Lucky Packet

by Trevor Sacks

  ‘After expenses, if there’s any little surplus – and I think there might be something quite respectable, Kolonel: there’s a lot of excitement around the base – whatever the demo makes, I hand over to you to disperse as you see fit.’

  ‘Can we just do that?’ said the Kolonel in an intimate, questioning voice I’d not heard him use before. He was seeking advice, and it was humbling for a man who usually knew exactly what to do.

  ‘You could, for instance, give it to the MOTHs or the Legion of Military Veterans, or maybe it could go towards a regimental dinner or something else the base really needs. You decide.’

  ‘I decide?’

  ‘You’re the kolonel, Kolonel.’

  I was used to being a passenger on whatever course of action Will dragged our family on, but where he once cruised, he now careered. He’d always been doting with Angie, placating her anxieties, but when she suggested scaling back the demo, he snapped at her.

  Instead of toning things down, Will accelerated his promotions. When I groaned at the fresh stack of flyers he handed me to place under windscreen wipers, he took me by my shoulders. ‘Ben, this is a massive opportunity that’s come our way. We’ve got to give it everything.’

  ‘You know what my friends are doing right now?’ I asked as Will handed me a fresh stack of flyers to place under windscreen wipers. ‘They’re on a beach, or at a bar, or sleeping off a hangover, or getting laid.’

  ‘Well then, I’m saving you the embarrassment of having to sit outside the bedroom while they get laid,’ he said.

  Throughout my childhood, I’d never questioned any action of Will’s because he’d undertaken all tasks with a conviction it had been easy to become accustomed to: his rudder may have swung unexpectedly from time to time, but he’d always kept us upright. It’s why I didn’t question his decision to report for military service, once he’d given his explanation; but I recognise now that whatever mechanism once steered him had since worked loose.

  What steered him, I suppose, had always been Great North Diesel and Auto Electric. It was small fry in his eyes, but it was to be the base for his empire-building. So directionless was I at the time myself, I couldn’t see at first that he’d become something he’d never been before: desperate.

  Though I had to hand out flyers on my holiday, it was exhilarating to be alongside Will; part of that feeling, I recognise, was the flood of adrenalin attached to the risk of failure.

  The crowd, a mix of soldiers and civilians, with the Kolonel and his wife in the flying saucer hat in the front row, were served entertainments that filled them with wonder, desire, thrills and delight. They were awed by the karatekas and their strict katas, attacks and counterattacks. They were titillated by the girl in the orange bathing suit and blonde perm, holding the placards as if for a boxing event. And they were roused and swept up by the very presence of The Ox.

  Will himself had a starring role – after all, the Kolonel had pushed Will into demonstrating his martial abilities. It was during a staged plank-splitting, tile-cracking performance, with Will playing the part of Eighth Dan Black Belt, that The Ox made his entrance. ‘If you’re so strong, fight me, jou sissie!’ boomed the giant for all to hear.

  After a series of chases, dodges, swipes and parries, Will pacified the giant with a pressure-point grip at the undefined meeting of his neck and shoulder.

  The Ox slumped, only to revive as Will exited the stage; for the big man’s encore he charged at the Kolonel, of all people, holding him in a bear hug and depositing him onto the stage.

  ‘Dames en here,’ said the MC, ‘ladies and gentlemen, let’s give a big round of applause to your very own Kolonel Nel, who put together today’s events for your enjoyment!’

  The Kolonel could do nothing but smile under the circumstances, those circumstances consisting of raucous applause, a kiss from the girl in the orange bathing suit, and the presentation of a bouquet of strelitzias in the proud colours of our flag.

  When we walked into the flat, Angie was throwing all of Will’s belongings into an old cardboard suitcase. ‘What’s going on?’

  In answer, she threw a belt at Will, the buckle nearly catching his forehead.

  ‘Fuck! You’re worse than The Ox, Angie!’

  ‘Not everything can be gambled, okay?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’ve had it with you, putting everything on the line. Today? That was just craziness. I don’t want a part of it.’

