Childish Things Read online

  ‘What’s wrong with Loulene?’

  ‘Nothing. It just doesn’t suit me. A name is like a dress, it has to suit you.’ She dropped her voice to make the most of the dramatic moment. ‘I told them my name is Bobby.’

  ‘Bobby?’

  ‘Yes. Like that song Simon always sings. “Me and Bobby McKay”.’

  ‘McGee.’

  ‘Yes, that one.’ A blinding smile lit her face. ‘Don’t you think it suits me?’

  ‘Bobby Vermaak!’ I muttered and turned on my stomach to read again.

  ‘Better than Lovey Vermaak, don’t you think?’

  ‘The army is a strange place,’ Simon wrote from Potchefstroom. ‘I wanted to be a parabat, remember, so I’ll have to go to Bloemfontein when I’ve done basic training, but now I’m beginning to wonder whether it’s such a great idea. I mean I’ve got this picture in my head of a paratrooper all the girls will fall for, but perhaps I’m the only one who’s going to fall, hard, out of an aeroplane. No, I’m not becoming a pansy. I’m just wondering.

  ‘I’m reading a book Pierre lent me. Catch-22, I think you’ll like it. I told you, didn’t I, that Pierre is the guy who grew up in Black River? He was expelled in standard nine, I heard the other day, because he told the headmaster that he was an old fart, can you believe it, so his parents sent him to a private school in Pretoria and he did standards nine and ten in one year. And last year he hitch-hiked across the country. I’ve never met a guy who asks so many questions. Or has so many strange opinions.

  ‘He says the Americans saw their arseholes in Vietnam. Solidly. He also says the whites have seen their arseholes in Africa, but we’re still arguing about that.’

  ‘Here a man eats meat,’ Pa said. ‘Beef, venison, lion …’

  ‘Snake?’ asked the man from the Cape, who was beginning to grasp the game.

  ‘Snake,’ my father said. ‘Only last week we had a snake barbecue.’

  ‘No, really, Carl, now you’re talking shit.’

  ‘Not so loud, there are children around,’ Pa said primly. ‘Come and have a piece of sausage meanwhile.’

  ‘I saw a monster of a snake next to the road this morning,’ said the Pretorian and swallowed some beer. ‘Easily six feet long. A car had driven over its head but its body was still wriggling when I stopped.’ Another swallow. The man knew how to expand a story. ‘I put it into the boot. Thought I could play a little joke this evening. Leave it under Jake’s bed with just the tail showing …’

  ‘No, dammit, man!’ One could almost hear the sigh of relief in the Capetonian’s laughter. ‘What would you have told my wife if I’d had a heart attack?’

  My father joined in the laughter.

  ‘But now I’ve had a better idea,’ the Pretorian said. ‘I think we should grill the snake this evening. Then Carl can show us how he does his thing.’

  ‘I second the motion!’ laughed Jake-from-the-Cape, even more relieved.

  My father was no longer amused.

  ‘We can do that,’ Pa said, his eyes on the grill, ‘but I’ll have to inspect the snake first. You can’t throw any old snake on the coals.’

  ‘Come on, Carl, it’s too late to chicken out now!’

  Jake-from-the-Cape slapped my father on the back. My throat closed as though I were choking on a piece of snake meat. The man shouldn’t have said that.

  ‘Chicken!’ My father’s voice rose as it did when he was losing a court case. ‘Ha! You’ll swallow your words tonight, Jake my man! Along with a nice mouthful of grilled snake!’

  ‘Bye, bye, Miss American Pie,’ Don McLean sang over the radio. ‘Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry …’

  I sang along, moved my shoulders and kicked my feet as if I wanted to swim through the music.

  ‘Why did the guy take his car to a lavatory?’ Lovey asked, lying next to me with her eyes closed.

  ‘I’ve also wondered.’ I thought she’d fallen asleep. ‘But Simon says when you sing, the words don’t have to make any sense. He says if everyone sang more and said less the world would be a better place.’

  ‘Not if everyone sings as off-key as you do,’ Lovey mumbled.

  I pretended not to have heard. Just listen to old Bob Dylan, Simon said. Oh, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now. It was actually better if the words were a bit jumbled, Simon said. Then it sounded deep.

