Blood Orange

by Troy Blacklaws

  – You don’t find something beautiful in the world often enough to kill it, he says.

  Starlings we may kill. That is another thing.

  My mother, being a woman, does not see that killing pesky starlings is not the same as killing weavers. My father laughs at her, and we boys do too. My mother is funny that way. She believes flowers have feelings, and ears. Sometimes she sings to them, or leaves the radio on for them when she is out. She forbids Zane and me to hammer nails into the old jacaranda, as if it might bleed.

  Zane and Jamani and I discover the skeleton of a dog down a dry well in the forest. Patches of hair still cling to the bones.

  When we tell Jonas, he says:

  – That dog was the box dog of the young baas.

  I wonder if the dead skeleton down the shaft, the shadow of the Box I loved, heard me calling his name when I searched far and wide. Maybe his yelps fell just short of my dull, human ears.

  Beyond the well, deeper in the forest, Zane and Jamani and I find an abandoned motorcar, stripped of wheels and seats and doors. Lizards and scorpions skitter through its rust husk. The windshield is cracked, but still in place. We stone the glass and it fans into cobwebbed veins before caving in. Then we stone the headlamps. A motorcar that once whizzed along the open road, heading somewhere, is now an eyeless, dented shell, abandoned in the bundu.

  I imagine James Dean’s head flying through the windshield of his Spyder. While Zane and Jamani pick up broken glass, play-play diamonds, my yellow daydream-haze fades. I see bits of glass as bits of glass. The javelin is just a javelin, no assegai.

  hero

  ZANE AND I FIND a steel box buried in Tomtom’s paddock. We dig it up, hoping it is treasure. There is a rusty padlock on it, so Jonas crowbars it open. Inside the box are guns and bullets. My father calls the police, who come in a van with an empty cage.

  One policeman tells us the ANC hid the box.

  – The ANC?

  – The evil men. They want to kill us all, the policeman tells us. You boys done something heroic for your country.

  – Maybe you boys even saved some lives, the other one says.

  Zane and I tell all the kids down at the polo club while my folks play tennis and we play polo on bicycles. I enjoy the awed look the polo kids give us, but I feel confused by the other time the police came.

  I don’t feel like a hero. I am not sure which side I am on. In the few films I’ve seen at the drive-in, or the cinema in Howick, I always hoped the one on the run from the police would get away. I thought that this must be something evil in me. Until my mother helped the men from Mozambique.

  trek

  FIRST, MAN LANDS ON the moon to change the world. Now we are to move to the Cape. For me the Cape is as far away as the moon, or America.

  We drive out the gates with Dingaan and Dingo and Amos behind us in the caravan and Lalapanzi clawing at my feet and Beauty and Jamani and Lucky Strike and Jonas waving in the driveway. I am sad, as I may never see them again. But there is the adventure ahead, and I do not cry for long.

  I imagine the Cape as full of colour. For one thing there will be sweet oranges you can just reach out and pluck and, for another, there will be the Cape coloureds. I have never seen a coloured in Natal. I imagine they are black like the Zulus, but wear colourful clothes all the time, like the Durban rickshawmen, or the clowns in the Boswell Wilkie circus.

  The house in the Cape is a thatched Dutch house in the valley where Bushmen once danced under the moon. In the valley, I discover, the coloureds do not always wear rainbow colours and the farmers do not grow oranges.

  The Simonsberg, a stone dragon, gazes down on the insect folk in the valley below. The Berg River flows through the valley and onwards through the vineyards of Paarl and the yellow wheat fields beyond to the fishing town of Saldanha on the cold Atlantic.

  The old Dutch houses in the valley glimmer tusk-white under the African sun. Behind the clay walls woodworms gnaw at yellowwood beams. Malay and Hottentot slaves clayed, whitewashed and thatched these houses. The slaves harvested the grapes and danced barefoot in wine barrels to squeeze the juice out.

  Today there are no slaves but the coloureds bend under baskets of grapes, under the glare of the sun. Slave bells still toll when a veld fire blazes and the coloureds are called to beat a firebreak.

  The Bushmen are long gone. Just one nomad survives. A flapping scarecrow of a man, he walks all day long in his tatty rags from farm to farm, driving a Firestone tyre with two criss-crossed poles. He tows a box behind him. The box is tied to his hips with a fraying rope. Around his neck hang the keys he has picked up over the years.

