Childish Things Read online

  I had used the rucksack as a beach bag, packing it each morning with my towel, book, dark glasses and purse before I went looking for Nic. Don’t run after him, my mother warned endlessly, as mothers have always warned. But I didn’t run after him. I merely made sure that I was in the right place at the right time. There’s a difference.

  I learned to read the weather and the waves. That’s what you do when you’re stupid enough to fall in love with a surfer. I knew when I could find him and where.

  In the end I had to admit that he was more interested in the waves than in me. But at least he was more interested in me than in any other girl.

  When the lights-out bell rang, I remembered the colour of his eyes. It was like those damp blisters you saw on kelp, blisters which burst with a soft plop when you trod on them.

  London

  16 June 1992

  Dear Child

  You have just turned sixteen, I realised today. As old as I was the day the photograph was taken at the Pretoria Zoo.

  I dug it out – the only picture I have of all four of us – after I had read my son to sleep with Roald Dahl’s scary little verses. No, they don’t seem to frighten him. The crueller they are, the wider his smile. My innocent, bloodthirsty little boy.

  He doesn’t know the date nor what it means. In the cool green land where his forefathers starved, it’s called Bloomsday by readers who know who Leopold Bloom was. In the hot country where his mother’s forefathers hunted and plundered – where politics have always been more important than books – it’s remembered for other reasons. He doesn’t know about the children who died or about the child who was born a short while before that day.

  And now I’m staring at a photo of four terribly white teenagers on a yellow lawn, a cageful of monkeys in the background. The boys’ haircuts are brutally short, their bodies are awkward in army uniforms. The girls are dressed according to the fashion pages in the Afrikaans Sarie and the American Seventeen. One is wearing a halter-neck smock which bells out at her hips over jeans which hang even more widely over high cork soles, rather like an old-fashioned layered wedding cake draped in denim. The other one’s hair is hidden under a kerchief, her body under a patchwork pinafore dress, as if she had borrowed a maid’s outfit for the occasion. A rich man’s child in the clothes of the poor.

  I wish I’d spent my teens in a more elegant age!

  I have begun to write a story about that terrible time which I would like to dedicate to you, if ever I finish it. But I don’t even know your name.

  Happy birthday, my nameless child. I hope your seventeenth year is better than mine was.

  M.

  We will fight and go forward with faith

  ‘So it is getting a little better?’ my mother asked, her eyes worried. Opposite her my young brother was sucking up the last of his chocolate milkshake so noisily that he could be heard in the street. She wore her usual martyred what-have-I-done-to-deserve-this expression, but apart from that ignored him.

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ I muttered, the straw clamped between my lips.

  We sat in the Portuguese café next to the local movie house, the walls around us covered in old film posters. In front of me there was a grease mark on the red and white checked tablecloth, a large red plastic tomato filled with ketchup and a menu covered in plastic like a schoolbook. After three weeks in this dull town I had accepted the fact that there were no elegant coffee houses in Black River.

  ‘Doctor Zhivago,’ my mother sighed. ‘It was the only love story your father ever liked.’

  My eyes wandered to the posters on the wall while I fought the temptation to suck up the last of my milkshake as Niel had done. Love Story, I saw, and remembered how I had cried when Ali McGraw died so beautifully and giggled every time she said bullshit. Opposite me my twelve-year-old sister stared open-mouthed at Niel, which encouraged him to suck even harder.

  ‘Wow!’ she said with an American accent.

  ‘Shaddup,’ I hissed and tried to hide behind my mother as one of the matric boys at a table in the corner turned to look at us.

  ‘Children,’ my mother tried saying in my father’s voice. But it never worked.

  ‘Ma, he’s wearing his school uniform and he’s behaving like an elephant in a zoo!’

  ‘Tcha, old Mart is just scared one of her boyfriends at the table there at the back will think her brother doesn’t have any manners.’

  ‘Well, he doesn’t.’ I grabbed the glass away from him so fast that the straw hung in his mouth like a long, soggy cigarette.

  ‘Sheesh, where’d ya learn to grab so fast?’ he asked with something like admiration in his voice.

