by Linzi Glass
PENGUIN BOOKS
Ruby Red
Linzi Glass was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and moved to the United States as a young adult. She has published articles, and has written plays, screenplays, short stories and two novels – the critically acclaimed The Year the Gypsies Came, and Ruby Red. She lives in Los Angeles with her many rescue animals and has a nineteen-year-old daughter, Jordan.
Praise for The Year the Gypsies Came:
‘Wonderful… This is a new book with an old and wise heart. It may very well have the makings of a classic’ Guardian
‘Beautifully, powerfully and compellingly written… extraordinarily moving’ Sunday Times
‘This outstanding first novel arcs beautifully to its terrible climax and is deeply moving’ Observer
‘A gripping read from an exciting new author’ Independent
‘Unputdownable’ Telegraph
Books by Linzi Glass
THE YEAR THE GYPSIES CAME
RUBY RED
LINZI GLASS
PENGUIN BOOKS
This book is dedicated to thirteen-year-old Hector Pieterson,
the first child to be killed on 16 June 1976, and to all the
children who lost their lives during the Soweto Riots.
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
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Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published 2007
Published in this edition 2008
1
Text copyright © Linzi Glass, 2007
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Extract from Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach reprinted with the permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group. Copyright © 1970 by Richard D. Bach and Leslie Parrish-Bach. All rights reserved.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
978-0-14-191853-2
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
‘Art is the blood of a nation.
Stop the arteries and the heart will die’
Linda Givon, owner of the Goodman Gallery,
Johannesburg/Cape Town, South Africa
Chapter One
I remember the first time I heard my mother mention Julian Mambasa. ‘His work is astounding. It cut right through me, made me almost gasp out aloud,’ she told Father and me after her first meeting with Julian. It was at an underground art exhibit in Braamfontein, the part of town where respectable seventeen-year-old young ladies like me were never allowed to go.
My mother, Annabel, owned one of the most well-known art galleries in Johannesburg. It was also one of the most controversial. The gallery carried the works of both the famous and infamous and the serene walls were hung with paintings of both the struggling and the successful. Talent, Mother always said, knew no boundaries.
In the past Mother had helped starving artists with money and supplies, but she had been so appalled to learn that Julian painted in his dimly lit shanty in Soweto that it didn’t take much for her to convince Father to let him move his meagre supplies, broken easel and tattered paintbrushes to our guest house. Airy and spacious, it had once been used entirely as a playroom for me, their only child.
On the first day that Julian arrived he was overwhelmed by what he saw.
‘Madam Annabel, you shouldn’t have, really you are much too kind, too kind…’ He had lowered his head and placed his large hands across his heart.
Mother had gone out and bought him the finest brushes, a gleaming new easel and beautifully fine stretched canvases.
‘Aah, but your talent deserves this,’ was all she said.
Her name had been well chosen for it meant beauty and grace. She was fair haired and slight with a slender boyish figure that gave her the advantage of wearing flimsy dresses that hung perfectly on her slender hips. I had inherited none of her pale fragility. I was already taller than her with dark hair and eyes and an athletic frame that served me well on the school track team.
I had stood silently beside Mother, feeling surprisingly shy in front of Julian. Mother had not told me that he was barely in his twenties, which made him just a few years older than me.
‘Ruby,’ he had said when Mother had introduced us. ‘Madam Annabel, you did not tell me that you hide your most valued masterpiece at home.’
I had waited to hear him laugh at his joke but saw only warm dark eyes looking down at me.
It was May 1976 and South Africa was at the height of apartheid, where the laws of segregation were strictly enforced. A harsh, unforgiving and hateful time when blacks and whites were forbidden to share the same public bench let alone share a meal together. It was on that crisp, cold day in May that my friendship with Julian Mambasa began. Ours was a bond that could not exist beyond the gates of our hilltop home in the affluent, white suburb of Westcliff.
But friendship, much like talent, knows no boundaries.
Julian arrived each morning on a bus marked in big black letters, NON-WHITES/NIE BLANKES, that dropped him off at the bottom of the hill on Jan Smuts Avenue. From here he would dodge his way through busy morning traffic, stopping briefly to buy a morning copy of the Rand Daily Mail newspaper from the young piccanin with the runny nose and tattered clothes that were two sizes too big for him.
