The Boy Next Door (3 page)

June looked at me, and I pretended to be reading the poster on “Good Hygiene Habits” on the wall.

They started to talk about other things.

When Daddy finished reading
The Chronicle
that evening, I took it out from the basket where Mummy puts all the old newspapers so that she has an ever-ready supply
of papers to line the kitchen drawers and cupboards. Mummy is convinced that the newspaper contains something that repels
cockroaches. I took the front page out. My heart was beating very fast as if I was stealing. I folded the paper over and over
again, and when I was in my room, I put the paper in the pink handbag Aunty Gertrude gave me for Christmas last year.

I kept thinking that if only we had moved from Thorngrove to Baysview in 1978 instead of 1979 I might have seen him. I tried
to imagine how he might have looked like around about my age, what kind of boy he would have been.

Daddy said that even though Mrs. McKenzie was a racist, she was not such a bad person. No one deserved to die in that manner.

In the past year, added Mummy, Mrs. McKenzie had changed. She had even told Mphiri to give us any spare vegetables from their
patch, and she had stopped complaining about the chickens. Anyway, when the municipal police had come round, they had turned
a blind eye because Daddy kept them well supplied with eggs. Mrs. McKenzie had not even made a fuss about the workshop. She
was not the same person who had called us kaffirs when we had first moved in and who had kept calling the municipal police
and the RSPCA over.

The superintendent of the RSPCA, Mrs. Van der Klerk came on a Saturday morning, with two black inspectors. She was very tall
and looked down on everyone she was speaking to, even Daddy.

“I have come to inspect the dogs,” she barked. “We have received numerous complaints about mistreatment at this address. We
are entitled by law to carry out a spot check on any animal’s welfare in any premises within the territory of Rho… Zimbabwe.”

She said all this very fast as if she were firing bullets, and Daddy and Mummy just stood there looking up at her. Even Maphosa
who always had something to say about white people was quiet.

“Where are the dogs?” asked the RSPCA superintendent.

Daddy pointed to Roxy and Tiger who were rolling about at her feet. The superintendent looked down, down at them. She looked
very hard.

I knew what she was thinking. Black people don’t keep dogs like Jack Russells. They keep skinny crossbreeds, big dogs who
are kept hungry so that they are vicious, for guarding property. But Daddy had bought the dogs from a white couple in Montrose
after he had read an article in
The Reader’s Digest
that said Jack Russells, in spite of their size, made excellent guard dogs and required very little upkeep.

“The other dogs,” she said at last. “The ones being mistreated.”

Daddy and Mummy looked at each other.

“These are the only dogs we have,” said Daddy.

The superintendent didn’t believe Daddy because she walked right past him, round to the back of the house to check. The inspectors
followed, then Mummy and Daddy, then Maphosa and me. The superintendent looked and looked. She knelt down and looked deep
into the dogs’ kennel. She even went to Rosanna’s place and then to Maphosa’s. Daddy’s workshop, too. Finally she gave Roxy
some pats on the head and said, “You have very happy dogs,” and then she left.

But still, Mrs. McKenzie was always shouting and screaming at Mphiri, calling him a no good so-and-so, and since Mr. McKenzie
Senior had died, Mphiri would disappear for days on end in his room. Rosanna said that Mphiri complained of headaches and
sometimes his face was a strange color with bumps and swellings. Rosanna said that he was very obviously getting attacked
by the spirit of Mr. McKenzie Senior who was quite angry to be dead and gone and to have his house taken over by the witch.
“Idiot,” said Maphosa quite angry. “Mphiri is an old man. Can you not see that with your two ever-busy eyes? He must be falling
and knocking into things. He should be back home where there is not so much concrete and walling and other unfortunate objects.”

For a long
time, Daddy told the story of the RSPCA lady and her inspectors to anyone who came to visit. He would always conclude by
telling the visitor, if only that fearsome lady had gone over to Thorngrove; she would have had her work cut out for her with
Mr. Rosset and his yard full of underfed crossbreeds.

