28 Boys Read online

  28 BOYS

  Ashleigh Giannoccaro

  Contents

  Welcome

  1. Francis

  2. Engela

  3. Francis

  4. Engela

  5. Francis

  6. Engela

  7. Francis

  8. Engela

  9. Francis

  10. Engela

  11. Francis

  12. Engela

  13. Francis

  14. Engela

  15. Francis

  16. Engela

  17. Francis

  18. Engela

  19. Francis

  20. Engela

  21. Francis

  22. Engela

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2016 by A. Giannoccaro

  Editing and Cover Blurb by Poppet

  Cover Design by Southern Stiles Design

  Cover Photography ©FrankysFunkyFotos

  Cover Model Franklin Petersen

  ISBN

  ISBN

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the written permission of the authors or publishers constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the authors’ intellectual property.

  If you would like to use the material from this book (other than for review purposes), prior written consent must be obtained from the author

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are products of the authors’ imagination and are all used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual events, locales or persons living or dead, are coincidental.

  For each person who shared their story so I could tell this one.

  These words are for you.

  Welcome

  The the place the world forgot

  This is not a ROMANCE, it’s not sexy and it isn’t beautiful.

  This is a LOVE story in a world where love has no place, but hope lives in the hearts of a few.

  Welcome to the Cape Flats — the place that the world forgot.

  28 - A number, but not just any number. A gang number, a symbol of brotherhood to a soul consuming cause.

  28 - His number.

  Boys - We can’t help but love them, my son, my brother, my father — even him.

  Boys - are the root of all the evil in my life, but also the only things I truly love.

  This is our LOVE story, where the number was erased but the consequences will haunt us forever.

  1

  Francis

  finds freedom

  It is deathly quiet, something that it never was inside the walls of prison. I am tempted to sleep, but it is my first night home after twelve years inside the four corners. Sleeping would probably be a bad idea, since no one has shown up to lay claim to my unowned loyalties yet.

  I lay down on the small couch, near the front of the shitty house where my family lives. I can see the streetlights shining through the holes in the roof, and they almost look like stars. Twelve years is a long time. I think I have forgotten what stars really look like.

  There is no one here. I am not sure where Ma is, and my sister, Felicity, must be out. After all this time there is no one here to welcome me home; not that they would want to.

  I close my eyes for a few moments and let my mind go back to this place, before, before I was a part of all this gang madness. When I was just me, and not a cog in the thug machine which rules the streets here.

  With my eyes shut I am aware of an engine rumble, a car is arriving outside. This could be very good, or very bad, depending on who has just come home.

  My heart beats a little faster, and the muscles in my shoulders tighten with the anticipation of reuniting with my family.

  The door grinds when it is forced open on tight hinges, and the muffled noises of bodies moving make my hairs stand on end. The presence filling the space in the doorway is not the petite frame of Ma, or Felicity.

  There is a man in my home.

  “Shhhh, Cecil, stop it.” The whisper of my sister’s voice is like music, but the name she speaks is a gunshot it’s so loud in my head.

  Cecil.

  I sincerely hope for both of them, that by some miracle, that is not the same Cecil who left me to die.

  “Cecil, what are you doing? No. Stop.”

  The obvious sounds of them kissing, and the shuffling of clothing, prompt me to clear my throat. The loud hack as the air escapes my mouth fills the small space, and causes them to freeze.

  I discern the sound of his gun cocking in the darkness between us. Her almost-silent whimper is a reminder of what I missed for so long.

  “Dink mooi, Cecil, as jy skiet is dit ’n agt wat jy doodmaak.” Think carefully Cecil, if you shoot it’s a twenty-eight you will kill. I sit forward on the couch, leaning towards where they are. “We both know how that will end for you,” I say.

  There is no answer in the pitch dark, but I know he just lowered his gun. The sound of his clothes moving gives him away. You see, being a Twenty- Eight comes with the respect of those who crawl the streets like ’roaches in the night.

  “Francis, is dit jy?” Is that you, Francis? My sister’s sweet voice cracks as she turns on the dim lights.

  “Dis ek, sus.” It’s me, sis.

  She is not a little girl anymore, she has grown up and I barely recognize her. I cannot see her clearly in the murky haze of the dim room. The antiquated, yellowed lightbulb, is probably older than me and doesn’t illuminate the room enough.

  My mother named me Francis, because she prayed I would be a girl so I would be saved from the streets where we were raised. My close friends, and the inmates who became my family in Pollsmoor, call me Fran; but my mother and sister always called me Francis.

  My baby sister throws herself at me, leaving Cecil standing with his gun at his side and an apology in his eyes. It is too late for sorry. I have been inside for twelve years, and freedom always comes at a price. He has been walking free and his time to pay will come. This impression of freedom is false, and I long for the security of the regimented life inside the walls that held me.

  “Ek is jammer, Frankie.” I am sorry, Frankie.

  He says the words, both redeeming and condemning himself.

