Tandia

by Bryce Courtenay

  'Heavens no! That's almost exactly what sculpture shouldn't be made to do. Good sculpture should please the eye because it is a part of the landscape, whether it happens to be the urban landscape or park land.' Harriet pointed to the near completed shape of the horse she'd been working on. 'See how it's standing?'

  Peekay looked at the plaster-of-Paris shape of the horse standing in the centre of a tarpaulin in the middle of the studio. To the side of it was the beginning of the second slightly smaller horse. Its shape was roughly formed by an armature of steel rods covered with chicken wire; this was how the nearly completed horse beside it had started its life. Harriet had bangaged the chicken wire with strips of coarse hessian dipped in plaster-of-Paris, building up layer after layer and allowing it to dry. When it was completely built up she'd commenced to shape the plaster-of-Paris as though it was a solid medium. The effect gave the horse's appearance a solidarity and astonishing strength. It stood with its neck craned and ears swept back, its forelegs wide and firmly positioned on the ground, its rump pushed slightly backwards as though it was baulking at someone or something unseen.

  'See the way it's so animated? It isn't a heroic horse on a plinth, it's a horse suddenly anxious about its forward progress. Something has arrested its attention and made it tentative. The rider will try to exert this will on the horse, make it move forward and overcome its anxiety. The drama is between the rider and the horse. It's an intensely private thing.'

  'I can See that!' Peekay said, excited by the explanation.

  'You're right, your horse isn't an exact down-to-the-last-tiny detail replica of how a horse looks; it's simply a wonderful expression of how a horse feels.'

  Harriet seemed pleased. 'It's the sort of horse which should be naturally set into a park among the trees with its hooves on the grass, where to the eye, it seems to belong; and where, at any distance at all, it seems to be quite real.'

  'That's what you mean about a piece of sculpture having a purpose?'

  Harriet nodded, her expression serious. 'The second horse, following slightly behind, will enhance the feeling, as though the bareback rider has taken the horses down to a stream to drink and they've all had a swim and now they're going home. If someone were suddenly to look up, say a little girl playing on a swing in a housing estate, and she saw my horses and rider through the trees, she'd know exactly what it would feel like if they were real, because, you see, in a sense they are real. Horses and people riding have always been a natural part of the dreaming landscape. Do you know when I first knew I wanted to become a sculptor?' Harriet asked suddenly. She stopped working on the torso and sat on an upturned tea chest. 'I was twelve and on holiday with my parents in Italy a year after the war. We'd driven into a small village in Tuscany which was reputed to have a beautiful church. My father's potty about churches. As usual the church was the main building in the piazza but this one was surrounded by huge trees, wonderful big old fig trees. It was the local saint's day, I forget which saint, and the village people were all out, playing bola, gossiping in small groups, mothers wet-nursing their babies, people seated at tables under the trees drinking wine, the men smoking. Under several of the trees stood a man playing a piano accordion, each musician taking turns to play a few chords before the others joined in so they all played the same melody.

  'I can remember how hot it was, how the women sat on chairs with their skirts hauled up to their knees, fanning themselves with small paddle fans dyed pink and green, which seemed to be made of plaited bamboo and carried the name of a brand of tinned tomatoes.' Harriet laughed. 'I know I'm telling it in detail, but that's how I remember it. The people seemed so natural, so easy with themselves and, although I was only twelve, I sensed, despite the war, I mean them losing it, that nothing much had changed in their lives. There was a sort of internal combustion that worked for them collectively as though the mass was greater than the individual and time had been previously arranged and there seemed no good reason to tamper with it.

  'We hadn't been long in the piazza when the bells sounded and the people started to flock towards the church. To my astonishment I realised that many of the people were pushing wheelchairs, while others hobbled towards the church on crutches. A boy of about my own age passed me pushing a man who had no legs in a wheelbarrow. They gathered around a huge stone statue of the virgin mounted on a plinth which stood outside the church. The plinth was stepped to hold hundreds of lighted candles. The enormous statue showed the virgin aloof, towering above the women, many of whom were ululating while others had thrown themselves at the base of the stepped plinth and seemed to be imploring the mother of Christ to heal their sick and cause their lame to walk again. In a few moments the piazza had changed from a natural and eternal village scene to one of frantic and frenetic people playing out an arcane ritual to the rigid, cold and unforgiving mother of God.