In Thorngrove (the raw coloreds called it Groove Town), I had a black dog called Rex who would disappear and come back limping
and bloody; he had been attacked, once again, by Old Man Rosset’s pack of dogs down by the end of the road where the stream
began. Sometimes at night the dogs barked so much you would think that all the thieves in the country had descended on that
one house. Some people, like Mrs. Bernie, said that Old Man Rosset had the evil eye, which could strike you dead. But other
people, like Mrs. Green, argued that didn’t make any sense: if Old Man Rosset had such a powerful weapon, why would he need
a pack of dogs? The other people would answer back, they were there for when he was sleeping, but then evil eyes were not
supposed to go to sleep…. One day Rex did not come back. Not the next day, not the day after that, either. I thought that
Old Man Rosset had kidnapped him and added him to his pack.

It was Rosanna who let out the secret: Daddy gave Rex to someone at work because he was afraid of him catching rabies. Even
though Rex was vaccinated, Daddy still didn’t trust that to work against all those dogs and their bites, especially after
the city council issued a health warning about a rabies outbreak.

When Daddy was a boy, a relative in Nyamandhlovu was bitten by a dog and the relative had to be tied to a tree to keep him
from attacking people.

Thorngrove was a colored suburb, and we had lived in a two-bedroom municipal brick house. The Soutter children who lived opposite
us used to torment me. They were always lying in wait for me when I came home from primary school with Rosanna.

“Your mother is a kaffir, kaffir, kaffir!” they would shout and throw stones.

Once, Rosanna chased them right into their house and smacked one. They said all these things about Mummy even though their
own grandmother, who sometimes just turned up at their doorstep and who they made sleep in the boy’s kaya, was coal black
and couldn’t speak any English; they tried to tell people that she was the mother of their housegirl. Also, Mrs. Soutter was
always coming round to ask for “some slices of bread,” “a bit of sugar, my dear, if it’s not too much trouble,” “a pinch of
salt,” “a tomato or two” because Mr. Soutter, who was a train driver, was also a world-class drunkard. Mrs. Soutter would
say things like Mummy was so lucky with skin like hers, whereas she suffered so much what with the sun burning her and all;
it was her Scottish ancestry that was the culprit. Everyone knew that the Soutter girls straightened their hair; once Charmaine
got caught in the rain and her hair caught such a dwinch that it looked like the hair of the golliwog I had received from
the Christmas hamper at church. And the Soutter boys never grew their hair; it was always well cropped, very close to the
scalp so that you couldn’t see how coarse it was.

The best thing about Thorngrove was Mummy’s cookery classes. Every Thursday evening, Daddy dropped Mummy and Granny Joseph
at the Guild Hall opposite the fire station. Granny Joseph was very big, and she occupied the whole backseat of the car by
herself. After every Thursday, Daddy complained bitterly about his springs and the alignment of his car.

Mummy spent two hours cooking, and when she came back home, she had parcels of food that she would carefully lay out on the
dining-room table. Scotch eggs were the best; I would eat the baked sausage meat, rolled in breadcrumbs, and leave the hard-boiled
egg for Daddy.

Mummy put on weight, and Daddy would tease her and call her
isidudla
, fatty, but then she went to the doctor and they discovered the cysts.

Mummy had three big files with all her recipes, and there were also pages with drawings and diagrams of very complicated table
settings. There were forks, which were 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d… then the spoons… then the plates…. She would save some of her personal
allowance from Daddy to buy dessert spoons, forks, dessert plates, soup plates, serving dishes, and she would put them in
the display cabinet in the lounge and lock them inside.

The European food Mummy cooked at her classes required special ingredients, and if Mummy wanted to cook them at home, she
would add them to the monthly grocery list. Sometimes the list would be very long, and Daddy would grumble about unnecessary
expenditures as he pushed the trolley up and down OK Bazaars on the End of the Month Saturday. Sometimes he would leave Mummy
and me stranded with the trolley in one of the aisles while he ran across the road to check and compare the price of one item
at OK Bazaars with that at Woolworths. Even if there was only a difference of two or three cents, he would get the cheaper
one. Sometimes he made two or three dashes across the road.

Mummy stopped going to the cooking classes because she said she was tired of Daddy always complaining and not appreciating
anything she tried to do to better herself. Her recipes and complicated table settings found their way to Daddy’s workshop
where he used the blank sides to draw his technical diagrams of the insides of TVs and radios.

