Childish Things Read online

  Childish Things

  Marita van der Vyver

  Translated by Madeleine van Biljon

  Tafelberg

  For all those who were there

  When I think back on all the crap I learnt in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.

  Paul Simon, ‘Kodachrome’

  Flight 605

  I had resolved never to write about my youth. After all, what can you say about the seventies – except to wish you hadn’t been there?

  The sixties produced hippies and sex, the eighties yuppies and money. But the seventies? What can you say about platform shoes and trousers with absurdly wide legs, David Bowie’s hacked hairdo, John Travolta’s disco dancing and Abba’s music?

  It was probably the most ephemeral decade in the history of the world. Disposable fashion, disposable dances, disposable music. And disposable lives in the warm country where I grew up. Young white boys shot on the border for the good of the nation and the country. Black schoolchildren shot in townships for another nation in the same country.

  But eventually I realised what all storytellers have to realise before they can break free from the past: it’s not what you want to tell, it’s what you have to tell.

  So here I am travelling through time, in more ways than one. Rushing towards a child I have never seen, while remembering the child I used to be. With another child next to me. And I am writing about my youth, about the seventies, about that country of contrasts.

  You’ll have fun on the way

  When I looked up she was standing in the doorway, two suitcases like coffins under her arms and a funereal cloud on her face.

  ‘Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away,’ she sang in a gruff boy’s voice and kicked one suitcase across the bare floor so that it slammed against the opposite bed. ‘Damn.’

  I was so flustered that I forgot to wipe away the tears on my cheeks. She dropped the other suitcase heavily on the floor and flopped back on the bed, shoes and all. Not the regulation lace-up shoes but the prettier, prohibited ones with a strap across the instep. She folded her arms behind her head, sighed, and stared at the ceiling.

  ‘I’m Dalena,’ she said without looking at me. ‘I’m your roommate and I’m as disgusted with this dump as you are, so cry away.’

  ‘I’m Mart,’ I sniffed and gave my eyes a quick wipe. ‘Sorry, I’m not used …’ A vague gesture encompassed it all – the bare hostel room, the bars in front of the window, the unfamiliar trees in the garden, the humid closeness so early in the morning. ‘I’m not used to this.’

  ‘Never mind, neither am I.’ She turned her head and smiled at me over her elbow with the widest mouth I’d ever seen. ‘And I’ve been here for three years.’

  Her eyes were a strange colour. Greyish-green. Or greeny-grey? Athletic legs, slender ankles and knees, decently curved calves. Muscular thighs under a school dress which had ridden up to the elastic of her panties.

  She wasn’t wearing the prescribed large, grey bloomers, either.

  ‘In the hostel?’

  ‘Yep. But I schemed to be out of it this year. I talked my father into letting me lodge with the PT teacher in town. She’s nice, she would’ve given me more freedom than this place. I convinced my father that I planned to take my schoolwork “seriously”. Told him I was aiming for a few As in matric but that I didn’t have enough time to swot in the hostel. And he fell for it. But the teacher unfortunately has a dish of a brother … and yesterday my father caught us in the shower …’

  ‘You and …’ I couldn’t believe my ears.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Naked?’

  She looked at me as though I was mentally deficient.

  ‘Do you shower in your clothes?’

  Long ago, I remembered, Simon had a marble, shot with green and grey and almost as translucently bright as her eyes. When the light caught it in a certain way, there were yellow flecks in it as well.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then there was a helluva scene and I was disinherited – not for the first time – and here I am, back in the hostel!’

  And I had been under the impression that children on the platteland were innocent.

  ‘The worst of it is that I can’t have my old room! It’s been given to someone else!’

  When the breakfast bell shrilled unexpectedly, I immediately jumped up, but she remained lying on the bed. Stretched out.

  ‘Now I’ve got to sleep in this stupid room with you. You’ve probably discovered it’s right under the bell. No one else wants it, that’s why they give it to new pupils.’

