That night in bed I thought about kissing Jill, then, without warning, Ruthie entered my thoughts. And suddenly a new kind of guilt made an appearance. There had been nothing between Ruthie and me, except our Saturday business dealings and learning to ride her brother’s bike. So why should I feel guilty, I asked myself. It made no sense. But, remembering the novel sensation of exploring the inside of Jill’s mouth with my tongue, I shrank with guilt. What would Ruthie have thought had she seen me, I wondered.
That week I also made one of my sporadic efforts to build a friendship with my father. Since becoming an ouderling, he was expected to visit the poorest members of the congregation from time to time to see if there was something the other members could do to help. I learnt from Mama that he sometimes had to visit families that had special problems. I asked her what sort of special problems they had and she said, ‘When the wife sometimes has a bruised face.’
‘Why did they choose Papa to do this?’
‘Because he’s a wise man and he’s the soul of discretion.’
The soul of discretion? Mama said it in English. I had only a vague idea of its meaning, but I liked the sound of it and I looked forward to the day when someone would call me the soul of discretion. The whole ouderling thing seemed very interesting to me. I asked my father if I could accompany him when he went on his visits. I might learn something that would prepare me for ouderling duties later in life. I did not mention my desire to uncover some fascinating facts about adult infidelities or teenage pregnancies. It seemed wiser not to mention those interests. He said no, I was too young. Usually our conversation would have ended at that point, but this time, to my surprise, he stopped to explain. ‘In most cases the people I have to visit are embarrassed about their circumstances. I cannot take a youngster like you with me. That would embarrass them further.’
‘But I’m the soul of discretion,’ I said in English.
He looked at me seriously for a moment, then burst into laughter. ‘You are not,’ he said. Laughing together was not something we did very often and this was an opportunity. I joined in the laughter until, still smiling, he walked away.
When Saturday finally came round, I was at the flea market even earlier than usual. Ruthie and her mother had not yet arrived and I had to wait a few minutes. When I saw their old Opel station wagon turn into Umhlanga Rocks Drive, I slipped in behind some of the other stalls. This was not a day on which I wanted contact with her mother.
It was only when I was sure that Ruthie was alone that I came forward. ‘Hello,’ I said.
Immediately her eyes widened eagerly. She sounded out of breath. ‘You got your motorbike.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I can see it in your face. You look so happy.’ She looked around quickly. ‘Where is it? I want to see it.’
What I had to say was important and I was afraid to say it, so I just let it come out, looking at her face all the time for a reaction. ‘Come for a ride.’
Her face, that had been full of excitement, suddenly became serious, her dark eyes fixed on mine. ‘When?’
‘This afternoon, after you’ve finished here.’
She thought about it for only a few seconds. ‘I’ll tell my ma I’m going to a friend.’
‘Where can I get you?’
‘There by the place where you learnt to ride a bike, but not in Greenwood Park. There on the Red Hill side.’
‘What time?’ Now I could hear the breathlessness in my own voice. I had never before in all my short life arranged to meet a member of the opposite sex anywhere, for any reason, except my sisters.
‘Two o’clock, but if I’m late, wait for me.’ The way her voice sounded I thought she might, like me, also be having difficulty breathing.
When I came to fetch my motorbike, Abraham wanted to know where I was going and could he come too. I had not thought of the possibility of Abraham wanting to come. In fact, I had thought of nothing except taking Ruthie for a ride. So I said, ‘No, I have to attend to private business.’
It sounded weak and I could see that Abraham felt unhappy at being excluded so soon. All our lives we had done everything or almost everything together. For me now to exclude him, when I had something as wonderful as a motorbike to share, was almost traitorous. Also, it was clear that he did not believe me. ‘What private business?’ he wanted to know.
‘Nothing. We can go for a ride tomorrow.’
That made him feel a little better, but only a little. ‘Which way you going?’
‘To town.’
‘You can’t go into town with no licence. You going to bioscope?’
‘No, I’m not going to bioscope. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘The traffic cops will catch you with no licence.’
I left him standing at the roadside in front of their house and set off in the direction of town, then took a loop back to the place where I was to meet Ruthie. It was just a block away from the North Coast Road on a quiet street between a warehouse on one side and a small factory on the other. There were no houses from which mothers could be watching and wondering what I was doing and perhaps thinking of reporting my activities to Mama or to Ma Peterson.
Ruthie was not there by two, nor by half past two, nor even three. From where I waited on the saddle of my motorbike, I could see the lowest block of the street where I had entered Greenwood Park on my only visit to the place. Other people were coming and going from the Indian shop on the corner and the buses that stopped on the other side of the road. Plenty of coloured kids came down the hill, quite a few of them girls, but none of them was Ruthie. I stayed where I was. If there was any chance of Ruthie coming, I was going to be there.
It was almost quarter past three when I saw her bounding down the road, her hair flying. Even from a distance, I knew immediately that the girl running down the hill, then pausing briefly at North Coast Road to look for cars, was Ruthie. She saw me while she was crossing and waved, a quick, almost panicky gesture.
