by Arushi Raina
“Hey—I offered you money before, remember, the first time. And you didn’t want it. So now you’ve just got this. Me.”
Like he would ever belong to anybody.
“Looks like I made the wrong choice.”
“Ja, looks like you did.”
I remember the dust floating in his car. The mlungu knew that I knew that he was trying to make me like him more, say or promise something that I couldn’t. I remember the smell of his newly washed shirt. An expensive brand of washing powder only for mlungus.
Twelve
Jack
At dinner, the cutlery felt cold and heavy in my hands. These days, I had less and less to say to my parents. My father, with no Van Roonens present, made no effort to make conversation. So it was left to my mother to talk us through the meal, and she talked and talked. My eyes wandered from her face to the windows, to the over-tended garden. I saw everything in a new unpleasant light that made it difficult to carry on as I had.
In a few months, it would be time to leave for England anyway.
“So what do you think?” Megan shifted in front of the mirror, pressing the dress against her body.
The shop attendant chimed in. “Looks very classy on you, the white really goes with your hair.”
“You’re putting a lot of thought into this,” I said.
“It’s your farewell. As Ricky says, we’ve got to go all out.” Megan carried it over to the till.
I pulled out my wallet.
She put her hand over mine. “Don’t be silly.”
“Don’t worry about it.” I drew my hand away, handed the shop attendant the money and slid the dress across the counter. The small beads were cold and hard. Soon my mother would tell Lillian to lay out white streamers through the trees. Then dancing on the lawn till one or two.
The shop attendant packed the dress in tissue paper.
We walked to the car in silence. The Mustang looked particularly broken and dusty in the pale afternoon light. I opened the door for Megan, closed it shut.
“You’re like your father.”
“What?”
“You insist on acting like some kind of English gentleman, paying for everything and opening doors for me. But you couldn’t care less about me.”
“Thanks for that,” I said. “Finally figured out my parents’ relationship.”
“I’m not blaming you for dropping me, Jack, I’m just making an observation.”
“Dropping you?”
“Barely even noticed. Thought so.”
I didn’t reply.
As we stopped outside her house, she leaned over, her hair grazing my face. I moved away before she could kiss me.
“See,” she said.
“I’m as surprised as you are,” I said. And I was.
“I’m not surprised.”
She stepped out of the car and walked up her driveway, the shopping bag tight in her hands.
I returned home with a package in white paper. A satin dress, no beads. I knew Zanele would dislike the dress, dislike that I’d bought it for her. But this was very little about Zanele’s feelings, more to soothe mine. Sometimes we do things to make ourselves feel like we can do whatever we want, when we can’t.
Thabo
You only have to see it once, and you don’t need to see the whole thing to know. Mustangs are very rare, especially in this part of the city. And this one was a red scratched one. Very rare. Zanele stepped out of it, looking left, right. Even though she looked, she didn’t see me and Sizwe on the other side of the closed-off street.
And the only reason I didn’t go right then to the mlungu’s car was because Sizwe was there. If I did anything, even made a face, Sizwe would turn around and see what I had seen.
Now I walked slowly to the bus rank. I waited for the seven pm and then the eight. At nine she came, still in her uniform.
“Zanele,” I called out.
She looked up but didn’t smile when she saw me. This was something I had not noticed before, but maybe it was always that way. Maybe I just lied and lied to myself. She walked toward me, and we walked together to her shack.
I wanted to hurt her. But I didn’t.
“So why the mlungu?”
“What?”
“Don’t pretend,” I said. “I know. I saw you with the mlungu. In his car.”
Zanele didn’t even look ashamed. She didn’t try to lie, say it was someone else. No.
All she said was, “Oh.”
Then she turned away to go inside. I took her hand, held her back. “Why? Why the mlungu?”
She tried to pull away. “Thabo, I don’t know.”
“You think the mlungu is better than us.”
Zanele pushed me and we fell. Her nails dug into my shoulders. Zanele held my shoulders down, her hair falling on my face. Then she got up, off of me.
I got up slowly. “All this time, Zee, I’ve taken your kak. But this time, this time I hate you.”
“I know,” she said. It looked like she was going to cry. Something I hadn’t seen in a long time. But I wasn’t sure if she was crying for me or the mlungu.
I walked away.
Zanele
One by one, students from each school stood up to say whether they would join us. They held up their right hands in fists. Some of them looked at me.
Soon there would be a thick snake of students all the way from Morris Isaacson to Orlando Stadium.
Masi came to the front in a green shirt, waving. And the crowd became quiet. He held his hands out. “We have waited a long time for them to listen to us. But they will not listen to us. So we will march. We will not fight them. We will just march.”
Students muttered.
“But if they try to fight us, we will defend ourselves.”
The crowd surged forward, excited and loud. Masi held them back with his hands. “Are we ready for June 16?” he shouted. “Are we ready?”