‘I am a lucky one. Lucky to have met such a good woman as your mother,’ Julian told me as he set up his new easel to begin his day’s work of painting and sketching in the quiet of a clean bright studio.
He shook his head as he looked around the dazzling s
tudio. ‘This is nothing like my home.’
I found myself drawn to the studio every day after school. Between brush strokes I learned about his life in Soweto, how he would wake up every morning to the raspy squawking of his neighbour Phillamon’s chickens. He would sneak into their yard and dig for his morning’s breakfast of eggs from under their warm feathers.
‘A hen is a good thing to own in Soweto. Guarantee of food. Better than some who have to go to the garbage dumps to find scraps to feed themselves and their young.’
Julian painted the view through his cracked, small window in his works: a washing line being hung by a crooked, wrinkled old woman with a basket balancing on her wobbly head, a broken bottle in the hands of a scarred young tsotsie outside a she been, a makeshift drinking parlour, a mother with big melancholy eyes feeding her baby in the gutter outside the one free clinic near Baragwanath Hospital, an outhouse, rust-covered pipes leaking stinking water where a ten-year-old boy slept with his head in the filth. This was the view from Julian’s room in Soweto.
While the view from my bedroom was of lush gardens, at a tender age my parents had shown me that the world we lived in was wrong – that people shouldn’t have to live in separate areas or ride in separate buses or be treated differently because of the colour of their skin. But by lifting the veil of ignorance from my young eyes they created another kind of division. They separated me from my peers, for I lived in a hidden world that existed behind our large iron gates. Here in the safety and privacy of our home, people were treated as if colour didn’t matter. Underground meetings of the illegal African National Congress were held sometimes in the late hours of the night, where Father was often the only white person present. Afternoon teas were served amongst the burnished orange geraniums that lined the finely manicured lawns to Mother’s liberal art-loving crowd where Xhosa and Zulu were spoken as frequently as English over just-baked crumpets and scones. The ever-present threat that a raid by police could turn our world upside down in an instant forced me into a life of even greater secrecy at school. What happened at home was to stay at home. But we did not realize then that our iron gates could not keep out the hate.
‘It’s the splinters of glass in people’s eyes that makes them see the world in jagged little pieces. If we could just get the glass out we could make them see clearly.’
My father often quoted from The Snow Queen to me. It was his favourite children’s story and he had been telling it to me since I was five. I think my father, David, always the idealist, expected to represent only good people with honest problems when he became a partner in a very important law firm, but he soon discovered that there were many unsavoury characters he was made to represent. Getting the crooked rich off was not his idea of being a lawyer, so he began seeking cases to help the disenfranchised blacks. It helped him feel as if he were making a difference, that all those years of studying had not been for nothing.
My father had thick wavy black hair and a muscular frame. He had large thick-fingered hands that he used with purpose. He never spoke down to anyone. Everyone counted. He loved the story of the Snow Queen because it was a quest about setting a wrong right. He told me this tale over and over again as I sat in my fluffy bunny slippers and drank hot frothy milk in his oversized leather chair in his warm study.
Julian’s favourite book was Harold and the Purple Crayon. He explained it all to me during one of our many afternoons together in the crisp white studio where he painted or sketched in charcoal.
‘I hear this story when I was just a small piccanin; it was being read by a white madam to her little boy. Me, I was there to help my mother fold up the many piles of laundry. Mama, she was working then as washerwoman for Dr and Mrs Gordon in a big house in Hyde Park three days a week.’
Between the folds of the warm sheets the words of Harold reached him. With his purple crayon in his small hand, Harold drew his world and then stepped into it. A path, an apple tree, even a whole city full of windows.
‘See, Harold, he created his own truth. You understand? He made it as nice and as comfortable as he liked. He drew things that could make a problem go away, and – puff — no problem any more.’
I nodded even though I wasn’t too sure what Julian meant.
‘See, Ruby, if there was a big rock in the middle of the road, Harold, he would draw a stepladder with his purple crayon to climb over it.’
Now I understood.
‘Right then, in Dr Gordon’s big house, me, I decided I was going to paint my way out of my world. Draw a better life for my people, my mother and her rough washerwoman’s hands and aching back that kept her up all night.’
