by Jenny Robson
*
It’s true I was useless at school. Especially at Port Alfred Secondary. It was like my brain was packed full of cotton wool. All the stuff the teachers said just disappeared under it. And I could never find it again.
That’s why this morning at Kagiso Holdings I got in a state when that small white woman put the test in front of me. With a pen and a sheet of rough paper for working stuff out. The questions with their big, dark question marks seemed to be shouting out at me how stupid I was. With their empty dotted lines where I was supposed to write the answer.
So I concentrated on filling in my name at the top. And then writing my date of birth in extra-big numbers. So that they would see straight away: today was my eighteenth birthday.
Question number one was something about buying and selling apples. What is the percentage profit? That was the question.
I could remember that percentage was something about hundreds. Because if you get a hundred percent it means you got everything right. Right? If you get thirty percent, you are a dom-ass. Like me. Or like my one friend there at Port Alfred Secondary, Rex Zwelethu Jili. Seventeen in grade nine. We were two dom-asses together until he left.
But no! This was not the time to feel useless and stupid! I gave myself a lecture, there inside my head. “Come on, Dirk Karel Strydom! You can do this. You are eighteen now. You are a man with a mission to get a place on this Youth Scheme, with training and wages. So act like a man. Read the question again. Slowly. Concentrate!” I sounded like one of my Port Alfred teachers.
Next to me, the coloured girl with the high eyebrows was scribbling away on her rough paper. Numbers were flying out of her pen. And then on the dotted line for question number one she wrote: 4%.
I could see her answer without even moving my head.
4%? That sounded like a good answer to me. So I wrote it there on my dotted line too.
I told myself, “Right, Dirk Strydom. That’s number one sorted out. So now you can work out number two for yourself. You don’t need to copy off some random Single A.”
Question number two was about driving a car to Cape Town and kilometres and litres of petrol.
How was I supposed to know anything about driving a car to Cape Town?
The furthest my dad ever drove me was to the Pretoria zoo for my ninth birthday. His Sentra couldn’t go much further than that. And Fatter Koos only drove me to some game farm outside Grahamstown once. He wanted me to shoot a buck.
“It will make a man out of him,” he kept telling Fat Sonya. “He’s such a moffie, this brother of yours.”
He was always calling me that. And laughing. Sometimes I got so angry I wanted to pick up one of his guns and put a great big bloody hole in his gorilla-shaped head. But instead he made me put a hole in a tiny little buck. And then he laughed all the way back to Port Alfred because I was crying and vomiting. Koos made me swallow some of the buck’s liver. He smeared some of its blood on my cheeks.
Sometimes I still wish I could put a bullet through his fat face. That one doctor I saw at the children’s home told me it was called IEA. Intermittent Explosive Anger. He had a fat face too behind his pointy little beard.
Meanwhile beside me, the Single A girl was scribbling away again on her rough sheet, working out number two. I still hadn’t realised who she was, even though her name was written right on the top of her test paper: Janie September.
*
So, anyway. All through January and February this year I slept with Aggies and Rosie at Northfields Play Park. It was fine then because it was still warm.
If it rained, we packed all our stuff in Rosie’s Shoprite trolley and headed past the fire station to Victoria Bridge. We had to pay Andries and Mal-Jan for a space – they were the two white hobos in charge there. Crazy men with red eyes, always high on something.
“You mustn’t talk to them, Dirk,” Aggies warned me. “Say thank you and God bless you to them. Then you walk away.”
But at least we kept dry. And we kept to ourselves, there in the far corner where the bridge sloped down so low we couldn’t stand up straight. Behind some Coca-Cola crates.
But by late March it was getting colder in the park. Aggies stole a Made-in-China mink blanket for me from a Chinese shop. It was a lovely, lovely blanket with its own strong zipper bag. Turquoise mostly. With dolphins on one side and a huge sailing ship heading for an island with palm trees on the other. That was the night Aggies told me about his three little girls: Thandeka and Gugu and Everbeloved.
