He jammed the gun into my hand.
“You do it if you think it’s so easy.”
The gun was light and fit surprisingly well. The kick wasn’t what I’d imagined, either, almost nothing, but I’d never fired anything before and my first shot went wild.
“See? Useless Pommie.” Ivan’s face was red.
My second went nowhere, too, and when Ivan began to laugh I didn’t want to play anymore. I was about to hand the gun back when a gray flash caught my eye. I didn’t even think. In a single movement I spun and squeezed and the thing scurrying across the road more than twenty feet away lifted into the air.
My stomach swirled with disgust and excitement as the rat thumped back onto the dust. Ivan’s mouth stayed open but the laughter had stopped.
He grabbed the gun and changed the clip.
“Do that again.”
I felt like I was floating. I took aim, pressured the trigger, and another rat rolled out of the world.
And another.
“Jeez, Jacklin. This is your first time?”
“Ja,” I said, absurdly proud.
“Well, where the bloody hell were you during the war? We could have done with you. You should be in the school rifle club.”
I thought now was a good time to approach what had happened yesterday.
“Your old man was pretty mad last night, hey?”
Ivan snatched the gun back, stamped his engine back to life, and shouted over the revs.
“My old man hates two things in life: blacks and queers. My boet’s a poof, okay? But if you tell anyone there’s a faggot in my family you’re dead.”
Now we just seemed to be going wherever, and Ivan stopped to take potshots at anything: birds, mostly, a few lizards, a snake . . . He missed them all. I was allowed a go at a bullfrog and obliterated it from fifteen meters. Ivan was getting fed up and I could see the clouds over him getting lower and lower.
We finally started heading back to the house when Ivan stood on his brake and slew to a stop. He stared at the ground with wild eyes.
“Look,” he pointed, and I saw clear imprints of antelope hoofs cutting a path. Alongside, droplets of blood. “I did get it.”
He abandoned the bike and darted off road. The kudu must have been close; the blood was still fresh. Ivan was making a mad, charging cry. We scampered over rocks, around ant mounds. Low acacias grabbed my clothes with thorny fingers. I wanted to stop only he just kept going.
And then he did stop. All at once, crouching low, he put his finger to his lips and pointed to a wall of bristle grass.
“On three.” I could barely hear him. He held the gun tenderly against his cheek. “Then watch me kill.”
His pupils were dilated and black.
“One . . . two . . .”
If he said three I didn’t catch it. He burst through, pouncing in an explosion of leaves and twigs.
What met us on the other side wasn’t a dying animal struggling to make a last bid for freedom. It was one of the workers in blue overalls crouching over an irrigation pipe, his tightly curled hair all bumpy and uneven, and with a cigarette rolled from newspaper between his lips. He jumped, spinning as we came, eyes wide and white against his chocolate skin. It was Luckmore, the tall, thin bossboy. I remembered him instantly as the one jumping out of the way of Mr. Hascott’s pickup.
“My weh!” he yelped. His face was so surprised it was almost funny. Then everything seemed to turn to stone when he saw the gun right in his face.
His cigarette went limp and tumbled to the ground.
A nervous laugh: mine. No one else joined in. Ivan kept holding the gun. I became hyperaware of everything.
The chill air.
The smell of the worker’s cigarette.
The bead of sweat hanging over Ivan’s eye.
His finger, tightening around the trigger.
He’s going to do it, I thought. For that brief moment, I was sure he really was.
There was a crisp snap of wood. Over the worker’s shoulder, the kudu gazed out from the bushes, limping. Ivan shifted his aim and fired a single shot. The worker dropped and covered his head with his arms.
The kudu’s legs had buckled. Ivan walked over to it, gazed down with thin lips, then shot it again, and didn’t stop until the magazine was empty.
TEN
“We came through the bush and this guy’s just there, and I swear he almost kakked himself.”
