by Malla Nunn
“Are you going to meet Gordon Number One?”
She jumps with fright and spins to face me.
“No! Of course not. I need to pee.”
The girls’ toilet block is across a grass field and hidden behind a screen of trees for privacy. When money comes available, three indoor toilets will be added to the washroom but, till then, peeing after dark is a nightmare.
Bold girls use chamber pots and empty them behind the banana field the moment the wake-up bell rings. Most of us cross our legs and pray for dawn. Some don’t make it, and washing wet sheets in the middle of the week is a worse humiliation than having to carry your own waste across the field and dump it in broad daylight.
“Why don’t you hold it like everyone else?” I ask.
“Mama Khumalo says it’s bad for you. When your body wants to go, you should go.”
“Mama Khumalo who made the slime?”
“Yes, her, and I really have to pee.” Lottie moves to the window, and I follow her. My bladder stings, and a night pee would be an adventure and a relief. Plus, maybe she’s meeting Gordon Number One after all. I’m going out with her to see things for myself.
“I have to go too,” I say.
“All right,” she snaps. “Follow me and be quiet.”
We climb over the windowsill barefoot and drop down into a crouch when we hit the ground. Moonlight falls through the Christ-thorns, and spiked shadows play across our nightgowns. It might be a warning to go back inside. I ignore the omen and wait for Lottie to lead the way.
“Quick to the corner.” Lottie runs in the tight space between the towers of tall thorns and the dormitory wall. She waits at the corner of the building and spies ahead. “We go from here to the banana field. No matter what happens, don’t stop. Understand?”
“Yes.”
Lottie sprints across the wide field behind the little-girls’ dorm, and I follow her. Wind tangles my hair, and my mouth goes dry. I cannot believe that this is me, Adele Joubert, running shoeless across a field at midnight in my nightgown. Nice girls stay in bed and have no interest in what bad girls do in the dark. Maybe I am not so good after all.
We reach the edge of the banana field. Lottie slides between the trunks of the banana trees, and we squat under a green canopy of leaves that branch over us. It’s a lovely night. Moonlight shadows stretch across the empty field, and spent banana flowers drop to the ground at our feet. The dormitories are small dots on the land, and the whole school is just a small thing under the enormous sky full of stars.
“It’s nice out here,” I say to Lottie, who swings her head to the left and puts her finger to her lips. She tenses.
“Shh . . . Stay down.”
I freeze. I wait for the Elephant’s hand to grab my shoulder or for Mrs. Thomas to tell us that we are bad girls and do we know what happens to bad girls who steal out of the dorm windows at night? Disaster. Lives ruined.
Footsteps creep through the banana field, and small animals scuttle through the leaves. Luckily, I have already peed. Someone passes close to us, and I could reach out and touch a trouser leg or an arm if I wanted to, but I don’t. A man stops at the edge of the banana trees and checks in all directions. He’s cautious.
Something in the width of his shoulders gives me pause. And his stance is familiar, the taut body and loose arms. Could it be? No, that’s cracked. Set your mind on higher things, Adele. The man turns, and the moonlight finds his face. I gasp. Lottie glares, and I tighten my jaw, my stomach, and my buttocks as Gordon Number One searches the rows of banana trees for the source of the noise. It’s hard, but I manage to stay small and still when what I want to do is jump and run.
When he’s satisfied with the silence, Gordon takes off across the vacant field and sprints in the direction of the senior-girls’ dorm. Once there, he crouches in the shadows of the Christ-thorns, and I stretch to see which window he crawls into. Or will someone crawl out to meet him?
I flick through the likely suspects, but the girl most likely to break the rules is squatting right next to me. Who could keep a tumble with Gordon Number One a secret anyway? If it was me, I’d want to tell everyone, especially since Gordon is so elusive. He keeps to himself, but he’s not considered a loner, only independent and mysterious.
Lottie yawns and rubs her eyes, ready to go back to bed. She has no interest in Gordon or his final destination. Then it hits me. She knows what happens next. She’s seen this before.
