The Mandela Plot

by Kenneth Bonert

  Crackcrack says, “This is OK Bazaars he’s wearing. True’s God. It’s bargain-bin, polyester special. His mommy goes to jumble sales. She shops with the shochs, I bet you anything.”

  I hear Pats arguing with them, I cannot believe how calm he sounds. He is saying something about all of us being Jewish, that they must be also if they are Solomon boys, so let’s just mellow out. The one with the rugby jersey grabs Pats’s head and bangs his own forehead into it, chopping like he’s an axe and Pats is wood. Pats goes white and stops talking. Without looking at me, Crackcrack pinches my chest so sore that I want to shout but I don’t do anything. “My shoes are handmade calf leather,” Crackcrack says. “Bet your daddy drives Toyota. I got my own Maserati. My driver Edson is parked up there for us, I got him till I get my licence. We go cruising and chicks stare. You goody-goody rabbi boys come from shul and scheme you can cause shit with us.”

  He pulls me round by my chest skin and lets go and I nearly fall into the rugby jersey one. “Present for you, Polovitz,” Crackcrack says.

  “I don’t want him,” Polovitz says.

  I see the other one of them has got hold of Ari’s red yarmie. I know it was a special present from his old man. Ari covers the top of his head with his hand and looks ready to bawl big time but he’s holding it in and he says, “Ja, but you okes are breaking the Shabbos. That’s all HaShem cares about. I feel sorry for what He will do to you.” Everyone sort of freezes for a second. HaShem is a strong word, a shul word. It’s Hebrew for The Name and we say it aloud instead of God’s real name, which only ever gets written down in the proper places, like the Torah.

  Then Crackcrack grabs Ari’s ear. “Sweetie,” he says. Twisting, he makes Ari go down to the ground. He takes black mud and slaps it on Ari’s cheek, smears it all over his face. “Now you look like the shoch that you are,” he says. “Be quiet, shoch.” Ari can’t hold it in anymore and starts to bawl, the tears running down the mud as he sobs like he’s having an asthma attack. He doesn’t even notice that the other two are using his special yarmie for a Frisbee. Meantime Pats is just parking there with his face still white as Tipp-Ex except where his forehead is growing huge red bumps out of it like giant chorbs on their way to being the worst case of blackheads in history.

  Crackcrack looks at the water and says, “What you reckon, Russ?”

  This Russ gives a big happy smile, looking down on poor Ari with his face all muddy and snotty. Russ says, “Bath time for the babies.”

  Crackcrack flicks his cigarette and slowly lights up another one from a gold lighter. The way he keeps his shoulders up and his eyes nearly shut as he does it, trying to look cool, I reckon he’s practiced it from movies. Then I see the pack is American Camels. I don’t think you can get Camels in the shops anymore cos of the sanctions. But he’s showing off he can, it’s more than just money. And like the other two he’s got on Puma and Lacoste and Fila—a kind of uniform. All-a-sudden it whacks me like a good one from a cricket bat how much less I am than them because I don’t have those logos on me. That they come from another world I don’t know anything about. And straightaway that makes me think of Marcus.

  “Oright,” Crackcrack is saying. “Time to boogie. All a you little rabbi boys get your arses into that water.”

  Nobody moves.

  “Shift it, you pusses. I won’t tune you again. You got till three or we will fuck you all up solid.”

  I look behind and see the mucky water in the weeds is full of floaters, slimy moss and strings of duck shit and cans of Lion Lager and other pieces of nodding rubbish. I look at the three of them in front of us. I think of hitting them—like seriously hitting. And in my head I see my brother pounding his heavy bag in our backyard, whacking it buff! buff! with the sweat flying off. Me, by myself, I’ve tried to do it a few times, but my shots are just these tiny little pokes with my bony knuckles into the hard canvas that I can hardly dent. I look at their faces and try to imagine doing it to a real nose, a chin, and the idea makes me feel weak and nearly sick, as if I am melting down and down, into my socks.

  “One,” says Crackcrack.

  There’s a little gap between two of them, on the left. I start going for it slowly, turning sideways, and Pats says, “Don’t try, Helger. You’ll just get us more hurt, hey.”

  It’s that word, that third word. Helger. It goes off like a bomb. I mean I see it in their faces—kaboom.