  I can see by the the dollar sign on his arm that he cannot be my friend. His gang belongs to a different number, and I am an eight. Inside, or outside my body, my blood and soul is branded 28, and it will chase me to my grave.

  “Go home, Cecil, this is my house.” He looks at the floor, shoves his gun into the back of his jeans, and turns around. “And Cecil, you just broke up with my sister. Do you understand me? Ek sal jou doodmaak.” I will kill you.

  Murdering him wouldn’t be hard. I have killed before, and I will again. I killed a man to become a member of the gang, I killed another to go to prison, and I killed eight more inside. I am a killer. I am a 28 and today I am free to walk the streets. I will be damned to hell all over again if I let a man like Cecil, a man like me, destroy my sweet sister’s life. If I do one thing in this life I will make sure she never sees inside the four corners, I want her to find a way out of the cesspool that is home.

  “Fuck you, Francis.” She slaps me as the door slams closed behind the boy I just broke up with for her.

  He is not a boy, he is a man. A man I won’t have anywhere near my sister. She bolts off the couch and follows him. I can hear yelling, and her cries, from my spot on the couch. I know he will walk away and break her heart even more.

  I feel like a sleepwalker moving through a world I once inhabited; now it all seems unreal, as if I will wake up in my cell any minute now. Running my hand over the threadbare couch, I torment myself with the truth that this
is finally real.

  The voices and cries become muffled by the thin walls keeping me indoors, but I can hear my heart beating to remind me to live. I am afraid to go outside, I need the confines of four walls to comfort the prisoner still living in my mind.

  Felicity bursts through the door not long after the voices go completely quiet. She doesn’t look at me, or say a word, she just walks past me to the only room with a door on it - the bathroom. It’s the one place she has always gone to hide. Only now she isn’t a little girl with pigtails and missing front teeth, now she is a young woman with the world at her feet and death biting at her heels. I don’t want her to search for her soulmate here, in the doorway to hell.

  I wait a suitable amount of time to let her stew, cry and froth at the mouth, before I go and knock on the door.

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  “Fuck off, Francis. Why are you even here? I hate you!” she screams at me from the other side of the door.

  Knock.

  My patience is wearing paper thin. I feel the time bomb of my inmate instinct starting to tick faster every minute she doesn’t unlock the door.

  “Maak oop, Felicity, ek vra nie weer nie.” Open the door, Felicity, I’m not asking again. I threaten her, balling my fists to try restrain the bubbling wrath. I am not accustomed to being ignored.

  Knock.

  I try it the right way one more time. “Go. Away. Francis!” she sobs, this time her voice is pained and breathy.

  Then I smell it. The split second it takes for the smoke to filter under the door and into my nostrils is all I need to break the door off its hinges.

  Wood splinters and cracks as I remove the barrier between us with my rage. I pull the string for the light so hard that it comes off in my hand, but in the dark I can see the glow of her lighter already. My dead soul shrivels up a little bit more as the stark light shows me the hideous truth.

  I am too late to liberate her from peril; the sores on her face and the rotten teeth as she heaves in the tik from her glass pipe say as much. The little girl with pigtails is lost forever and everything I did for freedom was for nothing. I stare into the empty abyss of her soulless eyes - and there is nothing left to save. I have seen enough tik in my life to know that it is the devil that will take you to hell while you still live and breathe. The words won’t form in my mouth as I let the door fall to the ground, turn, and leave her with the remnants of my heart on the floor.

  Two steps away, something stops me. I look back over my shoulder and ask, “Waar’s Ma?” Where’s mom?

  An evil cackle escapes her as she breathes in more of the toxic shit. “Sy is lankal dood, boet.” She is long dead, brother.

  As I walk back to the couch at the front of the house, I can only wonder if I have left one hell for another. There seems little point in betraying others to salvage my family if they cannot be saved — all I have left now is the flicker of hope that I might save myself.

  I have the strange sensation of tears forming in my eyes. I didn’t cry in all the time I was locked up. Ten hours of freedom and there are tears rolling down my cheeks. I lost twelve years of my life and didn’t care about it once. Inside the walls of prison I was someone else, now I am out here and there is nothing left to cling to.

  They were my hope.

  So now I sit and wait, for the future that I no longer want to come.

  2

  Engela

  I am no ones angel

  I watch that boy from next door; he has come back. Bladdy skelem. Bloody crook. I wonder how long it has been?

  We buried his Ma without him, and I was still in primary school then. The tik meth has eaten his sister’s brain, and she sells her cunt to try buy it back. A slither of guilt sinks in when I think about her.

  We were friends. I introduced her to them. It will be like all the other nommers numbers that come home, his prison bed won’t be cold and he’ll be back in the four corners. They never last out here, not if they have been in there longer than a few months.

  It’s like they need to be confined to survive, the regimented life of the gang is all consuming, an addiction that cannot be fed out here in the filthy air and dusty streets. No, seeing the sky scares them.

  He’s bigger than I remember him. I imagine those arms lifting concrete blocks for exercise. The devils from inside the prison live in his hollow eyes.

