black mamba
TOMTOM IS MY OLD, moth-eaten horse. Lucky Strike found him wandering in the hills and caught him for me. Tomtom loves to chew grannysmith apples out of my hand with his lazy, tea-coloured teeth. Lucky Strike taught me to ride him bareback and I ride old Tomtom everywhere: down to the likkewaan river and to the polo club. Sometimes I ride to the Karkloof falls, where sad men jump. Tomtom coolly grazes the wet grass at the edge. He is not scared. Just mambas and monkeys spook him.
I gaze down as the mist kisses my face and wonder how sad you have to be to jump:
down down down
dead.
Lucky Strike told me Chaka used to fling his wives down from Chaka’s Rock.
In my dreams sharks tug unwanted wives off the rocks. Blood sifts into the water, like tea seeping from a tea-bag.
On the veranda in the evenings, I love to hear the sound of Tomtom snorting and shuffling to and fro. It is good to know he is out there, just beyond the glow of the gas lamp.
When the vervet monkeys come down from the hills Tomtom whinnies and paws the dust. The monkeys dart into the mealie field next to Tomtom’s paddock to steal mealie cobs. Tomtom gallops up and down along the fence. The monkeys pick a cob and stick it under one arm and then pick another and try to stick it under, but the first cob drops out. So they pick another and drop another, until my father runs down, swinging the gas lamp, yelling voetsak voetsak.
Dingaan and Dingo are scared of the monkeys. They do not run down to the mealie field, but bark from the veranda. The cob-robbers voetsak, a furry flurry, scattering mealies for Lucky Strike to gather and cook for supper tomorrow.
For a long time after the monkeys voetsak, Tomtom is restless.
My mother comes into the kitchen while Lucky Strike cooks mealie cobs.
– Lucky, she teases, you shouldn’t run around with all the young Zulu girls.
Lucky Strike laughs and shakes his head.
– Aai aai, Madam.
– How will you fork out lobola cows for them all?
– Aai aai, Madam, he laughs.
He dunks his head into a deep enamel pot.
I love it when my mother comes into the kitchen to tease Lucky Strike, for it puts him in a good mood and he melts Peel’s honey in our milk. I wonder where Lucky Strike and all the young Zulu girls run around to. No one tells me. It seems to me that all the world is playing hide-and-seek.
Tomtom lies down, blowing hot wind through his nostrils. He will not get to his feet. I run up to the house for a grannysmith apple and tell Lucky Strike that Tomtom is sick.
– Tomtom is old, young baas. Maybe it is his time, says Lucky Strike, handing me an apple.
The apple slips from Tomtom’s foamy lips. His eyes stare at me with a flicker of the wild fear he used to have in his eyes when there was a mamba in the grass. I cry into his mane. His wheezing breath tells me Lucky Strike is right. It is Tomtom’s time. There is no dodging this black mamba of death.
When my father comes home he tells me to stay on the veranda. He walks down to Tomtom, his shotgun in hand.
I see him pat Tomtom’s head and then stand to load the barrel. I feel Lucky Strike’s hand on my shoulder. I see Tomtom’s head jolt, just before the shot cracks in my ears. I cry, closing one hand on Grandpa Barter’s knife in my pocket and clench the other so my nails dig into my palm.
– I am sorry, young baas, mumbles Lucky Strike.
My father walks back to me. I sense Lucky Strike drift into the shadows of the house. My father ruffles my hair.
– Hey Gecko, he says to me, life is hard. Sometimes you have to do things you’d rather not.
My father comes home with a stray tiger-lily cat to cheer me up after Tomtom is fed to the lions in the zoo. I call her Lalapanzi, Zulu for lie down. She dozes in the sun on the roof of the Chev, on the zinc roof of Beauty’s rondavel, or on the firebox. Out of reach of Dingaan and Dingo.
She peels herself out of shadows to stalk the shifting sun. In the cool of dusk you may see her weave through hibiscus after fieldmice and rats. She loves to cart her catch into the house in her teeth, drop it and hunt it again out of dark corners. In the end, she coolly cages it in her claws and squeezes until the flicking tail gives up flicking. Then Lalapanzi scatters bones and fur for Beauty to pick up.
