Embrace (53 page)
Bok was away from Toti, hunting along the Zambezi, for weeks at a time. Then, even while he was in town, he would often come home late at night, long after we were already in bed. Within a few months after we moved to the flat, Lena and I awoke and heard Bokkie, through our bedroom wall, in tears. We sat up and looked at each other in the pink flicker of the street’s neon lights, listening to our mothers words through her sobbing as she spoke to Bok. She said that she was not prepared to tolerate Bok’s nights on the town. It was one thing for him to be off in the bush, hunting to keep food on the table and the children in school. It was quite another when he was in town and out drinking and not spending time with us. I wondered whether Bernice in the next room could hear. Bok, pacifying in his most soothing voice, said that going out with clients was part of his work. He had to mingle with tourists and white hunters in order to attract more business.
‘Night after night, Ralph De Man,’ Bokkie again wailed, ‘I sit here with these poor children while their father is out with the rich and famous. You don’t care for them or me.’
‘Well, you should come with me, occasionally.’
‘And leave these little children? You know bloody well I’ll never, as long as I live, leave my children at home.’
‘We could get a babysitter.’
‘With what! We don’t have money to wipe our arses and you want to pay a babysitter. And a babysitter at their age, where do you think, Ralph De Man, I’ll find one with hair on her teeth?’
A long silence and I asked Lena whether I could come to her bed. She said no. I went next door and climbed into bed with Bernice.
Bokkie wept that she was tired of Bok coming home smelling of drink, cigarettes and other women. She said if it were not that she had to take care of us, she would go out and find herself a job. But whatjob would she get, she who had no training, had only ever worked in a bicycle shop? The only job she could get was working behind the till at Checkers with the poor white Makoppolanders. Maybe she could get a job cleaning other peoples houses like the kaffir girls? Would that make him happy? To see her scrub the shit stains out of white people’s underwear? Then she wailed again, sobbed that she was going to leave the following day to find a man that really loved her and her poor children. Now Bernice and I were also crying. After a while it seemed our mother had quietened down. Only then did Bernice whisper for me to go back to my bed, not to worry, that everything would be fine.
And so it came that whenever Bok and Bokkie argued and my mother cried, I went to Bernice’s bed. We rarely spoke about it, but when we did it was clear enough through their bravery that Lena and Bernice were as afraid as I that Bok might leave us, leave us alone in the dreadful flat, and Bokkie would become a servant to rich white people and we would have nowhere in the “world to go.
Aunt Siobhain found a three-bedroomed house for us to rent at 21 Dan Pienaar, down the road from Kuswag. Just across the street from the church. For Christmas Uncle Michael gave us a sausage dog we named Judy, from a Punch and Judy show that had come to school. Bokkie was to become the church’s chief gardener and landscape artist. It was disappointing to hear that she would not be paid a salary. Even though Bok would often be away, Dominee Lourens said he wanted our father to be a deacon whenever he was in town.
Bokkie began landscaping the church garden. After weeks of batding the discomfort of gardening in dresses, she was given special permission from the diocese to wear shorts on church property — as long as they reached her knees. A bunch of narrow-mindeds, Bokkie secretly called the town council. Side by side with Old Gilbert she wheeled barrows, dug massive holes and planted hundreds of shrubs. Amongst the trees she planted was the little mustard bush, which shesaid was the worlds slowest growing tree. It would still be small, she told us, even one day when we kids got married in the Dan Pienaar church. If Robbie Merwe and I were anywhere near the school’s fence over break, we could see Bokkie in her long shorts and Old Gilbert in his overalls, bent over the flowerbeds or pushing the lawn mower around the church with its tall steeple.
Soon after we settled into Dan Pienaar, I developed bouts of sneezing that were eventually diagnosed as acute hay fever. The record, counted by Bernice, was twenty-three sneezes consecutively. My eyes would swell up and I began to scratch and rub uncontrollably. When the sneezing and itches became unbearable, Bokkie sometimes drove me down to the beach to swim, the sting of the salt water burning away the itch and bringing at least temporary relief. What allergy I had developed remained a mystery. At Dr Lombardt’s rooms behind Checkers, I went numerous times for all kinds of tests. Eventually, even though we had no medical aid, I was sent to a specialist in Durban who said that the hay fever could somehow be caused by my broad septum — probably from breaking my nose at six. When I grew up I’d have to have a nose operation. For the first time in years we referred back to the fall from the Land Rover.