  The folk of the valley call him the Firestone prophet, for he mutters rumours of blood as he walks the valley from Paarl to Groot Drakenstein to Franschhoek. It is hard to tell if the prophet is coloured, or white gone dark under the sun. Maybe the day will come when no one bothers if he is one or the other, my mother says. Folk drop stale bread and bruised fruit into his box. He abandons his dark mutterings to tip his hat. Then he heels after his Firestone tyre again. His voice mingles with the clink of lost keys blinking like fish scales in the sun.

  He walks under azure skies. He walks when snow lies on the Franschhoek mountains. He walks all day, until the sun goes down, blood orange, behind the Simonsberg.

  cobra head

  THE SCHOOL BUS RUMBLES and rocks over the Helshoogte from Stellenbosch, to pick up us white farmkids bound for the government school for boys in Paarl.

  Through the windows: coloured kids walk in the dust to the local coloured schools, carting their books in OK Bazaars bags.

  Zane and I huddle together at the front of the bus, dazed by the raw bulk of the rowdy, pip-spitting matric boys who sit in the back row. They have just one year to go in blazers, then they go to the border to kill Cubans. They leer at me whenever I glance at them. Here in the Cape, war-war is no longer a game.

  The third day on the bus: a canna seed, catapulted from the back, stings my cheek. I spin around and the manboy in the middle of the back row beckons to me. His name is Spook.

  My knees jelly as I stand. Through swimming eyes Zane looks up at me, big brother of nine. The gabbling around me ebbs away, and all eyes zoom in on me. The bald head of the driver is fixed on the road.

  I drag my heels to the back. Two rows from the end, the bus lurches around a corner and I lose my footing. My hand lands on a bulging, woolly breast as I fall.

  – Sorry. I-yai-yai-yai I fell, I stammer.

  She, cheeks flaming, gawks down at her bare knees.

  I surface through a wave of catcalls and whistling.

  As I face Spook again, he is all teeth.

  – So, you laaik girls’ titties hey? grins Spook in the slow, syrupy voice of a policeman, or a postmaster.

  The matric boys on either side of him bray with laughter.

  – Answer me boy, or I’ll bugger you up, says Spook through his teeth.

  Spook’s rock fist rears up like a cobra’s head. I breathe in the stink of his sweat. There is no doubt in my mind that he would beat me up at the drop of a hat.

  I search his blue eyes for a hint of pity. There is none.

  – I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I just fell and —

  – Stan’ stiff when you talk to me, Spook barks.

  I stand stiff as a broom.

  – Juz your third day on the bus, an’ you already fresh with the girls, hey?

  In the corner of my eye I make out the wriggling of the poor girl.

  – We can’t have this sort of thing happening in a Christian country.

  The big boys snigger at his wit.

  – Now all you have to do is turn around, and tell her you sorry you touched her titty.

  I have never felt so abandoned, and tears squirt from my eyes. I gaze down at my feet to hide my tears. This is no comfort, for my shoes have a pumpkin-orange tinge to them. My mother bought me orangy shoes instead of the uniform brown all the other boys wear. I am ashamed of my sta
nd-out shoes and the nickname Pumpkinshoes Miss Hunter has given me.

  – Go on, before I give you good reason to cry.

  I turn to face the blushing girl.

  – I’m sorry I touched your titty, I mutter, wishing I would die.

  – Forget it, mouths the girl.

  But I will never forget it.

  blue murder

  MISS HUNTER LOVES TO hit boys on the hand with her wooden ruler. Afterwards, you rub spit on your hands to cool them down.

  Now Miss Hunter is up on a chair, yelling blue murder and waving her ruler, just because of a white mouse. The mouse is my mouse, Oliver Twist. He was meant to lie still inside my shirt pocket, but he got too curious and peeked out.

  – Put the bloody mouse in a box, yells Miss Hunter.

  I tip Oliver Twist into a square chalk box and shut the lid.

  Then Miss Hunter swoops down on me. She nabs me by the ear and frogmarches me to the boys’ toilet. I think she is going to pull down my pants and beat me with her wooden ruler. Instead, she tells me to tip him in.

  – Empty the box, boy.

  – Please, Mevrou, don’t drown my mouse, I beg.

  – Your mouse is dead, Pumpkinshoes. Don’t you be a hero now.

  Plop, goes Oliver Twist, under the blue-tinted water. After a time, he bobs up, doggypaddling.

