Moffie (2 page)

 

T
his is it. The time has come . . . Waiting for my mother to call me, I am aware of a depression that has settled in the sad morning light of the curtained room. My knees are pulled up into the hollow under my chest. I am lying still, hardly making an imprint on the mattress. So terrified am I that I have not moved from this position all night.

The light reflects off the wood-panelled walls onto my blue tog bag. In it is the kit we've been instructed to take. A narrow shaft of light through a slit in the curtain becomes distorted over the objects in the room. It is like a door opening into the room; instead of me passing through it, it passes over me. If I close my left eye I can make the light jump forward, then back again when I open it and close my right eye. I am too afraid to look at my watch.

Outside the sounds that find their way into the room are as familiar as ever: the almost human murder-screams of the pigs being fed, the birds chattering before immersing their wings in the first morning light, the murmur of the farm labourers on their way to work.

When there is such drastic change, surely everything else should also adjust to the altered state? When one steps into misery, all else should follow suit, for it could mean the destruction of a soul.

The familiar sound of my mother's footsteps on the wooden staircase, the first three steps of wood on brick, and then the hollow sound of suspended wood as she turns the corner. On the wall above this corner is a drawing of a blue beach buggy with impossibly wide tires, the wheels turned in boyish expectation. In the right-hand bottom corner my name is signed.

People have a rhythm, born from an internal tempo; or perhaps it is the ratio of their skeletons to their weight. It is as unique as the markings on a finger. I know my mother's sound like a calf knows the blazes on its mother. With her comes the scratching sound of my dog's nails as she jumps from tread to tread. My mother will say, ‘Rise and shine!' and then Dot will jump on the bed and my mother will say, ‘No-no, off-off!'

Two years. Two years! Today the knock on the door is different, my voice is different, unwilling, but the door opens with the same ride on its hinges. The Defence Force hasn't got to my dog yet. That will only happen tomorrow when she rushes up the stairs and doesn't find me in this bed.

Where will I be tomorrow when she comes looking for me? Where will the train be when she starts whimpering for my mother to open the door? In the bent reflection of my chrome lampshade my mother stands.

‘It's time, my boy.'

‘I know.'

As I am pulled into myself, I swing my legs over the side of the bed, bring my body up and sit on the edge, bent over.

 

While I'm getting dressed I look through the window at the valley. Above the house the strong mountains hug my separation. On the one side the morning light layers colours across the cliffs. On the other side the mountains are dark, heavy against the bright blue sky. Smoke from the labourer's cottages has drifted over the narrow road and lies amongst the peach trees like a phantom horizon below which the other world can still be seen. Outside my room is the large molehill-pimpled lawn that I've so hated mowing on Saturdays.

I walk down the wooden stairs to the smell of egg and a noise from the portable radio that no one seems to be listening to.

Bronwyn is not-having-to-go smug, and my father is happy that I am going to be taught some lessons—lessons he could never teach me, lessons I refused to learn: his doctrine, blastfrozen in Calvinistic self-convincing, a safety belt of dogma and fear.

What is certain is that I will suffer, mainly because of my views, my unwillingness, my desires. Only my mother feels sympathy. Her love is larger than politics and the threat of communism taught by my school and my father. Now she only sees her son being sent to war, and nothing is more important.

‘You must eat, Nicholas. It will make you feel better and you don't know when you will get food again. How long is the train journey to Middelburg?'

‘I think three days.'

‘Nonsense, two days at the most,' says my father, who always repudiates whatever I say.

‘The train stops at every station to pick up conscripts.'

‘Still, it won't take three days.'

I don't argue.

‘Come, eat just a little. Can I get you something else?'

‘No, he will eat what you've given him or nothing. Too bloody spoilt, that's his problem.'

‘No thanks, Mom, I'm really not hungry.'

‘Leave him, Suzie, if he doesn't eat he'll faint, like the sissy he is.'

