by Carl Muller
Carloboy found St Peter’s proper a rollercoaster. For one thing, life was full of great uncertainty. He was being tutored at home for his entrance examination to the Royal College. He was going on ten and was competing fiercely with Bryce Ratnayake for the favours of the pretty Christine Phoebus. His father had decided that boarding-school might be the best thing after all and had suddenly decided to can the Royal College and pack him off to St Thomas’ College in Gurutalawa. There was talk of transfers and Anuradhapura and what about the promised bicycle?
‘Sure to get transfer,’ Sonnaboy would say. ‘If put this big devil in boarding better.’
‘But see the fees at Gurutalawa,’ Beryl would object. ‘Can’t keep with Anna or somebody to go to school here? Can always come and see, no, when working to Colombo?’
‘Ye-es. But who will see what he’s up to? You think Anna can manage?’
Then, Glamour Boy got a wastepaper basket on his head and Carloboy, with others of his class, was sacked. ‘You have the option to remove him from school,’ Father Paris said. ‘Then it will not go on his school-leaving certificate that he has been dismissed.’
Sonnaboy, amazingly, neither fretted nor fumed. He just said stonily, ‘All right, I’ll take him out. Have to sign anything?’ He did, and for the second time in his ten years Carloboy had no school to go to. Instead, he was taken to the Royal College Hall where for six days he sat the entrance examination. And he passed and there was cake at home that day and his father celebrated with the neighbours and two bottles of arrack and roast pork and a stringhopper2 dinner.
Also, there was the bicycle. A Raleigh racer, mind, with cable brakes and sweeping handlebars and three-speed gears too! Carloboy never loved anything more than that bike. He took it down the front steps, through the gate, patted the narrow saddle and the white dazzle of each wheel rim blazed in the sun. Everything around him was wrapped in tinsel—the high rear wall of Phoebus’ house, the dense green hedge over the Wickremasinghe’s low front wall, the road that called to him, the road that met Hampden Lane. All he had to do was ride there, turn left, then left again and he would be in 34th Lane where his Christine would be sitting on her garden swing. She would be in her short, embroidered frock and her gold-brown legs would glisten and her long black hair send straying strands across her cheeks. Carloboy knew he loved Christine. One day he would marry her, he told himself, and take off her clothes and put his fingers inside her the way that Joachim’s servant had shown him. He could put his cock inside also. Who ever thought girls had holes like that, going all the way inside them? But today the bicycle was all. Nothing could ever take its place. His own bicycle.
He looked past his gate—a new gate after Daddy had wrecked the old one in that big fight with Sita’s boyfriend3 —
and then at his father who said, ‘Go on, ride it. Get up and go,’ and the warning, ‘Don’t go too far. Only in the lane.’ So he went, and tried out the gears and raced up Hampden Lane, swerving past old Mrs Pollocks who gave a whoop of alarm, then cruising, flaming-faced past Christine’s front gate, ringing his bell, stopping to meet Bryce and Merril, and Christine hung on her gate and admired his bike with long-lashed eyes and Carloboy knew that this was a beautiful, beautiful day.
The chronicler hastens. For one thing much of the story of the von Bloss migration to Anuradhapura is told in Yakada Yakā. Suffice to say, Sonnaboy took his son to this malarial station where, as a temporary measure, he pushed the boy into St Joseph’s school because (a) a lot of other Railway town boys went there and (b) because the boy couldn’t be allowed to run wild while he worked train to Kankesanturai and Talaimannar and came to grips with the north of the island. Also, it was a time-killing exercise. He had arranged to keep Carloboy and Diana with Anna from next year. Carloboy would go to Royal, Diana to St Clare’s. Carloboy could go to school on his bicycle . . . .
‘Anney can’t, men,’ Anna had promptly said.
‘Why?’
‘You’re mad or what. I can’t take responsibility. If go loafing all over or meet with accident or something you’ll come and scold. And roundabout here also all boys, no? Will join and go. Diana even never mind. Will go and come and closeby the school. Can go through Mallika Lane shortcut. But everyday cycling to Royal? See the way buses going on Highlevel road, will you.’
Colontota agreed. ‘And small fellow also. See the distance. You know how he got knocked by that lorry, no?’
‘He knocked the lorry,’ Sonnaboy corrected, smiling faintly at the incident. ‘Now he’s more careful.’
