Blood Orange

by Troy Blacklaws

  – You remind me of a girl with long hair floating under the ice, and she’s dead but she still looks beautiful and ...

  My words peter out. Damn, I have just told a girl fizzing with life that she looks dead.

  She dips her eyebrows in a V, as if to say: Woaahh, you’re weird.

  – Will you dance with me, then? I plead.

  She smiles at me and butterflies flutter again.

  Unfortunately, just as I drift in to her, The Police begin to sing Don’t Stand So Close to Me.

  But she’s so cool and just smiles at the irony and tells me her name. Alana.

  I jiggle my docksides two feet away from her. Her hips seesaw before my eyes.

  It turns out, I discover, that she also loved Catcher in the Rye and she too cried when the black boy is lost in New York in the film e’Lollipop.

  I wish I was free to hold her the way the Afrikaans boys hold girls at their sokkies.

  She does not go in for wild jiving. When a song ends she stands stock-still, glances around, waiting for the beat to kick in, or looking for better pickings.

  Then, out of the blue, the deejay spins a slow song. I shuffle from foot to foot. Do I just sling my arms around her hips? I have never had my arms around a girl, never mind my hips against a girl. I hope she will give me a signal, but her eyes go all over the place, other than looking into mine.

  So, I put my hands on her hips. There is a gap between her T-shirt and her jeans and I feel her skin under my hands. She turns to look deep into my eyes. We stand still as other dovetailed boys and girls float around us.

  Just as I want to let go and run for it, her hipbones begin to shift under my hands. She butterflies her arms around me and dips her head on my shoulder. O God, let this dance never end and I’ll promise never ever again, ever to peek at Bach’s Playboy. I close my eyes and bury my nose in her hair. I feel her nubby breasts rub against my ribs.

  Then the music is up-beat again and we begin jigging again, two feet apart.

  I’m gaga about Alana. I follow her out when her father comes for her in his big white Benz. She gives me a kiss on the cheek and leaves me alone under the moon with her kiss tingling, lingering.

  I stand there, catch her smell in my hands the way my father shields a match from the wind when he lights his Texans.

  I hear the deep growl of my father’s Isuzu. Dead on midnight. My father is always on time.

  By the time my father shifts into fourth gear, the smell of cow dung and dog has chased away the traces of her scent.

  – Had a good time with Tara? my father says as we swing into the corners of the Helshoogte pass.

  – I hardly saw her.

  – Did you dance?

  – Yes, I danced.

  – With the same girl, or a few girls?

  – The same girl.

  – Ah. I see.

  He can tell I do not want to tell any more. That her name is a magic thing I want to roll around in my mouth all alone, until I am used to it.

  I run up the bluegum avenue to the empty reservoir. I sit on the reservoir floor, feet folded under me, hoping the words will come to me. After a time of sitting dead still, a lizard comes out to bask. A blue dragonfly lands on my knee.

  Beloved Alana. No. We did not go so far. A flutter of lips on my cheek does not make me her beloved.

  O Alana. I would die for you. No. Sounds too much like Die Stem. At thy will to live or die, O South Africa. Dear Alana will do.

  Dear Alana

  You are the mirage of my imagination.

  But I remember the sliding of bone under my hand. She was no mirage. Scratch it out.

  Dear Alana

  Thoughts of you fly through my mind.

  Thoughts of you float. Thoughts of you flutter. Scratch out fly.

  Thoughts of you flutter through my mind

  like the wings of a

  What kind of a bird? A hawk? Too wild. A dove? Too tame. A seagull. Ja.

  like the wings of a gull

  on a sea breeze.

  Love Gecko

  I dream of Alana day and night and wander around in a daze. My mother is cross with me for putting the Nesquik tin in the old whining Westinghouse fridge and the milk in the cupboard, so that the milk goes sour.

  I forget to latch the door to the parakeet cage and the sky is flagged Caribbean blue and lime green and yellow.

  The parakeets flap overhead, perch in the lemon tree, in the bluegum. They are a row of colourful pegs on Nana’s washing line. Maybe their wings are too feeble after being caged for so long, or maybe they are afraid of the sudden, unwired vast sky of freedom, but they do not go far. Instead, the wild birds zone in on our yard. The butcherbirds, drongos and crows sense the tameness in the escaped parakeets and swoop at them with gaping beaks and claws.

