by Mark Behr
Bernice said Dademan was being kept in a morgue — a new word — a huge fridge where bodies lay frozen and blue. It sounded morbid,scary, perversely fascinating. I imagined a morgue to be quiet, like when one’s head is under water. Like Bokkie’s left ear. A place one wanted to be and didn’t want to be all at the same time.
In Durban I got my first pair of long trousers with a zipper. To the funeral I wore the new check trousers with my black Bata school shoes and Bernice wore an old dress of Stephanie’s and Lena one of Bernice’s that had first been Stephanie’s. Bokkie had to buy a black dress and a hat and Bok wore the black suit in which he and Bokkie were married. At the funeral everyone wept. It was horrible, seeing Uncle Michael and Bok, holding on to each other. It was ugly, ugly, seeing men cry. And Aunt Siobhain, and Stephanie and James. And Mumdeman, now so much smaller than I had remembered her from a mere two weeks before, clinging onto Sanna Koerant. I never again wanted to see an old woman cry but everyone said it was healthy that Mumdeman had not held back. Mumdeman didn’t want Dademan’s coffin in the church because it would distract our attention from the service and the minister’s sermon, which was, after all, the important thing. So the first time we saw the coffin was when we came out of church and set off behind the hearse. All the cars had their lights on.
Brandy and Coke and cigarettes; no sentiment in that; can smell him even now; as I type. Mumdeman sat on a fold-out chair at the open grave while the minister gave another sermon. Bok, Uncle Michael, Oom GerrieTheron and others from East Africa carried the coffin to the grave. They let it sink with a hydraulic lift. Before they started throwing in the soil, baskets of red rose petals circulated and we all walked around the grave, scattering petals. I tried to think of Dademan inside the wooden coffin. The nose, the De Man nose, the wrinkles and blond-grey hair — my hair — the busy, naughty blue eyes, my eyes, Bok’s eyes. Were they closed or open? And what if he wasn’t dead? Sam Pierce had told me a story of a woman who was buried alive. They dug her up and found scratch marks on the inside of the coffin. But Bok said that was rubbish; that we just had to accept that Dad was dead. Bokkie said that cremation was the newthing. This burying of people was a waste of valuable land; before you know it the entire surface of the earth will be nothing but row upon row of graves. Mumdeman had a plot beside Dademan. I didn’t want to think about it; not Mumdeman, please let me die before anyone else in my family.
Driving back to St Lucia, Bernice told us that her friend Mona said death comes in threes. We should look out; be careful and warn the family. Bokkie told her we were Christians who didn’t subscribe to that sort of superstitious belief. That was the property of the heathen who’d eat their words in hell.
Months later the Parks Board transferred Mumdeman to Midmar Dam. We all went over to Charters to help pack. And then, after Mumdeman’s stuff had gone off to Midmar, Bok and Phinias carried the cines and slides and my trophies to the Land Rover. The mounted sable, Grants gazelle and dick-dick heads; the slides and cines, everything Dademan had left me in his will. All to our garage in St Lucia and later to storage when we moved to Toti and then finally into Bok’s garage office in Bowen Street.
17
The lead pipes, covered in their orange cloth, lay hidden behind the shoes at the bottom of the locker in my new dorm.
The five of us had been divided into separate dorms. After eighteen months together in E, they had split us up. Lukas was in G, about six beds away from Mervyn. Bennie and I were in F, nine beds between us. As soon as Dominic got back — Uncle Charlie responded to my query — he would go to the furthest end of G. It all took a few days to sink in. At first I felt only the deep loss, the loneliness, brought on by being removed from my friends. Coming back from that holiday Aunt Siobhain had come along with Bok and Bokkie to see the grand school I attended. When reception told us to take mythings up to F, I already suspected what had happened. Uncle Charlie, welcoming parents at the desk, said that from now Juniors would occupy the school’s small dormitories and no Seniors or Secondaries would reside outside of the massive C, F and G. I unpacked things into the new locker with Bokkie. Bok showed Aunt Siobhain around the building and gardens. There was no sign of Lukas, Mervyn or Steven Almeida. I saw Bennie’s name on the bed, down the aisle from me.
