I woke on Sunday surprisingly happy, considering the domestic disturbance I had caused the night before. Life was more stimulating than it had ever been. The only cloud on my horizon was that next Saturday was so far away. That my motorbike was now locked in our garden storeroom and my father had the key was not an issue of any significance. I had predicted that. I knew that I would have done everything I had to acquire the motorbike, even if it had only been to take Ruthie on that one ride. And there was still the Saturday flea market.
With my attention elsewhere, our stock had shrunk to only one cardigan, two T-shirts and three old vases that looked worn and bleached by the sun. That Saturday, I did everything possible to try to persuade Abraham not to come. I would not mind doing the deliveries alone in future, I told him. He could relax and build up energy for our next trip to the graveyard or to look for stock around the neighbourhood. But he said he had plenty of energy and he would come with me to the flea market. Perhaps he did not entirely trust me with the Saturday morning payment or perhaps he also liked the idea of seeing Ruthie again. Whatever the reason, he insisted on making the delivery with me.
We arrived early, but Ruthie and her mother were not there yet. In fact, they did not arrive at all that morning. Abraham and I waited until ten o’clock before we gave in to the reality that they were not coming. On the way home with our small stock in Abraham’s cart, he said, ‘You can’t trust coons. They still owe us money from last time.’
‘Not much,’ I said. ‘About ten rands, but they’ll be back next week, I’m sure. Maybe Ruthie’s ma got sick or something.’
‘They better come back with our money,’ Abraham said.
‘I’m sure they’ll be back next week. Don’t worry.’
But they were not back the next Saturday or the one after that. After the third Saturday, Abraham stopped coming with me. The hope that suddenly Ruthie would again be at the flea market kept me coming back every Saturday for two or three months. After that, my visits to the flea market shrank to once every few weeks. About a year later, I stopped altogether.
A number of times I went to the place where I had waited for her on our one date, if you could call it a date. At other times I found a place, inside the brickworks gate, from which I could watch the road into Greenwood Park. But, if she ever came down that road, it was not while I was watching. Once and rather forlornly I visited the spot where she had taught me to ride a bicycle. Without her and her entourage of little kids, the place was empty and my presence pointless.
Ruthie and her mother never did come back. After about a month, other people had set up stands where theirs had been. Eventually I had to face the fact that we would not be seeing them again, or rather, that I would not be seeing Ruthie again.
I told myself that my heart was broken or perhaps that organ no longer existed and that the space it had once occupied was now vacant. I could feel only a void where it once had beaten excitedly. I was sure I would never recover.
But I was thirteen years old and before long there was another party where we again played Postman’s Knock. Jill was there and this time I kissed her five times. ‘You’re improving, Chris,’ she whispered to me. Then she glanced at my face and added, ‘All right, you don’t need to look like that. You’re improving, but you’re not a champion yet.’
I also practised what Jill had taught me on the other girls and most of them seemed to like it. Just one, a studious girl who was usually top of the class, pushed me away, saying in a voice that revealed her disgust, ‘Don’t do that. I don’t want your slimy tongue inside my mouth. Sies. I’ll tell my ma if you do it again.’
So it was that, by the time I stopped visiting the flea market, there were other matters occupying my mind and other pretty girls from school causing my heart to function unevenly. Despite it all, I did think about Ruthie and the way we had sat at our place in the sugar cane and everything we had spoken about. Somehow, the girls I kissed while playing Postman’s Knock fell into a different category. I did not have the need to tell them anything. I was also not really interested in anything they had to tell me. I was only interested in Jill’s instruction in kissing. Perhaps it was a matter of education. Romance had nothing to do with it.
PART TWO
obvious differences
‘All men are equal before God, but all men are not equal before men because the differences are obvious.’
– JIMMY KRUGER, minister of justice from 1974 to 1979
eleven
FROM THE BEGINNING I have been writing for three hours every day. I thought I could do seven or eight hours a day and finish sooner, but that has not worked. And, as I prefer writing in the evenings, that left my days empty and me prey to all the old demons my project has been awakening. The obvious solution was to get a job. On my first day of searching, I found one that suited me, a bit of luck that I understand is pretty unusual here. I now write copy for the town’s only advertising agency, the first time I have been employed by someone else in my entire life.
My new occupation has taken some getting used to. The biggest difficulty is that I am now the one taking the orders, instead of giving them. Not that Nathan, my employer, is a hard man to work for. Between us, we decide what needs to be done in my one-person section and I do it.
He soon realised that our relationship had to be different to the usual one between employer and employee. At the end of my first week in his company, he asked me to stay after work, he wanted to talk to me.
‘I saw your car today,’ he said. ‘You’re not a poor man.’ This was clearly a discovery.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not enormously wealthy, but I’m certainly not poor.’
‘This business you sold in Africa, how many people worked in it?’ It was a bit late to be asking that sort of question, but Nathan’s method of hiring people was to take a look at you, ask about your experience and, if he liked what he heard and saw, to make you an offer.