  London

  14 July 1992

  Dear Child

  I hate zoos. But I was so homesick today that I dragged my child to a zoo. Since I started writing my story last month, I’ve been homesick all the time. Or heartsick, as I prefer to call it. (There’s an Afrikaans word that describes the feeling better, but I can’t bring it to mind.) I thought I would feel better if I saw a few other exiles from Africa but that depressed me even more.

  A rhinoceros behind bars in a London zoo is a pathetic sight. It simply stood there, immobile, staring crossly with its small eyes at the visitors. Its rough, dirty-grey skin reminded me of the heels of the children at Cape Town’s traffic lights, those begging hands and drugged eyes which used to appear behind my closed window like visions from hell. I couldn’t take it. It was one of the reasons why I fled. I didn’t want to live in a country where children looked like that. And yet, when I stood in front of the rhino today I wondered which one of us felt less at home here, in the heart of London.

  I grabbed my child’s sticky hand and walked unseeingly to the lion cage. In the innocence of his two-and-a-half years, he, in any case, was more interested in the packet of dinosaur sweets in his other sticky hand than in any of the pathetic animals his mother wanted to look at. Children are supposed to like zoos but I wonder whether that isn’t just another myth adults want to believe.

  In the souvenir shop, at the end of our visit, he asked me to buy him a plastic dinosaur. They don’t sell dinosaurs here, I snapped at him, unnecessarily impatient, fed up to the back teeth with this passion for a species that died out ages ago. Zoos are for living animals, I tried to explain more patiently. Why? he wanted to know.

  Why, indeed?

  I offered to buy him a plastic rhino. Or an elephant or a lion. He wanted a plastic dinosaur. Sometimes my son is stubborn – like any other toddler – but sometimes it seems as if his whole body becomes one solid unyielding mass. Then he becomes far heavier than he appears to be, totally immovable. That’s when he reminds me of Pierre.

  The lion walked endlessly back and forth behind the bars, its mane tattered. It looked even worse than the rhino.

  ‘Leeu,’ I said to my son.

  ‘Leo,’ my English son repeated as though speaking of an astrological sign.

  ‘Roar, Young Lion!’ I ordered the lion, but it stared at me as uncomprehendingly as my son. ‘Rrroaaa! Rrroaaa!’

  My son’s munching jaw stilled for a moment before he clapped his hands in excitement. Applause for a mother who behaved like an idiot.

  Years ago there was a zoo below Rhodes Memorial in Cape Town. I don’t know if I ever saw it. Perhaps it was before my time. Perhaps my mother told me about it. But I swear I can remember an emaciated lion in a dirty cage near a freeway.

  That is my earliest memory of a zoo. The others are even worse.

  In junior school I went on an expedition, with a crowd of fellow pupils, to the Tygerberg Zoo. All I can remember is a bunch of wriggling snakes in a snake pit. I dreamt about snakes for months on end, woke up screaming night after night. My mother was at her wits’ end.

  And then, of course, there was the visit to the Pretoria Zoo, the day the photo was taken which I told you about last month. I was a teenager, all long legs and private parts, sweating in a small cable car high above a hippopotamus enclosure with only the thin floor of the cable car and a helluva long drop between me and the hippo. With his skinny body in his ugly brown army uniform, Pierre made the car swing back and forth, laughing defiantly. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed to be in another place – any other place – when I opened them. Wh
en I dared to peer through my lashes again, I hung right above the rhino enclosure. It was probably the start of my perpetual doubt about the power of prayer.

  ‘Which is worse?’ I asked my son, a game I regularly play with him. ‘To be squashed by a hippopotamus or impaled by a rhinoceros?’

  He squealed with laughter and even offered me one of his dinosaur sweets. He loves such horrible possibilities. Give him a story with a violent ending and he smiles from ear to ear. Dwarfs who tear themselves in half through sheer rage. Witches in burning shoes, forced to dance until they drop dead. Where did this bloodlust originate?

  His African ancestors’ hunting spirit? Or the fighting spirit of his Irish forebears?

  Only an hour ago I sent him to sleep with another pitiless fairy tale. So that I can continue my own pitiless story.

