Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  PROMISING YOUNG BOXER

  IN ROCK-CLIMBING ACCIDENT,

  RESCUED BY BOXING COACH

  Sometimes Meneer Prinsloo got his picture in the newspaper but nobody else from The Boys Farm had ever done it. Mevrou was furious because it should have been her in the paper.

  Now, Mevrou was not the sort of person to let a thing like that pass so easily. Although Meneer Prinsloo was the boss of the inside of The Boys Farm and Meneer Botha was boss of the outside, Mevrou was really the boss of the inside, because she looked after the boys in the little dormitory and also the sick room. She’d been a nurse in the town hospital once, so was the medically qualified one to do broken noses and arms and dressings and such things. I can tell you there was no love lost between her and Frikkie Botha, because if a boy got hurt in the boxing ring he would always want to fix him up and take her job away from her. What he’d done by taking Fonnie to the hospital without her also in the lorry was a terrible slight she wasn’t going to let pass without him knowing he was in a fight and a half because of the insult to her professional standing.

  This is how the most terrible thing happened. At first Pissy swore on the Holy Bible that the story of him and Fonnie going to look for bush doves and Fonnie climbing the big rock and falling was true. But Mevrou could see from his eyes or something that it wasn’t true, that there was more to the story. Every kid in that place was a good liar, because you had to be, even me, in the end I eventually learned to lie just as well as anyone else. Mevrou was an expert lie detector. To get away with a lie in front of her you had to have a special talent for lying. Besides, she knew how to work Pissy over big-time. She went to work on him.

  You’re going to ask how I know what I’m going to tell you now because otherwise you’re going to think I made it up or something. The sick room that Mevrou called ‘the clinic’ was two rooms at the end of a long veranda that jutted out at right angles from the rest of the building. Maybe they’d been added on later after the hostel was built because they didn’t look the same as the other part. The back of the sick room faced out to a small garden with lots of hydrangea bushes that grew right up to a window that looked into one of the two rooms, the room that was Mevrou’s personal office. The other room was where you stayed if you were too sick for the dormitory or were put in quarantine for the measles and stuff that was maybe catching. If you had to go to the sick room for something and the door was closed, what you did was go into the garden and creep through the hydrangea bushes and take a look to see if Mevrou was alone and at her desk, because sometimes she’d be lying snoring on the leather examination couch she sometimes used to examine people on. You see, you weren’t supposed to go to the sick room until after supper, only in an extreme emergency. If you disturbed her it was big trouble, I can tell you.

  You remember the scratch on my arm from the whitethorn bush? Well, it festered badly and I hadn’t gone to the sick room to have Mevrou take a look at it because then she’d ask me how it happened. I wasn’t so good at lying and remember, Meneer Botha said I wasn’t at the big rock when it happened. So I thought maybe she’d ask and I’d have to lie and she’d find out and next thing Tinker is ‘a dead dog or my name isn’t Frikkie Botha’. But Mevrou Prinsloo, the superintendent’s wife, stopped me to tell me to do up my trouser fly buttons that I must have forgotten. When I did she saw my arm and how it had gone all red and there was pus coming out and she told me to go and see Mevrou at once. So that’s why I was creeping through the bushes to see if it was all clear to go in and knock on the door. And that’s when I overheard what I’m going to tell you. There was Mevrou and Pissy Vermaak and the window was open a little bit so I heard everything, hiding in the hydrangea bushes.

  ‘What were the two of you doing in that part of the farm where nobody goes?’ I heard her ask.

  Pissy repeated the story of going to shoot bush doves with their cattys. Every kid on The Boys Farm had a catty. You made one by cutting two thin strips of rubber about a quarter of an inch wide and twelve inches long from an old car inner tube. Then you’d cut a forked stick from a branch, find an old piece of leather for the pouch and bind them all together using even thinner strips of inner tube. When you were finished you had your own deadly weapon to shoot birds with. The bigger boys were able to make really powerful ones that could take a stone high up into the branches of a stand of tall blue gum trees. There was a small forest of about twenty huge trees beside the stream, not far from where I’d found Tinker. This was a favourite place for bush doves, they’d roost high up in the very top branches and nowhere else. In the late afternoon you could hear them cookarooing. If the bigger boys shot three or four they’d make a fire and roast them, as they were fat and plump and delicious from eating some farmer’s mielies. Not that I’d eaten one. I was too small to use a strong enough catty and I didn’t possess the skill to bring a bush dove down from the high-up branches. I also wasn’t allowed to chop any wood or light a fire. Sometimes a bigger boy would shoot six or seven doves and he’d give them to Mevrou in exchange for three C to C cigarettes. She loved to put the bush doves into a pie. She said they were her favourite food from when she was a girl on her father’s farm. Anyone who wanted to get in her good books knew how to do it. So, you see, she knew all about bush doves and where they came from.