‘About sixty.’
Nathan swallowed heavily at the idea. You would have thought my little publishing house was The New York Times. His operation consisted of two designers who both worked on Apple Macs, a receptionist, himself, whom he saw as the account executive, and me, the copywriter. His wife, Rochelle, did the books. His previous copywriter had moved to the city to ‘make some money’ as she told me before she switched off her computer.
‘So you don’t need the money I pay you?’ Nathan asked me.
‘I don’t need the money to get by, no.’
He looked genuinely unhappy about that. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. I usually hire people who do need the money, and I prefer it if they need the money badly.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I told him. ‘I don’t need the money, but I need to work – and I need that badly. You’re the boss here and, as long as you give me a job, you’ll have only support from me.’
That seemed to put his mind at rest. He could not have known how badly I needed something to occupy myself and how happy I was to have someone else doing the hiring and firing and making the business decisions.
Also, I like Nathan. Working for him, with my own ambitions blunted or perhaps altogether extinguished, really is a pleasure. And if the work goes on deep into the night, that is also fine. It means that I do not have to sit at home, thinking or pretending to write my book. All my life I seem to have done too much thinking. And if the writing goes slowly, that too is fine.
Last night on television I saw an interview with Anna Netrebko, the opera star. She told the interviewer that she never thinks about her roles, she just goes out there and performs. It sounded like a good deal to me.
Copywriting is new to me, but I suppose local standards are not especially high. The most talented young people head for the city the way my predecessor had. On top of that, a life in publishing had to have taught me something.
The first job I did for Nathan was an eight-page brochure for a company with state-wide operations. The client liked it and paid promptly. Nathan bo
ught champagne and the five of us celebrated.
Last week he hired a new desktop artist. Unlike the usual kids that he likes to hire because you do not have to pay them much, she is over forty and, like me, divorced a few years ago.
A week or so after she started, Nathan came up to me, wearing an unusually sly expression. He bumped me gently in a man-to-man, shoulder-to-shoulder way, while telling me that she had been asking questions about me. More specifically, whether I was married and, if not, living with a woman. Nathan told her no to the first question and not as far as he knew to the second.
So it did not come as a complete surprise when she asked me what I did on the weekends. When I answered that I did nothing much, she suggested that we go swimming on the coming Saturday. She knew a little cove that you usually had to yourself. She would make sandwiches and such, if I could bring a bottle of wine, maybe two bottles.
‘Are you a good swimmer?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I like to lie on the beach in the sun in my bikini.’
I wondered briefly what she would look like in a bikini. I found that I had stepped back to get a better view of her figure. It must have been obvious, because she blushed. ‘Do you swim well?’ she said.
‘Pretty well. As a boy, I lived at the coast.’
‘Is that settled then?’
‘Sure. Why not?’
At least she would be a distraction. I knew she was not much for conversation, at least not for reasonably intelligent conversation. We had sat together during our lunch breaks a few times. She spent most of the time complaining about her former husband, ‘a two-timing son of a bitch, if ever there was one.’ When I asked her if she had ever two-timed him, she said, ‘Only after he started it.’
Her other favourite topic was how lucky some divorced women had it, having married rich men and coming away with divorce settlements that set them up for life. That was another thing about the two-timer she had married. He had messed up his affairs so badly that, shortly before they were divorced, he had to have himself declared bankrupt, leaving no settlement for her whatever. The bastard!
She did make an excellent sandwich though. The mixture of fillings was good and she had found some superb ciabatta at a small baker in town. She was also not slow on consuming the wine I had brought as my contribution. I had actually found some dry white imported from back home. And, yes, she did fill a bikini well.
One part of her arrangement did not work out as she had planned. I was relieved to find that we did not have the cove to ourselves. A group of about twenty teenagers, music and all, had already occupied one end of the beach. We settled down on the sand as far from them as we could, maybe a hundred metres away, far enough to attenuate their music, if not avoid it altogether.
‘This is nice,’ she said. ‘And we get the music for free.’
I really am a fairly good swimmer. So, after an hour or so of eating her sandwiches, drinking my wine and listening to more complaints about the two-timer and those women who had the lack of sensitivity that enabled them to achieve excellent divorce settlements, I told her I was going to swim out.
‘What do you mean by swim out?’ she wanted to know.
‘I mean to swim out into the deep water.’
‘Is it all right to do that? Won’t there be sharks?’
‘No, I don’t think there’ll be sharks. The water’s a bit cold for them.’ She came down to the edge of the water with me, as if perhaps I needed moral support. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ I said.
She nodded uncertainly and waved to me as I waded into the water.
Like so much of the Maine coast, the cove was lovely. The cliffs along the shore were steep and there were pines towards the top. The water was deep and sheltered from the surf. All that remained of the waves by the time they reached the shore were little ripples, not much more than a hand’s breadth above the trough. And the water was cold, but not too cold for swimming. The effort soon neutralised it.
