by Nick Earls
Ben types in ‘blaster flamethrower’. I want there to be nothing there. They want it to be true. They’re imagining South Africa, my country, with all of us driving round in armoured cars, scorching people.
But it’s real. It has a Wikipedia entry. It was invented in the late 1990s and it failed not because it was illegal but because it was too expensive. But obviously word got out, and it’s now part of how some Australians think about us.
‘Look.’ I point further down on the entry. ‘They only ever sold a few hundred, and none for years. So don’t go thinking we’ve all got flamethrowers because of that, because we don’t.’
‘Yeah,’ Harry says, sounding disappointed. ‘Fair enough. It’s like that idea that you’ve all got these massive walls around your houses with barbed wire on them.’
I picture the barbed wire coiling along the wall near my Cape Town bedroom window. I think about the security guard and the locked gates. I think about the reason we left.
I’ll talk about that one day, maybe. Not today.
‘There are lots of things Australians do that probably seem weird in other places,’ I say.
I want to tell them Australia is at least as weird as South Africa. And everywhere is weird if you’re from somewhere else. But I don’t want to be a tour guide to South African weirdness. So instead I change the subject.
Ms Vo walks up to me on the verandah as I’m putting my books in my bag.
‘Well, I think that was a good first day,’ she says, in a way that makes me think we’ll be pretending the b-word incident didn’t happen. ‘Is your mother . . .’
She peers down from the verandah and through the trees, towards the pickup zone outside the school.
‘She’ll be with Hansie. She said she’d park down near the robots.’
‘Rooibos?’ For the twentieth or perhaps hundredth time today, someone doesn’t quite pick up my accent. ‘Isn’t that a kind of tea? It’s supposed to be very good for you. But why would she . . .’
‘No, near the robots.’ I try to stay as calm as I can manage. I’ve had enough – of the day, of the school, of the country. I want to lie down and sleep for a week. And then wake up in Cape Town, in my bedroom. But Ms Vo still doesn’t seem to be understanding me, so I try it again, slowly. ‘Ro-bots.’
Ms Vo looks puzzled. ‘What kind of robots?’
‘The traffic lights. The robots. Red, yellow and green lights on a pole. They tell cars what to do.’
‘Oh, okay.’ Suddenly it’s all clear to her. Then she seems to be trying not to laugh. ‘Is that just your family’s name for them or . . .’
‘No, it’s everyone’s name. You don’t call them . . .’ No, she doesn’t, obviously. Australia doesn’t. ‘In South Africa that’s what we call them.’
‘Really?’ She raises her eyebrows. ‘Well, I suppose they are a bit robotic. In a one-legged way. Here we mostly just call them traffic lights.’ She takes a step towards the edge of the verandah. ‘I’ll walk down with you.’
The trees next to the building are flame trees. I want to tell Ms Vo it’s an African tree, but right now it wouldn’t surprise me if they turned out to be from Finland or Mars. From the path on the way to the gate, I can see the car down near the robots, and Mom and Hansie standing next to it. Hansie looks like he’s smeared chocolate on his face. Mom’s probably bribed him to get in the car. He’s probably hated his first day too.
In the two-minute pickup zone right near the gate, I can see Max getting into a black bakkie with ‘Craig Kennedy, Registered Builder’ on the door and a load of timber in the back. I know they call bakkies ‘utes’ here, but I don’t know if it’s one syllable or two. If it was Afrikaans, it would be two – oo-tuh.
‘How would you pronounce that, Miss?’ I point at the bakkie, but I don’t want to say “bakkie”. ‘That . . .’
She follows where I’m pointing and looks at the bakkie carefully. ‘Kennedy. It’s an Irish name. Kenn-e-dy.’ She smiles. I can’t tell her she’s been no help at all. ‘Where are you from in South Africa?’
‘Cape Town.’ I’m back to saying as little as possible.
‘Perfect. I’ve had an idea. I think it’d be good for the class. Cape Town’s got a colonial history, right?’
‘Definitely. From Jan van Riebeeck arriving with three ships in 1652.’ Finally, something I can be certain about. We’ve covered it all at Bergvliet.
