Karoo Boy (21 page)

Though my fear tells me to freestyle ashore, I remember my father’s words: The thing to do is stay calm. Keep your feet under, and frogkick so the shark does not confuse your splashing feet for a wounded fish. If he homes in on you, you sink and stay down till he veers away. If he still wants you, go for his eyes. With sharks and ostriches, go for the eyes.

I realise I do not want to see the house, with other boys’ bicycles on the grass and another maid on the kitchen steps.

I paddle out through the ice-tea surf. The rising sun glints in the empty windows of the weekend train to Cape Town. I stand on a borrowed board. No flicks or tricks. The wave barrels. For a moment, I glide. Then the wave tumbles me. I fight it instead of going with it. Have I forgotten everything? I even forgot to dogleash the board to my foot. As I surface I hear the crack of the board on rock. I wade up out of the water, feeling ashamed.

The nose of the board is torn off and the fibreglass juts out rawly. I sit on the rocks by the broken board, the rocks where Venus came out of the sea. The rock pools are so clear I have to touch to be sure there is water there. A crab has burrowed under the damp sand and only his peppercorn eyes peer out. There is a smell of beached kelp rotting. Savvy seagulls hover above me. I feel sure they can smell the desert in me, Karoo boy.

Dusk in Kalk Bay: I buy red bait and a handline and head for the harbour wall. The sun drops behind the mountain, orange and pink, like oil on the water.

I stare at the bobbing float, amid the dancing red and yellow reflections of the fishing boats and a dry seagull feather breezing over the water. In the rippling, lilting reflections I see my father’s staring, unflinching eyes, lids peeled to bare white eyeballs.

It was not the ragged volley of Chaka’s blunt barks that woke me that night in Muizenberg, four years ago. Nor the listless backyard rap of the other dogs of the neighbourhood. It was a tap on the skin of a tomtom, sent arrowing across the vast Karoo of black space behind my fluttering eyelids.

Though I am scared, I force myself to go on, out the kitchen door, out into the moon-bathed yard.

Hope’s khaya is dark. She is visiting a boyfriend in Langa. Chaka abandons his barking when he sees me, wags his stump of a tail and grins white teeth in the moonlight. Crickets
cheep cheep
over the hazy hiss of the waves. Kamikaze moths orbit the streetlamp. My father’s study door is ajar, leaking yellow glow onto the grass. There is no sound from his study. No tapping of typewriter keys. No Miles Davis or Steely Dan.

I feel Chaka’s hot breath on my calf as the door fans open.

Then my mind fades to black. All the Karoo years long, the spooled images lay in a far dark zone of my mind: latent with memory, yet undeveloped.

Now the images float out of the dark into a lagoon of consciousness:

My father’s gaping eyes.

His blood pooling glutinously as sump oil around his head, across the desk, tinging the typed pages of his unfinished novel.

A bindi of blood on the forehead of the Venus de Milo.

A zizzing fly swimming in the bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

The black gun on the floor, stumpy as a cold black toad.

A tug at the line jerks me back to reality. Bollard reality. The float dives. I wind the gut on to the reel. A seagull caws hopefully. But the fish jigs free. Damn. I have lost the feel for it. I forgot to yank the line so the hook bites deep into the gills. I reel in. The hook is bare of bait.

Again, I stand by my mother on the Kalk Bay harbour wall, twinless boy of fourteen. Again, wind dusts ashes from my mother’s hands, to a soundtrack of seagull cries and muffled voices and radio-static surf. But this other sinking of ash and flower among yawning fish is just a dream, a déjà vu. My flirting, finger-tapping, snake-catching father is not dead, he has just sailed away, up the east coast of Africa, to a place where lions run on the beach. A place where you can write a novel.

I ditch the rest of the red bait into the water. Fish dart at it as it sinks, as they arrowed in on the ashes of a man who dreamed his boys would one day play cricket for the province, the ashes of a head islanded in blood.

I turn my pocket out, and empty the orange coral seeds into the harbour. Lucky beads. Fish surface and, with a flick of fin, swallow an unhooked seed.

Tomorrow I will ride the train into Cape Town and look up Johan Myburgh, my father’s old friend on the newspaper. Perhaps he will find a job for me as coffee boy, the way my father began.

T
HANKS TO:

Daniela, for her intuition. Mia, for her magical laughter.

My folks, for my childhood in Africa. My brother, Dean, for all the frontyard cricket. Tarryn, whose fleeting life was a fiery poem.

Finn Spicer, James Scorer, Tom de Fonblanque, Andrew MacDonald for reading my novel pencil in hand.

Gillian Warren-Brown, Jørgen Heramb, Neil Wetmore, Conrad K., Zane Godwin, Nigel Gwynne-Evans, Andrew Stooke, Tim Volem, Meg Foster, Geoff Roberts, Leon Kandelaars, William Siegfried for their faith.

Alan Paton, for the words which awoke in me the desire to write of Africa. Delarey, beyond the horizon. Emil Holzinger, for the chance to read this novel to life on a hill above Vienna. Isobel Dixon, for her skilled eye and narrative instinct. All my students through the years.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 2004 by Troy Blacklaws

Cover design by Barbara Brown

978-1-4804-1002-2

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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