Visoog Vorster slides the cane home among the other canes. He squints out of the window onto the rugby field, giving me time to stop hopping and sobbing. Then he turns to face me.
– Now, you forget this liberal nonsense. You hear?
I wipe my dangling snot on my sleeve.
He reaches out his hand, as if to say: no hard feelings. The shaking of hands is, by tradition, the last act of the ritual of branding kudu stripes across a boy’s ass.
panama hat
ONE BREAK BALDHEAD BOSMAN’S classroom is left unlocked. I steal inside and climb the high bookshelf ladder to see what secrets the out-of-reach volumes hide. On the top shelf I find fingerprints on the dusty spine of The Voyage of the Beagle. I slide it out. As the book falls open, a paper drops out and wings down to the floor. I climb down, heart beating hard, for Baldhead Bosman will kill me if he catches me red-handed.
The paper is a black-and-white photograph of a coffee-skinned woman on beach sand. She lies with her legs Y-ed open. She squeezes a breast with one hand. With the other, she holds a Coca-Cola bottle down there. Half of the bottle is in her.
I wonder why Bosman has a photograph of a Coca-Cola bottle inside a coloured or Caribbean woman inside Darwin when he is forever ranting on about the coloureds and the kaffirs wanting their hands on what the whites have and that one day it will be us and them and that if we do not learn hard it will be us down the mines and behind the plough and them sitting on the veranda with a cigar and coffee and brandy.
I feel sexy, so I pocket the photo.
Leon du Plessis and I work the projector when flicks, usually James Bond or Clint Eastwood, are shown in the hall on the last day of term. He is the film fundi. I just hand him the reels. Still, I love the dark of the projection room, where I can watch films, unseen and undisturbed by Maljan and the De Beer brothers. Leon and I play in the Boland hockey team. He is the one who shoots the goals. He dreams of being a fighter pilot. Me, I still dream of going overseas, of seeing the world, maybe writing a novel, one day.
I regret confessing to my father that I want to be a writer. He laughs.
– You’re always in your own little dream world, of writers and explorers. Maybe I should send you to Sunflower Home.
Sunflower Home is a home for daft kids, like Spud. I know he does not mean it, but it is true that I am a bit daft. I spill my milk as if I am a dribbling old madman, I burn toast, I toss my dirty socks in the dustbin, I let the bath overflow.
Almost every night at supper my father says:
– How many times must I tell you not to stick your knife in your mouth? One day you’ll cut your tongue off.
It drives him mad.
There is a tok tok at the door of the projection room. It is Mister Sands. He tells Leon he wants to talk to me alone. My heart beats because of the rumours of the rides for ice-cream. He just stands there in the flickering light, for a long time.
– I heard about your being caned. He’s a bastard, is Vorster.
I shrug, though I am amazed by his risky words.
– I share your misgivings about South Africa, he goes on, but this isn’t a free country where you can just mouth what you feel.
He steps forward, rests chalkdust fingertips on my shoulder.
– I’m sorry about the cane. If you have such restless thoughts, about Mandela, about injustice, you can always come and talk to me. You hear?
I nod. As I nod, I pray he will not want to go for an ice-cream with me.
He winks at me, then turns on his heels.
His fingers leave dusty afterthoughts on my blue school shirt.
There is another teacher at Paarl Boys’ High who stands out from the rest. Mister Slater, my English teacher, wears a panama hat and he never canes us. His words mesmerise me, like the tones from a snakecharmer’s flute. Under Mister Slater, I discover words have individual character and history, that flamboyant comes from the French for aflame, that window comes from the Nordic vindauge, wind eye.
Mister Slater tells us of Jung and other heroes: of how Oedipus wanted to outfoot his fate yet ran toward it, of how Odysseus outwitted the Trojans with a hollow horse, of the sirens who lured men to their death on the rocks. He weaves together mythology and adventure and hints of the unexplored world of romance. He reads us the part in The Grapes of Wrath, ripped out of the school library copy, about the priest who loves the girls.
– Censoring a book is a vandalising of art. Such people ought to be fed to the crocodiles.
After school Mister Slater crosses the rugby field to his Zephyr under the jacarandas, unlocks the boot and drops his panama hat into it before going round to the driver’s door to climb in. Pukka English.
