Childish Things Read online

  My father didn’t think much of this I’ll-scratch-your-back-if-you’ll-scratch-mine Broederbond. My mother said it was only be-cause they had never asked him to become a member. I thought it was just something else he could blame her for. Her father, my Grandpa Fishpond, had supposedly been a member of the more liberal United Party. And they probably thought she was English because she dyed her hair and smoked Cameos.

  ‘Hmmm.’ Suna licked her lips. ‘Where did you learn to drink this stuff?’

  ‘Mart told me about it,’ Dalena said. ‘She just looks innocent.’

  ‘At the seaside,’ I said. ‘With Nic.’

  ‘Who is this Nic you mention so often?’

  ‘Don’t ask,’ Dalena warned. ‘Unless you want to spend the rest of the evening hearing all about this fabulous guy you’ve never met. The brownest eyes, the broadest shoulders, the best-looking legs, the most unbelievable personality, the biggest …’

  ‘You’re lying, I never carried on like that, Dalena!’ The vodka probably also had something to do with the heat in my cheeks.

  ‘Have you ever listened to yourself, Mart?’

  ‘The biggest what?’ Suna wanted to know.

  Now it was Dalena’s turn to giggle. Suna’s eyes widened. My cheeks got hotter and hotter.

  There were certain words even Dalena wouldn’t use. When it came to sexual parts, male or female, she couldn’t even mention the biological terms. Even though they sounded so chaste in our pretty biology teacher’s mouth.

  ‘Penis!’ she’d whispered for the first time the other evening in our hostel room. ‘It sounds like a new kind of headache pill!’

  ‘And what about vagina?’ I asked, as always braver in the dark. ‘Doesn’t it sound like the name of an old maid? There was an old maid named Vagina, whose looks became finer and finer …’

  Dalena had to put her hand in front of her mouth to stop laughing.

  ‘And testicles!’ I’d giggled. ‘Like something belonging to an octopus! He swings his dangerous testicles about to keep the enemy at bay!’

  ‘And vulva could’ve been a car. He climbed into his new Vulva and drove away.’

  ‘And uterus?’ We were both amazed by our daring. ‘Isn’t there a city in Holland called Uterus?’

  ‘Uterus and Clitoris,’ Dalena had announced in a dramatic whisper. ‘A Tale of Two Cities!’

  ‘Dalena exaggerates.’ I took a few quick swallows from the glass in front of me even though I knew it wasn’t a cold drink. ‘It was only a holiday romance.’

  ‘That’s what she tells you now!’ Dalena’s voice was louder than usual, even more like a boy’s. ‘After stuttering old Ben has won her heart.’

  ‘He doesn’t stutter, he …’ I fell into every trap she set for me. ‘He’s only shy.’

  ‘Ha!’ She gathered our glasses to mix another three Black Russians, confident as a cocktail barman behind her father’s counter. She was wearing a man’s maroon dressing gown in a silky material. She constantly said she couldn’t stand her father but she evidently couldn’t resist the temptation of wearing his clothes. ‘Let’s drink while we can. Don’t think we’ll get anything more than Coke and Fanta tomorrow evening. Perhaps a couple of sneaky beers for the boys, but definitely nothing for the girls! After all, nice girls don’t drink!’

  ‘Let’s drink a toast to Mart and Ben!’ Unlike Dalena, Suna’s voice had become higher and thinner. She sounded like a six-year-old girl. It could also have been the alcohol affecting my hearing. ‘To whatever may happen tomorrow night!’

  ‘As I know old Ben, bugger all will happen,’ said Dalena.

  My body felt too light for the bar stool, my feet too far off the floor. I studied the walls around me hung with dozens of framed rugby photographs. Team photos, mostly, from Springbok teams to farm-school teams with no differentiation between famous and obscure players.

  ‘What are you going to wear?’ Suna wanted to know.

  ‘Sheesh, I don’t know.’ I could hardly admit that I’d struggled with this problem for over a week. ‘Jeans, probably. What about you?’

  ‘It probably doesn’t matter,’ Suna sighed. ‘I don’t have a date.’