  What does it feel like to be sixteen? I would like to experience that feeling again – really experience it, not just recall it superficially – so that I can tell my tale that much better.

  I would also like to believe that you are well and happy, wherever you may be.

  M.

  Nights in white satin

  It was dark in the hostel and as oppressively hot as it was every night. Not quite as dark as every night, I realised, after lying with my eyes open for a while. The moon had to be nearly full.

  Simon would’ve known. His moods always became stranger as the moon grew. It was inexplicable, Ma said, it should actually happen to me because the moon was my ruling planet, but she thought it might have something to do with his rising star. Ma took things like that seriously. Simon only laughed and said he didn’t believe in the stars, it was because he was a werewolf that he was affected by the moon.

  I turned on my side so that I could see Dalena’s bed. She was also lying on her side. Probably as soaked in sweat as I was. The smell of Peaceful Sleep hung stupefyingly in the air. As it did every night.

  I was startled when I saw the whites of her eyes.

  ‘I thought you were asleep,’ I whispered.

  ‘Too hot,’ she whispered back.

  ‘Don’t you ever get used to it?’

  ‘To the heat?’

  ‘To everything,’ I whispered, ‘I’ve been in the hostel for almost two months and it feels as if I’m never going to adapt!’

  ‘You’re simply not a hostel child.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘I never had a choice.’ She sighed and turned on her back, folded her hands behind her head. Like the first morning she’d walked in here and thrown herself down on the bed. Bent her knees so that the sheet looked like a white tent in the dark. ‘We farm children had to go to boarding school from the start.’

  We were quiet for a long time until I asked carefully: ‘What do you think of Ben?’

  ‘He’s all right.’ She turned her face towards me so that the moon shone on her cheek like a searchlight. Her skin looked as white as the sheet. ‘A bit too sweet for my taste.’

  ‘What do you mean … too sweet?’ Yesterday Ben had asked me, stuttering and stammering, to go to Heinrich’s party with him. I would have been at the party over the weekend in any case – but suddenly everything had changed. I didn’t know what to wear, I didn’t know whether I should borrow my mother’s curlers to put up my hair, I didn’t know whether my short hair would look stupid with a bunch of curls, I didn’t even know whether I still wanted to go to the party. ‘Can he dance?’

  ‘Not half bad.’ Her teeth were a white flash in her wide mouth. ‘But if you want to move beyond dancing … he’s terribly shy, you know.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ I said quickly.

  ‘I don’t think he’s ever kissed a girl properly.’

  ‘Oh, that shy?’ I couldn’t hide the disappointment in my voice. ‘Perhaps you can teach him something,’ Dalena comforted. ‘There’s always a first time.’

  A few more moments of silence while I digested the information. ‘When was your first time?’

  ‘French kiss?’ Her body shook as she laughed. ‘In standard six.’

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘I never even asked his name! It was at one of my sisters’ parties. He and I smooched all evening and it was only the next morning that I realised I didn’t know who he was. I was so happy to be given a French kiss at last that I didn’t mind at all who gave it to me!’

  I took a deep breath, mustered all my courage. It was always easier to ask such questions in the dark: ‘And further?’

  ‘Further?’

  ‘What’s the furthest you’ve ever gone?’ My voice was so low that I could barely hear it.

  ‘That time in the shower,’ Dalena whispered. ‘With Miss Lourens’s brother.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘We touched one another … He touched my tits and I touched his … you know … down there …’

  I couldn’t utter a word.

  ‘And he became as stiff as a board.’

  I didn’t dare look at Dalena but I knew she was looking at me. Pulled the sheet up to my chin because the room suddenly felt cold. My body was covered in goose pimples.

  ‘And then?’ I whispered urgently, afraid that she would fall asleep.

  ‘I had the fright of my life!’ She started giggling, her teeth white in the dark again. ‘I knew boys became stiff … but I didn’t know it looked like that.’

  ‘What … does it look like?’ It was the most important question I’d ever asked in my life.

  ‘Have you ever seen a donkey in rut?’

  ‘You mean, his thing hung on the ground?’

  ‘No, man, it doesn’t hang! It stands up straight! It gets longer and longer like … like Pinocchio’s nose!’

