The old coloured man by the lagoon is still watching us, thinking maybe: What a carry-on for folks with a big brick house and grass yard and blackmama maid.
He wanders off with a Masai lamp stand in hand. It looks like the parasols the coloureds carry down Adderley Street during the Coon Carnival. Lips and eyes painted white and wide like the lips and eyes of a clown. Parasols jousting at the sky to the beat of the song that goes: My geliefde hang in die bos, my geliefde hang in die bos, my gelieeefde hang in die bitterbessiebos.
My love hangs in the bitterberry bush. The love of my mother for my father hangs in the bitterberry bush. It is as dead as a lizard spiked on a thorn by a butcher bird. It died when the ball hit my brother’s head.
I pick up black-eyed, orange seeds from under the coral tree, among the tumbling relics of our front room. I pocket them because my father, teller of myths, told me they are juju seeds, they bring good luck.
– I want you to go back to school tomorrow, my mother says.
I do not want to ride the train without spinning a coin with Marsden for the window seat. I do not want the boys at school staring at me, the undead twin. But then I remember Mister Skinner, who coaches cricket. We schoolboys call him Skin for short. I know Skin will look into my eyes and say:
– Douglas, I’m sorry your brother is dead.
The other teachers will cast sorrowful glances at me and go on as if nothing has changed. I know this because of the time Drew Castle’s mother died when a tossed stone flew through her windshield. Skin was the only teacher who went up to him and looked Drew in the eyes and said: I’m sorry.
Cape Town is an unafrican Africa where spears turn into lamp stands, and elephants into foot stools. An Africa of dogs and cats and garden gnomes. Death catches you off guard, lulled by the tunes of Radio 5, or playing cricket on the beach.
So, I will go to school again. I finger the juju seeds of the coral, hoping they will ward death away from me.
I walk down along the Zandvlei lagoon as the sun falls behind the Muizenberg mountain, then jaywalk across the Strandfontein road, jumping a gap in the motorcars that bead along the tar.
The fisherman who sold fish on Christmas day is still dangling snoek and dodging motorcars, jaunty and cocky as ever.
The sea wind sweeps high-tide sand across the road.
On the far side of the half-moon bay the dying sun stains the Hottentots Holland Mountains a rusty orange. Coloured fisher-men beach their nets beyond Sunrise Beach, but my father is not there among the flocking seagulls and the fish flipping over like bluegum leaves in a breeze.
I walk on the beach, past the lemon and pink and sky-blue cabins.
There is my father, on the rocks where the beach runs out and the surfers ride the dusk tide. Above the rocks is the railway that snakes along the shore to Simonstown through St James, Kalk Bay, Clovelly and Fish Hoek. My father gazes out to sea, still as a cormorant watching the rock pools for a flicker of fish.
He senses me near him. For a moment there is the old spark in his eyes, as if I may just be my brother and it was all a dream. But he sees it is me and, in seeing me, sees the boy he killed. His eyes swivel out to sea again. He combs his fingers through my hair, but it is not long before his hand goes limp on my head. I know that he is somewhere out there beyond the surfers, beyond Seal Island. I want to call him back but all I do is stare at my feet in the rock pool, at the way the water warps my feet so they jut out skew from the end of my legs.
As I stare, a face falls into focus and Marsden stares back at me.
– Douglas, I am going away.
I flinch. The face in the water fades. An empty black mussel gapes at my toes.
– Where will you go?
– I’m not sure. Maybe east.
I see my father sailing east along the coast as far as Malindi, where Bo Hansen will put him up. Maybe he will pick up the novel he began when he and my mother lived in Kenya. He always dreamed of being an author, but with Marsden and me on his hands he never had the time to write for himself, just for the paper.
When Marsden and I were nine my father was sent to London for a year by the Cape Times to report on the hippies who stood outside South Africa House in Trafalgar Square, chanting for freedom in South Africa. We lived in Camden, close to the zoo and Camden Market and the reggae-coloured barges on the canal. But when I think of England, I always think of the sun-flared day when we rowed on the river at Hampton.