  'It wasn't love I felt emanating from the blessed virgin. It was fear, deeply atavistic pagan fear. The church which taught love had mastered only fear. The Mother of God, who represented the warmth and continuity of motherhood, had become a monstrous apparition of power. In the piazza, with the washed-blue Italian sky above the warm cobblestones and dark shade under the giant fig trees, where moments before there had been music and laughter and soft afternoon drowsiness, now there was hysteria and madness. The hands and minds which had fashioned this virgin mother of God had been corrupted. New hands were needed, hands which would fashion a virgin to walk amongst the village people, one who nodded and smiled and stopped to listen to a bit of gossip, exchange a recipe, run her hand through a small boy's hair or comfort a mother whose child had been stillborn. A virgin mother of God with her feet on the ground.' Harriet bent down and picked up the maquette of two horses and a rider. She placed it on her lap, absently running her hands across the back of the smaller, riderless horse. 'It was at that moment, I think, that in my mind anyway, I became a sculptor.'

  Peekay was silent for some time, obviously thinking about what she'd said. 'Harriet, in Africa we would call you a visionary and the people would make songs up about you and as the women shucked corn or stamped meal or fed their infants they would sing them, sing about the woman who took the feet of the mother of God and placed them on the ground.'

  Harriet blushed, 'You are sweet, Peekay. The truth is, I'm fearfully retarded. While the other kids in kindergarten went on to better things, I never quite got over playing with plasticine.'

  Harriet rose from the tea chest and, walking over to him, she sat astride the wooden saw horse facing him. There was only just enough room for them both and the inside of her thighs and knees touched his own. Peekay's heart began to pound furiously as Harriet rested her arms on either side of his shoulders, She leaned forward, her breasts not quite touching his chest, and" closing her eyes, she kissed him. Then she pulled back, her face only inches from his. 'Peekay, how much longer must I wait for you to ask me to make love?'

  Peekay blushed furiously. A lump had grown in his throat which made it almost impossible for him to speak. 'But…but, you belong to Hymie,' he croaked.

  Harriet looked shocked. 'I belong to me, Peekay. I love you but I'll always belong to me.' She didn't wait for Peekay's reply, aware that her response would embarrass him even further. Instead she kissed him again, slightly opening her mouth, allowing her kiss to melt softly, lovingly over his lips, opening his own so that their lips fused.

  Peekay's whole body was a confusion. His mind reeled with the shame of his presumption, his heart thumped like Mojaji's drums and his maleness rose within him, the very heat of it like nothing his wildest, most erotic fantasies had ever conjured up. Mickey Spillane hadn't mentioned this part, this sudden overwhelming paralysis, when only one part of you seemed to work, draining the strength and heat from all the other parts so that the sum of everything became an urgent, blinding desire.

  Harriet pulled her head away slowly, breaking the contact carefully, as though too sudde
n a movement might shatter something; the air around them, time, movement, distance, the kiss itself. 'When you said, "That's the only way you're going to hit me, shithead!" that was the moment…that was the moment I fell in love with you,' she said. Peekay looked confused. 'Huh?'

  'When Peter Best fouled you after Hymie had called the end of the round, the first day we met, that's what you said after he'd hit you. That was the moment!' Harriet began to unbutton the cardigan Peekay was wearing. It was cold in the studio and she'd made him put it on after he'd posed for a while with his torso bare. 'This old cardigan of Daddy'S, it doesn't suit you at all,' she said, slipping it over his shoulders.

  Peekay's arms came up to her, pulling her against him and holding her. 'Oh, oh, Harriet you're so beautiful, please, please can we make love?' His face was buried in her hair, which smelt clean and slightly perfumed.

  Harriet pushed him away gently and rose, her legs still straddling the saw horse. Then she smiled a wicked little smile and lifted her arms so that Peekay could remove her sweater. Peekay stood up, oblivious of his erection, and pulled the sweater over Harriet's head, whereupon Harriet swivelled her torso so that her back was facing Peekay, her bra strap firmly clipped in the centre of a flawless, elegant back.

