Tandia

by Bryce Courtenay

  He rose slowly from his sweat-soaked bed. He glanced down at his rigid member. This! This is a part of it! The sex urge constantly overtook him and numbed his mind. He thought of the French and Belgian whores who came over from the Congo in a chartered DC 3 every three weeks to 'service' the miners. Peekay didn't want the first time to be with a whore, having to pay for it. But now, after yesterday, he wondered why. He wasn't really any different. When it all boiled down, the law degree he was planning to take at Oxford wasn't going to turn him into a civilised man; underneath he was a cruel, animal bastard like the rest of them.

  Peekay had imposed a number of conditions on the method of his deflowering. These sexual aspirations had been brought about very largely as a consequence of having read the entire collection of Mickey Spillane detective stories which he'd inherited from the previous occupant of the hut. The neatly stacked paperbacks with their lurid dime-store covers were arranged along the ledge of the only window in the hut, almost as though the books had become a part of the window. Peekay's resolve to eschew the French whores and wait until the real thing came along had been confirmed when he read how Mike Hammer, Spillane's detective hero, had seduced a beautiful and sexy heiress. He'd read that Hammer slipped his rough hands, more accustomed to fondling the butt of a snub-nosed forty-five, through the pink ribbon straps of her night lingerie, peeling them slowly over her perfect shoulders. Then he took her into his arms. Her skin was as smooth as whipped cream on a satin bedspread.

  It was the final sentence which had set Peekay's blood racing. He resolved to keep his virginity intact until life delivered him just such a whipped-cream experience. For he'd convinced himself that if he could achieve a single act of perfect lovemaking, all his carnal desire would melt away and manhood would click into place like a well-oiled rifle bolt.

  At eighteen Peekay was Amateur Lightweight Boxing Champion of South Africa, undefeated in one hundred and sixteen fights. He'd set his sights on becoming professional Welterweight Champion of the world.

  As if this wasn't enough, he wanted more. He had brains to spare, more than he could possibly need to be a world champ, which he correctly saw as something you became and, in a matter of two or three years, were no longer. For his real future he had decided to read law at Oxford.

  Peekay was aware these two ambitions were somewhat incompatible. But for almost as long as he could remember he'd been two people, or put more precisely, the same person who was thought about quite differently by two sets of people. There were those who talked about his being a future world champion and who had never heard of Oxford; and those who knew him as a brain, a small-town kid, the son of a widowed dressmaker, who had made them proud by winning a scholarship to a private school for the sons of the rich and who now had a place at Oxford University.

  Somehow Peekay had managed to keep both groups in his life happy. He Was highly ingenuous and people took to him easily, often taking strength from him as well as becoming loyal either to the boxer or to the brain, one or the other aspect of his personal disguise.

  Only Hymie Levy, Peekay's beloved friend, believed with him that both ambitions were possible and not contradictory

  Peekay had met Hymie on their first day at boarding school and they'd remained friends. Hymie was the son of a Jew who had fled Poland just prior to Hitler's invasion and who had "become a millionaire carpet manufacturer and retailer. Despite being born rich, Hymie was street smart, a loner who was naturally cautious and usually two steps ahead of most people in the thinking department. Where Peekay reached out, Hymie pulled back. Where Peekay accepted, Hymie questioned. Where Peekay trusted, Hymie was suspicious. Peekay's defence system, born out of his early boarding-school experience, made him a quiet sort of person. Hymie adopted loudness as his defence. The poor boy and the rich, the Jew and the Gentile. Together they made a formidable combination.

  Parted for the year and a half Peekay had been in the mines, the bond between them was, if anything, stronger. They thought of themselves as a duo and even, in the long term, inseparable. They would both graduate in law; Hymie would manage Peekay to a world championship fight, and eventually they would practise together in Johannesburg. While Peekay had been earning money in the copper mines to pay his own way through university, Hymie had already started at Oxford.

  Peekay walked over to the small paraffin fridge which stood directly under the window. He withdrew two small metal trays of ice each marked with a band-aid and sandwiched his erection between them. The shock of the ice cold contact made him jump but it worked every time and after only a few moments he returned the ice trays to the fridge. Then he pulled on a slightly sweaty jockstrap and a pair of boxing shorts and stepped up to the speedball which hung from a central rafter just below the fan.

