Embrace (52 page)

Lukas and the driver carried me upstairs to where sick-bay had already been prepared. One look at the leg and Uncle Charlie said I needed to be taken to hospital in Estcourt for X-rays and stitches. Perhaps an operation. As I might have to spend time in hospital he sent Lukas to fetch my pyjamas, dressing gown and toilet bag: And bring some PT shorts so he doesn’t have to go into hospital wearing only his underpants. Hang these over his locker,’ he said, handing my jeans to Lukas.

Uncle Charlie placed a temporary dressing over the wound. Above and below the white gauze, the leg had swollen into a narrow oblong ball. He left to organise a mattress in a canopied bakkie in which I’d be taken to Estcourt. I lay wondering over the horror of limping for the rest of my life. Physical deformity was about the last thing in the world I could imagine living with. A limp for a while — with admiration and pity as its pay-off — was one thing. A permanent deformity was quite another. I thought of my mother’s ear, how her embarrassment at not hearing well seemed to rub off on all of us so that we too felt embarrassed on her behalf.

Lukas returned, carrying his sportsbag. He sat down on the other bed. Held his hand out to me: ‘Here,’ he said, a key appearing between his fingertips. ‘It dropped from your dressing-gown pocket.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, casting my eyes to the bag by his side: ‘Pass the bag, please.’ He handed me the green canvas bag as I felt a flush spread up my neck. Act normal, act normal, act normal. I knew that he was awaiting an explanation. I had none to offer. I unzipped the toilet bag and nonchalantly dropped the key inside. Our eyes met briefly. He knew or suspected something. He wanted to ask, and I floundered to find words before he could. My mind having been so engrossed in my leg, I was nowhere near finding a believable story about the key. Say something, Karl, anything, clear your throat, scratch your head, rushed through my head. Every possible action seemed contrived, certain to enhance my look of duplicity. I was gagged, cornered in every side of the deafening silence.

‘Just a key I picked up. This fucken leg hurts, Lukas . . .’ Since the kick about an hour before, there had actually been little feeling besides discomfort when moving and the brief moment the disk had been slipped back. Now, for the first time, the deadness was changing to a light throbbing.

‘It looks pretty swollen, can you bend it?’

‘No. Uncle Charlie said not to. They’re getting a mattress put in the back of the bakkie, so I can lie down. Did you bring shorts?’ He took the black shorts from the bag and helped me slip them on.

‘Do you think you’ll stay in hospital?’ The key, for the moment, seemed forgotten.

‘I hope not. Last time I was in hospital was when I had my tonsils out.’

‘Who’s taking you, Uncle Charlie?’

‘Yes . . . Why don’t you get permission to come along to Estcourt? I’m sure he’ll come back tonight — even if I have to stay in hospital.’

‘What about choir? Cilliers wouldn’t let me go.’ At the mention of the name, I heard or suspected an inference, a challenge, a demand, a plea for explication.

‘It’s worth a try,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you go ask him?’

‘Okay. Can I say you asked?’ Clearly he was hinting; wanting me to respond. He was tormenting me. Or was I imagining it from beginning to end?

‘Just say Uncle Charlie may need some help and you don’t think I want to lie all the way there alone in the back of the van.’

He rose and said he’d run to the conservatory.

‘Won’t you see if Dominic is in one of the music rooms?’

‘Want me to tell him?’

‘Ja, say he must come and say goodbye.’

With me already loaded into the back of the bakkie, Lukas arrived in the parking lot. Jacques — his face flushed — was with him. Dominic not.

So you went to war with a horse?’ he asked through the open back of the canopy. His one hand, dropped casually over the bakkie’s side, took hold of my left toes.

‘The horse went to war with me, Sir.’ My eyes darting to Lukas, who had turned away to speak to Uncle Charlie. Jacques asked whether it hurt and I said it did, though not much. His hand ran up my calf.

‘I told you you were not invincible, you little shit,’ he said, cocking his head, smiling. I grinned nervously, feeling his hand lingering, now back on my foot; a flagrantly public display of affection and tenderness.

‘I’ve told Lukas he can go with you . . .’

‘Oh, great. Thank you, Sir.’

‘Come back soon.’

‘I will.’ He withdrew his hand as Lukas turned back to the canopy’s open hatch.

