Coconut

by Kopano Matlwa

  I kind of feel sorry for Ben though, because they live real far and he has to wake up extra early to get to school and stuff, but I guess it’s his fault because there are a million schools in the world and he went and chose the furthest one. I’m lucky because I live in Lil’ Valley Country Estate so if I feel like it I can even ride my bike to school. Maybe I’ll ask for a new bike for my birthday and if I get one I won’t scratch it and stuff because it will be all new and I won’t even fall as much because I am now steady.”

  I was riding high on pink and purple plastic horses, going up and down and up and down and round and round and round and round on the merry-go-round of dreams and children’s desires.

  “Hello, my name is Ofilwe Tlou and I am eight years old. I have a Mama and a Daddy and a big brother and an Old Virginia and we all live in a house in Little Valley Country Estate. My Daddy makes computers and stuff and my Mama is a nurse and makes sick people better at this one hospital. My brother’s name is Tshepo and he goes to another school for only boys. I don’t go to his school because I’m not allowed to because they don’t want girls there. When I told my brother that it hurts my feelings that his school doesn’t like me and I never even did anything ugly, he said that I shouldn’t be sad and that he’d tell his teacher that their rules are dumb and that maybe they’ll change the rules after he tells his teacher but that even if they don’t change their rules, he’ll still be my friend anyway.

  My brother is my favouritest friend because he’s nice to me and he makes me laugh and stuff and he saves me all the red wine-gums and he plays with me everyday and he helps me with my homework and stuff and he chases away all the baddies out of my room at night and he tells me all his stories, even the secret ones and he reads me all his funny books and all sorts of other stuff. Oh, and I have a budgie called Yellow. That’s all.”

  I just sit here. In this empty room. In an empty house. My head is full. My heart burst a long time ago. When I watch, when I listen, when I read, I must hold back. I cannot fall too deeply, believe too strongly or hold on too tightly to anything. Because how can I trust you – you mother, you father, you preacher, you teacher, you friend – when everything around me is a lie and all mercilessly trick me. I hate this cynicism that seeps through my veins. My mind is tired of reading through that barbed wire.

  Except for Old Virginia’s humming that comes from the laundry room outside, the world is silent. It is as if they are waiting for a response. A response from whom? I do not know. I have nothing to say.

  No toddlers with snotty noses and grubby hands play in the streets in Little Valley Country Estate. Groups of teenage girls in bright T-shirts, old torn jeans and peak caps do not sit on the front lawn pointing and gossiping about the guys that walk past the gates of their homes. Older sisters do not play the wailese loud, so that those who know the tune can sing along as each mops, dusts and sweeps their homes clean. In Little Valley Country Estate the neighbours are the cars you see parked in their driveways and the children are the tennis balls that fly over the wall and into your pool.

  Here at home, Tshepo was my only company and I his. Our motto was “Only Boring People Get Bored” and we swore to live each day by it. So as to prove that we were true to our word and that we were in no way boring people, each non-school day was a great adventure. We would make our own overalls by painting Daddy’s large vests blue with the fabric paints that the previous owner left behind. We would collect knives, forks, sticks, screwdrivers and other such objects that resembled tools and go out and assist the builders where new houses were being developed. We would make plastic hand-gloves, and search in the large dustbins at the back of the house for chicken bones that would later be used for crab fishing. We would record all the large reference books, business handbooks and manuals in Daddy’s study in Tshepo’s red exercise book and then arrange them in alphabetical order and create library cards for each so that we could monitor their usage. Tshepo was my best friend and I his.

  I now wander around the house aimlessly, Tshepo has again vaporised. I cannot think of anything worthwhile I have to do. Although tomorrow is a school day, I have no schoolwork I need to prepare. In fact, I think I am exactly a term ahead of the syllabus. You see, with all the hype around the matric year – that it is the most taxing, the most consequential and a time when you must prove your ability so as to secure yourself a position in a first-class tertiary institution – I had thought it wise to start preparing for the great challenge as early as my grade eleven year. It turns out that all the hype was just exactly that: hype. Using Tshepo’s old textbooks, I cruised through the first chapters and found that by Christmas Eve I had already covered half of the year’s content before the year even began.