She leapt onto the pillion seat without being invited. ‘Let’s go, let’s go, before somebody sees us.’
My motorbike again started at the first kick. I will say this about Gert van Staden: he was right, the bike did run. We set off up North Coast Road, which I saw as the quickest way to get away from Greenwood Park and Red Hill. About half a kilometre up the road we turned into a side street that ran between the last row of houses and the first wave of sugar cane.
Ruthie was tight against me, her arms wrapped around me and her legs pressed against mine. It was the first time, except for playing Postman’s Knock with Jill, that I had experienced physical contact with a female, except for my sisters and my mother. My sisters’ touches were usually hostile. My mother’s touch was pleasant and comforting.
‘Where we going?’ Ruthie yelled in my ear.
‘For a ride.’
‘Where?’
‘In the sugar cane.’
With that we came to the canebreak I had been aiming at. We bumped off the road, almost skidded on a patch of clay, and set off up the canebreak, a strip of thin, ankle-deep grass maybe five metres wide, with the cane towering above us, almost twice my height, on either side. I knew of a place where the break widened, to leave space for trucks to turn. If you stopped there and pulled the bike a little to the side, no one could see you until they were almost on top of you.
My only desire for Ruthie at that stage was to be alone with her. I just wanted us to be somewhere where there would be no Red Hill, no Greenwood Park, no flea market, no families, just us.
I stopped when we reached the spot. Ruthie leapt off as I cut the engine. She sat down on a patch of grass just where I had intended, out of sight of anyone coming down the canebreak. I went to sit next to her without touching, perhaps an arm’s length away. ‘This is nice,’ she said. ‘Your bike is also nice. And you can ride it already without falling.’
‘I’ve fallen three times,’ I told her.
‘Did you get hurt?’ I imagined a trace
of anxiety in her voice.
‘Not much.’
‘It’s a nice motorbike and it’s loud.’
‘The boy who had it before took the baffles out.’
‘What are baffles?’
‘They make it soft. If there are no baffles, it’s loud like this.’
‘I like it when there’s no baffles. It sounds like a real motorbike.’
‘Me too,’ I said. ‘I also like it that way.’
‘What’s your ma say about your bike?’
‘She doesn’t know.’
‘Your ma doesn’t know? And your pa?’
‘He also doesn’t know.’
‘He doesn’t know neither? They going to kill you, boy.’
‘Don’t call me boy.’
‘Chris,’ she said. ‘And what would happen if a traffic cop caught you?’
‘He’d take my bike away.’
Riding around under these circumstances made no sense to Ruthie. Her bewilderment was mixed with amusement. ‘Then why we doing this?’ The question was followed by a moment of laughter. I thought later of her laugh as having the sound of a silver bell.
‘After this I’m going to show it to my father and he’ll probably lock it up until I can take it to my oupa’s farm. I just wanted to take you for a ride once.’
She looked seriously at me. The merry grin was gone. She was just a skinny girl and I was a thirteen-year-old boy with knobbly elbows and knees, but I was more pleased to be sitting in the cane with her than I had ever been pleased about anything at any time, all my life, even the purchase of my motorbike. ‘You a funny boy,’ she said. ‘You do funny things and you say funny things.’
‘What funny things do I do?’
‘Getting all the stuff for me and my ma to sell.’
‘Why’s it funny?’
‘It’s funny because I never heard of a white boy doing that before.’
‘I just wanted to make money to buy my motorbike.’
‘And you say funny things like you took this big chance with the traffic cops an’ everything so you can take me for a ride.’
I was a little embarrassed at having admitted to that, so this time I said nothing.
‘It’s nice, Chrissie,’ she said. ‘I like it that you said that. Is it all right if I call you Chrissie?’
‘Yes, it’s all right. Everybody does.’
The rest of the afternoon we sat in the place where the canebreak broadened. She told me about her family, that her father had gone away, so she had to help her ma make some money, about her Uncle William who was rich and came to visit them occasionally, about her brother Johnny whose bicycle she had borrowed to teach me to ride and about her aunt, her mother’s sister, who had a job as head of a typing pool and earned a lot of money.
When she had finished, she asked about my family and I told her about Mama and how wonderful she was, about Annie, who was a sort of partner in business with Abraham and me, about Michie, who wanted so badly to be beautiful, and about my father, who was a very important person. She asked me what my father’s name was and I told her, ‘Bernard Vorster.’
At his name she screwed up her eyes and said, ‘I think I heard somebody talk about your father, but I can’t remember. What work does he do?’
I knew nothing about my father’s work except what I had learnt in the few minutes I spent hiding in the garden seat while he told Mrs Muller that her brother could not become white and get work that was reserved for white men. All I knew was the name of the section of which he was the head. To hide the words ‘Race Classification’ from Ruthie was not a conscious decision, but that was what I did. I also said nothing about Mrs Muller and her brother’s problems. ‘My father works in the Department of the Interior,’ I said.
‘My pa was panel beater before he went away,’ she said.
