The World Beneath

by Janice Warman

  Margie had said the boy was her grandson but that he was gone now, gone to catch the bus to Jo’burg; she had just been giving him some supper. Then the police had started a house-to-house search. They had burst into the Browns’ garden; the dogs had escaped through the open gates.

  The fish in their cases gape at him; they are frozen, as if they are still swimming, pewter bodies curved, mouths open. He wondered how it must have felt, deep and safe in the cool green ocean, and then the slice of the hook and the terrible fight, and the thrashing and drowning in the bright upper air.

  Mr. Brown and Mrs. Brown are sitting side by side on the brown leather sofa, holding hands. He has never seen grown-ups holding hands. He can see they are frightened and he does not blame them. He is a liability.

  “Joshua.” It is Mr. Brown. He is frowning, and he squeezes his wife’s hand as he speaks. “You can’t stay here any longer. It was safer for you to lie low. But now the police have come”— and he gives an involuntary shudder —“you really need to go. They could come back and finish their search. And who knows what that might turn up.”

  Joshua knows instantly that there are things in this house that must not be found by the police. There may be hidden weapons or things that in other countries would not matter — like certain books.

  “Of course I will go,” he says quickly. “I will go now, if you like.”

  “No,” says Mrs. Brown. “That would be dangerous for you.”

  She explains that Joshua is to leave the following morning. They will take him to the bus station. There he will not take a bus, but he will be picked up and taken to the Ciskei, back home, back to his mother and the twins, his grandparents; back to school.

  He realizes that he doesn’t want to go. He wants to stay in this city by the sea, with the mountain and the shantytowns and the fierce dogs and the nasturtiums. And even the police and the Black Marias. He can feel the heat and familiarity of all these things with an intensity that surprises him.

  But then he closes his eyes, and he can hear Tsumalo’s voice: “If you are going to be a free man, you must know how to read.”

  He can hear him say, “You are better than a son.”

  He can hear him say, “You and I will be free one day.”

  And he thinks, Viva Ngenge. Tsumalo is King. I will never forget you.

  But there is one thing he still has to do. So after he has thanked the Browns and said good night to them, he takes the flashlight they gave him and pads back down the concrete path, shoes in hand, and climbs over the locked gate, laying his jacket over the spikes. He uses the loquat tree to get into Anna’s garden; he finds her window and showers it with little pieces of gravel until she wakes.

  This time, he is going to tell her where he is going.

  The next day is hot. Mrs. Brown gives him a pack of sandwiches, a foil packet of Romany Creams, and a thermos of tea, two sugars. He stows them in his rucksack, along with some of her son’s old clothes. They all climb into the station wagon, and Joshua sits in the back like a laborer being given a lift to the bus stop. He slouches down in his seat, the tweed cap pulled low.

  His head prickles with the heat.

  As the car pulls out of the driveway, he looks up. The tarmac shimmers. He blinks: at the crossroads by the house stands Mrs. Malherbe. She is leaning down, her close-cropped, shingled hair gleaming in the sun, silver now, not pepper and salt. And she is holding the hand of the little boy from the shopping center. As he looks up at her, Joshua sees the clear blue eyes under the blond bangs. Of course; he is Robert’s son.

  A moment later they have crossed the road, turned left, and are out of sight: but that is when things begin to happen.

  A Black Maria screeches to a halt across the road in front of the car. Mrs. Brown screams. Mr. Brown hits the horn hard. “Go!” he says without looking around, opens his door, and jumps out. “Officer?” he calls, polite but puzzled.

  Joshua surprises himself by rolling out of the far-side door, springing to his feet, and running like a deer around the corner. He does not look back, though he can hear shouts. Above him are the close-leaved branches of the oak trees; he grabs the thickest branch he can see and swings himself up onto it.

  Not a moment too soon. He sits, not breathing, as several pairs of feet pound beneath him along the road. He doesn’t look down. If he does, he might fall. And if he falls, he might never stop falling. He puts a hand into the pocket of the jacket Mr. Brown gave him and into which he had put Sindiso’s gun this morning. It is still there.

  He knows that if the policemen come back along the road, he could kill one of them — but only one. And he remembers what Sindiso said when he asked for a gun of his own: “If you have a gun, you will be one person with a gun. And they will all have guns. So you will be killed.”

  So now he is a boy on his own with a gun. He wonders what has happened to the Browns. Have they been arrested? He wonders what will happen to the dogs. He thinks about their son in America. He thinks about all of these things as he sits in the tree on Links Road, just along from the tree in which Tsumalo had sat so long ago. All day he sits, his hands aching from holding on to the branches, until the sounds of the search begin to fade away, and dusk begins to fall.

  He looks down through the leaves. He can hear there is a car coming slowly along the road, and he stiffens, holding his breath, as it comes into view. It is a red Alfa, roof down. He can see a head of curly brown hair. The man pulls the car over and gets out. He begins to walk along under the trees, looking around him and calling softly for his dog.

  “Betsy,” he calls, “come here, girl. Betsy!”

  It is Robert. Joshua and he both know that Betsy is not there.

