Embrace (50 page)

At first I had laughed off Aunt Lena and Uncle Joe’s suggestion that I sing at the Little Top talent contest on South Beach. There was no way I was going up there to make a sight of myself amongst the amateurs for the fifty-rand prize. I was, after all, a boy professional. Then Uncle Joe said he would double the prize money. My interest was pricked. It crossed my mind that amongst the hundreds of thousands of people on the beach could be someone from the Berg. My worst nightmare, being heard by someone from the school. God, imagine Dom hearing about this. But the thought of one hundred rand, a year’s extra pocket money, loomed larger than the embarrassment. Aunt Lena said I should go up in only my Speedo, to show off my body. I refused.

‘Come on, Karl,’ Lena said.

‘You wouldn’t go for Miss South Coast Legs! Why must I go up there in only my Speedo?’

But I did. Thirteen years and two months old, with a black Speedo and a tan begun in East Africa. Another world. I had no idea what to sing. Gounod was as out as biscuits in an orphanage. Right, a bit of Britten’s
War Requiem,
that would get this audience on my side. Then it came to me: Abba, Dom’s tape to my rescue. With the little orchestra jamming it out behind me, I sang — I did — ‘Waterloo’. Looking out at the ships waiting to enter Durban harbour, I forgot about the screaming horde below me on the white sand. Dispelled any thought of how pathetic I must be looking. I thrust my hips out as I sang, danced and put expression into every word, every beat. Halfway through the song I knew that barring the entry of Jimmy Osmond or Lena Zavaroni, I would win. The crowd loved it. Screamed and cheered and joined with every chorus.

The winner would be chosen by the measure of applause. When the prize was awarded I could have punched the MC in the face. It was not cash, it was a fifty-rand gift voucher for further voice training. Backstage I asked the organisers whether I couldn’t exchange the voucher for cash. They said no. I was beside myself. Uncle Joe now refused to give me the fifty rand he had said he’d double. I boiled and for the rest of the holiday thought up excuses to go as seldom as possible back to the Malibu and to South Beach.

Angry at Uncle Joe for having done me in and wanting Lena on side, I asked whether she had noticed the way he looked at her. ‘Oh the looks are nothing,’ she said, ‘the other night when I stayed over he took out his old filafooi to show to me.’

‘In the middle of the street?’ I asked.

‘No, fool, in the Malibu, when I stayed over and Aunt Lena was taking a shower.’

‘What did you do?’

At first I just looked at it and thought I’d ignore him. Then, when he asked me whether I wanted to touch it, I had a thought.’ Lena smiled and looked away.

‘What thought?’

‘I took it in my hand and then bent down, like I was going to suck it.’

‘You’re lying, Lena!’

‘I swear. And just when it started going stiff and I knew he was all excited I brought my lips down to it and said: “I just want to send a message to my mommy and daddy at home in Toti,” and I started laughing and let it go and he pushed me away and I laughed in his face.’

‘Why didn’t you tell Aunt Lena?’

‘Ag, it would only upset her if she knew he was molesting me.’

The Mackenzies came for New Year’s Eve. Uncle Joe brought cartons full of firecrackers: spirals, Catherine wheels, sky rockets, sparklers. So many we wouldn’t be able to light half. And as we unpacked the Mercedes, I was still thinking of how to broach leaving the school, getting out of the Berg and back to Toti. I was sneezing, unable to control myself. Refused to take antihistamine.

After dinner we sat in the lounge playing Monopoly and watching South Africa’s first ever TV New Year’s message from the Prime Minister. The Brats were getting restless and wanted to light the fireworks. I burst into tears. I stood in the middle of the lounge floor and announced that I didn’t want to return to school. Through snot and tears I implored Bok and Bokkie not to send me back. I said I couldn’t spend all this money, when Lena, Bernie and Bokkie didn’t even have decent clothes. The outburst must have taken no more than three or four minutes. For all that time their eyes were on me: Bok, sitting in the one big chair. Uncle Joe in the other. Lena on the floor playing Monopoly with Aunt Lena and Bernice. Bokkie sitting on the couch entertaining the Brats.

None of them spoke. When my tears dried and I calmed down, I was overwhelmed with shame. I wanted to leave. I turned, left the lounge and went to my bedroom. Bok came in and said he was taking me for a drive. We drove in his Chevrolet through the deserted streets of Amanzimtoti. Bok asked whether I hadn’t learnt anything at all from Dr Taylor in June. I was now a young man, no longer a little boy. I was not to throw tantrums and scenes in front of our rich family. Like crapping in your own nest, he said, and I heard Mumdeman.