Before I can go on, she says, ‘Good. When the others are doing their presentations on Moreton Bay, it’d be really good if you could do one on Cape Town, as a contrast. It’d be interesting to look at Cape Town and any similarities and differences.’
‘That’d be great.’ It’s better than she realises. There’s a lot to tell. I have to stop myself coming out with it right now.
‘Ah, there’s your mother,’ she says, noticing Mom and Hansie and waving. ‘Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
She stops at the gate and leaves me to walk the rest of the way. Hansie has been crying and looks tired. It’s definitely chocolate on his face.
‘So, is my share of that in the car?’ I ask my mother, before she can ask me about my foul day, right here on the street.
‘So, what was your first day like?’ The picture on the screen breaks up and re-forms itself as Richard Frost, in Bergvliet uniform.
He’s eating breakfast. I can’t say I had one best friend in South Africa, but he’d come pretty close. It’s so good to hear a voice from home – a voice I don’t have to concentrate on so that I don’t miss something. I’ve got the laptop on the counter in the kitchen. Mom has been chopping onions for bobotie and has now moved on to the apples. Dinner will be ready early tonight. I’m hoping it’s before Hansie hits the wall and starts yelling again.
‘Weird! They speak English, but it’s like a different language,’ I tell him. ‘Eish. It’s like going from Bergvliet to Hogwarts. A guy told me in three ways this morning that a fan was broken and I had no idea what he was saying until I googled the words just before you came on.’
‘Try me,’ he says. He’s smiling. ‘How hard can it be? Hit me with your best Aussie.’
‘Bung. In a sentence: “It’s gone bung, mate”. He told me the fan had gone bung.’
‘Bung?’ He throws his hands in the air. ‘That’s stupid.’
‘I know.’ It feels good to have an ally, someone else who wouldn’t find it normal. ‘Here it means dead. And there’s another one: cactus. Same thing. Dead.’
‘But a cactus is a cactus.’ Richard seems outraged on my behalf, or on behalf of cacti. I hear his mother’s voice in the distance. He looks over her way and nods. There’s a painting on the wall behind him that tells me exactly where he’s sitting. ‘Out in some deserts, they’re the only thing that’s not dead.’
‘I know.’ Suddenly I can remember how their kitchen smells. And I just want to be back there. His mother bakes all the time. I can smell it just looking at him. I can feel how it feels to be there. Most of Australia is still only pictures to me, and things I’ve never heard of at all. But instead of getting into all that, I just say, ‘And then there’s carked it.’
‘Carked it?’ He says it as if he can’t have heard me properly. ‘That’s like a bird noise.’ He points at the screen. ‘Do they have some big bird of prey that goes caaaark?’
‘I don’t know. That’s good thinking. I could’ve done with you around today.’
‘Hey, maybe that’s why they say “stone the crows”. I went to that Aussie slang site you told me about.’ A hand reaches across the screen, passing him a mug. He takes it and sets it down. It’ll be hot chocolate. He persuaded his mother long ago it’s all about the milk and his calcium intake. ‘Do they actually stone any crows? And, if so, do the crows have to be doing something first to deserve it, or is it any crow?’
‘I haven’t heard anyone say it. But crows come right up to the house, so I guess it’s been a while since the last stoning, at least in One Mile Creek.’
Mom has started
cooking the bobotie and already there’s that great smell of onion and apple and curry powder frying in the pan.
I tell Richard that’s what we’re having for dinner and he says, ‘Hey, have you eaten kangaroo yet?’
‘Not yet,’ Mom calls out. Now she thinks she’s part of the conversation. ‘You can buy it here, though.’ She comes over with the spoon in her hand and leans across until she’s sure she’s visible. ‘People do eat it. It’s not just bush meat. It’s at the supermarket. We can also get things from home here. There’s not just kangaroo and other Aussie stuff. We can get biltong and boerewors and rooibos. There’s enough of us here now that there’s a South African shop. They call us Saffers.’
Richard jolts in his seat. ‘Ai. Not sure I caught that. Did you say . . .’
‘No, no – Saffers.’ I try to say it really clearly.
