by John Coetzee
Dance of the freak green gold
John Coetzee
“... I thought about that time I’d seen my uncle filling a glass jar with some slimy, green stuff he’d brought home from the dam next to the power station. When I’d asked him what he was going to do with it, he’d just looked very secretive and said something about a very valuable treasure that was hidden in the dam.”
Only a stupid fairy tale, Rick Williams continues to brood while travelling with his mother towards Ashby – a small village where the family is going to move in with Uncle Bert, an eccentric shift engineer who works at the old power station. Once again, Uncle Bert is busy with one of his crazy schemes – and what about the two sinister “gypsies”, a young girl and her brother, who are secretly experimenting with transparent tubes of bubbling green goo at their camping place on the opposite side of the dam? Rick and his new friend, Sipho Khumalo, decide to combine their skills to find out exactly what is going on. But then some startling events take place in rapid succession: a powerful explosion rocks the old power station – an incident for which Uncle Bert is blamed – and a group of thugs set upon the two so-called gypsies to drive them away. And while the mystery of the “green gold” in the dam is being unravelled, Rick falls passionately in love with the stunning Inez Gonzales.
In this prize-winning story, a bigger picture also unfolds: a thought-provoking scientific approach to tackling a tremendous problem all humanity is facing this century.
Other books in English by John Coetzee, published by Tafelberg
Accident on Rocky Pass (1982)
Struben’s Golden Valley (1984)
Flint and the Red Desert (1986)
Flint and the Dynamite Train (1987)
The Message (1991)
Black Swan Down (2007)
This book was awarded the
2007 Sanlam Silver Prize for Youth Literature
To my wife, Lene,
and my family, with love
Chapter 1
“Are you all right, Rick?”
That was my mom, trying to get through to me from the driver’s seat of her grey 4 x 4 Colt while speeding like crazy down the long hill into Nelspruit. But what could I say? The hurt of what had happened was still so raw inside me that I wasn’t able to speak just then. It felt like an invisible cord, stretching from my brain to the town where I had lived all my life, was doing its best to hold me back. But it wasn’t succeeding. It was just stretching… stretching… stretching…
My mom sounded even more uptight when I heard her voice again. “Didn’t you hear me, Rick? I said, are you all right?”
I still found it impossible to squeeze a reply through my tightly zipped lips.
“Look, we’ve been through this so many times,” my mom said grimly while taking her eyes off the road and glaring at me. “It was bound to happen, and now it has happened. I just had to do it, see, and there’s nothing I can do to change anything now, is there, Rick?”
I shut my burning eyes. The only person in the world I badly wanted to have with me right then was my dad. Nobody else.
My mom suddenly gripped the steering wheel so hard that her knuckles turned bone-white. “Look, Rick, I’m only trying to help you, okay! But let me tell you something – this is going to be much harder for me than for you and Susie.”
If the 4 x 4 hadn’t been travelling so fast right then, I would have jumped out onto the road and run all the way back home as fast as I could go. But then the truth punched me in the guts once more – we didn’t have a home to go back to anymore!
When my mom spoke again, I could hear hot tears of anger pouring into her voice. “It was your father’s fault. Cheating on me all the time while he was on those so-called business trips of his! How could he have been such a —”. She stopped short and, with closed eyes, took a deep breath. “Okay, so I did what I had to do, and who can blame me?”
I sat staring ahead of me, thinking only civilised thoughts about my dad because I knew he wasn’t nearly as bad as Mom was lately making him out to be.
“Don’t just sit there, Rick,” she continued. “Say something… just… anything!”
That was when I saw a traffic officer stepping out from under a bright red African flame tree and thrusting out a wide hand, which clearly meant “STOP”.
Tyres screeched on the tarmac and the stench of burning rubber slammed up my nostrils. A hooter blew furiously from somewhere in front of us. An angry driver waved his fist at my mom and shouted a couple of rude words at her while she swung sharply to the side of the road, stopping in a cloud of swirling reddish dust.
My little sister, who was still fast asleep on the back seat, woke up and started to bawl like a piglet being slaughtered.
“Oh please be quiet, Susie!” my mom said while pressing the button on the door next to her. The little motor whined softly as the window slid down, and she spoke to the cop, sounding very aggressive. “What on earth’s the matter, officer? You nearly made me have a serious accident.”
The traffic officer frowned while raising the peak of his cap a little higher on his dark brown forehead and peered through the open window. He first looked at me, then at Susie and then at our luggage stacked in the back of the 4 x 4. When he said something at last, his deep voice sounded polite but firm at the same time. “It seems you’re not planning to arrive alive at your holiday place, ma’am.”
My mom gave him a surprised look. “Holiday? We are definitely not going on any holiday. And what have I done wrong anyway?”
“Red traffic light, ma’am. Your driving licence, please.”
She shook her head, made a loud clicking sound with her tongue, and while she searched around in her handbag a lock of her hay-coloured hair tumbled over her flushed face. “Here it is. Let me tell you, I passed the test for my driver’s licence ages ago – and with flying colours too.”