“Where’s he going?” I say.
“Watch and see.”
Gordon detaches from the shadows and moves quickly in the direction of Principal Vincent’s house, which makes no sense.
“Mrs. Vincent?” I squeak in amazement. “It can’t be.”
“You’re right. It can’t be.” Lottie hands me dry leaves to wipe with. “Mrs. Vincent loves her husband, and he gives her everything that she needs.”
“Who then?”
“Think.” Lottie stands to stretch her legs. “What else is over there?”
“The Vincents’ house. The rose gardens. The overflow hut where the new teachers live during their yearlong probation. And . . .” Oh my goodness. I jump up and grab Lottie’s arm harder than I intend to. “Miss December!”
Lottie grins.
“But . . . but she’s engaged. She has the diamond ring and everything.”
“So?”
“She’s engaged to someone else!” Lottie’s dismissive So? shocks me more than the idea of Gordon Number One crawling through Miss December’s window to kiss that long giraffe neck of hers. And, truth be told, the thought of Gordon naked in bed thrills me, though I will never tell Lottie that. “Miss December is a teacher, and sleeping with a student is wrong. Plus, she’s engaged, which means that’s she’s cheating on the man she’s going to marry, and that is also wrong.”
“Your father is married, and he sleeps with two different women,” Lottie says. “Why is it okay for him to do what he likes but not Miss December?”
I am speechless. My face stings. Father takes care of us. He does what he can in the time that he has. He pays for all the things that Lottie doesn’t have. Like underwear. Plus, in Swaziland, a man can have many wives but a wife cannot have many husbands. That’s how things are. Father lies to his other family to be with us but he hasn’t broken the rules, not like Miss December, who sees Gordon Number One on the sly. When Father visits, he parks in front of the house and Mother kisses him in the doorway. Lottie’s wrong but I still have a knot in my stomach.
I take a deep breath, cool my temper, and hit her back with, “Is that what your mother told you? That you can swap one man for another, and on and on, until you’re shriveled up and nobody wants you anymore?”
Lottie clears her throat like it’s blocked and walks away. I have no choice but to follow her across the wide field behind the little-girls’ dorm and then into the bristling Christ-thorns. She climbs through our bedroom window, gets into her cot, and turns to face the wall, the way that I do when I don’t want to talk. What a baby. She was the one who dragged my father into the discussion. She got what she deserved.
I throw back the sheets and climb into bed with noisy movements. I fold my arms across my chest and glare at the ceiling. If Lottie thinks I’m going to apologize to her, she’s got a long wait. Her cot springs creak as she turns one way and then another, restless. I imagine the tiny spinning top with the Jewish symbols clutched in her hand as images of her father loop through her head.
“My mother told me that falling in love is the best thing in the world but it’s also dangerous.” Lottie’s voice is thick in the darkness. “My father loved her and she loved him, and when he died, he left her with a sadness that won’t go away. When a new man comes around, she thinks that he will take away the sad feelings and give her back what she had with my father. It never works out. She gets sadder, and they leave. That’s why yo
u have to take care of yourself, she says. Finish school. Be a nurse or a teacher or a secretary in an office, so that, no matter what happens, you’ll have a job and a roof over your head. Don’t . . . don’t ever give your happiness to a man to take care of, because when he’s gone, where will you be?”
I lie awake, stunned. In my imagination, her mother is a creature with her blouse hanging off her shoulder and a hand-rolled cigarette in her mouth. She does not talk about love and staying in school and sadness. Now Lottie’s put new thoughts in my head. She’s made me worry for the future.
What would happen to Mother, to Rian and me, if Father died or left us? Fear of being deserted preys on Mother’s mind and, if I’m honest, it preys on mine too. Mother’s job is to keep Father coming back to us and, when I’m home for the holidays, I walk to the telephone booth with her because I, too, have a part to play in keeping Father close. When he visits, I am all honey. I smile and laugh and keep my problems to myself. I give him every reason to visit again. Mother can’t afford to take Father for granted and neither can I.
