by Ekow Duker
‘What do you mean, André?’ His mother’s eyes were dark with worry.
‘Let’s forget about the engele for a moment.’
His mother was poised to interject but André held up his hand to stop her.
‘Today I gave violin lessons to a woman with no talent,’ he said. ‘And on my way home I stopped to play in an empty field with nothing but trees and birds around me. Don’t you think I can do better than that?’
‘There are weddings,’ Marietjie said, the desperation evident in her voice. ‘It’s the in-thing these days to have a violinist at a wedding. You could play at weddings!’
‘Really, Ma? You’d have me spend my life playing some bitchy bride’s favourite pop song? There aren’t that many weddings around here anyway and even if there were, I doubt most people could pay. I told you we should go to Joburg or Cape Town, but you insisted on bringing us here. To Mthatha.’ He flung his arm in the air to encompass the small, tidy kitchen and the flat-pack wooden furniture. ‘I’m serious, Ma. I can’t go on like this.’
The light went out of Marietjie’s eyes and when she spoke, her voice was as small as a little girl’s. ‘You’re leaving me then.’
André gave a quick nod. ‘Will you go back to Bloem?’
His mother looked away from him. Her lips trembled as she gulped a mouthful of air and then another. It was as if she’d fallen off the side of a boat and was struggling to stay afloat. ‘I think I’ll just stay where I am,’ she said at last.
‘But you don’t know anyone here.’
She shrugged, much as André might have done. ‘It’s quiet, André. I like that. No crowds jostling you in the mall. No one climbing over your wall at night to hit you over the head. No agricultural shows with so much cow shit the stench stays in your nose for days.’ She took a deep breath then went on. ‘They only invited me to those places because I was Mrs Trevor Barnes.’ She enunciated the name slowly and with as much scorn as she could muster. ‘At least in Mthatha I can be myself.’
André reached across the small table and covered his mother’s hand with his.
‘There’s another reason I need to go,’ he said softly. ‘You need to stop fighting my battles for me, Ma. I can look after myself.’
Marietjie dabbed at her eyes, not caring that she might be ruining her makeup and leaving dark smudges on her cheeks.
‘They’re not like us, you know,’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘The English.’
André sighed. His mother had a factory-set resentment towards the English. It was like she forgot her son was half-English.
‘The Harrisons are all right,’ he said brightly. ‘They’re English. I’ve never met Mrs Harrison’s husband Bill, but Claire has always been very kind to me.’
‘I don’t mean the Harrisons. I’m talking about the English English,’ his mother said. She gave a heavy sigh. ‘But you’ve set your heart on going to London, haven’t you?’
André avoided her gaze. ‘I’ve not decided yet,’ he said.
She looked at him and while her mouth was firm, her eyes were glassy with tears. ‘You don’t have to lie, André. You made up your mind a long time ago.’
CHAPTER 7
Everyone was pleased when Teacher’s parents left and went back to Ghana. Even Teacher looked relieved. Karabo missed Paa Kofi but she was glad Ma’ama was no longer in the house. They hadn’t gone to church when Ma’ama was there because the charismatic church they went to wasn’t up to Ma’ama’s evangelical standards. She said it was Karabo’s mother’s fault that Teacher had turned his back on the Methodists.
‘All that raising of hands in your church,’ Ma’ama said. ‘It’s not right. It’s not as if God was sitting up there, twirling around on the ceiling fan like a pigeon that’s flown in through the window.’
The church Karabo and her parents attended was called the Latter Day Church of Holy Fire. It was a large and inescapable presence in Mthatha, although the building itself was rather small. The Nigerian pastor whipped himself into a fervour every Sunday and swept the congregation, ululating and swaying, along with him. Pastor Fola Adebayor’s eyes blazed with righteous fury when he was in full oratorical flight. His sermons were suspiciously like entertainment. Karabo looked forward to it at the start of the week but, although she’d never admit it, she couldn’t help thinking that maybe Ma’ama had a point.