At night I hear a scratching coming from the bathroom because Lalapanzi uses the tub as a larder to store fresh victims. They run round and round as if they are about to be sucked down the plughole. My father lets Lalapanzi keep the rats. Fieldmice and moles he rescues from the tub with his bare hands. He pinches them behind the head and carries them down to the hibiscus jungle. Lalapanzi mews at his heels, her tail jerking with the unfairness of it.
My father is never scared. He picks up cold frogs and fuzzy, lizard-eating spiders and flicks them out the window as coolly as if they were jacaranda pods. It is only when he finds a black mamba in the garage that he sweeps it into an old gumboot, and shoots the boot full of birdshot.
blood
MY MOTHER JOGS ZANE and me out of our beds. We follow her gas lamp out into the dark of the hoojoo owl, of the slithery mamba and the slinky rat. I pinch the hem of my mother’s skirt. Out in the yard, we skip over the wire of the rabbit hutch. My mother tips up the Indian teabox. A white mother rabbit blinks red eyes at us. Zane and I gape gog-eyed as sopping, bald babies plop out of her into a lamplit world. For a moment they lie stunned in the mother’s blood and juice, then they nose blindly after milk.
– Isn’t birth beautiful? my mother purrs.
For me there is nothing beautiful in the bloody, pink, blind things. But I know I will love to hold them against my cheek when they get fur, so I nod. My mother smiles at me and I feel it is worth the lie.
Few of the babies will survive. A hawk will swoop down on them, or a mamba wiggle through the wire, or
– Sometimes the mother rabbit chews up her babies if she smells the human smell of your hands on them, whispers my mother.
It is cruel of the mother to kill her babies just because she smells us on them. I stare at her red eyes, at her wiggling, split-skin nose, and I want to hurt her.
The scratching comes to me from the bathroom. My heart drumming, I patter on bare feet through the dark. I flick the switch and the light-bulb floods yellow into the tub. Scared, button eyes look up at me out of a ball of pulsing rabbit fluff.
Frogs squeeze through the crack under the front door and go plop plop plop through the murky house. I lie dead still, thinking it may be the footfalls of the tokoloshe, the red-eyed, mischievous hobgoblin of the night, who uses the magic stone in his hand to witch himself into a smoky ghost, to seep through cracks. I hear the blood-fizzing yowl of a pig on the wind and the haunting uhoo uhoo of the hoojoo owl. The gnarled old lemon tree outside our window taps against the pane as if it wants to flee the dark.
Zane sleeps like a dog through the farty plop of the frogs, through pig yowls and owl howls, through the tapping of the lemon tree. I run to his bed and pinch his dummy out of his mouth. My mother finds me like that at sunrise, when the nkankaan goes ha ha haaa. She never says a thing about a boy of seven with a dummy in his gob. Maybe she knows how scary everyday things like pigs and lemon trees can be at night.
My mother senses things, somehow.
I am with my mother in OK Bazaars. I see a rag doll with a flowery pink dress and yellow wool for hair. I stare at the beautiful doll but I know boys are not free to play with dolls. Boys kill birds and play with bows and arrows and cricket bats and rugby balls. Boys don’t fiddle with flowery things. Not boys who want to be warriors or cowboys.
I glance at my mother. She drops a bag of Impala maize meal into the trolley for Beauty. She wipes her hand on her skirt, clouding the cloth.
I stare at the doll again, so beautiful. Without a word, my mother picks up the floppy doll and flips her into the trolley. My mother winks at me. My heart goes haywire as a monkey wedding, when rain falls out of a sunny sky.
Jamani
yells and writhes in the grass. Beauty and my mother come running out of the house. Beauty wails as if Jamani is dead. My mother sees the telltale red dots of snake fangs in the yellow heel skin.
– Fetch a sharp knife, snaps my mother’s firm, nurse voice.
I reach into my pocket for Grandpa Barter’s Swiss Army, the knife that saved the Siamese princess.
My mother cuts Jamani’s heel and sucks it. He cries blue murder. Beauty keens. Dingaan and Dingo bark. My mother spits venom and blood on the grass. Then she sucks Jamani’s heel again. Suck, spit. Suck, spit. Till she is sure it is just blood in her mouth. Then revs up the Chev and drives flat out to the hospital in Howick, with Beauty and Jamani in the back.
