The Mandela Plot

by Kenneth Bonert

  Stepping back to take it all in, one fact slowly dawns—all the security is in the perimeter. All the cameras point out, not one is inside our grounds. Almost all our doors are without locks. We never see the security guards inside, only at the gate, they’re not allowed in unless it’s a total emergency. The builders wanted to keep the school normal except for the perimeter. They never thought of a poison bee in the hive.

  I decide to walk all the way around the whole of the wall, on the inside. Maybe there’s a gate or a gap or something that nobody knows about, that’s not on any chart. Every break period I walk a little farther. I get up behind the rugby stands in the weeds behind the blue-gum trees. I tear my pants on thorns on the far side of the swimming pool. Always the concrete wall is at my right-hand side, rising up to block the sky. A creepy feeling the thing is watching me, looking down. Like it’s a huge stone idol standing tall on the land and who do I think I am to try and challenge it. The parts of it that are more open to the school have been painted by art students over the years. One mural shows the iconic headgear of a goldmine, another a jumping springbok, another our school founder with his watch chain and mutton chops. Then there are the First rugby squads and the tennis and cricket teams in their whites, the national debating champs. Staff portraits.

  Today I’m coming down the steep granite path next to the west­ern section of the wall, passing the tennis courts, and then comes the veld—an open section of wild yellow grass. This is a part of the school that hardly anybody comes out to and I’m alone. There’s a mural of my brother out here that I forgot about, a big one. But as I get closer to it I can tell there’s something not right. For this portrait the art students copied a photo of Marcus from the yearbook of like ’eighty-five I think it was, showing him running with the ball under his arm and his other arm handing off a tackler. You can see the tendons in his thick neck and the ripples of muscle in his forearm. But now when I stand in front of it I see some scaly bastard has gone and spraypainted a giant yellow cock on his mouth and written helgers suck. Across his legs it says fuck helgers. I stand there so long the bell rings.

  In the morning after roll call I catch up to the Gooch outside our home classroom on the Pimple. As he listens to my whispered description his face gets more and more pained, the lips twisting away from the teeth. “Holy kuk stars,” he says. “You not serious?”

  “Fraid I am, sir.”

  “This is your brother, this is Marcus Helger we are talking.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We cannot allow this to spread. Marcus is our symbol.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “Ganna slip you my spare office key with my left hand. I’mna tell you how to handle this personally. Be quick-quick and dead quiet. Tell no one, absolutely.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Gooch’s office is behind the swimming pool. There are crushed cans of Lion Lager and some used pill bottles in the wire rubbish basket next to his desk. A long corridor leads back, with nails in the wall and numbered keys hanging from them. The storage room at the end is full of pool and groundskeeping stuff: ropes with floaters for the lanes in swimming galas, life jackets and polystyrene boogie boards and then lawnmowers and watering cans and fertiliser and wheelbarrows. At break I get what I need, put it in a tin bucket, and head down to the mural. The sun is stronger than yesterday, baking hot, the concrete so bright it whips at my eyes like sparks. The veld looks dusty and dry, the colour of a lion. I imagine a wounded lion waiting in there, crouched down, panting for my blood. I reach the mural and get to work. The Gooch explained that the murals have a protective varnish, so I can remove the spray paint without damaging the mural under. Still, it’s tough, tricky work to scribble the red paint off with a toothbrush dipped in turps, one tiny square at a time. I’m sweating and my hand hurts and I need a drink of water. I stretch my back and look toward the school, the buildings like a mirage over the hot veld. I dry my forehead with my tie and start walking, cutting across the veld. It’s rough stones underfoot, there’re lizards and bits of glass, rusted cans. The land dips slightly and I’m surprised to find a wide streak of whitish sand with that swept look that dry riverbeds have. To my left it runs uphill to the high fence and tall lights of the tennis courts, to my right it goes down to what looks like a small brick oven. I lick my dry lips and head down. It’s no oven, it has a grate in front. Squatting, I find chunks of old grass and dirt stuck between the bars at the bottom and shade my eyes and squint to see what’s behind—the opening of a metal pipe. It slants away, off underground. My eyes are adjusting, I can see corrugations in the metal and something about this is familiar. I sit back on my heels and study the grate. It has hinges on one side and a latch on the other but there’s also a little plastic box with a wire going down into the ground. In the side of the box is a keyhole and numbers stuck on by a label gun: 253.

