He hesitated. I didn’t dare hurry him.
“Klompie’s folks were religious nuts. You know, real God-botherers, and they worked at this pentecostal mission up in the mountains beyond Nyanga, so far east they could have opened the window and pissed over the border. When the gooks started to come over on their raids, the police tried to get them to move, but the nuns tuned, ‘No way.’ They had God on their side, He’d protect them. So they stayed: Klompie, his mum and dad and baby sister, a priest, and the nuns. Plus the black workers. They thought they were good blacks, but just goes to show you can’t trust a Kaffir because this lot didn’t just steal food for the terrorists, they opened up the door to them. The gooks slaughtered everyone, even the blacks who’d let them in.”
“Why?” I asked. There was nothing else to say.
“Gooks don’t need a reason. They shoved everyone in a storeroom and just opened fire.”
Ivan’s voice stayed flat and even, his eyes training on something unseen.
“But De Klomp—Klompie—survived,” I said.
“Of course. Only because they wanted him to, though. Africans are born cruel, it’s the way they are, but not all of them are stupid. They often made sure someone was left to tell of what they’d seen. That’s what terrorists do. As it happens Klompie didn’t speak for a full year after that. He lives with his aunt and uncle now in Berg, and he won’t step foot on a farm or anywhere too rural, so God knows why they sent him to a school out in the sticks with bastards like Greet.”
“Ja, he’s such a bastard,” I echoed.
“It’s not Greet’s fault,” Ivan surprised me. “He’s in his rights as a senior to beat us. It’s the Kaffirs’ fault really, they’re the ones who did this to Klompie. It was the Kaffirs. Don’t you see that? Don’t you get it?”
I found myself nodding.
“Ja. I get it.”
We were almost at the house.
“He’ll deal with it,” Ivan said, “because that’s what we all do. Deal with it and move on.”
For how long, though? I wondered. “And what if he can’t?”
But he didn’t answer that one.
“You showed big machendes jumping to save him,” he said instead. “Huge gonads, flying off the edge like you couldn’t give a shit. You think you’re Superman or someone?”
He gripped my shoulder. There it was at last, what I’d been wishing for.
“That’s my name. Don’t wear it out.” I felt proud.
“Ja. But you’re sounding like a Pom again, don’t say things like that. As far as I’m concerned you’re one of us now. You belong here. With us.”
That word: belong.
And I thought, Yes, I do.
“And if that’s the case”—Ivan’s grip tightened with meaning—“you don’t want to be hanging around that Nelson bloody Ndube. I just told you what his sort are capable of, you can’t trust him. Steer well clear. Don’t you see? Don’t you?”
This time I said it. “Yes, I do.”
“And what’s the deal with you and Prior the Wire? You and snake-boy have been hanging around like a couple of bum chums.”
“I guess I feel sorry for him.”
“Well don’t, the guy’s a wanker. You don’t want to stick with him, not if you’re going to get through this place. I swear he dreams of taking it up the arse.”
I saw a way of affirming my position at the top of the ladder and took it.
“I think he wets his bed.”
Ivan turned keenly. “He does?”
“Once. I think. His PJs were wet and he hid them quickly after he got up.”
“We can’t have that. I think it’s time the Mess Police conducted a little experiment, to see if you’re right.”
The Mess Police.
More school folklore, another story of a time gone by when a whole dorm had apparently conspired to make some poor individual wet the bed.
They’d pretended to sleep as normal, and when the one closest to the victim had signaled the All Clear, everyone had crept slowly around. They’d carefully put the guy’s hand into a bowl of cold water, and then, very gently, dripped a few drops right next to his ear. It took a while, but when it happened it was obvious. The lights were whipped on, the victim’s bedding ripped back, and all he’d ever been from that time on, without mercy, was the one in the school caught with his pajamas drenched in his own urine. Apparently the guy had eventually left the school because of it.