The officer examined the little plastic-covered card, and asked my mom a few questions, like her postal address and things like that, which he wrote down on a pad of forms. Then he took a leisurely walk around the 4 x 4 and wrote some more things down. Susie started whimpering and my mom told her to be quiet: “Shush, Susie!”
When he came back to the window he handed my mom the form he had torn from the pad.
Her bright blue eyes opened wide as she read what he had written down. Then she took a very deep breath, which must have filled her lungs almost to bursting point. “Where do you think I’m going to get that kind of money from?”
The whiteness of the cop’s teeth suddenly disappeared behind the darkness of his lips as they clamped shut.
Sensing more trouble coming, my mom quickly backtracked. “Look, I’m sorry officer. You don’t know what I’ve been through lately. First, having to divorce my husband. Then losing the good job I had here in Nelspruit. And now being forced to take my 15-year-old son and my four-year-old daughter to go and live in a miserable little dorp up on the Highveld, right in the middle of nowhere! I really don’t know how we’re going to survive up there. Something like this won’t ever happen again, I promise you. Please – cancel the ticket and let me off this one time. I beg you with all my heart. Please, officer.”
His teeth again showed briefly. “Sorry, ma’am.”
“Please, officer…” she tried once more, but he was already walking back to the tree without looking back.
My mom stepped on the accelerator and drove off, clearly very upset; again someone hooted as she went through the next red light down the road too.
“Never … never will this town see me again!” she shouted when some other driver also had the audacity to hoot at her.
The lush greenery of Mpumalanga sped by on either side of t
he road, and the stabbing heartache of never again being able to see any of my mates back there in the town hit me like sharp hammer blows. I could feel the invisible cord tied to my brain stretching to its limit and suddenly snapping. And that’s when I felt my own tears spilling down my cheeks, tasting like lukewarm seawater in the corners of my mouth.
My mom drove on and on. For a long time neither of us spoke until, sometime later, we reached the top of the escarpment where the Highveld started. That was when she let out a long, drawn- out sigh that came from somewhere deep inside her body. “Well, I suppose we’ll just have to calm down and make the best of things once we get there, won’t we, Rick?”
I could feel my hackles rising again. “How am I going to do that, Mom? I’ve lost all the friends I’ve ever had. I’ve got absolutely nobody left now.”
“Well, you’ll just have to get used to it for a while,” she said quietly. “Look, I know Uncle Bert can be a bit of a pain in the neck sometimes, but he’s not so bad, is he, Rick? After all, as you already know, he has a very responsible job at the Ashby power station.”
Just hearing my uncle’s name again was enough to turn my stomach into a cauldron of boiling acid. If there was one person on this planet I never wanted to see again, it was Uncle Bert!
Sensing my negative attitude, she continued. “Where else could the three of us have gone to, Rick? After all, Uncle Bert is my brother, you know… and that’s what one’s family is there for, isn’t it? He’s the only blood relative we’ve got left, and so I phoned him in sheer desperation the other day – and thank goodness he agreed to give us a roof over our heads for a while!”
That did nothing to pacify me. I kept my thoughts to myself, all the while gazing at the rows of khaki-coloured maize stalks stretching as far as the eye could see on either side of the road. It looked so different up here on the monotonous flatness of the Highveld, and for a moment I found myself wondering what could have killed off all that maize.
“Didn’t you hear what I said, Rick?” my mom spoke again. “Why don’t you talk to me?”
I took a deep breath and spat the words out like bitter lemon pips. “Uncle Bert hates me, Mom! He always says such crazy things. He’s going to be just the same again as he’s been all the other times we’ve been to visit him. It’ll be like those times when Dad used to go there with us. And Dad also thinks Uncle Bert’s a lunatic. He said so often enough, didn’t he?”
From the corner of my eye, I saw her lips trembling; it was quite clear that she was very distressed and close to tears. “Oh Rick, please don’t make things even more difficult for me now.”
I don’t really know whose fault it was that things had turned so sour between my mom and dad. All I know is that I was completely devastated when my mom had said the divorce had come through. I had always got on very well with my dad, although, to be quite honest, I didn’t really see much of him. He was always travelling all over the country as a rep for some small chemical company that was forever on the verge of bankruptcy. But whenever he did come home, he was always very good to Susie and me, bringing us presents, taking us to the movies and giving us a good time. But he and my mom would sometimes end up arguing about some woman he’d met on one of his trips. And of course about money and all that kind of thing. So at times like that, I always went off to the mall in a foul mood to get away to where all my mates were – to the guys and girls that were absolutely normal, like me.
“You’ll just have to be polite to Uncle Bert and help him around the place,” my mom said, trying to sound a bit more friendly. “After all, you can learn a lot from him, you know. He really has a lot of knowledge about all kinds of scientific things.”
“Like what, Mom? Like trying to make pumpkins grow as big as Wendy houses and tomatoes as big as beach balls in that stuffy old greenhouse of his – all nice and juicy for him to make a big fortune out of them.”
My mom laughed for the first time on the miserable trip to the miserable place we were heading for. “Oh, don’t be silly, Rick! You’re really exaggerating now, aren’t you?”