My father at the oars of the skiff, Marsden and I trailing our hands in the green water. No fear of sharks, just ducks and swans to throw stale bread to.
Then we came to Muizenberg, to the house on the lagoon, six thousand miles south of Camden. Every day for years my father railed into the city to edit on the news desk. Then, a year ago, when Soweto fired up, he gave up editing to freelance. He wrote about the gangs in the townships, about the bergies, down-and-outs who camp under canvas or tattered beach umbrellas on the mountain slopes, about the hobos, who kip under newspaper in parks, maybe kipping under my father’s stories.
And he wrote about the Crossroads squatters. One time, Marsden and I went along to Crossroads shantytown with my father. He wanted to photograph the police bulldozing down the shacks. I saw mothers gather their world in bags and give their children rubbery chicken feet to gnaw on. I saw men jab futile fists at the police. I saw shacks tumble down under bulldozers.
Though my father was forever out hunting stories or typing them up in his study, on Saturdays he was free to watch Marsden and me play cricket. When we played in the Boland he drove us out there in the grey tailfinned Benz: Indlovu, Xhosa for elephant.
Indlovu rusts in the salty wind, but my father always loved her. He rode her with one hand on the wheel, whistling the tunes on Radio 5.
Coasting along the Strandfontein road to Stellenbosch: the sun glinting on the Benz star up front, cool salty wind rivers in, my father taps a beat on the dashboard with his fingertips. Creedence Clearwater or Fleetwood Mac or The Beach Boys floating out the windows, mingling with the smell of the sea.
Feet in a rock pool. Limp hand on my head. No music floating out to sea. Just my father and I, so still a sandpiper flits by a few feet away. It halts, wagtails for a moment, and then flits on again.
– Who will watch me play cricket?
I wonder if he still dreams of me playing for the province. I spend most summer afternoons after school caged in the cricket nets while others surf or cruise the downtown cafés or go to the flicks in Rondebosch. I am good at batting but when I field, my eyes drift, and I gaze up at Table Mountain, some days moody grey, some days tinted the ochre of fired clay. My mind is not focused enough for me to make it in cricket.
– From now on you have to play for yourself, Douglas.
A stone’s throw away a coloured man catches an octopus among the rocks. He holds it up to the sky and it ropes around his arm. With a flick, he turns it inside out and dashes it down on the rocks. He gathers the squirming jelly fronds and flings it down again and again to pulp its rubber flesh.
– I have something for you.
In his hand is his Zippo lighter and his Swiss Army pocket knife. Marsden and I always fought over who would get the Zippo and who the pocket knife when my father thought us old enough for knives and fire.
– You’re a big boy, Douglas.
I had always imagined I would be over the moon if he ever gave either to me, but I just pocket them. I stare out to sea and recall the myth my father told Marsden and me on the Kalk Bay harbour wall, of how love came out of the sea.
The blood of Zeus dripped into the deep water beyond the breakers and mingled with the sea foam, and Venus was born. Dolphins fed her and held sharks at bay. When she was a woman with mango breasts, she waded ashore onto the sliver of beach in Kalk Bay harbour and sent the Kalk Bay whalers so crazy with longing they flung themselves from Skeleton Rock.
Now Venus has gone back to the sea, among kelp lilting dark as shark shadows.
red bait
THE COLD BAY WIND gnaws at my cheeks as I stand on the Valsbaai platform, waiting for the train from Simonstown.
Schoolboys in uniform play football with a tennis ball, scuffing their school shoes. Schoolgirls hold on to their wind-tugged skirts above bare knees and short white socks and black Bata sandals.
The girls think the boys are childish, chasing a ball across the platform. The boys are glad they do not have skirts that blow up in the wind so they are free to chase a ball. The boys and girls sometimes glance at me, standing alone in the cold wind. No doubt they think: There’s Douglas. Him with the dead twin.
But they glance away guiltily when I catch their eye.
Businessmen try to catch their Cape Times from blowing away across the tracks.
SOWETO SCHOOLS BURN, the headlines cry.