  They all come home like that.

  Empty and lost.

  That’s why they all go back.

  “Take him some food. God knows there’s nothing edible in that vark huis.” Pig sty. My mother talks over the cup of tea steaming in front of her wrinkled face.

  She sits here watching the world outside spiral into a chaotic, criminal stronghold. It is like a war zone out there - without the war.

  “Fok dit, Ma. Fuck that, Mom. I barely feed all of us as it is. He can steal his own dinner.” I huff at her. I can’t take in a stray now. Not one that is a 28. No, that would be a very stupid idea.

  The crying baby draws my attention, so I walk out of the small front room and away from the haunted gaze of the criminal across the road. Ma watches though - she never stops watching.

  I pick up my sweet little boy and hold him to my chest, the soft sobs disappear into my skin as I absorb his despair. His daddy is in the four corners, and he may never come home. Even if he did it would be with a number, those empty eyes, and a concrete heart. My lover is dead.

  The boy I wanted to save is gone, and left me with another boy that needs to be kept safe. I worked hard to save my son from his father. I took big risks and trusted people who could ruin my life in a minute.

  The echo of gunshots and screaming in the distance outside, as the afternoon turns to dusky evening, soothe my son back to sleep. It’s a deathly lullaby, that sings the song of the gangs and the future I can only dream of saving him from. One day I will wake to the sound of birds and not the screaming horror of the world outside my door.

  I slither back into the kitchen chair. The old furniture creeks under my bum and I reach for my now lukewarm tea. As I gulp down the milky liquid my eyes meet his again, and I choke. Tea comes out my nose, burning on the way to spattering all over the blue table in front of me. I snot, and sputter to try get it under control.

  My mother glares at me as if I have gone mad, and yells. “Lift up your arms, stupid!”

  I can’t make my arms go up as I wipe the tea dribble from my chin and my now stained work shirt. “Thanks Ma, you could have tried to save me.”

  We just laugh and she goes back to watching. Always watching them.

  I am sure she knows all the stories, even the ones no one hears.

  “Take the man some food, Engela. Please, do it for me.”

  My mother continues her nagging, with her focus on the man standing against the small wall of the house opposite ours. His elbow is resting on top of the broken postbox.

  There is no point in having a postbox, as there isn’t any postal service. The kids have blown most of them up with homemade explosives and firecrackers.

  “No Ma, really. Is jy mal? Are you crazy? Ek kan nie die hele wêreld red nie. Ek is nie Jesus nie.” I can’t save the whole world. I am not Jesus.

  “I am not asking you to be Jesus, I am asking you to feed my dead friend’s son. He just got home from hell on earth and there is no one that even cares enough to feed him. Take him some fucking food.”

  The scowl on her face tells me I should just listen, but I really don’t want to go out there and feed a man I know is a killer. The man I know murdered my brother. He killed him to earn a fucking flag, a symbol of a gang that would be the end of my family. I hate him and my mother wants me to feed him.

  I don’t understand her.

  I spit in his food as I dish it up on a paper plate. No way I am going back to fetch my mother’s plate after he has eaten off it.

  “Do you just choose to ignore the fact that he killed Danial, Ma?”

  She shakes her head and answers me as s
he always does when I ask questions about my brother. “Engela, you were five. You don’t, and won’t, ever know the truth of your brother’s death. So hou jou bek en vat vir hom kos! So shut up and go feed him. I forgave that boy a long time ago. You should too.”

  My mother is a saint, she can forgive the man who killed her son. She forgave my father when he died inside Pollsmoor, the dreaded vier hoeke (four corners), she forgave me for coming home pregnant by a gangster who would only bring the death of the streets inside our house.

  She is a forgiver. I am not.

  I balance the paper plate on the palm of my hand and use the other to open the front door. The three steps down from the stoep (veranda) to the yard are a balancing act. I don’t look up - I don’t want to see him.

  Watching is not something I want to do. If I can’t see it then it’s not happening. Opening the half-broken front gate with one hand is not an easy task, but I manage it without dropping the precious dinner onto the dusty pathway at my feet.

  I didn’t bother with wearing shoes. My feet are tired and sore, and squeezing them back into my shoes would be torture. Trying to step lightly so that I don’t hurt them on the pavement as I walk out of the gate, I look up from the plate I’m carrying and my eyes catch his again.

  The plate tips and I look away to save the food from falling. I look left and right, to avoid being killed by a taxi, or some other idiot who bought a driver’s license for fifty rand and a box of smokes.

  The sky is a dirty orange with the glow of sunset and smog; the filthy air makes the evenings so pretty. The streetlights flicker on as I am halfway across the road; only four of them are working on our street. Nights are dark here.

  “Hello, Francis.” I greet him as I step up onto his side of the road. “Ma het vir jou kos gestuur. Ma sent you food. Dis nog warm. It’s still warm.” I get the words out without looking him in the eye. The plate is held out at arm’s length so I don’t need to get any closer to him.