It was a cruel story, though we secretly doubted it was really true because what kind of idiot would be so stupid as to fall for something like that?
None, I told myself as I followed Ivan’s instructions and let everyone else in the dorm in on the plan. It couldn’t possibly work, I convinced the voices in my head as I kidded Simpson-Prior into thinking I was making him cups and cups of tea before Lights Out because I was his friend. We couldn’t possibly all close in around him, trying not to laugh, without him waking and realizing.
Simpson-Prior slept while we produced a bowl of water and coaxed his bladder into letting go. After a while he murmured and grinned, and we detected a familiar smell rising from his bed.
The lights went on. The sheets ripped back. Simpson-Prior blinked as though coming out of a trance. He hadn’t yet noticed his pajamas were matted to his skin.
“Prior’s pissed himself!” someone yelled loudly—perhaps Ivan himself—and suddenly our dorm was full of older boys, too. They must have known, someone had told them.
The chant began.
“Prior’s wet the bed! Prior’s wet the bed!”
Simpson-Prior tried to pull the sheets back up but two boys grabbed him and stopped him, giving everyone an eyeful. There was nowhere to hide. Simpson-Prior started to cry but that didn’t make any difference, and he was dragged up and then through the whole house like a spoil of war.
I can still see his face today. Surprise? Disbelief? Horror? Hate? There is no word that could describe the harrowing look of betrayal in his eyes as he gazed through tears at each of us in turn—me in particular—in a dreadful search for what was going on, because even though he knew perfectly well, it was just too much for him to face.
Klompie came out of the San after a few days. I’d already swapped beds by then to the other side of the dorm, away from Simpson-Prior and Nelson. I wasn’t comfortable over there anymore. I felt bad for what I’d done to Simpson-Prior and for the way I’d treated Nelson, but luckily Ivan and Klompie were there to make me forget about all of that.
My friends.
Who knows, maybe that was the plan. Maybe Ivan’s idea had formed as early as then.
Ivan was pleased with my decision to move beds without being prompted. When I went down to the showers that evening, he shook my hand and patted me on the back like I was a champion boxer. Then he quietly pointed out Nelson, who was standing under the spray.
“That’s why we’re getting head lice, because of people like him. They can’t wash them out. I’m telling you.”
The water was bouncing off Nelson’s hair; it didn’t get wet like ours. I’d never really noticed that before.
ELEVEN
Because of everything that had gone on, it only dawned on me at the end of that term that I’d had just the one postcard from my grandmother, and that had been right at the beginning. That wasn’t normal.
I was desperate to ask my mother about it, but ever since I’d come home, her bedroom door had remained almost permanently shut and I never saw her. I guessed it was because she was feeling more sad than ever for some reason, though I didn’t know why.
Almost a week into the holiday, and I decided I’d just wait for her. I sat at the bottom of the garden where the lawn sloped into endless bush and threw stones at a Coke bottle.
Don’t bend your arm so much. I imagined Ivan telling me what to do. Not that I needed the advice because I was hitting it every time from thirty feet away. I wondered what he was doing at the moment. It seemed so long since he’d invited me to his fa
rm and I wished more than anything he’d ask me again.
Then I thought about Simpson-Prior’s expression that night we’d made him wet his bed. I found another stone and hurled it, pretending the bottle was the memory, but on this occasion I’d tried too hard because although I waited for the noise, the only sound of chinking glass came from up at the house.
My mother was up.
Our garden was huge and circled with a boundary of jacaranda and avocado trees and tall pines that felt like prison bars sometimes. Our bungalow sat in the middle, with its plain white walls and a gray asbestos roof that hung over a veranda the family hardly ever used.
The grass hadn’t seen rain for months and made noises under my toes.
“Herro, Mastah Bobby,” Matilda greeted me, bent double over the washing board yet still managing the biggest smile.
I waved back and went into the cool.
As expected, my mother’s door was closed, though I knew she’d been out because a glass by the drinks table had been used, empty before the ice had even begun to melt. He said he hadn’t but I knew my father had moved into the spare room because Matilda made the bed in there each morning.
