Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  During my last year at school he would often neglect taking his medication for diabetes whereupon his blood sugar level would became too high and he’d become tired and have trouble focusing, which in his particular vocation probably didn’t matter too much, but he often ended up pissing himself, which only added to his generally disgusting appearance and smell. On my instructions to Stompie, the dozen Pepsi-Colas a day he consumed had been reduced to six, alternating with water, but without his diabetic medicine this didn’t help him that much. Now that I was a law student at Wits University I had time to see that he took his medicine orally every day, but it was fast becoming apparent that Frikkie was coming to the end of his useful life as a mendicant. I finally persuaded him to come and live with me in the Hillbrow flat.

  Before you start thinking how generous of me to take him in, let me put things straight. In four years of school holidays I’d never managed to get the entire story of the murder of Mattress as well as the story of the great railway culvert explosion from him. It wasn’t that Frikkie was particularly evasive, but simply that he was never sufficiently sober for long enough when I was with him to write it all down. He’d either be outside Park Station begging, including the weekends, or we’d be having dinner, a tedious and laborious process I’ve previously described. After dinner he’d smoke a toke and the marijuana combined with a bottle of brandy meant he was soon comatose or, to be more precise, completely blotto. It must be remembered that Frikkie was in constant pain and so it was difficult to become impatient with him.

  Over four years I had collected notes on roughly what had taken place on the night of the murder, but I needed a lot more detail, every detail if I could possibly get them. The tiniest, I told myself, might end up being the most important. Now time was running out, he’d survived the winter Professor Mustafa said he couldn’t, but he most certainly wouldn’t survive another one living rough. It was approaching April and the high veld nights were closing in, and the promise of winter to come was heralded by a chilly evening breeze that whipped across the park soon after sunset. Increasingly, I was beginning to panic, thinking that Frikkie might die before I had a complete set of notes.

  If this sounds callous I don’t suppose I can disagree, but the task I had set myself wasn’t an easy one. Cleaning Frikkie up in the first place wasn’t simple. Alcoholics who sleep rough suffer in the main from three antisocial maladies: lice, bedbugs and scabies. Again with Professor Mustafa’s help I obtained a large container of Ascabiol, which he referred to as ‘Benzyl Benzoate’.

  ‘Shave his head, armpits and pubic hair, then rub this stuff all over his body, except on his head because it will damage his eyes . . . eye,’ he corrected. ‘Leave it on overnight, Tom, then wash it off in the morning, give him a bath if you can. Repeat for three days.’

  It all sounded pretty matter-of-fact, but it wasn’t easy, Frikkie Botha was still a Boer and therefore a proud man, and I know he suffered terrible humiliation. I confess it wasn’t easy for me either. Seeing him sitting huddled in Smelly Jelly’s red dressing-gown, rocking backwards and forwards with his thumb in the contorted little hole that was supposed to be his mouth was terribly distressing. His mutilated face was incapable of an expression beyond the horror permanently affixed to what were once its features, but you just knew he was thoroughly miserable and decidedly pissed off with me. Cleanliness may well be next to godliness, but for Frikkie Botha achieving it proved to be pure and utter hell.

  But I must say, Frikkie, bathed and with a fresh set of clothes every day, was now the cleanest and the un-itchiest he’d been for several years. I’d bought an apron made from aeroplane cloth to catch the food he spilled, and with a three-times-a-week scrubbing in the bathtub, in the cleanliness stakes anyway things were definitely looking up. It’s a curious thing, but people who go unwashed for months will do almost anything to avoid water. The smell of soap, on the first two occasions I bathed Frikkie, caused him to vomit into his bathwater. At first, the process of bathing him in Smelly Jelly’s ancient bathtub would cause his good eye to weep real tears, and the pathetic glottal sounds that emerged from his useless vocal cords made me feel like the biggest bastard ever.

  However, Tinky took to the new clean regime very well. A regular wash with an application of flea powder and a proper diet and his coat began to improve no end, and unlike his master I was sure he felt grateful for these changes in his personal circumstances. Doubling around with one foot in the air nipping at fleabites all day must have been a miserable existence. I have to add that I was very fond of him and he was quick to respond to affection. If you ever want a small dog you’d be hard-pressed to go beyond a fox terrier.