As they were about to drive off, I asked to sit with them for just a few minutes in the Chevrolet. The moment I was on the back seat I burst into tears and said I didn’t want to stay there. I begged them to take me home. Aunt Siobhain put her arms around me. Bokkie, turning around from the front seat to face me, looked perplexed. She said nothing. Bok shook his head and exhaled irritably. He said I was merely distraught at saying goodbye after such a wonderful holiday at home. I said I didn’t want to stay there if I couldn’t be in a dorm with Dominic and the others. Bok said I would get used to it; make new friends. I said I didn’t want new friends, I had friends and I didn’t want to be split from them. Then Bok asked whether I hadn’t learnt anything from Dr Taylor? Had Dr Taylor not taught me that happiness was in my own hands? He said I was twelve and a half, I would soon be a teenager, a young man. He said when I turned thirteen in October I would get my first watch; I could have a new, modern, digital watch, they’d bring up for Parents’ Weekend. I knew I’d lost; knew I was doomed for at least another six months. I dried my tears, kissed them, and got out of the car. I waved as they drove off. Hating them. Needing them.
At night, after everyone was asleep, I took the weights from the bottom of my locker. For half an hour — until I lay drenched and panting in damp sheets — I built my muscles. The days passed and the heaviness that hung shadows over me night and day refused to lift. The blues, bigger, deeper than they had ever come to me before. Dominic was not due back for another two weeks. And anyway, whatwas I going to say when he returned? How to tell him that I could no longer be his friend? Better that their plane crash into the sea on the way back from Europe.
I sought a place to be alone, away from everyone. Till then it had not dawned on me that one could be alone in that hateful place where people were everywhere. I need privacy, I thought, and felt wise at such a sophisticated word intruding into my thoughts. Now I discovered the solitude of the library, and with that came many recollections of the library near the Toti station. Initially I thought I would be chased off the walkway. But I was ignored. It became my place. I discovered the encyclopaedias and began my journey from A towards Z.
Nights in the vast impersonality of F dorm threatened to smother me. Sleep eluded me even more than before. Try as I did, the dream of flying refused to work its magic. Mornings left me exhausted and blue. During breaks I sat alone on the rock below the schools signpost. I wondered whether the sadness was the function of losing my mind. Perhaps the mad gene had somehow been activated. Aunt Lena’s had started when she was sixteen and Uncle Klaas’s only when he was already a professor. Perhaps it struck earlier with each passing generation. If I fathered a child maybe it would be mad already at birth.
There was nothing intimate about F. We looked down on the quad. Cathkin and Champagne Castle were nowhere in sight. While Bennie was only nine beds away, having him close to me meant nothing. Almeida, still in C, no longer attracted me. His aloofness was not sexy or mysterious. He was just the same as me, I thought, withdrawn and sad and miserable. Not mysterious. Certain friends, I saw, meant something only amongst others. I tried to stay out of Mervy’s way. I went riding, for there Lukas and I could bond, but even that was nowhere near the same as the eighteen months before our June Walpurgis.
Sometimes it felt as though I hated them all.
Alone they were almost strangers.
The world had turned its back on me and I wanted to do the same to the world. I yearned to be at home. Not with my parents or my sisters, but not here, and not here left me with only one option: home. I went with Mervyn to get extra pocket money. The accountant told me no provision had been made and what’s more, Bok had not paid my school fees for last term. The bookkeeper’s
words struck me like a blow and I stepped back from the window, aware that Mervy had heard. He asked her for another two rand and tried to give it to me. I refused. Why did she have to tell me that? School fees were not my responsibility; and why in front of the others? How angry I was with Bok. How I loathed my father, resented him for the shame he was causing me by keeping me there when clearly we could not afford it. And then dragging me to Dr Taylor, which, I knew, cost money: had I not seen the fucking enormous check? Was my handwriting not now also slanted to the right? Why didn’t Bok pay my school accounts rather than cart me to expensive educational specialists? I could already feel the shame of being asked to leave the school.
I missed Dominic, longed for his return almost as much as I dreaded having him there. At night, unable to fall asleep, I practised with the weights.