  All-a-sudden I’m thinking faster than Jody Scheckter doing three hundred kays an hour at the Kyalami racetrack. I walk to the gap and I know they won’t try to stop me now. I pass between them and they do exactly zilch, they just stand there like a couple of frozen blobs of shit, with their mouths open. I look back at Ari and Pats. “Come on, okes,” I tell them. “They won’t touch you. Let’s duck.”

  Polovitz says to Russ, “Bladdy hell. It is, hey.”

  “Can’t be,” says Russ. But he doesn’t sound like he did a few seconds ago, his voice is all high like a girl’s.

  Crackcrack steps up to me like he’s ganna sort this nonsense proper right this second. “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Martin Helger,” I tell him.

  “What crap.”

  “Oh hell, Jesus,” says Russ. “It’s the brother. Little brother.”

  “He doesn’t have one,” says Crackcrack.

  I feel everyone looking at me while I stare back at Crackcrack. “My brother goes to Solomon,” I say. “Maybe you know him. His name is Marcus. Marcus Helger. I was going to ask you all if you knew him. Before.” There’s dead quiet. I tell them my brother Marcus is in matric—that’s Standard Ten, last year of high school, and so he’s older than them, eighteen now. I ask them again do they know him, but I already know the answer. Something huge has swelled up under my throat. I feel like I’m standing on a tower above them, looking down.

  There’s a noise from someone. It’s like a yawn but different. It reminds me of a noise Ma once made that time in Rosebank when we saw this young black guy running down the street and a cop shooting at him from behind, the running man sprinting so full-on like I’d never seen before, with his head down and his arms going like mad and his jacket flying out straight behind him and the cop holding his big gun with two hands in front of him going poppoppop and we couldn’t believe it and Ma made that sound I can’t forget. Russ makes that kind of sound again, staring at me with his eyes all big like Meccano wheels. “I didn’t touch you, hey,” he tells me. “Not me.” He turns around and takes like two or three big steps and then he just sprints away and he’s gone and Crackcrack says to me, “You bluffing.” Polovitz starts to say something but then he stops and turns around and also runs. Just like that.

  Crackcrack is sloping off, chewing on his thumbnail. Ari grabs his arm. “Leeme go,” says Crackcrack, but he keeps looking at me and he doesn’t try to pull his arm away. What he does try is a smile, but it looks (Ma would say) just ghastly. He tells us he was only charfing when he said he was ganna put us in. They would never have actually done it. “Was a joke, hey okes, just a joke.”

  Ari says, “You called me a shoch.” The way he says it makes it sound worse than bad, like the worst thing you can do is call someone that. And it is pretty bad but I think he added much worse with the mud didn’t he. The tip of Crackcrack’s tongue pops out to take a quick spin round his sausage lips and then he swallows hard and sticks out his hand. I can see it trembling. “Here, man,” he says to Ari. “I am sorry. Put it there.” He looks at the rest of us. “Sorry, okes. I’m lank sorry.”

  Ari ignores the hand. Crackcrack offers it to me. Ari says, “Don’t be crazy, Helger. Don’t let him off.”

  I stand there for quite a while staring at the hand. Then Pats surprises me by saying in my ear, “Just let him go, hey. Let him go and overs.”

  Ari hears him. “It’s not overs,” he says. “No way!” There’re bits of drying mud still stuck all over his face and the rest of it looks red and swollen.

  All the time Crackcrack’s hand is stil
l out for me. “Come on, china,” he says—calling me his mate now, making like we are best buddies. “China, you don’t need to say anything to your boet, don’t tell Marcus. We all men, hey. We keep it here. I said sorry. I am.”

  I stare at him. “Don’t,” says Pats. But I already hear my voice speaking, sounding deep and rough, like someone else’s in my pounding ears. “But you’re not,” I say. “You bladdy liar.”

  4

  Afterwards we’re walking single file on the path through the bulrushes taller than us, our feet squishing on the mud. It’s hot like being in a greenhouse and I’m sweating big time and when we come out it’s like someone peels plastic off my skin as I feel cool air on me and it opens up so we can see out all across the fields behind the squash courts to Letaba Road. I am still shaking. Pats turns and says to me, “How could you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I just did.”