And,’ said Bok, ‘you have to stop turning every cake recipe into a melodrama.’ He told me things were going very, very well with his business. That I had to trust him. Happiness was in my hands! I should go back to school, leave adults to worry about adult business, not saddle myself with worries; that being away from home was turning me into a man. I felt better. What subjects are you taking, he asked. I want to take Latin and Art, I said. Why not Accountancy, he insisted. Because I’m not interested, I said. Don’t you want to make money, one day, he asked. I can make money with Art, I said. Okay, just for one year and you must balance it with rugby and sport, Philistine, okay? Okay, Bok.

At midnight, the Brats still awake, we lit the firecrackers. I missed Dominic. Imagined the Websters on the beach at Plettenberg Bay as we left 1975 behind.

On New Years Day as we prepared for church, Aunt Lena phoned to say she wasn’t coming because Uncle Joe wanted her to stay with the Brats. Bokkie reminded us that Uncle Joe refused for himself or Aunt Lena to set foot in any church, the Dutch Reformed Church in particular. Uncle Joe, who refused to read the Bible, said that the portals of hell were lined with the dominees, deacons and elders of the Dutch Reformed Church.

With Juffrou Sang away we made do without an organist. Lena shared her hymnal with me and we giggled at the solemn dragging of the congregation’s a cappella. I scooped from note to note, putting a sob at the end of every line. Bokkie jabbed me in the ribs. When the last hymn was over and Lena pulled away her hymnal, I whispered: ‘Thank you, I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers.’ She glared at me and shook her head.

Aunt Lena had secretly given us money to pay for
Ipi Tombi
with Aunt Siobhain and James. Aunt Lena had really wanted to come along too, but Uncle Joe said she couldn’t leave the kids and he didn’t want to pay for her to go and watch kaffir girls dancing around with bare tits. That, he said, he could see for free on one of his farms.

At lunch on 2 January, Aunt Lena and the Brats pulled into the driveway with the Mercedes. It was obvious from her face she had been crying. She burst into tears and said that Uncle Joe had left early in the morning without saying where he was going. Then, at eleven, when they were on the Malibu pool deck, he was back: with the little fourteen-year-old slut Matilda.

‘He didn’t say anything, just that she was now on holiday with us,’ Aunt Lena wept.

We sat in horrified silence. Once Aunt Lena had stopped crying,

Bokkie said, ‘Lena, my sister, now you have grounds for a divorce. Leave the fucken bastard.’ It was the first time I had heard my mother use the word.

‘He’ll take my poor children from me. We have no proof that he’s sleeping with her.’

‘Jirre, the whole Klerksdorp knows he is.’

Everyone around me is doing It, I thought to myself. Everyone is doing It with everyone.

‘How do I prove it?’ Aunt Lena sobbed.

‘Put a private investigator onto him.’

‘No one will do it for me, they’re all scared of him.’ I couldn’t understand why she didn’t get one from outside of Klerksdorp, from Johannesburg. I was stewing: our entire holiday was again, as had been the case year after year, messed up by the travails of my mother’s sister, the Brats and Uncle Joe. And yet, I knew, we kept visiting them, kept inviting them. It felt as though we were their willing prisoners — enjoying their money, the laughs, and that we therefore had to eat their shit as well. Support Aunt Lena at any cost. For the entire day and night it was just Joe and Matilda this, Joe and Matilda that. Matilda, Matilda, Matilda. A fourteen-year-old girl — the daughter of Joe Mackenzie’s farm foreman — someone I had never set eyes on, who had nothing to do with me or my life, was determining our every discussion and move. A fourteen-year-old slut’named Matilda was ruining my holiday. Not only Uncle Joe, but the mysterious Matilda. What’s her story? How could someone we knew nothing about, determine the course of our lives? I longed to see her. To put a face to the name. A voice to her mouth; fill in the silence that was making us all forget it was New Year. When things were meant to be nice.

I had to sleep on the couch in the lounge while Aunt Lena and the Brats moved into my room. Early the next morning, the day Alette was due back from Uvongo, Uncle Joe arrived in an Avis car and asked to see Aunt Lena. They sat out at the pool. The Brats sat on his lap while we stood behind the lace curtains in the lounge trying to eavesdrop. Within ten minutes Aunt Lena came in to say she was going back to the Malibu. Uncle Joe had sent Matilda back on the airplane and had promised that things were going to be different from now on.

‘But, Lena,’ Bokkie said, ‘he’s said that a hundred times.’

‘Please, please, Bokkie,’ Aunt Lena began to whimper, ‘support me in this. Remember Saul on the road to Damascus. If God could change Saul’s heart, he will, I believe, change Joe Mackenzie too.’