  ‘Bush doves? You were looking for bush doves, hey?’ she asked Pissy.

  ‘Yes, Mevrou, and Fonnie climbed the big rock to take a look where they were,’ Pissy replied, once again confirming the story going around.

  ‘This big rock, is it the big rock where the whitethorn grows on the other side of the pigsty?’

  ‘Yes, Mevrou,’ Pissy answered.

  ‘So tell me, man, this rock is 400 yards away from the stream where the big blue gums grow. How can a person climb that rock to see bush doves that are high up in the trees that you sometimes can’t even see when you standing right under the tree? How come, now suddenly Fonnie du Preez is supposed to see them and gone 400 yards away in the opposite direction?’

  Pissy was taken by surprise. ‘I dunno, Mevrou, he’s a boxer so he’s got very good eyes and you can see them better at the top of the trees from a distance.’

  ‘Ja, and you a very bad liar, Kobus Vermaak.’

  ‘No, Mevrou, it’s true, honest to God,’ Pissy protested. ‘We was looking for bush doves, I swear it on the Holy Bible!’

  ‘You better watch out, man! After this you going to wash your mouth out with soap? God is going to strike you dead. Using God’s Holy Bible like that is blasphemy, you going to go to hell and burn in an everlasting fire for all eternity, you hear!’ Mevrou picked up her sjambok. ‘You know I’ve never hit you before, Kobus?’

  Pissy nodded.

  ‘But now is different, all of a sudden you lying to me after all I done for you. It makes me very sad and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. All this time I’ve trusted you and now you go and tell me lies. You breaking my heart, man. I’ve treated you like your own mother and look what you done, you gone and lied to somebody who has always shown you love, who nurses you when you sick. And you’re a blasphemer.’ The tone of Mevrou’s voice suddenly changed. ‘Now you going to get six of the best, you hear! Take down your trousers.’

  Pissy looked really frightened. ‘But I could get a fit, Mevrou,’ he said desperately.

  ‘That’s all rubbish and you know it, Kobus. We just tell people that because it’s true you delicate of health, but you don’t get a fit from the sjambok, it doesn’t happen like that. Epileptic fits, we don’t know what makes them happen, only that it’s a brain seizure that makes you go unconscious and have convulsions. People don’t die from them unless they swallow their tongue. Lucky for you that kaffir, the pig boy, came along and put a stick in your mouth to bite on. Wragtig! How a kaffir would know to do a thing like that, I just don’t know, you can only thank God. After you’ve had one fit, you don’t usually get another for a long time.’

  I remembered how Fonnie had clouted Pissy on th
e side of the head and nothing had happened, when I’d thought he’d go into a fit for sure. I was in for a bit of good news. Being hit didn’t bring on Pissy’s epileptic fit. It hadn’t been my fault after all and he’d never nearly died because of it.

  Up till now I’d only been listening but I stuck my head up through the bushes so I could see what was going on. Pissy undid his belt buckle and his shorts fell to the ankles of his knobbly-kneed freckled stick legs. He stepped out of them and stood cupping his cock with his hands. ‘Bend,’ Mevrou instructed. I instinctively prepared to flinch as I saw her arm go up but it stopped mid-air and dropped to her side. ‘Bend more, touch your toes,’ came the command. Mevrou put the sjambok down, walked right up to Pissy’s bum and carefully parted his cheeks, using both hands to expose his arsehole. ‘It’s bruised!’ she said, then stepped back. ‘What’s going on, hey?’

