My mother swerves to the roadside as there may be photos of Marsden on the film a baboon is sniffing. She hoots the horn to scatter the baboons, then reverses up to the cast spool.
– Dee, you go for the film while I hold Chaka.
I gear myself for a shark-fanged baboon to dart from under Indlovu and jaw my hand. But I pick up the spool unscathed. I swing the door to. Chaka licks my ear as the grunting baboons home in again. My heart drums and I feel faint as we drive on up the winding road. I shall miss my father being around for when things get scary, like the time Marsden and I found a mamba in the yard.
Hope is all for stoning the snake and Byron wants to spike it with a pitchfork, but my father calmly lures it into a wine box and folds in the flaps. I have the box in my lap as we ride Indlovu out along the Strandfontein road to free it in the dunes.
My father would pick up in his bare hands the vleifrogs Marsden and I found in gumboots in the garage. He would catch spiders in jam jars and throw them out into the night. Like dark thoughts, the furtive furry things would find their way back after a few days. I wished he would kill them, as I never got used to the spurt of fear on discovering a spider in my cupboard.
Everything goes black as we are sucked into the mouth of a tunnel. The dark bears down and squeezes out any sea breeze still lingering in my lungs.
As we come out into the sun and drop down into the Hex River Valley my lungs fill with still, dry air. There are no fan-blades in the sky. The sun is a white eye. It sees all, like the glass eye of Bessie Malan.
Chaka’s slobber dries out and he pants bergwind gasps across my face. He gazes out over a landscape of stones to the edge of your sight, and dogs see far.
The dorps on the N1 go: Matjiesfontein, Vleifontein, Leeu-Gamka.
We head through a land of bald koppies and karakul sheep for a town called Klipdorp, in the far Cape, south of the Orange Free State border. Other than the picnic bays in the sketchy shade of bluegums every few miles, there is no shade.
A hawk drops out the sky to the parched earth. Then it flies up to a telegraph pole and tugs a string of lizard gut away from a flicking tail.
The road follows the telegraph poles, an unending echo of totems.
On long journeys, when Marsden and I were small, we would begin to fight like tomcats in a basket. My father would call out: First one to spot a lion gets ten cents.
We would sit still for miles and miles, eyes skinned for the telltale twitch of a tail among the Smartie-coloured cosmos. We never saw a lion, but my father would sometimes fork out five cents for an ostrich or a donkey.
At Beaufort West we turn off the N1 and stop at a BP.
– Fill up with 97, says my mother to the black petroljockey in a grasshopper-green overall.
He hooks in the pipe and Chaka goes bananas again. I feel ashamed that we have a racist dog. He loves Hope and Byron, but all other blacks are postmen or newspaperboys to bark at madly.
The petroljockey comes round to my mother’s window.
– Check oil and water, Madam? he says calmly, as if he is used to whitefolk dogs and their drooling fangs.
He twists open the radiator with a handkerchief from his pocket. He jumps back as rusty water fountains into the sky. Indlovu gurgles and hisses unhappily. The man fetches a can of cold water and Indlovu glugs a canful.
– I could shoot the bloody dog, my mother snaps.
We head for the N1 again, Chaka still barking his head off. My mother is so rattled by his barking that a big rig almost runs us down just as she steers onto the highway. The rig swings to avoid us. Indlovu screeches. The rig horn wails and it feels as if we will be sucked into the slipstream. There is a stink of burnt rubber.
Hope cries, my mother’s face is bleached and Chaka is dazed.
Behind us the petroljockey flicks his tip into the air and catches it in his hip pocket and I think of Bessie Malan’s eye in a deep tobacco-flecked pocket.
Chaka dozes off in my lap. My mother, regaining colour after the rig scare, tells the history of Klipdorp as we go along.
– Klipdorp is called Klipdorp because there is no river or mountain or kloof that landmarks it, just a pyramid of stones a pioneer digger from Amsterdam unearthed in his bid to find gold there.
Chaka farts as his legs jerk in his dreams of scattering baboons, or of catching seagulls that taunt him from the sky.
