The World Beneath

by Janice Warman

  And he sees again the sky-blue eyes of the boy, fixed on his.

  No. He can’t do it.

  He climbs down, wrestles the heavy thing off the cistern and back into his rucksack, and leaves the stall. As luck would have it, he sees a mop standing in a bucket of dirty water, catches it up, and begins wiping the floor with it just as a white man comes in, glances incuriously at him, and goes to the urinals on the end wall.

  Joshua ducks his head in the direction of the man’s back and walks out carrying the bucket and mop, which he leaves at the end of the hallway. He doesn’t want to be accused of stealing anything. Not even a bucket of dirty water.

  He leaves the shopping center behind him. He is dizzy and sick; he trips over a paving stone, losing his footing for a moment, and draws a sharp look from a sour-faced white woman passing by.

  On the national road, he doesn’t have long to wait. A cream Mercedes stops for him, one of the really old ones with tan leather seats whose diesel engines go tick-tick-tick. “Where to?” asks the driver. He’s elderly, English-sounding, trim, upright, wearing his seat belt fastened tight across his white shirt and maroon tie. A navy blazer with a badge on the pocket is hanging up behind him.

  “Rondebosch Common,” mutters Joshua. “Please.” He sits with his hands clenched between his knees to stop them shaking.

  They drive in silence. The man pulls over into the bus stop. “So. Here we are, then,” he says. He looks curiously at Joshua, who is leaning back against the seat with his eyes closed. “This is where you need to get out.” Joshua opens his eyes. The man looks concerned. “Are you OK? You don’t look well.” It’s six o’clock, still light.

  Joshua gathers all his strength and smiles at him. It would have been far better to take a bus back, to be lost in the crowd. This man will remember dropping him in a white suburb; an act suspicious in itself for a young black man. He climbs out, hefts the rucksack, and leans back in. “No, I’m fine, Master, thank you. I’ve got to get my bus back to Jo’burg. It’s coming soon.”

  He hopes that will put the man off his scent, so he won’t think he’s staying somewhere nearby, creeping in the back gate to borrow a bit of floor in the maid’s room of one of the big houses.

  “Thanks, Master.” He feels absurdly grateful.

  He shuts the heavy door, turns to wave, and heads in the direction he said he was going. Once the car has disappeared, he turns right at the traffic lights off the freeway, down Links Road, and right into Bonair, slipping through the gate of the house on the corner. The dogs rush up to him, jump up at him, pleased, wagging their tails — though the boxer only has a ridiculous little stump — and he strokes their heads. His hand is still shaking.

  He sits down in the camp chair, his face in the last of the sun, then abruptly changes his mind and goes inside.

  He lies curled up on the bed, eyes closed, hands tight between his thighs.

  It is morning; light is pushing between the rough slats that make up the door. Joshua has slept. He checks the watch: five a.m.

  He goes down the path on tiptoe, the concrete slabs cold under his feet, his shoes in his hand. Habit. The dogs come whispering out, wagging their whole bodies, rubbing against his legs, smiling up at him, if dogs could smile.

  Now he is out in the road. And in a few minutes he is outside number 23, with its weeping willow and the loquat tree with its shiny dark leaves. The small yellow spheres hang from the branches. He can taste them instantly, their tartness, and up he goes. It is not so easy to hide now that he is bigger, and not quite so easy to climb: he has to struggle to lift himself by his arms, and then he is level with the bay window. He shivers. It was the window to the Malherbes’ bedroom.

  From the tree he can see down the side of the house; the riot of nasturtiums are still there, the tangle of orange and red and yellow, their lily-pad leaves hiding the ground. On the other side of the fence is the lawn of next door’s house. It is as smooth as it had been; the house looks still and empty, although there is a car in the drive, a little red Mini. He hugs himself and shudders. He feels exposed. There aren’t enough leaves around him. He is too big. What if someone looks out of the top window?

