Karoo Boy

by Troy Blacklaws

  My father’s voice echoes in my head: First one to spot a lion gets ten cents.

  Perhaps I will find Tennessee if I dig in the Indian teaboxes railed up from Muizenberg.

  We go on, a dead lizard in her pouch. We cycle around Jakkalsdraai Koppie and there is the reservoir. Not a bluewater palm oasis, just a round, brick dam of tea-coloured water, five foot deep. The reservoir reminds me of an unthatched Xhosa rondavel. A spidery shadow is cast across it by the still blades of a steel windmill.

  Marika rests her bicycle against the drinkwater sloot. She dips her head under water, then flings her wet hair up. Strands of her hair curl like octopus tendrils. I laugh and she squirts a jet of water at my face. I laugh again, but I am not sure I should do the same to her. While I waver, Marika scoops up water in her hands and pours it onto the clay sand beside the sloot. The thirsty earth drinks it in fast.

  – For the frogs, she says.

  I laugh again, thinking she is kidding me.

  – They suck up water out of the sand through their skin. It’s called osmosis.

  I remember my father telling me that there are fish that survive years under the dry cracked floor of dams and rivers. My father called them phoenix fish, as they wriggle out of the sand when the rain falls, the way the phoenix, after flaming to ashes, feathers to life again. The thought of fish and frogs and other throbbing things I have not dreamed of under my feet spooks me. I hope Marsden, who hides in reflections and shadows, does not skulk down below: a cold-skinned, blind throbbing.

  Then she lies down flat, her ear against the clay sand, as if she can hear the frogs osmosing down under.

  I peer over the brim of the reservoir and touch the water. It is cold after the water of the sloot.

  Then she is on her feet again. There is sand on her dress.

  – Turn around, she says.

  So I turn to gaze at the Karoo veld: just a few dips and koppies, like the moon.

  I spin around when I hear a splash. There lies her dress on the sand.

  She surfaces and says:

  – It’s so lekker. Come in.

  Standing close to the wall so Marika does not see me, I peel off my shorts and underpants together.

  I toe up the wall and teeter bare-assed on the brim. I am not sure whether to flip in backwards, like a diver from the rim of a Zodiac, or to twist to drop in head first. Either way Marika is going to see my songololo, close up.

  – Come on, there are no crocs, teases Marika.

  I can tell she is enjoying my awkwardness. I go for the Zodiac flip and sink down into the cool water tapped from a deep underworld river. The sun spears through the dusky water and I can see her stomach and legs, the colour of the underbelly of a frog. I see a smudge of black down by her hips, like a Chinese brushflick on canvas. I surface into the blue sky and the laughter spilling from Marika’s teeth.

  – Lekker, hey? she says, spitting water at me.

  This time I dare to spit back at her. She yelps and lunges away, floating her budding, nubby breasts.

  – It’s my favourite place in the world. I hate going to the public pool.

  – Me too.

  Until I saw Marta in her bikini with the watermelon motif, I never went to the public pool in Muizenberg, so bound by railings and rules. The sea was free. The reservoir is hardly a sea but still I get the feeling of floating, severed from the world. In the sea it is a feeling mingled with the fear of sharks and razor rocks. In the reservoir the feeling is mixed with a fear that Marika will laugh at my songololo, shrunk to a stub in the cold water. It just pulls back like a touched sea anemone.

  Marika dives under and her feet periscope out of the water. She handwalks along the floor of the reservoir, and her feet follow.

  I dive down and my feet go up. They drift apart like twins out of synch. Each foot wants to go finning away alone. I stay down, fighting to pull them together. I surface, spluttering.

  – How do you stay up on your surfboard with such awful balance? laughs Marika.

  – I surf on my feet, I say.

  Not revealing that a longboard is a barge of a surfboard and that balancing on it is hardly a circus act. You can beach a longboard like a canoe, because it does not sink as you slow down.

  – So, seaboy, how long can you stay under water?

  – I’m not sure. Maybe two minutes.

  – Go under and I’ll count one kangaroo, two kangaroo. Okay?

  – Okay.

  I dive under. For a while I enjoy the cool and her white skin, ghostly under the water like a photographic negative. I wonder how many kangaroos I have been down for. I shut my eyes to focus on taming my heartbeat and slowly uncorking bubbles. I drift in a black platanna zone.