– Later they found out that, by some fluke, the digger’s pyramid was halfway between Cape Town and Johannesburg. Over the years caravans of drifters and fortune-seekers camped on the riverless flat, halfway between the fruit and the gold. So it became a dorp, Klipdorp. Then, one day, an old diviner’s fork danced in his hands. But the Klipdorpers laughed at him because any old fool could tell the earth under their feet was as dry as death. They doggedly oxed water all the way from the Zeekoe River for the rest of their lives.
Hope shakes her head at all this whitefolk history.
– It was only after the Boer War, when the boers came back to farm, after years of warring against the English on horseback, that a drill was sunk into the rock and sweet water flowed to heal the land.
My mother chose Klipdorp because of an advert in the paper for a house going cheap in the charming, undiscovered Karoo. Before my brother died, my mother would study the ins and outs of everything beforehand. We never went on holiday without her reading all the guidebooks she could find in the secondhand bookshops in Long Street. Now she buys a house she has never seen, in the middle of nowhere. To hell and gone, as Oom Jan would say. All she wants to do is paint, and Muizenberg does not inspire her.
– Muizenberg is too European, she says. The Karoo is rugged and that’s what I want.
So, just because my mother wants ruggedness, we head deeper and deeper into the outback. I do not see the charm of this landscape of stone and dust and thorn.
After miles and miles of karakul sheep: Klipdorp. The digger’s pile of stones is long gone. No river or mountain to mark it, just a sign saying: Welkom in Klipdorp. It is the kind of white boondock town you drive through, dipping down to 60 for a few kays. You may stop if petrol is running low, or if the engine is smoking, or if you need to pee. Then you kick up to 120 again, following the tar through the bald veld, maybe catching a glimpse of the black shanty township a few miles beyond the dorp, out of cozy white eyesight.
Delarey Straat, the main road, runs as the crow flies through the dozy dorp.
Wind-pumped water fountains like liquid cacti on the front-yard grass. Fences blur as morning glory and granadilla wind through the wire.
Rhodes Hotel: a deep Victorian veranda and a gnarled, elephantskin oak, dropping acorns into the dry sloot.
Dutch Reformed kerk: the tall spire spears a blue sky. A bird flies from the spire, handlining a shadow along the tar.
A jail with barbed wire on the walls.
A bottlestore with big adverts for Castle and Black Label and Klipdrift. A man kips on the kerb in front of the bottlestore, his head under a floppy hat.
There is a thatched Anglican church with stone walls. It looks as if a giant dug up a sod of England and dropped it in the Karoo. The priest is in the graveyard, hosing the cannas, tongues of red and orange flame like the flames that danced on heads at Pentecost. The graveyard is not a restful place to lie, as now and then, randomly, a motorcar or lorry hurtles by.
Then the town peters out into desert again and Indlovu U-turns and heads back through town. This time I see the black man sitting on an upturned beer crate at the Shell, across the road from the Rhodes Hotel. He has the white seafroth beard of an old man and a teacup patch of bald skin on his head. He catches me staring at him and waves his yellow handkerchief at me. By the time I wave back we are quite far down the street and I am not sure he sees my hand wave, like the nodding head of a felt back-window dog.
We pull in at the Sonskyn Kafee to get cool drinks and ask for the way to 9 Mimosa Road.
Coloured kids play hopscotch on the paving outside the café. A girl
with her hair in long stiff pippielangkous plaits hopscotches from square to square and, flamingoing on one skinny leg, reaches for the stone, while the other kids clap their hands.
There is nowhere to sit outside. It is not that kind of café.
By the door, firewood is bundled with strips of bicycle tube, same as you use to make a cattie to kill starlings. Strings of wine-gum beads hang in the door to keep the flies out.
At first it is hard to focus in the dark, but then I make out the café tannie with her hair tied up in a bun. Above her head are the cigarettes: Texan, Camel, Lucky Strike, Marlboro. Behind her are coffees: Koffiehuis, Van Riebeeck and Frisco. And the teas: Five Roses and Joko. On the counter are the newspapers, and Lion matches, and sweets: Chappie’s, niggerballs, Kojak lollipops. The shebang of colours and flavours, just as you find it in the Sea Breeze Café in Muizenberg.
It feels good to find such familiar things in a foreign place.