  ‘Don’t worry so much, baby. It was supposed to be a surprise – The Ox, the karate team. It was good wasn’t it? I planned it all out.’

  ‘You planned it? You got lucky, for once, that’s all. You know they say getting lucky is the worst thing that can happen to a gambler. Well, I’m out.’ She shoved the lid of the case down and it sprang back up from the volume of clothes inside it.

  ‘Come on, baby. I had to do it. The Kolonel had me by the balls.’

  ‘And if it had gone wrong? Where would you be now? You don’t think! You don’t think about what could’ve happened to you – to me!’

  ‘But it all worked out as planned.’

  ‘Take your fucking plans, Will. Take all of them!’ A shoe flew at him.

  ‘Ben, go buy a paper.’ From a large wad of cash, Will peeled off a ten-rand note and gave it to me.

  I went to find a paper, which was no easy task at 10 pm in those days. I eventually found a late-night café. Hoping it would give Will enough time to put on a second arse-saving performance, I read it from cover to cover. There was opposition to the proposed referendum on whether the negotiations for a new constitution should go ahead; a bomb had gone off at a post office in the Western Transvaal (no one had been hurt, and right-wingers were suspected); three people had died and a dozen had been injured in a clash between ANC and IFP supporters in an East Rand hostel.

  When I returned to the flat, there were more of Will’s clothes strewn on the floor but Will was cradling Angie’s sobbing head in his arms, rocking back and forth. ‘Here,’ said Will, handing me a twenty. ‘Go get another paper.’

  Though Will acted as if there was never any doubt that the demo would be anything but a success – and may have even believed it himself – I couldn’t shake the desperation I’d detected. There was desperation in his relationship with the Kolonel and the schemes he designed to retain his position; there was desperation in his association with Skamandrios – he’d called the bookmaker on our way home from the demo, and there was something desperate in the timing of that call, and that he’d placed it from a phone booth, and not from the flat.

  Moreover, where I saw desperation, he only saw the next great opportunity, which made it all the more painful to watch.

  He took me to the bus station the day after the demo and made me swear not to tell Ma or Victor about the show he’d put on, even though I let him know how well I thought he’d done.

  ‘Ma will worry if she knows,’ said Will. ‘And Victor, well, you know he’d love to have something on me.’ It was true – Victor would have a go at Will any chance he got. He’d regularly bring up an investment Will had told him about, something Will had heard in a meeting about shipping containers. Lately, he’d hint at Will’s gambling, too.

  Will peeled off a few notes from the karate demo takings.

  I shook my head. ‘You need it.’

  He retracted his hand. I never knew I had the ability to wound Will, and regretted instantly the sympathy I’d tried to show. I’d drawn attention to his weakness.

  The details of Will’s gambling compulsion remained obscure to me, whether it was born of desire to elevate himself monetarily, or to wipe away a debt (a debt, if I allowed myself to examine it, that may have had its source in the lawyers’ fees – or maybe that was a deceit on his part). But I saw, now, it had worn him badly; he was not the same brother who’d stood up so easily to bank managers and accountants with the resolve of the anointed head of the Aronbach empire.

  I was glad he had Ang
ie to rely on, because the task was beyond me. For the first time ever, I felt sorry for Will, and it scared me. Growing up is a series of curtains falling.

  I wasn’t strong enough to endure seeing my once-resolute brother faltering so, and changed focus. ‘What about getting our money back from Leo Fein? We could ask The Ox.’

  ‘I think he’s too smart for The Ox, that skatofatsa,’ said Will. I can only think it was a word he stole from Skamandrios; he enjoyed flinging it out whenever he could. ‘We need lawyers, and for that we need money – a lot more than we made from the karate, buddy.’

  ‘I just meant eventually,’ I said, feeling foolish at having made the suggestion.

  He gave me the notes he’d peeled off again. ‘Buy something stupid with it. You’re always so sensible.’

  2

  MOFFIES

  Elliot had decided to come back almost as soon as he’d heard the news that the referendum to end apartheid was to be held. His stay wasn’t permanent, he said, but he planned to spend four weeks with us until voting day.