  That pipe keeps bugging me for the rest of the day, I don’t know why. After school I take the municipal bus to the Yard in Vrededorp. I want to help Isaac, pass tools to him, so he won’t be so alone without Silas. But when I get there Arlene says he’s gone to town to see Harry Steed, his lawyer. I can have a lift back with her but she won’t leave for another hour, so I wander around the warehouse upstairs while she works in her office on the ground floor. That pipe—what is it about a metal drainage pipe in the ground that makes me feel like I know it when I don’t? I’m standing by the back window, thinking, when I hear the ripping snarl of an engine that can only be my brother’s old car.

  Down there, the Barracuda is pulling up at the back gate. Must be Victor Mabuza, maybe there’s some news of Silas. I run down the back stairs and jog through the wrecks. By the time I reach the gate there’s a group of maybe ten guys there around Victor, and he has a look on his face that makes me stop. They’re talking loudly to him and he starts shaking his head, and then he waves with his whole arm, raising his voice. I stay back round the corner of a wrecked Isuzu bakkie and watch them, some with tools in their hands. One of the workers, Sammy Nongalo, a tall young guy, takes hold of Victor’s wrist and starts tugging on it and Victor digs his heels and shakes his head. The others get louder. Victor is pulling his arm, trying to get it loose, but Sammy won’t let go. The other men press in closer around them. This whole situation is giving me a bad feeling and I’d rather walk away and pretend I haven’t seen anything but I remember my father apologizing to Victor at the clinic, his red eyes, so I straighten up and walk out to them.

  Everyone goes quiet as I greet Victor with a smile. His eyes are flicking around and he licks his lips and I can smell his sweat and see how it’s soaked right through his shirt. His chin is shaking. I look at the others but no one will look back at me. Sammy speaks in African and Victor says, “Goodbye. I must go now.” He turns around and walks through the gate. I call his name but he keeps going.

  I walk after him, catch him up. “Didn’t you just get here?”

  “I’m fine,” he says. “I am fine.”

  “He is fine,” says a voice right behind me and when I turn I’m surprised to see they are all with me, following. A guy called Phala is the one who spoke. “Everything okay,” Phala says. “Okay, okay.”

  “Is fine,” says Sammy, next to him.

  “Yes, fine,” says Victor. “I go now.”

  “He goes now,” says Phala.

  I want to talk to Victor alone, but the others are right there as he gets into the Barracuda. I notice now it has new hubcaps and a fat new aerial. It’s a brute of a car, Marcus used to love it. Quite the score for a young black guy to have. I’m even a little jealous of him, I wonder what kind of car Isaac will give me now that I’ve turned seventeen and can get my learner’s licence. I watch Victor reverse and drive off, the big engine gruffing like a hungry leopard. Now the others are walking back into the Yard. I catch up to Phala and Sammy and ask, “What was that all about? What were you saying to him?”

  “He comes to say hello,” says Sammy.

  “No,
” says Phala. “Everything is fine.”

  I believe them like I believe the world is flat, but what can I do? No one’s saying anything.

  33

  Now it’s morning again on the Pimple after roll call and outside class I’m giving the Gooch an update on the mural, that I’m making progress but the work is killer. He says, “You’ve got to get it done pronto, Martin. Every day someone could find, and then what.”

  I rub my nose. “Sir, I think I know who it was who did it, hey. I’m ninety-nine per cent sure it was Lohrmann. Johnny Lohrmann. In matric.”

  The Gooch grimaces. He looks away from me and gives off a sigh. He’s wearing his maroon shorts high on the waist. His knees are wrapped in about a thousand miles of tape each and he has at least a dozen whistles around his neck, like he’s the Mr. T. of rugby. “Ach, no, man,” he says. “I really didn’t want to hear this kind of talk from you.”

  I say, “But isn’t it important we find who it was, sir? To nip in bud.”

  “There’s no nip in bud,” he says. “It’s exact opposite cos you put a spotlight on. People will talk and go look. If you’d leave it alone it would die off.”

  “But sir.”

  “Everybody hates a tattletale, Martin.”

  He’s still not looking at me and we stand there in silence for a while, a blush climbing up my neck like a monkey. “Okay,” I say. “Okay, sir. Forget I said it, please.”

  “I wish that my ears had not, Martin. But I cannot undo.”

  “I take it back,” I say.

  His whistles jingle as he shakes his head and scratches his Tom Selleck moustache. “Can’t, my mate. You’ve put a conundrum on me.” He moves off, jingling, his stocky, strapped legs bowing out like parentheses.