He said, “In the old days, when I had my little girls, I never stole. It is wrong and wicked to steal. That is what I thought. I must pay for things like an honest man. Even if it was taking too long to finish the payment.”
Rosie nodded to me. “It’s true.” Then she went back to smiling down at the slippers she had found. They were fluffy and bright pink. She said, “I used to be a good dancer. All the young men from the streets around, they used to mos beg to take me dancing. They said I was like a feather. So light. No, but you must listen to Aggies’ story about his little girls. He never told anyone else except me.”
I sat with the mink blanket wrapped round me, there on the park bench, feeling the softness touching my cheeks.
*
In April, Mrs Mogwera said I could move into her maid’s quarters. She said, “I talked to Mr Mogwera, Dirkie. He says it’s okay. He says if you work in the garden with me three mornings a week, that can be your rent.”
She smiled at me with those sad eyes she has. With that lovely smile that was soft and comforting as my mink blanket. Strange, right from the start she always reminded me of someone. But I could never work out who.
At first I felt bad to have a roof over my head while Aggies and Rosie still slept on benches outside. But Aggies said, “No, you must go, Dirkie. You are young and there is hope for you. Your life, it can still change. But not my life. Me, I will never sleep inside. Not ever again.”
So I carried my bag and my blanket inside its zipper bag into Mrs Mogwera’s servant’s room. I put the blanket over the bed and I wondered if maybe it was my bed from my bedroom in the house. I put my clothes into the drawers of the dressing table that was there. The dressing table with the drawers that didn’t smell of my ma any more. With the red Rhodesian teak that looked dull now that no one oiled it.
Although the crack across the mirror was still there.
*
But this morning, on my eighteenth birthday, there outside Pick n Pay, Aggies said, “And later, after that Bethany, we go to Honeyridge, heh? Hawu, wena! Maybe we will get extra birthday luck today? I will bring your sign, okay?”
I nodded. I patted his arm under his holey jacket. Then I went to the pavement just past the Cell C shop and pointed my finger to the sky to let the taxi drivers know I was on my way to Der Hoogte.
Where Bethany lives.
4
The blue-in-the-face man
So, anyway. When I first came back here to Villa Park, I kept going to look at 5 Groenewald Road between begging with Aggies at Pick n Pay and rush hour at Honeyridge intersection and sleeping nights in the play park. Mostly I went in the late morning when the black man and his red 4x4 were gone. To work, I suppose.
It was like picking a scab. You know, when you’re little and you know it will hurt like mad? But you still keep picking at the edges? Because you want to see what’s going on underneath. Because when the blood wells up, it’s interesting to watch it. Even if there’s pain. Because it’s your blood, I suppose. Your very own blood.
Often, the black woman was out in the garden, working with her flowers. It was Mrs Mogwera, but I didn’t know her name yet. I just knew she had a nice smile and a soft voice.
She said over the wall, “Are you looking for a piece job? I need to build a rockery. Maybe you can carry the rocks for me?”
So I carried the heavy rocks all the way from the pile near the gate. And I saw how gently she held the little cactuses. How gently she put them
in the ground.
I said, “I used to live in this house. Five years ago, until I was twelve.”
She said, “Mr Mogwera, my husband, only bought it last year. My stepson Theo lives with us. He is in matric now. At Good Hope.”
She talked a lot while we worked. Mostly I didn’t really listen. It was about things and people I didn’t know about. But the sound of her voice was nice, like a little stream running through the garden past her Barberton Daisies. She had a thing about those Barberton Daisies: I wasn’t allowed to carry the rocks anywhere near them.
“Aren’t they beautiful? Three flowers already! I love the colour: like farm butter melting into gold, but then the stems are – oh, I don’t know – like serious jungle green.”
I looked down at them and said yes, they were beautiful.
We worked all morning until the rockery looked like a small mountain in the corner and my shoulders ached.
Mrs Mogwera said, “If you go round to the back of the house, to the kitchen, I will get some cool drink for you. You know where the kitchen is, don’t you?”
