The rest of that afternoon we went back to talking, without any embarrassment about the incident that had just passed. Much had changed, but the sheer joy of being together, the wonder of being close, whether or not I was touching her naked skin, was unaltered.
My own desires were held in check by the thought of offending and perhaps losing her. The thought that I might go too far and so drive her away limited my hands to her shoulders, her waist, her back, her neck, all relatively safe territory. It was a surprise to me when she wanted to talk about sexual intercourse. I had never thought that a discussion would be necessary. The truth is, I had not thought much about it at all. The desires of a teenage boy, at least my own at that age, cannot possibly be described as thinking.
‘The girls at school say it hurts the poor boy,’ she confided in me.
I responded with the wisdom I had gained in school playgrounds from other boys as ignorant as myself, and from a brief discussion with Abraham. ‘I don’t think so. I think it hurts the girl.’
‘Well, I heard it hurts somebody.’
‘I think it’s the girl who hurts.’
A horrifying thought seemed to cross her mind: How could I know such a thing? ‘Have you done it with another girl?’ She had pulled away from me to get a view of my face.
‘No, of course not. I’m only fifteen.’
‘I heard of kids who did it when they were younger than fifteen.’
‘Well, not me.’
‘But would you have, if I didn’t stop?’
Oh, God, I thought. Of course I would have. ‘Never,’ I said.
‘So who does it hurt then?’ Ruthie put the question almost accusingly. Seemingly, it would be just like boys to get the easy part of the arrangement.
‘A matric boy told me that it hurts the girl, but only the first time. After that it doesn’t hurt any more.’
‘Has he done it with a girl?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why don’t you ask him?’
‘I did and he said he’d done it often, but boys lie about that.’
‘Maybe he’s wrong,’ Ruthie said. ‘Maybe it’s the boys who hurt.’ Then she looked sympathetically at me. ‘Not you, Chrissie. I don’t want you to hurt when we do it.’
We told ourselves and each other that nothing had changed after that day, but by admitting to ourselves that we were going to do it, a boundary had been crossed. Saturday after Saturday in the weeks that followed, we travelled deeper into forbidden territory. And it was often Ruthie who led the way.
It was perhaps a month after we first discussed sex that Ruthie suggested that we run through the cane together.
‘All right,’ I said. I only thought about the cane pythons for an instant. Ruthie seemed to have forgotten about them. ‘I want us to run through the cane together, holding hands.’
‘We can do that,’ I said.
‘But I want us to do it without our clothes.’
‘With nothing on?’
‘Yes. I want to do it that way.’
I had felt her breasts. I had sucked them briefly, very briefly, a period measured in seconds. I had stroked her ankles and held her knees. Her thighs and anything else that may reside between her waist and her knees had remained untouched. But, apart from the quickest flash of breast, I had seen nothing that I could not see when she was fully clothed. Now I was going to see her altogether naked. I was still marvelling at the thought when a new idea occurred to me. ‘Do you want to see me?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’ She looked straight into my eyes, unblinking. ‘I want to see what you look like.’
My reply struggled to emerge. My throat seemed to have closed. ‘All right,’ I whispered. ‘When do you want to do it?’
‘Now.’ It was said with the same determination that got us into the lighting box at the opera, that taught me to ride a bicycle and got her onto the back of my motorbike. I was getting to know it well.
We got undressed slowly, watching each other as each garment was removed. Her eyes found the part of me that seemed to interest her most intensely, and mine feasted on every part of her. She was still light and slender, but not the way she had been as a thirteen-year-old. There were hips now, modest breasts, a small dark triangle at the bottom of her belly and the lean, long legs that did not seem to have changed since I first saw her.
Without warning she dashed forward, took my hand in hers and led me into the cane, running as fast as the narrow, ploughed channels between the plantings would allow. On either side, the coarse fronds of the cane scraped at skin, leaving the occasional tear that may have to be explained later at home. Just ahead of me, an arm’s length away, her hair was flying, the muscles of her buttocks were working and her legs were flashing with every quick stride.
I could hardly believe that this was happening, that I was chasing a beautiful naked girl through the sugar cane, more precisely, that I was chasing a beautiful naked Ruthie through the cane. To describe the feeling within me, I have thought about words like exhilaration or exaltation or rapture. None of them work. I was young, naked and aching. She was fleeing before me, but not for a moment letting go of my hand.
We got back to our special place, out of breath, not having stopped once. I pulled her against me and felt her arms tight around my neck with the same urgency that I was feeling. My hands were exploring where they had not been allowed before. To my complete astonishment and ecstasy, I felt her hand on my erection.
Nothing like this, nothing even close to this, nothing that I could ever have imagined, had ever held me in such a grip. I felt the ejaculation rising so fast within me that stopping it was an impossibility. Ruthie leapt back. ‘I hurt it,’ she gasped. ‘It messed.’
‘No, you didn’t hurt it.’
‘But look at it. It messed. What happened to it?’
‘I just shot. It shouldn’t happen outside like that.’
‘But why? Where should it happen?’
‘Inside you.’