Mummy said Thorngrove was only a little bit better than Magwegwe Township.

I don’t remember Magwegwe at all because I was very small, but she says that we were living in nothing more than a glorified
shack and we were paying an exorbitant rent to a businessman who owned various bottle stores in the townships. The three of
us lived in one room and used a paraffin stove for cooking so the room always smelt of oil. The toilet and shower were outside,
and we shared them with three other families. Some people in the township didn’t like having Daddy there because he was a
colored.

Whenever Daddy talks about Magwegwe he always laughs. He finds Magwegwe very funny. He will say something like, “Those Magwegwe
people, masters of improvisations….” And he never tells the same story twice about Magwegwe; there is always another story
waiting in the wings about any subject that will make his eyes water and his body bend over with laughter. I can tell that
he misses Magwegwe. Every now and then he goes down there to fix someone’s radio or TV.

Mummy does not miss Magwegwe at all. She did not find it at all funny.

Magwegwe was the place of her greatest humiliation, the place of my birth. Instead of being born on the right day like any
normal baby, I chose to make my grand entrance three weeks early. And instead of giving warning signs so that she could go
to the hospital in good time, no, I hijacked her when she was at Renkini, the bus depot, and made her give birth right there
on the concrete floor with drivers, conductors, bus passengers, thieves, crooks, rapists… all watching what was going on between
her legs and what kind of thing was coming out. Mummy would never forgive me for that. Or forgive Magwegwe. Or even forgive
Daddy for making her live in Magwegwe.

Up to a year before we moved in, Baysview was a Whites-Only suburb. Ian Smith changed the law: he wanted to show the world
that his government was a reasonable one and not racist by any stroke of the imagination. He said that people in Europe and
America were being misinformed by communists and their sympathizers. There was no apartheid in Rhodesia.

“We are Pioneers,” declared Daddy. Because of this we had to be brave and to take everything in stride—for example, when someone
left a dead snake in the letter box, Daddy carefully took it away with a stick and said that no one had ever been bitten by
a dead snake and that this was the work of some mischievous boys. Later, in the dustbin I found the white piece of paper Daddy
had taken out with the snake. It said, shit happens, to terrs.

Mummy had her reservations about Baysview when she first saw it.

First of all there was the cemetery that was four bus stops away from our new house. Even though she is a good Christian,
she still believes in ancestral spirits and ghosts.

Before independence the cemetery was full of dead soldiers from all the wars the whites had fought and there were also tiny
graves where dead white babies lay. Once, I walked home from youth group at church, and instead of walking up along the road,
I went down and walked among all the dead people and angels. After a while I got scared and I ran all the way out.

After independence, black people joined the whites, and the whites started going all the way up to Burnside in the kopjes
to try and find a place where they would be left to Rest in Peace.

Daddy says, once you are dead, you are dead. That is it.

The railway track that cuts across Baysview also troubled Mummy straightaway. Every day at about three o’clock, we can hear
the train that comes from South Africa rumbling onwards to the station. She says that the train gives her headaches, and very
often she retreats into the bedroom and lies down with the door shut.

Daddy says that the train is bringing goods and thieves. Services.

Mummy approves of the fact that Baysview is so close to town; she just has to catch one omnibus, which drops her after twenty
minutes directly in front of the Large City Hall, instead of her getting all squashed up in two or three Emergency Taxis when
Daddy is at work and can’t act as her chauffeur.

Once a month we all tshena in our finest clothes, and Daddy drives us into town at night to do Window Shopping. Sometimes
Rosanna and even Maphosa come, too. Daddy parks the car at the end of Selborne Avenue opposite Thomas Meikles department store,
and we walk along the pavements and look at all the brightly lit shopwindows. Meikles, and then across the road Edgars, Truworths,
Topics, and across another road Haddon and Sly and all the little shops in between. Maphosa entertains us with his comments
about the white dolls in the windows and about the other families we pass who are also tshenied and doing Window Shopping.
His best, most colorful comments are reserved for the couples we bump into who are busy fondling in corners.