A few miles out, a hawk on a telegraph pole tilts an eye at me. Apart from random koppies and gullies and, sometimes, a koala gum shading a picnic spot, the veld is flat. It gives no hint of the mountains that will thrust up through the sand when I get to the Boland.
By nine the sun begins to burn and I imagine rockrabbits hiding under stones. Only the lizards stay out, etched like bushman paintings against stone.
I bite into a Granny Smith from the tuckbox of padkos Hope packed for me. Such apples they export overseas, to London and Amsterdam.
I squint out the sun as the road unwinds dizzily.
It begins to seep into my head that my tuckbox days are over and that I will have to find food alone.
I see a small buck on the peak of a distant koppie. A dikdik, or a duiker maybe. Or just a stray dog.
As I cross the vast veld under a pelting sun, images of Cape Town pop up in my head:
In front of the Harbour Café, seals scull lazily, their stomachs turned to the sun.
The patchwork of canvas-shaded stalls of Greenmarket Square.
The parrotfeather colours of the fishing boats in Hout Bay.
The Atlantic breaks against the Kalk Bay harbour wall. In the lagoon calm of the harbour, fish surface to nibble at red bait or bread crusts.
The compass hand of Cecil John Rhodes signposts the un-discovered hinterland northeast. Trek this tack over the mountains and through the Karoo and beyond, and you will find diamonds and gold.
The car gives up the ghost in Banhoek, on the hill beyond Pniel. I freewheel back down the hill to a sad, roadside garage. A cigarette stub dances in the corner of the mechanic’s mouth as he mumbles his verdict.
– Engine’s shot.
– Will you give me something for the car?
He smears grease on the bib of his overall and stares down the road to Pniel. I wonder if he has heard me.
– Is she worth anything?
– Two hundred rand, maybe.
– Two hundred rand?
– Might get something for the tyres.
I am glad Moses does not see me pocket the rand notes as dirty as a dipstick cloth. All the Sunday afternoons of tinkering under the hood or staring up at the diff, reduced to a few red notes.
I grab the duffelbag from the boot, and the Basotho blanket from the backseat, and walk uphill, lugging a heavy heart. I cannot bear to turn around. I know the yellow Volvo, jilted, abandoned, gazes her accusing headlights after me.
Further up the hill, I stop to buy hanepoot jam from a farm stall. I dip my finger into the hanepoot and lick it.
There is a dam just below the road, and the road bends around it. I climb through the fence and slither down the sandy slope to wash the stickiness away. The water is low and you can see the frame of a half-sunk bicycle. Three Egyptian geese glide further out, and watch me wash in water stained orange by the clay.
Back on the road, I thumb the cars that whine by. A blue Ford tractor rumbles along, towing a train of empty fruitbins that go clatter, clatter clank. The Egyptian geese beat the water with their wings, then fly over away towards the Simonsberg. I run after the tractor and jump onto the running-board of the trailer, the way the blacks do at dusk on Oom Jan’s farm, after the last shift of fruitpicking. The driver turns around and waves me away. I just wave back at him. He shakes his head but drives on.
Sitting on the rim of a fruitbin, I watch the roadside pines go by and, behind the pines, the fruit Moses dreams of.
The tractor turns off the road just before Stellenbosch. I jump down and watch the tractor rattle out of sight along a dirt road.
I walk downhill on the rippling edge of the tar, past the bus depot and into the coloured quarter of Idas Valley.
I sit on the steps in front of the café in the afternoon sun, washing spicy samosa down with neon-yellow Pinenut.
Then I walk to the crossroads, and I go up to cars when they stop at the light, the way beggars and newspaper boys do. A farmer in a bakkie says he can give me a ride as far as Spier, the wine farm.
– From there you can easy get a lift to Muizenberg.
It turns out he knows Oom Jan and that they once went fishing together in South West Africa.