Next, Dr Lombardt made tens of little pricks on my arms — I wondered whether the stepladder of pricks was going to go up from the pulse all the way to my face — and applied various drops over the punctured skin. A number of these turned into angry welts and it was decided that I was allergic to house dust, dogs, cats’ hair, pollen and grass. The results sounded dreadful to me, for they basically meant I was allergic to my whole world, including Judy the sausage dog. I was given a prescription for antihistamine tablets, which brought on not only the end of the itches and sneezes, but a remarkable calm from within which all the world seemed relaxed and controlled to me. When I went to boarding school, I would take along a huge supply of antihistamine. To my surprise, I never needed the tablets in the Berg, nor on tour anywhere else in the country. Also in Klerksdorp, duringholidays when we visited Aunt Lena and Uncle Joe — where I was surrounded by cats and dogs and an enormous garden full of flowering plants — I never once took a pill. With time I didn’t bother taking the tablets to the Berg. But the moment I set foot in Toti I couldn’t survive without swallowing antihistamine at least once or twice a week. Soon the doctors claimed it had to be something very specific to the Natal coastal climate: maybe the fumes from Shell & BP’s funnels, or the plant at Illovo Sugar Mills, or maybe the ocean itself. Be it as it may, antihistamine alleviated all symptoms and everyone said the hay fever was something I would in time outgrow.
Our neighbours on Dan Pienaar were two Catholic girls who went to Amanzimtoti Senior Secondary with James. They were Mary-Alice and Betty Preston. Mr Preston worked for the municipality and they had a pool in their back yard where we sometimes swam.
My best friends at school remained Robbie Merwe and Felix Van Zyl whom we called Vlakvark for a reason I cannot today fathom. Both were in Voortrekkers with me. After team meetings on Friday afternoons they were allowed to come and play at our house until their fathers collected them around sunset. Robbie told me that the excrement of the Indians — charras, currymunchers — in Chatsworth stank worse than any other human excrement because of the quantities of curry and spices the Indians consumed: ‘It eats away their insides, so they shit out parts of their stomachs and intestines each time they crap. That’s why they’re all so skinny and why their shit stinks so much. Stay upwind from Chatsworth,’ he said.
Many of my leisure moments were spent alone at the edenic Kingsway Bird Sanctuary where I took my books and sat reading. The sanctuary held a number of tortoises and rabbits in pens, while ducks, geese and peacocks roamed free on the lawns and beneath the evergreen trees. Lena would join me and from a hide-out in the bushes we soon started secredy to fish in the lake. Fishing was stricdy prohibited in the sanctuary, but what no one saw couldn’t hurt us.
I got my first non-family kiss in the sanctuary, around ten, from Alette who was then twelve. She lay down beside me in the grass and allowed me to stick my hand into her pants and feel her poefoe, like a snail, sticking pleasantly to my fingers. I was stiff and she stuck her hand into my pants and we looked at each others and when she asked whether it was my first time I said yes, it was. There was no need, I thought, to tell her about the little scrubbings with Stephanie or Patty Pierce.
Lena and I also became friends with Glenn and his sister Thea who lived right up Dan Pienaar. Glenn was in class with Lena and Thea with me. After homework we four went to the bird sanctuary or played touch rugby or the catching game. When Bok was home from safari, he played cricket with us and taught all of us and cousin James how to bowl overhand. Great was my delight to discover that Thea did ballet, an activity that had captivated my imagination from Stephanie’s days as a dancer. Stephanie had recently quit, because, as Aunt Siobhain said, she was now interested only in boyfriends. I begged Bok to let me take ballet classes with Thea in Athlone Park. Bok said I could slip into tights and start ballet as soon as I wanted — over his dead body. I hated him for it.
