There is this silence that follows, and then a few claps, and then it’s like sudden rain on a tin roof, all the clapping and cheering. Sergeant Van Niekerk steps forward and puts up his hand until finally there is silence except for one voice from the crowd who shouts, ‘Where is this new genius?’ And the clapping starts again but then finally it stops. ‘Later you’ll see him!’ Sergeant Van Niekerk says. ‘But first I must tell you something else. I have known Tom Fitzsaxby since he was six years old and I consider him a very good friend of mine. But today he did something astonishing, you hear! Simply astonishing, and there is no other word for it.’
You could see the Dominee and Meneer Prinsloo were not happy, and they were scowling all over the place, and there’s no smiles or clapping coming from the church elders either. Doctor Dyke has got his legs crossed and is looking up in the space above his head. But the district magistrate is clapping with the rest of the crowd, and even the Dominee doesn’t have the authority to tell the doctor or the policeman to sit down, let alone make a fuss in front of an outside high-up like the district magistrate from Pietersburg.
The crowd has now become completely silent so you can hear a pin drop. ‘This afternoon my wife Marie went into labour quite suddenly,’ Sergeant Van Niekerk began. ‘She and Tom Fitzsaxby were alone in Doctor Van Heerden’s house. Marie tried to get to the doctor’s phone but could only get as far as the kitchen because the pain stopped her from crawling further. So she called out to Tom who was outside in the back garden. Tom went into the doctor’s surgery and called the hospital.’ The sergeant turned to indicate Doctor Van Heerden. ‘But the doctor here is doing an emergency operation and he can’t leave or the patient will die. The ambulance has gone out to fetch a farmer’s wife, so can’t be sent. I am in court with the district magistrate, Meneer du Plessis. Mevrou Van Heerden is out and can’t be contacted. So the doctor tells Tom what he must do if he can’t get there on time. And with nobody there, Tom Fitzsaxby delivers my baby daughter on the kitchen floor.’
Now there’s the most clapping and shouting and cheering of all, and I can see some of the women are crying. Even if I wanted to I couldn’t tell them the truth, which was that the baby just plopped out while I was trying to hold Marie’s legs, and she was busy kicking me halfway into next week, and at the same time she’s hanging onto the cupboard door handles so hard that she pulled one of them off, screws and all. I wasn’t brave at all, and crying all the time because I was so frightened seeing that long sausage umbilical thing coming out of her baby’s stomach.
After a long while the cheering and clapping stopped and Sergeant Van Niekerk said, ‘Before you meet Tom Fitzsaxby I want to announce that my little daughter’s name will be Saxby van Niekerk! If you all turn around, Tom Fitzsaxby is sitting in the middle compartment and isn’t expecting any of this to happen.’
I just had time to duck below the train window because I truly wasn’t expecting it. I know it sounds funny, but it was as if they were talking about somebody else. How can I put it? I knew it was me alright, but it wasn’t, if you know what I mean? I wasn’t used to having people pay attention to me, except Meneer Prinsloo and Mevrou and that was always bad. So people saying good things was something I’d never had in public, and it was as if it was another me out there on the platform, and the real, private listening and looking me was sitting hearing all of this in the train compartment.
‘Show your face, Tom!’ I heard Sergeant Van Niekerk shout out. But I wasn’t game to do it. ‘Please, Tom!’ he said. So I put half of my face above the train window ledge and everyone laughed.
Then Doctor Van Heerden came into the compartment behind me. ‘C’mon, Tom, don’t be frightened, son,’ he said softly. ‘Now it’s your turn for a bit of the glory around here.’ He took my hand and we went down the corridor of the train and down the steps to the platform, and the crowd parted and I could feel hands touching me and patting me on the back and people saying, ‘Congratulations,’ and smiling at me. We climbed up the ladder and I stood between Doctor Van Heerden and Sergeant Van Niekerk, and my knees were shaking worse than the time when Meneer made me pick up the already opened scholarship letter on the floor next to his shiny brown boots.