  He gazes at it. Then a sound catches his attention, and he looks at the house next door. A light has come on inside. For a few moments nothing else happens. Then the heavy oak door opens, and out comes a young woman with a camera bag in her hand. Behind her there is a tall young man. He is carrying an overnight case. He stows the case in the tiny trunk. He takes the camera bag and puts it on the passenger seat. “Hey, sis.” He holds out his hands and takes hers. “They’re going to be angry. Jislaaik, man, are you sure you should go?”

  She is tall and narrow, with a fall of brown hair to her shoulders.

  “Stefan, I’ve got to go. I can’t stay and listen to them go on and on. Especially when they say we are well rid of Biko. They drive me mad.”

  Joshua is alert, up in his tree.

  “Come.” The young man opens his arms wide, and she folds herself into them, her head on his shoulder, eyes shut. Then she straightens and pulls away.

  “Can you get the gate?”

  “Sure. You take care now, hey. And phone when you get there. Don’t worry about me. I’ll take the flak.” He smiles down at her. His hair is blond, with tight curls, his face open and sunny.

  Out of the open door hurtles a small figure; she throws herself at the young woman, and the two hug, the two dark heads close, the older girl laughing.

  “I’ll come back, Anna. Don’t worry.”

  “Lizzie, don’t go!” comes the querulous tone, and up in the tree Joshua smiles in recognition.

  “I’ve got to. But I’ll be back soon, I promise.”

  Stefan waits, and when the two have said good-bye, he lopes off down the drive and carefully lifts the iron gates across the drive so that they don’t drag on the tarmac. He mock salutes as the little red car comes by, then closes the gates, but not before watching the Mini creep off up the road, its engine surprisingly loud in the early morning quiet.

  He walks back up the drive, pausing to pull the disconsolate girl to his side. The liveliness has gone from him.

  Joshua finds he has been holding the branch so hard that when he lifts his palm away, it holds the imprint of the bark. He swings himself down from the tree in a sudden motion, finding he does not care whether he is seen or not.

  And so it is that as he passes the big wrought-iron gates and glances up the drive, he sees a small, sturdy woman coming down it, in the light blue uniform and the white apron and the doek that signifies the job of maid, and his heart painfully turns over in his chest. It is his mother. He knows it with a certainty that leaves him dizzy.

  But as he leans a hand against the pillar, she looks up and he sees (of course!) that it is not. How can it be? She is in the Ciskei with his brother and sister, home at last with her family. He has not seen her since Sindiso grabbed him and pulled him out of these gates, her arms twisted brutally behind her by the white policeman, her cries ringing in his ears.

  This woman has a light brown face and the bits of hair that escape from underneath the white scarf have a reddish tinge. Not Xhosa then. She is Colored. And about sixty, by the look of her — much older than his mother. She gives him a wide grin, a mischievous smile that envelops her whole face in a sea of wrinkles.

  “Hey, what you doing here?” she asks. “This is mos a white area, you know.” But her intonation is light, her tone jokey, and the word “white” she draws out, so that it seems to have several syllables rather than just one, like this: “whyyyyyyutt.”

  He is mute. But while she waits, her smile turning to a look of concern, he begins to recover his ability to speak. “I lived here,” he manages to say, while she approaches and begins to rummage about in a mailbox attached to the gate.

  It is her turn to be silent, and she regards him for several seconds before her puzzled look clears. Her eyes widen. “You!” she declares, and before he can demur,
she has opened the side gate and pulled him through it. “Kom!” she commands.

  Before he has time to think, he is following her back down the familiar drive and around into the yard, and then — horror, no, he can’t do it — up the back stoep stairs and into the kitchen. There is the green door with its worn baize and dull brass studs, and the little door to the cupboard under the stairs, a low door that now seems barely big enough for a tokolosh to fit through.

  “No,” he tries to say. But there he is, inside, seated at the table, a different table, he notes, made not of speckled white iron but of shiny dark wood, and the woman is fussing with the kettle.

  He is nervous about sitting here in this kitchen, even though now his legs can only just fit under the table. But she tells him that the owners are away on holiday in Durban. She is in charge. There is a golden Labrador called Temba, who runs in from the garden and lays his trusting head on the boy’s lap and trembles and wags his tail, his brown eyes fixed on Joshua’s.