At Spier, I stand by the side of the road. The train from Cape Town goes by: kudu kudu kudu kudu kudu kudu kudu kudu. I wave and the train whistles. Marsden and I sometimes rode this train from Cape Town to Stellenbosch, to spend a weekend with Dirkie.
An old Chev stops. It is a coloured family on their way to the beach. The father opens the boot to put the duffelbag inside, and beachbuckets and spades spill out. He gathers things again and ties down the boot with wire. The kids jump over the seat into the boot, and park on top of the bags and baskets and coolbox. They are going to the beach just this side of Sunrise we always drove past in Indlovu. I remember the colourful playground and braai spots the government built there for non-whites.
– They give us the beaches where the backwash is strong and where the sharks cruise up and down, up and down, the father laughs.
He drives past their beach to Sunrise Beach and drops me off by the fruitsellers. Then he U-turns and the kids wave through the back window as they head back.
The same fisherman is dodging motorcars and dangling his catch of snoek on the same spot. Four years of hawking snoek, come burning sun or howling southeaster. Four years of dancing on a compass foot while Muizenberg orbits round. Fours years of my drifting beyond the snoekseller’s world, a world unaware of my exile, not batting an eyelid at my return.
I buy some grapes. A man wraps the fruit in brown paper.
– There you go, chief.
– I’ve come home, I tell him.
He nods. It is the only tangible thing to mark my homecoming.
– I’ve been away a long time.
– That’s so, chief, that’s so.
– Do you remember me?
– I remember you, chief. You and your brother, and the dog. Twins is not something you forget.
I feel ashamed that I do not remember him. I remember Byron and Matches, and the snoekseller, but the fruitsellers and lollyboys and paperboys and dustbinmen are just a blur of black faces in my mind.
– I was in the Karoo.
– I just know Cape Town, my basie.
– Well, see you, hey.
– See you, basie.
There are no sand yachts on the lot where we played cricket. I spit grape pips in the beach sand. I drop my shorts, not caring that I am wearing Jockeys rather than a Speedo, and run to the sea, the way Marsden and I used to run on my father’s sandflicking heels. I dive as the tide sucks at my feet. It feels as if the cold will crush my skull. I surface and tread water. The cold gnaws into the bones in my feet, but I swim out to where the surfers ride the waves in rubber skins. Far away: the matchstick sunbathers and umbrella flowers.
– Chips, dude. We spotted a fin this morning.
– Thanks.
My heart pounds as I peer into the deep, shadowy water. Somewhere, down there, death lurks. A hint of the latent speed of an unshot torpedo in the casual flick of a tail. Gills rippling. Fine-tuned senses yearning for a rumour of blood. Chips, dude. Thanks for telling me, dude. Do I flap my hands and fly?
Though my fear tells me to freestyle ashore, I remember my father’s words: The thing to do is stay calm. Keep your feet under, and frogkick so the shark does not confuse your splashing feet for a wounded fish. If he homes in on you, you sink and stay down till he veers away. If he still wants you, go for his eyes. With sharks and ostriches, go for the eyes.
I realise I do not want to see the house, with other boys’ bicycles on the grass and another maid on the kitchen steps.
I paddle out through the ice-tea surf. The rising sun glints in the empty windows of the weekend train to Cape Town. I stand on a borrowed board. No flicks or tricks. The wave barrels. For a moment, I glide. Then the wave tumbles me. I fight it instead of going with it. Have I forgotten everything? I even forgot to dogleash
the board to my foot. As I surface I hear the crack of the board on rock. I wade up out of the water, feeling ashamed.
The nose of the board is torn off and the fibreglass juts out rawly. I sit on the rocks by the broken board, the rocks where Venus came out of the sea. The rock pools are so clear I have to touch to be sure there is water there. A crab has burrowed under the damp sand and only his peppercorn eyes peer out. There is a smell of beached kelp rotting. Savvy seagulls hover above me. I feel sure they can smell the desert in me, Karoo boy.
