‘I want to hear it from Chrissie.’ She was looking at me with a steady stare, through eyes that did not seem to blink. This was a formidable woman. Her little flea market stall may not have been much in the world of retail, but I remembered how clearly she had been in charge, how she obviously knew exactly what she was doing. She was skilled enough to provide a decent home for herself and her children. Polite and friendly as she was, it was clear that no one was going to take advantage of her or her family. I had no doubt that the same applied to her samoosa kiosk in the hotel. It also applied to this white boy who was again taking too intense an interest in her Ruthie. She wanted to hear it from me, but what exactly was it that she wanted to hear?
The words that came out of my mouth were completely unplanned and had not even been expressed before that moment. ‘I love Ruthie,’ I said.
‘Oh my God,’ Ma Peterson said. ‘That’s not what you said to me, Ruth.’ Ruthie, who was still standing, had raised a hand to her mouth. The concept of love had never been a discussion point between us. In simple terms, neither of us had ever confessed love to the other. ‘The way you told me, you said you an’ Chrissie liked listening to opera music together.’ So it appeared that the ‘everything’ Ruthie had told her mother had been a heavily edited version. A new thought came to Ma Peterson. ‘Where you been going Saturday afternoons to listen to music?’
Ruthie looked at her mother as if she had been struck dumb.
‘We went to see La Traviata together on three nights,’ I said.
‘And on Saturday afternoons?’
‘We’ve been meeting in the sugar cane,’ I said.
‘Alone?’
‘Yes, Mrs Peterson.’
The politeness of my form of address had no effect. The mixture of astonishment and outrage in Ruthie’s mother was growing with every question. ‘Just you two there by the sugar cane by yourselves?’
‘Yes, Mrs Peterson.’
‘An’ playing music on what?’
‘We didn’t play music,’ I told her.
She turned to Ruthie, her eyes blazing. ‘What you been doing then, Ruth? You said you go to Chrissie to play music. I thought Chrissie was a girl. I didn’t know it was the same Chris with the motorbike.’
‘I never told Ma that Chrissie was a girl.’
‘You never said he was a boy neither. I made a mistake by thinking you the one kid I got whose got some brains. Tell your ma, are you pregnant?’
‘No, Ma.’ The anguished tone of the falsely accused was unmistakable. ‘We never done that. Never.’
‘You telling your ma the truth?’
‘Yes, Ma. As God’s my witness. We never done that. I never done that with nobody.’
‘Not yet,’ Sarah Peterson yelled at her daughter. She pointed a solid, stumpy finger at Ruthie. ‘And you, do you love him too?’
Ruthie looked at me, her eyes filled with both panic and tears. In a moment I had become more afraid of her answer to that question than of her mother’s wrath, the possible vengeance my father might bring down on my head or anything else. She nodded, just once, not a very big nod, but I knew Ruthie and that was the most emphatic acknowledgement I had ever seen. ‘Yes, Ma,’ she whispered.
‘And you think that makes it all right? That you two love each other is the worst news I heard in my life.’
I must have been looking at Ruthie in a very special way, because her mother suddenly rounded on me. ‘You, boy, why you looking at my Ruthie like that? Don’t you know what trouble you in? Do you know about the Immorality Act? A white boy, an Afrikaner boy like you, and a coloured girl, you can both go to reformatory. If you were a few years older, you coulda both gone to jail.’ The thought that the Act and its strictures might apply to me and Ruthie had not occurred to me. In any event, we had not yet done enough to get ourselves into jail. The stocky finger was pointing at me now. ‘You, boy, I don’t care if you end up in jail, but you not taking my Ruthie with you.’
‘What’s reformatory, Ma?’ Ruthie suddenly wanted to know. She was obviously not satisfied with my explanation at our place in the sugar cane.
‘Reformatory is jail for kids and you can be sent there. It’s just like jail. People say the Tokai reformatory in the Cape is worse’n jail.’
Ruthie glanced accusingly at me, no doubt remembering my assurance that we could not be sent to jail.