  Peekay's hands suddenly trembled. 'Oh fuck! Push to the right…pull to the left! Shit no! That was when you worked from the front! Pull to the right, push to the left! Jesus!' The bra came away into Peekay's hands. For a moment he looked at either end of the bra strap, not quite believing his eyes. Then he let the bra fall from his fingers. He was in control. Harriet had turned back to face him, planting tiny kisses on his face, her fingers working at his belt buckle. Peekay's hands rose and cupped her wondrous breasts, 'Oh, oh, Jesus!' They both stepped over the saw horse together and Peekay, removing one hand, dragged the large, colourful eiderdown from it to the floor.

  EIGHTEEN

  Peekay's first professional fight took place at the end of April. There had been a last-minute cancellation by an English boxer named Terry Cousins who was scheduled to fight Jacques Habib, a French Algerian welterweight, in a non-title major preliminary bout at Earl's Court. Cousins's trainer, Charlie Perkins, had called Dutch Holland to say that his fighter had come down with the' flu and had asked him if he had a welter in his stable who could fill the bill. Dutch had seen the French Algerian fight on four previous occasions and felt that Peekay, despite his lack of experience in the professional ring, could take him - or at least make a damn good fight of it.

  Holland was of the school who believed it wasn't such a bad thing if a boxer lost his first professional fight, providing always that he wasn't badly hurt in a mis-match. He wanted to see Peekay blooded; he'd never had a boxer near as good, but he needed to know just how good Peekay really was.

  'A young boxer can have everything in the book, dance like Fred Astaire, fast as a bleedin' rat up a drainpipe, punch like Joe Louis, Einstein's flippin' brains, but it's what he does when he's too tired for fancy footwork, too buggered to lift his arms and he's got one round to go with his opponent ahead on points. That's when you know if you've got a champ or a chump.'

  Dutch had taken Peekay into the professional ranks immediately after the abortive Oxford/Cambridge bout. Now he needed someone to put real pressure on the young South African and he felt that Jacques Habib, a tough and experienced professional once ranked number one in Europe and now a little past his prime, might be just the man to sort his lad out. If Peekay looked like taking a bad hiding he would throw in the towel. The press would lambast him for creating a mis-match and the British Boxing Commission would probably hold an inquiry. But if Peekay survived it would be worth it. Even if he took a bad hiding from the Arab, provided he showed he had heart, he would still be good enough to get a crack at the British Empire title in a couple of years.

  Hymie was concerned, but he trusted Holland's judgement and, as Peekay pointed out, by going higher up the ladder so early it would be that much quicker to get a shot at the world title.

  Peekay had resolved to tell Hymie about Harriet and him after the fight. Apart from telling Harriet that he would confess to Hymie almost immediately, they hadn't discussed it. Peekay was anxious to avoid another blast from Harriet on the subject of her emotional independence. The mere use of the word 'confess' had raised her ire. 'You have nothing to confess! I don't belong to Hymie. You haven't stolen me. I belong to myself!' She'd stormed off in a huff, leaving Peekay scratching his head.

  Harriet had called him a pompous ass and he supposed he was in a way. But he couldn't help feeling guilty and he knew he had to tell his friend. His reason for waiting until the fight was over was based on his knowledge of Hymie. Hymie would be anxious not to upset him before his first professional fight and so might too easily dismiss the affair. This would allow Peekay to get off lightly and perhaps, as a consequence, allow the issue to remain dormant and unresolved between them.

  While Peekay hated the idea of hurting his friend, he felt himself morally obliged to take whatever scorn Hymie cared to dish out. He'd pinched his girl, and he was expecting Hymie to fire both barrels at him simultaneously.

  Peekay knew he'd been a bit of a prick over the Odd-Bodleian affair. After all, what Hymie had done wasn't so bad. He'd merely tried to make a point by using Peekay's childhood rather cleverly in an attempt to knit a hopelessly disparate bunch of chaps into a group of boxing supporters. It was a tall order even for Hymie, but by challenging him, Peekay had completely destroyed any chances he'd had of pulling it off.

  Peekay was also aware that some people saw him as too perfect, too good at everything; now with Harriet, he'd be seen as the guy who got the girl. But he didn't see himself the way others did. Rather he knew he was the one person amongst them who had been soiled, who had been corrupted. Since he'd been a small child he'd spent his life trying to get the taste of shit out of his mouth.