She had sad eyes, I noticed. Even though she was smiling. But I didn’t wonder too much about it. I was busy breathing hard, but not just from all the carrying: I was also trying to be brave enough to walk around the garage to the yard. It was very hard. I had to clench my teeth and force my legs to move.
I squeezed my way down the path between the garage wall and the next-door fence. That felt strange. The last time I walked down that path, back on that October day when I was twelve, it had seemed wider. Even though it was raining and my blazer was soggy and my school shoes were full of mud.
I passed the garage window where my dad’s fishing rod used to hang even though he never went fishing. But of course it was gone now.
Around the garage corner, I turned into the yard. The patch of arum lilies was still there, growing out of the mud underneath the gutter that always dripped. It was still dripping.
Mrs Mogwera stood at the kitchen door. “Come inside, Dirk. I’ll make you a sandwich too, if you want.”
But how could I ever, ever go into that kitchen? Even though I could see that Dad’s green-ferny lino was gone and there were shiny beige-and-white tiles instead.
I said, “No, I’ll just eat outside. My shoes are dirty.”
So I sat on the step of the maid’s quarters. I could see into the maid’s room. My ma’s dressing table was still there, standing against the far wall. With the huge crack in the fancy mirror.
Mrs Mogwera sat down close to me on a white plastic chair and we talked a while.
*
My ma had sad eyes too. But for no exact, proper reason. Not like Mrs Mogwera. Even though Sonya tried to explain it to me.
But suddenly, when I was eleven-years-and-eight-months, Ma stopped being sad. She began to get dressed again in proper clothes. Every day. And the whole house got filled with her humming and with busyness and excitement. It was a good, good time. Maybe even the best time in my life! Even though it started off badly. Even though it started off with my dad stressing because he couldn’t find a job.
“Imagine that, Dirkie,” he said to me there in his chair at the kitchen table. “Forty-one and washed up already. They’re only giving jobs to their own people. They call it transformation. Well, soon they’ll be transforming us into beggars! But don’t say anything to your ma, okay?”
Then it went on to my dad screaming at the TV. Some black man was talking on the screen, standing behind some pulpit-looking thing. And my dad went ballistic.
“Blue-in-the-face? I’ll give you blue-in-the-face, you bastard!” He was screaming, going red in the face actually. It seemed funny, but I made sure I didn’t laugh. Especially when Dad started screaming the K word at the TV, even though the man had disappeared and there was now some advert for tyres.
Next day, Dad even bought a paper. Mostly we never had newspapers in our house because of what they did to my ma. But there on the front page was a big photo of that blue-in-the-face man with his pink tie.
“Just listen to this, Dirkie,” said my dad. “Just see what he says. He reckons we can whinge until we’re blue in the face or we can simply leave the country. Yes! Simply leave the country! What way is that for a government minister to speak? Minister of Safety and Security, nogal!”
Then, for the next few days, he and Ma argued behind the closed door of their bedroom. I tried to hear. All I heard was Ma saying, “Are you crazy, Pieter? You’re the one who should be locked up in the loony bin. Not me!”
I caught Dorcas trying to listen too. When she saw me watching, she pretended she was dusting the pictures in the passage.
But by the next Saturday, everything had changed. Ma was up and wearing a nice pink dress. She looked a bit like Jimmy Big-Deal Cameron’s mother. Almost.
“Imagine, Dirkie!” she said with no sadness in her eyes. “New Zealand! Your dad is taking us to New Zealand. Won’t that be a wonderful adventure? No crime! No more being frightened! I don’t think they even have burglar bars over there. But what must we take with us? Oh goodness, there’s so much to sort out!”
Dad kept phoning people and talking about something called “Expression of Interest”. Like a form you filled in on the Internet to tell the New Zealand people you wanted to go there. I went with Dad to the Camerons at number 12 because they had Internet. We came back home and Dad hugged Ma.