Julian was seven when he decided that he would become an artist, like Harold with his crayon, and draw himself out of poverty in their filthy suburb, Naledi, and out of the township of Soweto. At first he drew pictures of black faces sitting in shiny, fancy cars. A handsome father at the wheel and the children all in their finest clothes. Everyone was smiling. In another picture he even parked a car in front of a two-storied house set on rolling lawns and wrote at the top, ‘This house belongs to the Mambasa family.’
‘But when my mother found those pictures that I had proudly taped to our shanty wall she ripped them down, tore them into a hundred pieces and whipped me with the long, hard handle of a broom, yelling that I was never to draw such terrible things again.’
‘Why was your mother so upset? I don’t understand,’ I said, shocked at what his mother had done to him for simply drawing.
Julian put his sketchpad down and came towards me. I was five foot six inches in stockinged feet but Julian was a towering six foot three. Dark, gleaming brow, warm, oval eyes and large, square hands that moved ever so gracefully like the wings of an eagle, stretching and reaching into the open air when he wanted to make a particular point take flight.
‘Me also, Ruby, me too. I didn’t understand then, but when I was done crying she rubbed a warm cloth on my stinging legs and told me that – Hai! – we could be arrested and put in jail for having such pictures in our home. That drawing black people like us living like white people was wrong and not allowed.’
Julian dug his hands into his paint-smeared overall pockets. He looked deeply at me before he spoke again. He smelled of old, worn leather and sweet musk.
‘I never draw like that again, but, me, I keep sketching whenever I can, then painting. When my schoolteachers at Orlando West High see I have talent, they get me an old easel and some used oil paints. My mother, she was proud when I won the most-promising-artist award when I was fourteen, but she always check to make sure I am not painting anything that might get our family in trouble.’
Julian turned to look at a large charcoal drawing he had finished only a few days before that still sat on an easel.
‘You are only one child, Ruby, but me, there were six of us living in two rooms, well seven really, but my father, he get home from the mines so late and leave so very early.’ Julian sighed softly. ‘It was like he was not even there.’
The picture was of an iron bed raised high on bricks, a single bed, but somehow Julian had managed to draw five sets of large sad eyes, attached to five long and scrawny bodies that were somehow all squeezed on to its tiny mattress, limbs across limbs, gangly feet flopping over the sides.
‘Is it your…?’
‘Yes. Me and my brothers and sisters,’ he said. ‘That is how we slept. But you cannot feel the cold. Hear the pipes hissing and leaking. A painting cannot give you that.’ He sat down again at his easel and faced the painting, then he reached his hand out and gently traced the faces of the children in the picture.
‘This is what white people want to see. Not happy black people in fancy cars.’
‘You should be able to paint whatever you want. Surely?’
‘No, it is not so. At least for now. Now I paint my people’s pain. I must pretend, you see, that nothing will ever change for us.’
When Julian spoke these words it was as if he had climbed inside my v
ery soul. Pretending was something that had become a part of me. No one at school could possibly know that I spent a great deal of time creating the appearance that I was like everyone else, that my life was normal in every way. I knew I would be shunned and an outcast if my fellow schoolmates found out that blacks were people I actually spoke to and not just when I wanted extra mashed potato or lemonade served to me. In truth, my parents were probably some of the only whites in South Africa who did not have black servants living on our property and meeting our every need. You did not have to be rich to have a black nanny who worked six days a week and late into the nights before collapsing exhausted in her small ill-lit room on the family grounds. Thirty rand a month and food bought you her loyalty. My parents did not believe in having servants. Black people sat at our dining-room table as guests and ate dinner with us while Mother and I cleared their plates away at the end of the meal.
To make certain that I appeared to be ‘normal’, I worked hard and got straight As. I was a school prefect and popular with loads of friends and a drawer full of ribbons from winning athletic events. But my shameful truth was that I, Ruby Winters, felt like a fraud and it was just a matter of time before I was found out.
Chapter Two
It was about two miles from the top of Westcliff Ridge to school, which was in the tree-lined suburb of Saxonwold. As with most private schools in Johannesburg, the grounds were expansive, the rugby field immaculate and the swimming pool crystal clear and skimmed daily for fallen leaves. Only the offspring of the richest and most prestigious families of the area went to Barnard High School. The golden ones, as it were, of the golden city, as Johannesburg was sometimes called. The school, formerly called Theason High, had recently been renamed in honour of the famous Cape Town heart surgeon, Christiaan Barnard, who had performed the world’s first open heart transplant. It pleased me that our school was now named after someone who understood the workings of the heart.