At this my sister giggles and she and my father grin at each other. Yellow egg yolk drips from his bottom lip and runs down his chin.

‘I'm just glad it's not my job to get you into shape. I feel sorry for those instructors.' He chuckles, looking at my sister for support.

‘For heaven's sake, Peet, Nicholas is leaving today! Why make it unpleasant?'

‘The sooner they whip some discipline into him the better.'

The egg has coagulated on his chin, settling in his goatee, stopping its movement just below his smirk.

‘You are going to see how the real world works, my boy,' he says to me, and then to all of us, ‘It's going to be good for him. Best thing to get boys away from their mothers' apron strings. Little babies. At your age I was a man.'

How dare he talk like this? What does he know? He never went to the army. It is his government, it is what he stands for, that I have to go and defend. I am going to fight for him! The thought churns my empty, knotted stomach.

‘I don't believe in what I'm being forced to do.'

‘Please, let's not get into that now.' But our anger is larger than my mother's pleading.

‘It's your bloody government that you voted for that I now have to fight to protect!' My sister, two years my junior but in her third-parent capacity, says, ‘Don't say bloody.' She knows this will irritate me.

Again my mother tries to keep the peace while my father with the egg on his face lectures me on politics in between insults. So I retaliate. Then he calls me a moffie and I say, ‘If I am one, I am what you have made me.'

When he lashes out, it is a split-second lapse of restraint rather than a calculated attack. It is a strike-and-grab blow, the corner of the table preventing his full weight from following his fist and allowing just enough time for my mother's pleas to stop the attack. But the blow is strong enough to knock me off my chair.

I sit on the mottled, dusty carpet supporting myself with one arm, the other hand stopping the blood dripping from my nose. There is a measure of freedom in my anger, for it is stronger than my fear. In the kitchen doorway my dog cowers, ears flat and eyes darting between my father and me. I get up and go to the bathroom.

Behind me my mother is crying. This is what brings regret; she hardly ever cries. They are arguing—I hear her anger through her tears. They are arguing about him hitting me just before my leaving for the army. What if I don't come back? How will he feel then? The part I hate to hear is, ‘And how can you call your own son that? You should be ashamed of yourself!'

‘What?'

‘You know what I mean, Peet.'

‘You mean a moffie?'

‘Yes, it's the most despicable thing you can call anybody, never mind your own son!'

‘You know what I meant.'

‘What did you mean?'

‘I meant he is a sissy, not a homo.'

‘Well, you should know better. I never want to hear that word in this house again. Sissy is bad enough.'

‘Well, he is one, and I hope they flog it out of him in the army. I sure as hell have had no luck with him.'

Between my arms supporting me on the edge of the basin, blood drips into the running water. A dark red drop sucks from my nose. As it hits the water, it expands into a stringy, paler red and then spirals down into the drain. In it I detect frail, slimy mucus.

I see myself framed in the mirror. A red streak flows from my right nostril. Some blood makes its way over my lip and I suck it into my mouth, tasting the metal and salt. Behind the rage in the mirror is my mother.

‘When the bleeding stops we must go.' She keeps quiet for a while. Between a sigh and a sob she says she thinks it's a good thing that my father and I will be separated for a while. I know she hopes that time will bring change.

But we have crossed an invisible line, like a layer between two temperatures. So complete is the destruction of this forced kinship, that it cannot be undone.

I feel hate—shocking, driven hate—and I use it as the fuel to face this day. I wish Frank could be here to see me off; I miss him with raw self-pity.

 

They insist on coming to see me off. I question my father and Bronwyn's motives but say nothing.

He leaves the house dressed in his usual fastidious way; no trace of the lack of control that drove his fist into my face. His clothes are drab and outdated. So are his rules, which are to be accepted without question. Beating or mentally abusing your child is condoned, particularly if the child doesn't conform.

We walk to the pale green, spotlessly clean Chevrolet and put my bag in the trunk. It looks small and insignificant. Like my life, I think. The painstaking cleanness reflects this man who is my father, and I see him personified by the car. ‘If you don't keep it clean, you don't respect it.'