  ‘At table in the hostel. If you don’t grab you go hungry.’

  I enjoyed the slightly shocked expression on my mother’s face. She touched her bottle-blonde hair, stiff and sticky with spray as usual, and looked over my head at the posters. Niel burped, looking me straight in the eye. Lovey giggled behind her hand and my mother looked more martyred than ever.

  ‘You should’ve kept him back a year, Ma,’ I said. ‘Any idiot can see he shouldn’t be in high school yet.’

  He looked at me as if I’d slapped him. I almost felt sorry for him. He was the smallest in his standard six class and his biggest fear was that he wouldn’t grow much taller.

  ‘Never mind,’ Ma comforted as usual. ‘Simon only started growing when he’d almost finished school.’

  Hearing Simon’s name made me feel depressed all over again. My elder brother had started his National Service a month ago. Now I was the eldest in the house with this poison dwarf of a baby brother, and a sister who believed that life was a movie in which she played all the leading roles.

  The Portuguese café owner was leaning forward behind the counter, resting on his elbows, between the cash register and a fan which swung to and fro like a human head. Every three seconds a breeze blew through his dark hair. There were two similar fans in the far corners of the café, high above the tables, but they seemed to make no difference. My grey school uniform clung to my thighs and there were damp circles of perspiration under my arms.

  Behind the owner’s head hung the only poster which didn’t advertise a movie. It was the kind you saw in travel agents’ windows: a big colour picture of a deserted beach with palm trees. Like somewhere overseas, I thought longingly. Lourenço Marques, it said in heavy black letters across the blue sky. That was where LM Radio broadcast from.

  The man had sad eyes. He reminded me of the café owner in a book I’d read during the holidays, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The name caught my attention in the bookcase at the beach house between all the other books that had stood there for years, fading in the sun. I had wanted to tell Dalena the plot but she lost interest when she heard that it didn’t have a happy ending.

  ‘Gone with the Wind,’ Ma sighed again, her eyes on an old poster.

  ‘They don’t make movies like that any more,’ Niel and Lovey said quickly before Ma could say it.

  Ma didn’t even seem to hear.

  ‘Have you heard from him again, Ma?’

  ‘Simon?’ My mother ferreted in a crocheted bag with wooden handles and took out her pack of Cameos. ‘Two letters in one week! He must be terribly homesick.’

  ‘I miss him.’

  ‘So do I, Mart.’

  Ma swallowed the last of her tea and lit a cigarette. Equality? asked the woman in the Cameo advertisement, peering at the camera through thick false eyelashes. Onlymen are born equal. We’re different. Like our cigarettes. She was beginning to look a little bored. Ma, not the girl in the ad.

  Actually, all four of us were a bit bored. It was Friday but because the school was holding a sports meeting on the following day, the hostel children weren’t allowed to go home on the Friday afternoon. Ma felt sorry for us and had come to see us. But when she and Lovey drove to the farm later on, Niel and I would have to remain behind.

  ‘A Friday in the hostel!’ We will not give up the fight against ter
rorism and Communism, I read in the newspaper lying in front of my mother. We will fight and go forward with faith until we have achieved a just peace. The Minister of Police had spoken at the funeral of an adjutant who had been killed with three other policemen on the Rhodesian border. ‘It’s terrible!’

  ‘It’s going to be fun!’ Niel smiled with Ma’s dark eyes, adult eyes in a pointed little-boy’s face which made him look even more like a poison dwarf.

  ‘I wish I was a year older,’ Lovey sighed. ‘Then I would’ve been in the hostel too!’

  ‘I wish I was two years older, Lovey, then I need never see a hostel again!’

  ‘My name is not Lovey,’ she said as usual.

  ‘Sorry, Lovey,’ I said as usual.

  Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, I read on a poster in the corner where the matric boys were sitting. Now that was a smart movie. Bob Dylan’s music.

  ‘If you want to go to Stellenbosch, Mart,’ Ma said and drew an ashtray set in a miniature tyre towards her, ‘you’ll have to stay in a hostel.’

  ‘No ways, Ma! I’d rather go to an English university. Then I can do as I like even if I have to stay in residence.’