  Peekay was beginning to understand how powerful sex was as a weapon and how, if he wasn't terribly careful, it could come between him and his beloved friend, even if Hymie accepted his affair with Harriet. He loved Harriet with a passion, but a fair part of the passion began with his loins, whereas his feelings for Hymie were born out of a steadfast friendship which had lasted longer than anything else in his life except his relationship with Doc. Not to have Hymie as his closest friend was unthinkable.

  Peekay's final preliminary was at seven, an hour before the main event, a ten round light-heavyweight contest which, by coincidence, featured Peter Best's brother and a Nigerian boxer. Both were unbeaten and it promised to be a good fight, although Best, the British Empire title holder was expected to win.

  Peekay's opponent, Habib, with thirty-two fights to his name, was a tough and respected welterweight who had won twenty-five of his fights, lost six and drawn one, though eighteen of his wins had been by knock-out. In his last fight he'd been narrowly beated by an American negro stationed in Germany with the US Occupation Forces. The French Algerian, who at twenty-nine was a little past his prime as a fighter, was nevertheless still rated third in Europe and had to be considered very much the favourite against the unknown student 'from Oxford.

  Such was Dutch Holland's reputation in the fight game, that Frank Mitchell, the boxing writer for the Daily Express, cautioned his readers to watch the young South African carefully. He commented:

  Normally I'd be asking myself why the British Boxing Commission was allowing a match-up between the experienced and still highly rated welterweight French Algerian Jacques Habib and an unknown young South African boxer who goes by the unlikely name of the Tadpole Angel. But with over twenty years' experience of the fight game, I have learned to respect the judgement of the incomparable Dutch Holland, who is handling the South African boy. Holland would not have brought the young fighter who, by the way, is reading law at Oxford, against the vastly more experienced French Algerian if he wasn't expecting big things from him. Holland is a trainer known for h
is caution and has the reputation for bringing his fighters along carefully.

  Make no mistake, my money remains firmly on the Frenchman from Algiers, who may be a little past his prime but still carries the best left hook in Europe - when it connects. But I'll be watching the Tadpole Angel very carefully too, and I suggest fight fans do the same. You may find it worthwhile catching an earlier tube to Earl's Court to witness this six-rounder.

  Hymie and Peekay arrived at Earl's Court just after six to find Dutch Holland and Togger waiting for them. Harriet and E. W. were there to meet them too.

  'Dutch, we haven't mis-matched Peekay this time, have we?' Hymie voiced the fears they all felt.

  Dutch shrugged. 'I hope not, my son. I got a reputation to keep as well, you know.' He turned to Peekay, speaking quietly. 'You and your manager better be off to the dressing room. The fight's on in half an hour. Togger wants to handle the bucket and sponge. That orright with you?'

  Peekay nodded and smiled at Togger who, with Harriet and E.W., had moved closer, conscious of the tension between the three men and relieved by Hymie's sudden laughter. Togger looked gratified. 'You won't regret the decision, Peekay. I learned me spongin' technique in a bleedin' Turkish Bath in a Soho club. I can bring a dead member to life with a soapy sponge.'

  Peekay laughed at Togger's crudeness. He knew, though, that Togger was worried for him. Habib was a big name to be fighting first off. Peekay could feel the familiar tightening of his stomach, but this time the tension was worse than usual. He wasn't kidding himself, he was scared and suddenly he wasn't at all sure they hadn't made a terrible mistake going in at Habib's level.

  After Peekay had changed into his boxing gear, Hymie bandaged his hands and slipped on his gloves, leaving them unlaced. They were waiting for a fight steward to call them to the ring. Then Hymie fished into the pocket of his sports jacket. 'Here, I've got something for you.' Peekay looked up as Hymie continued. 'A friend of yours gave it to me with specific instructions. I saw him last Christmas in Johannesburg.' Hymie imitated the soft tones of an African speaking English. 'Tell for my brother, always when he sits on the pot, he is so still, at this time when he waiting for the fight, he must wear for this, it will make him strong. It will make him the grandson of Shaka Zulu and the son of Dingane.'