Ivan and I told the story together, he perched on the table in the middle of our study room with me beside him. Everyone circled around us and listened intently, desperate to hear what happened next. It felt good, although Simpson-Prior was laughing too long and too loud, which I found a bit irritating, and when he coughed Mazoe orange juice through his nose I knew he was just trying to get attention for himself, and that perhaps Ivan was right about him.
Nelson came in, no doubt to see how my weekend was, and instantly the moment was gone. In all the excitement I’d forgotten about him, and that he was bound to find out sooner or later that I’d lied.
I put my head down and hoped everyone would move away, but if anything Ivan pulled them in farther.
“But I tell you, this guy”—he gripped my upper arm, almost like I was going to run away—“this guy is the best shot ever. He’s a demon. I’ve never seen anything like it. You name it, he’ll sight it and blow it away, onetime.”
I blushed. Nelson looked at me quizzically.
“I thought you were going home,” he said as we walked to supper. “I thought you were going to get your old man to change his mind.”
I felt bad and uncomfortable.
“Ja, well, I didn’t,” I said, because I had nothing to defend myself with.
“So you went with him?”
“I didn’t want to stay here on my own.”
“You could have come to mine. I told you.”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“Why not?” he asked, really wanting to understand.
“Because . . .” I began.
Because what, though? Because in hindsight I wouldn’t have had as good a half term with him? Because I wanted Ivan to like me and not pick on me all the time? Because Nelson was black and I was white, and the weekend had taught me that this difference somehow made staying with him impossible? Practically no one else would have even contemplated doing such a thing.
“Just because.” I said it flatly, drawing a line. “Why do you care? It’s my life.”
He looked at me with hurt eyes. I don’t know why I felt surprised, wasn’t that what I’d been after? To do something to make him leave me alone and stop asking difficult questions?
“I just thought . . .”
“Are you my mother?”
“No.”
“So quit telling me what to do.”
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
“It’s just that you said you were going home.”
Over by the wall I spotted Ivan nudge De Klomp and point my way. They both aimed finger guns and then mimed someone being blown away in slow motion. I couldn’t tell if it was them marveling about my shooting again or teasing me.
“Well, I didn’t, okay? Big deal. Stop bugging me.”
Without looking back I went to join Ivan, and to my relief he got De Klomp to budge up so I could sit between them until the bell rang and we filed into the dining hall.
Inside, we discovered the school prefects were still mad about the rugby. Up at Top Table, Portis, the Head Boy, didn’t say grace but made the whole school stand while he told us what a bunch of spoofless faggots we were.
“Where was the support?” he wanted to know. He played on the wing and had scored a disallowed try. “You guys need to learn some respect.”
He made us stay standing until the prefects had finished eating so that we only had a few moments to eat our meal before prep. What we didn’t realize right then was that this punishment would go on all week.
Nelson started to avoid me, and now and ag
ain I’d catch him staring at me, his face bunched with a lost and sorry frown because he didn’t know what he’d done wrong. I wanted to try and explain, I really did, but even in the dorm Ivan seemed to be watching, checking to see what I was doing, so it was far easier to ignore him.
One afternoon I spotted Nelson sitting on his own in the common room, crying quietly. I decided to finally break the stupid silence when some boys from another house came rushing in and stopped me.
“There’s been an accident,” one gulped with excitement. “On the main road just outside the school. It’s not serious but you can see it from the fence.”
When he said it wasn’t serious, he meant no white people were involved. You could spot the carnage straightaway. A bus full of people had been going one way and an army truck the other, but most of the buses in the country had chassis that were so shot they crab crawled with their front wheels virtually rumbling off the tarmac while the rear jutted out in the middle of the road. The army truck—a Crocodile, which was an ugly bulk of angled metal and jagged edges and virtually indestructible—had come around the corner too fast, plowed straight into the side of the bus and ended up on the grass. The bus had stopped being a bus altogether.