  Her name is Margie, she says, and she tells him about the Andersons. The father is a lawyer, the mother a GP. The two daughters have gone to live in England. She tells him to come back tonight and she will make him her special crumbed stockfish and her twice-fried chips.

  But it is still early; by seven a.m. he is back in the garden shed down the road, in time to be called for breakfast.

  It is evening. “We all thought you were dead,” says Margie. Her hair is still under the doek, but more of it has escaped now, and beads of sweat sit on her forehead as the oil seethes in the pan. She used to work up the road for the old Kloppers. Then, when Mr. Klopper died and Mrs. Klopper went into a home, she came to work here, at number 23.

  “But —”

  “Yes,” she says. “I worked for Mr. Malherbe. I needed work, and I knew what that man was like, but I wasn’t scared. Oh, no!” And she throws her head back and laughs. “He gave me no-o-o-o-o trouble.”

  Joshua finds this hard to believe, but decides to listen and not argue.

  In any case, he knows she didn’t have to work for him for long. “Lucky I was away or it would be me sitting in tjoek,” she says. “But the people who did it were so-o-o-o clever. They must have worn gloves. There were no fingerprints. And they stole nothing. Not a thing. The side door was unlocked.”

  “But —” said Joshua, thoughts forming fast. “But didn’t the police think it was you who’d left the door unlocked?”

  Margie turns from the stove. “That’s why I broke the window before I called them.” She smiles at him, but this time the smile does not reach her eyes. I hated him too, those eyes say. We all did.

  She turns back to flip the fish in the pan. A faint smell of burned crumb reaches him. “It’s quite easy. You just wrap your hand in a dishcloth.” He realizes she is referring to breaking the window.

  The fish is delicious, its white flakes soft under the crust of crumb. It tastes of the sea, or how he imagines the sea might taste. She has given him a small glass of beer to go with it; they are sharing a can. As she takes it out of the fridge, she catches his eye and shrugs. A small smile tugs at the edge of her thin mouth.

  He thinks he likes her.

  It is only after the meal, after he has told his story, gazing at the window where he had last seen Tsumalo alive, crouching like a lion, after he has fiercely dabbed a stubborn tear that escaped his eye, that she hesitates and says, “You know Tsumalo escaped.”

  “No.” The word barely forms on lips that are suddenly dry. “No. He couldn’t have. He was dead. I saw him.” If only — if only — if only —“He was dead. He is dead.” Now he really is crying, dashing the tears off his cheeks with the backs of his hands, bent over with a pain in his stomach so sharp that he thinks he might get sick.

  She smiles at him, a real one this time, a real grin. “No. He was taken to the hospital. But the doctor who was doing the death certificate found a pulse. He didn’t tell the police or they would have taken him away.” She pauses for effect. “And pouf!”— she waves her hand as if it were a magic wand —“they made him disappear. First into intensive care, and then into the black men’s ward, under another name. Then, once the bullets were out, his stomach wound healed — and it took a while — he was smuggled north, across the border.”

  Joshua found hope was forming despite himself. “Where is he now?” He wants to believe this story. Desperately.

  “Nobody knows.” Margie’s air of triumph abates. “He was supposed to go to one of the training camps like the one you were in. But nobody knows where he went. He didn’t get there.”

  And Joshua is forming another question, shaping it with his hands, when there is a little noise at the front of the house, beyond the baize door. Then, much louder, the high, sudden voice of a siren.

  The Labrador erupts from the floor, barking wildly.

  “Quick!” Margie hisses. “Out the window!” And as he hesitates: “Polies! Gaan! Go!”

  Now he is out in the yard, landing with a thump, clumsily, on his knees in the yellow dirt, and running for the side of the house, crushing the nasturtiums beneath his feet, breathing hard. It is all but dark here; the sun has set, and there is barely room for him between the tall wooden fence that borders Anna’s garden and the house walls beneath the high bay windows.

  He is crouching, inhaling the sweet-sour smell of the squashed flowers, his hands over his ears, as if that would help. He can hear they are in the kitchen, crashing about, shouting at Margie. He can hear a police dog snarling and barking and thinks briefly of the mild-mannered Labrador.