  He began to work the beautiful tear-shaped leather ball, ignoring the pain -from his swollen hands. The beautiful drumming rat-tat-tat-tat of his fists on the leather ball soon calmed his mind; although he hadn't fought for nearly eighteen months, he knew he hadn't lost any speed. His body was harder than it had ever been and his mind, after working a grizzly, was a good deal tougher. A couple of months sparring with good partners and his timing would be right on the button. He'd be ready for his first fight in England.

  After twenty minutes at the speedball Peekay's entire body was a lather of sweat. But he felt good, clean. He couldn't undo yesterday. He'd go over to the cottage hospital and see Botha. Explain to him. Apologise. It probably wouldn't help but he'd do it anyway. The Boer bastard would be surprised, think Peekay was going soft; what had happened to him in the fight was fair in the violent kind of world they both shared.

  He walked over to the door and took a towel from a hook.

  Slipping off his boxing shorts and jockstrap, he wrapped the threadbare towel around his waist and left the hut to walk over to the shower block. Tonight was his last shift underground. After tonight, the next time he went underground would be in a London tube. For some days Peekay had been trying to keep down his excitement, but now it rose in him, tingled inside of him ignoring his attempt to push it away. He did a spontaneous little dance in the dust.

  Hymie met Peekay at Southampton where the Union Castle liner docked. They looked an odd combination; the blue-eyed Peekay in a cheap suit, carrying a battered suitcase, his body tanned and hard, his crew-cut just beginning to grow out; and Hymie, dark-eyed, pudgy and pale-faced, in corduroys, duffel coat and college scarf, his dark hair worn just short of a mane. They climbed into Hymie's little tan Ford Prefect and set off for Oxford.

  Peekay, who had expected to find a bleak, cold England, was not prepared for the sublime shock of a perfect late September day. The idea of four distinct seasons had always fascinated him; it was tidy, clean and precise, the habits of an old and fastidious land. Now, in this quiet coming to the end of summer, there was a kind of purity which Africa could never possess, like the organ notes in a Bach cantata. Here no dust-devils danced across the cracked red earth, mocking the day-after-day thunder of Mojaji's drums as they attempted to beat the spring rains from a brazen, remorseless African sky. In this brassed and yellow autumn afternoon, England was more than Peekay had ever imagined.

  TWELVE

  Wisps of early morning mist sat on the surface of the Cherwell as Peekay and Hymie walked across Magdalen bridge. Hymie's car was parked in a small garage he'd rented just behind the grammar school. Despite the pale sunshine, Peekay's blood, still thin from the tropics, made it feel like the dead of winter to him. He was grateful for the fur-lined leather gloves Hymie had tossed him as they'd left their stairs. Peekay had been at Oxford a month and his life had settled into the usual student routine: lectures, tutorials and rather a lot of time spent both in the Radcliffe Camera and the Bodleian Library.

  To this had been added a fairly heavy training schedule. Hymie had found a gym on the outskirts of Oxford near the Nuffield car works, where Peekay could work out with two apprentices from the Morr
is plant, known simply as Bobby and Eddy. Both boxed professionally. One was a middleweight, the other, like Peekay, a welter. They were countrybred, likely lads, fast enough, handy in the ring and very strong. Peekay had sharpened up, getting his timing right by boxing them both together, each taking alternate rounds. Wearing protective headgear, he'd go flat-out for six rounds four times a week.

  The two Oxfordshire lads were contracted to spar for five bob a round. To keep them from becoming discouraged, Hymie secretly added a pound bonus if they could put Peekay on the canvas.

  After only two weeks of intensive training, despite the heavy protective headgear they wore, Bobby and Eddy quite often found themselves on the seat of their pants in the middle of the ring. Peekay was getting back his form and by the day the appointment with Dutch Holland came around his speed was back; his punches had their old crispness and were probably landing harder. The year he had worked in the mines to build up his strength was beginning to payoff. Neither Hymie nor Peekay was silly enough to think that a good showing against two straight-up-and-down Saturday night club fighters meant they'd get the nod from Dutch Holland, Britain's foremost fight trainer. The great man only worked with amateurs destined for the professional ring and he didn't seem over-anxious to accept the task of turning Peekay into a professional.