  The sale of the three Steinway Baby Grands meant I had more than sufficient money to keep us both and I tried again without success to discourage Frikkie from working. He’d written me a pleading note: Showbiz is my lewe, sonder dit is ek ‘n dooie man. Showbiz is my life, without it I am a dead man. Frikkie had never accepted that he was a beggar but always saw himself as a performer. I was finally forced to concede that leaving him incarcerated in the dark little flat wasn’t an option and that he’d die all the sooner left alone all day. Neither he nor Tinky would be able to tolerate the confinement. Both were creatures of the street, accustomed to living their lives on a busy city pavement.

  The problem was that Hillbrow was a mile-and-a-half from Park Station, and Frikkie’s heart condition coupled with his diabetes made walking all that way quite impossible and the tram wouldn’t allow pets on board. With the cooperation of Professor Mustafa, I managed to obtain a second-hand wheelchair from the hospital workshop for nix and sixpence (almost nothing). The workshop foreman reinforced it wherever he could, which added a fair bit of weight but made it ideal for street work rather than the polished lino hospital corridors for which it was originally constructed.

  Frikkie thought it was magic, a theatrical prop that added an extra dimension to his act. It was as if an old, tired vaudeville warm-up actor found himself togged out in a new top hat, starched shirt, bow tie, dancing taps and tails. The wheelchair gave him a legitimacy and, in his eye, new respectability. It was almost as if his act, cleaned up and rewritten, had finally made it onto Broadway. But the funny thing was that the freshly laundered Frikkie in his wheelchair evoked far less pity or curiosity, and made less money than the filthy smelly version sitting on an old wooden crate under a dirty hood. I guess the public prefers its freaks to be thoroughly wretched.

  Pushing him to Park Station in the morning was easy enough, the mile-and-a-half from Hillbrow was virtually all the way downhill. Taking him home at night was a different matter and improved my fitness no end, but the real problem became getting him up to the third floor. I solved this by paying the janitor, a solidly built African named Six-gun, five shillings a week to piggyback Frikkie up the stairs, while I stored the wheelchair in the basement. Six-gun reversed the process each morning. It was good pay for Six-gun, but worth every penny. Frankly, I don’t know what I would have done without him and towards the end the big African claimed his back was giving him trouble, and demanded and got seven and sixpence. It was daylight robbery, only slightly less than his weekly salary as janitor, but I had no choice.

  I’d moved Frikkie into the little bedroom and bought a second-hand divan for the sitting room that served as the lounge with a blue chenille cover in the daytime and as my bed at night. I also got one of those enamel bedpans and another spouted one for pissing into from the hospital because Frikkie, in a semi-comatose state, wasn’t capable of getting out of bed at night and finding the bathroom. You don’t think of these things when a person lives in the open. There was a public toilet next to the art gallery the brotherhood would use at night and at the steam pipes the guys just moved slightly away from the sleeping men and pissed on the pipes. The hot piss turning to steam as it hit the pipes created an unpleasant effluvium, but on a freezing night the cold bit so hard into your nostrils that it neutralised most of the stink.

&nbs
p; What I hadn’t reckoned on was Tinky, who like Tinker had never lived indoors, and had no idea of toilet-training and, at first, got very upset being restrained and unable to be outdoors at night. But that’s the thing with a fox terrier, they never stop learning. After a few weeks with newspaper spread everywhere he might think to do his business, he finally got the idea and learned to go out last thing at night and first thing in the morning. He now had his own basket with an old blanket, and eventually seemed happy enough, though sometimes on a cold winter’s night he’d wake me up whimpering with a paw resting on my arm and I’d haul him into bed with me for a bit of a snuggle.