‘Bye, Karl,’ he said and stepped away from the vehicle. Lukas slid into the back and propped himself up on his arm beside me.

‘Bye, Mr Cilliers,’ I said.

Uncle Charlie told me to bang on the carriage window if my leg became too painful or if I wanted him to slow down on the gravel road. He dropped the hatch, sealing us in. Then we were driving off, leaving the school behind us in the descending dusk.

‘I couldn’t find Dominic, but I told Precious to tell him we looked for him.’

I said it was fine and changed the subject to speak about horses and the afternoon’s ride.

Requiring nothing more than local anaesthetic, the wound was cleaned and stitched, the leg X-rayed. I was given a bottle of painkillers and we started on the return journey. It was late, maybe around nine, by the time we left Estcourt. In the back both of us were quiet, not speaking much for most of the way. After we left the tarmac road, somewhere around the time we passed the turn-off to Loskop and the Theron farm, Lukas spoke.

‘Cilliers was rather upset.’

‘When you asked to come?’

‘No. When he heard it was you.’

My heart sank. I waited a while. ‘What did he say?’

‘Oh my God, take me to him, quickly . . .
Like it was the end of the world, and we almost ran to the bakkie.’

It was the first time I had been spoken to about Jacques as though he had any form of relationship to me other than that of choir master — with me one of his least interesting voices. I was now suddenly intrigued by what more he might have said. About the way he may have looked when he worried about me. Still present was a nagging in my head that Lukas was on to something. To trust myself to ask another word about Jacques would be stupid. There had been again, in Lukas s voice, the tone of expectation. That, deliberately, is what he wanted me to hear from his telling the incident. To refer again to the key would be crazy. No, leave the key at what I’d said.

‘He’s probably worried about me missing choir,’ I said after a silence which had again lasted just a moment too long. ‘I’m quite hotin seconds, these days, you know,’ I continued. ‘Not quite as useless as I was in firsts. Before you know it I’m a soloist.’

Then we laughed; cracked up at the notion. The tension between us was gone.

‘And in seconds, just like Almeida,’ Lukas said. I laughed, but couldn’t quite shake the feeling that he was trying to tell me something.

We packed our things on a Bedford lorry to leave St Lucia, Zululand and the Natal Parks Board.

Bok had grown tired of what he called the authoritarianism of the Parks Board system — and he wanted to earn more money. Who could ever get ahead on the hundred and seventy rand a month he had been earning as a game ranger. No free accommodation plus weekly ration of impala or warthog meat would put him in a position to give his children a decent education. He was joining White Hunters Incorporated in Durban to take wealthy tourists along the Zambezi and Okavango to hunt for trophies. There were bags of money in organised hunting, just waiting to be collected.

Few clear pictures remain in my mind of the circumstances under which we left the bush. All I knew was that Camelot was being sold to Dr Ian Player and Simba had to go to another ranger whose name I no longer recall. Everything surrounding the departure seems to have happened fast and memory is now little more than a diffuse haze. No time for long, sad goodbyes to the just-broken Camelot. Nor to Simba, who had to go because we were moving into a flat where dogs were not allowed. I tried to not think about the dog or my horse and whether their new owners were going to treat them well. What had to be focused on was us De Mans moving on, making progress, poised on the brink of material comfort for the first time since Tanganyika.

In Matubatuba I said goodbye to Guisbert, who had become my best friend. We promised to write to each other but never did, the same as the Pierces, whom, I recall, came to wave as the Bedford, loaded with all our stuff, pulled off. Lena and I sat on the front seat beside Bok while Bernice and Bokkie followed behind in the Peugeot to make sure nothing came off the truck. And so we drove towards a new life in Amanzimtoti, the same South Coast town as Uncle Michael and Aunt Siobhain, where Uncle Michael had just opened up his fish and chips shop at the Toti Drive-In.

In Toti Lena and I shared a room in Afsaal flats, where we lived while we waited for Bok to make enough money so that we could rent a house. The small holiday flat above the beach cost ninety rand a month. Lena and Bernices turquoise Kuswag uniforms were made by Aunt Siobhain on her new Singer with the electric pedal, and my safari suits were selected from the school’s second-hand storage. Unlike many of the Kuswag children, we always had money for new school shoes and never had to take second-hands from the bin. My new brown Batas were a source of pride and I shined them with Nugget every afternoon. As in St Lucia, we had to change out of uniform the moment we got home. While our home was now a different place, the order of much remained basically the same: making our beds in the morning, never sitting on bedspreads, setting and unsetting the table, rotating dish-washing responsibilities, saying grace before meals, and ‘Thank you, Bokkie, the food was very nice’ before we left table. Then it was homework, after which Bokkie allowed me to go off and play and swim on the Toti beach.

