Whitethorn (67 page)

Mr Fisher froze. ‘I'll have you know I too am a Jew, Mr Farquarson. I think we'd better call a taxi to take you home,' he said, his voice ice-cold.

‘Intolerable! I will not put up with this a moment longer, I shall resign! Get out of my way, boy!' the Ship of State demanded, hands flapping and coming at me full-steam ahead, attempting to use his stomach as a prow to knock me out of the way. I stepped aside and he lumbered into his small office and practically fell into his swivel chair, immediately scrabbling around for pen and paper. He found his fountain pen and had barely managed to remove the cap when he promptly fell asleep, his forehead hitting the surface of the desk as if in a skit out of a Mack Sennett comedy.

‘Come, Tom, we'll sort all this out later,' Mr Fisher said, his voice still frosty. Then he added, ‘Perhaps what happened since Mr Farquarson's return from lunch should go no further than the two of us?'

‘Of course, Sir,' I replied, knowing full well the kind of merciless grilling I was about to receive from Bobby and Graham the moment I got back to the basement.

Union Jack must have observed the whole thing because he was standing near the lift, and when I pressed the button he said in Zulu, ‘
Usebenze kahle, Baas
Fitzy,' which means it is good, or well done! Mr Fisher looked up questioningly, not understanding what the big Zulu had said to me. Then Union Jack added hurriedly, ‘
Baas
Fisher, for now we are not having electric floor polish machine.'

Mr Fisher grinned. ‘Union Jack, go down to the electrical department and tell them to give you to a new floor polisher, tell Mr Saunders to call me.' He left me at the lift. ‘Tom, I'll take the stairs up, I must say I have a new respect for what they taught you at . . . what was it again?'

‘The Born-again Christian Missionary Society, Sir.' If only he knew, there was a lot more Boys Farm involved than there was Smelly Jelly's influence.

It's amazing what a difference something like the Steinway incident makes. All of a sudden I was a bit of a hero around the place and Bobby and Graham decided that I could wear my new gear to work, but not the Brylcreem. I'd only been with Polliack's for a year of school holidays but after the three pianos I was told I was no longer a trainee and my salary went up a pound a week. Money! I was rolling in the stuff! The commission for the sale of the pianos was 5 per cent, so I also got 157 pounds. If I was careful it was sufficient to see me through my entire university degree.

At the Reverend Robertson's suggestion I applied for a scholarship to Witwatersrand, Wits as it is known, and also scholarships to Natal, Cape Town and Stellenbosch. The selection of Stellenbosch was of my own volition as it was an Afrikaans university, which I wouldn't have minded as it was very prestigious among the
Volk
and the Nationalists looked like being in power for some time to come. Their proposed ‘apartheid' policy was gaining tremendous support. To ever-increasing applause from the white minority, the country was beginning to run backwards into the nineteenth century at a great rate of knots.

The end-of-year results came out in late January and I'd obtained a First Class matriculation and, to my surprise, I headed the entire country in both English and Afrikaans. The first was undoubtedly due to Miss Phillips and her early reading curriculum, the second, I suppose, because it had been my first language. In early February, the university scholarships were announced in the newspapers and I'd been granted a full scholarship at all four universities. But here's a funny thing, Gawie Grobler's name was on the Stellenbosch list. I'd written to him on three occasions when I was in First Form at school, but he'd not bothered to reply so I'd lost touch with him. You can't keep writing letters into a vacuum and stamps were too precious anyway. Seeing his name as a scholarship student at Stellenbosch decided me against going there. The distance between
Voetsek
the
Rooinek
and The Boys Farm was beginning to widen, and in life you don't go back to the past to see if it still hurts.

But in the end, that's exactly what happened, The Boys Farm came back to bite me on the bum. Frikkie Botha's physical condition was deteriorating to the extent that he could no longer live the life of a derelict and still beg effectively for a living. Despite the warning from Professor Mustafa that Frikkie wouldn't make it through another winter, he'd refused to give up his way of life and he somehow survived the steam pipes for another year. Despite my urging, Frikkie was intractable and refused to entertain the idea of the Salvation Army men's home. No amount of persuasion could make him change his mind.
If I die, I die
, he'd written.