When my mother comes home, she says the doctor said Jamani will survive.
– You saved his life, I tell her.
– I’m a nurse, she smiles.
At supper Lucky Strike tells Zane and me in the way he always does to make us feel that life is full of drama and adventure:
– Yo yo yo. Your mother is brave. If she was a man she would be a Zulu warrior.
O God of the assegai and the bones, let me become a warrior, brave in war, brave against lions or tigers. Not scared of snakes or sounds in the dark or the tokoloshe. Not a scaredy cat who runs away.
hobgoblin
IN THE KINDERGARTEN RUN by nuns, I stare out of the windows in the direction of the farm. A ruler cracking down on my head jolts me back to the singing of Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, or the farmer in the dell, the farmer in the dell, hey ho the derry-o, the farmer in the dell. The nuns never tell us what a dell is or why we should sing hey ho the derry-o just because the farmer is in it.
Again and again the farm lures me away from the nuns and the singing. On the farm Jonas spikes snakes on a pitchfork and giggles spitty gums at our shrieks when he flings a dead but squirming snake at our feet. In the Zulu compound on the hill, bubbles gargle out of the nostrils of a sheep’s head in a black three-legged pot. When chicken heads are axed, the headless chickens dart about the compound chased by Zane and Jamani and the other Zulu boys and me, their beady-eyed heads still shivering on the block. The chickens zigzag haphazardly, tricky as the bounce of a rugby ball.
In the Zulu huts: a smell of woodfire smoke, the taste of corn cobs on the flames, the feel of putu pap squeezed inside a fist. Newspapered walls and cheap, chipped china and grassmat floors and Soweto jazz on the radio. Beds propped high on bricks out of reach of the stumpy tokoloshe. My father laughs at the Zulu men for being scared of a short-ass, baboony thing. I just hope the tokoloshe is after Zulu boys rather than me and will go for Jamani in the backyard rondavel.
At the door of Lucky Strike’s hut in the compound, his old, elephant-skin father sits on a stump, gazing runny, tobacco eyes across the deep kloof to the hills, where the past hides among dassies and monkeys. The past was when he stood at the gate of his kraal in the setting sun, counting the fat cows he would pay for a barrow-hipped wife. Counting cows in the days before the long foot-trek to Jo’burg and the white man’s mines.
But Jo’burg is far away and I only know life at school and on the farm, where Zane and Jamani and I chase lizards and end up with a tail wriggling in our fingers as the lizard flees into a black crack. We pelt each other with clay down by the river. We fish the river for black bass and bluegill, with bamboo rods and earthworms on the hook. Sometimes we see a likkewaan in the river and fling stones at it, as if it is a crocodile.
My blind, batty great-grandmother, Grandmama Rudd, is to visit from the old home in Pietermaritzburg.
– Why do we have to fetch her? I whine in the Chev on the way to pick up Grandmama.
– The farm air is good for her, Gecko. Now, you be sweet to her, you hear? My mother frowns.
I just sulk and fiddle with the radio dials.
– One day I will be old and I hope you will come and fetch me to visit, she teases.
I dare not tell my mother that I sulk because of Grandmama’s stale smell and the stink of her pee in the pot under her bed and her creepy, flaky-skinned hands, and her blind, smoky eyes. She scares the wits out of me, the way she blindly floats her long white hair and bloodred gown through the cool dark of our house.
Grandmama has a habit of ghosting out of the gloom, giving me a swift kick up the ass. Out of the way Box, she grunts. I skid across the pine floorboards that Beauty waxes on hands and knees. Box was the dog my mother and father gave me on my first birthday. They said I patted him, tugged his ears, rubbed his nose on my chin, then dropped him into my toy-box and closed the lid. So it was that my birthday dog came to be called Box.
One day Box ran away and though we called him for days he never came back. After Box went, my father came home with the black Labrador pups, Dingaan and Dingo.
Box is long gone, and I believe Grandmama knows that it is me and not Box in her way. Somehow she senses I hate her potty pee and flaky hands, so she foots me across the floorboards. I wish she was dead.