It took some time, the best part of an hour, for Ruthie’s mother to show us how hideous the consequences of our actions could be. When it seemed that she had exhausted all the angles and that there was nothing left for her to discover, she looked tiredly at Ruthie. ‘You, little miss, you not going to kiss and cuddle with no white boy, or no brown boy neither, there by the sugar cane from now on. You hear me?’
‘Yes, Ma,’ Ruthie said. ‘Can Chrissie come here to the house then?’
Without answering, she got up and left the room. Ruthie followed, but was back almost immediately. ‘She went into her bedroom and closed the door. She always does that when she’s upset.’
While I was still wondering what you should do after your actions have driven your girlfriend’s mother into her bedroom, the front door was flung open and a dishevelled boy in jeans and T-shirt, a few years older than Ruthie and me, came bounding into the room. He stopped when he saw me and his eyebrows rose a little. ‘Johnny, this is my friend, Chrissie,’ Ruthie said. ‘Chrissie, this is my brother.’
Johnny looked at me with an interest that was curious rather than intense. ‘So,’ he said, apparently to both of us, ‘you want to come play soccer?’
I looked at Ruthie. She was looking back in a questioning way. ‘I always play with them,’ she said.
‘I don’t mind playing,’ I said.
‘Lekker,’ Johnny said happily. ‘Let’s go. We on’y got three a side so far.’
With Ruthie and me the teams’ numbers swelled to four a side, the two of us on opposite sides. Johnny was the captain of the side I was on. The game was played with a tennis ball, the goals were the space between two apple boxes and the pitch was the street, perhaps a sixth of the length of the real thing, perhaps less. From time to time a badly kicked ball landed in a neighbouring garden. When that happened, there was no knocking on the door or ringing of the doorbell to ask permission to fetch it. The nearest player either vaulted the garden wall or let himself in through the gate and collected the ball. Everyone, except me, came from Greenwood Park and had always lived there. For anyone to find kids from the neighbourhood among the roses in the front garden, if there were roses, was no cause for surprise. I was to learn that if you were from the neighbourhood, you were family.
My presence was something of a surprise to the neighbourhood though. A number of people, men, women and smaller children, appeared in front gardens to watch the game. ‘It’s because you here,’ Johnny explained to me. If they had judged the matter by my performance, the neighbourhood people would have decided that white boys are no good at soccer. The position I played in our school rugby team involved a lot of charging and tackling, but little kicking. Even Ruthie kicked more accurately than me. In fact, she kicked better than most of the boys.
For me, the game had an exhilarating quality that had nothing to do with the fact that, despite my lack of skill, we won four–three. To see Ruthie dashing back and forth with long boyish strides, her black hair flying, to be involved in the game with her, to be part of her community, even for just an hour, to join the game she always played: all of it elevated the afternoon onto a plain I had not visited before.
When it was over and the low sun was casting shadows across the street where we had been playing, I stood at the gate with Ruthie for a few minutes. ‘They’re all watching us,’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘The neighbours, everybody. They all noticed you. They watched the game and they’re all at the windows now, watching us. For you to be here is a big thing in Greenwood Park.’
Perhaps the neighbours should have meant more to me. Wisdom might have suggested t
hat. The only one peeping from a window who interested me was Ma Peterson. For a moment I saw her face at a window. It was only much later that I realised that the look I had seen on it was one of fear. Even when the realisation did come to me, I was puzzled by it. Why should anyone be afraid of me?
‘And our place in the canebreak?’ I asked Ruthie.
‘That’s over, Chrissie. Do you mind that it’s over? You can come here instead.’
Yes, I minded that it was over. I minded more than I had ever minded anything in all my life. But if meeting her in her home was the only possibility, I would see her there. ‘No, I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I’ll do what you want.’
‘It’s not what I want, but my ma is right. If we are alone there every week, we will go too far.’
Too far? What was too far? Nothing I could do with Ruthie would ever be too far. ‘I’ll be back next Saturday,’ I told her.