From the rattling fridge I grab a Coca-Cola for me and a Canada Dry for Hope. My mother does not drink fizz. She reckons it just makes you thirstier. She drinks gallons of tea early in the morning and stores up the liquid like a camel until her first gin and tonic in the evening. Indian tonic is bitter, but my mother enjoys bitter and spicy tastes, dry red wine that makes your tongue tingle, and mango atchar that stings your lips and burns your ass afterwards.
My mother buys firewood, a newspaper and Springbok bread.
– The house is not egzekly on the corner. There is a rugby field on the corner, and the house is by there, the café tannie tells us, her lardy white arm signposting the way, somewhere beyond the pinging pinball machine.
The braai meat we find next door in the Karoo Slaghuis. The butcher’s apron, dark blue with white kudu stripes, is smeared with blood.
Butcher: Karoo lamb is juicier—
Saw: vuzzzz
A chop, bread-slice thick, drops from the teeth of the saw onto newspaper.
Butcher: and sweeter—
Saw: vuzzzz
Butcher: and cheaper—
Saw: vuzzzz
Butcher: than down in Cape Town.
Saw: vuzzzz
The butcher plops the newspapered chops and a coil of boere-wors on the counter and wipes his hands on his apron. Under the glass of the counter, meat spiced a vivid orange is threaded on sticks like Hawaiian flowers.
Overhead a fly, lured to a pink bar of light, dies in a spit of flame.
Butcher: Enjoy it.
At the Kommaweer bottlestore, my mother runs in for a sixpack of Castle dumpies.
– Too hot to drink red wine, she chirps cheerfully to Hope and me as she hops into Indlovu again.
9 Mimosa Road: the walls a dirty white, red paint peeling on the wavy zinc roof. A dry bougainvillaea forms a canopy over the stoep. The house looks bare after our house in Muizenberg, where hibiscus and frangipani and Pride of India hid it from the street. A lone, thirsty jacaranda casts sketchy shade in the yard. The house has an abandoned, cursed air to it. No wonder it is cheap.
A gaunt, raggedy-feathered bird perches on the roof. Chaka barks at the bird and it flaps away in gangly flight.
VERKOOP slants red across the TE KOOP sign. A Mevrou van Zyl from next door comes over with the keys and a melktert she has baked for us.
– It is a change to have folk from Cape Town come to us. Usually folk work their fingers to the bone in the hope of a place by the sea one day, she says, shaking her head.
– Yes, it is beautiful by the sea, my mother smiles sweetly.
Then why on earth are we in this far-flung, voetsak dorp? I wonder.
– Ou Willem, God rest his soul, dreamed of dying there by the sea in Onrus with his mouth full of geelbek fish.
The buffalo grass sends out snaky runners across the yard in the hope of finding water. The skull of a kudu bull is nailed to the stoep wall.
– Ja-nee. He had to do with tinned sardines, she laughs.
I sense it is a joke she has told before. I hear mice, or rats, skitter away through the tangle of bougainvillaea. Black ants drip down from the skull. So, some things survive.
Our neighbour on the other side from Mevrou van Zyl is the rugby field on the corner. Though it is midsummer, boys are playing rugby. The buffalo grass under their feet fades to cowskin patches of dust. Chaka pees against the fence to mark his turf and then races up and down the fence to bark at the boys.
The barefoot boys stop their playing for a moment to stare at the stranger and his crazy dog, but then they play on, ignoring Chaka and me. The boys are lithe and sinewy. There is something jaunty and cocksure in the way they drop a shoulder before spinning out a pass. The flick of a hand to glide the ball. I sense in the stirred-up dust of impala feet that the boys are born of the earth.
Though they know I am there they do not call out to me. In a way, I am glad because I have never had an instinct for the zigzag bounce of a rugby ball. Just as I have never foreseen which way life will tack. It is all random to me. A fluke ball kills Marsden. A blind corner throws up a band of baboons. A whim casts us into exile in the desert.
A shiver ripples through me because the Klipdorp boys look so hard and because fate is so haphazard. There are six coral seeds in my pocket and I finger them as if counting out an over in cricket.
I see the bird is back on the roof. I reckon it is a buzzard, or a vulture of some kind. I throw a stone at it and the bird jerks into flight again as the stone clatters on the zinc.
– What on earth? calls my mother, jutting her head out of a window.
– It was a buzzard. Or a vulture, I lamely mutter.