  Zane and Mila and I catch a few parakeets in a butterfly net, but the rest, over fifty of them, are pecked, till they fall to earth, flecked red and quivering to death. My mother, scared of flapping things, watches through a window. I know how it hurts her to see birds die, and I, who let them fly, dare not look into her eyes.

  My father comes home with a pink envelope for me. Zane snatches it and runs out into the yard. I have no choice but to tackle him and pummel him till he lets go. I run up the avenue to the reservoir to open the bent envelope under a sinking, mother-of-pearl sun.

  Dear Gecko

  I thought your poem was sweet. I thought you were sweet too.

  Au revoir (that’s goodbye in French)

  Alana

  The French bit is a sign she loves me.

  I want to ask Alana to see The Gods Must be Crazy with me at the Protea Cinema in Paarl, but I cannot see her jamming into the dung-and-dust bakkie between my father and me when she is used to a Benz. So I go on, riding the bus, running up to the dam, girlless. It is only in Wilbur Smith’s novels, in Bach’s tattered, fingered, taboo Playboy magazine, and in my dreams that I get a chance to discover girls. There is no chance of seeing them topless on the beach, as you may overseas, for the law forbids white girls to bare their nipples.

  Whenever I visit Bach, I beg him to let me flick through his Playboy again. Forgive me God but I love to linger on the silky, butterscotch skin, the pink nipples, and the veil of hair hiding the forbidden, yearned-for, magic thing. I know guilt will gnaw at me afterwards. I know I will need to kneel in the cold, hard pews of St George’s before I sip the blood of Jesus again, as the blood of Jesus may kill you just like oleander if you are in sin. I know I will not look my mother in the eyes when she serves me my supper. Though I know all this, I still flick through the Playboy, my heart thudding, knowing the magazine is banned and that you can be caned if the police catch you, knowing Jesus-on-the-cross bends his head in shame.

  Afterwards the images stay in my mind. A kaleidoscope of nipples and bellybuttons and parted lips. I whittle away the guilt by hurting myself. I skin my fists against the wall. I run barefoot through the orchards and vineyards (so stones and duwweltjies sting my feet), and dive deep down into the dam at night (when my fear of being sucked down into the murk is strongest). Before I go to bed, I kneel and pray to God: Dear God, save me from the women who come to me in my dreams.

  But still they come. They come naked, like Botticelli’s Venus, and they beg me to do things to them. They beg me to tip Peel’s honey into their bellybuttons and lick it out. They beg me to drip a drop of the blood of a pigeon on their forehead. They beg me to sniff at their bottoms, as if I am a dog. But when I want to peck at their hips, they titter at my puny, puppy cock.

  killing Biko

  AS GIRLS STAY AT bay, there is time for other things. I watch Bach shoot frogs in the dam. The shot frogs flip over onto their backs, tongues of white in the dark water. I go pigeon-hunting with Bach and Lars. Lars shoots them out of the pines with his .22. The pigeons flap to earth, a frenzy of feathers. It is my job to run up to the jerking bird and tug its head off with a quick twist. We pluck the birds, kebab them on wire to cook on a f
ire under the stars with the hiss of burning vinestumps and the hum of motorcars along the sawmill road and the shrill cry of guineafowl in the bluegums.

  Lars has a pig called Steely Dan that thinks he is a dog. Neglected by his mother, Steely Dan was rescued by Lars’s father and given to their dog, Hella, who was in milk. So Steely Dan sucked dog milk from Hella with her pups, Fidel and Marx. He always comes bounding out with Fidel and Marx to bark at coloureds who run the gauntlet of Nero and Fango on one side of the avenue, and Fidel and Marx and Steely Dan on the other.

  Just like a dog, Steely Dan digs down on a blazing day to lie in the cool unearthed sand below. Just like a dog, Steely Dan edges so close to the vinestump fire that stray coals singe his skin. It is around the fire with the dogs and Steely Dan and the kebabbed pigeons that Lars tells Bach and me about the police and the way that they killed Steve Biko.

  – After being fucked around by the SB, the secret police, they chucked him half-dead in the back of a van and drove him from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria over dirt roads. The police said Biko starved himself to death, of his own free will. Bastards. Truth is, he died of a bleeding brain.