  – Bloody vermin, Miss Hunter swears.

  She yanks the dangling chain and he is sucked down the gurgling throat of the toilet. Just when I think Oliver Twist is gone forever, he bobs up again, his eyes black canna seeds popping out of his head with fear.

  Again Miss Hunter yanks the chain. This time she jabs at Oliver Twist with her ruler, as a farmer dips sheep. This time he stays down.去

  Though I will never forget Miss Hunter sheepdipped Oliver Twist dead, she teaches us some good things about dying:

  The Egyptians fish your brains out through your nostrils and bury you alive with your slaves.

  The Romans put a penny in your mouth for the ferry to the underworld.

  The Kalahari Bushmen bury you in a hole, with your bow and a quiver of arrows to hunt buck in the world of the spirits.

  One time, when Miss Hunter is called to the office, a boy called Spud unzips his pink songololo in front of the class. Spud’s head is full of potato and he is always up to no good. He still has his songololo out when Miss Hunter comes in. Her eyes flare and she jabs at his songololo with her wooden ruler. Spud hops from foot to foot. The hot-potato hopping is so funny we howl with laughter.

  Then Miss Hunter holds his hand, palm up, and stings it over and over. Spud howls for mercy. Then she drags him out of the class by his sideburns. We stare out the window, empty our pencil boxes, flick through maths homework, anything to avoid each other’s eyes.

  Spud never comes to the school again. I hear he was caught pinching Camels from the Cape-to-Rio Café.

  In South Africa, if the police catch you redhanded, and you are under 18, they tie you down and beat you, just for pinching cigarettes. The magistrate says how many cuts you get and there is nothing your father can do to save you, even if he is big in the fruit-canning business.

  – You see what comes of fiddling, Miss Hunter tells us, after Spud is caught by the police. First you fiddle, then you swipe cigarettes, then you smoke dagga, and then you rob the Boland Bank or join the ANC. It’s downhill all the way.

  Lucky Strike smoked dagga, but he never swiped so much as a teaspoon from us. I wonder if Lucky Strike has run to Mozambique or Angola to join the ANC. Maybe he has traded his whittling knife for a gun. Maybe they have caught him by now and he is jailed with Mandela on Robben Island.

  – Mandela and his Cuban friends in Angola want to hijack this beautiful country, Miss Hunter tells us. The godless Russians give them the tanks and aeroplanes. If it wasn’t for our boys on the border, the evil men would burn this school, rape your mother and your sisters.

  She lets this foot-fiddling thought sink in for a moment, then goes on:

  – Now that Rhodesia is going to the dogs, South Africa is the last white, Christian outpost.

  That is why, when we go to high school, we will march on Fridays. That is why, when we leave school, we will go to the army. We will fight to keep our mothers unraped, our schools unburnt, to stay on the God-given land. Though Mandela is behind bars, the Cubans are still out there, lurking in the Angolan bush, planning the big hijack.

  Miss Hunter flops to the floor while chalking the blackboard full. Kobus de Jong runs for the headmaster, Meneer Theron. Meneer Theron huffs in, steering poor Kobus ahead of him, sure that this is a schoolboy joke. But it is no joke. Miss Hunter lies there, stone dead, black hairs jutting through her stockings and her eyes wide, just like the time Spud had his songololo out. Meneer Theron shuts her eyelids. I wonder if he will put a coin in her mouth for the penny ferry, but he just covers her up with the dusty tablecloth.

  Then he shoos us out of the classroom, into the schoolyard. While waiting for the ambulance to come across town from Paarl hospital, he gives us each a hiding for driving poor Miss Hunter to the end of her wits.

  Though Meneer Theron blames us for Miss Hunter’s death, we are all made to go to her burial in school blazers, and look sad and sing sad songs for her. I am sorry we do not get a last gawp at her, the way it was with Grandmama Rudd. I wonder if they left her brain in. When the dominee goes on about how she is now in heaven with Jesus, surrounded by little children just like us, I wonder how Miss Hunter will get on without her wooden ruler. The dominee smiles at us, reminds us that Jesus said suffer the children to come unto me. Meneer Theron glares at us, as if to say: I’ll see you hang from the yardarm.

