The Mandela Plot

by Kenneth Bonert

  Then the prefects show up and ask me when I’m going down to the tuck, Crackcrack is there waiting. I say, “Tell him I’m waiting right here. Tell him if he doesn’t come, he’s chickening out.”

  “But rawls are always in front of the tuck, you know that.”

  “Tell him right here.”

  The prefects go and fetch the head boy, Neville Shankster. Head boy is the prefect of the prefects, Volper’s favourite little prince with his steel glasses and his perfect tie knot. He tells me rawls are always in front of the tuck. “I stand here,” I say. “Tell that wanker is it yes or no. I’m waiting and I don’t have all stuffing day.” Neville tells me I’m being a prick. “There’s such a thing as respect,” he says. “I can see why people want to klup you all the time.” “Just run along and fetch him,” I say.

  I’ve started to walk up and down so my shaky legs don’t show and my breaths are snorting in my nostrils and my insides are shaking because my heart is thumping so fast. Be calm and think properly. I keep looking back and making sure I can see the mark I made. Then I sort of move more into myself, looking down, forgetting about the noise and the light around me, and when I look up again there’s a whole wall of blazers and faces in a big semicircle. The prefects are shoving them back. Spunny’s big head is in the second row—he gives me a middle finger. Then the ranks of the blazers are splitting apart, and through them comes Crackcrack, the Strongest Lad, followed by Sardines Polovitz and some other cronies of his whose names I’m not sure of. Crackcrack stands opposite me and starts jumping up and down and wheeling his long arms and showing his teeth and biting the air. Head boy Neville moves in between us, he’s saying something but I can’t make sense of the words. Then he’s stepping back, shouting something, and time feels sticky, like I’m trying to move as fast as I can but I’m moving through honey. Crackcrack rips his tie off and rushes at me. He’s waited till the last second to pull his tie off so he wouldn’t remind me to do the same, which is lank boff of him I have to admit, as I flash on what he did to Beefus. Too late now to get mine off.

  “Arrrrr!” Crackcrack is screaming as he sprints in with one long arm stretched at me and the other balled up in a bony yellow fist and pulled all the way back behind him. He’s already three-quarters of the way to me when I turn around and run into the weeds. This must have paused him, cos I hear him shout behind me, “Aw come on, you fucken puss, what’s this!” Then he is crashing in after. Meantime I’ve bent over and I’m grabbing at the ground like mad but for like half a bad second I’m shitting myself cos I can’t get my fingers around it and a kick comes smashing through the weeds, the tooled leather slices across my thigh but then my hands have it, they have it, and I’m spinning and coming up with the thing tight in my double grip and I see Crackcrack, see his face change. Then I’m lunging at him through the sticky-honey time, going all the way, as he jumps back and I’m feeling it hit and then pulling and lunging again, out of the weeds now and under the bright sun and the faces behind Crackcrack are all stretched long with shock as he trips and sits down and tries to scoot back with his arms held out. There’s blood, red and red. On the dust, on the white shirt. He’s screaming as he scoots back on his arse and I’m still lunging at him and everything’s taking so bladdy long to happen and there is someone else who is screaming too, someone close by in the crowd, making a terrible sound, it sounds like some girl shrieking and why won’t they shut her up already? But when I rub my mouth on my shoulder I feel it moving and I know who it is. It’s me.

  46

  Nobody else makes a sound. They’re all just standing there like it’s assembly, a whole school paralyzed. Only Crackcrack is mewling and sobbing, he’s on his side now and clawing at the ground as he drags himself, his other hand around his middle. Head boy Neville steps up slowly and steps over him and stands there in front of me with his arms out. He’s the first one to speak. “Put it down, Martin. Put it down.” I look down. I’m still holding the javelin in my fists. It sticks out ahead of me like a giant needle, the point of it red now. As I stare at it, some of the red drips off. I look up and see prefects on all sides, homing in on me. I make my hands open. The javelin drops. The first rugby tackle hits me from the left—it’s a good one, low and hard, the Gooch would be proud. Neville jumps me from the front as I go down and they all pile on, pinning me with overkill weight. I try to tell them that I’m not struggling but they’re not listening and even if they were I don’t have the breath to make myself heard. They lift me up. People are shouting for the paramedic. Neville says take him to the office and they start to march me and I get walked a few feet with my hands twisted up behind my back before I dig my heels in. “Wait, okes,” I say. “My blazer is there. I need my blazer.” I start struggling until someone says I got it and then throws it over my head. I get marched down all the way to the office like that, my notorious polyester blazer hanging over me like a hood of shame. The only one who talks is Neville. “You’re going to be arrested for this,” he says. “Volper will call the cops, you know. You’ll go to prison. You’re bladdy mad in the head.”