Men leave women every day for brighter faces and warmer welcomes. Take Tandy Lewis. She had a cement-brick house with a lawn and a maid, and a dog that slept inside; now she lives in a tin shack behind Delgardo’s Liquor store. Now the dog sleeps in the yard, and she has no electricity. Everyone says it’s a shame. Her Irishman left her with nothing. And there are others . . . and that’s how things are.
Worse than a possible disaster waiting for us down the road is an unsettling question for which I have no answer: Does he love Mother and does Mother love him? He is mostly a voice on the other end of the phone and a face during brief visits at holiday times. He can’t know her—her inner feelings, how clever and sensitive to slights she is—any more than she can know when he’ll walk through the door next.
I glare at the green walls, the half-open window, and the lumpy shape that Lottie’s body makes under her blankets. I am furious at her for pushing my mind where it doesn’t want to go and for pulling images to the surface that ought to remain buried where they can do no harm: there’s Mother in the public phone booth, the white moths, the cracked glass, the ache in my jaw from smiling too hard for too long when Father comes to visit, and the three of us sitting in the backyard with our feet in buckets of warm water. I love Mother’s voice, but now, because of Lottie’s stupid comment about him having two wives and why can’t Miss December do the same, the memory of Mother singing “Oh Happy Day” under the night sky makes me want to cry and pull my hair out.
The even in-and-out sound of Lottie’s breath reaches me, but I’m not fooled. She’s wide-awake, just like me. I can tell. I have spent long hours tuned to Rian’s asthma attacks and to the quiet that comes when he finally falls sleep. Lottie’s breath is too hard and deliberate. She’s faking sleep, and I think that my unkind words about her mother have dug up memories of the time that her father gave her the spinning top and her mother was happy. Bet she wants to cry and pull her hair out too.
“Good night,” I whisper across the room, and she’s got to know that my saying good night is an apology, but that I will never tell her sorry to her face, because that would put me in the wrong and make me weak.
“Good night,” she whispers back.
We lie awake with our memories until sleep takes us away.
13
Goliath
Why, I ask you, does a dirt road on the southern border of Swaziland have to be swept? Chores keep us busy outside of the classroom, but I’d rather use the time to learn more Bible verses for the Scripture class competition. First prize for the most verses memorized is a spool of white satin ribbon if the winner is a girl, and a penknife if the winner is a boy. Lottie says the knife is worth more, which is typical of her and, I suspect, true.
She works across the road from me, bent over at the waist, her broom sweeping in wide arcs that leave a fan pattern on the ground. Last night, she hurt me and I hurt her back, and instead of hating each other and planning revenge, we got out of bed and got on with our day. We are not friends, but we’re not enemies either.
She lifts her head at the sound of a car engine and looks across the cattle grid that marks the entrance to the school grounds. Engines are rare at Keziah, and most students within earshot will stop to check the make and model of the vehicle.
“White bus,” Lottie says, and moves to my side of the road. “I thought it was Mr. Parns bringing Darnell back to school. He’s been gone for more than two days already.”
“Darnell will show up,” I say. “He always does.”
“True enough,” Lottie says. “But that black eye of his gave me a bad feeling, and God help him if he’s making trouble on Bosman’s farm.”
“Darnell is gone and gone,” I say. “And what can we do about it?”
“Nothing,” Lottie says. “We just have to wait and see, and hope that he’s safe.”
The engine noise grows louder, and I catch sight of the “white” bus. The bus is actually blue with a silver grille covered with dead insects, but the people inside it are white, so that makes it a white bus. If the people inside it were black, it would be a native bus.
The bus is packed with white South African children on their way to an outdoor “Praise Jesus camp” somewhere near Hlatikulu. They come through Keziah in the late afternoon on the first Friday of the January term, every year, sure as rain. We know the blue bus by sight and try to avoid being near when it cuts through school. Everyone on the blue bus thinks that mixed people are inferior, but the road that runs through Keziah is smoother than the main road, so the driver makes a detour to use it.