Karabo’s mother Precious set the rhythm to life in the Bentil household. On Mondays and Tuesdays, she would be strangely reticent, as if she’d just moved into the house and was restrained by her new surroundings. By Wednesday, she’d be dropping oblique hints about the perils of an ungodly life and Teacher would nod wisely in agreement. By Friday she’d be clapping her hands as she did the housework. And by Sunday, oh Lord! by Sunday she’d have worked herself into a lather and be singing hymns at full blast. It was as if she was on a celestial parade ground, not living in a little three-bedroomed house with tufts of withered grass masquerading as a lawn.
On Sunday mornings as they got ready for church, Karabo and her parents listened to hymns on the radio. Then they’d go to church and sing the same hymns all over again. Her mother was always resplendent in a buttoned red jacket atop a black skirt. Karabo particularly liked the white satin sash her mother wore across her chest, for it matched the little bobble hat perched on her head. She looked like she was dressed to do battle, which in a way she was. As for Teacher, he always went to church in a suit and tie, even in summer when it was thirty degrees outside. Sundays were when Karabo got to wear little white dresses and shiny black leather shoes with decorative perforations in the leather. Her mother and father both laughed when she said her Sunday clothes made her look like a girl.
‘But you are a girl,’ her mother cried.
But Karabo didn’t want to be a girl. She wanted to be like Teacher.
One morning when they were about to set out to church, a man shuffled up to the Bentils’ gate. Karabo was almost fifteen by then and she no longer wore little white dresses or the shoes with the perforations. She went up to the gate where their dog, Saddam, was leaping up and down in excitement.
There were kernels of white hair scattered about the man’s head and his fingernails were chipped and encrusted with a dark residue. Karabo could hardly hear him speak over Saddam’s excited barking.
She shouted at him through the wire. ‘We don’t have any jobs.’
He smiled at her suddenly, exposing wet gums in a startling shade of red. His teeth, at least those that still remained in his head, were a gnarled mix of brown and yellow. Karabo shuddered. It was like looking into the mouth of an animal.
‘No piece job,’ she said, criss-crossing her arms a few times to make sure he understood. She could tell from the slouch of his shoulders and the battered shoes he wore that he had no real conviction that they would have a piece job anyway. He stood there staring at Karabo until she began to feel uncomfortable. ‘No job,’ she said again and took a step back. She was glad the fence was between them. Then she turned and walked towards the car where her parents were waiting. She could feel the man’s eyes on her.
‘What did that old man want?’ her mother asked.
The man shuffled away and Saddam followed him, barking madly all the way to the corner of the yard where the palm trees stood in a tight, bearded clump.
‘A job.’
‘He should go to the ANC. Maybe they will give him a job,’ Teacher said mildly.
Karabo caught his eyes in the rear-view mirror. They were uncharacteristically hard and flinty. Not many people knew how militant Teacher could be. He had an acute sense of social justice which he hid behind a soft-spoken manner and an endearing stammer. He wasn’t one to make placards at the kitchen table or march in the vanguard of a protest rally. He was more likely to be at the rear, walking slowly with a pensive look on his face. He had odd rules, too. He refused to give money to a beggar if he were kneeling down. Teacher always said a man should never kneel for anyon
e, no matter how hard his lot. There were a lot of beggars in Mthatha.
‘It’s Sunday,’ said Precious as they reversed into the street. ‘It’s not a day for politics.’
‘I’m sure that old man looking for a job would agree,’ Teacher said. ‘He should go looking for work tomorrow.’
Karabo smiled to herself. She wished she were as clever as Teacher. He had this way of disarming an opponent with a few well-chosen words that made them feel utterly incompetent. Not for the first time, her mother had nothing to say.
They passed a Land Rover heading the other way and they all turned their heads to stare at it. The driver, a white man, waved at them but none of them waved back.
‘Bill Harrison,’ Teacher declared and Karabo thought she detected a hint of bitterness in his voice. She glanced up at the rear-view mirror, hoping to catch Teacher’s eyes but he did not look her way.
‘I hear he’s emigrating,’ Precious said. ‘To Australia.’
Teacher was driving faster than before. The engine let out a high-pitched whine and the frame of the car rattled in protest.