  As the sparks firefly into the sky, I find it hard to believe such a thing can happen in South Africa, my country.

  – Thing is, it all came out when this journalist dude, Donald Woods, fled to England with photos of Biko’s fucked-up body. And each time a man dies, the police tell another story: He hanged himself in his cell with his bootlaces. He fell from a high window.

  A man’s skull cracking open against the tar, like a crab’s shell.

  – He fell down the stairs.

  (Farmboy on Christmas trips to bigtown Pietermaritzburg: I cling to my mother’s skirt, scared of catching my fingers in the steel comb teeth of the rolling steps.)

  – He slipped on a bar of soap in the shower.

  Slip on the Lifebuoy. Slip on the Sunlight. Another way to die in the Cape.

  memento

  UNTIL NOW I HAVE just hunted lizards, birds and frogs on the farm, but now my hunter uncle has invited us to go hunting big game in Botswana. After two days caged in the old 404, I am now on the back of my uncle’s Ford 4x4. The 4x4 bucks and keels as it plunges through the thorn bundu. There’s a skinner on the back with us and a Bushman tracker on the roof.

  The Ford jams to a halt, and I am flung onto my hands and knees, cracking the lens of my binoculars. My father’s strong hand tugs me to my feet.

  A kudu bull stands focused in my one-eyed binoculars, so dignified with his spiral horns and pinstriped coat. He has a white line across the bridge of his nose, as if he’s wearing reading glasses.

  A gunshot bangs in my ear, echoes kadow wow wow wow. Smoke whispers from the barrel of my uncle’s gun. The Ford crashes through bundu after the wounded kudu. The Bushman tracker clings to the roof, like a baby monkey riding its mother, his eyes skinned for traces of the blood spoor. He dangles a stick over the windshield to signpost the way for the driver below.

  The kudu lies dead in the dust. Blood trickles from his mouth and clots in the sand.

  Vultures loop in the sky above.

  The hot bullet that the skinner digs out of the kudu’s neck is in my hand.

  – A memento of your first hunt, my uncle says.

  A spot of blood stays on my palm after I slip the bullet into my pocket. I look on as the skinner peels the kudu. The tracker chops off his horns with an axe. Another memento.

  The campfire: a gathering around the coals while the kudu liver sizzles on a spade.

  – A delicacy, they tell me amid laughter and beer and meat strung up in a baobab and the yip yip yip of a hyena.

  pennywhistle

  AS LARS IS FREELANCING for the Cape Times, he sometimes goes into the black townships to cruise for news, as he puts it. Lars reckons, since I just turned sixteen, I ought to go backstage: see the real, raw-boned South Africa. I clamber into his rusty old VW beetle, called Dirt. The road bridging the familiar, mapped-out world of my childhood and the alien, other Africa becomes rutted as the tar gives out.

  – It will be surreal for you but don’t be scared, laughs Lars.

  I imagine I am about to enter a world in which houses, chimneys and dogs melt, as if in a Salvador Dali painting. I am on edge, but Lars is as cool as Cool Hand Luke. As long as Lars is around I will be okay.

  Dirt rides a pot-holed road through the brick matchbox houses of Jamaica Township, one like the other. There are no palms. No trees of any kind. Just solitary, moth-orbited lamps. Then the brick houses give way to tumbledown shacks in un-lamped dark, and they do melt into one another. Dirt goes on, further and further into this jumbled maze, dodging deep dongas to keep from turtling over.

  Blanketed silhouettes huddle around glowing drums. Firefly sparks dart starward.

  Bony dogs slink into hovering shadows.

  A man in a Che Guevara beret and a moth-eaten grey blanket leaps into the headlights, swinging a long-bladed panga over his head like a Samurai.

  Dirt jams to a halt. Lars winds down the window.

  – No fear, Comrades. I guard your car with my life, Che calls, jabbing the long blade at a mangy dog squirting pee at Dirt’s hubcap.

  The dog yelps and flees.

  I imagine we will return to find Dirt strewn with the corpses of dogs and men who venture within panga range.

  I follow Lars, finger hooked through a loop of his Levi’s, along a mud alleyway winding among shacks of zinc, plank and paraffin tin. Sounds of radio jazz and distant barking and murmurs mingle. The shacks ooze smells of bubbling pap and sour beer and Vaseline.

