Karoo Boy (7 page)

The braai meat we find next door in the Karoo Slaghuis. The butcher’s apron, dark blue with white kudu stripes, is smeared with blood.

Butcher: Karoo lamb is juicier—

Saw:
vuzzzz

A chop, bread-slice thick, drops from the teeth of the saw onto newspaper.

Butcher: and sweeter—

Saw:
vuzzzz

Butcher: and cheaper—

Saw:
vuzzzz

Butcher: than down in Cape Town.

Saw:
vuzzzz

The butcher plops the newspapered chops and a coil of boere-wors on the counter and wipes his hands on his apron. Under the glass of the counter, meat spiced a vivid orange is threaded on sticks like Hawaiian flowers.

Overhead a fly, lured to a pink bar of light, dies in a spit of flame.

Butcher: Enjoy it.

At the Kommaweer bottlestore, my mother runs in for a sixpack of Castle dumpies.

– Too hot to drink red wine, she chirps cheerfully to Hope and me as she hops into Indlovu again.

9 Mimosa Road: the walls a dirty white, red paint peeling on the wavy zinc roof. A dry bougainvillaea forms a canopy over the stoep. The house looks bare after our house in Muizenberg, where hibiscus and frangipani and Pride of India hid it from the street. A lone, thirsty jacaranda casts sketchy shade in the yard. The house has an abandoned, cursed air to it. No wonder it is cheap.

A gaunt, raggedy-feathered bird perches on the roof. Chaka barks at the bird and it flaps away in gangly flight.

VERKOOP slants red across the TE KOOP sign. A Mevrou van Zyl from next door comes over with the keys and a melktert she has baked for us.

– It is a change to have folk from Cape Town come to us. Usually folk work their fingers to the bone in the hope of a place by the sea one day, she says, shaking her head.

– Yes, it is beautiful by the sea, my mother smiles sweetly.

Then why on earth are we in this far-flung, voetsak dorp? I wonder.

– Ou Willem, God rest his soul, dreamed of dying there by the sea in Onrus with his mouth full of geelbek fish.

The buffalo grass sends out snaky runners across the yard in the hope of finding water. The skull of a kudu bull is nailed to the stoep wall.

– Ja-nee. He had to do with tinned sardines, she laughs.

I sense it is a joke she has told before. I hear mice, or rats, skitter away through the tangle of bougainvillaea. Black ants drip down from the skull. So, some things survive.

Our neighbour on the other side from Mevrou van Zyl is the rugby field on the corner. Though it is midsummer, boys are playing rugby. The buffalo grass under their feet fades to cowskin patches of dust. Chaka pees against the fence to mark his turf and then races up and down the fence to bark at the boys.

The barefoot boys stop their playing for a moment to stare at the stranger and his crazy dog, but then they play on, ignoring Chaka and me. The boys are lithe and sinewy. There is something jaunty and cocksure in the way they drop a shoulder before spinning out a pass. The flick of a hand to glide the ball. I sense in the stirred-up dust of impala feet that the boys are born of the earth.

Though they know I am there they do not call out to me. In a way, I am glad because I have never had an instinct for the zigzag bounce of a rugby ball. Just as I have never foreseen which way life will tack. It is all random to me. A fluke ball kills Marsden. A blind corner throws up a band of baboons. A whim casts us into exile in the desert.

A shiver ripples through me because the Klipdorp boys look so hard and because fate is so haphazard. There are six coral seeds in my pocket and I finger them as if counting out an over in cricket.

I see the bird is back on the roof. I reckon it is a buzzard, or a vulture of some kind. I throw a stone at it and the bird jerks into flight again as the stone clatters on the zinc.

– What on earth? calls my mother, jutting her head out of a window.

– It was a buzzard. Or a vulture, I lamely mutter.

– Oh for God’s sake, Douglas, leave the poor bird alone.

My mother’s head is gone again. One moment she wants to shoot Chaka for barking, then she feels pity for a buzzardy bird.

I turn to mend a hole in the fence so that Chaka does not run out. From across the street, a barefoot, tanned girl watches me. Sun flames her tangling, gypsy hair, casting her face in shadow. Sunlight filters through the cloth of her dress, revealing the inside of her legs like a secret.

I abandon the wiring. I want to do something eye-catching to hold her gaze. I pick up a dry jacaranda pod that looks like the hard shell of a river crab. It has a good weight in my hand and would be good for skimming and skipping over water.