  He stops and listens. Then, very quietly, he says, “Joshua? Are you there? I’ve come to take you home.”

  Joshua closes his eyes tight. He can see his grandparents’ house and the dusty road that leads to it. He can see himself running down it calling, “Mama! Mama!”— and there they are, all of them, crowding out of the little building, calling his name: his sister, his brother, his grandmother, his grandfather, and then, at last, his mother. There are tears streaming down her face like a waterfall.

  “I’m coming,” he whispers, and he begins to climb down.

  amandla — Xhosa for “power”; a rallying cry during the fight against apartheid.

  bergie — Afrikaans for homeless person

  Black Maria — police van with a steel cage on the back to transport prisoners

  bliksem — Afrikaans for “lightning”; derogatory term, roughly translates as “bastard”

  boetie — Afrikaans for little brother

  Ciskei and Transkei — “homelands” or “Bantustans” that were part of the apartheid system, areas created like Native American reservations, supposedly to act as home territories for the black population. They covered a fraction of the area of “white” South Africa, although the black population was far larger. The people who were based there needed passes in order to work in the “white” part of the country.

  doek — Afrikaans for head scarf

  duiker — a small African antelope

  hamba kahle — Xhosa for farewell

  hayi — Xhosa for no

  jislaaik — Afrikaans exclamation of astonishment

  mielie-pap — maize porridge, a staple food in southern Africa

  moegoe — Afrikaans slang for “twit”

  mos — Afrikaans for “after all”

  safe house — a house where freedom fighters could find shelter

  stoep — Afrikaans for “veranda”

  suurvygies — a ground-growing succulent (the name translates as “sour figs”) whose fruit can be made into a preserve

  tamatie-bredie — Xhosa for lamb stew with tomatoes

  tjoek — Afrikaans slang for “prison”

  tokolosh — Xhosa for the little evil spirit who haunts bedrooms

  Umkhonto we Sizwe — “Spear of the Nation,” the military wing of the Afri
can National Congress (ANC), which was the main revolutionary organization fighting the apartheid government, and which formed the first truly democratic government of South Africa

  I grew up as a privileged white child surrounded by poverty and deprivation that we largely didn’t see. This was a world in which it was illegal for a boy to live with his mother, in which black people not only did not have the vote but barely had a legitimate existence, in which those on both sides of the conflict were brutalized.

  I wrote The World Beneath because this was the world that I grew up in, and it was why I left South Africa for England. The South Africa of 1980 — still reeling from the murder of political activist Steve Biko and from mass bannings of publications and people — was a dangerous place for a newly qualified journalist, and those who were brave enough to stay often ran into trouble with the police, like my fellow students whom I wrote about in Class of ’79.

  The house in The World Beneath was the house that I lived in; and although the boy himself does not exist and neither my family nor I feature directly in the book, we too had a black maidservant whose children were being raised far away in the Ciskei, and who, like many, was supporting them with no state help; I’m not sure if she had help from the children’s father.

  Our maid was also called Beauty. To my shame, I met only one of her children, just once, a bright and loving little girl whom I tried to teach to read. But she was just on a visit and soon returned to her grandparents.

  I was outraged to learn that white children got their schoolbooks for free but that black children had to pay for theirs. Then, in 1976, my last year at school, the Soweto riots broke out, and it was shocking to hear of all the children who were shot.

  For many children and teenagers, the apartheid era in South Africa is not even a memory. They were simply too young when the last white government was in power, and if they recall Nelson Mandela, it will be as a past president of South Africa, not as its most famous political prisoner.

  This is why I wanted to write about that time and about the rise of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.

  First, to my daughter and son, Imogen and Dominic Warman Roup, for being unfailingly loving and encouraging. They were just seven and nine years old when the manuscript was first read aloud to them, chapter by chapter, and were extremely discerning and strict editors. Julian Roup, for keeping calm and keeping me fed through all those after-work work hours. And the usual suspects: Gail Walker, Fiona Powrie, Barbara McCrea, Jeanne Samuels, Liz Wildi, Tracey Hawthorne, Susie Rotberg, and Heather Meyerratken — my sister, and my sisters under the skin: they know what I owe them. My nieces, Kate and Hannah Walker, who, like their mother, were early readers. Joe Bond, for his encouragement during the darkest times. My beloved parents, Lynne and George, without whom none of this would have been possible. Ros Barber: poet, scholar, author of The Marlowe Papers, and my creative writing tutor at the University of Sussex. My editor and friend, the poet and children’s writer Mara Bergman, for her patience and her faith in my ability — even when that ability was quite invisible to me — as well as her extraordinary skill in turning this into a book for the most discerning audience of all.

  Janice Warman

  East Sussex

  January 2015

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2014 by Janice Warman

  Cover photographs copyright © by akg-images (man), The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images (woman being served tea), Tim Street-Porter/Beateworks/Corbis (home), Michele Burges/Alamy (boy)

  With thanks to Tony Brutus for kind permission to include “I am the exile,” by Dennis Brutus © 1968 Dennis Brutus

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  First U.S. electronic edition 2016

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2015931429

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