Daylight was banished in my mother’s room and merely glowed around the edge of the curtains while she lay in the gloom, pale and propped up against pillows. I scarcely recognized her anymore.
Her eyelids fluttered.
“Darling. Goodness me, what are you doing here?” She raised an arm, another glass at the end of it I hadn’t noticed until now, sloshing clear liquid. “It’s so early.”
“It’s nearly the afternoon,” I replied.
“Really? Golly, and here’s me still in bed. I’m sorry, darling, I haven’t been feeling too well recently. You know how it is.” Her cold and damp fingers found my face. It was the touch of a stranger and it made me uncomfortable. “Look how my little baby’s growing up. That school of yours must be feeding you well. What time is it?”
“Almost twelve. Mum—”
“Almost lunch, then. That’s good,” she said. Guilty eyes peered over the top of her glass. “Don’t worry, it’s only water. Promise. Have the rains come yet?”
“No, Mum, it’s only September.”
“I do miss the rain so. Cold, gray, English rain . . .”
A vacant cloud drifted over her. I’d noticed that same cloud almost straightaway on my first day home and it hadn’t gone away.
“Mum, have you heard from Granny recently?” I asked.
She stayed silent for a while.
“Your grandmother is,” she began. “Has . . . Is . . . Oh, it’s all too late.”
Too late?
“For what?”
She reached weakly for the bedside table and her bones made shapes under her skin. In her hand she held a tattered envelope with a British stamp on it.
“Here.” She sighed. “This explains everything.”
As I went to take it, I saw it was a handwriting I didn’t recognize. The word URGENT had been written on it in big capitals and I hesitated. It was enough time for her to change her mind and she took it back.
“Your grandmother has gone away,” she told me in an unfamiliar tone because she was speaking into her glass. She tipped it to take a final swig of whatever it was only to find she’d already finished.
“Where?”
“Does that really matter?” She noticed my reaction to her tone and softened her voice. “Moved. An old people’s home. Yes, that’s it. A sort of hospital. She couldn’t cope on her own anymore, the poor thing. So old, so suddenly. It happens.”
“But . . .” Only at that precise moment I didn’t know how to articulate my thoughts. “But she didn’t tell me.”
“She couldn’t. Not in her state.”
“But . . .”
“Maybe she forgot where to write to, her mind’s not what it was. Come, come, darling, it’s not like she’s really part of our lives. We live here now.”
This time I pulled away from her touch without trying to and we looked at each other.
“Mum.”
She hid her eyes.
“Don’t argue.”
“I . . .”
“Don’t.” And when I flinched: “Please. If only you realized . . .”
Something told me I didn’t want to. I wrestled with confusion.
“Do you know where she is?” I asked. “So I can write?”
“No, I don’t. Oh, darling, do take Mr. Glum away. Trust me, she’s better off where she is, and she’ll only get confused if you start bombarding her with letters. Best to leave her. Things will improve now that it’s all over.”
All over?
“Her friend Marjorie has sorted it all out.”
“So you don’t think maybe we could leave here to stay with her,” I floundered, “like you said once? You said. I don’t like school, some boys do bad things to other boys. You don’t think we could live there with Granny? You know, while we settle back.”
My mother—or the woman in front of me who vaguely resembled my mother—ran her tongue over cracked lips. We held each other’s eyes, and for a few seconds I thought I could see someone I’d known before fighting to get out. She almost made it before the glass drew her back and she rattled her teeth against the rim. The cloud descended fully and won her from me.
“No, my darling, I don’t.” She burst forward and retched a huge, shaking cough into her hand, then raised her energy a second time, dropped the envelope back and shut the drawer with a loud clap. “It’s all too late. We belong here with your father. What time did you say it was? Perhaps it’s not too early for a drink, then maybe I’ll get up and we’ll have lunch together. Be a good boy for Mummy.”