“How about that? A hundred and forty points, Leila. That’s what I reckon we score. That should be enough to get us accepted. We’ll have to wait about two weeks to know for sure. Thank goodness for that half-brother of mine in Auckland – that gave us a few extra points. I must try contact him again …”
All three of us set to working: clearing the maid’s room of rubbish and newspapers, pushing Sonya and Koos’s left-behind boxes into one corner. Dad said the room would be a good place to store all the stuff we were definitely taking.
“This way we can see things clearly,” he said. “We can see exactly how much there is. And cut down if need be. I must find out exactly how big a container is. Or maybe half a container. And the costs.”
But that’s when he found Koos’s gun: lying right there in one of the boxes. Loaded.
Dad went ballistic. He phoned the pineapple farm, even though it was long-distance and we needed to save money.
“Are you insane? How can you leave a loaded gun lying around like that? What if Dirkie and his friends got hold of it? What if the maid found it?”
Fatter Koos promised to send his brother around to collect the gun and all the rest of their boxes. Just as soon as his brother got back from his contract in Zambia.
And anyway, Dorcas had to leave.
Ma said, “We must save all the money we can. This immigration is an expensive business. And I must learn to do my own housework. They don’t have maids in New Zealand.”
Dorcas sobbed and howled and begged and wiped her face with her scarf. “How will I feed my child? How will I pay school books?”
I didn’t feel sorry for her. Not one bit. This was fair. After the stuff with the bath and then, even worse, the stuff with the frikkadels, this was her just payment!
Then Ma said the dressing table must definitely go with us to NZ. That’s what we were calling it now: NZ. Like it was some family friend.
She said, “It’s all I have left of my ouma’s house. And it’s worth a lot. Plus we can get the mirror fixed properly over there. They have proper craftsmen who know what they’re doing. Not like the cowboys here.”
Mr Cameron and his older son helped Dad move the dressing table into the maid’s room, behind all the boxes my ma was packing. And re-packing. She kept changing her mind about what she should take. Till my dad said, “Leila, you’re driving me a bit crazy.”
But he didn’t sound cross. The first letter had come, with its fancy silver fern on the top. It said we had been selected from the Pool for further consideration. Dad went whistling off to the library for some books a
bout NZ.
*
And now, there is the dressing table, still standing against the back wall of the maid’s room. Still with its crack. The people who bought the house from us must not have realised it was an antique. So they just left it behind for the next owners. For the Mogweras.
When Mrs Mogwera said it was okay for me to move in, I managed to fit all my clothes in the drawers. With space to spare. So that was good.
Mrs Mogwera also said I could fetch hot water from the tap in the kitchen to wash. The maid’s bathroom only has a cold tap. She even gave me a bucket. But I just wash in the cold water. It’s still much better than the fountain at Northfields Play Park. At least there isn’t any green slime. Or tadpoles.
I don’t think her husband is too happy I am there. Even though he gave permission. Even though he gets three free mornings of gardening a week. Whenever his friends and family come round for a braai or a party, he makes me leave for the night. And his son Theo from his first marriage hates me, I think.
I’ve heard Theo say, “Why must we have this lekgoa in our yard? It’s embarrassing. It’s undignified. It’s not like he pays rent or anything!”
Often when I am sitting on the maid’s step, I can see his net curtain move and I know he’s staring at me, standing there in his posh blazer from his posh high school. In the room that used to be mine.
But it is different when Mrs Mogwera’s family comes. She has three sisters, all gigantic, even though she is so small. They laugh a lot and sit outside on the white plastic chairs in the sunshine and do each other’s hair.
Often they talk to me, nice and friendly. They explained to me about Mrs Mogwera’s sad eyes. “Our poor, dear sister Lebogang,” they sigh and their laughter disappears. “Poor, lovely Lebo. It is such a sadness.”
*
So, okay. There outside the Pick n Pay mall, a taxi finally stopped for me. First Born, it was called. It isn’t one I’ve ridden in before. And it wasn’t very nice. The driver spoke to me rudely, like I wasn’t welcome. The passengers shifted away from me, like they didn’t want my body touching theirs. This lekgoa invading their space.