The Rowing Lesson (14 page)

Next to you, a flurry of white coats swarm all over
Geelbek
, the next-slab-fellow, who is one of the few white bodies, except that he’s more yellow-orange than white. Somebody says he worked on the railways because there’s something black in his lungs, a kind of coating or fur. But that’s not what the chaps are busy with. That’s not the surprise.

You see Dorothy May outside afterwards, gulping air and smoking a cigarette. You almost tell her, because she’s not the way she was in the dissecting hall, two feet taller than you and twice as clever. She’s a girl again, and her white coat is off. You can see her long legs, and the soft, healthy skin of her throat. You imagine her naked on one of the slabs, alive not dead, more alive than anything else in the world. You’re walking with her towards Main Road, the
cape doctor
sifting through the trees, cleaning your face, your hair, your heart. Still, at every corner, the bad smell waits, somebody’s ugly pig-dog following you home. You want to shoo the bloody thing away but it won’t listen. It sticks to your heels. It won’t give up.

Dorothy won’t give up either. She’s talking about the test coming up next week, and have you started swotting yet and what questions do you think Skullfinder is going to ask and are you going to specialize one day and what did you get for chemistry last year. You watch her lips moving around and around, Table Mountain standing up behind her like a huge mantle of rock on her shoulders and you want to take her and lie down with her and put your smelly hair between her breasts, and suckle. You’re going to ask her out, to the Bioscope, or to the Starlight or Bohemian, because she is the kind of girl you can swirl in the dark with a cocktail stick. The sky is so blue it’s daring you.

“Don’t miss the greatest adventure of all time. . . .” There’s an army poster on the lamppost and Dorothy’s eyes go from the words to you, and the daring is backwards now, and she’s asking if you’re going to enlist. You tell her about Uncle Oscar and how he’s paying for everything because your father died the day before the war started. She’s nodding but she doesn’t really know what selling the house and the shop means, what happened on the corner of Meade and Hibernia.

Are you going to swot with me or not? It’s hard to tell the difference between white and grey rami and have you found the greater splanchnic nerve? She’s about to open her handbag to freshen her lipstick. You almost grab the shiny liver shape away from her. The chaps are chuckling in your ear. You’ve got to have the big match temperament, Harry. You’ve got to score the touchdown. There. She has the bloody thing in her hand now.
Geelbek
’s yellow
piel
.

The next lamppost is talking while Dorothy’s screaming at you, You’ll be sorry, Harry! You’re a coward, Harry!

She’s dropped
Geelbek’s
penis at your feet. Dorothy’s running, walking, sobbing, How dare you? She’s growing again, and you’re the one getting smaller. You never eat enough, Harry, and Maisie’s healthy as a horse. She’s as pretty as a primrose and as clever as that fox that ate all the grapes. The posters are coming at you, Join up now! The only dress for non-key men is a uniform! (Dorothy’s around the corner and gone, lost smoke, something else broken that can’t be fixed.)

Even
Geelbek
’s penis is telling you to enlist. You pick it up and it’s cold in your hand, not circumsized. You’re going to have to return it to the Valley of the Shadow of Death in case Skullfinder comes looking, in case Dorothy tells. This is a balls-up.

Chapter 11

I’m thinking of the nurses in your room, the blond one with the full lips and the other one, brown-haired and mousey, clips in her hair, eyes downcast. They’re touching you as if it’s nothing. I’ve stood at your bed for hours and hours, your words rattling and running ahead of me, behind me, all around me, everything you ever told me, streaming back to the source before it’s too late. In all that listening and talking, I haven’t reached out a hand to touch your hand, or the top of your black-and-grey head. Si-Si, I say. Have you touched him yet? Simon looks at me as if I’ve gone mad. What the hell are you talking about? You should touch him, I tell him. At least one of us should. Why don’t you? he asks. Since it’s your bright idea.

If he was awake, he’d be flirting with the blond nurse, reaching for her. Ma would be telling her, He’s just a dirty old man. We’d be looking away, pretending not to see or to hear, I say out loud, even though the words are hard to speak. We’d be very embarrassed.

Simon nods, his eyes filling up. And I wouldn’t even mind.

We’ve drifted back to the door of your room, and the blond nurse motions to us to come in. He’s ready now, she says, as she plumps the pillow behind your head, as she tucks you in. A grey cloud is filling you up from inside, and your face is darkening and changing. Life is the miracle! you once said, coming home in the early morning after delivering a healthy baby boy, drops of blood like roses on your shirt, blood on your tie. There’s nothing miraculous about death. When life goes, the body is just a piece of meat, a thing on the table.

How long . . . ? The rest of the sentence writes itself on the empty walls. The brown-haired nurse catches the two words in her fist and says, A day perhaps, maybe shorter. It’s hard to say. But she pulls out Ma’s chair and tells me to sit, to rest. Maybe she’ll bathe me too, and brush out the knots in my hair if I sit quietly enough, if I pretend to be you.