  We’re in front of the office, the glass wall with the little hole in it. They unhand me and step back a little. I roll my sleeves down and put my blazer on. “You’re such a fuck-up,” says a prefect called, I think, Abramson. “You’re such scum.” He sounds sort of amazed, like he’s making a discovery he still can’t believe. I ignore him, straightening my blazer collars as Mrs. Brune, the wrinkled gnome, pops up behind her glass, announcing in a voice all whispery and serious, “He’s ready now. He’s waiting in the office.” I go through the doorway to the right of the glass, into the white passage. As I pass Brune’s door she clicks her tongue, a disgusted sound meant for me. The door to Volper’s office is half open. I stand there for a few seconds, patting my blazer to feel the pocket even though I know it’s there because I’ve been feeling it against my ribs. Be calm and think properly. This is the real part, this was always the real part of it. You’ve done the other, you can do this too, Martin. Just think, thin—

  “Get in here!”

  I step through and close the door behind me and when I turn I find Volper standing in his shirtsleeves holding a phone receiver to his chest. He waves me forward as he sits down and pivots around on his leather chair, away from me. “Yes . . . yes,” he says. “Fine. Oh I will. Thank you.” He swings back and hangs the phone up, tells me, “That was Mrs. Dalgleish at the sickroom. They’ve called an ambulance for Lohrmann.” He stares at me and my eyes go sliding over the huge teak desk till they stop at the photographs with the silver frames. “That’s your wife, hey,” is what I hear myself hoarsely murmuring over the dumdumdum of my pulse in my ears.

  “What?” says Volper. “What did you say to me?”

  I move closer to the desk, like right up against it, and too softly I say, “I have. Something. For you.”

  He stares at me and then his eyes go slitty. “Have you been taking drugs?”

  I don’t answer. I lift up my right hand and put it under my blazer. Volper’s eyes drop to my chest. My hand stays under the blazer.

  Volper blinks fast and shoots to his feet. One shoulder starts going up and down like a sewing needle. He’s frowning like I just spoke to him in Japanese or something. Slowly I pull my hand out of my blazer and when he sees what I am holding his whole face relaxes again. I look down at the yellow envelope with elastics around it. It hits me that a person could imagine it’s full of money, like a bribe, and that makes me think of Hugo on the back stoep at Oberholzer’s place. Go off my land, Jew. Volper is saying, “When I’m good and finished with you, giving you the lesson of your young life—believe me—then and only then will I be telephoning the police force. You’re going home in the back of a police car today, young man. Meditate on that.” I’m having trouble speaking so I just hold up the folded envelope and shake it at him and he says, “What is this nonsense?” Then he says, “You are on drugs, aren’t you. Your parents will be—well I don’t know what, act
ually. Helgers.” He shakes his head, wincing. Then he says, “Get over to the corner. I am going to thrash some sense into your soul. And then I’m going to thrash you some more. I’m going to thrash you till my arm falls off. You could have killed that boy. You could have been facing a murder charge! You bloody imbecile!” I just keep standing there, holding the envelope out. “Helger!” he screams at me. “Do you hear me Hel-gerrr!”

  My hand jerks, tossing the envelope. But I’m so tense the throw is pathetic, it doesn’t reach him, flopping on the desk. “Take it,” I hear myself rasp. Volper isn’t listening, he’s saying, “You get over to that corner. Right now.” I clear my throat and say, “I suggest—” But it’s too soft and Volper is shouting again. I clear my throat once more and when he stops I point at the envelope and speak up and say, “Suggest you look at that.” I keep pointing, not moving, and Volper says, “What is this?” He leans forward and pokes at it and then he picks it up and rolls off the elastics and opens the envelope. His hand with its nicely shined nails delves inside and brings out the photocopied pages with the photos paper-clipped to them. Those photocopies were all done on the Nashua copier in the library upstairs, and the photos are colour prints of the originals that I made in the photo lab, working alone in the time after midnight when the school belongs to me, only me. Volper keeps saying What is this nonsense as he shuffles the pages and the photos but the way he’s saying it is all weird, over and over, like he doesn’t know that his mouth is in drive, and it’s getting softer. All-a-sudden he drops the lot like they are burning hot. But his hands stay paralyzed, the fingers spread wide open over the pages. I say to him, “I have other copies of all of those. You know where I got them from.” I look to the parquet floor in the corner, now under the rug. And Volper rotates his head like he’s made of wood and looks that way too. His lips have gone white—I’m talking Lux soap white like I’ve never seen before on a human being. He looks down at the spilled photos and the pages and he makes this funny throttling sound and reaches for them, but then he freezes again and sort of sways there on his feet, backwards and forwards, and he says the word no nine or ten or twelve times, I’m not counting exactly. “Yes,” I say. “I’ve got them. Copies. Lots. And I will send copies everywhere. I mean to everyone.”