‘Inside me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that the stuff that makes babies?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh Lord.’ Her voice still had the same breathless sound. ‘We better get dressed.’
Once we had our clothes on we sat down on the grass again. ‘It’s very big,’ Ruthie said. ‘I didn’t think it would be so big or so hard. I saw my brother’s and it’s tiny.’
‘Johnny’s?’
‘No. I’ve never seen Johnny’s. I mean Solly. He was there the day I taught you to ride a bike.’
‘But he’s only about five.’
‘Six. He’s six.’
‘When he gets bigger, it will too.’
‘How big are other boys then?’
‘They’re all different. Some are bigger, some are smaller and some are in the middle.’
‘Where did you see them?’
‘In the shower, after rugby practice.’
‘Are they hard then?’
‘No. That only happens when …’
‘When you’re with me?’
It was not quite like that, but the idea was right. ‘Yes,’ I said.
Ruthie was frowning with the urgent need to know. ‘If that happened inside me, if it messed like that, would I get pregnant?’
‘I don’t think it happens every time.’
‘It doesn’t shoot every time?’
‘It does shoot every time. I don’t think you get pregnant every time.’
‘Every time?’ Her tone was disbelieving. ‘Chrissie, I don’t want to get pregnant even one time.’ Then there was a new idea. ‘I heard you can get things that the boy puts on, then you don’t get pregnant.’
‘I heard that too. The boys at school call them ef-els.’
‘Where do you get them?’
‘I don’t know. I think chemist shops, but I don’t think they sell them to fifteen-year-olds.’
Ruthie took my hand and looked seriously into my eyes. ‘We got a problem here, boy. I want to take you
home to meet my ma.’
thirty-four
Ruthie’s insistence that I should meet Ma Peterson was one of the biggest surprises of my life, before or since that day. Agreeing to it was not something I could do right away. It took a lot of persuasion by Ruthie and a few weeks for me to think it over. Even then, I was not convinced.
Of course I had met her mother many times before, as a supplier, eventually the main supplier of her flea market stall. And she knew about the trip Ruthie and I had made into the sugar cane on my motorbike two years before. ‘But you haven’t met her properly,’ Ruthie said. ‘I want her to meet you properly. I want her to know about us. I want her to see what a wonderful person you are. I want her to see why I love to be with you.’
I had difficulty understanding the need to have her mother know anything about me. In fact, I did not understand it at all. After what happened when we ran naked through the cane, meeting her mother was about the last thing in the world that I wanted to do. ‘I want you, boy,’ she said, ‘but I’m scared. I need my ma.’
‘You don’t need your ma,’ I told her. ‘We won’t do anything wrong.’
‘That’s what you think. The way I felt then, we nearly did it.’
‘Then we won’t run naked again.’
‘No, I don’t want you to be a secret from my ma. If I tell her, I’ll feel safe after that.’ But that was not the end of what she wanted. ‘I also want to meet your mama.’
I had overwhelming doubts about meeting her mother, but the idea of her meeting Mama was not a matter of doubt. It was an impossibility. ‘You can’t meet my mother,’ I said. ‘She won’t understand. As for my father, he’ll go crazy. And my sisters will think I’ve gone crazy.’
‘I don’t want to meet your father or your sisters, just your mama. You call her Mama?’ She was speaking to me earnestly, trying to convey the sincerity of what she wanted. ‘She will love me. I’ll make her love me.’
‘She won’t love you, Ruthie.’
‘She will. I’ll be so sweet to her she’ll have to love me. Most people love me, but I’ll be so nice to her, I know she’ll love me.’
‘She can’t. The way she is, she could never love you.’
‘You said she’s a kind person.’
‘She’s a very kind person and she would have loved you as a nice little girl, if you worked for her or you served her in a shop and if you had nothing to do with me. If she knows what we’ve been doing, she won’t love you.’
‘And your father?’
‘He’s much worse.’
‘I don’t believe it. I wish you would let me meet them.’
So I told her about the school holiday I spent in my father’s office while the Portuguese were fleeing Mozambique. I told her about Miss Rodrigues, who tried to cover her brown face with base and about the way we had to tear out the top page of the application for the refugees before writing ‘obviously coloured in appearance’ across the head office copy. I even told her about Rocha, who had spied for us, but who had been turned away and why, and how someone had shot him and dropped him into the harbour. And finally, I told her about the list of eight different kinds of coloureds in the document Snake had given me and that my father was in charge of it all in our province. Her face became more serious the longer I spoke and she again seemed to shrink, the way she had when the bus driver had called her my coon girlfriend. She was silent for some time after I had finished. When she spoke, it was very softly. ‘What they going to do to me, if they find out?’
‘Nothing. They just won’t let me come near you any more.’
‘They won’t send me to jail or nothing like that?’
‘No, they won’t. We’re under age. They can’t send us to jail.’
‘And you? What will your parents do to you?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe they’ll send me to a boarding school far away or even a reformatory.’
‘Reformatory? What’s that?’
‘I don’t know. I heard they send bad kids there.’
‘Will they send me there too?’
‘I don’t know.’