  When I’m in his office at first break I run my eyes down the row of keys hanging on the nails and stick 253 in my pocket. In the hot veld by the desecrated mural I squat in front of the grate and hold the key to the box, my hand shaking like there’s an earthquake on. Without giving myself a chance to think, I stab it in. I’m sort of praying it won’t fit properly, on a level, but it slips into that keyhole like it’s greased and then I wipe my sweaty hands on my shirt and stare at it some more. I’m thinking an alarm could sound, I could bring the guards here in like seconds—seriously, gunmen. It could set off a bomb drill. Parents will be called, I’ll be expelled. Maybe they’ll report to the police and then what. Shut up, I say in my breath. Just shut up a second. I bite into the skin of my forearm and then I turn the key. There is a hard click. There. It’s done. I wait it out, sweating like a rotisserie chicken, but nothing happens. I reach up and undo the latch and pull on the grate and it creaks stiffly but swings out. I push my head inside the sloping tunnel. There’s a humid musty smell of soil and rot. The corrugations on the bottom are packed with sand and stones. I roll on my back and lie there breathing in that almost familiar scent, that feeling. I reach up and touch the roof of the pipe, run my fingers over the bumps in the steel and then I rap my knuckles and—bink—just like that I remember it, the tin noise.

  I sit up so fast I bang my head but I don’t care. I’m remembering that day when Marcus and I were small and walking Sandy through Brandwag Park. And the whiteout flash of the lightning and the flash flood that filled up the creek in front of us. They always taught us to be afraid of flash floods. Kids who played in the mine dumps or the sewers got drowned like rats by them every year, they said. I’m remembering the things that flooding river carried past us so fast that day, a Pick n Pay shopping cart, a six-pack of Castle Lager, a tire, a shoe. And then the whole riverbank started caving in, it collapsed into the water and got washed away and what was left behind was a section of the pipe sticking out, as long as a car. The water kept pressing against it and when things in the current bumped into the pipe it made that tin noise—bink!—and then it started bending and creaking and it broke, it snapped off completely and went bobbing down, half sunk. Marcus was already hopping out of his sandals, he was woo-wooing and laughing all crazy, telling me to hold on to Sandy, pulling off his shirt. Next thing he dived in and swam after it. He caught it too, and rigged it up against the bank like a slide so he could take rides through it, yelling and howling. He was so free and loose in those days when we were little. When the storm stopped and the sun came back it felt like a new day, everything washed and dripping, and we went back to where the pipe had broken off. We could see how the rest of the pipe went back and back into the earth. There were tiny little blobs of daylight in that black hole. “Bet you a million,” Marcus said, “that it’s coming from all the way.” And I remember now how he pointed up, up, over the tops of the trees, to the white rooftops in the distance. The Jewish school.

  34

  When Saturday comes, Isaac gives me a driving lesson. I wonder if I should tell him what happened with Victor coming to the Yard, but there’s not that much to tell, really, and I don’t want to risk upsetting him. The lesson finished, we go to visit Silas in the Illovo clinic. It’s not like the last time. Silas is sort of awake, his lips moving, and Isaac grips his shoulder and puts his ear down to hear what he’s whispering. Also there’s a woman there I’ve never seen before. She says her name is Gugu, she’s one of his daughters, from KwaMashu near Durban in Natal. Silas has a few wives. Gugu has a baby with her who plays on a blanket with squeaky toys. The white nurse keeps sticking her head in and looking at the kid and snapping her lips, shaking her head, and muttering Honestly these people. Silas falls asleep and Isaac goes off to find a doctor to talk to. I move seats to be next to Gugu. “Tell me,” I say. “Has Victor been by today?”

  “Yes, of course. I am staying with him. He was here when he dropped me.”

  I ask if everything is okay with Victor. “What do you mean okay?” she says. I tell her that he came by the Yard on Friday. She squints at me and her voice changes as she asks me what happened. I say, “What’s going on, Gugu?” She looks at the door. I tell her I’m not going to say a word to my father. She grabs my arm. “You must not,” she says in a hiss. I promise her I won’t. She tells me I should talk to Victor.

  “What’s going on with him and the others?”

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  “You know,” I say. “You not even asking me which others. You knew I meant at the Yard.”

  She gets all stiff and sits up, folding her arms. “So ask them. Those bustuds there.”

  “Why you saying they bastards, what d’they do?”

  “I think you know. What did they do when Victor came to the bizness, heh? You said you saw.”

  “I’m not sure. He had to leave.”

