19 With a Bullet (3 page)

One day, urged on by my good friend and constant devil-on-my-shoulder, Darryl, I wrote her a horny letter, marked it ‘personal’ and handed it to her with a smile as she left the classroom. She took it, also with a smile and stuffed it into her handbag. She probably thought I was having some problem with my poem or sonnet and was too shy to ask for help in class. I spent the whole night deeply regretting what I had done; I was sure she would show her husband the letter, or turn me in to the headmaster the next day or, even worse, pick me out and make a fool of me in class. Who was I to try a hit on her? What was I thinking?

The next morning I crept sheepishly into school, expecting the worst. But, amazingly, my fears were put to rest when she came into the classroom for first-period English beaming from ear to ear, and sent a few provocative looks my way. Jackpot! I had lucked out! I had rolled the dangerous dice of love and landed with huge double-sixes! Since that morning, and for the last five months now, we had been screwing after school any place we could. I would skip classes and meet her at the lake close to her house, or go to her house for ‘extra lessons’ after school. The black nanny would watch the little tykes and we would disappear into the study. The nanny knew what was going on and would go for obliging strolls in the backyard or around the block.

Bev was 30 years old, married, with two kids; I was 19 and more or less permanently horny. She told me that she had met her husband when she was 13, dated and married him and that she had never experienced another man. She made up for lost time, though, and went wild on me. We became bold and stupid and would even steal quick French kisses in the corridors if the chance arose, or run naked around her car at the lake at 11.30 in the morning.

I was living out every schoolboy’s fantasy and she was living out her own. I had unleashed a tigress.

I couldn’t brag to the other guys at school about my accomplishment, especially when they would talk and drool over her. I would sit with a ridiculous smirk on my face, and nod.

“Boy—what I wouldn’t give to sink a bone in her. See how she was standing just now with those slacks crawling up her bum? She knows what she’s doing … I know she does.”

“Yeah, cool, eh? I bet she’s a tiger in bed too … you can tell.”

“Probably loves being slammed from behind,” I would say with some authority and a smile a mile wide.

“Yeah, probably,” someone would venture.

I would nod my head and crack up.

“What the fuck’s wrong with you, laughing like you know something! You wish you knew! Hey, can’t I laugh, or what?”

Darryl was the only one who knew; the delicious secrecy of it was killing him more than it was me, but I had sworn him to silence with the threat of bodily harm. He’d agreed, but grilled me endlessly on details. The rumours started to fly soon after a school party at my house when she’d arrived unexpectedly, had a couple too many drinks and was all over me. So, a couple of months later, when the headmaster caught me and a friend red-handed bunking at a café, he saw his chance and delivered a stern ultimatum. “Bring your parents to see me about this matter, or don’t come back to school,” he said. I couldn’t face my parents, either over the issue of bunking or the other small matter of diddling the English teacher, so I chose right there in his office not to go back to school.

¹
broer
: brother;
okes
: guys (Afrikaans coll.)

²
brother (Afrikaans)

GROWING UP IN SOUTH AFRICA

Shine on, you crazy diamond—Pink Floyd

It wasn’t the first time I had run into a little trouble at school. I had attended most of the schools in the surrounding towns, and been in a new high school almost every year. To me it was fun—each year I was checking out the scene, and I was the new boy in school.

We lived on a 15-acre plot about 30 kilometres out of town, in a beautiful old farmhouse, built with 40-centimetre-thick brick walls and high Dutch gables on either side of the tin roof. It had huge spacious rooms and creaking yellowwood floors; it was the original farmhouse of the folk who had owned the thousands of surrounding acres that had been subdivided over the years and sold off into smaller plots.

An imposing set of brick-pillared gates led onto a dirt driveway that wound through an orchard of mixed fruit trees and the two acres of garden and immaculate lawn that was my mother’s pride, and which she maintained like a park. The garden itself was surrounded by a three-metre thorn hedge that was two metres wide in places. Behind a vine-covered four-car garage was a secondary driveway that led through a wood of tall black wattle trees and a huge woodpile to four acres of fenced paddocks where we had a couple of horses, a few mules, donkeys, cows, pigs, about 30 sheep and a flock of peacocks that roamed free, calling with their unnerving voices and leaving their beautiful feathers scattered around the farm and on my mother’s cherished lawns.