‘Careful thamai,’4 Anna snorted, ‘can see how he comes on the bike here, no? Coming like the wind and then catching the brake and tyres going barass in the sand.’
‘Knocking the lorry’ had been another grim business, made grimmer by an irate Mr de Kauwe who said that Carloboy had borrowed his son’s bicycle and wrecked it. It had been an impulse of the moment. There was this big lorry and it was going Carloboy’s way. The boy decided to hitch a ride. He sped up on the borrowed bike, manoeuvred to spitting distance of tailboard and gripped it. The lorry rolled on and thus anchored, Carloboy free-wheeled with it. All he had to do was keep his handlebars in check with his left hand and be ready to swerve out of danger at the drop of a hat. But the lorry had braked without warning and Carloboy had been propelled into it. His head struck the metal hingepin and the bicycle slammed in, front wheel twisted. Men carried the unconscious boy into the Canal View restaurant and retrieved the bicycle that closely resembled a monkey puzzle. When Carloboy was revived he had a bump as large as an egg on his temple and it had turned an interesting blue with a patch of red that blotched around his eye and travelled around the cheekbone. ‘Baby mad?’ a man asked, ‘to lorry hanging and going. Again like that doing don’t, you heard.’
Carloboy stared woozily. His head swam his hip hurt and he had to wheel a mauled bicycle to Ralston de Kauwe whose mother had hysterics and rushed to tell Beryl that her son came: ‘Like dying, men, come quickly and take to the hospital. Like this the bump and whole side blue and red patch all over. Limping limping and came. Must see the bicycle. God knows what Kevin will say.’
Kevin didn’t say much. All he asked was that Sonnaboy get Ralston’s bike repaired. ‘If fork is damaged then you have to get ‘nother bike. Can’t go to weld fork and allow to ride.’
And so, Carloboy was beaten (after the doctor has passed him as fit to be beaten, that is) and warned never to hang on to lorries, buses or any other vehicles which included municipal ambulances, co-operative store’s lorries, Black Marias and dog-catcher vans. Oh, the beatings were part of that tender time.
Beryl would scream: ‘Next time you hit Diana, get the broomstick across your back!’
Indeed, the girls ganged up. Through each day there was the constant whine. ‘Mummeeee, this Carloboy is hitting!’ which was the girls’ way of keeping an elder brother in order. Carloboy would be smacked and the sisters would giggle. It became, to them, a nasty little game. ‘Mummee, pinching me, this Carloboy!’ or ‘Mummee, look at this Carloboy!’
‘Now what!’ Beryl would shout.
‘Saying will burn my doll!’
‘Leave the girls alone! Go and take you books!’ Beryl screams.
‘What did I do? For lies they’re shouting!’ Carloboy yells.
‘Shut up! Do what you’re told! Don’t you come to shout at me!’
‘Fine thing, no? I didn’t do anything!’
‘Don’t come to talk back. Know what a saint you are!’
‘Bloody bitch!’ Carloboy would hiss. ‘You wait!’
‘Mummee, now saying filthy words to us!’
‘Will you get out of there! Come here! What did you say?’
‘Nothing.’
‘All lies, said bloody bitch. Marie also heard.’
Beryl slaps the boy fiercely. ‘Sit in the hall and study!’ she yells. ‘And don’t get up until I tell you!’
Yes, the beatings, the taunts of the sisters, were a part of it all. And
the taunts especially. ‘Bigger you get the worse you’re becoming!’ was a favourite indictment.
There was always the exhortation: ‘Nice way you’re behaving, no? Eldest must set an example to the others!’ and those reminders which didn’t actually mean a thing: ‘See that Pinder boy. How he’s studying. Why can’t you also apply yourself a little? Brainless you’re not, no?’ (But there was also the favourite, much-used dismissal: ‘Get out of my sight, you bloody brainless idiot!’)
Truly, a ten-year-old never knew. The ob-la-di and the ob-la-da could fluster a boy for keeps. It was the same on that fateful First Holy Communion day when Beryl dressed her son in spectral white and pleaded that she couldn’t go to church because she had ‘the cooking also to do’. Sonnaboy just mooched around the garden in a singlet and khaki shorts and said. ‘You’re going? Receive, receive and come. Told Mummy to make nice breakfast. Come straight after church, right? Bought currant loaf from F.X. Perera’s also.’