Sunflared deep resin pool in the Berg River. The trout stay down in the shadows. Dirkie, Marsden and I, we know they are there and we flick the fly hooks in and out to tease them out. Flisk flisk, the fly whisks past my ear. But the fish stay in hiding. We drop the fly rods for flat stones to skip over the river. Dirkie is the skipper king with fourteen hops.

I toss the pod for Chaka to chase. He catches it in his teeth as it falls, claws up dust on the turn and jikas his head as if gulleting a rabbit. I imagine the girl awed by my cold-blooded dog. But when I look again the barefoot girl is gone. I feel marooned.

Tossing a jacaranda pod to hook a girl. You bloody fool.

His stub ablur, Chaka chews the pod at my feet. Dumb cur. I feel an urge to hurt him, to hear him yelp for being so blind to my feelings.

I kneel to drink from the raintank tap. The water is sour.

I find a ladder in the garage and climb to the top of the tank and peer over the rim to see if something has fallen in to sour it.

A mangy dog-hide floats in a reflected sky. The reek floods my head and I feel dizzy. The ladder sways. The tank pitches away from me and the sun races across the sky. I am Icarus falling into the sea. It will be cool and deep.

But there is no sea under me and the earth is as hard as clay fired in a kiln. I am dead, until I feel Chaka’s slobber on my face.

Hope thinks death has swooped down on us again and cries out to God:

– Tixo Tixo Tixo.

My mother comes running out, drops to her knees and scoops my head up in her lap.

I feel the lilt of the dog-water in my stomach and want to be sick. The earth tilts again and I cling to my mother.

– There is a dead dog in the tank, I tell her.

– Yo yo yo, Madam, whines Hope. This is bad magic.

– This is no juju, says my mother, just local boys trying to scare us away.

She combs her fingers through the long strands of my lemon-juiced hair. I recall my father’s lifeless hand on my head at dusk on the rocks and begin to cry because there is no father to chase jinxes away, or to bury dead dogs. My mother holds my head to her breasts, as she did on Christmas day. Over her head I see the buzzard land on the roof again.

When the water runs dry I tie a handkerchief, bandit-style, over my nose and mouth to dull the stink. I climb the ladder again to fish the rotting dog out with a wire hook. Now that I get a good look at it, I see that it is not a dog, but a jackal.

Long Beach. Marsden and I are five. We find a dead duiker in the dunes with maggoty eyeballs and crabs scuttling to hide in the gaping stomach. One brave crab creeps out, pincers up. We pee on it.

I dig by the fence, watched by the beady-eyed buzzard. The jackal lies dead in the sun, and flies buzz around. Chaka, usually full of bravado, hides on the stoep. He smells that the jackal is a wild thing.

The earth is too hard by the fence and I give up and dig where the tankwater has drained. The spade sinks deeper this time. I dig fast and then use the spade to shovel the jackal towards the hole. The spade cuts into his pelt, and blood and water ooze out of a gill slit. I vomit on the grass. My head reels and I use my hands now to drop the jackal in the shallow hole. I claw sand in with my fingers.

Then I climb down into the rain tank to scrub it free of scum.

Oom Jan’s farm. Dirkie and I squeeze through a hole in a big steel wine vat to scrub it out for pocket money. Marsden is too scared and we taunt him, calling him moffie, moffie, our voices warping, echoing in the vat.

I wonder, as I scrub, if stranded seagulls and buzzards and drowned jackals are signs that death and misfortune have not stayed in Muizenberg under the eye of Bessie Malan, but followed us here, riding the roof with Hope’s caged, scruffy chickens.

The kitchen window sill is a clutter of teas: not the Joko or Five Roses you find in shops but Darjeeling and Red Zinger and Ceylon. Teas sent by my mother’s friends from around the world, the parcels torn and taped up again by the customs men to check it is not dagga or something evil from overseas.

My mother brews some rooibos tea to still my stomach. I carry the smoking mug through echoing rooms to my bare bedroom with the window to the rugby field. Until the orange corduroy sofa arrives by rail, I am to sleep on the floor. My books tumble from the crocodileskin suitcase I inherited from Grandpa Thomas. I can still make out his ports of call, stamped in black ink: Cairo, Zanzibar, Lourenço Marques, Durban, Cape Town.

I stack the books against the wall in a corner:

The Old Man and the Sea
, with the old school stamp and a seagull feather in it.