  Doors ajar cast winking images:

  A family huddles around paraffin stoves.

  A mother gives her child her breast.

  Another woman washboards clothes in a tin tub.

  Old men play cards in dim candlelight, slapping them down like children playing snap.

  An open-mouthed child stands in a doorway and stares at two white phantoms drifting through his world.

  Another door frees a gush of beer fumes, smoke and pounding music. White teeth draw us, brothers and comrades, into the crowd. Figures filter through the walls until it is steamy inside. I smile at all faces my eyes zoom in on, for the panga still slices through my mind. Besides, Lars has gone out of sight.

  A man called Matanga, who reeks of Brylcreem and beer, corners me. He tells me of his girlfriend’s unfaithfulness.

  – She kissed a coloured from Salt River. On the lips.

  Matanga is so close I feel his spit speck my face.

  – The bitch I wanted to marry.

  I shake my head.

  Matanga pulls a gun out of his pocket.

  – I’ll kill her.

  He morbidly studies his gun.

  – You don’t have to kill her, I mumble.

  – Whajusay?

  – Do you have to kill her?

  Matanga leans even closer and whispers:

  –You don’t feel my hurt.

  I resist the urge to wipe my face free of spit.

  Throughout my dialogue with Matanga, I keep shuffling to jazzy music. If my feet stand still for a minute, some bopping dude zooms in on me, tunes me to relaaax. But it is hard to relax with Matanga in a morbid mood. He swigs down one Lion beer after another and sinks deeper in his blues.

  – My fortune gone on a ring.

  He shakes his head, peers into his Lion.

  Then, out of the blue, he cheers up, asks me to dance. He still has his gun in his pants, so I follow him into the tangle of dancers.

  We dance, Matanga and I, to a zippy bigband song, full of tsotsi, cocky trumpets chasing a scared pennywhistle.

  Then Matanga goes out to pee Lion beer.

  I shrink into a corner, eyes skinned for Lars. But he is nowhere.

  Giggling girls tug me out of my corner and draw me into their ring to mimic their Soweto jitterbug jive. They laugh at the sight of a white boy making a jerky bid to mimic African rhythm. One girl with white whi
te teeth wiggles her shoulders so her dungareed breasts bobble and jiggle two inches away from my face. Her nipples peek out, then tuck in again.

  – Viva Mandelaaa, cries a woman in a black turban, as if drowning in the sea of smoke.

  Fists dart up like cobra heads to a chorus of Viva Mandela, viva Mandela.

  – Amandla, the turbanned woman cries.

  – Awetu, the dancers chant.

  Fists fly high. I lift my white fist in a shy black-power salute.

  – MK is coming, calls a schoolboy armed with a plank AK47.

  – MK is coming, I echo.

  I have no idea who MK is.

  Just as I catch sight of Matanga bearing down on me again, I feel Lars’s firm hand draw me through the crowd and into the cool night.

  – I juiced my info for a story. Vamoose.

  Dirt is an albino hippo under the moon. Che kips behind the wheel, the panga on the dash. He jolts awake when Lars taps on the window. He swings the door and Lola escapes from the radio and la la la lolas up to the moon.

  Dirt drops Che in the rearview, rattles over the pot-holed roads, hums along the tar.

  – Who’s MK, Lars?

  – Umkhonto weSizwe. The Spear of the Nation. They are the underground soldiers of the ANC.

  I picture the plankgun boy running along tunnels under the earth.

  – You seemed to enjoy yourself with the girls, Lars jokes.

  – Come on, I deny.

  But the dungareed breasts jiggle on in my mind as the moon follows Dirt home.

  the outsider

  I HAVE MOVED OUT of our thatched Dutch house into the maid’s room, under the same zinc roof as the Peugeot 404. I paint the walls yellow. I pin up a ragged, dog-eared Dylan I begged Lars for. I feel independent here, though I go back into the house for my mother’s cooking and to bath.

  One night as I come to the back door, a rat darts out of the cat hole cut for Lalapanzi, and scratches up my leg. I yell and my father runs out with his .22, expecting to find me dead in my bed.

  Another time, I see a puffadder slither across the path that leads from my room to the back door.