  I now walk up to my room. When I get there I will work through past matric examination papers. From fear of completing the entire syllabus and having nothing to do for the rest of the year (and of lack of anything better to do), I had spent the rest of the December vacation working on some previous matric examination papers Tshepo had left in the newspaper room. I loved it. And when those were through, Daddy was only thrilled to buy me a book of past matric examination papers that dated as far back as 1995! The thought that the answers to every question, no matter how challenging, were there at the back of the book in the Answers section was comforting and therapeutic. It was, and I suppose still is, the only thing that is certain in my life. Those sums are the only thing that makes perfect sense. I know that if I ever make a mistake, am ever stuck, unsure of the value of x, find that my books do not balance or that I cannot remember the name of the muscle that raises the upper eyelid, the solution will be there, a few pages away, and then everything will be right again.

  I abhor my bedroom. It is a creamy-pink room with a four-poster bed placed in the centre that makes me think of little bald girls dying of cancer. It is a sombre room.

  When I was a little younger, a lot more foolish, but nevertheless happier than I am now, I covered my bedroom wall with posters of people I thought were the greatest breathing beings of our time. I remember spending hours one Saturday afternoon, carefully sticking the magazine cut-outs up, mindful to first stick sticky-tape on the back of the silky pages, so that the Prestik would not tear them up if they were ever removed. Exhausted, I lay on my back, admiring the walls, proud of my efforts. Tshepo walked in a little while later, probably wondering where I had disappeared to. I watched his eyes look around; I was excited because I knew I had done a good job. “Take them down,” Tshepo said.

  “What?” I asked, irritated at Tshepo’s irrationality. Did he not see how much work I had put into this? All he could think about was the expensive paint on the walls.

  “Take them down, Ofilwe.”

  “But Tshepo, look how nice it looks. I promise they won’t make the paint peel off. I won’t ever move them around.” Yeah right, I thought to myself. I’ll move them around if I want to. I didn’t think he was serious; besides, who was Tshepo to tell me what to do?

  The rest that followed was a jumble. A jumble I can barely remember, except for the word ‘white’. White. White. White. There was not a single face of colour on the wall. I had not noticed. Honest. It was only after he pointed it out that I saw it too. I mean, why on earth would I do something like that intentionally? What did it matter anyway? It was purely a coincidence; perhaps there were no black faces I liked in the magazines I cut out from. “None at all?” I looked around once more and then at Tshepo. In his eyes I saw what was only to hit me many years from then. I think it was on that day that Tshepo saw me for what I was. I wish I had then too; maybe things would have worked out differently.

  In every classroom children are dying. It is a parasitic disease, seizing the mind for its own usage. Using the mind for its own survival. So that it might grow, divide, multiply and infect others. Burnt sienna washing out. DNA coding for white greed, blond vanity and blue-eyed malevolence. IsiZulu forgotten. Tshivenda a distant memory.

  “You will find, Ofilwe, th
at the people you strive so hard to be like will one day reject you because as much as you may pretend, you are not one of their own. Then you will turn back, but there too you will find no acceptance, for those you once rejected will no longer recognise the thing you have become. So far, too far to return. So much, too much you have changed. Stuck between two worlds, shunned by both.”

  I just sit here. I’m done. I am done with doing calculations. I am through with working out vectors. For now it is no longer a goal of mine to find answers. It is what it is. Why try and understand it? The day is almost done. If I sleep now, the new day will come sooner, with its own tasks and obligations, and today will be forgotten.

  Part Two

  “Promise to keep a secret?”

  “What kind of secret?”

  “A bad secret.”

  “Dark?”

  “Black.”

  I watch my clock radio flicker to life. The blinking of the electronic red numerals hurts my eyes, but I squint hard to stop them from closing. The pain will harden them and make them stronger. The blinking is followed by DJ Tinky’s husky voice, which enters the early morning stillness like a wisp of smoke. I quickly bury the clock radio under the Lentso Communications sweater I now call my pillow and find the ‘off’ knob, groping with my sleepy fingers in the darkness. Uncle stirs in the bed next to me. I shut my eyes tight and hold my breath and focus on making my body completely lifeless. I really need to figure out how to get this thing to buzz without switching on the music. I do not want to have to deal with Uncle so early in the morning. Uncle’s breathing slows down and soon he is blowing trumpets through his nose again and so I know it is safe to get up. He is fast asleep.