People were cheering all over the place. Then the stationmaster blew his whistle and said the train must leave immediately or it would miss the connection at Louis Trichardt. The boere musiek band struck up and played ‘The Maori Farewell’, which later got called ‘Now is the Hour’. It had become a popular song after the New Zealand All Blacks’ last rugby tour and had been translated into Afrikaans and was now used a lot for saying goodbye when a person left on the train. It was a lovely song, and after the volk had sung it they cheered a lot and the stationmaster dropped the green flag and blew his whistle, and the engine tooted twice then went ‘choof-a-choof’ as Gawie Grobler and me began to move away from Duiwelskrans.
‘Goodbye, Tinker, see you soon,’ I whispered. I could hardly remember when my beautiful little dog hadn’t been at my side, because, you see, that wet sack floating down the creek was truly the beginning of my proper life. I said quietly, ‘Sala kahle, Tinker,’ which means in Zulu, ‘Stay well, Tinker.’ If Mattress had been alive he would tell you that it means much, much more than this when you truly love someone. The loneliness stones were already piling up and getting heavy in my chest.
Gawie Grobler began to cry, I was very tired and closed my eyes. The train wheels were saying, ‘Clickity-clack, what’s in the wet sack, clickity-clack, he’s caught his tenth rat, clickity-clack, we’re closing the case, clickity-clack, they’ve rubbed off his face.’ I didn’t know the wheels could speak.
After a while I opened my eyes and Gawie was still crying.
‘You okay, Gawie?’ I asked.
But he didn’t answer at first, then he said with a sob, ‘Ja, I’m okay, Tom.’ He hadn’t called me Voetsek.
‘I think it must be very hard to be a genius, hey?’ I said, trying to comfort him.
He looked at me and said in this small sort of voice, ‘You the genius, Tom. I’m only the Afrikaner Genius.’
‘No, I’m not!’ I replied, surprised he would say such a stupid thing.
‘Can we be friends again?’ he said hoarsely.
‘Ja, of course,’ I replied.
We shook hands.
Gawie grinned, his eyes still wet. ‘Maybe we both geniuses, hey?’
Then we laughed and laughed until our heads came off.
He pointed to me, ‘Rooinek!’
I pointed back and said, ‘Surrogaat!’
‘Voetsek!’
‘Third Class Rooster!’
‘Genius!’
‘Afrikaner Genius!’
Then, all of a sudden, at the exact same moment, we both started to blub.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Everylasting Love
NOW I SUPPOSE YOU’RE expecting a whole heap of stuff about going to a posh school. But I’ve decided against that because everyone has already read a book about going to boarding school, like the one I’ve already referred to, Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Oh, by the way, I have to correct what I said about the Bishop’s College probably being much the same as that because I was wrong. Boarding school was very good compared to Tom Brown’s story and also compared to The Boys Farm. The food was much better and you hardly ever got beaten, and then only for proper things done wrong. Even though I was the youngest, once again I discovered a surprise about myself, this was that I was tough. What wasn’t tough at The Boys Farm was tough here, I won’t say butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth, nothing like that, but when it came to defending myself I wasn’t scared, and I had a mouth that could fire verbal bullets very accurately, if it had to. Voetsek was one person, Tom Fitzsaxby was quite another.
I’m only telling you this because maybe you’ll hear me say things that I wouldn’t have said before. I can’t think of an example, you’ll just have to wait and see. The thing was that at The Boys Farm, if a guy wanted to have a go at you he
wouldn’t do it alone; the kids would work in a pack. Unless it was a Fonnie du Preez. Here at the Bishop’s College it was one on one, so you knew if you had the courage you had a good chance to defend yourself. You’d put on the gloves and go into the gym and settle the matter. Not that I was much of a boxer, but at The Boys Farm you had to do it, and so I wasn’t scared of putting on a pair of boxing gloves.