Exhilarated though I was and thrilled that the crisis with her mother had been survived and I still had my Ruthie, my head was clear enough to leave Greenwood Park through the cane, the same way I had come.
thirty-five
Tuesdays and Thursdays were rugby practice days. Mondays and Fridays we did target shooting under the supervision of Mister Odendaal. Wednesday was the only afternoon that I came straight home after school.
When I got home on the Wednesday after I had met Ruthie’s mother, Annie was the only one at home. Michie was still at school, rehearsing the small part she had in Washington Square, their school play, and Mama was shopping. As was my way, I went straight to my room without saying anything to Annie. Usually she would not even have looked up from what she was doing when I came in. This time, to my surprise, she followed me into my room.
The moment I saw Annie’s face, I knew that something was seriously wrong. ‘Stefanie Palmer is spreading lies about you at school,’ she said. Her indignation was obvious, both by her heaving chest and in her voice. ‘And the kids believe it.’
‘What did she say?’ The problem areas that came to mind were La Traviata, the bus trips in and out of town to see the opera, our visits to the sugar cane – could anyone have seen us entering the cane? What else could there be?
‘She says you were playing soccer in Greenwood Park on Saturday. I told her if she lies about my brother again, I’m going to tell the headmistress.’
This was a severe threat. ‘What did she say?’
‘She said she’s not the one who says so. Her brother told her. He heard it from someone else who heard it from a coloured ousie who works in their house. So I said, it doesn’t matter. If she spreads these lies, I’m going to Mrs Taylor.’ Mrs Taylor, the headmistress of the girls’ school, was known to hate gossips.
‘Good,’ I said.
But Annie was not finished. The burden of a possible family scandal was weighing heavily on her. ‘Tell me it’s not true,’ she said.
‘I don’t play soccer. I only play rugby.’
Lying to Annie has never been simple and she was not going to let me deceive her that easily. ‘I’m not buying that bit of fancy footwork,’ she said in English. There was no Afrikaans cliché that would have expressed it in quite the same way. ‘So you were playing soccer there.’
‘No, I don’t have anything to do with those people,’ I said. In my mind I saw Ruthie and what we had been doing in the sugar cane and the way I had gone to see her mother. ‘I don’t play soccer there.’
Annie looked searchingly at me for longer than I felt comfortable with. ‘If Stephanie says that again, I’m going to Mrs Taylor to complain.’
‘Good,’ I said.
She studied my face a while longer before going back to her room. She knew I had lied to her and I knew that she knew. But this was the kind of lie that people allow to exist between them for no other reason except that it allows the relationship between them to continue.
After she was gone, I thought about my one visit to Greenwood Park and vowed that I would never go there again. But, even as I made the vow, I knew I was going to break it. In fact, I knew I was going to break it the very next Saturday and every Saturday in the weeks that followed.
In less than a month, I got to know all of Ruthie’s immediate family, and they got to know me. I also started a new enterprise, one that turned out to be far more rewarding than stealing vases off graves.
My new business came about when I was in the bicycle shop in Broadway buying new tyres for my bike. A man of about my father’s age, wearing a well-tailored suit and dark tie, came into the shop and started looking at expensive sports bikes, the kind that cost more than I had paid for my motorbike, and had frames so light you could pick them up with one finger. Old Mister Simpson, the owner of the bicycle shop, deserted me immediately to serve him, whispering to me as he went, ‘Got to serve him, Chris. I’ll be back in a moment.’
‘Hello, Donald,’ the new arrival said. ‘I want to pick up a bike for my boy, something decent.’ I had not recognised him at first, but I immediately knew the voice. Staring at him now, my eyes confirmed what my ears had already told me. He was the main organiser for the liberals during their by-election victory.
‘Of course, Mister Harvey,’ the old man was saying. ‘What about the one you’re looking at?’
‘It doesn’t look too bad.’
I looked at the gleaming, beautifully enamelled work of wheeled art and thought, if that’s not too bad, what will good look like?
‘How big is your boy?’ Mister Simpson asked.