One afternoon, as I made my way to the library — my new refuge — Mr Mathison passed me on the passage and asked me to come to his office. I had no idea what he wanted from me and at once was certain that it had to do with the unpaid account. For the first time since June I re-entered his office. He said that he’d been keeping an eye on me and that he wanted to entrust me with a centrally important task. A slight thrill. Mathison adjusted his glasses. Pushing them with the tip of his forefinger up his nose. Then he flattened his blue wool blazer across his chest and smiled at me. Would I, he asked, keep my eyes and ears open and come and report to him if I ever heard anything similar to ‘the business’ of last term.
I said, of course I would. He nodded affirmation. I left the office, momentarily elated.
At night, after a session with the weights and panting in a pool of sweat, sleep again declined to fetch me. I tried to will myself into the dream of floating. It wouldn’t come. I felt cold, freezing. When I eventually awoke, I had dreamt I was holding something I couldn’t see. Something whose heart was beating against my enclosed palms. Then it started throbbing, like a pulse in my hands and I became frightened. Then, in the next picture it was Lena’s hands growing from my arms and then I was on a rhino s back falling into the sea and going down, down into black water, drowning with the rhino’s wild eyes sinking beside me and I awoke, sure I had been screaming. I wondered whether the dream had been in black and white or in colour. In the morning my head was thick as if I hadn’t slept a wink. When Uncle Charlie came in, calling, Wakey, wakey, rise and shine, PT shorts, white vests, running shoes, I was already long awake. Were it not for the dream recalled so vividly, I would not have believed I had dozed at all. Freezing during PT, my head throbbing, I fell behind the troop of runners. I vomited. Steam rose from the frosted yellow grass. The Senior at the back told me he’d walk me back to school. By morning choir I couldn’t stand up straight. I told Mister Roelofse I was ill. He sent me to sick-bay. Uncle Charlie said I had flu. I had a temperature and every lymph node was swollen. He inspected all the glands of my body and rested his palm on my inside thigh, then moved it up to my penis and asked whether that too was aching. I said no. He removed his hand.
Friday at dusk, after two days in bed, I wanted to go to the phone to await Bokkie s weekly call or to phone reverse charges. Uncle Charlie said the school had already phoned home. My parents sent their best wishes for my speedy recovery. Auntie Babs Theron visited from the farm. Bokkie had phoned her to come and look in on me. She brought a tartan-patterned tin of shortbread and sat on my bed. She asked me how I was feeling. I said I was fine. Even Auntie Babs, a woman Bokkie idolised for her dignified composure, the smartness of her home and her four well-mannered children, looked different. What was this woman or her kindness to me? She could not save me. Her generosity and charity meant nothing. I lay there wishing she would leave and stick the tin of shortbread up her cunt. Saying goodbye she promised she’d call Bokkie and say I was getting better. ‘Eat the shortbread, Karl. It will make you feel stronger. And phone me if you need me, okay? I’m just down the road. You can keep the tin.’
I had no desire to get better. I wanted to die. If I died they’d all feel ashamed of what they’d done to me. I imagined them at my funeral, weeping, loathing themselves for not loving me enough. And then, me rising from my coffin, to be welcomed like Lazarus into the arms of my father who would at last love me. My headache grew worse. At times it felt I couldn’t lift my skull from the pillow. I wished I had my antihistamine, for that, I knew, would make me feel better. I refused to eat. Sometimes flushed the food down the toilet. If I got sick enough they would be forced to come and fetch me. Beauty or one of the other servants brought me food. At least once I wept into Beauty’s arms, saying I wished I could run away and never come back. She asked what was wrong with me and I said I no longer wanted to be at the school, that I missed Dominic. She asked what she could do for me and I shook my head against the pillow, tears streaming down the side of my face.