Carloboy was disappointed. There was Norman Dekker. His parents were there. Some parents had even brought Kodak box cameras along. Families packed St Lawrence’s. Carloboy saw Mrs Holsingher bearing down on him, ‘Where? Your daddy an’ mummy didn’t come?’
‘No, Aunty.’
‘Sin, men,’ Mrs Holsingher told pasty-faced Mrs Gray. ‘Sent alone to receive and go. One even should have come.’ So Carloboy joined the Dekkers who took him to their home in Manning Place where he had a slap-up breakfast and played cowboys and came home at lunch-time with a broken communion candle and a rumpled shirt and every bit of starch worked energetically out of his once immaculate trousers. He was beaten, of course, and on that day Sonnaboy used a hard Indian sandal which left large bruises on his calves and thighs. Nothing, he later said, is as good as a First Holy Whacking!
Schooling in Anuradhapura took time, but the move to that north-central town was greeted with a great relief by the Wellawatte neighbourhood. Old Phoebus was vastly relieved. He had vibrated indignantly when he discovered that his nine-year-old daughter—nine years old, mind!—was actually accepting love letters from Carloboy. And she was replying too!
‘Damn cheek of the bugger!’ he told Ratnayake. ‘Can you imagine, men, at this age if doing like this what he will be like later!’
Victor Ratnayake leaned forward to mumble. ‘Never liked them, men. Because my Ivy saying Mrs von Bloss is cousin or something I also put up. Engine drivers—what can you expect. And engine driver’s son, no? My God, the dirty words he knows.’
‘From over their wall passing to my one. And she also taking and writing. Lucky the wife told to see how our servant-boy is going near the wall when their servant-girl is sweeping. Caught the bugger and put two slaps. But keeping an eye I was and how, caught in the act! I saw, no. Coming to the wall and waiting. Just waiting. I was looking from the bathroom fanlight. Then Christine came running to the garage and I saw him wave the hand and give a paper. Straight away I went. Come here at once, I said and started crying and saying he gave and I didn’t want to take and the bugger ran inside. Took the paper and how? My darling Christine and I love you and all the rubbish. Mother gave a good slapping!’
Ratnayake, who was trying to sort out this rigmarole said, ‘Lucky didn’t try with my ones.’
‘Must have been afraid. Too close, no? When went to next lane that started all this.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘Do? Went to the wall and put a shout. Told that Poddi to call the mother. Came with big smile. When I showed the letter she got a shock. “I thought only children, no, and playing,” she’s saying.
‘What to children, I said, from, so early got such ideas from who, I asked. Not a word. Told will tell the father. Asked to give the letter to show so I gave.’
‘I heard a big row there. Must have given the bugger tight.’
‘I don’t know. Didn’t come to talk to me anyway.’
There was no need to. Sonnaboy thrashed his son until even Beryl had to intervene, and then with the mercury dropping, sat to marvel at a love letter that was too good to be true. ‘From where he’s learning to write like this?’ he demanded. ‘Must be reading all your love story magazines also!’
It had been a painful day for Carloboy who cried himself to sleep and woke with a stiff leg, a throbbing head and fever. Beryl dosed him with Venivelgeta and two Aspros and his sisters sniggered. True, Diana had pissed in fright when her brother received that terrible whacking, but she was now ready to sneer and mock. Carloboy thought it had to be very, very wrong to be drawn to a girl. It had to be . . . and his mind moved, drawing up pictures. When cousins Ivor and Marlene came to stay, Ivor would sleep with him and Marlene with his sister. He would go to Aunty Elsie’s and he had to sleep with Ian. It was not good, it would seem, to be with, play with, fight with, sleep with girls. He remembered the day his daddy had said: ‘What? No friends for you to go and play with? Playing here with the girls? Trying to become a damn sissy?’
The problem was that Carloboy, at ten, was looking at girls in a strange and excitingly new light. He had even begun to cycle daily to Aunty Leah’s where he looked long at Marlene, at her expressive eyes and rich lips and knew he loved her madly—just as he loved the Redlich girl and Yvette Foenander and Diedrie Ohlmus and Caryll Raux and the rafts of girls who came to church and Sunday school and the many he met on his way to school. So many, he had mused, and Christine next door and he would squeeze shut his eyes and try to imagine how Yvette or Carmen or Therese would look in their nakedness just as Joachim’s servant woman looked each time she lured him to her bed.