Wailing filled the air. A couple of passersby and police cars had stopped, but no more than that, and even though the ambulance had arrived it could only carry two at a time and it was twenty-something kilometers to the hospital and back.
One of the older boys spotted the soldiers who’d been in the Crocodile by the edge of the trees, their guns slung casually over their shoulders. They were big men, and the only thing they seemed concerned with was finding a light for their smokes. They called over a small man in a policeman’s uniform, demanded some matches, and then sent him away without looking him in the face. The policeman looked happy to be going the other way again.
Why weren’t they doing anything to help? I wondered.
As though answering the question, the older boy pointed out the crimson berets tucked into their waistbands.
“Fifth Brigade,” he said. “Mugabe’s special troops. Evil bastards.”
A small commotion sparked farther along the line as a boy from our year called Pittman started to climb the fence. Ivan was egging him on the loudest, while for once, I noticed, De Klomp wasn’t by his side and had retreated, looking small and pale.
This Pittman guy got up and over, and, with a huge grin he started to creep through the thin trees to where the soldiers were squatting. None of them had seen him.
“Don’t,” came De Klomp’s thin voice behind us. “He mustn’t. Make him stop.”
I don’t think anyone else heard him, and when I looked he’d turned and was heading quickly back toward the house.
Now Pittman was really showing off, jumping and mimicking a gorilla. When his foot found a pinecone the noise crackled like fire, and the next thing we knew the soldiers were all up and rushing toward him. Pittman started to run, his face suddenly a portrait of complete fear, but they were quick. The front soldier knocked him to the ground and pinned him with a boot. The rest flooded around and pointed their guns at him, screaming in Shona and kicking his heels.
Behind the fence, even Ivan looked relieved when the policeman came running back over and begged them to stop.
Gradually they calmed and lifted their guns. One of them spat at Pittman and stamped on his legs as he went.
The policeman hauled Pittman back to the fence.
“You stay!” He shook him. “You are crazy boys. Stupid.”
“We were only having a bit of fun,” Ivan protested through the wire.
“Ja.” Pittman wiped the policeman’s black hand off his skin. “It was only a game.”
“You cannot do this.” The policeman shook his head gravely. “Not with them. Never with them. Next time maybe I will not be there to help and you will not be so lucky.”
Pittman basked in his moment. He was from Heyman House but he spent the rest of the afternoon in Selous, in our study room. He told everyone what had happened, getting louder and louder. De Klomp was back by Ivan’s shoulder, laughing much more than the rest of us to hide the fact he’d snuck away and hadn’t been there to see it. None of us had known Greet was in his study above trying to get an afternoon’s sleep, but Greet’s mood over the mealtime punishments had been steaming for days and De Klomp should have just known better.
He didn’t care who it was. Greet simply marched in and gave us all one solid thump each, then took De Klomp and two others off to the drying room with a cricket bat and ball. Greet spent the next eight minutes smacking the ball around as hard as he could.
The sound echoed around the house.
When it was over, Osterberg and Davidson hobbled back to the study room, fighting tears. In time it would be one of the good stories to tell, but not yet.
De Klomp, meanwhile, hadn’t come back.
He still hadn’t appeared by supper time. Ivan looked worried.
As soon as the bell for prep went I heard him slipping out. I followed him into the night. If we got caught we’d get whacked for sure.
“I’m coming with you,” I told him.
“No, you’re not.”
I felt brave because I wanted him to like me again.
“I’ll tell everyone about your brother.”
He thought about it.
“Keep up, I won’t wait.”
“Where are we going?”
“The Cliffs,” Ivan answered matter-of-factly. “He’ll be there.”
I didn’t ask how he could be so sure, I just knew he must be right.
We ran across the playing fields to the bottom gate.
I hadn’t been to the Cliffs before because they were strictly out of bounds. It was actually only one cliff, a disused quarry in the middle of the bush from when the school had been built; a sheer sixty-foot face on one side and a gradual slope on the other. There were no safety fences or anything, of course, but it was an ideal playground where boys could leap off and jump into the murky water below.