  “It was wrong, hey,” says Ari. “Lank wrong.”

  I feel my face twisting. “Ja, now you say that. That’s not what you said at the time. You were all like go for it.”

  “I wasn’t!”

  “Ja, you were.”

  “How could you do it, Mart?” Pats says. “It was sick.”

  I look away. There’s a buzzing in my head. “I don’t know,” I say. “It was like someone else was.”

  “You did it,” says Ari.

  Then Pats starts telling me how terrible I am again and I feel some of the other feeling coming back into me and I say, “Fuck him. He deserved. He deserved what he got.” There’s this sad little bush to my right, minding its own business. I go over and grab it and start yanking, but it’s tougher than it looks. I grunt and jerk, losing skin on my hands, until the roots rip completely out of the dirt. Then I turn and chuck the whole thing away into the bulrushes. I spit and wipe my mouth, breathing like I just ran a cross-country.

  They’re staring at me. “There’s summin wrong with you,” Pats says softly.

  I point. “You were both in it also. Fully.”

  Ari rubs his nose, says, “They were all shitting themselves like I have never seen. Your brother must be some main man at Solomon, or what.”

  I say, “I don’t know. If I did I would have said who I was straightaway.” Which is true cos Marcus never talks to me like when we were little, not for years, not since starting at that high school.

  “How can your brother be going to Solomon?”

  There it is, hey. After all this time. I kept it from them as a secret and I could because they’re shul friends who never come to my house to play and Marcus never goes to shul and they never ask me too many questions about my family anyway cos they’re always talking about themselves. But I always knew they’d find out eventually—maybe that’s why I did it today, why I went down there. I put my hands on my hips and look away. Just waiting now for what must come next.

  “What high school are you going to next year?”

  It feels good in a way, to spit the secret out like a rotten tooth. “I’m ganna be going to Solomon also.”

  They kind of smirk at me for a while until they see that I am dead serious, then they look at each other like oh-my-God. Ari says, “How can you go to Solomon?” Pats says, “Why you been lying?”

  “I was never lying,” I say. But I know that’s not exactly true. For years I’ve been letting them think I’m going to government high school just like they will. I mean I go to a government primary school like them so why wouldn’t I go on to a government high? Plus they know I live in an old bungalow in Greenside with no swimming pool and Greenside boys don’t go to Solomon. They’d maybe believe me if I’d said that other Jewish private school, middle-class—but not Wisdom of Solomon High School for Jewish Boys up in Regent Heights. Never ever. I haven’t been lying! I almost say or shout again to my only two friends, but I bite my lips instead, my face hot. Not lying. I just wasn’t saying. There’s a difference, right? I was just keeping shtum about it until today when I saw the rugby jersey down in the willows. I wanted to stick it in their bladdy faces for once, show them they not better than me cos they’re not.

  I thought it would be like, Allow me to introduce you to some fellow Solomon chaps. And the Solomon chaps would say, Oh how delighted to meet you. So frightfully delighted. Cos Solomon is full of gentlemen scholars and I am going to be one too because that’s what I want to be and have friends like and will have. I still can’t believe those okes were really Solomon okes, except they were. Okay so they were some bad apples. But also, on a level, I’m not that surprised by them, I mean when I think of Marcus and how he changed so majorly when he went to Solomon, there’s a part of me that sort of nods and goes uh-huh, exactly, that makes complete sense, but I don’t want to listen to that part. I push it away. That part gives me a sick feeling all the way down into my balls.

  Meantime Pats is saying, “Your da, he works in a scrapyard. He drives around in that old bashed-up bakkie.” Straightaway I see him, my da Isaac Helger with one knobbly elbow sticking out of that rusted Datsun, driving rattly down Clovelly Road on his way home, whistling in his teeth, his thick forearm covered in ginger curlies like the ginger hair over his sunburnt face full of wrinkles and a blob nose and stickout ears. I hate it that I feel embarrassed but I do.

  “How can he afford?” says Ari, puffing up and pointing a finger at me like a lawyer in court on TV who is getting the bad guy in the end. “I mean financially afford. You have to be able to financially afford!”