So many girls. So many of his, own cousins, too. And it was all bad, bad, bad! The beating told him so. It was bad to go to Joachim’s again. Bad to look at Marlene the way he did. Girls were a source of trouble. ‘I hate them, hate all,’ he said and it grew in him, scorched him and his head buzzed until Beryl, finding him. very hot and restless, placed an icebag on his head.
‘That a way to hit?’ she told Sonnaboy. ‘Now high fever also.’
But recovery was swift enough, and with it the wisdom to realize that a certain wiliness of mind and secretiveness of spirit was needed if one had to consort, however innocently, with girls. Poddi, too, was soon to go away, and it seemed so easy to stand behind her as she made the beds and squeeze her breasts. Poddi would jump, then look and say, ‘Apoi, baby no? I thought someone else.’
It was some comfort to a mind awash with doubts and fears. Poddi squeezed him. ‘Now big, no? Those days so big only,’ showing her little finger, and Carloboy followed her to the tiny servants’ lavatory where she dropped her cloth and pressed him close and nuzzled his cheek and said, ‘Baby to the mat come in the night,’ and Carloboy said how he watched her in the light of the signal lamp and she never knew.
Yes, Anuradhapura put paid to a lot of things. Elsie’s daughter Caroline, too, remembered how Carloboy had beat her over the head with a cricket bat. Beryl agreed that the boy was vicious. He was developing a hatred for his sisters and now this Caroline business.
‘Lucky with the flat part that hit,’ she said. ‘Small crack. Had to rush to the hospital.’
‘Where’s that bugger? Break his bloody bones!’
When he flung a scissors at Marie, slicing open her forehead, Sonnaboy beat him senseless. Even Beryl found this quite unreal. ‘How much going to hammer like this? Must catch and talk and see why he’s behaving like this, no? Just hammering, hammering. See now, devil won’t even cry!’ And Beryl would drag her son away and get him to remove his tattered shirt and dab flavine on the places where the belt had broken the skin and say, ‘Told, no, to leave the girls alone. Just going to fight and say things to them.’
‘So they’re the ones who start mocking and all,’ Carloboy would protest.
When the transfer orders came, and Poddi had gone back to her village, and Sonnaboy had, with much bluster, cancelled wedding anniversary celebrations, Beryl said: ‘Till end of the year even take an’ go to Anuradhapura, men. If have a
school for a little while even send there. Enough the botheration I will have with the girls and the baby also. And staying at Ma’s in Millicent’s room. Will drive everyone mad, that’s what he’ll do.’
Sonnaboy agreed. Beryl, as usual, was in the latter stages of pregnancy. The Mahadanghawatte Lane house was to be given up. She would stay with her mother until the baby was born. For a while, father and son would live in the new station. The neighbourhood cheered. It had been a fierce year and it was ending peacefully enough. ‘Must say a thanksgiving Mass,’ Mrs Swan told her husband. ‘You wait and see will you. That small devil will be worse than the father!’
Old Albert Swan nodded. ‘That Beryl gave the twenty rupees she borrowed?’
‘Yes, yes. Came yesterday and gave. Going to stay at her mother’s until go and get the house ready it seems.’
‘My God, then that Carloboy still going to be loafing this side?’
‘No, no. Taking and going. Next year will bring and come to go to Royal. How he passed the exam God only knows!’
Swan, who was an old Peterite, bristled. ‘If couldn’t learn at St Peter’s you think he will learn there? You mark my words. No good. He’ll come to no good.’
(Capitalize those last four words, please. A lot of people in a lot of places, in a lot of homes in lanes and gardens, from Racecourse Avenue to Pamankada, from Kohuwela to Dehiwela and beyond shared this conviction. Carloboy Prins von Bloss would Come To No Good!)
Chapter Nine
This, readers will say, is simply not done. Why should we read Yakada Yakā(or whatever the outlandish title of that book is) to learn about Anuradhapura? It’s not fair!
You’re right, of course, and I do beg your pardon, but I don’t wish to do better or worse than what has already been recorded. I abhor re-telling and, pardon again my temerity, if you haven’t read Yakada Yakā, you really should. Why? Because I wrote it, of course, and don’t you want to know what the blue blazes a Yakada Yakā is? Case dismissed!