‘And yet he’s still here,’ Teacher said. ‘He’s been emigrating for years.’
This time it was her mother’s eyes Karabo caught in the rear-view mirror. Something passed between them but she did not know what it was.
Everyone in Mthatha knew Bill Harrison. He was a quiet man with spindly legs and lank blond hair that had long retreated from a large, speckled forehead. He looked more like a tame accountant than a successful farmer. There was a time when it seemed as if every other person in Mthatha worked for the Harrisons. It was rumoured that Bill Harrison preferred women as his farm workers for the men were often turned away.
The Harrisons’ farm was not far from the Bentils’ house. In fact Karabo’s mother had worked there too for a while. She’d helped to look after the house many years ago when Mrs Harrison had fallen ill.
‘Maybe he hasn’t got his papers yet,’ Precious said.
Teacher discounted that suggestion with a harsh grunt.
‘It doesn’t take that long to get Australian papers. I could do it in three months and I’m not even white.’
‘I hear the black people in Australia have a hard time,’ her mother said. ‘I’ve seen pictures of them and some of them are very dark. As dark as …’
She stopped herself and looked away from Teacher. They drove the rest of the way to the church in silence.
The Latter Day Church of Holy Fire was an outwardly nondescript building made of galvanised metal roofing sheets. It used to be a warehouse and in summer the smell of chemicals seeped from the walls and made the congregation even more light-headed than Pastor Adebayor’s sermons did. It was full today, with more than two hundred people jammed into the wooden pews. The Bentils were lucky to find a space at the back, where they squeezed in between a woman with two babies on her knees and a man who was already asleep.
It wasn’t only Pastor Adebayor Karabo looked forward to seeing on Sundays. She hoped Inspector Thulisane from the Mthatha police station would be there too. With his slim-cut jackets and mirrored glasses, Inspector Thulisane could have been a model in a men’s fashion magazine. Or an actor in an American crime drama. Slick American crime dramas didn’t translate easily to Mthatha but somehow Inspector Thulisane pulled it off.
Inspector Thulisane served as an usher in the church. At collection time he carried the velvet pouch from pew to pew. He always assigned himself to the side of the aisle where Karabo was sitting. She thought that was rather cute.
That morning, when Inspector Thulisane came up and handed Karabo the pouch, his jacket fell open, revealing the polished black butt of a gun. Hawu! Karabo was so alarmed she almost let the pouch fall to the floor. Since when were guns allowed in church? She glanced at her parents to see if they’d seen the gun but their eyes were closed and their hands were raised to the ceiling in the exact pose Ma’ama disapproved of.
Karabo scrabbled in her pocket for the five rand coin she’d brought with her. As she dropped it into the pouch, she looked up and Inspector Thulisane’s eyes met hers. She saw an almost desperate pleading in them. It was the same look she’d seen on the odd-job man’s face that morning. She drew a sharp breath, not knowing whether to be furious with Inspector Thulisane or sad. Men had the strangest ways of signalling that they wanted to fuck.
CHAPTER 8
Precious had come to believe that marriage was rather like an iceberg. For when a marriage falls apart, large chunks of it topple into an icy sea without making a sound. Nowadays when she and Teacher went to bed, they did so without speaking. Precious stayed cocooned on her side of the bed and her husband on his. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for her to roll over and hold him but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to do it. They both stared into the darkness and pretended to be asleep.
There seemed to be more and more things Teacher reproached Precious for. He rolled his eyes when she couldn’t do sums in her head. That hurt her terribly, especially when she remembered how patient he’d been all those years ago when she’d been in his class. She didn’t dress well enough for him anymore. He said the uniform she wore to church on Sundays made her look like an old matron. And on the rare occasions they went out together he walked a few steps ahead of her, as if he didn’t want anyone to know she was his wife. Teacher was falling out of love and Precious did not know how to catch him.
She was at her wit’s end when she decided to go and see Jabu, the diviner. She’d prayed to God about her marriage but sometimes Jesus could be slower to arrive than the municipal engineer. At least with igqirha, she put the money in his hand and for that reason she could hold him to account. What was more, Jabu’s house was only a short taxi ride away. He didn’t live in some indeterminate place with no address in a vast expanse of sky.