  She swung her legs down and sat on the edge of the bed, stretched arms resting on the palms of her hands like guy ropes to keep her upright while she looked me up and down. I felt as though I was facing a headmaster. But then she smiled, a smile that literally spanned her face from ear to ear like a long, beautiful bridge.

  ‘Whose table are you sitting at?’

  I was so entranced by the smile that I forgot the matric girl’s name. ‘She has … huge boobs?’

  ‘Oh, Laurika. With that bunch of drears? Sheesh, no, you’ve got to get away from them.’ When she adopted a serious look her face was nothing special. Except for the colour of her eyes, perhaps. ‘Would you like to sit with me?’

  I could only nod enthusiastically.

  ‘Stick with me, baby.’ As soon as she smiled, as she did now, her face became one you would notice in a crowd. ‘I can’t promise to make you famous. But you’ll have fun on the way.’

  That’s how I got to know Dalena van Vuuren. And nothing would ever be the same again.

  Since my arrival the previous day I had felt like a wild animal locked up in a zoo for the first time. Later I realised that an Afrikaans school hostel in a conservative platteland town could, in fact, be described as a kind of zoo. The windows were barred to keep inmates in and outsiders out. There were feeding times and visiting hours and sleeping times and even times when pupils were gated. Sometimes we behaved like animals, too.

  Hideous, I’d thought when I first saw the hostel room.

  A grey blanket on a grey iron bed, greyish linoleum on the floor and a greyish-white clothes cupboard. Empty, but with a musty smell emanating from its interior. The smell of lost dreams, I thought with the poetic licence of an almost sixteen-year-old. Actually, it was only the smell of stale food, I realised later: of cake and rusks and other edibles hidden behind clothes and gobbled in silence.

  Even the walls had a greyish tinge. And bare, bare, bare. Not a poster or a painting or a postcard, not even a hole where a nail had been or a mark where sticky tape had stripped away the paint.

  A cheap wooden table, grey with age, under the window. Wire mesh against mosquitoes in front of the window. And bars behind the mesh, even though the room was on the second floor.

  Slowly I’d sat down on my bed and stared at my knees under my new grey school uniform as if they belonged to someone else. Golden brown legs after a holiday at the sea.

  My mother suppressed a sigh and sat down on the other bed in the room. I hadn’t wanted to look at her, afraid that I would start crying. Or even worse, that she would cry.

  ‘Only three days,’ she’d said in a thin, unfamiliar voice, ‘then it’s the weekend.’

  I looked away, through the mesh in front of the window, to where orange flames burned in a tree. I didn’t know what kind of tree it was. Where I came from, trees behaved in a dignified manner, green in summer, bare in winter. Oak trees, weeping willows, fig trees. Not gaudy pink and purple and orange like the frangipani and the jacaranda and the tree-with-flames in this hot, feverish country.

  But now we had come to live in the Lowveld because my father had made a mint with one of his schemes
and for the first time had been able to afford a small farm. Because he wanted to play at being a farmer even though he was an attorney. Because he’d seen too many cowboy movies, as my mother had mumbled when she’d heard of this plan. Because he saw himself as a pioneer in the Wild West.

  The idea was that my mother would run the small banana farm while my father and a few partners developed a kind of health farm in the vicinity. A place where wealthy people could stay when they wanted to stop smoking or drinking or to lose weight or simply to rid themselves of aches and pains. Stupid, I thought, like all my father’s schemes. To expect adults to pay large sums of money to stay in a glamorous concentration camp! To get a bowl of lettuce for lunch and do PT three times a day!

  And it was as a result of this fantastic idea that I, at almost sixteen, was sitting in a hostel room for the first time in my life. A few years before, when I was still reading the Afrikaans version of Angela Brazil’s books, I wouldn’t have minded. There was a time, not too long ago, when stealthy midnight feasts and silly pillow-fights sounded more fun than the wildest party in the darkest of garages. There was a time when I could eat tins of boiled condensed milk down to the last lick without worrying about whether my jeans would still fit me.