I swam smoothly out, rolling over onto my back a few times to see my companion for the day still standing at the water’s edge, her hands clasped anxiously in front of her. I was soon a hundred metres or more from the beach. A few of the kids from the other picnic were also standing up to watch my progress.
There is something about swimming in deep, cold water that has always instilled a sense of peace in me. People have told me that the reason is that our bodies are made up of ninety per cent water. Others tell me that it is because our distant ancestors evolved in water. Whatever the reason, the peace that descends on me while swimming, especially while swimming in the deep water of the ocean, is like no other.
And the cove was a wonderful place to swim. It had steeply sloping sides that fell almost vertically into the water with the pleasant little beach at the end. It was narrow enough that you could swim out quite far, without ever being far from some shoreline.
I was wearing goggles and occasionally ducked my head under the water to look down into the hazy blue that sloped away into deep black below me. The cove curved slowly to the left and the wavelets entering from the sea grew bigger, but only a little over a foot above the trough.
The water suddenly became colder, as if I had crossed a boundary line that divided cool and cold. I was about to turn back when a flash in the goggles revealed something in the water, below the surface, away to my right. It was only then that, for the first time, I noticed the buoy. It was bright orange, about double the size of a football. I swam towards it, ducking under the water to see what was underneath it.
From a distance it looked like a crate with something moving inside. As my vision became clearer, I could see what looked like feelers protruding from openings in the side. I was looking at a lobster trap floating some six feet below the surface. Inside there was a dense gathering of the ugly crustaceans. Deeper, perhaps forty feet down, a rock reef appeared out of the gloom, no doubt the home of the lobsters.
I surfaced to take a breath and think about the lobsters in the trap. Sudden death seemed preferable. I dived again and swam round the trap once. Coming back to where I had started, I saw the contraption’s hatch and the clasp that held it in place, no problem for a human to open, but quite impossible for a lobster. I reached out and unhooked it, then, pressing down on the end of the crate, I tilted the trap so that the mouth faced downwards.
The lobsters, perhaps ten of them, came pouring out of the trap, fanning across the reef as they scrambled for safety. I went up once more for air, before going back down to make sure that they had all escaped. Then I started for the beach. On my way back I found two more traps. I released the lobsters in them too. They too disappeared into the deep water.
What was that all about? I asked myself, destroying the day’s livelihood of some other entrepreneur.
My desktop artist was still at the edge of the water where she had been when I entered the water. I knew that I was not going to tell her about the lobsters. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked. ‘You went so far I thought you weren’t coming back.’
‘Where could I have gone?’
‘I don’t know. China, maybe. You didn’t come back.’
‘Well, here I am.’
‘But you were away so long.’
It was becoming clear that conversations with her were often going to follow this sort of pattern. But her insistence on how long I had been away gave me an opening. ‘I am rather tired. Do you mind if we go home?’ Before she could respond, I hurried on. ‘I’m afraid I’ve overdone it. I need to get to bed and sleep.’
There must have been a certain finality in my way of saying it, because her eyebrows rose a little in surprise. On the way back to town, she said nothing.
twelve
I really did enjoy the years of my early teens. The world was a stimulating place devoid of complexities. The only problems were those you brought upon yourself. Perhaps in that respect, nothing has changed. But the consequences of mistakes seem to have expanded with the passing years until, eventually,
nothing remains simple and no one is unaffected.
Perhaps it is because of all this that I appreciate Nathan so. The simplicity of his approach to life is a lesson to anyone who has contact with him. If you work for him, you are part of his family and he cares for you in that way. People who worked for him years before but were driven away by their own ambition, come to visit him when they are in town. His ties with others seem to be permanent.
He is the sort of employer who likes to know everything about his employees. In my case, perhaps because I come from a different continent, his interest seems especially intense. He keeps asking about my family and I keep trying to provide answers that are as brief and noncommittal as possible while trying to avoid sounding rude.
His optimistic soul has reminded me of the joy there was. The memory of the good times, and times that were more than good, has come as a surprise. Like so much of those days, the joyous times seem to have been obliterated. Not least of these good times were the visits to Oupa’s farm.
The week before we went was always one of growing excitement. We usually left on the Friday as soon as school closed. My father got off early and he and Mama would be waiting in the car at the school gate when we came out. Everything we were taking was packed and we were ready to go.
All week we talked about going and the things we would do when we got there. By Wednesday, Mama was baking biscuits to take with us, I had my clothes packed and Michie was talking about new clothes she needed for the trip.
‘I have nothing to wear to the wedding,’ I remember her pleading with Mama before one visit. A cousin I had never met was going to be married on the Saturday. ‘I can’t go to the wedding reception in the things I’ve got.’
‘You can wear your yellow dress,’ Mama told her. ‘You look lovely in it.’
‘It’s old. Ma bought it for me months ago. Everyone’s seen it.’
The Classifier Page 9