  I wonder if Jesus’ heaven and the Roman underworld and the Bushman world of the spirits are the same place, or if every colour has a heaven, just as every colour has its own school. My mother told me: All loved things have a spirit, and go to heaven. I loved Box and Oliver Twist, so they would have floated up from their wells and drainpipes. Granny Rudd loved Grandmama, so she will be footing some poor dead boy up the ass. And, as it turns out, Miss Hunter was loved, for her son drove all the way down from Messina in the far north for her burial.

  After the burial my mother cooks I&J fish fingers and chips to cheer me up, and my father lets me sip the foam off his beer. It’s a magic moment.

  dog days

  ALL SUMMER, FORD TRACTORS with fruit-laden trailers clang down the bluegum avenue. The fire-sun saps all green, the dams dry out and the clay cracks into tortoise-shell patterns. Frogs creep under the clay shell into the hot damp ooze below and wait for the rains to fall again in June. Cow-tails swish flies from dung-flecked hides. Fly-stung fruit drops into the sand to rot. The stinging sound of cicadas is like a pine needle needling your eardrum.

  Zane and I eat peaches and pears and grapes until we get gyppo guts. We play cricket on the front lawn with spindly Kala and sulky Langtand, who live in the nearby coloured town of Pniel, on the road to Stellenbosch.

  Flip van Staden, whose father is poor and works at the sawmill on the railway, is shy and just hangs around on the fringes. Flip is freckled and white, like Nesquik sprinkled on vanilla ice-cream.

  Sometimes Bach, the German boy who lives down the road, drops by and bowls a few balls.

  The tall pines around the lawn are part of the game. If you hit a ball at a pine without a bounce, you are out, as if caught. There is also the risk of the dogs catching the ball in their teeth and running into the vineyards with it. So many balls are buried in the vineyards that I imagine revisiting the valley one day as an old man to find an orchard bearing cricket balls as fruit.

  Our thatched house at the foot of the Simonsberg is cooled by wide whitewashed walls and shaded by tall pines and an old bluegum. The bluegum is bent by a climbing bougainvillaea, a fountain of pink. My father always says it is the highest bougainvillaea in Africa.

  – Open another bottle of Roodeberg, my father jokes, the bluegum may come down tonight and kill us in our beds.<
br />
  – In for a penny, in for a pound, nods Grandpa Barter, holding out his glass for a refill of red.

  Since Granny and Grandpa Barter followed us down to the Cape from Natal, they come over at dusk for sundowners on the veranda. In front of the veranda a shaggy-bearded palm sways in the wind.

  Within the walls it is dark and cool. It smells of the Dubbin wax Mila, the Xhosa gardenboy, rubs into my father’s boots, and the Malayan bobotie that Nana, our coloured maid, cooks. And, at night, it smells of wet dog, for my father runs the dogs up to the dam on the back of his Isuzu 4x4 bakkie for a swim at dusk.

  Under the grass in the front yard is a brick cellar. To Zane and me it is a hideout. A bomb shelter. We stock it with Oros Orange and Ouma rusks and kudu biltong. You never know when the Russians will come, or when the bluegum will come down on the folks and orphan us.

  You can climb the gnarled lemon tree up onto the zinc roof of the garage and lie there, among the ripening pumpkins and the smell of pines on the breeze and wafts of cow dung ploughed into the vineyards. If you close your eyes, the sigh of the pines filters through the clank of tractors, the cry of guineafowl and the barking of dogs, and the sun swirls colours behind your lids.

  We head over the Simonsberg to Bikini Beach. Zane and me and the paddleski and picnic basket and icebox and deck chair and dogs bundled on the back of the Isuzu 4x4 bakkie. The dogs bark whenever they see another dog, till their gobs froth and fling strings of drool to the wind.

  We go through the Strand, along the seashore, to Bikini Beach, tucked away behind Gordon’s Bay harbour. My father sinks into his deck chair to read the Sunday Times. He frees his toes from his farm boots and wiggles them under the sand. There is no way he is going into the water when he can stay in his deck chair with the Sunday Times bikini girl.

  I wait for a big wave to gather and just as it is about to curl I run and dive from the sand. In mid-air I see a shark gliding through the curved wave. Time stops for a moment, a blink of the eye, the way it does when Wile E. Coyote runs off the edge of a cliff and his feet pedal the sky before he plummets to earth. I hope to God it might be a dolphin, but then I see the gills, four gouged commas after the full stop of his eye. I windmill my arms, as if to rewind my flight through the air.