Kitchen Boy (7 page)

An old memory slips into her head, as it has been doing more often these days. What would her life have been like if Maurice had come back? She remembers that night on the screened sleeping veranda where a bed had been made up for him. Johnny was packing his kitbag next door, and their parents were asleep on the far side of the house. Maurice’s pleading hissed in her ear. ‘Please, Barbs. You’ve got to let me do it. I might be killed and I’ve never done it. Please, Barbs. You’re the only girl I can ask.’

‘Do you love me?’ The age-old bleat of a cajoled woman. She was fifteen and he was leaving for war in the morning.

‘Of course. Yes. I love you. Come on, please, just let me –’ Beseeching as his hands burrowed into her bra and slid up her thighs. ‘Please, Barbs. I love you. My folks love you. I’ll marry you when I get back. Please. Now.
Now.
’

Maurice was a sugar farmer’s son; he and Johnny had gone to boarding school together, so she’d known him for years. Of course she’d let him do it: a furtive coupling that was over in minutes and left her feeling sticky and used. Barbara Kitching, ex-virgin, sucker for sweet talk. If he’d come home, she could have been a sugar farmer’s wife living in luxury, instead of a lonely old elocution teacher with nothing but vivid memories. As she mouths the words of the hymn, she is dying for a cigarette.

‘He will make good his right – to be a pilgrim.’ The organ and the voices pause again, then forge on, ‘Since, Lord, thou dost defend – us with thy spirit –’

On the other side of Barbara, Dr Bridget Kitching listens to her breathing. There’s a noticeable buzz of emphysema, not surprising after all those years of smoking. It’s crazy the way people persist with dangerous habits.

Bridget has her own demons to deal with today. J J gave her hell about abandoning Hugh and Sam when she went back to medicine and joined a team researching multi-drug-resistant TB at King George V Hospital.

‘I didn’t abandon them. Don’t you remember that Hugh divorced me? And of course Sam stayed.’

‘You started the rot by leaving them in the lurch. Damn poor show.’ And he’d refused to have anything more to do with her.

She looks at her son, scowling as he walks up the aisle next to his grandfather’s coffin. He used to see a lot of the old man. He must be feeling bereft and he’s only twelve. She decides that she and Hugh have to make plans. His marriage to Neli won’t last, and where will Sam be then? Doubly divorced.

‘We know we at the end – shall life inherit. Then fancies flee away – I’ll fear not what men say –’

You can tell who among the congregation were at English-speaking schools: they emphasise the t’s in ‘not what’ to make it sound like a staccato ‘pot-shot’. It was something you did to irritate the teaching staff who stood glaring round the edges of school assemblies.

Lin wonders whether kids are still doing it and reminds herself to ask Sam later. The pall-bearers have come to a standstill, with the coffin in place below the steps leading up to the high altar. Sam stands in front of Herbie, his boy’s hair sticking up and his neck straining out of a grey blazer that he has outgrown. This walk next to his dead Grampa must have been a tough ordeal for him.

She moves forward and reaches for his hand as the organ swells and the voices of the congregation rise to the rafters in a triumphal ‘I’ll labour night and day – to be a pilgrim.’

Sam lets his aunt squeeze and then hang on to his hand, thinking that she needs the reassurance after the grim walk up the aisle. There aren’t any boys watching to mock him later. The congregation is mostly old, except for the rugby guys. His eyes have strayed sideways from Grampa’s coffin to the Springboks and Sharks players whose autographs would give him major cred at school. If they stand around outside after the service, maybe he can ask them to sign something. But what? He’s not carrying any paper. He decides to use an Order of Service with Grampa’s photo on the front. That’d be cool.

‘– im – im – imm – imm –’ The echoes die away to silence in the cavernous space bounded by columns and stained-glass windows.

Today’s outjies want petrol money and say it is too far to come to practice. In my day I used to ploeg all day on Fridays and then drive my John Deere 25 miles to practice.

– A Schweizer-Reneke farmer, in G
RAHAM
J
OOSTE
’
S
Rugby Stories from the Platteland

J J had been a good rugby player at school and in the prison camp matches, and, after a season of playing with the combat-savvy Survivors B Team, he was damn good. He could run on the wing like a springhare, jinking and stiff-arming tacklers as he hurtled for the try line. He was chosen for the university A Team, the Lily-Whites, then for Pietermaritzburg, and in his third year for Natal.