If I didn’t eat maybe I could get anorexia nervosa like the Springbok gymnast Debbie Bingham. That would show them. I refused to read from the Bible on the bedside table. I knew what I was doing was a sin; I was not treating my body as the temple it was. I didn’t care; fuck God, fuck Jesus, fuck the Holy Spirit. I was going to hell and I didn’t care. My going to hell was Bok and Bokkie’s fault. And Miss Roos’s. Doos. I read The Blue Lagoon; The Swiss Family Robinson; Twenty Thousand Leagues Beneath The Sea; Groen Koring and Die Goue Gerj. There was some book — maybe the Jules Verne — with French phrases italicised in the middle of the English. It infuriated me that writers would leave entire sections of French in English books without saying what they meant. On that bed in sick-bay, I decided that if I ever wrote a play in English, I’d leave some words in Afrikaans so that people could feel what it felt like to get to an important sentence only to find it in a language they didn’t understand. If I, Karl De Man, had to learn French to understand some stupid English novel properly, others will just have to learn Afrikaans or stay in the dark for all I cared.
No one was allowed to visit. I would spread the flu virus and flu was to us in the Berg what the black plague was to the Middle Ages. When not reading, vomiting or flushing food down the toilet, I seemed to be crying. If Uncle Charlie came in I said the red eyes were from the headache. He gave me two Disprins dissolved in water.
It was as if a light beam fell into the room when Dominic waltzed in there, grinning and scolding me for being in bed when he had just returned from the trip of a lifetime. Back from Europe and Uncle Charlie had given him permission to come and visit. I sat up in bed and could not wipe the smile from my face. He brought me Toblerone chocolate and a lovely white and blue T-shirt that said ‘Gay Paris’ and a cassette of a new group called Abba. He fetched a tape recorder from one of the music rooms and played me the song ‘Waterloo’. He said the music was real schmaltz but it was fun and catchy and his mother loved it and he was sure I would too. He showed me photographs of when he had turned thirteen in Paris. He held up the T-shirt and grinned. He said his parents had bought us each one and did I know — and now he whispered — that the word gay was also a secret word for homosexual? I shook my head and said he was surely joking. He giggled and said no, that’s why his parents had bought the T-shirts. I fell back into the pillow and turned my face to the wall. How could this be happening? What had I done to deserve this? That the first present I got from Europe was something
I would have to hide in my cupboard; throw away and never let anyone see.
Dom sat beside me on my bed and asked what was wrong. I said I didn’t want to be there; I wanted to go and live with Aunt Lena and Uncle Joe in Klerksdorp. I didn’t want to be in the school if we weren’t in the same dorm. I did not say that I could not be friends with him, whether we shared a dorm or not and that the evil T-shirt from Paris proved everything Dr Taylor had said. I did not say that something terrible had happened while he was away, enjoying himself and his parents’ boundless wealth.
Then, instead of anything I had expected, Dominic said: ‘Karl, you are not really sick. You are homesick. And that is never going to go away. Y
ou must get up. You must pull yourself together. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. I am here.’ He didn’t smile, pored at me sternly. ‘It’s stupid that they’ve split us up, but there’s sweet blue all to be done about that. I’m here for you and I love this place. I can give you some of my love for the place. Get up, Karl, please. You are not sick.’ I cried, held onto him. I wanted to tell him what had happened while he was away; that he had no idea as to why they had really separated us. That Dr Taylor had said I could no longer be friends with him. But what would it matter?
‘Karl, promise me you will get up — for just one week?’ He sat closer to me, speaking urgently. ‘If you’re not better after a week, I promise, I will tell my father to tell Bok to come and fetch you. And if you stay, just think of it, were touring Malawi at the end of the year, it’s only three months away.’ Now he beamed, smiling, as he held my hand, trying to inspire me.
That night I prayed to God to let me live and to make me get better. I swore to live a Christian life, to become a good boy. Next morning the symptoms were gone. I told Uncle Charlie I was ready to go back to class. The six of us were again together, during break, down at the fort we were building at the river. And at night, I practised with my weights: I would not write plays or poems, I would trynot to act girlish and deepen my voice when I spoke, try not to use my hands, I would do everything to become the son Bok wanted. I would throw away the Paris T-shirt as soon as I left the school at the end of the year. But I was not going to give up my friendship with Dominic. Not for anyone or anything. Surely, surely, God, Bok and Dr Taylor would forgive me that one transgression? Within no more than six weeks I felt the sleeves of my black school T-shirts clinging a little tighter to my biceps.