  Suna wasn’t ugly. She had long blonde hair and a great body and all; but she also had acne. Not badly, but as a result she suffered from a serious lack of self-confidence. The moment a boy looked at her she dropped her head and swallowed her tongue.

  ‘Oh, come on, Suna!’ Dalena bellowed. ‘I told you I’d make you look great with my sisters’ make-up. You’re going to look like Cinderella at the prince’s party.’

  ‘Cinderella had a fairy godmother.’ Absently Suna rubbed her pitted skin. ‘You can’t cast magic spells, Dalena.’

  ‘There’s nothing that foundation and blusher can’t fix. There’s absolutely nothing …’

  And with this prediction my roommate fell off her high bar stool with an ear-splitting crash.

  I sat on the balcony in front of Dalena’s bedroom and looked out over her father’s farm. It wasn’t a toy farm like my father’s. Chris van Vuuren was a real farmer, not an attorney wanting to play at being a farmer.

  Over the weekend I’d realised for the first time that Dalena’s father was filthy rich. You would never have guessed it if you saw her in the hostel. She wasn’t one for fantastic clothes or shiny bangles or anything that showed that her people had money. I knew what my mother would say: if you were used to money you didn’t have to flaunt it.

  My people weren’t exactly poverty-stricken, but my father’s bank statement was always as unpredictable as his next scheme to make money quickly. Or to lose it quickly, which happened more often. At the moment things were going rather well with a farm and a swimming pool, but the Van Vuurens’ farm and swimming pool made ours seem like a suburban plot with a fishpond. The Van Vuurens not only had a swimming pool big enough to hold a school gala, they also had a jacuzzi and a sauna.

  ‘Jacuzzi,’ I said aloud to hear what this exotic word sounded like in my mouth. Almost as pretty as French. ‘Je t’aime, mon amour.’

  ‘What?’ Dalena asked behind me and I was so startled that the writing pad fell off my lap.

  She stood at the French doors which opened out of her bedroom on to the balcony, yawned lazily and stretched her arms high above her head. She was wearing only the loose T-shirt in which she’d slept. Love is … I read on her breast, above a picture of two little dolls hugging one another on her stomach, with the rest of the sentence on her hips … being nice to her even if she’s grumpy.

  ‘I thought you and Suna were still asleep.’

  ‘So you sat talking to yourself.’ She blinked her eyes in the sharp morning light. ‘Anyone would think you were in love.’

  ‘Did you enjoy the party?’

  ‘Oh, it was OK.’ She dropped into the deckchair next to me, yawned again, stretched her bare legs. ‘You obviously enjoyed it.’

  ‘Where’s Suna?’

  ‘Probably still dreaming about how popular she was.’

  She turned her head towards me, the grey-green eyes wide awake now, and smiled that impossibly wide smile. ‘She was a hit, wasn’t she?’

  Thanks to Dalena’s sisters’ make-up and the low red lighting in the rondavel, Suna completely forgot about her skin problem. And once the boys saw how she could wriggle her body on the dance floor, she didn’t have any breathing space for the rest of the evening.

  ‘You didn’t look so bad yourself,’ I told her, my eyes on the sugar-cane fields which would soon start shimmering in the heat. ‘Heinrich virtually drooled every time he looked at you.’

  ‘Sheesh, he’s as much of a used-to-nothing as all the other schoolboys. If you wear a halter top, they know you’re not wearing a bra. It’s enough to give them wet dreams for the rest of the term.’

  I had a vague suspicion of what she meant by a wet dream, but it sounded so awful that I didn’t want to believe it.

  ‘No way do I want to bother with schoolboys any longer.’ She got up and
idled back to the glass doors. ‘I’ll leave them to you and Suna. I’m going to call someone to bring us coffee.’

  In this house the whites did even less than in any other house I’d ever been in. A battalion of servants in crisp white uniforms moved as soundlessly as ghosts over the wall-to-wall carpets. As soon as you needed one, she appeared before you like Aladdin’s subservient genie. You didn’t even have to make the effort to rub a lamp.