  He was almost a new person to me and I admired him just as much now, if not more. His hair was kept, if that’s the right word, in a style I couldn’t conceive of attaining. It was cropped close to his head on the sides, almost respectable, like the crew cuts given out all over town but with a couple of short dreadlocks reaching back from a longer patch on top, like Cherokee war feathers. It was a showstopper. It was the hairstyle of an art-rock bass player, not an ordinary human being, and he’d kept the earrings and added a nose ring.

  After art college he’d taken a job at a London newspaper as an illustrator. But in his spare time he’d started up a comic book called Thunk, a counterculture publication with a strong anti-corporate, anti-capitalist, proto-anti-globalisation message, sex scenes, and a feature strip called ‘Nuns with Guns’ as its centrepiece. He’d come away from his political friends and his squat and his ragtag comic and, I suspect, a difficult relationship, for his first visit to the country in four years.

  My disappointment at having to come back to Victor’s after my adventures with Will in Pretoria were tempered by Elliot’s arrival. With school over and friends already away studying, there was no one my age to be around. I was lonely and had nothing to keep myself occupied. I could have tried to get a job in some shop or restaurant. Victor certainly goaded me about it, and I used my draft-dodging as an excuse. I told myself I deserved something better and that it would come along in time; in truth, I felt incompetent even to carry a plate, to get the order right, to get the change right.

  So I did nothing. Now I had Elliot to do nothing with, as if we were on holiday together, and once again I could coast in a brother’s slipstream.

  Elliot and I decided to go to the town show, which happened to be on that week.

  We were about to get into Victor’s car in the driveway when we saw something move over the gravel and onto the sandy verge outside the wall. We left the car and stalked towards it. A lizard a metre and a half long with stout legs looked back at us suspiciously from its push-up position.

  ‘Watch out for the tail,’ I said.

  The legavaan swaggered its thick midriff forward in slo-mo and drove a blue tongue at the air. I moved behind it, away from its stump head. Elliot went around the other side and crouched in his tight black jeans, edging nearer with outstretched arms. The legavaan’s paranoid eyes took Elliot in.

  ‘We’ll put it in the back,’ he said. In our old house in Jorissen Street, we’d had a large old tortoise we called Buster, who’d made the back garden his home years before, trimming the grass and eating old lettuce. He’d come freely (or so I’d been told), then a smaller one arrived, all on his own (again, I never thought to question it). Now this massive reptile on the red sand pavement ahead of us had come into town from the desiccated veld.

  I wondered what it was doing here, outside Victor’s house. The legavaan hissed at us and puffed itself out until its belly lay in the grit. It must have risked a great deal to come here from the bushveld. It was pure, even in its desperation; maybe because of it. There was nothing left to consider except its own survival.

  The lizard began to writhe the muscled tail behind it, and it gave off a continuous sound like the hydraulics deep in the working parts of sixteen-wheeler trucks.

  Elliot made a lunge for the tail but before he could get anywhere near it, the tip whipped past his face and he had to jump back. Still in slo-mo, the legavaan made for the lucky bean tree and used its claws to haul itself up the trunk. It opened its jaws and looked back at us from the low branch, its mottled flesh billowing.

  ‘Well, maybe we should just leave it,’ said Elliot.

  He took the driver’s side and I the passenger seat, and we started down the road to the showgrounds on the outskirts of town. The referendum posters started right at the top of Grobler Street:

  NO TO BLACK MAJORITY RULE

  NO TO INVESTING IN CHAOS

  NO TO COMMUNIST RULE

  BELIEVE FW AGAIN? NEVER! VOTE NO!

  STOP NAT SELLOUT TO ANC. VOTE NO!

  The rest of white South Africa may have begun to detect some regret for apartheid, but not our town. A yes vote would mean an escape from the immediate guilt of apartheid, if not from its lingering cruelty. Whether most white people wanted the National Party to negotiate the end of apartheid out of selfish economic interest, or moral principles, or a desire to wipe clean the centuries of guilt, they wanted a yes vote. They were giddy with the prospect of life after apartheid, even though – or maybe because – it had seemed impossible for so long.