  “Oh, I am fortune’s fool!” Uncle would begin, whimpering.

  “Yes, Uncle,” I would sigh. No, Uncle, I would think. Not again, not now, please. I had homework to do. Homework I hated, but homework I had to do.

  “I have lost all my mirth, the earth seems sterile.”

  “Yes, Uncle,” I would say again, for that was all that was expected from me, the fifteen-year-old niece, during these laments when Uncle would spew out pieces of Shakespeare as if he thought them up himself whilst lost in the abyss of his sorry existence.

  “I am dying, Fikile, dying,” he would wail, clumsily throwing himself onto the poor old couch and then, as if suddenly becoming aware of the volume of his voice, begin softly whimpering again.

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “When beggars die, there are no comets seen,” he would sob, pulling from his pocket his crumpled handkerchief along with a couple of five-cent pieces that would clink noisily to the ground.

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “Why me?” he would cry. And I would cry out the same in my head. Why me? Why do I have to listen to Uncle blubber and snivel and sob out garbage every day of my life?

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “I am a godly man, Fikile.”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “I am an honest man, Fikile.”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “A righteous man, Fikile.”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “That it should come to this?”

  “Yes, Uncle”

  “I struggle each day to keep a free and open nature.”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “The world is grown so bad that wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch.”

  At this point, of course, I had long stopped listening and was writing out my corrections at the back of my test book. I had listened with heartfelt concern the first time he’d come home crying (this was years ago) and taken earnest notice the second time, but by the third or fourth time I realised it made no difference whether I listened or not. He was speaking to himself, and all he wanted me to say was “Yes, Uncle.”

  “They use me, Fikile.”

  So what if they used him? He had messed up his own life. He had messed up all the grand opportunities he once had to be something and now some kind white people had been nice enough to give him a job and he had the audacity to complain about it. It didn’t matter what the job involved, it wasn’t like he was killing people or anything. I had problems of my own. I deplored school and was trying my best to stay out of trouble by doing my corrections like Mrs. Ralefetha had said, but it was difficult to concentrate with the intermittent “Yes, Uncle,” I had to say.

  “I mind my own business, Fikile.”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “I sit in my chair at the security desk and read my books and mind my own business.”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “I love my books. You know I love my books?”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “My Hamlet, my kings – Richard and Lear – my Julius Caesar, my Antony and Cleopatra, my beautiful but yet so tragic Romeo and Juliet.”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “Ah, but some rise by sin and some by virtue fall.”

  “Yes, Uncle.” And there he’d go again, weeping disgracefully.

  “Oh Fikile, when Mr Dix approached me at my humble security desk and inquired about the books I read, I was only honoured to share with him the might, the mastery and supremacy that lay within those pages.”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “But he is mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love or a whore’s oath. I was a fool.”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “Was I a fool, Fikile?”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “Oh!” he would wail, “You are right, I am a fool!”

  And then I, startled out of my corrections and back into the sorry reality of the present, would realise that was one of those moments when I was supposed to say “No, Uncle” instead of “Yes, Uncle.” But there were few moments like those, so I paid them no mind, except to quickly rectify things with a “No, Uncle.” Then he would cease wailing and get back to his whining, which was only slightly less aggravating.

  “No, Uncle.”

  “No, you are right, Fikile, I was a fool. I should have known those heavy white men in their dry-cleaned suits were not interested in my sonnets but in my black skin.”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “But how was I to know, Fikile? How was I to know?” he would ask, his eyes fast filling to the brim, pleading. Such a twerp, I thought. Such a sorry, pathetic, little twerp.

  “Oh, what men dare do! What men may do! What men daily do, not knowing what they do!”

  “Yes, Uncle.” I loathed this man.

  “What a piece of work man is.” He loved this, did Uncle. He loved the backstroke and freestyle in his private soup of sorrow.

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “It is a curse, Fikile, to have a heart as big as mine.”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “Today we went to Hyde Park, to the offices of Borman-Nkosinathi. Tall buildings, glass doors.”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “They dressed me up in a brown suit with yellow lines. I chuckled to myself as I put it on in our security officer’s box. Me, in a brown suit with yellow lines, Fikile! I looked like a real Sexwale!”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “But all that glitters is not gold,” he whispered, his thick lower lip trembling.