by Mark Behr
‘Certainly, Joseph. We can go on till we get it right,’ and I’d begin again, strutting from the bottom of the footpath, Suz at my heels.
How many other texts sabotage memory here? How what was read, seen, feared, loved and believed later, filters now the Joseph Atwood, the Karl De Man of then? The more I thought about the donkey being chewed up — that it hadn’t even happened in Umfolozi but that Mr Atwood had the power to make it happen wherever he liked — the more I thought I would perhaps make movies. Better yet, write them, produce them, star in them, shoot them, edit them, and show them. If you did that, you had the power to make a story into fact, fact into story. Just as you pleased, to fool or entertain the whole silly world.
23
Tobie and Chiluma cleared our dishes while the six of us listened to Seven Singles and albums from the Olvers’ collection. They and Ma’am were away at the neighbour’s for supper. Soon the six of us were dancing to The Beatles and The Beach Boys, with Tobie and Chiluma pausing to watch from the dining room, grinning at us through the doorway. I ran to our room and slipped out of my school T-shirt into the blue and white one Dom had brought me from Paris. When I walked back into the lounge everyone whistled as I clicked my fingers and jigged my hips. Mervyn and Bennie complained that there was no disco music and that The Beatles belonged in the sixties. Dominic invited Tobie to join us and the man roared with laughter. Dominic persisted, imploring him to come onto the floor, but Tobie shook his head and said no, the master would soon be home. Then Dominic bounced over and grabbed him by the arm, both of them laughing, and he tugged Tobie into the lounge. Soon the two of them were jiving around. The rest of us called approval from the chairs, and Chiluma stood grinning against the door frame. After the song Tobie ran from the lounge, in stitches, he and Chiluma clasping hands and giggling while we clapped and called for him to come back for another dance. I found both Patsy Cline’s and Frank Sinatra’s Greatest Hits. After a brief argument about my old-fashioned taste the others allowed me to play just a few tracks. Chiluma and Tobie again stood in the doorway, waiting to see and hear what we’d get up to next. Almeida and Lukas, Mervy and Bennie, and Dominic and I waltzed; big, dramatic turns, with me steering Dominic and shouting direction to the others. When ‘I Fall to Pieces’ — the duet with Jim Reeves — came on, we all stopped, for alas, the song was not a waltz. From the doorway, Tobie said: ‘Two-step, Master Karl, two-step,’ and before Bennie in his overeagerness could remove the LP from the turntable Tobie and I were spinning around the room, me leading, him following, like a champion. I wished Bok and Bokkie could see me, now better even than when they had taught me. Tobie was as light on his feet as I must have been in the days my parents had guided my first steps — and now I was leading. It was a terrific moment. Tobies smiling face and tasselled red fez above me, his torso covered in the long white cotton suit like an Arabian prince, I thought, coming to pay homage at Scheherazade’s court. If only I were dressed formally, and not in the PT shorts and T-shirt, what a picture we’d make. Dominic draggedthe coffee table from the centre of the floor to the side, opening up a large space across which we could move.
The music and our elegant twirling came to an end. Tobie was immediately bashful, peering at us through his fingers and shaking with laughter. Everyone applauded. When ‘A Poor Man’s Roses’ came on, he and I again swept around the room, this time in ever widening circles, bigger steps, bolder swirls, arching our backs outward, turning away and stepping out from each other, coming together again, interlocking hands and again twirling around the room. As the song advanced, we grew breathless, yet continued as if we had only just begun, smiling at each other. The bystanders grew quieter, even as we grinned at them and each other.
Then, it was a twist, the last song on the album — ‘Too Many Secrets’ — and everyone including Chiluma came onto the lounge floor. I showed off Oupa Liebenberg’s Charleston. Soon we were all doing it, pulling faces, laughing, sticking out our palms to one another, or swinging imaginary strings of pearls. Things fizzled from there and no objections followed my placing Sinatra on the turntable. Bennie and Lukas drifted to their rooms and Mervy, Dominic, Almeida and I remained. This is Gershwin, Dom said, did you know he was a homosexual? Ignoring the question, I stared from the window across the lake. Behind me the music was changed. I would have loved to remain there. Live in the house and take care of it while the Olvers went back to England. I turned to face the lounge. Dom stood, ready to say goodnight. Almeida was going through the rows of LPs. Mervyn was looking at Tobie in the doorway. Tobies red fez was now gone, his head of hair exposed. Small plaits ran back to his crown. My eyes rushed down his white cotton-clad body even as he kept his on my face.