All the African staff lived in neat brick houses at the back of the farm. My brother and I would spend hours playing soccer with the black kids on the green grass next to the dam. Afterwards we would sometimes sit at their fires with them and eat
mieliepap
³
until my mother called us home long after dark. As we grew older and saw that we were all travelling different paths in life, the soccer stopped. I missed it.

When it was high-school time, my brother and I were sent to a private school in Benoni, the town closest to us. It was a Jewish school, as it happened, with a good academic reputation. My brother and I were the only Christian kids in the school for a while, but it was a gas. We rubbed shoulders there with the kids of the local doctors and lawyers. All was going well until, for some reason I can’t remember, I broke the nose of an exchange student from Israel. It was my first year in high school and he was a senior. So I changed schools, by popular request.

We were pranksters and would go out of our way to pull cruel and elaborate tricks on each other or on unsuspecting friends, like the time I was kitted out with dark glasses and a white cane and led to a girl’s house, where I sat quietly sipping coffee in the living room while Marlon and Darryl told her and her parents how I had tragically lost my sight and my girlfriend in a motorbike accident. The girl fell in love with me and my tragic story, but was furious and in tears when she saw me a week later singing ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ on stage at a small nightclub without either my white cane or my sunglasses. She never spoke to Marlon again.

It was all rather fun until, at the ripe old age of 15, I got the girl down the road into trouble. Somehow word of it reached the headmaster (who was a world-class prick) so he and his deputies summoned me to his office, called me names and dragged what was left of my good name through the mud.

It turned out that the girl wasn’t pregnant after all. That was a good thing for me, as her father was one of the original members of the Hell’s Angels in South Africa; he raised fighting dogs and cockerels on their plot; he was one mean cat. Lance and I set a relay-running record over that little business that stood for many years.

My folks decided to send me to a popular private college-type school in the middle of downtown Johannesburg. It occupied an entire office building. We could wear our hair long, smoke at breaks, and had no real uniform except a tie. By some great stroke of luck Darryl was sent to a similar establishment a block away from mine. We were having a blast, and would commute the 50 kilometres to Johannesburg by train with the busy morning work crowd. The freedom of the new college was agreeable and we were starting to figure out the downtown girls.

Everything went well for the first four months. Then, on the way home from band practice one night, we stopped for a smoke and were suddenly confronted by a truckload of cops and all arrested for possession of marijuana. At 16, I honestly didn’t give a shit—but I did feel bad about letting my folks down.

The next lucky public high school to draw my custom was in Kempton Park. Here I met Taina. She was the drum-majorette leader, and I would watch her leading her troupe of marching girls behind the brass band, dressed in a short-skirted uniform, tossing her mace high into the air and catching it like a circus trick, all without missing a step. She was a doll. All the older guys were trying to date her but I, being the new boy in school, with a bit of a reputation, was the one who snagged her.

I would pick her up at her five-acre plot just outside of town and have to face her father who looked like a ferocious Afrikaans version of Elvis Presley with jet black hair, thick pork-chop whiskers and a thicker waist line. He had beefy forearms covered in a mat of black hair, yellow eyes like a cat and was mean as hell. I understood why nobody was dating her. He would sit at the dining-room table with a bottle of whisky at his elbow and warn me not to bring her home later than eleven. He could be violent but he somehow took a shine to me and soon I was slugging down Johnny Walker with him each time I picked Taina up. I discovered he was a diamond in the rough—as long as you weren’t black, that is.

It was an uneasy time in South Africa. The country had been in a declared state of emergency for a couple of years by then; the state of emergency gave the police the power to arrest and detain people at will.