  For his first appointment with Dutch Holland almost a year ago, Hymie had carefully prepared a portfolio of Peekay's amateur career. Holland had thumbed through this absently and stopped at the last page, which showed a ten-by-eight black-and-white photograph of Peekay in the traditional boxing pose.

  'Not a bleedin' mark on him. How many fights did you say he's had, then?'

  'One hundred and sixteen. He's hard to hit,' Hymie replied.

  A small smile, more a smirk, appeared on Dutch Holland's face. 'Either that or he's been fightin' schoolgirls. I know a coupla lads will be happy to put a dent in that pretty-boy hooter,' he'd said, jabbing a small, pudgy finger at the photograph.

  'They won't be the first to try, Mr Holland.'

  'We'll see soon enough, lad,' Holland replied, but he'd reluctantly agreed to put Peekay through his paces when he eventually arrived in England.

  The Thomas it Becket gym, situated above a pub from which it took its name, was on the south bank of the Thames near Bermondsey docks. Neither the pub nor the gym was open when they arrived half an hour early. A guy wearing a worn cloth cap and a woollen scarf wrapped around his neck and chin was sitting on the third from bottom step leading up to the gym. He was hunched against the cold with his hands under his armpits and looked up as Hymie and Peekay approached.

  'You the two toffs the guv's been expectin' then?' It wasn't hard to see he was a pug. He possessed the best pair of cauliflower ears Peekay had ever seen and his nose had been flattened so many times it spread across his face in an arc almost as wide as his mouth. 'Which one of you gents is Mr Levy then?'

  Hymie nodded. 'You the caretaker?'

  The pug nodded and stood up. 'I hang about for the guv'nor. Don't expect you'll see him till half nine, though. Them two others neither.'

  'Two others? The two boxers?' Peekay asked.

  'Yeah, them two. I'll open the gym, but I'm warnin' you, freeze the knackers off of a brass monkey up there. By the way, me name's Fred.'

  Peekay smiled. 'Nice to meet you, Fred.'

  They climbed the outside stairs where Fred fumbled with a set of keys, his hands shaking badly. 'It was the war see, if it hadn't been for the flamin' war I'd a been British champ an' all.' He stopped fumbling with the keys and looked at them. 'Adolf put the kibosh on all that.' He found the key he'd been looking for and, holding it in both hands to steady it, inserted it into the lock. 'Done much fightin' then?' he asked, holding the door for them.

  'A fair bit,' Hymie answered. Fred led them past two glass-partitioned offices and into the main area of the gym. 'Shit! This place smells like a wrestler's jockstrap! Can we open the windows please, Fred?'

  Fred tapped what remained of his nose with his forefinger. 'That's the one good thing about me hooter, can't smell nothin'! Sorry, guv, them windows is screwed down for the winter.'

  'Jesus, Fred, I'm expecting a lady! Can't you get any fresh air into this place?'

  Fred looked surprised. 'This ain't much of a place for a lady, guv. Not too many ladies come by. Togger's sister sometimes and some of her friends. I'll fetch a chair for her from the guv'nor's office.'

  Peekay looked at Hymie. 'What lady?'

  'Harriet, she wants to meet you. Remember? I told you she's a sculptor…well, training to be one anyway. She's interested in boxing,' Hymie grinned. 'You know, the human body in its purest form.'

  'Jesus, Hymie!'

  'You'll like her, Peekay, I promise.'

  Peekay sighed. 'I'm shitting myself with the prospect of two of Britain's best welterweights who've been instructed to knock my bloody head off and you decide it's time to show off your girl!'

  'Them two welters, one ain't.' Fred interjected suddenly. Both of them turned, having forgotten he was still standing beside them. 'What was that?'

  'Them two welters, guv, one's a middle. Turned pro this season.'

  Peekay looked at Hymie. 'I thought I was being matched against a couple of welters.'

  'Ja, me too.' Hymie said, a mystified look on his face.

  'Better wait and see.' He turned to the ex pug. 'Fred, did a parcel come for me? It should have been addressed to the pub downstairs.'