– Oh for God’s sake, Douglas, leave the poor bird alone.
My mother’s head is gone again. One moment she wants to shoot Chaka for barking, then she feels pity for a buzzardy bird.
I turn to mend a hole in the fence so that Chaka does not run out. From across the street, a barefoot, tanned girl watches me. Sun flames her tangling, gypsy hair, casting her face in shadow. Sunlight filters through the cloth of her dress, revealing the inside of her legs like a secret.
I abandon the wiring. I want to do something eye-catching to hold her gaze. I pick up a dry jacaranda pod that looks like the hard shell of a river crab. It has a good weight in my hand and would be good for skimming and skipping over water.
Sunflared deep resin pool in the Berg River. The trout stay down in the shadows. Dirkie, Marsden and I, we know they are there and we flick the fly hooks in and out to tease them out. Flisk flisk, the fly whisks past my ear. But the fish stay in hiding. We drop the fly rods for flat stones to skip over the river. Dirkie is the skipper king with fourteen hops.
I toss the pod for Chaka to chase. He catches it in his teeth as it falls, claws up dust on the turn and jikas his head as if gulleting a rabbit. I imagine the girl awed by my cold-blooded dog. But when I look again the barefoot girl is gone. I feel marooned.
Tossing a jacaranda pod to hook a girl. You bloody fool.
His stub ablur, Chaka chews the pod at my feet. Dumb cur. I feel an urge to hurt him, to hear him yelp for being so blind to my feelings.
I kneel to drink from the raintank tap. The water is sour.
I find a ladder in the garage and climb to the top of the tank and peer over the rim to see if something has fallen in to sour it.
A mangy dog-hide floats in a reflected sky. The reek floods my head and I feel dizzy. The ladder sways. The tank pitches away from me and the sun races across the sky. I am Icarus falling into the sea. It will be cool and deep.
But there is no sea under me and the earth is as hard as clay fired in a kiln. I am dead, until I feel Chaka’s slobber on my face.
Hope thinks death has swooped down on us again and cries out to God:
– Tixo Tixo Tixo.
My mother comes running out, drops to her knees and scoops my head up in her lap.
I feel the lilt of the dog-water in my stomach and want to be sick. The earth tilts again and I cling to my mother.
�
�� There is a dead dog in the tank, I tell her.
– Yo yo yo, Madam, whines Hope. This is bad magic.
– This is no juju, says my mother, just local boys trying to scare us away.
She combs her fingers through the long strands of my lemon-juiced hair. I recall my father’s lifeless hand on my head at dusk on the rocks and begin to cry because there is no father to chase jinxes away, or to bury dead dogs. My mother holds my head to her breasts, as she did on Christmas day. Over her head I see the buzzard land on the roof again.
When the water runs dry I tie a handkerchief, bandit-style, over my nose and mouth to dull the stink. I climb the ladder again to fish the rotting dog out with a wire hook. Now that I get a good look at it, I see that it is not a dog, but a jackal.
Long Beach. Marsden and I are five. We find a dead duiker in the dunes with maggoty eyeballs and crabs scuttling to hide in the gaping stomach. One brave crab creeps out, pincers up. We pee on it.
I dig by the fence, watched by the beady-eyed buzzard. The jackal lies dead in the sun, and flies buzz around. Chaka, usually full of bravado, hides on the stoep. He smells that the jackal is a wild thing.
The earth is too hard by the fence and I give up and dig where the tankwater has drained. The spade sinks deeper this time. I dig fast and then use the spade to shovel the jackal towards the hole. The spade cuts into his pelt, and blood and water ooze out of a gill slit. I vomit on the grass. My head reels and I use my hands now to drop the jackal in the shallow hole. I claw sand in with my fingers.
Then I climb down into the rain tank to scrub it free of scum.
Oom Jan’s farm. Dirkie and I squeeze through a hole in a big steel wine vat to scrub it out for pocket money. Marsden is too scared and we taunt him, calling him moffie, moffie, our voices warping, echoing in the vat.
I wonder, as I scrub, if stranded seagulls and buzzards and drowned jackals are signs that death and misfortune have not stayed in Muizenberg under the eye of Bessie Malan, but followed us here, riding the roof with Hope’s caged, scruffy chickens.
Karoo Boy Page 5