A cheer went up. Everyone stamped and the floor shook.
Vusi joined me in the corner of the room and held out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.
“Congratulations,” he said.
I waved his cigarettes away. “For what?”
“For this,” he said. “In the history books, they will write about Masi, about the SASM members. But you did it too.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Nothing’s happened yet. Stop dreaming about history books.”
Vusi exhaled, smoke rose slowly to the dirty ceiling. People were leaving in small groups.
Masi put his hat on and nodded to us.
“We are going to change all their lives. Do you believe me?” Vusi said, staring at Masi, the students clustered around him.
“Yes,” I said. “Because, if I don’t, there’s nothing left to fight for.”
I turned the light off in the hall and we left, walking in different directions. A police car slid next to the sidewalk, slowing down but not stopping. I kept my head down and didn’t change my pace.
My home was quiet and empty. I tried to sleep, thinking about how I’d lost Thabo for good.
Meena
Zanele came in to buy red lipstick.
“How’s what’s his name, Jack, doing?” I said, looking down at the cold black tube as it rolled across the counter to me.
“I don’t know,” she said, and let the words hang there, clarifying nothing.
I tallied up the lipstick purchase and put the tube in a bag. I hadn’t expected Zanele to be so serious about the white boy. So serious that she wouldn’t tell me.
“It was a question,” I said. “That’s all.”
“I know. It doesn’t matter.”
But it did.
“It’s finally happening,” she said.
“What?”
Zanele leaned forward
across the counter as three of my father’s friends entered the store. “Sixteen June. Keep an eye out.”
“For what?”
Zanele flashed my father’s friends a large fake smile, then left.
Zanele
I woke up the next morning to see Mama standing at our window, tying up her braids. They were thick, good for tying in one piece. As she stood against the morning light, working with her hair, she smiled. She probably didn’t even notice. But then the cap was over her hair, and when she turned from the window she wasn’t smiling anymore.
“Are you ready?” she said. “Zanele, I am talking to you.”
“Mama, I can’t go with you,” I said.
“Tell me, Zanele, why can’t you come and help me? Why is it so difficult? Tell me.”
There were white streamers through the tree in the old playground. Piano music drifted from the house. Then the breathy voice of some American woman, who kept telling Jack to hit the road and never come back.
This time we walked in through the front door. I went into the kitchen and did what Mama told me to do. My hands sunk into sugary dough again and again. Upstairs, maybe Jack was putting on a tie and pulling at the knot so that it was straight under his throat.
“Mrs Craven? Jacky boy?” A boy came through the door. He carried a bottle of wine and looked like he had been squeezed into his suit. He stared at me but didn’t recognize me from that time he had come to the shebeen with Jack. He was wearing the same ugly light blue leather jacket then, too. He backed out of the kitchen, joining the others on the landing.
We pushed the pastry in the muffin pans and put the jam inside them. Then we covered it over with more pastry. Before we put the tray in the oven, Mama made small patterns on the top.
I wish I had never seen Jack’s friends. I wish I had never seen this house. What was Mankwe’s word for me? Careless. Jack and I had been careless, but he could afford to be.
Jack
I first saw her standing behind the piano as my father was toasting me. His hair was thinning in the front, and as he stood with his champagne flute held against the light, that part of his scarred forehead glowed. I had assumed she wouldn’t be coming. So I hadn’t even thought to check with my mother. She was looking at my father in a cold irritated way. That was when my father said, “Because we all know that Jack will be happy to leave us in this backwater, while he conquers the world. Starting with England.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” I said, putting my hands on her shoulders as she tacked up pictures in her mother’s room in the maid’s quarters. They were pictures of her and her sister, and then some older women. The edges of some of the photographs were chopped off. In some pictures, a disembodied man’s hand or a shoulder in a shirt remained. Some of the pictures had been shot from odd angles, so it was hard to see faces.
She turned. I looked for any sign of how she had taken the news about Oxford. It was impossible to tell.
She turned back and kept pasting the pictures.
“You’re not going to say anything?” I said.
“No. I need you to go.”
“Why?”
“Jack, you are in the maid’s quarters,” she said.
I turned away from the wall and faced her. Her eyes met mine and then switched back to the photographs.
Even though she wasn’t looking at me, I could tell she was angry, in her cool quiet way.
The maid’s cap highlighted the sharpness of her features, the set of her mouth, the inherent irony of her being a servant to anyone.
“Why these pictures on the wall?”
“Don’t think I’m coming back here. Might as well do it now.”
“What does that mean?”
“You need to go back to the party in case they’re looking for you.”
“This is the first time you’ve heard of England, and you’re saying nothing.”
She put the photographs down. “Jack—maybe you want this to be your moment of truth, but I have other things to worry about. This is not the first time I’ve heard of England, of mlungus going to England. Just go.”
“We’ll talk later, okay?”