During my last year at school he would often neglect taking his medication for diabetes whereupon his blood sugar level would became too high and he'd become tired and have trouble focusing, which in his particular vocation probably didn't matter too much, but he often ended up pissing himself, which only added to his generally disgusting appearance and smell. On my instructions to Stompie, the dozen Pepsi-Colas a day he consumed had been reduced to six, alternating with water, but without his diabetic medicine this didn't help him that much. Now that I was a law student at Wits University I had time to see that he took his medicine orally every day, but it was fast becoming apparent that Frikkie was coming to the end of his useful life as a mendicant. I finally persuaded him to come and live with me in the Hillbrow flat.

Before you start thinking how generous of me to take him in, let me put things straight. In four years of school holidays I'd never managed to get the entire story of the murder of Mattress as well as the story of the great railway culvert explosion from him. It wasn't that Frikkie was particularly evasive, but simply that he was never sufficiently sober for long enough when I was with him to write it all down. He'd either be outside Park Station begging, including the weekends, or we'd be having dinner, a tedious and laborious process I've previously described. After dinner he'd smoke a
toke
and the marijuana combined with a bottle of brandy meant he was soon comatose or, to be more precise, completely blotto. It must be remembered that Frikkie was in constant pain and so it was difficult to become impatient with him.

Over four years I had collected notes on roughly what had taken place on the night of the murder, but I needed a lot more detail, every detail if I could possibly get them. The tiniest, I told myself, might end up being the most important. Now time was running out, he'd survived the winter Professor Mustafa said he couldn't, but he most certainly wouldn't survive another one living rough. It was approaching April and the high
veld
nights were closing in, and the promise of winter to come was heralded by a chilly evening breeze that whipped across the park soon after sunset. Increasingly, I was beginning to panic, thinking that Frikkie might die before I had a complete set of notes.

If this sounds callous I don't suppose I can disagree, but the task I had set myself wasn't an easy one. Cleaning Frikkie up in the first place wasn't simple. Alcoholics who sleep rough suffer in the main from three antisocial maladies: lice, bedbugs and scabies. Again with Professor Mustafa's help I obtained a large container of Ascabiol, which he referred to as ‘Benzyl Benzoate'.

‘Shave his head, armpits and pubic hair, then rub this stuff all over his body, except on his head because it will damage his eyes . . . eye,' he corrected. ‘Leave it on overnight, Tom, then wash it off in the morning, give him a bath if you can. Repeat for three days.'

It all sounded pretty matter-of-fact, but it wasn't easy, Frikkie Botha was still a
Boer
and therefore a proud man, and I know he suffered terrible humiliation. I confess it wasn't easy for me either. Seeing him sitting huddled in Smelly Jelly's red dressing-gown, rocking backwards and forwards with his thumb in the contorted little hole that was supposed to be his mouth was terribly distressing. His mutilated face was incapable of an expression beyond the horror permanently affixed to what were once its features, but you just knew he was thoroughly miserable and decidedly pissed off with me. Cleanliness may well be next to godliness, but for Frikkie Botha achieving it proved to be pure and utter hell.

But I must say, Frikkie, bathed and with a fresh set of clothes every day, was now the cleanest and the un-itchiest he'd been for several years. I'd bought an apron made from aeroplane cloth to catch the food he spilled, and with a three-times-a-week scrubbing in the bathtub, in the cleanliness stakes anyway things were definitely looking up. It's a curious thing, but people who go unwashed for months will do almost anything to avoid water. The smell of soap, on the first two occasions I bathed Frikkie, caused him to vomit into his bathwater. At first, the process of bathing him in Smelly Jelly's ancient bathtub would cause his good eye to weep real tears, and the pathetic glottal sounds that emerged from his useless vocal cords made me feel like the biggest bastard ever.