Dusk in Kalk Bay: I buy red bait and a handline and head for the harbour wall. The sun drops behind the mountain, orange and pink, like oil on the water.
I stare at the bobbing float, amid the dancing red and yellow reflections of the fishing boats and a dry seagull feather breezing over the water. In the rippling, lilting reflections I see my father’s staring, unflinching eyes, lids peeled to bare white eyeballs.
It was not the ragged volley of Chaka’s blunt barks that woke me that night in Muizenberg, four years ago. Nor the listless backyard rap of the other dogs of the neighbourhood. It was a tap on the skin of a tomtom, sent arrowing across the vast Karoo of black space behind my fluttering eyelids.
Though I am scared, I force myself to go on, out the kitchen door, out into the moon-bathed yard.
Hope’s khaya is dark. She is visiting a boyfriend in Langa. Chaka abandons his barking when he sees me, wags his stump of a tail and grins white teeth in the moonlight. Crickets cheep cheep over the hazy hiss of the waves. Kamikaze moths orbit the streetlamp. My father’s study door is ajar, leaking yellow glow onto the grass. There is no sound from his study. No tapping of typewriter keys. No Miles Davis or Steely Dan.
I feel Chaka’s hot breath on my calf as the door fans open.
Then my mind fades to black. All the Karoo years long, the spooled images lay in a far dark zone of my mind: latent with memory, yet undeveloped.
Now the images float out of the dark into a lagoon of consciousness:
My father’s gaping eyes.
His blood pooling glutinously as sump oil around his head, across the desk, tinging the typed pages of his unfinished novel.
A bindi of blood on the forehead of the Venus de Milo.
A zizzing fly swimming in the bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
The black gun on the floor, stumpy as a cold black toad.
A tug at the line jerks me back to reality. Bollard reality. The float dives. I wind the gut on to the reel. A seagull caws hopefully. But the fish jigs free. Damn. I have lost the feel for it. I forgot to yank the line so the hook bites deep into the gills. I reel in. The hook is bare of bait.
Again, I stand by my mother on the Kalk Bay harbour wall, twinless boy of fourteen. Again, wind dusts ashes from my mother’s hands, to a soundtrack of seagull cries and muffled voices and radio-static surf. But this other sinking of ash and flower among yawning fish is just a dream, a déjà vu. My flirting, finger-tapping, snake-catching father is not dead, he has just sailed away, up the east coast of Africa, to a place where lions run on the beach. A place where you can write a novel.
I ditch the rest of the red bait into the water. Fish dart at it as it sinks, as they arrowed in on the ashes of a man who dreamed his boys would one day play cricket for the province, the ashes of a head islanded in blood.
I turn my pocket out, and empty the orange coral seeds into the harbour. Lucky beads. Fish surface and, with a flick of fin, swallow an unhooked seed.
Tomorrow I will ride the train into Cape Town and look up Johan Myburgh, my father’s old friend on the newspaper. Perhaps he will find a job for me as coffee boy, the way my father began.
THANKS TO:
Daniela, for her intuition. Mia, for her magical laughter.
My folks, for my childhood in Africa. My brother, Dean, for all the frontyard cricket. Tarryn, whose fleeting life was a fiery poem.
Finn Spicer, James Scorer, Tom de Fonblanque, Andrew MacDonald for reading my novel pencil in hand.
Gillian Warren-Brown, Jørgen Heramb, Neil Wetmore, Conrad K., Zane Godwin, Nigel Gwynne-Evans, Andrew Stooke, Tim Volem, Meg Foster, Geoff Roberts, Leon Kandelaars, William Siegfried for their faith.
Alan Paton, for the words which awoke in me the desire to write of Africa. Delarey, beyond the horizon. Emil Holzinger, for the chance to read this novel to life on a hill above Vienna. Isobel Dixon, for her skilled eye and narrative instinct. All my students through the years.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 2004 by Troy Blacklaws
Cover design by Barbara Brown
978-1-4804-1002-2
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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Karoo Boy Page 16