The bus slows and rumbles over the cattle grid. The gears shift lower, and the wheels make a mess of our smooth brushstrokes. Now we’ll have to start all over again or risk getting more work tomorrow. I step back and bump against the fence that guards Mrs. Vincent’s rose garden. We should move farther away from the bus. Mother says that poor white people are the most dangerous. Some of them have less money than we do, and they hate us for it. From the moment we slide into the world with our mixed blood and mixed features, we live below them, no matter how stupid or hopeless they are.
The bus draws level with us. An ugly boy with freckled skin sticks his head out of an open window. “Hey, monkeys,” he yells. “Stay in the bush where you belong!”
“Go climb a tree.” A pale girl with messy red hair joins in. “Where are your bananas, crinkle-heads?”
“Oh ha ha ha.” The boy imitates a monkey, leans out of the window, and spits. A wet glob hits my cheek, and I squeal as if I’ve been slapped across the face. I wipe away the spit with the back of my hand, which trembles. My reaction makes the boy laugh, and I shrink. This is my fault. I asked for it. We should have run away while we had the chance.
“Yeah . . . good aim.” Lottie grabs a stone and clenches it in her fist. “But you’ll die ugly, bum-face.”
The boy’s cheeks flame. He is shocked that a brown girl, that any girl with color, would insult him out loud and in public. His cheeks puff with another mouthful of spit, and Lottie raises her arm. She flicks her wrist, and the stone whistles through the air, hits the boy above the eyebrow, and splits the skin. Blood leaks from the cut.
“Spot on!” Lottie says under her breath, and smiles at the boy’s expression, the faint glimmer of tears in his mud-brown eyes. He cannot believe that a colored girl got him back with such perfect aim. That a colored girl is David to his Goliath. But Lottie’s not finished. “Hottentot! Bush monkey . . . Bet your pa has a face like a toad. And your stupid, fat, cross-eyed ma too!”
“Shh . . . What if the bus driver hears?” I grab Lottie’s arm and pull her toward the side of the Vincents’ house. From the backyard, we can run and hide in the bush if the bus slows down. “What if he stops?”
Lottie pulls away. “That boy got what he deserved, and I’m glad. Aren’t you?”
“
Yes, but . . .”
“You’re scared of everything,” she says, exasperated.
“That’s not true.” I scramble for a reply. “It’s just . . . we should have left before the bus got here.”
She turns on me. “He spat on you, and we’re the ones who have to run and hide? He’s the one who ought to be ashamed of himself. Not us. Him.”
Words stick in my throat. Lottie’s face is bright red, and a vein throbs on her forehead, so full that it might burst. She is furious at me for shrinking instead of fighting back. She picks up a stone and shoves it into my hand. I open my fingers to let it drop, but she forces my fingers closed and holds them there. She is stronger than I am.
“Throw it,” she says.
I shake my head.
“Throw it,” she repeats.
The bus is farther down the road now and almost at the long rows of orange and mango trees planted in the school orchards. No way I’ll hit it, even if I throw it as hard as I can. Still, I hesitate. Bad girls throw stones, scratch and bite, and talk back, and I am Adele Joubert and I am trying as hard as I can to be good.
“Do it.” Lottie pinches the soft flesh behind my upper arm. I gasp in pain, and she leans closer with glazed blue eyes. She had that exact look when she said that the driver of the crashed sedan deserved to die because he caused the accident. She was right. He killed the cow and almost killed us, and he got what was coming to him.
“Do it or, trus faith, I will pinch again, till you scream.”
I lift my arm and I throw. The stone falls well short of the bus, which will stop to disgorge a stream of angry white boys any second. And the girl with the pale skin who told us to go climb a tree . . . She’ll hit us harder, because our neat uniforms and our combed hair enrage her.
The bus keeps going: the wheels churn dust into the air.
“Do it again. Just for fun,” Lottie says, and she is the devil whispering temptation into my ear. My fingertips tingle. The bus is way past the orchards now and well beyond reach.