There is a photo of a building in flames and the black gutted carcass of a bus in the foreground with schoolchildren dancing around it. In the distance you can make out the army trucks. The guns of the soldiers on the back of the trucks aim up at the sky, like the legs of a flipped-over insect.
The back page says there is a rumour of a rugby tour by the Pumas of Argentina. The All Blacks and the Lions do not want to play the Springboks, because of apartheid. Oom Jan says it’s because they are scared of being buggered up by the Springboks again.
At the level crossing the boom swings down and the motorcars jam.
I want to jump the tracks and catch a train going the other way, away from Rondebosch, away from school. Get off at Kalk Bay and dangle red bait to catch fish from the harbour wall.
The train comes into sight.
There is a scrambling for rucksacks and sport bags. A girl struggles with a guitar and sports gear and school books:
– Can I carry something for you? I offer.
Her cheeks tint.
– Okay, she says, and swings me her rucksack.
It is heavy. Full of biology and history books, no doubt.
– Grazie, she says as the train jolts on. I’ll see you, hey.
She goes to join other girls and I hear them call her Marta.
Marta, with her ginger hair twisted into pigtails, makes my head fizz. I wish she would sit beside me to fill out, colour in the gaping hole of Marsden gone. But she abandons me to the emptiness I border on, giving all the colour and life of her to the other girls. Her pigtails flick like flywhisks when she swings her head.
My cheek against the cold glass, I see the world through a zoom lens: foreground of yards and dogs and bicycles in a blur, and Table Mountain in focus. Without a jostle for the window seat there is no fun in it. My rucksack, on the seat beside me, does not mind not having a view, never nudges, never rubs against me.
I fish the dog-eared copy of The Old Man and the Sea out of my blazer pocket. Miss Forster, my English teacher from last year in standard six, gave it to me. Miss Forster who wore frocks so summery you could see the curve of her breasts when she stood by the window. Now she has gone to Amsterdam for good. Oom Jan says the whites who voetsak overseas are cowards. They suck the fruit of the land while it is sweet and then, when it turns bitter, they run. My father says exile is a hard road. They do not waltz off to London and Amsterdam and Tasmania on a whim. But Oom Jan snorts, and downs another long sluk of Lion Lager. Anyway, it is better that those who do not love South Africa go, Oom Jan reckons. My father says he should be open-minded. Just because you leave something behind does not mean you do not love it. Oom Jan says it is the folk with a British passport in the back pocket who are so open-minded, as they know they can bugger off when the pawpaw hits the fan. And so it goes.
The Old Man and the Sea: Old man Santiago dreams of Africa, of white beaches and roaring surf. He tells the boy he has seen lions on the beach at dusk.
Maybe in Malindi or somewhere up the coast of East Africa you will see a lion on the beach, but in the Cape the lions have been hunted dead.
In his dreams Santiago smells the smell of Africa.
I wonder if he smells reeking kelp carried on the sea wind or the stink of snoek in the sun or the tang of bluegum or the dust snuff of a dirt road.
The school, a private school, is shaded by stone pines and islanded by a sea of fields. Among all the white boys are a handful of Indians, blacks and coloureds. This is why Marsden and I were sent here, instead of going to the all-white government school in Muizenberg. My father wants us to grow up colour-blind. Oom Jan says the kind of fancy black boys pussyfooting across the cricket pitch at a private school are not the same as the barefoot black boys on the farm, just as he says American negroes like Muhammad Ali are not the same as your African black.
To skip the awkwardness of hanging around amid whispers and glances, I hide behind the cricket nets till the bell goes. The Old Man and the Sea is falling apart from being carted around in my pocket. I open it at random and read for the mood and echo of Miss Forster’s voice. The school bell calls me back from the faraway sea where sharks strip the old man’s fish to the bone. I have lost track of time. The timetable I was sent in the post says I have Mister Jansen, the history teacher, known for beating the hell out of the standard sevens because the sevens are always up to all sorts of high jinks.
I arrive breathless at Mister Jansen’s door, expecting him to yell, but he just flashes his tobacco-yellowed teeth at me.
– You must be Douglas.