Mom laughs. ‘Short for South Africans. Not the k-word.’
What she means is ‘Not kaffir’, not the most racist word you could think of.
‘It’s a complete coincidence that it sounds a bit like it,’ I say. ‘They don’t use that word here, I don’t think. At least I haven’t heard it.’ Mom steps back to the frying pan and starts stirring again before everything sticks. ‘I don’t know where the black and coloured people are, though. Not in One Mile Creek. It’s whiter than Bergvliet.’
‘Must be townships somewhere,’ he says.
‘Must be.’
I’ll find out and let him know. Piece by piece, I’ll make sense of this place. I wish he wasn’t so far away. I wish all of South Africa wasn’t.
I take a look at some Cape Town websites. Of all my homework, the talk’s the one thing I actually want to do. I just need to find the best angle.
‘Your pa will be skyping just now,’ Mom says, still with her back to me. ‘Don’t get too deep into anything you can’t interrupt.’
She turns the gas off and pours the bobotie mixture into a baking dish. She covers the baking dish with foil, bends down and puts it in the oven.
I stare at the empty living room. It doesn’t feel like home. The dents from the legs of a previous sofa are still in the carpet. Mom and Dad have bought an outdoor table and chairs, but for now they’re inside. Our furniture is still in a big container on a ship somewhere in the middle of the ocean, and it feels as if we’re camping here, or that we moved in when the owners weren’t looking.
I’m sleeping on a mattress on the floor in my room, and Hansie has the blow-up bed we used to take on holidays for him. He only just fits it. He’ll be lying diagonally if our furniture doesn’t turn up soon. It’s way better than the motel we stayed in for the first week, though.
‘First days are never easy, eh?’ Mom says behind me. ‘Everything’s new. It’ll be okay though. It’ll be less new tomorrow. And I bet there are lots of Australian things you haven’t even heard of yet that’ll turn out to be great. Just wait.’ The timer on the oven clicks as she turns it. ‘Forty minutes, and perfectly timed to skype your pa. Let him know we’re here.’
When I check ‘contacts’ in Skype, Dad has just come online.
Mom goes to the kitchen door and calls out, ‘Hansie, come talk to your pa.’
Dad is on the screen by the time Hansie rushes in from his room. He’s making engine noises, a toy plane in each hand. Dad’s still got his mine gear on, and the silver patches on his bright orange shirt flare when he moves.
‘Howzit,’ he says, and waves.
‘Howzit, Dad. Where are you?’
This is our first Skype call to the mine camp. He looks around behind him. I can see the head of a bed with a white pillow on it. Next to the pillow there’s a powerpoint and high up the wall there’s an airconditioning unit. He’s the only one of us with a real bed.
‘This is my little house here,’ Dad says, stepping to one side to show us more. ‘You’ll be surprised what they call it. It’s a donga.’
Back home a donga is a dried up riverbed or a ditch.
He smiles. ‘Pretty lekker donga, eh? A lot nicer than sleeping in one of ours.’ He glances around again and reaches his arms out to the sides. ‘What you can see is almost the whole thing, except the bathroom. There’s four of us in this building, each in one of these.’ He looks back at the camera. ‘But what I really want to know is how your first day went, boys?’
‘Good,’ Hansie says. He’s kneeling on a stool, running his planes along the countertop.
‘So, what was good, Hansie?’
Dad knows it was an automatic response. Mom has already texted, telling him some of the details. Hansie lost it when Mom went to leave the child-care centre, then wailed at the door for the next twenty minutes before being persuaded that there were new toys to play with. About every half hour after that, he’d work out no one he knew was around, and the wailing would start again.
‘I don’t remember.’ Hansie leans forward and touches the screen.
‘Well, have a think about it and I’ll get back to you,’ Dad says. ‘What about you, Herschelle? That Mr Brown seems pretty good.’
‘Browning.’ I need to have the right name in my head. ‘Don’t make me call him Brown.’ Mom’s just behind my shoulder. She’s waiting to hear what I say. ‘I think I made a pretty good start.’ It’s a total lie, but Dad wants good news, I know it. And he’s not getting good news from Hansie, that’s for sure. We’ve come all this way and he just wants us to be happy. ‘Everyone’s doing talks on Australian colonial settlements, so I’m doing Cape Town as a comparison.’