  “You are so right, hey,” says Pats to him. “The Sheinbaums go to Solomon. The bladdy Sefferts go. The Ostenbergs send their kids there.” He’s talking famous names from the Sunday Times and that—like the owners of the diamonds and the goldmines, the ones who build the big casinos and own the larney shopping malls and the big companies on the stock exchange. There are only three hundred boys at Solomon, and they all come from families like that. Never Greenside scrapmen.

  “Something,” says Ari, “does not add up.”

  It’s like I am not there, the way they’re discussing me like I’m a medical case. In my head I can see them running home to spill the news about me, little Marty from Shaka Road, and finding out what I already know. That just cos old man Helger might look rough when you see him in shul on Yom Kippur with that old suit that doesn’t fit and no tie and wrinkled neck and boiled-looking hands and face all sunburnt and drives around in a rusted truck doesn’t mean he hasn’t got—doesn’t mean he is like them. Cos they’re the idiots. They don’t know that Isaac Helger owns our scrapyard. They don’t know yet how a place can look dirty and ugly but that doesn’t mean it’s a poor place. Me, I know cos Da has said it so many times, It’s dirty fingernails that digs up real money.

  Ari turns to me. “They are ganna eat you alive in there, my bru.”

  Pats says, “And what year is your boet, again?”

  “You know Marcus is in matric,” I say. “Stop acting.”

  “I’m just saying he’ll be gone next year, bru, when you get to Solomon. Those okes are ganna moer you for what you did.”

  For what I did. Like they weren’t involved.

  “Let’s be honest,” Ari is saying. “You don’t have any friends. You can’t do sports cos you’re a full-on minco. Your marks are so bad you already been held back a year. You don’t have really much personality, hey, I mean admit. And I mean look what you did today. Something is wrong with you, hey.”

  “No,” I say, dry-mouthed. “It’s what we did.” I notice that I’ve started walking up and down, I can’t keep still. It’s bladdy amazing how much they know about me. And it’s sick how right they are. It hits me that everyone who knows you probably always knows a lot more than they say to your face. Only when the kuk hits the fan do you find out, most probably.

  “You the one who schlepped us down in the first place,” says Pats all calm, touching the bumps on his forehead that are starting to turn blue. I see it then. What they want me to do. All I have to do is say sorry, like alwa
ys. I have to say it was a hundred per cent my fault. I must do that little laugh I do through my nose and put my head down like I do whenever I lose, acting all Oh well what can I do? It makes me think of our dog, old Sandy, and how she rolls onto her back and shows her soft tummy to be scratched. I have to be that. I’m always that. If I do that now everything will be back to normal and we can all walk to Pats’s house like usual, and play Risk after lunch and I’d lose and we’d play throwing stones in the pool to fetch and I’d lose that game too. All-a-sudden I get it—they’re jealous. I feel my fingernails digging into my collarbone but I don’t remember putting my hand there. “Oright,” I say. “I’m going, hey.”

  “Going?” says Pats.

  “Home,” I say.

  “Oright, go,” says Ari, his face all squinchy like he bit an onion. “You go.”

  “I am,” I say.

  “Fine. Big wank.”

  “It’s not your fault,” says Pats.

  “Is that right,” I say. As I walk off I hear Ari asking what my problem is. My hands are fists in my pockets. No sports, no marks, no friends.

  This one time in the Yard my da caught me out telling a lie. He’d asked me to watch an exhaust for blue smoke. I told Da there was nothing, but I wasn’t even looking, I’d been reading this paperback book called Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe. My da Isaac has these thick fingers and his hands are like sandpaper from all the calluses. He’s old but those hands are so bladdy strong, man. They are like pliers, I swear. He squeezed my arm so I could feel the fingers digging in down to the bone, giving me five bruises that I remember lasted for like two weeks after. I remember every word he said too. Your name is all you have in this world, boy. Once you lose your name, you can never get it back. People have to believe in that name. Helger. If you tell stories, that’s what your name will turn into—bullshit. Don’t ever forget that.

  Da is so right. Nothing more important. Look at how those two ran away from the name Marcus Helger, just the name. A name can be a real thing, like a gun or a knife. I will make one for myself at Solomon—for something. Whatever I have to do. I don’t need Ari. I don’t need Pats. I don’t need anyone. My face is wet.