  Now I felt too old.

  ‘Well, I suppose I have to go.’ My mother’s face was shiny with perspiration. This was her first acquaintance as well with the greyness of a hostel room. She looked at me as if she would never see me again. ‘Your father’s waiting in the car and it’s hot.’

  He was the one who wanted to come and live here, I thought.

  ‘Will you manage the unpacking?’

  She looked at the new nylon suitcase on the floor. Grey – as though we’d had a premonition when we’d bought it the previous week – with its handle and binding as extravagantly orange-red as the flowers on the unfamiliar tree.

  ‘Yes, of course, Ma. Please go.’

  She got up and hugged me briefly, frightened of an emotional outburst. She smelt as she usually did, of baby powder and cigarette smoke and the sickly sweet hairspray (‘For Firm Hold’) that made her hair stick to your fingers. But her smell mingled with the strange odours in the room – stale food, disinfectant, Peaceful Sleep mosquito repellent – and I drew away because I felt sick. She thought it was because I didn’t want to kiss her.

  It was only when she left the room that I cried.

  Years later she told me that she had cried too, all the way home. While my father tried to convince her that I would learn team spirit and obedience and good table manners in the hostel – plus all the other decent attributes which, according to him, his four children seriously lacked.

  ‘This is what happens when you try to rear children in the modern manner,’ he had accused her, and not for the first time. ‘From Dr Stock’s books.’

  ‘Spock,’ Ma had sighed.

  ‘You know perfectly well what I mean. If I’ve told you once, Marlene, I’ve told you a dozen times that you mustn’t come crying to me if they turn out to be dropouts or drug addicts.’

  My holiday at the sea felt like something in the distant past. I couldn’t even remember the colour of Nic’s eyes.

  Brown, of course, I thought in a wave of panic, but what kind of brown? Brown like bitter chocolate or brown like milky coffee or brown like gingerbread or …? I realised that I was hungry and wondered whether hostel food was as awful as everyone said it was.

  The bed opposite me was empty, the sheets and pillowcase a dirty white with the faded initials of the Transvaal Education Department in both languages – T.O.D. T.E.D. T.O.D. T.E.D. T.O.D. – in their serried ranks as the only decoration. ‘We always keep a couple of beds open,’ the matron had explained. ‘Newcomers are often a day or two late.’ Her voice sliced through my marrow like a butcher’s saw. I hoped that the newcomer on her way here had been involved in a car accident. I didn’t want to fall asleep next to a girl I didn’t know from a bar of soap.

  The bell rang so shrilly that I was startled, and ran to the door. Outside, in the passage and above the door, hung something that looked like a giant’s bicycle bell – a stainless-steel serving dish which made an indescribable noise. Of all the rooms in the long passage, I had been given the one directly below the bell. I shut the door and burst into tears.

  That was the supper bell, the first of many bells I would learn to distinguish in my new life as a boarder.

  The dining hall was even more hideous than the bedroom. There were eight girls at each long table, seated on hard wooden chairs with high backs. While Matron said grace some stared at a bowl of brown bread in the middle of the table, faces as strained as a sprinter’s in the blocks. The moment the saw-like voice said ‘Amen’, everyone made a grab for the bowl.

  There were twelve slices of bread in the bowl, I realised later, which meant that only the four fastest eaters could have a second slice.

  It was even worse than I had imagined, I thought, while the girl next to me swallowed her bread in great, greedy bites and shot out her hand for the second slice. It was like something from Charles Dickens!

  At the head of each table sat a matric girl who was allowed to serve herself first. Then the stainless steel dishes were passed back and forth until they eventually reached the end of the table where the losers sat. The unpopular ones, the ugly ones, the stupid ones, the newcomers, like me. By the time I’d served myself the last of the food, the matric girl’s plate was virtually empty.

  The evening meal was mealie porridge and sausage with a sauce of baked tomatoes. Where I came from we had mealie porridge for breakfast, with milk and sugar and a lump of butter. And even for breakfast I wasn’t mad for it.