There is a boy in my English class we all call Slimjan. There is Maljan the mad Jan, and Slimjan the clever Jan. He is so sharp at untangling metaphor and finding motifs for Mister Slater that I am bitterly jealous of him. He can track images filtering through strands of narrative like a Bushman picking up the blood spoor with his hawk eye. A drop of blood in dry grass. A bent twig. A hoof dint in the sand.
I want to beat Slimjan in English; after all I am the rooinek whose grandpa went to Oxford, and here is this boer boy with an uncanny flair for writing. Mister Slater says he is inspired by the muses. I wish Mister Slater would find my writing inspired, but he always writes in the margin:
Too pedestrian.
My writing walks, or plods, instead of flying like Slimjan’s.
Or: Too literal.
I have to unwind, let my imagination freewheel. But it is hard to unwind with Maljan wanting to beat the tutumandela shit out of me and Baldhead Bosman forever flexing his plum and the De Beer brothers lurking like wolves in the back of my mind.
For me South Africa is inescapably literal. As literal as a cane biting into flesh, as a steel hook in the head.
kissing Jade
AFTER GRANDPA RUDD DIED from falling out of a coral tree, Granny came to live in the Cape. She has a house in Windermere Road, Muizenberg, near Zandvlei. During the school holidays I go and stay with her.
On the way to Muizenberg, I always spend the day in Cape Town.
My father drops me at Klapmuts station, on the line from Paarl to Cape Town.
The train whistles and wheezes through the Klapmuts vineyards, then the Muldersvlei cow fields, then the northern suburbs backyards with their colourful washing and barking dogs.
An hour later the train arrives in Cape Town. Ahead, under its cloth of cloud, Table Mountain looks down on the city and the harbour of moored cargo ships and yachts and the seagull bay and Robben Island.
How many years does it take for jail bars to rust through in the sea wind? I wonder.
From the station I step into Town, a carnival of colour and sound.
Muslim men in tasselled flowerpot hats and Muslim women hidden behind black cloth. Coloured flowersellers with bright cloths on their heads, selling proteas and roses. Magazine stalls. Fruitsellers calling: peachaaas and lichiiis and bananaaas.
Amid the honking taxis and buskers and double-deckers of Adderley Street, Jan van Riebeeck stands unruffled, casting his stone gaze mountainwards.
I haunt the backstreet bookshops and choose something with an arty cover that catches my eye, and a morbid title that Lars would give the nod to: As I Lay Dying, Heart of Darkness, Hunger.
I walk down St George’s Street and listen to a banjoman or watch a tapdancer. Superstitiously, I drop a coin in a hat and head for the cheap and dark Black Dog Café. As I sit there waiting for my Coke float to arrive, Leonard Cohen sings So Long, Marianne. I dip my nose into my new paperback and breathe in the smell of a virgin book, its spine uncracked and its mystery unspilt. Outside a bergie hustles folk for a few cents.
The best thing after lunch in town is a film. Somehow I can forget my Paarl Boys’ blues when the screen images begin to roll and I dig into a box of hot popcorn.
I enjoy the cigarette ads. The rugged Camel guy pontooning his Land Rover across crocodile torre
nts and rigging a tent in tropical downpours, then sparking up a Camel to the distant call of a fish eagle. The Winston ads: a festival of rodeo cowboys, Colorado rapids, California bikinis, neon-pink lips swigging Coca-Cola.
At the end of a film I stay as the credits unreel. Not to discover who the gaffer and keygrip are, so much as to linger in the magic before surfacing to the real world.
Afterwards I catch a train out to Muizenberg and Granny Rudd.
Rondebosch. Newlands. Wynberg. Plumstead. Retreat. Lakeside. Muizenberg.
Though Lakeside is closer to Zandvlei, where windsurfers skim across the lagoon, and the house in Windermere Road, I always go on to Muizenberg station. From there I walk along Muizenberg beach in the cold tangy wind off False Bay. Across False Bay, towards the Hottentots Holland Mountains, I can just make out the Strand and the harbour of Gordon’s Bay on the far curve.