Above Thea s bed was a poster of the greatest ballet dancer in the world. Pretending to go to the toilet I’d leave the touch rugby games we played to gaze at Margot Fonteyn. She had white feathers in a band around her ears, her breasts were tiny, almost flat, and her long legs jutted out of a white ballet tutu, ending below the silk-laced ankles in slippers on what Thea called ‘point’. This was her in
Swan Lake,
though to me she always looked more like a flamingo than a swan. It never crossed my mind to ask what made Margot Fonteyn great, the greatest. That seemed self-evident from her grace and beauty on Thea’s wall. At home I practised in the passage, almost breaking my toes as I tried to land on point from jumps. Down the passage I danced and spun, knocking my knees against the walls, pretending I was Margot Fonteyn. In the Toti library I came upon a bookwith large ballet photos, and there I saw old grainy shots of Vaslav Nijinsky and a handsome man with flaring nostrils and a wild fringe that made him look like a horse. Rudolf Nureyev. These were the first male ballet dancers Id seen: in tights, muscular, white, their scrotums pulled into swallows’ nests where their legs joined. And Nureyev looked wild, like an animal. I wanted to be him. In one photograph he had his bushy hair pulled back by a nylon Alice band and on another by what looked like a hairclip to keep his hair from tumbling into his eyes. I wished we had the money to go to the Alhambra to see NAPAC’s ballet where Mrs Willemse tookThea during ‘the season. Now I wanted to see male dancers. I took the book from the library and showed Bokkie the photographs of Nureyev flying through the air in
Spartacus,
of Nijinsky prostrate and painted in the
Afternoon of the Faun.
I asked her whether she would ask Bok a last time whether I couldn’t just try ballet once or twice. If I weren’t the best in the class I’d stop. I promised. She said no, I’d heard what my father had had to say on the subject and she herself didn’t think it a good idea for a boy to do ballet anyway. And what’s more, best for me to stop gesturing so wildly with my hands when I spoke, because that could also create all sorts of suspicions. And if I didn’t stop she would ask my teachers to tie my hands to my chair. And she’d heard that boys who did ballet only ended up being full of sights. And that wouldn’t look good in a big boy like me. I wondered if I were smaller, not as tall, whether maybe then I’d be allowed to dance.
Some afternoons Mary-Alice and Betty came over, but they were prohibited from playing touch rugby as Mrs Preston didn’t want them breaking bones or being scarred for life. At their house I was introduced to the music of their idols Donny and Jimmy Osmond and David Cassidy, whose denim-clad bodies and faces adorned the Preston girls’ walls. At receiving my first pair of bell-bottom jeans — hand-me-downs from James — I begged to have purple and orange braid sown all around the floppy bottoms but Bokkie said only drug addicts and hippies wore braid. May I have a peace sign then, Ibegged, but Bernice said they’d learnt at Sunday school that a peace sign was a broken cross — symbol of the Antichrist. No, a witch’s foot, said Lena. What about Stephanie, I cried, she has a peace sign on her jeans. Well, the whole family knows where she’s heading, Bokkie said. Only when James got new jeans with gold and silver braid in a man-dala pattern did Bokkie reluctantly give in and allow braid — a very narrow blue strip with white traingles — around the hems of my bell-bottoms.
I developed — from all my reading, Aunt Siobhain said — the gift of the gab. It stood me in good stead on the neighbourhood streets where there was a form of open warfare between the English boys of Amanzimtoti Senior Secondary and us Afrikaners from Kuswag.
‘Afrikana, rotten banana,’ they hollered at us. And I, in perfectly modulated English, would retort: ‘We can change to the Queen’s English whenever we want, but barring plastic surgery you will never be able to change your ugly faces.’
‘Oh, listen to the little professor!’ one of the English boys would smirk.
‘Rather a professor than a poofter!’ I’d sneer.
‘Listen who’s talking, you little naff. Big talk in front of your sister!’
‘Rather humiliating when a girl is your physical superior, isn’t it?’ I again spoke in exaggerated vowels, standing closer to Lena, putting my arm around her who would never, under other circumstances, have indulged such displays from me to her.
‘Rockspiders, that’s what you Dutchmen are. Go back to Holland!’ they shouted at us.
‘We were here in 1652, before you rednecks. You only came in 1820, why don’t you go back to England, imperialists!’ I barked.
After once beating up James at school, the English gang sent a message with him that I was going to fall on my face if they ever got hold of me alone. I felt sorry for James. Being our cousin in the
English school could not be easy. Yet, blood, so we knew, was thicker than water. Despite his pleas for me to stop calling his schoolmates names, I persisted, becoming more and more scathing and sarcastic. The gang rode past 21 Dan Pienaar on their racing bikes, and we would stop our cricket or touch-rugby game and stand in our yard, yelling abuse at them. When they turned their bikes and tried to come onto our property we threatened to call the police.