Cry, the Beloved Country
, hiding the postcard I stole from my father’s drawer of a mermaid with bare breasts. I wonder how the photographer got her skin to blend into fish scales under her bellybutton. I imagine Marta naked, her tangling red hair coiling down like wisteria to hide the nipples of her budding breasts. I hide the mermaid inside the slow sad book again, feeling guilty I have harboured so sinful an image when Marsden is dead.

To Kill a Mockingbird
. A fishmoth falls from the binding. I smudge it dead under my finger.

Of Mice and Men
. Though I have read it half a dozen times, I still cry when Candy’s blind and stinking dog is shot.

My father’s fingered copy of
The Outsider
: I open it at random and read the note pencilled in the margin:
In the eyes of M. all experience is equal. Whether he stays in Africa or goes to Europe is irrelevant. One existence is as good as another.
I wonder if it is irrelevant for Miss Forster whether she is in Cape Town or in Amsterdam. Somehow I feel sorry for her living in a cold, flat city. I feel a longing for her, like a longing for KitKat when you have been surfing for hours.

I spark my father’s Zippo and picture him docked off the east coast of Africa, sipping a lonely whiskey, dreaming of me, Dee, longboard boy.

Dark glides in through the window and dams in the room. I sit alone in the dark, surrounded by the dark. Outside, the sky is still blue, tinged with pink. There is a scratching sound. I think there are rats in the roof. Then quiet again. Then I hear the humming of telegraph wires plucked by a dusk wind.

Against the black screen of my drooping eyelids I see my father and Marsden and me at sea on the Hobie Cat. My father’s hand rests on the tiller and the sun is in his hair. He is carefree and Marsden and I hike out, our backs skimming the water. The sail is drumskin taut. Then he lets the sail out an inch and the Hobie keels, dipping Marsden and me under a wave. It is a game he loves to play.

I zippo the
Cape Times
from the unpacked Indian teaboxes, and the pyramid of firewood catches. It is the first time I have ever braaied, because my father always used to braai. I turn the coil of boerewors all the time to make sure it does not burn. I feel like a man, with the tongs in one hand and a beer in the other.

Hope is to eat with us, although she usually eats alone in her khaya off her yellow enamel dish that she keeps under the kitchen sink. My mother gives her a china plate. You can tell it is a big thing for Hope to eat off china, as she keeps brushing her skirt with one hand, flattening her spongy hair with the other.

We all drink Castle out of the bottle, something my mother used to say was uncivilised. The world has turned on its head and I feel giddy as I stare into the firelit amber of the beer.

I listen for the soothing radio static of the sea and the zither of mosquitoes. Instead there is the zing of crickets and the call of an owl. Somewhere in the distance, there is a volley of gunshots. A farmer shooting at a jackal or a stray dog. A policeman shooting at a stonethrower.

I imagine the barefoot girl alone in the zinging, Karoo night, spinning on a koppie under the scattered stars.

Inside, the house is empty of memory. Outside, frenzied moths dive at the street lamp.

It is good to feel the seeds of the coral tree in my pocket.

T
HE SCHOOL IS IN
Palm Straat, a palmless street of trimmed flower-beds, scarecrow gnomes and birdhouse postboxes. There is a brick wall around the schoolyard that makes it look like a jailyard. Although Klipdorp is just a dorp, boys and girls come to school from the farms round about and board in the hostels. I am called a dayboy. I am free to go out of the school walls during break, when the boarders have their tea and sandwich in the hostels.

An unscared crow perches on the wall, catching torn corners of sandwich flipped to him by clowning kids.
Kaah kaah kaah,
goes the crow.

Counting crows:
one for sorrow, two for joy, three for girls and four for boys
.

When the bell goes, the crow flaps off. The boys and girls jostle into rows, to be marched to the hall. Because I stand apart, a teacher snaps at me. So I fall in, and follow gleaming black shoes into the hall, a PT gym. There are no chairs, just rungs to climb the walls and ropes hanging from the roof, so we sit cross-legged on the floorboards. The looped ropes remind me of hangings in cowboy films.

When the headmaster, Meneer van Doorn, comes in, we stand. His black hair is slicked into combed rows to hide his baldness. His cheeks are hollow and his skin sallow. He scowls for the fidgeting to end.

– Good morning, school. You may be seated.

We all sit.

– Will Douglas Thomas stand.