Granny Rudd has somehow come to life since Grandpa died. We drink the red wines he had stored away for his rockingchair days. We play scrabble late into the night while Grandpa’s Miles Davis records fizz under the needle and the sea wind rattles the window and Granny tells me again about the jacaranda days in Durban. She tells me she loved another man before she met Grandpa, but there was a rumour he had coloured blood in his family and her mother forbade her to see him again.
– Now that Grandpa is dead, I sometimes think of my first love again. Strange, isn’t it? That I still feel like a girl sometimes.
She laughs. I find it unsettling to think of a girl, with a girl’s thoughts and desires, hiding inside her sagging frame, but I smile at her anyway.
During the day, in Muizenberg, I walk along Sunrise Beach to watch the oilskinned fishermen hauling in seagull-plagued nets. Sometimes sharks are caught in the nets and, mesmerised by their cold eyes and rippling gills, I prod at a sack of teeth and muscle with my toe.
At sunset I run along the coastal road, a road echoed by the railway that twists like a centipede over the rocks to Simonstown. I run past the red and yellow and blue and green cabins at St James’s tidal pool. Past the vividly painted fishing boats in Kalk Bay, where they used to hunt whales in the old days, where coloured boys handline from the harbour wall, dangling bare toes like shark bait over the waves.
Far beyond the handlining boys the lights of Simonstown string out like beads in the falling dusk.
I run along the beach under a half moon, reflected in the wave foam. Ahead I see figures huddled around a driftwood fire. The sound of a guitar on the breeze and the amber flicker of the fire on their faces draw me to them.
A girl strums the guitar, sings Bob Marley over the cadences of the sea. I linger at the edge of the pool of firelight to let her voice flow through me. A young man, aware of me there, half in the dark, shifts up to make a gap in the ring for me. So I sit down in the sand, feel the breeze cool the sweat on my skin and sip at this new wine of being with folk who are young and free and smile at me.
I stare at the girl with the guitar as she sits across from me in her frayed denim shorts, so short that I glimpse her lime-green panties as she plays. Her long black hair catches the firelight in glints and hints, merges with the sliver of shadow in the shallow valley between her breasts. She rocks as she sings so the cotton spanning her breasts goes taut, then slack, then taut again, like a sail catching a sulky breeze.
When she lays the guitar aside and hugs her knees I still see a hint of lime.
Words about freedom and injustice ripple around. They laugh at the thought of Sha Na Na being at Woodstock with true soul poets: Joplin and Hendrix. One guy tunes that Kerouac wrote On the Road in three weeks on one long unravelling bog roll. They squabble over whether Ulysses is literature, or shit. The guitargirl tells them how cool it is in London and Amsterdam. They are in awe of her, for she has been there, overseas.
– Amsterdam is coffeeshop mecca, and London club mecca. South Africa is just so ... out of time.
Then she turns to me.
– Where are you from?
I do not want to tell her I am a farmboy from Groot Drakenstein.
– Paarl, I fib.
But any place out that way, in the Boland, is primitive to folks from Cape Town.
– So, do you go to Stellenbosch University? she digs.
– I’m still at school, at Paarl Boys’ High.
– Isn’t that where they still have initiation and all that primal ritual?
I nod. No doubt they all went to larney private schools in Cape Town.
She comes over to sit by me, and butterflies flap in my stomach.
– I’m Jade. My mother was a flowerchild. Called me Jade River. Cool, hey?
– I’m Gecko.
– Cool name. You also a flowerchild baby?
– No. It’s just a name I picked up in Zululand.
– Zululand. Far out. Teach me some words.
– Inyoka is snake. Inja is a dog.
She echoes the words and the others laugh.
– I dig ethnic words. They sound so instinctive. I study music at UCT, first year. It’s so bohemian after the discipline of school.
– You ever meet a Danish guy called Lars? He’s my friend. He studied at UCT.
– No. UCT’s a labyrinth. It’s not like a school out in Paarl, you know.
Fool farmboy for imagining she would know Lars. Though he writes freelance for the Cape Times, he never gets a byline. That honour is for the big guns.
– I can’t get over you being in such a savage school.
I tell her about mad Maljan and the hounding De Beer brothers, about Visoog Vorster’s run-up and Baldhead Bosman’s love for plum. As I tell her these things we drink red wine, cheap Tassenberg from a box. She squeezes my hand, stares mesmerised eyes deep into mine, as if I am a traveller from another world.