‘Goodnight, Masters.’
‘Goodnight, Tobie . . . Thanks for supper. And everything.’
He smiled, turned around and left through the dining room and kitchen.
‘I hate it when they call me Master,’ Dominic said and left the lounge.
‘I’m going to bed, will you two turn off the lights?’ Steven asked as he and I pulled the coffee table back to the centre of the room. Ma’am and the Olvers came through the front door. They told us about their supper and asked whether we boys had had enough to eat. As Mervyn and I prepared to leave, Ma’am pointed and asked about the T-shirt I was wearing. I laughed and said Dominic had brought it as a gift for me from Europe. Mr Olver said our shoes were still out on the jetty and he thought it best if we brought them inside lest we forgot to pack them in the morning. Mervyn and I walked out to the jumble of sandals, then made our way back to the front door. In the passage outside the lounge we came to a standstill. It was Mr Olvers voice: ‘. . . All of them, you know. Borderline cases.’ And then Ma’am: ‘I suppose that’s the million-dollar mystery, isn’t it? How to keep a boy sensitive and still make sure he’s not . . . You know . . . Happy!’ Their laughter rumbled into the passage. I shoved Mervyn and we walked by the lounge door without looking in. We didn’t say goodnight to them or to each other.
Under our mosquito net, I turned onto my back. I slid my hand into Dominic’s pyjama shorts and he moved his into mine.
At last,’ he said out loud and I said shhh, please. We tugged off our shorts. He clasped my erection in his fist and began moving the skin. With his in mine, I did the same. After a while he whispered that he was close. Not thinking, I whispered back — close to what — but he just grunted and suddenly I felt it, wet, warm, and for a moment I thought he had pissed. Then its slippery texture struck me and I knew he had squirted semen, juice, come. This was what Lukas had meant that day with the sheep; what happened before his bed’s springs went quiet; this was like King’s litres of squirt into Cassandra. How remarkable, how fascinating.
The hard object in my hand was going limp, and to my regret Dominic had stopped manoeuvring mine, which remained erect. He took the tip of the white sheet and wiped his belly, then dropped the wet section down the side of the bed. He faced me and asked whether I wanted to come. I said it had never happened to me. Snorting, he said it was time I had the experience. Once I felt it, he said, I would be addicted: ‘Only difference,’ he whispered, ‘unlike Condensed Milk and drugs, this has no bad side effects.’
He tried with his hand to bring me to a climax, but eventually, when I heard he was exhausted, told him to give up. Warm and sweaty, we pushed the sheet off us till we lay uncovered beneath only the mosquito net.
He asked what I liked most about him. I grunted, embarrassed by the question, and thinking now of what Mervy and I’d overheard from Ma’am and Mr Olver.
‘Come on, tell me,’ Dom insisted and I pushed Ma’am and Mr Olver from my mind. The idea of verbalising what I liked about him was somehow indecent. It fell, I thought, like what we had already been doing, into a realm of things boys were not meant to ask of each other. This was the borderline. Alette could tell me she loved me and I could tell her in letters that she was beautiful. But voicing intimacies to Dominic in the dark not only seemed impo
ssible, it constituted a further blurring of the space I had allowed us to enter. He nudged me, waiting for an answer. This is my last night in Malawi, as part of this school or as Dominic’s friend, I told myself. Just go for it. Just once.
Eventually I said: ‘Your sense of humour.’
‘Yes. I agree, I do have a marvellous sense of humour. And?’
‘And . . . your kindness. And your voice. It was like dew, shining on blades of grass, when you did “Last Rose of Summer”.’ Above us, the outline of the mosquito net was neatly tucked into a ring from where it spread into a giant magnolia in folds out and over us.
