Embrace (54 page)

‘How can you call the police, you don’t have a phone, Rockspider!’ one shouted, pointing out the absence of telephone cable to our home.

‘We can go to Betty and Mary-Alice’s phone,’ one of us countered. ‘They are decent Englishman, not like you scum.’ We, the Afrikaans kids, were trapped in our yard by the English. Only the division was never quite so clear, for James was with us, and he was English as were Mary-Alice and Betty.

The boys got me alone, one day, when I was reading at the tortoise pens in the bird sanctuary. With Lena fishing in the bush, far on the other side of the lake, I knew my luck had run. Three of them surrounded me, shoving me between them. A foot struck me in the back, a fist against my chest, and a shoe in the stomach as I fell to the ground, panting for air, hoping only that I wouldn’t cry. Then, an angel of mercy, Lena sprinted down the grass embankment, her eyes ablaze, hissing for them to get away from me. I lay gasping for breath, too afraid to move.

‘You’re only a girl,’ they jeered. Lena, with the speed of a leopard, jumped at them, her fists flying, her foot catching the biggest of the three in the stomach. One tried to grab her from behind but she swung around, got hold of his neck and threw him to the ground.

‘You better run,’ I shouted, still cowering on the lawn. ‘She’s going to kill all three of you.’

‘We can’t hit girls,’ one said, slipping his nose between his fingers, running them up and down at the same time thrusting his hips. Lenarushed, headbutting him in the face. He stumbled back clutching his hands over his nose and ran. At once all three were running and Lena was after them. I shouted for her to let them go. She grabbed the back one by his shirt and spun him around. He shouted as Lena flung him into the slimy water run-off. Almost slipping over the fall into the pool he managed to grab onto a branch and drag himself up onto the side. He screamed and ran off, crying that if he got bilharzia our poor white parents would pay the doctors bills. Lena shouted that if they ever touched me again she would break their arms.

‘Were not poor,’ I called after him. And we’ve got more brains than all you Soutpiele put together!’

The discarded book back in hand, we crossed the lawn and snuck into the bush so Lena could resume her fishing. She said she’d known there would be trouble when from across the lake she saw them pass through the gate. We baited our hooks and cast in from our secret place. Our rods were bamboo poles; our hooks pins stolen from Bokkie’s sewing kit or from Pahla Hardware. Soon forgetting the closeness of the shave, we were again laughing and Lena was certain the English boys wouldn’t come near me again. Together we sat preparing new verbal assaults for me to sling at them the moment opportunity arose. A phone had now been installed at home — though we were never allowed to make calls — and I suggested that next time we should actually call the police.

‘Poor James,’ I laughed, ‘he’s really gonna get it at school this time.’ ‘Do him good,’ Lena smirked, ‘to get those little white fingers out of the flower arrangements. Little dandy.’

The thin makeshift bamboos to which our lines were tied, the wine-corks as floats, were a far cry from the rods, reels and coloured floats we had used from the jetty at St Lucia. All sold off with the move to the city. What a sad excuse the lake of Kingsway Bird Sanctuary now seemed for all the places we had called home before leaving the Parks Board.

Are we really so poor, Lena?’ I asked, putting a clump of bread onthe hook and suddenly wishing we were back in a place where I had barely needed to know what money was. How I envied Robbie who at break bought a packet of Fritos or an ice cream every Friday when he received his pocket money. Imagine being allowed to get pocket money!

‘Bok says were going to be rich. And we already have more than some of the Kuswag kids. Just ignore the Souties, Karl. We’ll have our day.’

‘In heaven,’ I said.

‘Before that, I jolly well hope. I’m going to marry a rich man, someone like Uncle Joe.’

‘He’ll make you mad.’

‘Aunt Lena was funny before she met Joe Mackenzie. Anyway, I’ll divorce him and take his money. And remember I’m not the one with the mad gene,’ she said, glancing at me with a twinkle in her eye. I asked her to stop and for a while we sat in silence, watching the corks, waiting for a bite.

‘Do you ever think of heaven?’ I asked.

‘No. Do you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Shall I tell you what it’s like up there?’

‘Okay. But not one of your long-winded, boring stories.’

‘Heaven is where no one speaks,’ I said. ‘People just look at each other and they know what the other is thinking without saying a single word.’

‘Karl, jissis man, you’re crazy. What about the angel Gabriel, he spoke to Mary?’

‘Real angels communicate without words.’