He does not offer a word on Marsden. He just hands me my book and bids me to a desk right under his nose. His eyebrows are paintbrushes of hog hair.
The boys cast their eyes down at pencilled textbooks but risk staring at me when he turns to chalk the blackboard again. I wish I was handlining for fish in Kalk Bay or visiting Miss Forster in Amsterdam.
I walk down a shadowy alley in Amsterdam. In the pink light of a window I glimpse a red garter against white skin, before my father’s hand tugs at mine.
In my dreams it is Miss Forster dangling red bait in the shadows.
When the bell goes I am sucked into a river of schoolboys. I catch Marsden’s name, a float bobbing on the surface of a tumbling tide. Oliver weaves towards me, against the flow.
– Hey, Douglas, there’s a cool karate flick on in town. A few of us are going Friday if you wanna come.
I know it is his way of saying sorry about Marsden.
– Sorry. My mother doesn’t want me railing back out to Muizenberg after dark.
My mother does not want me to see karate flicks either. But this I do not tell him.
– Pity, says Oliver.
I get the feeling he is relieved.
The next class is with Skin. Though I know him from cricket, I have not yet been taught by him. He does not even glance at me, as if I have not missed a thing. As if he has not heard. He settles the class and says we have to read The Great Gatsby, while he plays a jazz record in the background. I do not have the book yet so he says I should go with him to the book room and I follow him.
The book room is a naked bulb and books stacked to the roof. I make out a few titles: Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men.
He dusts a copy of The Great Gatsby against his cords, and hands it to me.
– Douglas, I was dreadfully sorry to hear about your brother.
I stare at the dust smear on his cords as tears well in my eyes.
– I’ll miss Marsden on the cricket pitch. But I hope you’ll play on, in spite of everything.
– I want to play on, I sob.
My tears fall on to the cover of The Great Gatsby, a fiery tiger-skin pattern.
I mop the tears away with my sleeve.
– I am sorry about the book, I say.
And Skin reaches his arms out and holds me and I cry. His shirt is all wet with my crying. I want to cry against his shirt forever but part of me is ashamed about the shirt.
– Look, why don’t we take a drive down to Sea Point after cricket. We’ll see the sun go down from the Hard Rock, then I’ll drive you home.
– To Muizenberg? It’s far.
– We’ll go via Hout Bay. I love the climb over Chapman’s Peak.
– I don’t have my cricket togs along.
– You could catch up with Gatsby in the library, or watch the practice.
– Okay, I nod.
– Good lad. Give your mother a bell, so she knows you’re with me.
blue grass
THE LIBRARY IS HAUNTED by Old Shuttlecock, who stocks it up with books on Hitler and submarines. He is forever scuttling to the boys’ john, keys a-jingle, to run the keys under a tap. Then he swings them on their string till they dry. He scares the hell out of schoolboys with his jangling keys, and he resents lending out books to savages like us. Still, I risk running into the war-crazed Old Shuttlecock rather than have the boys gawk at me through the nets.
From a dark corner of the library I hear the distant crack of cricket balls against wood.
I open The Great Gatsby at random. Lines underlined in a wavy freehand catch my eye. I read of blue grass and yellow cocktail music and the earth lurching away from the sun.
When the ball stoned Marsden’s head, just in front of his ear-hole, I had the feeling the earth jerked away from the sun.
Now the earth floats unanchored in space.
– Come on then, Skin calls.
He is in his cricket whites. His hair is ruffled and his pants are stained red from rubbing the ball.
I pack the book into my rucksack and follow him out into the schoolyard. Oliver stands by a tap with a cluster of other boys who are splashing their faces and laughing. The laughter fades out as Skin and I go by. They look at their shoes and murmur to the teacher: ’noon, sir.
– Afternoon, boys, says Skin.
I can tell by the jaunty skip of his walk that he loves being the schoolmaster, being called sir.
– So, how’d you get on with Gatsby? Skin wants to know.
– I just dipped into the story, I tell him, conscious of the boys’ eyes on us as we follow the curve of the cricket pitch to where his sky-blue Peugeot convertible is parked under the stone pines.
Karoo Boy Page 2