We didn’t talk again until we got there. Winter was an eerie time in Africa: no chirrup of crickets to electrify the air, no buzz of flying ants to meet the rains. And the dark was always thicker, sometimes tinged with the waft of burning wood from somewhere you couldn’t see.
Smoke came that night, too, and Ivan slowed.
“We’ve got to be careful.”
“Why?”
He tutted. “You won’t understand.”
De Klomp was sitting with a fire at his feet, shivering because he was still in only his sports T-shirt and shorts. We got as far as the tree line around the clearing when he heard us, and he was up in an instant, stepping back into the gloom. I saw angry red marks on his arms and legs where the ball must have hit him.
“Klompie. It’s me, Bru. Jacklin’s here, too, no one else. We were worried.”
It was too late, De Klomp had already turned. One moment he was there, the next he’d just gone, snatched by the night in a way that seemed completely unnatural. We sprinted after him, and it was only when I realized Ivan wasn’t alongside me anymore that I noticed the blackness ahead. But before I had time to question it everything had suddenly gone, and like in a dream I was floating in nothing for what seemed an eternity as cold air and silence carried me. Then I was falling. Just falling. I could taste my heart in my mouth. With arms spinning and legs kicking, I went down into the abyss, faster and faster until at last I landed.
My final thought was that I would surely die, but the surface gave way and I kept on falling, down and down, sucked from beneath as freezing water filled my mouth and nose.
When I erupted back to the surface, something pale bobbed in front of me and I knew straightaway it was De Klomp, face down and unmoving, and without another thought I’d flipped him onto his back. His shoulder and face were bleeding, he must have clipped the rock face on his way down.
“. . . are you doing? Can you see him?” Ivan was shouting from way abov
e. “Jeez, man, talk to me . . .”
I held De Klomp under the chin and paddled him to the other side. I was glad to hear him groan as I dragged him up the slope.
“Dad?” he kept saying. “Dad, is that you? Don’t go in there, Dad.”
He was trembling. For whatever good it would do, I took off my sweater and laid it over him.
“Dad?” He curled into me.
I felt embarrassed. I didn’t know what to say so I just answered as any thirteen-year-old schoolboy would.
“Shut up, you idiot, I’m not your old man. You should be glad, your folks would kill you if they found out about this.”
At which point he came around. I could see his eyes focus on me, then he rolled away and started to sob. How was I to know that it was completely the wrong thing to say because, actually, his folks wouldn’t do a thing to him seeing as someone had already killed them?
We walked back through the dark mostly without speaking, Ivan guiding De Klomp with his arm around his shoulder and me always slightly behind. Every now and then De Klomp let out a sob and Ivan let him pause.
“I understand, Bru. I understand.”
But I didn’t.
We’d set off again when De Klomp was ready.
Ivan’s caring, fraternal exterior was a side I hadn’t seen, but I kept my distance because none of it was for me. This was between them; I wasn’t part of it. Ivan wouldn’t even turn to look at me so I was certain the steely quiet was fury with me for having made De Klomp cry like that.
We took him to the sanatorium for the night. Fortunately it was Sister Lee on duty, who was a soft touch, and we told her De Klomp had slipped and knocked his head and fallen in the pool. It never even occurred to her to ask what we’d been doing there at this time, in winter.
Ivan and I went slowly back to the house together.
“You can’t blame him for blubbing.” It was a relief to hear him speak to me again, like being released. “He’s not a poof; it’s because of his time in the war. Greet’s a bastard.”
“You think what he did brought it back to De Klomp?” I asked. “The war, I mean?”
“The war doesn’t come back, Jacklin, because it never goes. It’s part of us. And we’re reminded of it every day: Nothing works, you can’t buy anything, and the blacks walk around like they own the place.”
Out of Shadows Page 6