Lena and Bernice had friends living in Brigadoon Flats across the road. My sisters were rarely with me in the afternoons. Down Beach Road lived Robbie Merwe, whose father owned the Seahorse restaurant, and he and I began spending time together at school and on the beach. Sometimes Bokkie dropped me off at the Toti library where I spent hours and took out books on loan for the first time. With

Kuswag being a new school — we were still accommodated in pre-fab classrooms — the library there had few books and hardly any in English, which were my favourite.

We attended the new Dutch Reformed church that had recently been built at the bottom end of Dan Pienaar Drive. There was now no escaping either Sunday school or church. Stripped of our excuse about living far out of town, our Sunday mornings were now gobbled up into two solid hours of monotonous worship: Sunday school followed by the murderously boring sermons of Dominee Lourens. Now were right on the inside of civilisation, Bokkie said, and we have to take serious stock of any bush behaviour we might unwittingly exhibit: ‘Keep your eyes on the other kids and the teachers, so that you can see how things are done in the city. You, Karl, especially. At least the girls had the time in boarding school already before Matubatuba. But I’m worried about you.’

On the very first day during sang perie, my new Juffrou Sang said that the new boy had to stand up and introduce himself. I stood and said I came from Matubatuba, where my father had been a game ranger, but that he was now a white hunter. Juffrou Sang teased that a pretty boy like me had to have a pretty voice and she let me stand on a chair and sing. I said I’d sing my favourite song, ‘Under My Skin, by Frank Sinatra, but Juffrou Sang said I’d do no such thing. Since when did an Afrikaans boy sing English songs at school? I said Matubatuba had been dual medium. She said this was not Zululand and I had to sing in Afrikaans. After a moment’s thought I started with ‘Bobbejaan Klim Die Berg’, swinging my hips and clicking the beat with my fingers. Her face lit up and she broke into a smile. Afterwards she said I had quite a voice and that she wanted to enter me for the Durban eisteddfod.

I was almost nine and my voice had been discovered. At the flat I told Bokkie, who said I had probably gotten it from Bok who in Oljorro days had been quite a crooner himself. I had no idea that myfather had a good singing voice and undertook to ask him to sing with me when he came back from the Zambezi.

While Lena and Bernice were on the netball court, I began to play rugby. Initially I was at eighth man but in the same season was moved to lock. On Saturdays our under-ten As took the bus to schools in Durban and the Bluff, sometimes playing against English schools on the fields behind Kings Park Stadium. That first season, though I and the rest played ourselves half to death, we didn’t win a single match. It was, so our trainer said, because Kuswag was a new school. By the time we reached under-fourteen and started wearing rugby togs, us Afrikaners and our game would have developed and we’d walk over the English opposition. While enjoying rugby, I continually felt some form of envy towards James, who was in Amanzimtoti Senior Secondary where they played soccer. All the English schools had soccer, which seemed so much more civilised. Soccer had no scrum and no tackle. In soccer you didn’t seem to get injured. But I knew soccer was an English sport and there was no way I was going to get to play. I secretly wished to go to an English school, but it was clear that we had now become full-blooded Afrikaners. It made no sense to me that Bok’s family had been English in Tanzania, that he had gone to an English school in Kenya, and that I was now in a monolingual Afrikaans school. I read almost only English: it sounded so much more sophisticated than Afrikaans. Yet instead of playing soccer in our free time on the beach, Bernice, Lena and I insisted on playing touch rugby and told James that soccer was a sissy sport.

As both Afrikaans and English were compulsory school subjects and James struggled with Afrikaans, I often helped him with homework, on occasion writing his essays for him. I knew that if one wrote about death and suffering in an Afrikaans essay you did well. Despite all the afternoons and weekends we spent together, there was a clear division between my cousins and me: James went to Cubs and later to Boy Scouts, I went to Voortrekkers. Lena and Bernicewent to Voortrekkers, and Stephanie went to Girl Guides. They were Presby, we were Dutch Reformed.