  'Yes, Mr Levy, it come yesterday, I put it in the guv'nor's office. Will I fetch it then?'

  'Hello! Anyone home?' a female voice called from the door.

  'Shit!' Peekay exclaimed, suddenly anxious.

  Hymie patted him on the shoulder. 'Cool it,' he whispered,.then he raised his voice cheerily. 'Come in Harriet!' Hymie moved towards the door and Fred followed him, presumably to fetch the parcel or the chairs, but at the same time he removed his cloth cap. The three words spoken by Harriet told him the person at the door was a lady.

  In fact, Harriet Clive wouldn't have noticed either way. Her clipped accent, the unconscious product of a good English boarding school, belied a personality in which there was no place for even the slightest pretension. As she walked towards him Peekay saw an attractive girl who wore a brilliant green polo-neck sweater under the ubiquitous blue duffel of the time. Her faded jeans disappeared into a pair of scuffed brown riding boots. She was about three inches shorter than Peekay and by the way she moved towards him Peekay could imagine a nice shape under all that heavy stuff.

  Peekay smiled as Harriet approached. She threw her head back slightly and, bringing her right hand up, she brushed her fingers through a mane of chestnut hair. Then she took his hand. 'Hello, I'm Harriet Clive, I've been dying to meet you!'

  Peekay's heart pounded against his will. She wasn't beautiful, not even pretty in the conventional sense, but she was unusual looking. Her perfectly ordinary brown eyes were set high above angular cheekbones. Her skin was a very light olive with both her nose and mouth seeming a little too big for an otherwise dainty, heart-shaped face.

  'Hello, Harriet. Hymie tells me you're interested in boxing?'

  Harriet laughed. 'The human form, rather more. I'm hoping to be a sculptor. I don't know anything about boxing.'

  Peekay grinned. 'Why don't you quit while you're ahead?'

  He pointed to Fred who had returned carrying two bentwood chairs, one stacked on top of the other. 'As Fred says, not too many ladies come here.'

  Harriet looked suddenly concerned. 'Oh? I hope you don't mind my coming?'

  It wasn't what Peekay had meant and he blushed. 'No, that's not what I meant, it's nice of you to come.'

  'I'll be terribly quiet.'

  Harriet hadn't quite known what to expect in Peekay. Hymie had spoken of him so often she had conjured up someone she wasn't quite sure she'd like. Rather too
handsome and too good at everything, particularly games. She was beastly at games. In her experience, the strong, goodlooking types usually turned out to be about as interesting as boiled cabbage.

  Taking Hymie's deSCriptions of Peekay alone, she'd decided she wasn't looking for that much perfection in a man. In fact she simply wasn't looking. Hymie came down to London reasonably infrequently, so she wasn't obliged to turn it into a grimly serious affair. He was nice to occasionally think about when he wasn't there and nice to be with when he was. Actually, she thought of Hymie as a sort of male protection device. If another man badgered her or became too persistent she could put them off with chat about her brilliant Oxford boyfriend. Brilliant Oxford boyfriends seemed always to do the trick.

  Meeting Peekay at last, her preconceptions were confirmed. The lightly tanned skin, the shock of hair just beginning to grow across the forehead, the deep blue eyes, the perfectly straight nose: he looked like he'd been created from a police identification kit. It was a superior face, she decided; not quite pretty, but still the sort of idealised looks which belonged in a Rupert Brooke poem. Peekay looked like the sort who went to Harrow, flew a Spitfire, and secretly harboured a desire to be beaten by someone dressed as his childhood nanny. Finally, she decided, he was much too dull-looking to sculpt.

  Harriet had been hoping for a somewhat battered face, interesting because it was still young, yet showed the premature wear and tear of a hundred hard fights. If she were to sculpt him she'd have to concentrate on his body and rearrange his face. While her mind was working on these modifications she looked up, directly into his eyes.

  Peekay actually felt as though he had been pushed backwards. Her look was so open, so cool and appraising, it was like the slap of a wet towel. Suddenly his defences, so carefully developed and so easily brought into play, seemed useless. He felt vulnerable and hoped like hell it wasn't showing.