All the time she had been listening, she was staring into the grass in front of her, her face turned away from me. She seemed to be considering carefully what I had told her. It was impossible to Ruthie, in her world, that anyone might deal with her and her family as viciously as we had dealt with the refugees from Mozambique. Finally, she turned back to me. ‘I still want you to meet my ma. If you do, I’ll feel safe with you.’
I could do nothing but agree. The forbidding nature of my own family made it necessary for me to meet hers.
The time was set for a Saturday afternoon when all Ruthie’s other family members would be out, occupied with their weekend activities. Ordinarily, Ruthie’s mother would have been at her samoosa kiosk, but she arranged for her sister to look after it for the afternoon. I was not clear on how much Ruthie had told her, but it was enough that she stayed home from her business to meet a fifteen-year-old boy.
The Friday night before the meeting, I lay awake for hours. To me and to all other Afrikaner boys, mothers were sacred. Now I was to face a coloured mother after I had been running naked through the sugar cane with her daughter. And she was going to know this. When I walked in the door, she would immediately recognise me as the would-be seducer of her precious child and the one who, two years before, had taken her daughter into the sugar cane on his motorbike. Maybe she would think of me as the seducer, not the would-be seducer, believing that I had probably been successful – or rather that we had been successful.
I tried to plan what I should say, but I could find no suitable words. Mrs Peterson … I thought. That was how I would begin. But that was as far as I got. Sleep came eventually, but the night brought no further inspiration. When I woke, I was no closer to a useful speech for Ruthie’s mother.
By that time I had ridden all over the Durban North area on my bike. So, finding a way into Greenwood Park so that no one would see me entering or leaving was not difficult. In those days, the sugar cane still bordered Greenwood Park on the north side. I found a track into the cane, not far from the edge of the suburb. To get onto the road that bordered the first row of houses, I had to wheel my bike down a furrow between the rows of cane for thirty or forty metres, but that was no problem.
Ruthie had told me about everyone who lived in the house: her mother, Sarah, whom everyone called Ma Peterson; her mother’s sister, Auntie Pearl, who, with her husband, Uncle Courtleigh, occupied one of the bedrooms; her big brother, Johnny, whose bike I had learnt on; her little brother, Solly, and her little sister, Delicia, the one who often echoed Ruthie’s words. The one person Ruthie had avoided talking about was her father. ‘He doesn’t want us any more,’ she told me, after I asked about him. ‘He has another woman now and he lives in Wentworth with her and her kids.’
‘Are they all going to be there when I come?’ I asked her.
‘No, just my ma. Be sure you’re there on time.’
‘Before I come, are you going to tell her who I am?’
‘Yes. I’m going to tell her everything.’
‘Even the time when that happened?’
Her eyes widened at the absurdity of the suggestion. ‘No, not that. She’d kill me. I’ll tell her everything else.’
The house was rather like ours, a little smaller and it had not been painted for a long time, but otherwise it was very much like the houses in Red Hill. There were hardly any trees or shrubs in the garden. I could only see one magnolia tree down the side. Two small unused flower beds on either side of the front door had been dug recently and a small lawn neatly trimmed.
The curtains in the front of the house were drawn. It looked like no one was home. I told myself that something must have happened for them to change their plans. Perhaps I should get back on my bike and speed down the hill out of Greenwood Park. That would be the best thing to do. But if they were home and Ruthie saw me leaving, what would I say to her next time? Would there be
a next time?
I knocked on the door but nothing happened. I was free to go, I told myself. Ruthie’s ma had obviously been called away. Some family crisis had come up – or a business one.
I was about to turn away when the door opened. Ruthie herself stood there. Her eyes were wide open, as if I were a surprising presence at the door of her home. Without speaking, she gestured for me to come in, then led me down a short passage into the living room, where her mother was waiting.
Ma Peterson must have been about forty. She was sitting on a small couch and she did not get up as I came in. She was a sturdy presence, her face rather like her daughter’s, but broader and darker. A habitual frown deepened with my appearance. She was wearing a cotton dress and slippers. ‘I’m sorry to see you,’ she said to me. Her voice did not sound friendly and I still did not know what the ‘everything else’ was that Ruthie had told her. ‘I thought we were not going to see you any more after you took Ruthie for a ride on your motorbike. So what have you two been up to now?’
At that point my upbringing took over. I advanced the few steps across the room and held out a hand. ‘Hello, Mrs Peterson, I’m glad to see you again.’
‘I’m not so glad to see you again, boy,’ she said. Whatever Ruthie’s mother was feeling, she did shake my hand. ‘Last time we had enough trouble with you, taking my Ruthie riding on your motorbike all over the place.’
She was still seated and I was standing in front of her, in much the same way as I had sometimes stood in front of our headmaster after some activity that transgressed the school rules. I could find nothing to say about my past sins that, I was aware, were far more serious than infringements of school rules. ‘Sit down, Chrissie,’ Ruthie whispered.
‘Yes, you better sit down, Chrissie,’ Ma Peterson said. ‘I need to hear what this is all about.’
‘But I told Ma.’
The Classifier Page 26