Simon is at the window now, watching the boats bobbing in the harbor, a plane in the far distance. I look at his curved back, brown hair touching his collar, and I’m remembering the model aeroplanes he built and hung from his ceiling, on translucent strands of nylon thread. The Spitfire next to the Hurricane, the Halifax tailing the Mosquito, another Spitfire slowly spinning by itself. Simon’s building a Meteor now, and he lets me watch him, his hands careful with the small parts, deliberate with the dabs of glue. He wants to be a doctor when he grows up, just like you. He’s going to be a good doctor, I think, as he glues the wing to the body.

A GOOD DOCTOR just like you. It’s years later and you can’t help it but damn it all, man, you’re proud of Mrs. Boshof ’s porphyria because you’re the one who finally diagnosed it, beating all those fancy specialists in Cape Town to the finish line. They thought it was her appendix, her brain, her stomach, her skin, her nerves, always her nerves. Come on, chaps. For crying out loud. I delivered all four of her babies. I know this woman has nerves of steel.

The term just ended and Simon’s on his way home from medical school, driving over the Du Toit’s Kloof pass. The Hurricane’s up on his ceiling clinking against the Spitfire in the breeze. Ma didn’t have the heart to take down his planes.

I’m thirteen going on fourteen, standing in the kitchen in our house in Worcester, smelling freshly ironed sheets, the hot cement of the back stoep, when Simon drives down the driveway, the branches of the loquat tree scraping the top of his car. Yesterday I heard muffled conversations on the phone, saw Ma’s face drawn tight at the corners. You slammed the front door, rattling bones.

Something’s wrong. The snuffling terrors are marching down the passage, a bestiary of two-footed, three-footed and even ten-footed creatures. Some of them are as old as I am, some are much younger but they all have names and faces, they all clamor for attention. Fear of the Terribly Black Dark stabs Little Fear of My Own Death who’s chasing Fear of Everyone’s Death who’s being led by the nose by Fear of the Powers That Be. Somewhere in the middle of the pack is Fear of Failing, desperately holding hands with Fear of Singing out of Tune, who looks like a bandicoot with a crooked snout. They can’t even march properly, which is Fear of Doing the Wrong Thing’s very worst fear.

When Simon slams the car door, they all fall silent, pressing themselves against the wall, not gone but flattened. He always had a way with them, his lopsided, rueful smile vastly shrinking their numbers, disarming the fiercest of the lot. When you’d lose your temper, screaming, I’ll give you something to cry about! Simon would show me how to stay still, watch the storm unfold and pass away. Let it wash over you like water off a duck’s back, he’d say.

I’m happy to see my big brother but he hardly notices me as he walks through the back door into the kitchen, empty handed. He gives me an odd little squeeze around the neck, his face turning away from me. He’s lost something that’s bigger than a suitcase or a record album or a bag of laundry. The snuffling terrors shake themselves off, start up a low cackle, talking amongst themselves. Simon’s presence does nothing to calm them down. I decide to stay in the kitchen, close to the ironing table where Maria, our Coloured maid, is ironing shirts and listening to stories on the radio. There’s always a serialized drama in Afrikaans every afternoon at around three, ruined farms and broken marriages, jealousy between the sisters-in-law, a stillborn child, a terrible car accident and endless, burning drought.

I can hear Ma summoning you on the office telephone system, prying you loose between patients. What follows is a film dismantled by the projector, one melting picture on the screen and then several long strips of celluloid alive and curling on the floor. There’s Simon, vanquished for the first time by the Snufflies, bawling his eyes out. You’re shouting at him so loudly that I stuff my fingers into my ears. Maria turns up the volume on the radio as two lovers are magnificently reunited in a whirlwind of stars and bells and Christmas music on Langebaan beach.

Johannes! Marietjie! The lovers swoon. In the next room, I hear seven different kinds of crying, yours, Ma’s, Simon’s, and four Snufflies who have shown up, just to make things worse—Fear of the Neighbours’ Hearing, Fear of the Maid Hearing, Fear of the Whole Town Hearing, and, worst of all, Fear of the Patients Knowing Everything.

It sounds like Simon failed first year, I whisper. And they won’t let him go on.
Ag
, shame, Maria says. Your daddy so wanted him to be a doctor, you know.
Ja
, I answer. Steam puffs out of the top of the iron, the smell of your lightly baked shirt searing my nostrils.

The sliding door between the kitchen and the dining room bulges, the grain of the wood suddenly grown large. How could you do this to me? How could you? The sentences are lassoes, cutting through the air and roping poor Simon. It sounds as if he’s sinking to his knees, the words driving a stake through his heart. I can see Fear of Failing stamping and cheering, dancing up a storm on top of the dining-room table. The word Bertie explodes like gunshot, and then there’s a loud crash, a broken dish, a flying chair, Stop It! Flung into the air, water from a twisting hosepipe.