The guys at the Bishop’s College had never boxed, so even though I was smaller, on the few occasions I was required to stand my ground and fight it was only against a single opponent and I was able to give as much as I got. In life a person doesn’t mind getting a hiding fair and square because afterwards you can still walk away with your self-respect intact.
While I had always been a loner, I now had to be a different kind of loner from the one I had been on The Boys Farm where my ‘lonerness’ was caused by being a Rooinek and not an Afrikaner. At a boarding school for rich English-speaking kids there were three reasons I had to hide and be a loner. The first was that I was illegitimate, a fact I hadn’t previously known, thinking my mother had simply left me at the orphanage because she and my father couldn’t afford to have me. But two days before I left The Boys Farm, Meneer Prinsloo had called me into his office.
‘Tom, Doctor Van Heerden is writing behind my back to Pretoria about you staying with him in the school holidays. Now, Pretoria wants to know what I think because I am your surrogaat father. Without my permission, you coming back here every school holiday, you hear?’
‘Ja, Meneer,’ I muttered, looking down and shuffling my feet. The idea that I would be forced back to The Boys Farm at the end of every term filled me with horror.
‘But I’m a generous man, and I’m going to tell Pretoria it’s okay by me because you been nothing but trouble to us here.’ He picked up a sheet of paper from his desk. ‘This is a copy of your birth certificate and it says here “Born out of wedlock”, do you know what this means?’
‘Ja, Meneer.’
‘It means you a bastard,’ he said gratuitously.
If he expected me to react he had about as much chance as a snowball in hell. I was long past caring what he or Mevrou said about me, but afterwards it worried me a lot. Being an orphan with parents somewhere or even dead is different from being illegitimate, meaning that you were not only not wanted but were a mistake in the first place. You can tell a lie with a clear conscience if you’re an orphan because you don’t really know what has happened to your parents, but when you know they didn’t want you in the first place it’s a different kind of lie and one you’ve got to live with forever. So this was my first worry at the Bishop’s College, what kind of lie to tell if I was forced to explain. The second reason was because I had no parents, I had no home. The third was that I had no money.
The problem with lying about not having parents is that you can’t just say you don’t have a mother or a father, and don’t know who they are, because you have to have at least a mother and she must be somewhere. In my case, all I knew was that my mother delivered me to the orphanage and cried a lot, and then disappeared forever. If you say this then you’re telling the truth, and that points to one direction, you back to being illegitimate. The only thing that was good about The Boys Farm was that everyone was more or less in the same boat, but even then everyone wants to have someone somewhere, that’s why Gawie had to invent his uncle in Pretoria.
You can only invent one lie and the best one is that both your parents are dead and that makes you an orphan. But how did they die is always the next question. Then you’ve got to invent a whole new lie. The trick here is to invent a very simple lie, like, for instance, they died in a motorcar crash when you were still a baby and you couldn’t even remember them. That’s a safe lie and you can keep telling it, but it’s not much of a story. There you are, a baby in a basket in the back seat, and bang-smash-tinkle, it’s all over, and now all of a sudden you’re an orphan. There are no memories or past, just this black hole called coming from nowhere and being a no-one. It may sometimes work, but even nowhere has a history, and a no-one was once a someone. So people want to know who these dead people were. Where did they come from? Why no relatives? Where were they going at the time of the crash? What did your father do before he died? Where did they live? If you can’t answer these questions they’ll think you’re lying, and you just want to cover up that you’re illegitimate. So back to the drawing board you go. This time you decide to design a new and improved lie, and that’s where the trouble begins.