“It’s the honest truth, Mom. That’s what I heard Uncle Bert telling Dad the last time we went to visit him over that long weekend last year. Uncle Bert always has so many crazy schemes – but none of them ever come to anything.”
“Well, that’s really none of our business, is it, Rick?”
In the long silence that followed, I thought about that time I’d seen my uncle filling a glass jar with some slimy, green stuff he’d brought home from the dam next to the power station. When I’d asked him what he was going to do with it, he’d just looked very secretive and said something about a very valuable treasure that was hidden in the dam. Sheesh! I suppose he must have thought I still believed in the tooth fairy and other weird things that small kids like my little sister Susie believe in.
After a while the silence became unbearable, and I decided there and then to push on with the argument about that crazy uncle of mine. “It’s Uncle Bert who’s always exaggerating about all kinds of things, Mom. When I was as old as Susie is now, he told me that an asteroid from outer space was going to slam into the earth and kill everybody on it. Scared the hell out of me! But it didn’t happen, did it, Mom? Otherwise we’d all be dead right now, wouldn’t we? How could he lie to me like that?”
“Oh, Uncle Bert is just a bit eccentric, that’s all. Surely you know that by now, don’t you, Rick? Come on, we’ll just have to show him that we are very grateful to him for taking us in until I can get back on my feet again somewhere one day.”
After that we kept our thoughts to ourselves until much later in the afternoon, when two long smokestacks with grey fumes billowing from them, and four gigantic, curved concrete cooling towers with white vapours hovering like clouds above them, loomed up on the horizon: Ashby power station. That was when my heart sank again, thinking about the kind of people who would live and work around there. And the thought of having to go to some miserable little school with the crowd of dim-witted thugs that were sure to attend it made me feel even worse.
I sensed my mom glancing me again. “I’m sure it won’t be as bad as you think, Rick. You’ll make a few good friends there once we’ve settled down, and everything will be okay.”
I just saw red. “I don’t want to talk about it, Mom.”
A steady breeze blowing towards us soon brought the familiar ‘rotten egg’ smell of the fumes from the power station into the 4 x 4. I began to feel nauseous. And it must have made Susie feel sick too, because she started to bawl again and, hugging her old knitted doll, Polly, she desperately cried out that she wanted to throw up.
“Can’t you see what it’s doing to us already, Mom,” I pleaded. “Please let’s go back home!”
My mom again sounded as if she was reaching the end of her tether. “Listen to me now, Rick. We don’t have a home anymore, see. Ashby is going to be our living quarters for quite a long time to come, and we’ll just have to be very grateful to have a roof over our heads.”
So I decided it was time to zip up again and I did just that.
At last we drove past the long ash dump and the sombre, grey buildings of the power station and into the village near the edge of the large dam. Nothing had really changed since we had been there last. As a matter of fact, the only difference was that it looked even crummier than before. There was hardly any paint left on the rusty corrugated iron roofs of the cottages, and most of the gardens around them looked like miniature junkyards. My Uncle Bert’s cottage looked equally dilapidated, and his mud-splattered, dark blue Bantam bakkie next to the garage looked as if it had been hauled out of the swamp on the other side of the dam.
Then I saw Uncle Bert coming towards us in his greasy blue overalls and dirty yellow safety helmet, with tufts of greying curls sticking out from under it. He still looked the same as he had when I last saw him. And from the frosty look in his greyish-blue eyes as he peered at us through the thick lenses of his specs, it was obvious that he wasn’t al
l that delighted to see us, in spite of the good things my mom had said about him earlier on.
When my mom got out of the 4 x 4 and went up to him to give him a hug, he quickly stepped back and grunted “Hello, Maureen.” Same old Uncle Bert.
“Hello, Bert,” my mom said, putting on a false cheerful front, like she always does whenever she feels hurt and embarrassed. “It’s good to see you again. Thanks so much for helping us out. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you, Bert. I really don’t know what we would have done if you hadn’t agreed to let us stay with you – just for a while, until I can get back on my feet again.”
He just shook his head and snorted. “That ex-husband of yours is to blame. I told you many times you should have divorced him long ago, but you wouldn’t listen to me, would you, Maureen?”
My mom let out a weary sigh. “It’s been a long drive, and we’re really pooped, Bert.”
“All right, we’ll talk about it later,” he mumbled.
“Where would you like us to put our luggage, Bert?” my mom wanted to know.
“Your things and Susie’s things can go into the main bedroom and Rick’s into the other room,” he said.
My mom sounded very surprised. “But where are you going to stay, Bert?”
“Don’t you worry about that. I’ve already set myself up in the garage.”
“No, Bert. That really wouldn’t be fair on you! Why should you be deprived of your own home because of us? I was under the impression that Rick would be staying in the garage. Not you.”
He gave my mom one of his usual ‘penguin on ice’ looks. “This is how it’s going to be, Maureen. You three will be in the cottage and I’ll be in the garage. That’s that, see! And the garage will be strictly out of bounds to everyone,” he added, giving me a warning look.
The way he said that made me suspect that he was again busy with one of his secret schemes or projects, or whatever one could call them. But none of the things he was always busy with had ever interested me anyway, so I didn’t really care.