“Come, honey. Dance with your mother.”
As I took her out on the lawn, her body felt cold and fragile. She’d had too much sherry, and it was early.
My father watched us from inside the living room.
Megan watched us too, our slow half dance on the grass. She clapped slowly as the music drifted in and out.
Lillian came out with a tray of champagne glasses. She looked up, watching my mother and me, and started walking over with the last glass on the tray. And then my mother stumbled, knocking over the tray. The champagne spilled down the back of her dress.
“Watch what you’re doing.” My mother’s voice was loud and shrill, cutting through the cold air.
“Madam, I’m sorry.” Lillian held out the napkin, my mother ignored it.
“Use just a bit of your brain, Lillian.” My mother held the back of her dress away from her skin. “Really, if it’s not too much to ask. Now go, take yourself and this glass away from here.”
Lillian walked away, slow and deliberate.
“I’m so glad, Jack, that you’re going to England. So proud of you.” My mother turned back around and took hold of me again. Smelling even more of alcohol.
“I know.”
“All I’ve ever cared about is your happiness. You know that.”
“Yes.”
She rested on my shoulder and closed her eyes. I saw the light on in the maid’s quarters, a single figure sat there, watching.
And then the Jouberts arrived.
My mother left me to greet them. I followed, slowly.
“Can you believe he’s off so soon?” my mother said, taking Joubert’s arm. “It’s already mid-June.”
“Nice to see you, Anna, always nice to see you.” But Joubert was looking at me. “Jack,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Your face looks better.”
“Thanks.”
“We are going to talk about that,” he said. He took hold of my shoulders and walked me away from the garden. My father had left the living room, didn’t seem to be in the house.
Joubert walked me to my father’s study and sat down in my father’s chair.
“Sorry, Mr Joubert. Are you looking for my dad? Can I get you a drink?”
“No, no, nothing. You can sit down, Jack, my boy. Because I know.” Joubert leaned back, smiling in a way that shrank his eyes into slits. “I know,” he said again.
I sat, waited.
“The last time I came here, I remember mentioning the attack to you.”
“What attack?”
“Don’t act stupid with me, boy. The traffic policeman . . .” Joubert said, enjoying himself. “I told you we had the number for the licence plate on that car. So we tracked it down, and we found who the car belonged to.”
“And who was that?”
He leaned forward. “You.”
He waited for me to say something, so I said nothing.
“I knew it was you.”
“Okay.”
“How does a black girl get into a white man’s car and then attack a policeman? Why would she be there, in this white boy’s car?”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
Joubert’s face turned red. He stood up and leaned over me. “You broke the Immorality Act.” His spit landed on my shirt and my face. “And that tsotsi was blackmailing you. He had come for the money, but you didn’t have enough, so he beat you up.”
“Very good.”
“Who is the tsotsi’s girl?” he asked me.
“None of your business.” And there it was, my biggest slip up. I’d spoken too soon, too loudly, said the exact thing I shouldn’t have said.
If only I’d gone along with him, said I’d picked her up somewhere and had no idea who she was. More disgusting to Joubert, but much better.
Joubert raised his eyebrows. “Interesting. I’m going to ask you one more time. Because if you don’t tell me, I will make sure this becomes public. If you break the law, you won’t be able to go to your fancy school. Your family shamed.”
“Come on, Mr Joubert. The police don’t care about that kind of stuff like they used to.”
“When there is an assault on a police officer, we care. Who is this black?”
I got up and buttoned my jacket. “Mr Joubert, if I tell you her name, what do I get in return? Your silence?”
Joubert said nothing.
“I thought not. So you see, there’s really no point in me telling you who she is. I wouldn’t be getting anything for it. You should really rethink the way you handle your interrogations.”
“I will find her anyway,” Joubert said.
“Good luck with that. I hear there are a number of women fitting her description all across Alexandria and Soweto.”
Zanele
There were four glass cabinets against the wall in Jack’s room. They were full of trophies and pictures of him with old mlungus putting medals around his neck.
Then there was a picture of Jack as a child, with his father. His father wore an army uniform and was leaning down, holding his rifle and his son. Jack’s eyes were drawn away from the camera.
I went to Jack’s desk. Sheets and sheets of tables with numbers, plotted lines, the same equation with small differences. I opened his drawers. There was very little in the first one, just a few paper clips, an extra wallet and a pocketknife. It was like him to have a few things in his drawers that could belong to anybody. In the trophy cabinet, behind the trophies, some envelopes addressed to Jack Craven from Oxford, England. I opened the envelope and flipped through the pages of the brochure.
Jack
When Joubert and I walked out of the study, almost everybody was dancing. Zanele came out with the drinks. Four flutes, amber yellow in the last of the sunlight. Joubert and I parted and I started toward Megan, who was dancing with Ricky. But there was Zanele, with Joubert right next to me, and she about to speak to me. Not now.