His hand jumped to the dashboard to fiddle with the radio dials and Year of the Cat leapt out of the radio.

  It is a pity we will just stay for tea, as Oom Jan makes his own boerewors, stuffing the mix of cow and fat and spice in long gut skins, flimsy as the rubbers you sometimes find on Sunrise Beach at dawn. The spices for his boerewors are a secret, like the recipe for Coca-Cola or Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  I love Kentucky. Sometimes on Friday evenings in Muizenberg, we would pick up a keg of Kentucky and go to the drive-in.

  My father hides Marsden and me in Indlovu’s boot, to smuggle us in to see One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, since we are too young for the 2–18 film. I love the feeling of lying coiled up against my brother in the boot. Twins, breathing in the same dust and dog smell, and hearing my father’s beers rattling.

  Auntie Tia and Oom Jan come out to meet us, while Dirkie hangs back sheepishly. The dogs jump up against Indlovu at the sight of Chaka, pawing at the window, barking at their old friend and at the chickens on the roof. Oom Jan boots the big boerbull bastard dog in the ribs and the boerbull’s yelps mix with Chaka’s frenzied barks, and the yip yip yip of the fox-hunting Jack Russell hanging on the boerbull’s heels, like a pilotfish shadowing a shark. I jerk back the handle and Chaka catapults out. The dogs cavort and caper around Indlovu, so that Hope is too scared to get out.

  – Voetsak, Oom Jan yells at the dogs and they bound away into the vineyards to bark at guineafowl and rabbits.

  I imagine Chaka telling the boerbull and the Jack Russell stories of chasing seagulls on Sunrise Beach, and the farm dogs thinking: sassy sea dog.

  – Bloody dogs, grunts Oom Jan.

  He gives my mother a kiss as she steps out of the car.

  – It is good to see you, Sarah. But I hope you are not going to go through with this Karoo trek of yours.

  – Jannie, leave her be, says Auntie Tia.

  She gives me a sloppy kiss on the mouth. Her mouth is always syrupy, as if she has just had a slurp of hanepoot. As soon as she goes around to hug my mother, I wipe my mouth dry. Then I remember Dirkie, and look up to see him watching me.

  – Kom nou, jong, Oom Jan calls Dirkie.

  Dirkie shuffles over.

  – Hello, Tannie Sarah, he says.

  – Hello, Dirkie. Don’t I get a kiss?

  My mother bends her head so he can kiss her. Hope, seeing that the coast is clear, climbs out of the car. I can tell Oom Jan finds it odd that Hope should sit in the front. I imagine him thinking: Typical Capetonians. Full of liberal ideas: driving around with chickens on the roof and a hoity-toity hotnot up front.

  Hope goes around to the back of the house, where she can drink tea from enamel mugs with their maid, Meisie.

  We sit on the stoep, and Meisie appears with the tea tray of china cups and scones and gooseberry jam. Dirkie gazes out over the vineyards towards Paarl mountain, as if he has never seen the view before. You would think I was the dead twin. Oom Jan digs around in his pipe, and then taps the old tobacco into a potted oleander.

  – I wish you wouldn’t do that, chides Auntie Tia.

  – Tia made the jam herself, you know, chirps Oom Jan.

  He is keen for us to see how his wife has adapted to farm life, giving up fancy things like bridge and the theatre for things that you can hold, like jars of jam and bricks of butter. Somehow, it comes out as a
n accusation of women like my mother who buy their jam and butter at Spar.

  – Sarah, stay with us on the farm, says Oom Jan. The boy can go to school in Paarl with Dirkie.

  Although Oom Jan knows that it is Marsden who is dead, and therefore Douglas in front of his eyes, it is an old habit of his to sweep away any doubt whether it is Marsden or Douglas by calling us boy.

  – And me? Shall I be your concubine? my mother mutters, as if commenting on the view.

  Oom Jan spits a mouthful of tea back into the teacup. Auntie Tia lifts her teacup to hide a smile. Dirkie is puzzled. I do not think they learn much English in Paarl. I am not keen to go to Paarl after all Dirkie’s stories of the headmaster, Ou Langhans, who canes you if your blazer is unbuttoned, or if your hair tickles your ears, or if your shoes do not shine.

  – No, really, says Oom Jan. It is not right for a woman to go gallivanting around the bundu with a paintbrush. These are violent times, you know. You could end up with a panga in your head.

  – Jannie, for God’s sake, Auntie Tia pleads.

  After tea, we bundle back into Indlovu. Chaka’s panting mists up the windows.

  – Totsiens, Meisie calls out to Hope.

  Under my feet is a box of Merlot wine from the farm. I wipe the mist from the back window so I can see them wave at us. Oom Jan has his arm around Auntie Tia, and she looks like a reed beside a rock. His other hand is on Dirkie’s head. His hand says: I am your father and you are my son. This is your land and your destiny.

  On the outskirts of Paarl we veer towards the mountain and climb the winding Du Toitskloof pass. Below us lies a patchwork of vineyards and orchards, and dams glinting in the sun. We swing around a corner and the road is full of baboons.

  My mother keeps her foot light on the pedal as she weaves Indlovu through, so the baboons do not jump on the roof and rip the chickens out of their cage.

  I have to wind up Chaka’s window. Kamikaze fool dog thinks he can take on a whole tribe of baboons. His barks chisel into my head.

  Hope reaches for something to throw at the baboons. Whenever she sees a snake or rat or any wild thing she instinctively stones it. She does not care if it is a tobaccoroller or molesnake or any undeadly animal. There are no stones in the cubbyhole, so she flings a shot spool of Kodak film at the baboons.