The black political parties—the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) had been banned years before because of their communist ties. Powerful bombs were being detonated at shopping malls and bus stops in protest, but it was mostly blacks who were getting killed in these blasts. There were rocket attacks on industrial installations; the appalling murder and rape statistics ranked us among the worst in the world. The riots in the black townships had been going on for a couple of years now, since the 1976 Soweto uprising, and were getting worse. Many times we could see the thick black smoke rising in columns in the townships many miles away as thousands of blacks rioted in the streets, burning and stoning anything in front of them. A lot of blood was being shed in the name of apartheid. The police would not allow reporters into the townships, but the word was that they would cheerfully shoot hundreds of the rioters. The rioters, too, would kill or burn alive any white or—even quicker—any black in their path whom they suspected of collaborating with the apartheid system.

Schoolchildren were often in the front lines of the riots; when police occasionally shot them there would be a global outcry. If you got in their way when they were on the rampage, these ‘students’ would stone you to death with half-bricks and dance and sing over your body. It made little sense to me, because—besides the rioting in the townships—almost everybody, black and white, seemed to get along and there was a lot of goodwill on both sides, contrary to the simmering hatred portrayed by the world media.

Our black maid on the farm shook her head at the rioters and said that they were
mal,
crazy, and that if the black people ran the country it would be a mess and she would leave.

³
maize porridge (Afrikaans)

SWAPO
the bush war on the Angolan/
South West African border

Us and them—Pink Floyd

But this wasn’t the only trouble our country was going through. Since the sixties, South Africa had been dealing with an ugly conflict on her northern border. It had started off in a small way with a few isolated landmine incidents and the odd abduction here and there, but over the last six or seven years had erupted into a full-scale little war, sometimes with as many as ten or 15 South African troops being killed in a week.

The objective of the South West African People’s Organization, SWAPO, was to try and wrest South West Africa from the control of South Africa and see it become independent. South West Africa, as it was then, had been a German colony until it was taken from her after World War I and given to South Africa to look after on a 99-year mandate as part of the war booty. SWAPO wanted independence for what it called Namibia, which in itself wasn’t such a bad idea, considering it wasn’t our country to begin with. The only problem was that SWAPO were communists, trained, backed and supplied by Russia, China and half a dozen other communist-bloc countries who, as we saw it, wanted to get their sticky paws on mineral-rich South West Africa, and in particular the uranium that was mined there.

SWAPO spread its communist doctrine by force and propaganda. They would lay landmines on civilian roads, abduct new recruits from villages by force and take them back to be trained in Angolan bush camps. They would often kill the headman of the village and his family, or anyone who crossed their path. They came armed with AK-47s, RPGs and landmines and, by the mid 1970s, were pretty well trained and would not hesitate to stand and fight against South African security forces. The threat to South Africa’s security took on a different complexion in 1975 when Portugal, which had controlled Angola (just northwest of South Africa) for over 400 years, threw in the towel and pulled out after 16 years of bitter civil war. The communist-backed MPLA promptly seized control of Angola. The new MPLA government threw its weight behind SWAPO, which had its training camps in Angola, and SWAPO in turn stepped up its intimidatory forays across the border into South West Africa. At the same time, Cuban troops started pouring into Angola as ‘advisers’, and pretty soon there were 50,000 well-armed Cuban troops in southern Angola, dug in about 160 kilometres north of the South West African border. This was a major threat to the security of South Africa.

My older brother, Murray, had returned from his 12-month stint of national service as an MP, a military policeman, and told us what was happening on the South West African border. He had been in the beautiful Caprivi Strip, a thin finger of South West Africa that drove an 800-kilometre wedge between Zambia and Botswana to the tip of Zimbabwe–Rhodesia. Although Caprivi was not considered a red-hot area, his base had come under 122-millimetre rocket fire from across the Zambian border—the great, muddy Zambezi River. He told us how he had heard the first explosion when the big rockets hit the base and how they had all dived for the bunkers, but he had gone back out when the call went out for a volunteer who knew the area. He volunteered to drive with and direct a Jeep full of ammunition to their mortar pits down by the river. Afterwards, the officer in charge had said that he would be mentioned in dispatches for his action. They had careened the Jeep down a dirt road which was in open ground and taking heavy fire from across the river, so he directed the driver to smash through a fence and a wooden wall and bounce across a field to get to the mortar pits where he spent the rest of the attack.