  Pissy, still holding his ankles, looked back. ‘Nothing, Mevrou,’ he cried. His face had gone very red and I could see he was about to cry. Mevrou had seen the same purple marks I’d seen when Tinker was being nearly murdered. I’d never looked into a person’s arsehole before Fonnie made me do it and as far as I knew, everybody’s arsehole could have been purple like that.

  ‘It’s bruised and there’s signs of bleeding. What’s going on, Kobus?’ Mevrou demanded, looking the fiercest I’d ever seen her, and that’s really saying something. ‘Stand up and put on your pants,’ she instructed.

  She made Pissy sit down on the leather examination couch and drew up her chair. Pissy looked very frightened. His bony shoulders were hunched over his narrow chest and his hands gripped the side of the leather couch, his skinny legs dangled and his knees bumped together so that the bottom part of his legs sort of splayed out. He had three front teeth missing because of Doctor Dyke’s horse pliers and his pale blue eyes were rimmed with red below his close-cropped bright ginger hair. The usual yellow glob of snot hung halfway out from his nose. I can tell you he was not a pretty sight.

  About this time my heart was beginning to beat faster. Mevrou was famous for getting the truth out of a person and she’d been known to bring undone even some of the best liars in The Boys Farm. Pissy wasn’t a bad liar but he wasn’t good enough to compete with some of the older kids who, easy as pie, could convince you black was white and then the other way around again. Pissy was between a rock and a hard place and was about to be interrogated by the best lie detector in the business. What if Mevrou made him tell the truth? I would be in the deep shit and be known as an arselicker and cocksucker for the rest of my life, but much worse than this, they were sure to kill Tinker.

  ‘Kobus, genoeg! Now you tell me the truth or we go to Meneer Prinsloo and he’s going to recommend they send you to the reformatory in Pretoria. With you delicacy of health you will die in that terrible place.’ She paused. ‘They going to send you for sure because I’m going to sign the recommendation myself, you understand?’

  How clever is that! She didn’t beat around the bush, just came out with the single biggest threat known to man, the reformatory in Pretoria for boys who are bad. The stories from that place were bad and it was true a boy could even die in there, easy as anything.

  ‘Tell me what were you doing at that rock? If you lie I’m not going to waste my time, we go straight to Meneer Prinsloo,’ she repeated. ‘I’m also going to tell him about the bruises around your anus.’

  Pissy looked up, you could see he was scared stiff, but you really had to admire what he did next. ‘If I tell you, Mevrou, will you promise not to take me to Meneer Prinsloo?’ She had him over a barrel and he had the cheek to try to bargain with her.

  ‘I can’t promise because I don’t know what you going to tell me,’ Mevrou answered. ‘But I promise I won’t sign the recommendation for the reformatory if you tell me everything that happened and leave nothing out.’ Mevrou was miles too good for him.

  ‘He likes to piss on me,’ Pissy declared suddenly, his voice barely above a whisper.

  Mevrou was clearly surprised, not sure she’d heard correctly. ‘Say again?’

  ‘Fonnie du Preez likes to piss on me,’ Pissy repeated, a little louder.

  ‘Piss on you! How?’

  I confess it’s not what I expected him to say either. I thought he was about to spill the beans, tell about me and Tinker and everything. Although I don’t know how you explain how somebody pisses on you, they just do it, don’t they?

  But Mevrou didn’t wait for an answer. ‘How long has this been going on?’

  ‘He just did it that one time at that rock.’

  Even I could tell it was a big fat lie, but it explained a lot of things, the way he always smelled for one thing. If the clothes you wear for a week are drenched with piss that’s how you’re going to smell all the time. I’d never remembered smelling him on a Sunday when we took a shower with soap and got our new change of clothes before going to church, so everyone in the congregation would think how nice and clean the boys from The Boys Farm always were.

  Mevrou let the lie pass, her voice became clipped and businesslike. ‘At the rock? The day du Preez had the accident, that’s when he pissed on you?’

  ‘Yes, Mevrou.’

  ‘Explain to me what happened.’

  Pissy looked down at his knobbly knees and even from where I was in the hydrangea bush I could see he was shaking. ‘I don’t like to, Mevrou,’ he said, his voice trembling.