When the All Blacks came on tour in 1949, he was among the hundred and twenty players chosen to attend the Pretoria trials organised by a national selection panel that included Danie Craven. There were doubts about the choice of players. There hadn’t been any tests since the beginning of the war, and the provincial games were patchy.

J J’s luck held. He’d gone home after the trials and was sitting next to the wireless in the lounge with Dot and Barbara on the Saturday evening when the team was announced, starting with ‘Die Springbokspan is soos volg –’ The second-to-last name was J J Kitching.

Victor had been pacing up and down with the dregs of his fourth gin and tonic. He stopped and let out a ‘Fucking marvellous!’ before stumbling to the drinks trolley again.

Dot embraced her son, murmuring, ‘My champion. Well done.’

Barbara, home for the weekend, clutched her throat and made gagging gestures behind her mother’s back. But he could see she was pleased. She’d grown into a young woman in New Look frocks and nylons, with an actor boyfriend who talked like Noël Coward and wore a white silk scarf with his tux. There were moments when J J had to restrain himself from punching the man’s smug civilian face.

‘Shot, Johnny,’ she said later, when they’d escaped Victor’s usual evening rant and were sitting on the veranda steps watching fireflies flit among the aloes in the rockery. She’d thought they were fairies until the night he and Bobby caught some in a jar and showed her the unremarkable little winged insects, their abdomens tipped with an eerie pulsing green. ‘See? Just goggas with tiny little torches going on and off in their bums.’

‘But where do the batteries go?’ she’d asked, mystified.

J J and Bobby fell about laughing and she’d felt stupid and gullible.

He was no longer the impatient boy who had rushed off to war, but a driven man who trained obsessively and basked in the roar of a rugby crowd. Hands-off with women, though. ‘They just want to trap you,’ he’d say. Men gathered around him at parties, ignoring the hopeful girls. Barbara had wanted to introduce him to her friends – he was a real catch – but he said he didn’t have time for complications.

After he was chosen for the 1949 Springboks, South African Breweries in Durban offered him a job as a salesman which would give him all the latitude he needed to go on playing for his country. He left university the next day, saying, ‘Thank God for that. I was bloody bored stiff.’

His boss was a sapper who had joined up at thirty, been taken prisoner at Halfaya Pass, and then spent three-and-a-half years in POW camps in Italy and Germany. He had a nervous tic in his right eye and no time for fools. They stuck together, the war-damaged.

The cheery hit song that year was ‘I’m looking over a four-leafed clover’. As if everything was all right with the world again. As if.

The gravel road opened onto a clearing and they faltered to a stop, a line of scarecrows in worn-out uniforms, gaping at the great log chalet. ‘Go!’ The guards prodded them forward with rifles.

B
ISHOP
C
HAUNCEY ASCENDS THE STEPS IN FRONT
of the high altar, resplendent in a cope of purple brocade set off by billowing sleeves of snowy lawn. He inclines his mitre towards the crucifix and veers to face the congregation, changing course like a galleon in full sail, his jewelled pectoral cross heavy as an anchor on its gold chain.

By his side, Reverend George does an abrupt rotation, playing up the contrast in his role as the people’s priest. His black cassock is overlaid with a k-sheeting tunic embroidered with Zulu motifs by women parishioners in KwaMashu.

Two microphones on long stalks dangle above the two priests.

‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live,’ the bishop intones, ‘and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’

Shirley thinks: John stopped believing in God after the war, so where does that leave him? Just plain dead. It’s not fair. This is all wrong. Good people should go to heaven, whatever they believe.

Hugh is still standing next to the coffin with the other pall-bearers, all of them uncertain what to do next. He wonders if the King James Bible translators had written these Church of England services. While researching Jacobean plays, he’d paged through the Book of Common Prayer and discovered some gems: ‘A Commination or Denouncing of God’s Anger and Judgments Against Sinners’; ‘Tables and Rules for the Moveable and Immoveable Feasts’; ‘The Ministration of Baptism to Such as are of Riper Years and Able to Answer for Themselves’. Even a ‘Table to Find Easter-Day from the Present Time Till the Year 2199 Inclusive’. That was looking ahead, for sure.