  The matric girl at the head of the table had the face of a young child: a button nose, her hair bunched in ponytails above her ears; but her breasts were two majestic mountain peaks which overshadowed everything in their vicinity. I stared at them unashamedly.

  Perhaps this area was so fertile that it wasn’t only the vegetation that grew faster than in other places? Maybe the people too were affected. I looked at my seven table companions. Naturally they didn’t all have big breasts, but the one next to me, the one who had grabbed the bread, had hands almost as big as my father’s. And the one opposite had a plait as long and thick as a child’s arm.

  ‘What did you say your name was?’ the one with the incredible plait asked when she saw I was looking at her.

  ‘Mart.’ The porridge stuck to my teeth like wonder glue. ‘Mart Vermaak.’

  Now all seven were looking at me. Where do you come from? Which school were you in? Do you know …? But as suddenly as the chorus of questions started, they forgot about me. Seven heads turned away from me. Seven voices chatted enthusiastically about the recent holiday.

  I stared at the baked tomato skins on my plate – as horrid as the skin on a cup of coffee – and tried to remember exactly what it sounded like when a wave broke on a rock.

  Another grey tiled floor in the bathroom, two rows of dirty-white basins opposite one another, two rows of lavatories and baths behind closed doors, and a few open showers against the furthest wall. What had happened to all the colours in the world? Even the girls around me seemed colourless, off-white in their summer nightgowns, as though I were looking at an overexposed photograph.

  I brushed my teeth and thought about my holiday. Tried to recall the smell of suntan lotion, the screech of gulls carried away on the wind, the sticky feeling of sand against a wet body. Anything to get away from this unreal reality.

  But all I could smell was the Clearasil ointment the girl next to me was using for her pimples. Looking at herself in the mirror with open-mouthed concentration, she was unaware that I was staring at her. All I could hear was water rushing out of taps and showers. If I closed my eyes, perhaps I could imagine it was the sound of waves.

  When I closed my eyes, the sharp, foamy taste of toothpaste was on my tongue and I suddenly remembered that Nic’s mouth had tasted of peppermints and tobacco wi
th a lingering aftertaste of salt.

  A bell rang – another one – and everyone rushed out of the bathroom like cockroaches when a light went on in a dark room. I also changed into a cockroach.

  In my new bedroom my unpacked suitcase and my empty school rucksack lay on the bed. On top of the suitcase were balls of crumpled newspaper in which I had wrapped a mug, a porcelain doll and a few other pathetic ornaments to remind me of home. I sat down on the bed and read one of the newspaper reports because I didn’t know what else to do until the next bell rang.

  Our enemies must know that every single one we lose on the border, binds us more closely to our country, South Africa. So said the Minister of Police, Mr Jimmy Kruger, at the funeral of a young constable shot in Rhodesia.

  I crumpled the newsprint and looked for a waste basket. Under the table there was a wire waste basket. Grey, what else?

  When I looked outside, through the mesh and the bars, the unknown tree still flamed orange. Hundreds of tongues of fire licked at the deepening dusk. Further back, an orange bougainvillaea poured over the wire fence surrounding the hostel garden. And almost in front of the window grew a green shrub as high as a tree, with great white flowers which hung from the branches like inverted crinkle paper cups. I wondered whether it was these cups which gave off the heartbreaking odour.

  I had to turn away from the window because my eyes were smarting with tears again.

  So I sat and stared at the bare wall in front of me, absently stroking the coarse sailcloth of my rucksack. A grubby rucksack on which the names of friends and silly messages had been written with various coloured felt-tipped pens. I looked down and drew in my breath sharply. Next to me on the bed lay something which looked like a small heap of spilt salt. Carefully, because it was far more precious than salt, I tried to gather it into my cupped hand.

  I let the sea sand flow back and forth between my hands while my holiday unreeled like a movie in my head. Actually much better than a movie because I could even smell the suntan lotion.