I had to carry the suitcases back to the car and she cautioned: ‘Karl, don’t say anything, please. Just be nice, or else he’ll take it out on me and the children.’ None of us said a thing in front of her. The moment they left Bokkie went into a silence, deeper and more horrifying than I could remember from previous times.

Lena and my animosities were forgotten in the glow of a shared outrage. We sat at the pool with Alette. ‘I swear to you two today, I will never get married,’ Lena was saying, lines to her mouth.

‘Me neither,’ said Alette.

‘And I swear to you too: may God strike me dead if I ever do.’ It was as though Lena and I saw — at least on this one issue — the world through the same set of eyes. How surprised I was to contemplate missing her along with Alette when I went back to the Berg. ‘Living together,’ I continued. ‘I’ll do that. Dominic’s parents say marriage is outdated.’

‘Yes, and fuck the Church,’ Alette said.

‘Dr Webster’s right. Living together’s becoming the in thing,’ Lena continued. ‘I’m going to do it too. Look at Coen and Mandy, living together in sin and happy as any couple I’ve ever seen.’

‘My parents,’ Alette, began, ‘I know you’d never say so, but their marriage is in trouble. All my father does is work, work, work at the university, his students are much more important to him than my mother. They don’t speak to me about it, but I wouldn’t be surprisedif they separate. I think my mum would have done it long ago, but she’s scared of the censure of the Church.’

‘What’s censure?’ I asked.

‘If you get divorced you’re not allowed to go to church for a year.’ ‘Do you really think they might... divorce?’

‘Sometimes I hope they will.’

Going back to the Berg — out of the house with my mother’s terrible silence, Bok’s grandiosity, the whispers of my aunt’s tears and faith in a Damascus Road awaiting the most evil man I had ever known — now seemed a wonderful prospect. We would be in Standard Six, in the Senior Choir. And the dreadful Harding and Reyneke would be gone! There would be Dominic. Yes, Dom. This year was going to be incomparable. Dom and I could pick up where we left off. We’d take ourselves back to Lake Nyassa! Why had I ever wanted to leave? To hover with dragonflies high above the pool: to see the whole story from a position of elevation. Idiotic, to think I’d rather be down here, back with the family. And Ma’am. Art and Latin. There would again be Rufus, the river and our new fort. And none of this shit flying around the idea we call home.

About that first night I went to the fort, I remember clearly how, from a distance, their acrid smell reached my nose. A good five paces before the snores like branches groaning in the wind sounded from inside our grass and stick sanctuary, I knew already they were in there: smoke, old sweat and sleep, the aromas of the Great Unwashed. Erasing almost every other from the spring night’s air. The school’s coarse grey blanket would be ruined, that much was certain. No ways it could be salvaged after passing through their foul lives. I’d have to make a plan and get another from Beauty. In the meantime probably freeze my bones off. Sleep even less because of them. One needs eight hours of sleep to function properly at school and in choir, everyone knew that. I was down to about six, sometimes five. If being cold at night kept me awake even more, I’d be a wreck. Exhausted and pneumonic, I may end up in sick-bay. I could see Jacques and Dominic bent over me, worried brows, their thumbs caressing the black halfmoons beneath my eyes. My pale and dying skin. ‘It was for my starving uncle,’ I’d groan, barely able to speak through chapped and peeling lips. ‘I couldn’t see him suffer any longer. To see others suffer is to me worse than if it were me. There was snow on Champagne Castle. I gave my life so that he may live.’ And I’d be a hero. Like Racheltjie de Beer and Wolraad Woltemade. Our country’s undisputed national heroes. But before I died, Buys and Marabou and Lena — everyone who’d ever been nasty to me — filed past my bed crying, murmuring how sorry they were for everything they’d ever done to me. I’d turn my head tragically on the pillow and I’d look up at Dom and Jacques and bravely try to smile at them as I struggled with rasping breath to whisper: ‘Loving someone means never having to say you’re sorry.’ No, ridiculous. All that would happen would be me freezing and probably not even getting near death or sick-bay’s doors. Thoughts of turning back were now foremost in my mind. This was crazy. Risking my place in the school for someone I barely knew and cared for even less. Now I was down here, I might as well go through with it. Silly to turn around at this point and not give the old fool what he’d asked for. I’d just have to get another blanket from Beauty. But I didn’t want to see them. Let them just find the blanket and know it must have been me. Karl, the Good Samaritan. And may God grant that they’d then get out of here, leave, take the blanket with them, back to the Transvaal. The worst would be if anyone found out. Jesus, no. The De Man boy’s poor white uncle.