‘Good,’ he says, nodding. ‘That’s a good idea from your teacher. And think about what you can say. Even just about the van der Merwes. Long before anyone in England even thought about Brisbane, we were farming at the Cape. Are you making any friends? Or is it too early to ask that?’
‘Max,’ Mom whispers, as if I need to be fed an answer.
‘Well, I would’ve said it’s early, but Mom obviously wants me to tell you about Max. He was my tour guide, and he’s not a bad guy. We played handball at lunchtime. He’s no good at tunnel ball, but he’s not bad at handball.’
‘You like handball,’ Dad says. He’s looking way too glad about it all.
‘It was just handball. And I already know what I like. And who I like.’ It snaps out of me, but he deserves it. Hansie reels away from me and drops a plane.
They want me to be happy, but I won’t have them telling me I already am. Or that meeting one non-awful person and hitting a ball around means this is all easy and everything’s like home now. It’s not like home. Not at all.
Dad’s just looking at me, not sure what to say next.
‘They’ve got nothing to counter my skidder,’ I tell him, trying to calm down and just talk. ‘Not the guys I played with today.’
‘Always good to have a trick up your sleeve.’ He nods and light flashes from his silver patches. ‘Just wait till you show them what you can do at hockey.’
‘They don’t play hockey.’ I can’t believe he doesn’t know this already.
‘What do you mean? I’ve seen them play us on TV, at the Commonwealth Games.’
‘Well, they don’t have it at One Mile Creek.’
‘We’ll find you a club somewhere.’
A club. More new people, new words, new ways of not getting it right. More work fitting in. Dad seems fine at the mine. He looks like he has no idea how tiring fitting in is.
That night I can’t sleep. The faint glow of the hands of the travel alarm clock on my floor tell me it’s about ten o’clock. One Mile Creek is quiet at night. Somewhere in the distance, I can hear a car.
After an hour of lying there, I get up and open the curtains. My window is just glass, no bars. Probably not even thick glass. The fence outside is designed to look nice in photos, not to work like a fence. There are trees on either side of it. Possums scramble through them sometimes, and every time they do it freaks me out. Every time, my first thought is to wonder where the guard is. But that was Bergvliet, not One Mile Creek. No gu
ards here. I can’t feel safe here at all.
There’s a streetlight just outside our house, and our car is a dark shape on the pale stamped concrete driveway. There are no gates. There’s nothing between the car and the street.
It could be stolen by anyone. Anyone might be on their way to steal it or break into the house.
The kitchen lights are still on when I go to get a glass of water. The free local paper is lying folded on the counter, open at the neighbourhood crime report. It looks like a regular feature, with a map numbered with crimes. This week, across the entire north-western suburbs of Brisbane, including One Mile Creek, there were only five break-ins. And every one seems to have been through an unlocked door or an open window. That can’t be right.
‘Ai,’ says Mom, coming up behind me with a cup of tea. ‘They don’t even lock the doors, these Aussies. Cashmere, Eatons Hill.’ She points to the text that matches the numbers. ‘Every car stolen was by someone who walked into a house through an unlocked door and took the keys.’ She laughs. ‘They should just leave a sign when they park the car: free car – please enquire inside about keys. The skollies here need an open door before they can work out how to steal anything.’
Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s why we don’t have a wall or a guard. Have they locked all the smart skollies up already? Do the ones who are still around have so little idea about how to rob people?
I google ‘the marter’ while I’m having breakfast on Tuesday, and it turns out there are Mater hospitals, including a big one in Brisbane where a lot of babies are born. So, that’s what Ms Vo meant when she said she was born at the Mater.
In Science, Ms Vo hands out a worksheet and tells us we have an hour to fill it in. It’s on ‘solids, liquids and gases’. It’s based on the whole term’s work and I’ve only been part of one lesson in which I said ‘bloody’.
‘Just do the best you can,’ she tells me as she puts the sheet on my desk. ‘Treat it as practice with our way of assessment.’