The only time I do not wish Grandmama dead is when she tells the story of the ice girl, and the story of Jake-up-a-tree. Grandmama married a man in England in the days before motorcars and aeroplanes and her smelling and blindness. They went out to Canada to find gold. There, in a shantytown, a girl died in winter. She fell through the ice while skating and they broke the ice downriver to fish her out. They could not bury her in the frozen earth, so she was kept in a box till spring. In the spring they lifted the lid of the box to discover that the girl’s hair and fingernails had grown. When a Red Indian called Jake died in the same frontier town, they did not bother to make a box for him but put him in a sack and strung him up a tree until graves could be dug again.
– Tell me the story of Jake-up-a-tree, I beg her again and again.
Sometimes she tells me, but mostly she just drifts hobgoblinly through the dark.
When Grandmama dies in the old home in Pietermaritzburg I get to go to her burial. It is funny to see my father, the farmer, in a suit and tie, his hair Brylcreemed down, his Italian shoes gleaming.
– Like a real gentleman, my mother smiles.
She kisses him on the cheek. I feel so happy, I almost forget we are all fancy just to see Grandmama dead.
In the church Grandmama Rudd lies in a lidless coffin. My mother and father think I might dream about Grandmama if I see her dead, but I want to. Though I was scared to death of her alive, I feel no fear of her dead. Perhaps it is because I know she can no longer drift up darkly from behind.
Granny Rudd has railwayed all the way down from Zebediela in the far northern Transvaal to bury her mother. I am all wound up for she is to stay with us on the farm afterwards and will play dominoes and mikado with me.
– The old dear’s in heaven, my mother whispers to Granny.
I stare long and hard at the wrinkled face and ghost hands of Grandmama. I feel no pity for her, just a longing to pinch her skin to see if it is as cold as frog skin.
Granny Rudd winks at me, as if to say: sweet boy. If she knew I had wished her mother dead she would not wink at me.
– Are you sad your mother’s dead, Granny? I whisper, but it carries over all the sniffling and fidgeting.
Granny sobs and my father cuffs me on the head. I wish I could lasso the words, but they float out of reach, out there among the sweet incense and the fluttering candle flames and the Holy Ghost. Like dragonfly wings. I am sent out in shame. Fool boy, the sour frowns of the grown-ups say.
Out to where Beauty is looking after Zane, who is kicking a yellow beach ball among the gravestones.
Sun-melon yellow. Sunflower yellow. An undead colour.
cowboys and Indians
I AM TO GO to school to get an ijoocajun, otherwise they will jail my mother and father. I stare out the rear window of the Chev at Zane and Jamani, standing at the gate and waving as if they will never see me again.
We wear khaki uniforms at the school in Howick. We line up in rows when the bell goes, so we look like dwarf Englishmen marc
hing off to fight the Boers. Though there are no Afrikaans kids at the school in Howick, we still play war-war during playtime. None of us wants to be a Boer because they lost the war, but some unlucky English kids have to be Boers, just as you sometimes have to be a Red Indian in cowboys and indians. It is the luck of the draw.
A smell of chalk dusts through Miss Fish’s classroom. When the chalk breaks in her hands and scratches across the blackboard it makes my blood shiver. A pale, bony girl called Sarah sits in the back row with me. She hides her half-nibbled sandwiches under the flip-up lid of her desk. She begs me to let her sit on my hand. I let her. She follows me around at playtime and tries to kiss me until I stick my tongue out at her with a zebra silkworm wriggling on it and she runs away, crying.
Under Miss Fish you do not have the freedom to sit where you want to, or to pee during class, or to ask a question without your hand up in the air. Miss Fish keeps her pencils in a Royal Baking Powder tin. If you put your hand up to tell Miss Fish you have to go, she hands you the tin to pee in. So you just pinch until playtime or the end of the day. I am scared of Miss Fish, for her eyes change shape behind her glasses, like the bottled monkey foetuses and pickled snakes on the classroom shelf. Miss Fish does not believe in hiding the truth from us.
– Stand by your desks, she yells out of the blue.
We jump to our feet and stand at our desks with palms turned down to show Miss Fish that our hands are scrubbed. If she finds dirt under your fingernails, or if your fingernails are jagged from biting, she flips your hand over and stings it with her ruler.
– Only savages bite nails and hide bread under their desks, spits Miss Fish.
A horsefly sting. A bee sting. A bluebottle sting. Each sting stings sorer.
Blood Orange Page 2