Without my asking he said: ‘I love everything about you, your hands — if only you’d stop biting your fingernails, your legs, your feet,your dick,’ he giggled, ‘your generosity and your energy.’ A list of praises washing over me like a breeze from the lake, yet still leaving me slightly embarrassed. No one had spoken to me like this before. Trepidation, the awareness that something was wrong, kept flicking the corners of my mind. His list had brought to my tongue ideas I wanted to speak, about him, though I couldn’t: your fingers, Dominic, with round fingertips like little pink gecko’s toes, those I love; your cheeky smile, your giraffe eyes, those I love and have dreamt of kissing; the sights you throw when you’re having fun behind the piano like when you did your Liberace impersonation in Marabou’s class or your concentration when you’re just alone with the music; the way your thin hair gets sweaty during hikes and sticks to your temples and the way your temples throb when you’re having an argument with Bennie; the way the tip of your nose moves when you speak. Not a word of it could leave my lips.
Then he asked what I liked least about him and I immediately said there was nothing.
‘And me?’ I asked.
‘Your moods. When you’re unpredictable. The way you change from laughing and pestering one minute, to going off the next and sitting on your own. Sulking and feeling sorry for yourself’
I wasn’t sulking when I went off alone, I said. I just had to think about things. I needed to be by myself to work through issues.
‘Well, still,’ he whispered, ‘we never know what’s going on with you when you become like that. Too much working through issues will drive you crazy.’
He asked what I liked most about his body. He was again venturing where I had not thought of going outside my own silent contemplation. How vast the distance, I could have self-consciously identified that night, between what we can think and feel, and what we can and eventually will and do say. And is what we don’t say closer to what may be true?
He prodded me with his elbow. Unable to say that I liked the angleof his neck before me in class, the peculiar shape of his fingertips as they spread over full octaves, I turned the question around and asked him rather to say what he liked most about his own body.
‘My eyes, most, I suppose. And least that I’m so short and so fucken thin.’
‘I always wanted to be short and thin,’ I whispered, ‘I wanted to be a jockey.’
And you?’ he whispered. ‘What do you like least about your body?’ It was becoming easier. Barriers were falling away.
‘I wish I had a chest and pecs like Bennie. And I want to look like Robert Redford or Steven. He’s as beautiful as a boy’s allowed to be before he looks like a girl.’
‘But, my boy, my dea fella!’ Dominic put on an American drawl. ‘You’ve got my kinda looks, Karl. And Mom and Dad also think you’re far more gorgeous than Steven.’ He laughed: ‘Bennie’s a short-arse, like me. Your legs are great. No, you’re much better looking than Steven and you do look a bit like Robert Redford. I wish I was as tall as you or Lukas.’
‘I would prefer to be your length,’ I said.
‘Height,’ he said, and laughing, added, ‘length is what Mervy’s got between his legs.’
‘I wouldn’t mind having Mervy s length! Fuck, it’s huge. Though I don’t want it to be red and clammy like his.’ When it became a little chilly I dragged the sheet back over us, feeling for the wet corner, bringing it briefly to my nose, trying to place the smell.
And I love the way you move. So does Mum,’ he said. ‘Mum says it’s so androgynous.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘It’s a mixture between the way a man moves and the way a woman moves, like a dancer.’ Blood rushed to my face. I couldn’t respond. Did he not realise that this was the last thing on earth I wanted to hear? I felt like kicking him off the bed, telling him to go back to his own side of the room. I would keep my eyes on Bennie and Lukas,
I thought. See how they moved. Get away from the borderline. Androgynous was not how I was going to move, could not afford to move.
‘Mom says you’re going to be as handsome as your father, when you grow up.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
‘Why not? He’s very good-looking you know.’
‘I read somewhere that we re born with the face God has given us, and by the time were thirty-five we carry the faces we deserve.’
‘So? What’s that got to do with you being good-looking?’ ‘Nothing,’ I said, unable to express the certitude that I would deserve an ugly face, that I knew the face God had given me had already by that night malformed.
I thought he had fallen asleep, but then he lifted himself, leant over and kissed me on the lips. Again I was embarrassed, but allowed it. Just a peck, not with an open mouth. Only lips against mine for what was less than a second.