I look back at the house through the rear window and try to catch a last glimpse of my dog. She looks forlornly at the car and turns to the spot she has chosen to wait for my return. Near her hangs the box that was the home of two squirrels I had saved and reintroduced to freedom.

As I get out to close the first gate behind us, I see moisture dripping from the exhaust. The smoke and vapour of the cold engine seem to muffle the sound of the idling car. Suddenly everything I see is crucially important, chastising me for my previous indifference, mocking me: And now you are going and we are staying.

To the right of the kitchen door is the table where I stitched my mother's hand after one of the pigs had bitten her. To the left of the gate is the spot where Bennett beat the woman with a piece of pipe and she fell and hit her head on the lawn mower still smelling of freshly cut grass and pulverised dog shit. All my observations are vividly laid out in front of me, waiting to be acknowledged.

We drive past the side of the house in which I have experienced so much sorrow, but now don't want to leave. The structure suddenly looks sad, droopy and empty. But the largest void is Frank-shaped. Touching my tender, swollen lip, I move my finger up into my nose and pick at the caked blood. Then we are through the second gate.

Once we've crossed the last bridge, the gravel road ends, the rattling stops and we accelerate on the asphalt bordered by the greenery that shelters this winding road out of the valley.

On the left is the old tree trunk where we used to wait for the school bus. We round the slow bend past Van Breda's packing shed and I turn around to look back, not caring about Bronwyn's malicious pleasure.

Through the back window I stare back at Banhoek, stainless in the morning light and slightly warped by the curve of the glass.

Every inch of the road out of the valley is layered with tiny adventures: the popping sound of jacaranda blossoms as I cycle over them, pockets of air with different temperatures and smells of the rich valley life, the late afternoon sun on closed eyelids. Yes, I love this valley; it's what happened to me here that scarred. Strange that it never tainted the place—but then, it is so incredibly beautiful.

And through it all runs the cord of sexual discovery. How mortified he would be if he knew about the sex, his son's exploration of the unmentionable, the other races. Yes, to him that would be the ultimate evil.

‘The heart is dirty.' This is what the black woman said about my parents, right there, at that very spot, when I caught up with her as she was leaving the valley after being fired, ostensibly for stealing. Is this how she felt when she spoke to the little snot-nosed child clinging to her with a fistful of her skirt? She, too, didn't know what was waiting for her outside the valley.

I have learnt so much here: a new kind of love, the first hate. A hate that had started way back but had broken soil here—all part of my initiation between these mountains. Acne, alcohol, sex, religion, loss, revolution, assault, no rights, failure and fantasy, all of it learnt here. But the torture, that's what I will never forget, the soul-scarring realisation that I am what I have feared and prayed I wouldn't be.

 

We pass the shop with its dry wooden floors and high shelves, old glass display counters with cheap jewellery and sweets. I recall the sounds of the trading mingled with the smell of soap and paraffin in the dimly lit room.

The owner was murdered here when the revolution reached the valley. At that time death seemed so distant, only for the old and tired. Death was for others, but now it seems so close. For two years I will be on the vehicle of its pursuit.

There is little conversation in the car. In front of Bronwyn our father sits neatly. Far to the opposite side our mother looks small and withdrawn.

 

Over and over in my head I feel-hear the words, ‘This must stop, this must stop!' Then it becomes a plea. ‘Please, please, dearest Lord, I beg of you, let something happen, anything, for this to stop.'

When we turn down into Helshoogte, the valley of my youth becomes obscured and I catch sight of Table Mountain in the distance; where I will board the train . . . today.

 

A pool of parents, family and friends has formed on the platform. We enter the station in rough formation after having enrolled at the Castle, and we walk towards our families. They probably still see us as the same people, but on the threshold of our departure we have already been altered—spirits now, walking amongst them, touching them in conversation, but they don't own us any longer.