  But our town of bittereinders said no. They believed that farm-grown muscle and, if necessary, an arsenal of hunting rifles would keep the future at bay.

  ‘Do they really think they can stop things changing?’ I said to Elliot, who had both hands tightly on the wheel of Victor’s Audi 500. Victor never lent me the car but didn’t hesitate about tossing the keys to Elliot, even though my brother was an erratic driver at best.

  Another poster appeared among the others: a man in a stripy balaclava stood with the long barrel of a revolver close to his face, and the three-legged swastika of the well-known right-wing group on a patch on his shoulder. The headline YOU CAN STOP THIS MAN was above him, VOTE YES beneath.

  The National Party had pitted themselves against the Conservative Party and their AWB allies. They were painted as a real threat to negotiations and, though the poster may have seemed melodramatic elsewhere, it wasn’t a complete distortion in a town like ours.

  ‘This referendum’s an insult,’ said Elliot.

  ‘I thought you came back for it.’

  ‘Sure, okay, but it shouldn’t have to happen. An all-white vote? Are they kidding? They’re lucky they’re getting the chance to negotiate a new constitution as it is.’

  ‘But, I mean, who’s going to be stupid enough to vote no? The newspapers are telling people to vote yes. Even big companies are telling people to, otherwise they say millions of jobs are gonna be lost.’

  ‘That’s a bullshit reason,’ he said. Jumping his turn at a four-way stop, Elliot steered Victor’s Audi 500 across the path of a lurching Honda Ballade.

  ‘Cowards.’ Elliot raised a middle finger through the window. ‘They’ll vote yes because they’re worried about business, or they want to play rugby against other countries again.’

  We parked among the cars in the dust outside the gates and walked towards the showgrounds. If we were living in a time when, whatever your opinion of it, you were about to be touched by great change, you’d never have sensed it at the town show. Rugby shorts and raw velskoene. Beer and biltong. Patchwork leather jackets and moon bags were still in fashion and On Sale.

  In the enclosure, a bull competing for first prize stood dripping snot. The relegated little cluster of military vehicles was on display, as always, at the military exhibition. And whites, whites everywhere – except for the cleaners picking up greasy chip packets, mopping beer and piss from under the uri
nals.

  Not only were there South African flags for sale (the orange-white-and-blue because the new one hadn’t been invented yet) but there were also the old Transvaal flags, the vierkleur of the former Boer Republic, which you saw more and more of these days. It was all part of a great regression, all the way back to the days of the Great Trek. Seeing it made it hard to keep hope alive.

  Elliot and I stood by a steel kiosk on wheels waiting to order a beer. Two policemen in their faded blues walked behind us. ‘Stay cool, man,’ said Elliot. ‘No one’s going to arrest you. They let me through, didn’t they?’

  I’d let Elliot know that I was hesitant to leave the house since I’d ignored my army call-up. I’d hammed it up, probably, exaggerating the risks to impress him, and to drive home the point that I was objecting in my own small way.

  We walked with our beers, past the two policemen with brush-cut moustaches, towards the top of the arena where I’d tried to ask Georgina Melck out years before. We sat level with the ground, on the top terrace, although this year there was nothing down on the sunken field below.

  Behind us a group of Afrikaans boys were chatting and one of them said something (in translation here but originally in Afrikaans, which sounds so emphatic when swearing or getting your temper up): ‘Hey, what the hell? Is that a guy or a girl? Nice earrings, moffie!’

  ‘Moffie’, he’d called us. It was a word reshaped from ‘hermaphrodite’ into a denigrating diminutive, more or less equivalent to ‘faggot’, but with far wider applications: anyone English-speaking and, especially, Jewish, qualified, in my experience. Also, those who didn’t play rugby, hate ‘kaffirs’, drink brandy, wear khaki, wear shorts, love their country, love their flag, go to the army or go hunting.

  ‘Leave it,’ said Elliot to me, sucking on his beer. ‘D’you wanna go on the big wheel?’

  Well, he had to be prepared for onslaughts like these, coming back to town with hair like that. Mine, grown long finally beyond school regulations, felt quaint in comparison.