  ‘You’ll break your father’s heart if you don’t go to Stellenbosch.’

  ‘He broke mine,’ I replied, ‘the day he dropped me in front of the hostel.’

  ‘Don’t always exaggerate, Mart. It’s not that bad.’

  ‘How do you know how bad it is, Ma? You’ve never been in a hostel!’

  It sounded sharper than I’d meant it to but Ma didn’t react, simply tapped her ash neatly into the little car tyre. Goodyear was written on the rubber. A good year for whom?

  ‘Well, I listen to you talking … about your roommate, the way you …’

  ‘If it wasn’t for Dalena I’d have committed suicide by now!’

  This time she reacted.

  ‘Don’t say things like that, Mart.’ A forefinger tap-tapped the cigarette. This was a sure sign that you had to watch your step. She didn’t lose her temper easily, my father was the quick-tempered one, but the day she did lose her cool … Don’t push me, she always said. Don’t push me.

  ‘If it wasn’t for Dalena I’d probably have run away.’

  ‘Lady and the Tramp!’ Ma’s petulant mouth opened, her eyes pleased. ‘Do you remember it?’

  She knew I wouldn’t run away. I would moan and groan, I would threaten and sulk, I would cry every evening until my eyes were sore. But I would endure and persevere.

  I was nothing if not her daughter.

  ‘This is wild country,’ Pa said with the pride of a pioneer in his voice. ‘Wild but beautiful.’

  They were standing on the veranda, grilling meat and looking out over banana trees which stretched as far as the eye could see. Closer to the house, next to the swimming pool where I lay reading in the sun, the thin trunks of a few pawpaw trees towered above the pinks and purples of the bougainvillaea and the scarlet flowers of the hibiscus. I turned on to my back to catch the sun on my front.

  ‘Look, way across there, where it’s hazy, lies the Kruger National Park.’ Pa gestured, a beer bottle in his hand and a silly little cloth hat on his head. Prisoner of Love was printed in red on the white material. He swallowed a mouthful of beer and deftly turned the grill. ‘You can hear the lions roaring at night.’

  ‘I’ll be damned!’ said his friend from the Cape.

  ‘I kid you not,’ my father confirmed. ‘Sometimes the hippos come and drink at the swimming pool.’

  The man from the Cape gave an uncertain laugh. I turned up the radio so that I wouldn’t have to listen to my father’s tall tales. Wiggled my bottom to the beat of Mick Jagger unable to get no satisfaction. Tried to concentrate on my book again.

  Dalena had told me to read it. Which should have made me suspicious immediately because my roommate wasn’t the world’s greatest reader.

  ‘Has it got sex in it?’ I’d wanted to know.

  ‘It’ll make your teeth curl.’

  ‘In Afrikaans?’

  ‘Man, Andre P. Brink is not like other Afrikaans writers.’

  The way in which she accented the P made the name sound elegant and exotic. ‘I’m telling you, it’s hot stuff. Nude scenes.’

  I didn’t want to show any interest. But when my mother took us back to the hostel on the Friday afternoon, after our visit to the Portuguese café, I asked her to stop at the library.

  ‘Have you got Ambassador by Andre P. Brink?’ I asked the old lady behind the counter.

  ‘The Ambassador.’ She looked at my grey school dress and her heavy eyebrows rose like twin helicopters above her spectacle frames. ‘Aren’t you a bit young for such a difficult book?’

  ‘It’s for my mother.’ Without turning a hair. Sometimes I took after my father.

  So here I was lying in my holiday bikini next to the swimming pool, sweatily searching for the first nude scene.

  ‘This place is alive with snakes,’ Pa said. ‘As thick as my upper arm. Mambas. Green ones in the trees, black ones on the ground.’

  ‘What do you do if you come across one?’ The man from the Cape was beginning to sound sceptical.

  ‘You wet your pants!’ my father laughed. I peered towards the veranda over my dark glasses. Pa shook his head and bent down to turn the grill again. ‘No, the black people here know how to deal with snakes. Never Die – he’s the boss boy – always carries a long stick. He can crush a snake’s head with one blow’

  ‘That’s probably why his name is Never Die,’ said Pa’s other friend who came from Pretoria.