  It was a two-storey house which made me feel as if I were acting in a romantic movie, something about war and slaves in the American South. The balcony on which I was sitting, with its copy of Victorian wrought-iron railings smothered in purple bougainvillaea, ran right round the house. In the entrance hall, as big as a school hall’s stage, there was one of those sweeping staircases I’d only seen in the movies. It was the kind on which a beautiful actress in a ballgown would appear, standing like Lot’s wife for a moment before floating down like an angel.

  I could see that everything around me had cost money, from the cold marble floor in the bathroom to the shaggy white rug which lay like a lazy polar bear in one of the guest rooms, but I had to admit that I didn’t admire many of the objects. I couldn’t help thinking of my mother and her widow’s jar of axioms. People who have the most money, she liked saying, often have the least taste.

  Not that my mother could’ve run classes in good taste. When I’d shown her an interior decorating article in Sarie last year in which ornaments like the three porcelain ducks against our passage wall were disparaged as the ultimate in kitsch, she’d only laughed. But a month later the ducks had gone. Only three dark marks remained, minor monuments to years of motionless flight. My mother tried, after all, even if there were still many things in our house that would’ve driven Sarie’s interior decorator to despair.

  But Dalena’s mother had either never read Sarie, or she had enough self-confidence not to be dictated to about what she should have in her home. The walls were hung with pictures of children in ragged clothing, their eyes as large as plates with teardrops like transparent leaves clinging to their cheeks. Or stormy seascapes painted by someone who had obviously never seen the sea, with waves like blue flames topped by spumes like spoonfuls of whipped cream. At first I thought it was modern art, about which I knew nothing. But when I had another look at Dalena’s mother in a family photograph, with a purple haze in her hair and her mouth in a stiff pleat, I decided that she didn’t look like the kind who knew anything about modern art either.

  I pulled my writing pad towards me to write to my brother. I would’ve liked to tell him what had happened at the party but I was scared that he would tease me. I would like to tell someone that I got a kiss after all, at the end of the party. And not just an ordinary kiss, mind you, Dalena.

  It was while ‘Nights in White Satin’ was playing. We sat outside in the dark and … well, just sat, really. Ben wasn’t chatty, exactly. Not the kind of guy who would tell everyone what he got away with with a girl, I comforted myself. Dalena, of course, would say it was because he hadn’t got away with anything yet. If only Dalena knew!

  That’s probably why he says so little, I thought afterwards, as speechless as he was for the first time that evening. He was saving his tongue for better uses. My mouth felt the way it did after I’d chewed too many sticky toffees. But I couldn’t stop smiling.

  And my roommate didn’t have to know everything all the time.

  London

  8 August 1992

  Dear Child

  All I have to give you today is a small newspaper report. The older I get, the larger are the gaps in my vocabulary. I had thought that the opposite would happen: that in the final analysis I would be able to say everything that could be said, if I only continued to practise.

  I had imagined that to put words to paper would be like fishing. The wider the experience, the bigger the catch. Now I know this is not necessarily true. It may happen that your net becomes worn over the years, and full of holes, and that you no longer want to take the trouble to mend it because you no longer care if the small fish get away – only the really big ones are still a challenge.

  There are a few things I’m trying to say, just a few, but because I’m finding it so difficult to catch the right words, all the others slip through my fingers these days. I’ve never been good at small talk. I was always a fiasco with a cocktail in my hand among people I didn’t know well, but these days I even have trouble in talking to friends. If I can still speak of friends.

  That’s probably why I have a growing need of these letters, to share things with you I can share with no one else, even if it’s only once in a while. (Or is it because I’ve started writing about my adolescence that I’ve developed a teenage need to have some kind of a diary?)

  Heimwee. That’s the word I was groping for in my previous letter. Heim as in the German Heimat, wee as in weemoed, that indescribable longing for one knows not whom, where or what. Here is a little tale picked up in an Afrikaans newspaper about heimwee.

  Afrikaans? Yes, now that it’s no longer necessary to hang my head in shame because I come from that accursed land, I sometimes dare to walk into South Africa House on Trafalgar Square where I page through old newspapers and magazines looking for – what? Faith? Hope? Love? What I usually find is suspicion, despair and hate.

  But sometimes there is something I missed in the local press. Or perhaps I’ve grown so used to reading between the lines in South African newspapers that I can no longer interpret the lines in British newspapers.