Mister Harvey demonstrated the height of his son, then glanced at me. ‘Half a head shorter than that lad,’ he said, smiling slightly in my direction. Mister Simpson assured him that the bike was the right size for the boy and that any boy would be delighted with it. I thought of my roadster through clouds of envy and agreed with Mister Simpson’s appraisal. Then Mister Harvey did the unthinkable: he wrote a cheque for the full amount. He did not even ask for a discount. I wondered if my father earned that much in a month. I also wondered what political organisers got paid.
Mister Simpson looked very pleased with the transaction. Being a businessman myself, I could see why he deserted me to help Mister Harvey. That one sale was worth more than all the tyres in the shop.
Mister Harvey, for his part, looked distracted. He picked up the bike by the bar, turned towards the door, then stopped. ‘Tell me, Donald, is there a florist close by? Our wedding anniversary is tomorrow. Thank God I remembered it this time. I normally forget.’
‘Just round the corner.’ Mister Simpson was gesticulating to show his customer where the flower shop was located.
As he went through the door, I returned the favour to Mister Simpson, deserting him for Mister Harvey. ‘I’ve got to talk to him,’ I whispered and set off. I caught up with him halfway to the corner. ‘Mister Harvey.’ He stopped and looked at me in surprise. ‘I have an answer to your problem,’ I told him.
He looked at me with an expression of vague amusement. ‘I didn’t know I had a problem.’
‘About your anniversary and your wife’s birthday and so on.’ I had added the bit about the birthday, assuming that the same difficulties applied.
His smile broadened. ‘Let’s hear it,’ he said.
‘I have a business that supplies flowers on special days. You give me the dates and I see that your wife gets flowers from you on those dates.’
At that he laughed loud. ‘How old are you, son?’
‘Fifteen.’
‘I wish my son had a business head like yours. His head is only full of girls.’
I almost clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth in sympathy, but thought better of it.
‘When do I pay?’ he asked.
‘I’ll bill you,’ I said bravely.
He laughed again. ‘You’ve got a deal,’ he said. ‘You can start with my anniversary tomorrow. By the way, this business of yours, does it have a name.’
‘Dog Box Flowers,’ I said in a moment of inspiration. ‘My flowers keep y
ou out of the dog box.’
At this he laughed so much that he had to put down his son’s bike and lean against a post supporting the shop’s veranda.
Later, I learnt from Mister Simpson that my first client was one of the city’s top advocates. His money came from litigious clients, not politics. I had the florist deliver the flowers to his home the next day and I delivered the invoice to Mister Harvey’s office myself after school. The next morning the money was in my savings account.
Before I went home on the day Mrs Harvey received her flowers, I had signed up Mister Berman, the estate agent, Mister Schoonbee who owned a corner restaurant on Broadway and Mister Crichton, the vet. In the next week I added thirty more local businessmen and professionals and another ten the week after. The Durban North business community shared a common problem in struggling to remember the days that were important to their wives. Dog Box Flowers filled their need.
And it was profitable. I told them all that I only charged a ten per cent commission. That much was true. What I refrained from mentioning was that I also negotiated a twenty per cent discount from Mrs Hillebrand, the florist, for all the business I was bringing her. I only made my move a month after she had already received plenty of business from me. ‘I’m sorry, my boy,’ she said. ‘A discount is out of the question.’
I turned to go, remembering the advice Uncle Stefan had given me when I bought my motorbike. They want to sell more badly than you want to buy, he had told me. ‘I’ll take my business elsewhere in future,’ I said over my shoulder.
‘Wait,’ she yelled.
I stopped, but stayed where I was, only looking back at her over my shoulder. ‘Do you know how expensive it is to run a shop like this?’
‘Take it or leave it,’ I said.
‘You insolent young devil.’ She was turning red in the face.
‘I’ll take that to mean that you’re leaving it.’ I started moving again.
‘All right, I’ll do it.’
I turned round to face her.
‘Five per cent and that’s final,’ she said through gritted teeth.
The Classifier Page 27