  “Exactly. It’s them. They are the ones.” And she stares at poor Silas, all shriveled in the face lying there with the tubes. Before I can ask anything else Isaac’s footsteps are in the corridor.

  I keep my promise and go on not talking about the Victor incident with Isaac, or anyone, but in any case I have the other things on my mind and in my guts, sitting there like a lead ball. Sunday afternoon after the braai when everyone is occupied, Zaydi napping in his room, Isaac polishing the samovars with Brasso, Arlene reading one of her thick book-club romances, I take my empty school satchel to the Sandy Hole and put some things in it. There's a song by The Cure stuck in my head (“Killing an Arab”). I lower my bike with a rope over the wall cos I don’t want anyone to hear the gates and then I climb down and ride into Regent Heights, crossing the RH soccer club’s deserted pitch. Through a gap in the fence on the far side there’s a trodden path into the wild grass. It goes downhill and comes out onto the open space of Brandwag Park. It’s a nice bright day like most of ours are in Joburg and I can see all the way down the slope to where the deep-sunk stream winks in the sun. There’s a group of black church people wearing blue-and-white robes, singing by the water.

  I lock up the bike in the woods and walk, trying to remember, to line things up in my mind and work out where it must have been. It would be hard to believe there was ever a flooding river h
ere but you can see the evidence of water power in how the stream trickles along the bottom of a steep donga, a trench that only years of flooding could have carved out, so deep that its walls are taller than I am. I climb down into it and walk along beside the water. Sooner or later I must come across the pipe. But it’s not working out that way. I go up and down in both directions, farther out than we would have been that day, but still there’s nothing. I start thinking maybe that’s because it doesn’t exist anymore. Maybe after it broke in the storm years ago they never repaired it, they just built a different pipe somewhere else or whatever. Up and down I march but there’s no point—all I see is red dirt. Makes me feel tired and sad. I really wanted to have something for Annie.

  Eventually I just give up. I’m walking back along the stream when I see something ahead—some metal sticking out, almost at the top of the trench. I’ve been missing it because I’ve been looking down all the time. The way I remember the pipe is that it was just above the water. But what I forgot was that the water was up to there that day. Bladdy schlemiel. I start running. Here it is—a pipe of dented corrugated steel, looking thin and tinny, sticking out of the stony bank by maybe a metre. It’s angled downward and dark inside, the bottom covered in sand, exactly what I’ve been looking for though smaller than I remembered, about as round as the empty oil drums we use for rubbish at Solomon. Big enough. Now comes the hard part. I look around to make sure I’m alone before I get the torch out of my satchel and shine light up that black hole. Dr. Helger the proctologist, peering into the earth’s arse. Looks pretty healthy and unobstructed to me, but I wish I had an all-body condom cos it’s definitely not clean. I take a breath and reach in all the way and schlep myself up and in, squeezing onto my belly. It’s the only way cos there’s no room to crawl with the satchel on my back. I start worming in deeper and then I get jumped by brutal anxiety. I never knew I hated tight spaces this much. I feel like I can’t breathe, it’s like being in the boot of the Chev again. I try to keep thinking about that, about Jules. I’m doing it for the children. Ja, right—Annie’s tits have nothing to do with it, you saint. I force myself to keep going, I’m worming my way up a hot, filthy pipe and the corrugations start to hurt me, the bones of my arms and my knees especially. The torch beam shows the black hole pulling away from me like the eye of some retreating monster. What’s horrible are the cobwebs that get in my mouth, make me spit. All-a-sudden I see something shaking like a whip on the sand in front of me. Holy God, it’s a snake. The thing is gone already but I can’t go on for a long time, I just lie there shaking, thinking what have I got myself into. In the end I go on cos worming backwards on my belly seems much worse. There could be things behind that I won’t see till I’m on them. Things might be creeping up on me right now. I start wriggling faster. It goes on and on, I’m grinding myself bloody here. It gets steeper and more tiring. I get so exhausted I have to rest and then I worry there’s never going to be an end. I keep on, but I’m going slower. I’ve been crawling by now for what must be over fifteen minutes, I think. I’m getting a desperate, worried feeling like what if I get stuck? Or run out of air. Marcus’s voice is in my head, reminding me that panic only makes things worse. But the torch beam is getting weaker or am I just imagining it? What if the batteries die? What if I hit a dead end? I can hear myself making sobbing noises, the way they echo in here. I’m soaked with sweat. I see Parktown prawns scuttling around me and making that hissing noise they do, and I also see some massive rats. But I’m too tired to freak out. I just keep slithering on. Nothing else I can do.