The fire burns down to a glow. The others go, now two, now one, until it is just Jade and me, alone on Muizenberg beach. Jade holds my hand and I follow her behind the beach cabins. We lie down together on the sand that collects there in deep drifts.
– Perhaps the police will toss me in jail for kissing a schoolboy, Jade jokes.
As my lips touch hers, gingerly, I imagine she will turn into smoke, turn out to be a figment of my dreams. But she stays, under my lips, under my hips. Kissing Jade is magic: it is peaches so ripe the skin slides off, or butternut when butter melts into it, or chocolate on a rainy afternoon.
Her tongue, slithery as mango, wedges my teeth apart, toys with mine, then is gone again. Instinctively, my tongue forays after hers, deep into her sweet mouth.
Then she pulls away.
– Cool it, she laughs. I want it to last.
She pulls her cotton shirt over her head. Her breasts, freed, jelly bare and white under the moon. This is the moment of unveiling I have yearned for. I fall into a daze, transfixed as a chicken with its beak on a curved line chalked by a Zulu sangoma. I surface out of the daze into a feeling of fleeting panic, the panic I felt as a child in Durban faced with a choice of ice-cream. How to choose which nipple to lick first?
If this licking, this sucking of a girl is a sin, forgive me God but it is beautiful.
She tells me her lips are jealous of her nipples, so I kiss her lips again. Then, as the sky tints perlemoen pink, Jade unbuttons her shorts and slides my hand inside her lime-green panties. She tugs my white shorts down. My songololo is no longer the wormy, coy thing I have been ashamed of. He stands up, a charmed snake. I feel as if he will spit, but she whispers soothing things to calm him.
– You’re beautiful, she purrs at him.
I have never thought of him as beautiful before. She tugs off her shorts and the lime-green panties and flicks them away and playfully wings her legs open and to. I gaze in wonder at her mossy kloof.
Afterwards, as I lie naked on the sand next to her, I wonder if it means we will be together forever.
– It was magic, Gecko, but I have a boyfriend. He’s a bass guitarist in a band. I’m too old for you anyway, hey?
&nb
sp; She kisses my forehead, buttons up her sex and tucks away her breasts.
In the glow of sunrise she drops her lime-green panties on my face and goes.
Fishermen wade out to haul a net onto the beach.
Gulls cry and scraps of coloured slang carry on the breeze, over the drum and lull of the waves.
shebeen
I HEAD FOR JAMAICA Township again, this time in a taxi with Kala. He is coloured but has black chinas in the township and he goes to drink with them in a shebeen come Friday nights. Though I am seventeen, no longer the virgin boy of sixteen hooking on to Lars’s Levi’s, I still wish I had told someone where I was going. But who to tell? My father would kill me. Lars is lying low. Bach is long gone. Besides, it was a spur of the moment thing.
We, Zane and the Pniel boys and I, were playing cricket in the yard when Kala tuned me:
– Hey Gecko come along for a taxi ride to Jamaica, jus’ for a shebeen beer.
– I dunno, Kala, I, I ... I’m not so keen.
I did not tell him I am scared the police will catch me. Scared too of the rumour that they just drink sour, home-brewed beer in the shebeens and the sour beer makes a man do crazy things.
– Too scared to risk your soft white skin? Kala jibed.
So I had no choice. We caught the black mini-bus taxi just outside his school, a railway shed with a schoolyard stamped hard by the bare feet of kids skipping or playing soccer with a tennis ball or shuffling behind handmade wire jeeps. Wherever you go in South Africa you see such chock-full black taxis zooming along, but it is the first time I have been in one. My coins are handed forward from hand to hand to the driver and then the change comes back from hand to hand to me. The driver has his head way out of the window as he honks and whistles and hustles for another soul to sardine into his van.
Then we hit the teeth-jarring dirt roads of the township. The taxi weaves through endless rows of brick matchbox houses towards the shacks Matanga and the dancing girls taxi home to in the dark after another day of cooking Spur hamburgers and dust-binning and sweeping and petrol-jockeying and nodding ja baas, ja baas all day long in Paarl.
Blood Orange Page 9