‘Since when can people understand each other without speaking?’ she asked, shaking her head and squinting in the glare.

‘In heaven they can. It’s a little like that Englishman — showing you the sign with his nose. I mean, he didn’t say a word and you knew what he meant.’

‘So, that’s sign language, like for the deaf. It’s still a language.’

‘But heaven will be without signs even. And no one will be deaf ‘Oh please, Karl!’ she clicked her tongue, irritated. ‘Rather tell me what we’ll eat and drink in heaven.’

Paraphrasing, adapting, changing and adding to my memories of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
and drive-in sweet commercials I started, wondering briefly whether she’d notice and catch me out: ‘There’ll be lots and lots of chocolate. As you come in, right beside the gates: huge, huge, huge slabs of Nestle Peppermint Crisp and Cadbury’s Whole Nut, and it will hang like fruit from trees. I’m seeing the Mopani branches bent almost to the ground from the heavy chocolate harvest. And we’ll walk on marshmallow stepping stones across cream soda rivers, I can see us now, crossing like were playing hopscotch — and the hippos are jelly babies and the fish all kinds of shaped Smarties. Without saying anything were picking our fill of Aero and Chocolate Log from the branches, wide like the wild figs in the forest of louries. The next stream is Coca-Cola, and the next one Fanta, spurting from orange fountains and were sailing on a lake much bigger than this in a boat made of sweet wafer and, Lena, you’re taking a bite from the life vests that are made of marzipan. The boat’s masts are inlaid with cherry’s — maraschino — and the sails are vanilla ice cream sprinkled with Flake that’s melting in the sun and were just opening our mouths and it’s dripping between our lips . . . And it tastes like Mevrou Dominee s brandy tart sauce . . .’ I paused, my own mouth watering. I looked at her.

‘That’s more like it,’ she said. ‘Put in some seafood — prawns and crayfish mayonnaise — savoury stuff, things like that...’

It could be said that if Juffrou Sang had not selected me to sing the lead in the
Pied Piper of Hamelin,
I may never have learnt to read — in my desultory way — sheet music and may never have ended up going to the school in the mountains. But that’s second guessing the route I may or may not have followed, and I am not taken to doing that — ever. What in life is done is done, what is written is written, what is regrettable is regretted, who was loved can never be unloved, and to rewrite this life other stories will have to be told or this one read differently.

To perform the Pied Piper I not only had to learn four solos, I also had to play the recorder. By learning the recorder, Juffrou Sang was of the opinion I was at least learning the rudimentaries of music, despite our not having a piano at home. The newly built house where Juffrou Sang lived with Prof and her daughter was at 27 Dan Pienaar, just down the road from us. Through the many afternoons there as I practised my solos and mastered the recorder, I got to know and increasingly like Alette, whom I knew was the top student in class with Lena, According to Lena and Glenn, Alette was a bookworm and a bore who looked as clumsy as an anteater when running on the netball court. The two of them would never be friends, and, Lena warned, it would stand me in good stead to remember that Juffrou Sang and Prof were snobs who thought themselves better than the rest of Kuswag and Dan Pienaar. The drip Alette was already well on her way to being a real culture vulture — just like her pretentious mother. And, Bernice said, she’s an only child, and only children are always spoilt rotten.

Within a matter of months Alette had become one of my closest friends. Her and Lena’s class were on a playground separate from ours, and while we rarely spoke to each other at school and she seldom came to our home, our afternoons at their house were spent playing recorder duets, singing, and me occasionally just sitting listening to her practice the piano. Her long brown hair was always tied in two severe ponytails behind her ears, she had stocky legs and even at that age a matronly walk — yes, Lena was right — rather like her mother. She had a pointy nose that turned upwards and small round eyes like a monkey. She was plain incarnate, and I was old enough to know. Yet, as time went by and the more of it we spent together, her laughter at sticking a bow in my hair, her cleverness, her interest in how we had lived in the bush, her musicality, the way we sang togetherand played the recorder, became to me intoxicating. I found my eyes drawn to her mouth, the way her full lips — Lena said she had poetoe-smackers like a black girl — were outlined with a tiny ridge like a light pencil line. My heart leapt when she walked into church and sat down somewhere near the organ. I began picturing her walking down the isle in a glittering wedding gown while I stood below the pulpit in a black suit with a red rose in my lapel.