  “You can’t,” says Volper. He sits down. Now that crazy white of the lips is starting to pop up in patches all over his face.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I just want to be left alone, you know?” I look down at the prints. From where I’m standing I can see the one of Volper with the smiling young man with the good chest muscles where the two of them are naked and hugging together, looking into the lens. The print that is half underneath this is the same young man kissing Vol­per’s neck. Beside it is the one with the different young man, lying naked on his tummy with the shadow of the photographer next to him and the photographer—it’s Volper—is in the mirror and he is naked and he’s caught a major bone, his stiff thing sticking out under his fat belly, and there’s a swimming pool showing through the door. It makes me remember what it was like when Annie and I first found these in the little wooden box in the safe, the incredible feeling of can this be true, can this be real? And then seeing that it was. And I even know some of the lines in those letters by heart. I dream of you and hunger for you. I think of you every time I’m alone I want you, only you and I’m jealous of the Bitch. That was the young man with the spiky handwriting, the other one was more flowy. That was the one who wrote, I’m your darling I’m your whore I’m whoever you want me to be, Arn. Love and love. I remember how Annie and I looked up their names in old yearbooks and worked out who they were, ex-students. One’s a big-shot lawyer with his own kids now. “I’ll tell you what,” I say to Mr. Volper. “I’m going to go now, oright? I won’t send these to anyone. Or tell anyone. And all you have to do is leave me alone. How’s that?”

  Volper looks up, he’s still swaying. It’s like he’s just taken one of my brother’s right hooks to the temple but somehow managed to stay on his feet. His voice is small. “How did you get these?”

  “I was in here once and you left me alone. I found the safe. You had left it open. I looked inside.”

  He frowns. “When? No. No. How could you have?”

  “I made copies and put them back.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Well, I have them. You don’t have to believe what I’m saying. Just look there in front of your eyes.”

  “No. Who gave these to you? Was it—one of them?”

  “Nobody gave them. I got them from the safe. Nobody else knows. I’m the only one. I know about the safe, you can see that, I’m telling you it’s there. Think about it.”

  He looks down at the photos again. His wide scarecrow head with its thick yellow thatch is nodding all trembly on his squat neck like he’s suddenly got Parkinson’s or something. “Oh you’re a filthy individual,” he says to his frozen hands. “Oh you are a maggot indeed. A filthy, dirty, disgusting individual. Oh. You filthy Helger.”

  “That’s okay,” I say. “You can call me what you like. So long as you leave me alone, I mean completely. Do not call the cops on me. And make sure I don’t get charged. Talk to the parents, whoever. Just make sure. From now on I don’t ever get punished for anything again. So long as you stick to that, we’ll be fine. Otherwise you know what will happen, hey. I’ll send copies of those to the board, to your wife. To the papers, to the cops, the government, to bladdy everyone I can.” I start backing away to the door and by the time I reach it there are tears coming down Volper’s white shaky face.

  “Wait,” he says “Wait.”

  “Just leave me alone,” I say. “And I’ll do the same. That’s all.”

  47

  Arlene is frying kingclip for supper when the phone rings and she picks it off the wall by the bread box. I’m reading Jock of the Bushveld for like the nineteenth time cos it makes me feel sort of cosy and I need cosy cos Jesus Christ what a bladdy day this has been. Then Arlene says it’s for me and it’s like a fresh kick in the guts all over again. I’m sure it’s the cops with the news that Crackcrack just pegged off. I’ve killed a man, Ma—just like in that song by Queen, what do you think of that, Ma? Ja, that’s right, I stuck him with a sports javelin like I was trying to make a sosatie out of the fellow. It didn’t go in very deep, I pulled it short, just gave him a little prick or two in the liver (cos that’s what pricks deserve ha ha) but infection got in and finished him off or I nicked an artery or— “Hellooo,” Arlene is singing, “ground control to Martin, Mar-tin.”