The bus took us to Blantyre International from where we boarded the Air Malawi 727 to take us back to Jan Smuts. Having overcome his fear of flying, Bennie told the whole plane that Dominic and I had danced with a kaffir the previous evening. I felt no shame, threw my hands into the air and said I’d do it again given half the chance. And Dominic, speaking loud so that half the choir could hear, said he could understand Bennie’s discomfort, for Tobie was after all a much better-looking man than Bennie could ever dream of being. Feeling as on top of the world, finding it unthinkable that I would ever again be unhappy, let alone have the blues, I sat gazing down on the Africa beneath us. No one — ever — had been as happy as I had for most of the four days at the lake. There was the fact that I was not coming back to the school. That I was not sharing with any of the others. I would write to Dominic, explain that I had to start high school in Durban. We would be pen pals, perhaps visit each other in the years ahead. And I could phone him when no one was home.
At Jan Smuts the Clemence-Gordons and the Websters and Bennie’s mother were waiting. We all stood for group photos and Dr Webster asked Mr Clemence-Gordon to take a photograph of me and Dom between him and Mrs Webster. The luggage with the yellow dots came stuttering along on the newly installed conveyor belts. Lukas was catching another flight to Port Elizabeth and I was flying on to Durban. We took our cases from the conveyer. That was the last time I ever saw Steven Almeida. His parents were there with his beautiful sister, Marguerite. Lukas and I almost knocked Mervy down with a choir bench as we looked on Marguerite Almeida; her flawless, exquisite face, her long, curly black hair, her huge black eyes and olive skin. Like her brother, she was one of the most gorgeous creatures I had ever set eyes on.
And so the choir and the six of us split up, saying we’d see each other again at the end of January. And Dom, with his parents at his side, came up and hugged me. ‘Loelovise yokou,’ he said and for a moment I wasn’t sure how to respond. He pulled a face and hugged me again, now whispering in my ear: ‘Soosayok yokou loelovise mime titoo.’ He pulled away. He was standing right in front of me with his parents smiling at us from behind him. I at last managed: ‘Loelovise yokou titoo.’The Websters hugged me and said they’d see me at dropoff, end of January.
I tried not to think of not seeing them ever again. I’m going on with my life, I whispered to myself. Uncle Charlie gave me my ticket and said I and the other Durban boys should move to check-in and board on time. We made our way to domestic departures. A thought struck me and I told the others I�
��d join them in a second, I just needed to go to the toilet. They told me to hurry.
I dragged my suitcase into a stall where I unclipped it and pulled out the Paris T-shirt. I dropped it into the toilet bowl. Flushed. It didn’t disappear. I began to panic, worried now that I’d miss myplane. I flushed again, but the tank had not yet refilled itself. I lifted the tank’s lid off and set it on top of my suitcase. I dragged the dripping T-shirt from the toilet bowl and dropped it in the tank. Secured the lid.
Ran to check-in. The other two were gone, already on the plane. I boarded the flight. I was seated alone, away from the others. Bok and Bokkie would be waiting. What would they be able to read from my face? Had last night with Dom changed the way I looked? Would Bok smell it on me? Halfway to Durban I went into the airplane’s loo and washed my hands, over and over. I stared at my tanned face in the mirror, wondered whether there were lines around my eyes that would give me away. Lifted my penis and scrotum through the flannels, bent my back and neck down as far as I could and sniffed. Undid the belt, dropped the flannels to the floor and washed my loins.
24
There was, to my mind, something gratifying in my return being from outside the borders of South Africa. With the family, awaiting me at Louis Botha, was Alette. She had cut her hair, short, like Lena. The two of them, beside each other, looked more as if they were sisters rather than Lena and Bernice. It was two days before Christmas; hot and humid inside and out, everyone tanned and brown, looking healthy and happy with the world and with me being home.
I said I’d brought gifts; that Malawi had been the most unforgettable experience of my life and that I wanted to live there when I grew up. As we drove off, leaving the Isipingo Flats below us, I listed the cities where we’d sung, told them about the Olvers, the markets, the lake, the catamaran, the snorkelling and that Ma’am Sanders had turned out to be quite nice. Lena said Ma’am’s sister Miss Hope was a real pain but Alette said she liked her. Sitting half on my lap in the back seat, Alette asked about the concerts. I said that the one in the Central Africa Presbyterian church had probably been the highlight. I spoke about the heat, about boys fainting on stage. Lied about us getting three encores. Bokkie said fainting wasn’t unusual in the heat of the tropics. She’d fainted regularly while pregnant with Bernice and Lena in Oljorro.