  ‘Like Pinocchio’s nose!’ I whispered, amazed, and tried to imagine this odd description. Without success.

  ‘Perhaps it also has something to do with lying,’ Dalena giggled. ‘A boy will say anything when he’s like that: “Don’t worry. I won’t put it in. I know what I’m doing. You can trust me …”’

  ‘Is that what Miss Lourens’s brother said to you?’

  ‘Fortunately my father caught us in time.’ Dalena’s sigh hung in the air for a long time, like a soap bubble before it burst. ‘Otherwise I don’t know …’

  ‘And what does it feel like?’ I kicked off the sheet again. Smelt my own sweat. Almost as strong as the fumes of Peaceful Sleep. ‘I mean, if it … if it looks like Pinocchio’s nose … does it feel like Pinocchio’s nose, too?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never touched Pinocchio’s nose!’

  She started laughing so much she had to push her face into the pillow to calm down. I giggled nervously too, frightened that a prefect or the teacher in the passage would hear us. Frightened that we wouldn’t be able to continue discussing this vitally important subject.

  ‘No, man, I mean … does it feel like wood?’

  ‘Wood? Are you out of your fucking mind?’

  She shook with laughter again. I was getting desperate.

  ‘No, man,’ she eventually whispered, ‘it feels like meat! Like raw sausage. Raw sausage frozen hard. But of course it’s not cold …’

  ‘Like warm frozen sausage?’

  ‘If you can imagine something like that.’

  I couldn’t.

  ‘Where is he now?’ I asked, to get the picture of the strangest sausage in the world out of my mind. ‘Miss Lourens’s brother?’

  ‘You may well ask.’

  ‘Didn’t you see him again?’

  ‘I told you, they all lie when they’re in that condition.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘I’ve heard my sisters talk about it.’ Dalena’s two older sisters, both at university, had recently become my most important source of information about this irresistible subject. (Through Dalena, as I had met neither of them.) And perhaps not even a trustworthy source because, according to Dalena, neither of them had gone ‘all the way’.

  ‘They say a man can’t think once his thing is ha
rd. They say it’s your own fault if you let him go too far because then you can’t say no any longer. He goes quite crazy.’

  ‘Crazy?’ I swallowed heavily. I saw the shy, quiet Ben with wildly milling arms, foaming at the mouth. ‘How crazy?’

  ‘They say he’ll rape you just like that.’

  The room was dead quiet.

  ‘But how can you tell … ?’ I took a deep breath like someone preparing to swim under water. ‘How far is too far?’

  The silence continued. All I could hear was Dalena’s regular breathing. This time she had really gone to sleep, I decided.

  ‘I think it’s when you don’t want him to stop,’ she eventually replied, so softly that it sounded as if she were muttering in her sleep.

  ‘You can stay as you are,’ Dalena sang while she mixed coffee liqueur and vodka in three tall glasses. ‘Or you can change …’

  ‘Wrong song!’ Suna laughed on the high bar stool next to me. ‘This isn’t cane, it’s Red Russians!’

  ‘Black Russians,’ I said and watched Dalena pouring Coke into the glasses.

  ‘It’s all the same fucking thing, man,’ Dalena said in Janis Joplin’s world-weary voice.

  Suna was overcome with a fit of giggling. I couldn’t help laughing as well. Nobody could swear like Dalena. Except, perhaps, Janis Joplin.

  I could curse in my thoughts like someone who ate on the sly when no one could see her, but as soon as I said a swear word out loud, I spat it out like milk that had soured. And Suna was like someone on a strict diet who enjoyed watching other people eat. I had never heard her swear but she started laughing uncontrollably every time Dalena used a rude word. And Dalena cursed like a gourmet. She rolled the words around her tongue the way my father did with good wine.

  ‘Cheers, Mart.’ She handed me a glass after adding a handful of ice to it. ‘Let’s drink to Heinrich’s party.’

  My stomach felt hollow every time I thought about the party but I knew it was too late to back out now. Suna and I were spending the weekend with Dalena because the party was being held on a neighbouring farm the following evening. Naturally, we weren’t supposed to be sitting in her father’s bar, but her mother had to spend a few days in hospital with some nervous complaint or other and her father was at a Broederbond affair, according to Dalena.