Purkey and Clyde have moved up the side aisle on the left like two giant cockroaches – one portly short, one gangly – and are now standing in the shadows, their hands cupped over their flies. Clyde finds it hard to keep still. He clatters his tongue stud against his teeth and his little finger plays with the metal tag of his trouser zip. Purkey wishes he could send him outside, but respectful attendance is crucial to the Digby & Smith superior interment service. The pall-bearers need to sit down now. He catches the eye of the Reverend, who flaps a hand to indicate that they should take their seats. Retief Alberts shuffles to the wheelchair waiting for him at the far end of the Moth pews.

The bishop frowns at the disturbance, but carries on in his fruity voice, ‘And though after my skin worms destroy this body –’

Sam tries not to think of the worms lying in wait to feast on his Grampa. They’d gone fishing in a small boat on Durban Bay once with a squirming mass of earthworms in a billycan. Grampa had shown him how to find them in the garden by digging in the damp earth where Charlie watered his mealies behind the khaya. You’d see a bit of pinkish worm trying to wriggle out of sight, then you’d hook your finger under it and pull, like stretching elastic, until it snapped into your hand: clammy-cold and squirting poo as it writhed.

It was even worse baiting hooks with the boat rocking near the slimy pilings under Maydon Wharf where things lurked in the water. The first time, when he couldn’t keep the worm still, Grampa said, ‘Come on now, boy. Grasp the bloody thing and push the point through one end. Then thread it on from side to side.’ He felt sick when the hook went in and the worm jerked. He looked up and said, ‘I can’t,’ but Grampa barked, ‘Don’t be so wet. It’s just a stupid worm,’ his face all cross.

Later, when Sam could crucify worms without his fingers trembling, Grampa caught a spotted grunter and showed him how to kill it by slicing crossways with his fishing knife through the spine at the back of its head. ‘Most humane way,’ he said as the fish shivered and died. He then turned it over and cut a long slit up its belly to show Sam how to clean it. ‘Pull out the guts with your fingers, like this. Careful of the gills. They’ve got sharp edges. Look.’ He scrabbled in the slithering mass with a knobbly forefinger. ‘These red arcs are the gills. That pale chunk is the heart, still beating. Do you want it?’

Sam steeled himself and said yes, then held the small pulsing lump of flesh in his palm, watching until the pulses slowed and stopped. ‘Do hearts live longer than bodies?’ he asked.

‘No. Usually they give up first and then you die.’ Grampa was busy packing his fishing bag.

‘What is dying, actually?’ Sam wanted to know because a dog he’d loved had died of biliary only a month before.

The old man gave him a sharp look. ‘Just like going to sleep.’

‘But you said some of your friends had a horrible death.’

‘That was different. They were fighting a war. If you’re very sick or your body stops working, dying is like –’ He thought for a bit, then said, ‘Like getting out of a bad place. Getting free.’

Sam looks at his grandfather’s flag-draped coffin in front of the altar, and thinks, Is Grampa free now? Are cemetery worms the same as the ones I used to dig out? How do worms get into coffins and bodies if they don’t have teeth?

Lin feels him shudder and puts her arm round his shoulders.

‘We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.’ The bishop’s hooded eyes trawl the congregation to see who is present. The mayor in one of the raised VIP pews at the back, wearing an orange headwrap that matches the intricate embroidery on her brown shweshwe robe under the mayoral chain. A number of councillors. Rugby representatives. Prominent Durban businessmen. The editors of the
Mercury,
the
Daily News,
the
Natal Witness
and the
Sunday Tribune.
Knots of journalists and photographers. TV news teams. Two pews of Moths. Quite a turn-out for an old man.

Reverend George, poised to take over with Psalm 39, worries about the eulogies. At the planning meeting he’d suggested inviting just the mayor, a representative each from SARU and Breweries, and J J’s friend, Mr Pillay.

‘We must have one of the Moths too,’ Hugh objected.

‘Old men go on too long.’

‘They were his comrades in arms.’

‘A dying generation. Sadly,’ the Reverend added to appease him.

‘A generation that made sacrifices from which we’ve all benefited.’

‘Maybe. But –’

‘Those men went through hell with Dad. People should hear what they have to say.’

‘We don’t have enough time for reminiscences.’