I’m not going to ask Bertie! Your voice is pure black. Bertie’s a big shot nowadays, a fancy shmancy cardiologist on Chris Barnard’s team. He drives a Jaguar and he lives in a glass house in Camps Bay with a pool and twin girls my age, who like ballet and want to be models when they grow up.

Ma doesn’t know when to stop. Maybe Bertie. . . . FUCK BERTIE! The words burn right through the kitchen door. Jeez, there’s even a brownish stain on the white shirt Maria’s ironing. She quickly tosses the singed shirt into a basket under the table.
Ag nee
, man, she clucks, lightly tapping the underside of the iron with a moistened finger, steam hissing back at her.

When has Bertie done me any favors? When? This is different, Harry, Ma says. It’s for Simon. (The ill wind falters, then changes direction.) You didn’t tell me what was happening. You didn’t tell me he wasn’t swotting. I didn’t know, Harry. Of course you bloody well knew. You know everything! Now you’re going to tell me it’s all my fault. (Of course it’s all your fault.) Ma gives a long-suffering sigh. It’s all my fault. You’re paranoid, Stella. No—YOU’RE paranoid!

Stop! Simon’s cracking, broken voice rises up above the fray. Johannes is whispering into Marietjie’s ear, My
liefling
. Maria lifts her iron, anticipating the next kiss. My heart sits in my throat like a bullfrog. The phone burbles, breaking the spell. You answer it, clearing your throat first. Champing? you ask the receptionist, your code for Are they champing at the bit? Are the patients tired of waiting for the doctor? She’s supposed to answer Champing, or Not champing, doctor.

Instead, she connects you with Mrs. Boshof, and now you’re clearing your throat again, almost laughing.
Wragtig, mevrou
, you’re saying, followed by a stream of Afrikaans. She calls you Dr. God, this lady with the rare disease that you love so much and now you’re laughing out loud again, loving her name for you, and how you saved her and how all those doctors at Groote Schuur could learn a thing or two from you, a country doctor whittling wood all day long like a peasant. Because that’s what they think, don’t they? The whole damn lot of them including Bertie, too-fucking-big-for-his-boots Bertie, towering above you as if he’s going to take a piss on you.

Why don’t you ask First Prize? you ask Ma. Your bloody brother knows all the senior chaps at the medical school. He can help us. No! Simon bellows, a raw sound from deep in his chest. I don’t want to be a doctor anymore! He slams the French doors, almost breaking a pane or two. The next thing we hear is the revving of his car engine, the car backing up, turning, then heading down the driveway, the branches of the loquat tree scraping its roof, a final parting shot.

I help Maria fold a crisp white sheet as the church bells ring for Johannes and Marietjie. Here comes the bride, big, fat and wide. He’ll change his mind, Ma says. We’ll ask First Prize to put in a good word for him. How could he do this to us? Your voice is naked now, and I cover up my ears barely hearing you say, He’s bloody lucky to have a father! Ma sighs, Here we go again. I’m squeezing my ears so hard that my head feels like it’s in a pulsing tunnel. Your words go up my nose. We were allowed to repeat in those days. It was different. He knew it was different!

Betsy, you ask me later that night, pouring yourself a glass of Cabernet, watching the deep red liquid swirl a third of the way from the top of the tulip-shaped glass. Do you know what they’re doing to District Six? I move the wine bottle away from you, and you grab my hand fiercely. Don’t, Ma admonishes, fixing me with a long, tight stare. I let go of the bottle, stretching my numb fingers. Simon’s absence yawns. The last and most fearsome of the Snufflies glimmers from the French doors, a blurry, tearswept figure I know as the Fear of Being Alone.

Do you know what the bloody bastards are doing? They’re tearing the heart out of Cape Town. My spidery fingers crawl across the tablecloth, closing around the base of the wine bottle, inching it away from you, Fear of My Father Drinking Too Much sitting on my shoulder like an engorged owl. Ma’s eyes are scorching, and she crosses her arms, tightening the mantle of disapproval around her shoulders. To the secretary, president and treasurer of the Worcester Teetotallers’ Society. . . . You lift your glass. Cheers! You haven’t noticed the basket of my white knuckles around your bottle of wine.

Constitution Street, Hanover Street, the fish market, the British Bioscope, it’s all gone now. They smashed it all to pieces. All those tumbledown double-storied houses with the
broekie
lace are gone, bulldozed right down to the ground. The
skollies
are gone, and the
nonnies
and the children and the old people and the fish-horn and the smells of curry and the sea, it’s all finished. Group Areas Act. Finished and
klaar
. Over and done with. Goodbye to Picadilly, goodbye to Butler Square. Remember Harrington Street? When I was a houseman, I once had a Malay patient who lived at number forty-five. Head-on collision. You shake your head from side to side, a lion with an earache. What a mess. Took us hours to stitch him up. His wife was sitting right next to him in the passenger seat. You shake your head again, remembering blood, glass, a dead woman’s lacerations. We had to tell him when he woke up.