  London – What do you do when you’re in a strange country and your heart longs for your birthplace in Africa? You build yourself a mud hut in your backyard.

  (A mud hut! I thought. And read on avidly.)

  That’s exactly what Mrs Desiree Ntolo, a refugee from Cameroon did – to the annoyance of her neighbours and the local council in Dagenham, an industrial area east of London, which has instructed her to demolish the structure within a week. Mrs Ntolo built the hut entirely on her own.

  (How? I wanted to know. How do you build a mud hut?)

  Using a pick and a spade she dug stones and gravel out of her garden, watered the soil and trampled out strips of mud with her feet. A council spokesman stated that the hut could not be allowed to stand since it contravenes planning regulations, but Mrs Ntolo remains defiant: ‘The mud hut is in no one’s way,’ she said. ‘They must also consider my rights. If I can’t go back to Cameroon, I at least want something that reminds me of it.’

  (Can you guess whose side I’m on?)

  Love

  M.

  How will we know which side to choose?

  ‘So South Africa is finally getting TV,’ Simon grinned behind the steering wheel of Pa’s new kombi. ‘Any day now we’ll have the idea that we’re living in a civilised country!’

  ‘Yes, I hear they’re starting test broadcasts in Johannesburg next month.’ I stared through the window. I was tired of seeing only green all day. It was supposed to be autumn but in this region the plants evidently took no notice of seasons. ‘Here in the back of beyond we probably won’t be able to get it for years.’

  In the Cape the trees would be losing their leaves now, the vineyards turning gold and the weather becoming a little cooler each day. Here it was always hot, hot and green. So hot and green it was enough to make you puke. We drove past a clump of the burning trees that also grew in the hostel gardens. Long brown seed pods hung from the branches like Christmas decorations out of season. Flamboyant, Pa had said when I’d asked him what kind of tree it was. No, I don’t mean the tree’s appearance, I said, I want to know what it’s called. Flamboyant, Pa had said again, a flamboyant flamboyant – like a sweet sweet or a sore sore.

  ‘What do you think of the kombi?’ I asked.

  My brother’s upper arm bulged every time he changed gear. The muscles in his arms were as new to me as the car. That’s why National Service was a good thing, Ma said. It changed boys into men. It also changed them in other ways, I h
ad decided over the past weekend.

  ‘What’s the idea?’ Simon switched on the car radio, pulled a face when he heard boeremusiek and immediately switched it off. ‘A kombi is a great car for a surfer. But if Pa wants to be a farmer, why doesn’t he buy a pick-up or a four-wheel drive?’

  ‘You know Pa doesn’t really want to be a farmer, Simon! He likes the idea of living on a farm, but surely you don’t expect him to do a farmer’s work, do you?’

  ‘Well, who is supposed to do it?’

  ‘Who do you think?’

  ‘Ma?’ Simon shook his head. ‘She’s going to leave him one day.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  My father had ostensibly bought the car for my mother – handing her the bunch of keys like an engagement ring, beaming at his own generosity – so that she could ferry bananas to the farm stalls in the district. And then occasionally he could ‘borrow’ it from her over a weekend, he had suggested, to transport a few friends to a rugby game in the city. Surely more practical than a pick-up?

  Ma said if he’d wanted to be practical, he would’ve bought her a new washing machine. But my mother’s favourite song was the one Shirley Bassey sang so passionately: I love you, hate you, love you, hate you … Every time Ma heard it on the radio she sang along, just as passionately, even though she was usually off-key.

  ‘And now for something completely different.’ Simon took a cassette from his jeans pocket, smiled as if he’d produced a rabbit from a hat and pushed it into the cassette player. ‘Jesus Christ Superstar!’

  ‘But that’s …’ I swallowed to keep the shock out of my voice, tried to sound as worldly as my roommate. ‘Isn’t it banned?’

  ‘Everything that’s fun in this country is either banned or sinful.’ He definitely sounded different, I decided. ‘One of Pierre’s pals smuggled it in from LM.’

  I listened in silence to the unfamiliar music and wondered whether this Pierre, whom I was going to meet shortly, didn’t influence my brother too much. But I would never say it. I didn’t want to sound like my mother.