  “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it someone official, like?”

  She frowns at me. “No. Why’re you asking that?”

  “Is it?”

  “What’s the matter? It sounds like a friend of yours that’s all.”

  I stretch the cord into the passage, covering my mouth. “Yes, who’s this?”

  “Martin, that you? Have you just been to the dentist or summin?” Pats. Thank God Almighty. And then I remember I gave him my phone number on Saturday night. He wants to tell me I was absolutely right, he made a mistake about seeing Marcus.

  “But you were so sure,” I say. “You said you would ask around. And about Dynamite Gym? Did he go there?”

  There’s this long silence and then he says, “Martin, does it really matter what your brother did long ago? I made a mistake, I’m telling you it wazzen him.” There’s a crackle and a soft whoosh—he’s smoking. “Check, bru,” he says. “I did swing by the Dynamite, ukay. I went there in person and those okes, they tuned me solid to loz it.”

  “So what if they did?”

  “If those okes tell you let something go, you let it go.”

  “Fine. You know what? I’ll go myself—”

  “Hey hey hey. You’ll do nothing. You will do absolutely zilch, man, Martin! I’m serious about that. Remember what already nearly happened to you at Xanadu.”

  Now I’m
helping Arlene set the table, my head full of Marcus. I see him again hitting the heavy bag and behind the wheel of the Barracuda. Silent Marcus with his thick neck and his secret life. All those secrets make him heavy, like we learned in physics how a great mass pulls things towards it, that’s what gravity is. Marcus has gravity. He doesn’t even need to be here at home to make everything orbit him.

  When Isaac gets home we can all see straightaway that he is in a dark mood. I make sure to give him an extra-large whisky as he washes without saying a word to anyone. Then it’s the six o’clock news with old Michael de Morgan and the top story is about the “fruitful talks” our foreign minister, Pik Botha, says we’ve had with the Thatcher government. Old Pik with his trimmed moustache and his Hitler side part and his bouncy attitude. Everything is just super fine, says old Pik. He tells the camera that Commonwealth countries should watch their own backyards before criticising South Africa, like the Canadians, for instance, and how they treat their own Indians over there. The odd thing is I don’t hear any stomping or shouting from Isaac. I look at him with the side of my eye and I can see Arlene is doing the same in her chair next to his. Isaac has his feet up, yes, but the legs are still. He’s just sitting there staring, sunk down in his chair with his chin on his chest and his whisky glass on his belly, not moving, not saying a thing. The news stories go by—a car bomb went off outside Ellis Park rugby stadium, a black off-duty cop got buried alive by a mob in a township cemetery when he went there for the funeral of his friend and someone pointed him out as a cop—and there is not one shout of “bladdy schmocks” or “stupid ponce” or “useless bladdy twat” from Isaac, there’s not even one really good, loud bullshit! It’s so strange it makes me start to worry about him, like has he finally gone and had a cardiac or something? Arlene must be having the same type of thoughts cos right before we get up for the supper table at the end of the news, she asks him if he is all right. She has to ask him twice, like snap him out of his own little daze there. He looks around and says he dropped in at the Grand Lion Tavern on his way home. Arlene doesn’t say anything but her eyebrows go up high—Isaac stopped going to taverns years ago because he was going too much. Now he says all the talk there at the Grand Lion, it really got to him. People going on about buying guns and Krugerrands and tinned food and whatnot. They’re talking about emergency escape plans. They’re talking visas for New Zealand, Australia—that’s nothing new but now it’s also Argentina, Uruguay, anywhere else. And he says it’s all the moving vans and the for sale signs he noticed on the drive back when he looked for them instead of pretending they weren’t there. And the gold price dropped again and the rand did too against the dollar. We have to face it, these sanctions are really starting to bite hard. We can’t go on squeezing oil out of coal forever, which is what we’ve been doing to keep the economy squeaking along. We can’t make everything ourselves. And it’s true Botha will be frekking off and in the grave any day now but this guy De Klerk who the Nats have lined up to replace him is no different, just another bald hardegat, another tough-guy Afrikaner, and it’s ganna be more and more of the same. It all makes him think of Rhodesia in the last years under Ian Smith when the country tried to go it alone, but you can’t go it alone, can you . . .