We also told each other what we thought about life, what churches we attended, what we wanted to be one day. She wanted to be a singer on the stage and be famous and I wanted to be a businessman and make plenty of money. The taste of money, realised through the graveyard vases, had taken effect and so far the flavour was good. I could already see that you needed money if you were to do exciting things. I could not have brought Ruthie to this place without having made the money to buy my motorbike.
And we told each other about the things we liked to do. I liked to go to the beach, especially North Beach where the waves were big and you were fighting the sea all the time. I also liked to play rugby. I liked to do business. And now I liked to ride my motorbike.
She liked to read and she read a lot. Yes, I remembered, so did I. I told her I liked to read in English the greatest classics ever written, Treasure Island and Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. She said that most of all she loved music and singing. There was a kind of music she sometimes heard on the radio that she loved, but she did not know what it was called. When she found out she would tell me.
The sun was low in the sky and our spot and the entire canebreak was in shadow when we heard a rustling in the cane. We both looked in the direction of the sound, but it stopped immediately. ‘What’s that?’ Ruthie asked.
‘I don’t know. Maybe a python.’
‘What’s that? What’s a python?’
‘It’s a big snake.’
‘A big snake?’ She was on her feet. ‘I didn’t know there snakes in the sugar cane.’
The pythons in the cane were real. I had seen one from close up when it got into an avocado tree in a neighbour’s backyard. It was winter and food must have been in short supply. I was six at the time. The python measured more than four metres. When it dropped out of a tree onto their garden boy, he started screaming. He was a little chap and he would have been the python’s lunch for sure if we had not all heard his cries for help.
Uncle Stefan pinned down the snake’s head with a broom, then chopped it off with a hand axe. Abraham and I helped two other fathers to hold the tail. Afterwards Uncle Stefan skinned it and sowed the skin of the head onto the skin of the body. The last time I was in their house, it was still on the wall, about the length of two adult men, one standing on the other’s shoulders. In width, at the thickest point, the skin was more than the length of your arm, even if you have long arms. It was all Abraham could talk about for nearly a month. You would have thought he had killed it himself.
‘It could also be a cane rat,’ I said.
‘I don’t like rats neither.’ By now she was standing in the very centre of the canebreak, with as much distance as she could find between herself and the cane on either side. I went and stood next to her and felt both her arms encircle my waist. ‘Let’s go. I didn’ know there’s snakes an’ rats.’
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘The pythons eat the rats and the rats don’t do anything.’
‘I don’t like them, not neither.’
Neither the pythons nor the rats had done anything to affect our afternoon though. Only the position of the sun did. Ruthie should have been home already and so should I. And I had a problem looming at home. This time I had to take my motorbike home. My lateness was nothing compared to the problem that was going to arise around my ownership of a motorbike.
‘Drop me off by the same place,’ Ruthie said. ‘Don’t come into Greenwood Park. My ma will kill me if she sees me on a motorbike with a boy, specially a white boy.’
By the time I dropped her, the afternoon was giving way to twilight. She leapt from the seat behind me and started running. Over her shoulder, almost as an afterthought, she yelled, ‘Bye, boy.’ She paused a moment at North Coast Road and, apparently remembering, she yelled, ‘Chrissie.’ Then she was on her way up the hill, only slowing to a walk when she was almost out of sight.
When I could no longer see her, I turned my motorbike round and started for home. I had expected anger from my parents, but what I got was astonishment, which soon turned to a strange kind of bewilderment. Out of that rose a determination that I was not going to be allowed to ruin my life. It seems that I had ta
ken the first step towards becoming a Hell’s Angel or some other kind of awful biker who would smoke dagga, engage in sex orgies, whatever they were, and do other utterly disreputable things.
I had been careful not to let my sisters into the secret of my motorbike either. I was aware that the two of them were serious security leaks. They were as surprised by developments as my parents. Annie told me afterwards that, as soon as I started drawing near to the house, my father came out of the bedroom, looking like a thundercloud just before the storm. ‘Do you hear that?’ he had asked. ‘Can you believe that some people allow their sons to ride around on a motorbike that sounds like that?’ It seems he got more and more agitated the closer I got to home and he could scarcely believe his eyes and ears when I rode down our driveway and round to the back of the house, trailing the offending racket behind me.
To my surprise, Mama did give me supper that night. I thought that, at the very least, I was going to be sent to bed hungry. It seems that my sin was too big for ordinary punishments. In fact, it was too big for any kind of punishment. I was not to blame. My parents spent the rest of the night asking each other what they had done wrong to have produced a boy capable of generating his own cash which he had then spent on something as morally ambiguous as a motorcycle. And all of this when he was only thirteen years old. Then riding it home, without baffles, making enough noise, in Mama’s words, to awaken the whole of Red Hill cemetery.
If my parents did not sleep that night while they struggled with their obvious failures in raising their son, I lost consciousness almost immediately and slept soundly and happily till the next morning. All night I dreamt of sitting on the grass in the canebreak with Ruthie. It was only the next morning that I first considered that it was just as well that my parents knew only about the motorcycle part of my aberrant ways. They had not yet found out about my new friend.
The Classifier Page 8