Whoever she was, it was then that I started to hate her, and I carried on hating her a bit more each day until she died.
Back to the bottom of the garden, and beyond. I didn’t want lunch, I wanted to walk. Just walk. I threw stones at everything: at trees, at rocks, at lizards on the rocks. I even hit an African Hoopoe as it flew away.
“Stupid bird,” I cursed only when I knew it was okay. “Stupid bird in a stupid country.”
The sun was blaring, the red dust hot under my soles. I must have walked for a good hour before I saw anyone, and even then it wasn’t a real person. He was part of an old monument, a weatherworn statue of some up-his-arse white man in military uniform and with a razor mustache. I’d never seen or heard of him before; a pioneer who had apparently discovered gold and built the town, so the plinth told me.
He built? Or the blacks he beat and whipped? I could hear my father. Not so powerful now, is he?
Although he looked powerful to me, perhaps because his expression or his pose or something else reminded me of Greet.
“Stupid place for a statue,” I told it.
There was a path that might have been a dirt road once but any sign of civilization had been taken over by the trees. I turned and felt uneasy when I realized I couldn’t see any sign of our house or how I’d got here.
“In the middle of bloody nowhere. Stupid.”
A sudden rustling made me jump. For a moment I thought maybe it was an animal, but a couple of young men came through instead, each holding a Chibuku carton and clearly fairly drunk on it. They were laughing and swaying and speaking loudly in Shona. When they spotted me they stopped and just smiled, each black face glistening beneath a thick padding of hair that pushed out at all angles. I could see bits of their gray-pink maize drink in their teeth.
I tried indifference and nodded. One of them copied me and giggled. The other said something I didn’t understand, his eyes moving from me, to the statue, to me. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt and there was a big scar down one of his well-defined arms from shoulder to elbow. I wondered how he’d got it. He caught me staring and laughed something to his friend, pointing to the monument.
“Ndipo fojica,” he called.
I turned away. I heard him make singsong noises while the other blew hysterics.
“Ndipo fojica,” he said again.
I just kept walking, hurrying while trying to make it look like I wasn’t. Ivan’s voice tapped me on the shoulder: Africans are born cruel.
My heart beat solidly when I saw them following. I lengthened my stride.
“Mwana haasati ava nomurangariro.”
Another reason to laugh. Why did they find everything so damned funny?
I moved faster; so did they. I broke into a casual trot; they dropped their Chibuku cartons and started jogging. Eventually I just ran, I didn’t care which way. I barged through twigs and leaves and leaped over scrub. I couldn’t ignore the thorns, though, and had to stop to pull them out.
Still they came, their motion smooth and effortless and relentless as they emerged through the bush. Like warriors.
With a small cry I set off again, only I was too preoccupied to notice the rock in the ground and, before I’d got anywhere, I was down and inhaling dirt.
In no time the two Africans were up to me. I scrambled backward as the one who’d done the speaking walked calmly up to my feet, close enough for me to see the reds of his eyes and draw on his pungent odor. He bared his gums. How many folks had felt what I was now feeling during the war? How many people had this man killed? I wished more than anything that Ivan was with me.
He raised his hand and I just stopped trying.
“Kanjani, shamwari,” he said. Hi there, my friend. “Ndipo fojica.”
And when I made no reaction he gestured his hand to his mouth.
“I want fojica. Fojica.”
He only wanted a smoke!
Still smiling, he kneeled low.
“Shamwari, why you running a-weh? Do you thinking I will in-ja you?” He pointed to the cut on my leg. “You run fast-fast and now you are in-jad.”
My mouth opened and closed.
“You must see a doctor. He give muti to make you better-better, number one. Yes?” he went on. His friend hovered, yawning and digging his fingers harmlessly into his hair. “I am looking for wherk, bhas. I wherk very hard for dollars. Does your fatha need good wherkers in the garden like me, my friend? My name is James.”
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