She dressed quickly and in her haste she almost stumbled over Karabo. Her daughter was sitting on the front step, tossing small stones at the empty space where Teacher usually parked his car. She looked up at her mother without much interest. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.
Precious didn’t like Karabo’s forwardness. It was Teacher who had instilled that filthy habit in her. That was why she didn’t take Karabo to see uTata anymore. Since uMama had passed away, there was no reason to take Karabo anyway. uTata thought his grand-daughter was rude and why wouldn’t he, when Karabo had called him a drunken fool to his face? Precious had slapped Karabo hard for saying that. It was grief that led her father to drink but she didn’t expect Karabo to understand that. Perhaps Karabo called uTata names because she was mourning her grandmother as well. But if she was, that was a strange way to show it.
‘Oh, I just need to run an errand or two,’ Precious replied.
‘Can I come? I’ve nothing to do.’
‘Haven’t you any homework?’
‘I’ve done it.’
‘Surely you have a book to read?’
Karabo arched an eyebrow and looked at her mother as if to say, Really? The girl read almost as much as Teacher did. It often felt like a competition between the two of them, with Precious the odd one out.
Then Precious began to feel silly for casting about for reasons not to take Karabo with her. She was her daughter after all.
‘All right,’ she said with an exaggerated sigh. ‘You can come with me.’
Karabo sprang to her feet with an excited shriek. Standing, she was a head taller than her mother and Precious wondered for the thousandth time where her little girl had disappeared to.
‘But you must wear something decent,’ she said, looking disapprovingly at Karabo’s shorts and T-shirt. The T-shirt stopped well above the child’s belly button and her shorts started an equal distance below. ‘People will think we can’t afford to buy you clothes.’
Karabo bounded into the house and came back in the dress Ma’ama had sent her from Ghana. It was made of cotton with black and yellow markings, which Teacher said were symbols of prosperity and
long life. Karabo had been overjoyed when the dress arrived in the post. It wasn’t so much the fact that Ma’ama had sent it that made Karabo so happy; she was just thrilled to have something from the place her father came from.
The neckline of the dress scooped low to expose the swell of Karabo’s breasts. Precious was about to send her back inside to put on a bra, but she didn’t want Karabo to think of her as the prudish old matron Teacher had said she’d become, so she let it go. She followed her daughter through the gate.
‘You don’t have to pay,’ the driver said to Precious as they boarded the taxi. It was not unusual. This happened to Precious rather often, when a black man in awe of her complexion would offer her a random favour. And with the even lighter-skinned Karabo by her side, the effect was only magnified.
‘But I must pay,’ insisted Precious. Had she been alone she would gladly have accepted the driver’s offer but she didn’t want to teach her daughter the wrong lesson. However, Karabo barely looked at the driver and quickly took her seat. It was as if she was already used to such acts of colour-induced largesse.
Karabo kept asking where they were going until Precious had to pinch her to be quiet. She was too embarrassed to say they were going to see igqirha. His house was in a much less respectable part of Mthatha than where they lived. There all the fascia boards were askew and the paint was falling off the houses in leprous, greying scabs. A pavement special kept pace with Precious and Karabo for a while after they got out of the taxi to walk the short distance to Jabu’s house. The dog trotted alongside them like a guard of honour.
Precious raised her hand and shouted at it. ‘Get away!’ It froze and stared at her with one paw raised off the ground. ‘Get away!’ she cried again, but it slunk away only when she bent down and pretended to pick up a stone to throw at it.
A group of boys ahead of them heard Precious shout and they turned to see who it could be. They were teenagers, about Karabo’s age, all dressed in drab cotton trousers and faded shirts. Precious held Karabo’s hand tightly and as they hurried past, one of the boys called out in a loud voice, ‘Yellowbone!’ The boys laughed loudly and made obscene sucking noises. Precious felt Karabo stiffen and slow down. She had to tug on her hand to keep her walking.