  Two minutes maybe.

  My empty lungs burn and I see red behind my eyelids. Psychedelic sea anemones reel in a red sea. I kick out my feet and skin my toes.

  I suck in deep draughts of sky and hang on to the brim while my heart beats a runaway tomtom beat.

  Marika is out of the pool with her dress on over wet skin. Again she laughs at me, gasping platanna. I see the shadow of nipples under cloth. Marika swings her head to dry her tassled hair, the way a dog coming out of the sea shakes sea water and wetdog smell in your face.

  Behind her I see her white panties caught on the spiderweb spokes of her bicycle wheel. A breeze catches the cloth and the wheel turns a quarter turn.

  The blood on my toes begins to crust.

  – How long have you been in the Karoo? I ask Marika.

  – Forever, says Marika. I was born in Klipdorp.

  – Have you ever been away?

  – Just to Durban, for a holiday. Pa is always travelling, but he never takes me or Ma. Sometimes he gets drunk on his quarts of Hansa beer and hits Ma. In the morning, all babbalaas, he goes down on his knees and begs her to forgive him. Vergewe my, vergewe my, he sobs. And she says if Jesus forgives her, how can she not forgive him. But why would Jesus need to forgive her? All she does all day is read the Huisgenoot, keeping one eye on the maid to see she mops and does not burn the pots.

  Marika picks up a stone and chucks it at the windmill. It clangs against the steel.

  – I sometimes think of running away but there is nowhere in this desert to run to. And if you hitch, you end up raped or stabbed, or kidnapped by the Arabs.

  Marika, eyes veiled by the kind of beaded cloth you cover a jug with to keep the flies out the milk, jikas her hips in my head.

  – I once cycled out here, to the reservoir, with a blanket and a tin of Ouma rusks to camp out. I dipped the rusks in the coffee I cooked on the fire. Then I lay down, under the stars, and thought, this is the life: just me and the stars and fire and no sulking mother or sourpuss teachers.

  Another stone zings off a windmill blade.

  – I lay there until I heard a sound in the dark, just outside the firelight. It was the sound of teeth cracking bone and I was scared. Then I saw his eyes shine in the firelight and I thought: I am dead. It’s a leopard. Please God, make the leopard go away, I begged. But eyes stared fire at me. I jumped on my bike and pedalled like crazy. After a while I turned around and saw it was not a leopard after me, but a lynx. I dropped my bike to pick up stones to chuck at him. He dodged the stones. When I got on my bike again, he followed me.

  The lynx lopes after Marika, across the horizon of my imagination. She drops her panties in the sand, and he stoops to sniff at them.

  – Only when I rode under the orange lamps of Reservoir Road, did the lynx spin around and go back into the dark.

  He slinks back to the dying coals to pick up the abandoned bones that have to do instead.

  – When I got home Ma cried and Pa beat me with his belt until I bled. Then he begged me to forgive him. I spat at him and ran to my room. I smeared the blood on the sheet so my mother would see. Afterwards, as I lay on the bloodied sheet, I wondered if the lynx would have eaten me, or lain down by me under the mimosa. I wished I had chanced it with the lynx rather than runnin
g home to my doos of a Pa.

  My hand stings. I uncurl my fist to find I have cut my palm with the blade of my father’s Swiss Army pocket knife. Marika is so deep in her thoughts, she does not see. I lick the blood.

  – He’s still your father, I tell her.

  – You know, he makes me sick. One time I heard a sound like a cat lapping milk and peeped through the toilet keyhole to see Pa wanking over the Scope magazine. I wish he was dead, or sailed away like your pa.

  Marika’s disgust at her father’s lust makes me feel uneasy. I recall how my father told Marsden and me he had seen a snake in Bangkok slither inside a woman’s sex, how it somehow found its way out again, head first. I wonder if he saw other things he never dared tell his boys.

  – I want to travel the world when I get out of school, says Marika. I want to backpack through Europe, but Pa says it is the backpack girls who end up smoking dagga in Amsterdam and not shaving their armpits and whoring around.

  – I love my father, I tell her.

  – Hey, I’m sorry. But maybe your Pa did not hit you, hey?