  Mevrou sighed this big sigh. ‘Don’t make me angry, Kobus. Tell me at once!’

  ‘He wanted to stand on the rock and piss down on me, like it was a nice joke.’

  In my mind’s eye I saw Fonnie with his big cock and a stream of golden piss cascading over the edge of the big rock on Pissy’s ginger head. Splash! Trickle. Of course, that’s not what happened and couldn’t have happened before I got there because I would have seen if Pissy’s head and his shirt were wet and I’d have smelled the extra fresh piss on him. So far Pissy was winning in the lying game and, I must say, was doing bloody well under interrogation.

  Mevrou drew back in her chair. ‘A nice joke? You let someone piss on you and it’s called a nice joke? You an Afrikaner from a proud people and you let a person piss on you for a joke!’

  ‘Not to me, Mevrou, to him it was a joke,’ Pissy mumbled.

  She’d got that bit wrong. An orphan can’t be a proud anything even if he is an Afrikaner, which is better perhaps than being English, but if you just belong to the Government it’s not much to be proud of because there’s nobody who gives a shit about you. Also, the part where Mevrou said she’d treated Pissy like his own mother. He didn’t have a mother so how could she know about that, hey?

  ‘You didn’t think it was a joke but you let him do it to you? You could have run away,’ Mevrou said.

  Pissy shook his head sadly. ‘You can’t, Mevrou, he’ll jus’ get you later.’

  It was a good point and she let him have it. There was no hiding place in The Boys Farm. They always got you in the end. It was best to take what was coming to you, even if it was unfair, otherwise it only got worse and worse.

  Mevrou sighed again. ‘So far all we’ve got is the pissing joke. Did he masturbate in front of you?’

  We all knew the word, although I wasn’t completely sure how it worked, you rubbed your cock and white stuff came out, but only if you were bigger. All I knew was that it was the worst thing you could possibly do on The Boys Farm. It got you sent to Meneer Prinsloo who would give you six of the best with his vicious, specially long bamboo sjambok. They said he’d stand way back and run at you, and each cut was like ten ordinary ones. God definitely didn’t like masturbation and Meneer Prinsloo said, ‘God forbids it and so do I.’ They put you in the tank afterwards, or if it was summer, in a small cupboard that was pitch dark. You could hardly breathe in there and you stayed for the whole day without food, just some water. Afterwards you had to kneel down and put your hand on the Bible and promise God you’d never do it again. I gasped at the very thought of Mevrou
suggesting such a thing had occurred. But it was me who was in for a big surprise.

  ‘He sometimes did it,’ Pissy said.

  ‘In front of you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he make you do anything?’

  ‘Like what, Mevrou?’

  ‘Like suck his piel?’

  ‘No, nothing like that, Mevrou,’ Pissy said, almost in a whisper.

  What a dirty lie! I knew it was a lie because of what Fonnie made me do and Pissy saying it tasted like boerewors. You could just tell he did it the way he said it was lekker and all. I just knew that Fonnie made him do it and Pissy didn’t even mind one bit.

  Surprisingly Mevrou didn’t make a fuss when I felt for sure Pissy was on the way to Meneer Prinsloo. She suddenly changed the subject. ‘What about the accident to Fonnie du Preez on the rock? Tell me.’

  Pissy was ready for her. ‘After he’d finished he was doing up his fly and laughing a lot and he stepped back without looking and this piece of rock came loose and he slipped and fell down.’

  ‘Backwards? He fell backwards?’

  It was a trick question. All Fonnie’s injuries were on the front, his face and head, and he’d broken his arm by frantically trying to cushion his fall. What’s more, the skin inside both his arms was scraped raw from the surface of the big rock. Pissy twisted the top part of his body around. ‘No, Mevrou, he sort of twisted, then suddenly lost his balance and he fell down on his face and head and broke his nose and his arm and was unconscious.’ He looked up and for dramatic effect added, ‘I even heard it snap, like when you step on a twig in the bush.’

  My admiration for Pissy was growing by the minute. I mean, for his slyness and his ability to lie like a dog. He was proving far and away the best liar among the ten-year-old boys. I was observing a world champion liar in the making. If I hadn’t been there at the big rock myself I would have been convinced that every word he said was God’s honest truth.