  At the end of the alleyway, he sees the loquat tree, scales it, and drops into the next-door garden. The lawn stretches in front of him like a desert. He leans back against the wooden slats of the fence, breathing hard. He closes his eyes. He should never —

  “Boy!” He opens his eyes. Anna stands before him. Close up, he can see she is taller than before, but still the same Anna; her eyes are bluer and her dark hair longer. “Come!” And she runs straight down the length of the fence to the back of the house. Here there is another yard, another maid’s room, and a door she pulls open. “Quick, in here!”

  The door slams, she is gone, and he is left alone with the relief that floods through him. In the gloom he can just see a workbench, a few tools on it, a vise clamped to it, an old dog basket, and at the end of the room, behind a pile of broken furniture and under the workbench, a space. In he goes. His mouth is dry. He is so thirsty, he wishes he’d had more of the beer.

  He closes his eyes, wraps his arms around his knees, and makes himself as small as he can, as small as he had been under the stairs.

  “Sssst.” He can hear a hissing noise somewhere, and he drags himself out of a deep place where he is running and running after a person he knows to be Tsumalo, who is retreating and retreating before him across a desert he has to cross to get into Botswana. He has been trying to call out, but all that would come out of his mouth was a tiny dry croak, like a young frog’s.

  “Here, have this!” He opens his eyes with a start, and there is Anna, crouching beside him: yes, taller, up close, but still smaller than him. Less plump, bangs in her eyes, and holding out a mug of water. He drinks it down so fast, he almost chokes.

  “What are you doing here?” He doesn’t even know how to answer this and lifts both hands in a gesture that says, I couldn’t begin to explain.

  Instead he asks, “Are they gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it safe to come out?”

  “No. Stay for a bit.”

  “Thank you.” He waves the mug at her and smiles suddenly, a big, happy smile, and she smiles too.

  “Where have you been?” she asks. “It’s been two years. I was worried that you had been killed, like Tsumalo. The police released your mother, and she left for the Ciskei. Mrs. Malherbe’s son took her away. But we never knew what happened to you.”

  “No,” he says, and hesitates. Should he tell her? “I was in the camps. They are training soldi
ers to come back with bombs. To carry on the struggle.” He stops. What can she know, this pampered little white girl? Yet she had helped him without a shadow of hesitation. There is something different about her now. A certain wiry strength, a watchfulness about the eyes; she is less strident, more considered.

  “Thank you,” he says to her again. “Now I must go.”

  He is out in the road, running in the light dusk, keeping close to the hedges. In a minute he is back outside the Browns’. But there is something strange about the way the gates are standing ajar, one gate wider than the other. And where are the dogs? He turns on his heel just as he sees from the corner of his eye a flash of blue uniform. A policeman!

  There is a yell, a guttural swear word he can’t quite hear, and the air burning in his throat and his lungs. He didn’t know he could run so fast. He rounds the corner onto Links Road and shinnies up and over the six-foot wooden fence and into the garden on the far side of Anna’s house.

  In the middle of the lawn there is a fishpond. Sitting on a bench by it is an elderly white man, alone in the half-dark beside a seated stone Buddha. He scrambles to his feet. Outside, in the road, they can both hear the heavy tread and the sonorous breathing of the policeman as he passes. “Boy!” he shouts. “Just you wait, bliksem, just you wait.”

  Joshua fixes his gaze on the old man and raises a shaking finger to his lips.

  Their eyes stay locked until the heavy breathing and the footsteps have faded. Joshua places his hands together in the prayer position and bows his head. “Thank you,” he mouths. The man inclines his head in response. And Joshua might be wrong, but he’s sure he can see the glimmer of a smile.

  He is with the Browns in their study.

  They had heard the sirens and rushed down to the shed to warn him. And when he wasn’t there, they’d panicked.

  Fat Mrs. Ellis from across the road had blabbed that she had seen a black boy going into the Andersons’ garden and it was known they were away. She was worried he might be a burglar. So the police had come. Poor Margie had had the devil of a job calming them down, says Mr. Brown.