  – Sometimes he did. I remember one afternoon, in Muizenberg, my brother and I were in the mood for monkeying around, so we teased Byron, the gardenboy, hoping he would drop his hoe and chase us. He was hoeing up the dried-out pumpkin vines. If he dug deeper he would unearth the skeletons of all the dogs my father buried over the years. Inye, zimbini, zintathu, we chanted to the tune of eeny meeny miny mo. Inye, zimbini, zintathu, catch a nigger by his toe, if he hollers let him go, inye, zimbini, zintathu. My father came out of his outhouse study with a tennis shoe in his hand. We bolted for the house. My father caught Marsden on the backdoor steps. I heard the thwacking of the tennis shoe on Marsden’s ass as I skidded into the kitchen. Hope was clattering away at the sink, the Sunlight foam flying. My mother was always telling her to go easy on the Sunlight. I dived for the curtained cupboard under the sink and skimmed along the waxed boards under Hope’s skirt. I had my knees under my chin. Fish heads eyed me from the dustbin. I heard the clatter and clank of china on the draining-board and felt the U-bend pipe dig into my ribs. I heard my father’s feet creak the boards. Have you seen Douglas? my father demanded of Hope. My stomach churned with fish stink and fear. No, Master, Hope said.

  – The same maid you have now? Marika wants to know.

  – The same Hope. She breastfed Marsden and me because my mother’s milk ran dry before we had drunk our fill. Her boy September was born six months before, so she still had milk. Anyway, she said: No, master. Then I heard my father’s footsteps fade. From somewhere deep in the house I heard my father calling me. I darted out from under the sink and headed for the door. Out in the yard, Marsden yelled: Run, Doug, run. And I ran, Chaka snapping at my flying heels. The front gate was just up ahead when my ribs thudded against the grass. My father was on top of me. The rubber sole of the Dunlop tackie stung like blazes.

  Marika twirls some strands of her hair into a string and chews on it.

  I throw a stone at the windmill. It flies soundlessly into the setting sun.

  – Afterwards, my father told us he never wanted to hear us call a black man nigger again because it was as rude as kaffir. Casting my eyes down in shame I saw Dunlop tattooed on my skin where my father missed my ass. He said we had to say sorry to Byron. Byron said: Kulungile, boys. I know you good boys.

  Marika kisses me on the cheek. My heart flies a boomerang loop around the windmill.

  – Come, she says. We better go home.

  She picks her panties off the spokes and pulls them on under her dress.

  I drop my bicycle in the grass amid a concert of crickets and a yammer of distant dogs under the Southern Cross, the foot slanting south to where the Atlantic and Indian run together.

  Under the stars in Malindi: ice clinks in the whiskey in my father’s hand on a stoep on the edge of the sea, and in his head whirl memories of me.

  Through the kitchen window I see my mother alone at the table. She has peeled the red hog’s head off a bottle of Gordon’s London Dry Gin. Doctor Zhivago lies face down. When she sees me in the open doorway, she hurls a tea caddy at me. It jangs off the door jamb and scatters tea over the chessboard lino.

  Chaka barks and skids across the floor in that foggy, foreign moment before he knows it is me.

  – Where on earth have you been? my mother yells.

  Chaka, cowed, ducks under the table.

  – I was out cycling with Marika, I stammer at the violence of her voice.

  – I’ve been worried sick.

  – I’m sorry, I mumble, on the verge of tears.

  Her voice mellows:

  – Dee, it would kill me if something happened to you. You must promise me always to come home for tea.

  Since we lived in Camden my mother calls supper tea, even if there is no tea to drink. I sulk and stare down at my sandals, islands in a sea of tea leaves. I wonder if you can smoke tea.

  Marsden and I overhear a UCT student on the train tell another that smoking the strings from under banana skins gives you a high, so we dry banana skins on the roof. Behind the cabins on the beach, we slit one of my Dad’s cigarettes and spill the tobacco onto a square of Cape Times and mix in strands of dry banana. We forget to roll in a filter and end up spluttering and spitting out tobacco on the sand.

  – I promise to be home for tea.

  Chaka, sensing the coast is clear, surfaces again, wagging his stub. It was a joke, right? I knew it was a joke, he grins.

  – I’m sorry I flew off the handle, Dee.

  She gets up and comes to me. I think she is going to hold me and I want her to, but she just gives me a butterfly kiss on the forehead and floats past me into her studio.