  I wish I could say the same thing about Frikkie, who proved impossible to bed-train. He was an alcoholic and wasn’t about to attend Alcoholics Anonymous. He still needed his dagga and brandy at night, and he’d often mess his bed in his sleep or his casual aim into the spout of the urine jug would, more often than not, miss the mark. I had a rubber mat under his sheets to protect the mattress and kept three sets of sheets for him, one always at the local Spotless laundrette, with his blankets making the same journey every Saturday morning. I’d pay Hettie, the coloured woman at the laundry, a shilling extra for a scrubbing brush and the loan of a bar of Blue Velvet soap. This allowed me to use her large washtub to remove the crud off Frikkie’s blankets before she’d let me consign them to one of the semi-industrial washing machines. I can tell you there were times when a person felt pretty desperate, but what kept me going was that slowly but surely I was getting the information I wanted.

  I wouldn’t allow Frikkie his smoke and brandy until we’d completed half an hour of what I suppose can only be termed interrogation. I know he grew to hate it because I’d constantly cross-reference the stuff he wrote to make sure he wasn’t inventing any of the facts. I was aware that alcoholics often develop delusional disorders and become paranoid, so I had to be careful. I guess I was pretty remorseless, and in retrospect it must have seemed cruel, but it worked. Despite the alcohol and the marijuana his recall was amazing, facts he’d written months and even a couple of years previously would be repeated unchanged on paper. From the very beginning I dated the spiral-pad notes and kept them together with my own. Frikkie may have been uneducated but he was a country boy and he’d learned early in life how to listen and to acutely observe his surroundings. Besides, righteous hate and the desire for revenge becomes the best way to stimulate and to keep the memory sharp. Invariably his last written sentence would be, Those bastards we’ll get them hey. Frikkie had no idea of punctuation or exclamation marks and often even saved himself the trouble of a full stop. Curiously he didn’t mind photographs being taken of his face, in fact if a tourist wanted to do so he charged an extra shilling. I borrowed a camera from Bobby Black and took a series of pictures of Frikkie from every possible angle, although I wasn’t quite sure why I wanted them. Certainly not for vicarious reasons, the living, breathing Frikkie was a constant reminder of the tragedy of his broken body and his pathetic life. I simply filed them with the rest of the notes.

  Mixed into all of this was life as a first-year student, which I found absorbing, and I loved the study of law. For the first time I realised that the big red book I’d stolen from under Doctor Van Heerden’s house, and which I’d long since completely memorised, had served to train my mind. The learning of torts and the more detailed aspects of law came easily to me, whereas they seemed to be anathema to the other students. This ability to commit stuff to memory was probably a good thing. I was kept very busy caring for Frikkie, working at Polliack’s during the varsity vacations and on Saturday mornings, and checking every Saturday afternoon after work on the brotherhood to see who among them needed emergency treatment. So I had very little time to study and my assignments were almost always late. My law professor called me in. ‘Tom, you have the ability to win the university medal when you graduate in law if you apply yourself,’ he said. Then, giving me a meaningful look, he added, ‘May I suggest a little more application and a little less play, eh, young man?’

  Then the ‘winter of one too many’ finally arrived, and on the evening of 10 May 1952 Frikkie died in the bathtub while I was soaping his back with a flannel. He simply jerked once and his body slumped forward so that I reached out and grabbed his arm. ‘Wees kalm, ou maat. Be calm, old mate.’ I called. But his head lolled awkwardly and his body became a sudden dead weight, and I then realised his breathing had stopped and moments later he evacuated in the bathwater. The farmer, boxer, resistance fighter, accident victim, showbiz personality, park and steam-pipe derelict was finally dead, his suffering over. Only moments later Tinky started scratching frantically at the closed bathroom door and commenced to howl his dear little heart out.

  I’d be lying if I said I missed Frikkie Botha. But I was grateful to him for three things: a complete set of notes on how Mattress was murdered; another of the incident where he lost his face at the railway culvert; and finally, the custody of the nicest little dog after Tinker that you could possibly imagine.

  The year 1952 proved to be a very good year for me. I was seventeen years old but my life to this point hadn’t exactly been a load of fun. I’d learned a fair bit about the process of staying alive in a hostile world, but it had been all work and very little play, and I suspect Tom was in danger of becoming a very dull boy. Even though I was known at Polliack’s for my enthusiasm and easy laughter, you can fake life and happiness for just so long before the process starts getting too difficult. I’d never been drunk or smoked a cigarette and, most of all, never kissed a girl, much less fondled, as almost every other young male my age claimed to have done, a set of firm and luscious breasts with nipples pointing to the moon.