  Silently I sang along with Mick Jagger. I didn’t know what I would’ve done without LM Radio.

  ‘Mart, you must be careful of the sun!’ My mother warned from the edge of the veranda where she had appeared with a bowl of salad in her hands. ‘Else you’ll be crying in a vinegar bath tonight.’

  ‘Oh, Maa!’

  ‘It’s just a thought.’ Ma was wearing a trilobal skirt over a matching floral bathing suit. Her dark glasses could have belonged to Jackie Onassis. The clusters of red cherries hanging from her ears looked real enough to eat. ‘But remember it’s not the Cape sun.’

  I placed the open book over my face. The black letters swam in front of my eyes. I felt the sweat running down my stomach and filling my navel.

  ‘Gosh, but the water looks good.’

  The voice of the Pretorian sounded closer, as though he were standing next to my mother. Ma’s high-heeled cork sandals creaked as she walked away. It was quiet for a few moments, but I had the feeling that someone was watching me. I peered past my book and saw the man leaning on the railing of the veranda. ‘Nice hills on the horizon.’

  ‘Yes.’ My father gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘I’ll have to buy a shotgun one of these days to keep the boys at bay.’

  ‘I’d like to see her in a few years’ time.’

  Did the bastard think I was deaf? I lay without moving as though I’d fallen asleep.

  ‘Mart is a quiet child,’ my father said, ‘always has her nose in a book. Lovey is going to give me grey hairs, I can see that already. She’s the wild one.’

  ‘My name’s not Lovey!’ Lovey called out from somewhere, ran down the stairs and jumped into the swimming pool with a splash which sounded like applause.

  I was so grateful for the distraction that I didn’t even mind getting wet, just tried to keep the book dry by holding it above my head. I turned my back to the veranda and watched my sister bursting through the surface of the water like a glittering trout.

  ‘I caught her in the bathroom the other day, shaving her legs,’ my father said, sounding annoyed. ‘With my razor! And she’s not even in high school!’

  Lovey climbed out of the swimming pool, straddled me and shook herself. The drops of water scorched my skin like dry ice.

  ‘Come on! Look what you’ve done to the book!’

  ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘Nothing you’ll be able to understand.’

>   ‘How do you know?’

  She sank down on the wet paving next to me. Her skin was as brown as a nut, her body still unformed, but her nipples already showed darker under the tight bikini top. She winked at me as if she knew what I was thinking.

  ‘You must ask Ma to buy you a bra.’

  ‘I already have.’ Not ashamed about it at all, as I had been. ‘I wear it to school.’

  I pulled the damp book towards me, tried to read again. The frangipani tree behind me smelt as stickily sweet as Ma’s hairspray. All around me on the paving the creamy-white frangipani flowers had been dropped as though the scent had become too much even for the tree. It was difficult to concentrate on a book – even one with sex in it – when the trees around you smelt of hairspray and the sun burned your bare legs and the plants were so green that it seemed as if you looked at the world through dark glasses even when you took them off. Now I understood why everyone always said people overseas read more than people in Africa.

  That was yet another reason for living in an attic in Paris one day: to read lots of books while eating long loaves of French bread, drinking cheap French wine and smoking strong French cigarettes. And when I wasn’t reading, I would write romantic Afrikaans poetry which I would declaim with great feeling to madly attractive Frenchmen with black eyes and sunken cheeks who naturally wouldn’t be able to understand a word …

  ‘I’ve thought up a name for myself.’ Lovey’s voice broke into my dreams of the future.

  ‘You’ve got a name,’ I said irritably.

  ‘How would you like it if everyone called you Lovey?’

  ‘I can’t imagine anyone ever calling me Lovey,’ I sighed. ‘I probably don’t look like a Lovey.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t stupid enough to tell the kids at my new school that you call me Lovey.’

  ‘And now they call you Loulene?’

  ‘Hm-mm.’

  Slowly she shook her head while she drew patterns on the wet paving with her forefinger. Bit her full lower lip as Ma did when she wanted to hide her feelings. But it had always been easier for Lovey to show her feelings than to hide them.