So here is my new-and-improved lie. Remember the waterfall Sergeant Van Niekerk took me to on the day of the grand picnic? Where when you stood in a certain position and called out, your voice kept echoing? It was the most beautiful spot I’d ever seen, and if someone had to die that was about as nice a place to die as you could think of. A great sheet of white water tumbling down into a tropical rainforest, strange and beautiful birds calling out, diamond sunlight and every day rain when the world would begin all over again. So I put this beautiful woman and handsome man at the very top of the falls. They’d left their baby in the shade of a giant tree at the bottom of the waterfall. Then they’d climbed up the cliff and undressed and stood on a rock, and kissed and then, holding hands, they’d jumped down into the waterfall and disappeared, never to be found again. A young herd boy looking after his father’s goats in the high mountains heard the echo of a baby crying, and followed the great echo to find the child lying swaddled in a blanket under the tree. His name was Mokiti Malokoane, but he also had a white man’s name, Joe Louis, and was the son of a mighty chief named Mattress Malokoane who sat under a marula tree all day and drank kaffir beer, and was terribly wise and greatly respected for his platform feet. The question of my name was easily enough solved because my parents had written a message across my chest and stomach in beautiful copperplate handwriting:
Tom Fitzsaxby,
the legitimate son of
Rosemarie and John Fitzsaxby
The woman’s name came from Marie smelling of roses and the man’s name was the English version of Jan, which was Sergeant Van Niekerk’s Christian name. I decided to always end the story by saying, ‘Now the truly amazing thing is that you can search every phone book in every town and city in South Africa and you won’t find a single Fitzsaxby.’ Whether this was true or not I was unable to prove, but Miss Phillips had once said that because it was such an unusual surname she’d looked through the Johannesburg phone directory and found no Fitzsaxby, so I reckoned I was pretty safe.
In reviewing my new-and-improved lie I discovered one rather sad fact. I was unable to refer to my erstwhile parents as young or beautiful and handsome or even that they’d kissed and held hands as they jumped. If they were destined to disappear forever and nobody had seen them arrive at the great waterfall, how would I have known they loved each other and were young, beautiful and handsome? The key to the new-and-improved lie was that I told it very sparingly, and only after a great deal of prompting. This was to give the impression that I was myself reluctant to believe it. If having heard the story someone was to say, ‘Is that really true, Tom?’ I could shrug my shoulders and answer, ‘How can I possibly know? But all I can say is that I’ve been taken to the spot where it was supposed to have happened and it is exactly the way it was described to me. The echo is there, the big tree is there, the waterfall is there and the big rock they’re supposed to have jumped from is there.’
Now my third problem was money. Everyone had pocket money and I had none. Not a single penny. I’m sure if there hadn’t been the excitement of the birth and the event at the railway station that Doctor Van Heerden or Sergeant Van Niekerk would have given me maybe five shillings, but in all the gerfuffle they didn’t remember. The guys would go to the tuckshop and buy a cream bun or a Cornish pastie and a Pepsi-Cola, and if you were in a group you couldn’t do the same. They were all rich kids, and often one would offer to buy me a bun or a Pepsi, but, of course, you couldn’t accept because you couldn’t recipr
ocate. So you’d always just say, ‘No, thanks, I’m not hungry,’ or something dumb like that. Of course, everybody knows you don’t have those nice-tasting things because you’re hungry. So you could never hang around with a bunch of guys after school because all roads led to the tuckshop.
Maybe all of this sounds like a little thing, but being illegitimate isn’t, and a nobody with no money in a school made up of kids with rich parents who knew exactly who they were and had the money to prove it was a difficult situation. If I was going to be forced into being a loner then I had to decide what kind of loner I wanted to be. In my experience there are only two places to hide if you’re a ‘nobody’ and a forced-to-be loner, either at the back of or at the front of life. At the back is to be a nothing person, someone who is present but seldom noticed, whose opinion is never sought or given, and who is the last to be picked for anything. Until Miss Phillips came into my life and, of course, with the exception of Mattress, this was what I had been at The Boys Farm. Hiding at the back of life wasn’t a very successful method of living, and contained a fair amount of unhappiness, but it had nevertheless allowed me to survive reasonably intact in an institution from which most kids emerged damaged.
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