  The university campus was full of young female students, many of them gorgeous enough to render one trembling at the knees, while the basement at Polliack’s was a veritable Mecca for pretty girls. More than once I’d received the ‘big eyes’, especially when it was followed by an elaborate compliment about my musical knowledge. I’d know in my pounding heart that this was a thinly disguised invitation to take the next step and to ask them out. Furthermore, the news of the Steinway triumph had swept through the company and several of the young women who worked in the accounts departments paid a visit to the basement. They always lingered much longer than was necessary to enquire about a pop song currently climbing up the charts on Springbok radio.

  Bobby Black would tease me and say things like, ‘Tom, you’ve got more young crumpet walking into your life than Frank Sinatra has bobby-soxers at his concerts!’ And Graham would raise one eyebrow, prop, pout and make remarks such as, ‘My dear, if you wished to do so, you could get laid more often than the centre table at the Carlton Grill.’ They were teasing me, of course. In those days before the pill, getting a nice girl to part with her knickers was a very difficult process, even for the Casanovas of this world. While my imagination ran to lurid detail, in reality my wildest hope extended to a chaste kiss on the lips (never mind tongues becoming involved), and a bit of a fumble at the front of a straining sweater.

  Alas, I had no idea how to behave in front of a girl or how to go about achieving this inept ambition. I knew that my easy confidence, chatty demeanour and lyric patter would disappear in a puff of smoke the moment I stepped out of the Polliack’s basement. The instant I hit the pavement I felt certain I would turn into a mumbling, clumsy oaf. While my fantasy life appeared in panoramic Technicolor, my sexual reality was a black-and-white, faded, cracked-and-curled-up-at-the-corners box-brownie snapshot. The memory of a cheek once briefly kissed, its softness never quite forgotten.

  Then all of a sudden, out of a clear and wholly translucent blue sky, La Pirouette came into my life. Metaphorically speaking, one moment I’d been trundling along in a squeaky pedal car and the next I was behind the wheel of a Formula One Jaguar racing at Le Mans.

  It all happened when old Mr Polliack had his annual garden party at his mansion in one of the very posh outlying suburbs. It was a very important affa
ir on the musical calendar of Johannesburg and involved a marquee and French champagne by the silver bucket-load dispensed by an army of waiters in white uniforms and cotton gloves to match. The food was catered for by the one and only terribly famous Carlton Grill with practically every delicacy known to man laid out on a table in the marquee the length of a cricket pitch. An outdoor stage and dance floor featured bands representing almost every aspect of music, except boere musiek, as well as the top musicians and singers in the country. Termed ‘Polliack’s Annual Musicians’ Garden Party’ on the invitations, it was intended to take place during a Saturday afternoon but was habitually known to continue until the early hours of the following morning.

  While no expense was spared, this wasn’t a stuffed-shirt affair with the usual compulsory high-ups such as the mayor in attendance, but was instead strictly a party for musicians. Even so, it was considered a most prestigious event and an invitation to attend was regarded as a badge of honour and a sign that you were considered to be among the cognoscenti in your profession. A fact, according to Bobby Black, that in no way prevented a great many of the participants from behaving very badly, which, he pointed out, was considered almost compulsory.

  The other aspect for which the garden party was evidently famous was the calibre of the females who attended with their invited male partners, or the glamorous singers who were there in their own right. ‘Let me assure you, Tom, this is a party-and-a-half, man!’ Bobby would say to me. ‘When it starts to get dark you begin to hear the moaning taking place in the bushes. If you walk into the maze on the third lawn, ooh-la-la! You better be wearing dark glasses, man! Behind the hedges and the swimming pool cabana, you wouldn’t believe what’s going on.’ He’d say all this in a conspiratorial voice, almost reduced to a whisper. And, of course, I lapped it all up, my febrile imagination recreating this modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah taking place in Mr Polliack’s manicured garden. I tried to isolate the goings-on behind the neatly clipped hedges, in the cabana and within the dark recesses of the exotic maze on the number three lawn, creating for each location a new and increasingly erotic fantasy.