  – Dee, I need you to be good to me, you understand?

  I nod.

  – Be a dear and make your mother a g&t.

  I go into the kitchen and pour gin from the naked bottle. The Indian tonic is lukewarm, so she will want it on the rocks. My fingers stick to the tin of the ice tray and I have to hold the tray under cold water to free them again. My hand stings under the flow.

  I go back into the studio with the ice going clink clink in the glass, and a cube in my mouth. My mother has her head in her hands and I think she is crying but she tilts her head up and whisks hair out of her eyes.

  – Dee, come sit beside me.

  I join her on the old riempie bench she has in the studio.

  – I remember so vividly when you were born. You and Marsden lay crying on my stomach, covered in blood. I sang Blowin’ in the Wind to you. I had sung it you while you were still in my womb, and you both hushed as if you remembered the song. The first few days I couldn’t tell you apart, but you were Douglas and Marsden by the time we went home to the flat in Sea Point. Marsden, always sweet, would doze when he’d drunk his fill, but you were moody and needed rocking and singing. You would only fall asleep with your head nooked between my breasts.

  Rather than look into my mother’s eyes, I stare at the stinging slit in my palm. A toothless red zip.

  – You and Marsden were the fruit of my love, and though I sometimes yearned for lost freedom, I loved you with all my soul. Dee, you have to take care. If I lost you, I’d have no reason to go on.

  It seems unfair, in a world of hard balls and sharks and lynxes, to expect me to outfoot all the dangers fate throws my way. The weight of having to survive for my mother bears down on me. I wish my father would come and put up his feet and read the Cape Times. I would know then, as the ice clinked in his Jack Daniel’s, that I was free to run out into the dark to play fearlessly, just as I had swum freely in a sea of dancing kelp shadows when he was just a stone’s throw away.

  nagapie eyes

  I CARRY THE IMAGE of Marika through the jostle and jangle of school. In my mind I see beads of amber water on her skin. In a hazy dwaal, I snag my shoulder bone against the bones of others. Smudged sounds filter through a film of sweet illusion.

  My desk in Meneer de Beer’s
class is scarred by graffiti, furrowed by nibs and pocket knives. Indian blue ink has seeped into the wood. There is a hole from the days of inkwells and a groove to keep HB pencils from rolling down the slant of the desk. Under the flip-up lid: hard, dry tits of gum. Some boy has gouged out the word fuck. In my mind fucking is an impaling, a spearing. My love for Marika is too pure to want to fuck her. I want to dream her, colour her in.

  Meneer de Beer’s voice, on the sexuality of the avocado, rambles on. I gaze nagapie eyes at Marika. Though I yearn for her to glance at me, to signal to me that the reservoir was a beautiful thing, she stares ahead, chews a stubby pencil.

  In my mind she drifts alone across a desert of shifting dunes. Her footmarks flower in the sand. A mangy lynx lopes after her. It wants the water on her skin.

  Marika sucks in her lips and then blows them out at me with a pop sound and a widening of her eyes. The pop of her lips is the pop of a bluebottle on the beach when you jab it with a mussel shell. My heart tumbleturns. She loves me.

  Meneer de Beer drops his chalk. He bends for it and his tortoise-shell glasses slip from his bent-down head. He crushes the chalk underfoot as he fumbles with blind fingers through a fog of laughter.

  An image surfaces out of the developing paper of my mind: Moses’s hands flapping in the dust, a hopeless reaching for his stolen pass.

  Meneer de Beer’s glasses lie at my feet and I instinctively pick them up to hand to him.

  I glance at Marika. She tongues the tip of her nose. She loves me not.

  Then the glasses are in Meneer de Beer’s palm. In that instant before hanging them on the bridge of his nose, he squinches his eyes at us like a dazed mole unearthed by a dog. Then his eyeballs focus through the lenses and the class falls silent. He is the teacher again.

  A crow pecks at its reflection in the windowpane, a waxy oilslick glint in its feathers.

  – Thank you, boy, says Meneer de Beer.

  Someone from the rows of desks behind me makes the sound of a plughole spinning water down, but quits when Meneer de Beer glares at the class. Joost sniggers and he is called to the front. Joost bends over the desk, his grey shorts spanning taut. Meneer de Beer chalks his cane. It is a custom of his, to prove his skill.