However, Tinky took to the new clean regime very well. A regular wash with an application of flea powder and a proper diet and his coat began to improve no end, and unlike his master I was sure he felt grateful for these changes in his personal circumstances. Doubling around with one foot in the air nipping at fleabites all day must have been a miserable existence. I have to add that I was very fond of him and he was quick to respond to affection. If you ever want a small dog you'd be hard-pressed to go beyond a fox terrier.

The sale of the three Steinway Baby Grands meant I had more than sufficient money to keep us both and I tried again without success to discourage Frikkie from working. He'd written me a pleading note:
Showbiz is my lewe, sonder
dit is ek ‘n dooie man
. Showbiz is my life, without it I am a dead man. Frikkie had never accepted that he was a beggar but always saw himself as a performer. I was finally forced to concede that leaving him incarcerated in the dark little flat wasn't an option and that he'd die all the sooner left alone all day. Neither he nor Tinky would be able to tolerate the confinement. Both were creatures of the street, accustomed to living their lives on a busy city pavement.

The problem was that Hillbrow was a mile-and-a-half from Park Station, and Frikkie's heart condition coupled with his diabetes made walking all that way quite impossible and the tram wouldn't allow pets on board. With the cooperation of Professor Mustafa, I managed to obtain a second-hand wheelchair from the hospital workshop for nix and sixpence (almost nothing). The workshop foreman reinforced it wherever he could, which added a fair bit of weight but made it ideal for street work rather than the polished lino hospital corridors for which it was originally constructed.

Frikkie thought it was magic, a theatrical prop that added an extra dimension to his act. It was as if an old, tired vaudeville warm-up actor found himself togged out in a new top hat, starched shirt, bow tie, dancing taps and tails. The wheelchair gave him a legitimacy and, in his eye, new respectability. It was almost as if his act, cleaned up and rewritten, had finally made it onto Broadway. But the funny thing was that the freshly laundered Frikkie in his wheelchair evoked far less pity or curiosity, and made less money than the filthy smelly version sitting on an old wooden crate under a dirty hood. I guess the public prefers its freaks to be thoroughly wretched.

Pushing him to Park Station in the morning was easy enough, the mile-and-a-half from Hillbrow was virtually all the way downhill. Taking him home at night was a different matter and improved my fitness no end, but the real problem became getting him up to the third floor. I solved this by paying the janitor, a solidly built African named Six-gun, five shillings a week to piggyback Frikkie up the stairs, while I stored the wheelchair in the basement. Six-gun reversed the process each morning. It was good pay for Six-gun, but worth every penny. Frankly, I don't know what I would have done without him and towards the end the big African claimed his back was giving him trouble, and demanded and got seven and sixpence. It was daylight robbery, only slightly less than his weekly salary as janitor, but I had no choice.

I'd moved Frikkie into the little bedroom and bought a second-hand divan for the sitting room that served as the lounge with a blue chenille cover in the daytime and as my bed at night. I also got one of those enamel bedpans and another spouted one for pissing into from the hospital because Frikkie, in a semi-comatose state, wasn't capable of getting out of bed at night and finding the bathroom. You don't think of these things when a person lives in the open. There was a public toilet next to the art gallery the brotherhood would use at night and at the steam pipes the guys just moved slightly away from the sleeping men and pissed on the pipes. The hot piss turning to steam as it hit the pipes created an unpleasant effluvium, but on a freezing night the cold bit so hard into your nostrils that it neutralised most of the stink.

What I hadn't reckoned on was Tinky, who like Tinker had never lived indoors, and had no idea of toilet-training and, at first, got very upset being restrained and unable to be outdoors at night. But that's the thing with a fox terrier, they never stop learning. After a few weeks with newspaper spread everywhere he might think to do his business, he finally got the idea and learned to go out last thing at night and first thing in the morning. He now had his own basket with an old blanket, and eventually seemed happy enough, though sometimes on a cold winter's night he'd wake me up whimpering with a paw resting on my arm and I'd haul him into bed with me for a bit of a snuggle.