Lena’s and Glenn’s displeasure did nothing to still my growing passion for Alette or Juffrou Sang. On the contrary, my sister’s scowl, her exclusion from my going over to 27 Dan Pienaar, may in some ways have added to my bliss.

As we were the only kids on Dan Pienaar who received no pocket money, we, together with Glenn and Thea, Betty, Mary-Alice and James, decided to put on a musical in the neighbourhood. A fundraiser for me and Lena. Bernice had to stay home for homework, something I regretted as she, unlike Lena, had quite a good voice. At my suggestion that we invite Alette, Lena baulked, saying she wouldn’t participate if Alette came along. Mary-Alice, Thea and I wrote down words to songs from
The Sound of Musk
on foolscap pages with sheets of carbon between for multiple copies. We all dressed up and took to the neighbourhood streets, me shimmering in a blue chiffon dress borrowed without consent from Mrs Preston’s cupboard. Itching on my head was Aunt Lena’s old wig and my face was vaguely obscured by Mary-Alice’s communion veil, attached to the wig by one of Bokkie’s hairclips. I was Maria and the rest of the troop doubled in various roles: they were the nuns’ chorus singing ‘Maria’ while I danced across lawns up and down Dan Pienaar Drive. I did Maria’s solo of ‘I Have Confidence in Me’, and Betty and Glenn did ‘Sixteen Going on Seventeen. Mary-Alice, who had a good voice and with her long hair insisted we call her Isadora Duncan, was breathtaking as the strict Mother Abbess. Even though we hadn’t initially planned it, Mary-Alice threw in a performance of ‘Long Haired Lover From Liverpool’, which drew howls of approval and applause from all over the neighbourhood. James and Thea, now nervous and withdrawn in public as they had never been in private, switched roles as any one of the Von Trapp children. Lena, self-conscious about her singing despite our protests that it was fine for a musical, acted as the purse-keeper, collecting five cents from each yard for every performance. We did ‘Do-Re-Mi’ and ended with ‘Climb Every Mountain marching out of the yard, back into the street. We were the Von Trapps fleeing from the Nazis, a group of professional actors, a troop of minstrels from the Middle Ages. Under my leadership we went from lawn to lawn — careful to stay out of sight of Alette’s house.

By the end of the afternoon, we had made two rand. Lena and I were ecstatic. We had more money than we’d ever possessed. I already knew what I would buy. Thea had told me of a CNA in Durban that had a poster of Rudolf Nureyev on sale for one rand twenty. It was in black and white, unfortunately. But that made the poster cheaper than if it were in colour and it was now, unexpectedly, within my reach. I was sure Mrs Willemse would buy the poster for me next time they went into town. I could see it, glossy and vivid against the wall, above my bed where at night I could lie looking up at the man leaping skyward. And who cared if it was in black and white; I would simply imagine that it was in colour and it would be so.

At home we excitedly told Bokkie and Bernice of the day’s extraordinary windfall. I said I was getting a poster of Rudolf Nureyev for above my bed.

But instead of sharing in our delight or praising our resourcefulness, Bokkie was beside herself: ‘We are not poor whites! We don’t stick hippy posters against white walls and even less do we run around the streets begging for money!’

‘James was also with us,’ I said, hoping the complicity of Aunt Siobhain’s son would bring her to a different insight.

‘I don’t care about your English cousin! Were Afrikaners and we have different values. It’s all those years at St Lucia under the Pierces. You two have today single-handedly ruined our reputation in this neighbourhood! How can I show my face on the streets again, face the Dameskring at Bible Study? That
my
children go around the neighbourhood collecting money! Wait till your father gets back from safari! Just you wait.’ Rather than beating us — a fate we would have preferred infinitely — she told us to get rid of the costumes. To our horror, she sent us back through the neighbourhood to return the money and offer apologies for our behaviour. From a distance she followed, standing at the bottom of each street or driveway, supervising us as we slunk to front doors in the dusk.

When Bok got home Bokkie forced us to tell him, in our own words, how we had shamed the De Man family. This was not the bush, Bok said, and we had to learn to abide by the codes of the city. Even as he spoke, it looked as though he might start laughing, and we knew we were safe. Then his expression went stern and he said that if he heard that I was in a dress or a wig ever again, or that I’d danced across the neighbourhood lawns, he’d beat me so that I’d remember it for the rest of my life. And somewhere there, in the humid haze of the long Toti afternoons, I slowly danced less. Sang more and again read more. Often still wondering how much smaller I would have had to have been for them to have allowed me to be a dancer.