Childish Things Read online

  ‘And here we have John Lennon,’ I said, and never got to the other three Beatles because my son stretched out his arms to grab John Lennon’s legs. ‘But you’re not allowed to touch him.’

  He was determined to touch him. I tried to pull him away but he began screaming. I looked around, saw no security guard and allowed him to touch, quickly, and with a dirty hand, John Lennon’s leg.

  It wasn’t good enough. He screamed so loudly that we had to end the excursion right there, before we could even get a proper look at Madonna or Michael Jackson. Which perhaps was also fitting, I consoled myself on the Underground on the way home. My taste in pop music never really developed beyond December 1980. On that day, when John Lennon was shot by one of his crazy admirers, I knew that the seventies had really ended. The day the music died.

  The biggest danger in Angola, I read in the newspaper, is that Unita or the MPLA will refuse to accept the result of the election. Then the civil war and the bloodshed will continue. Until there are no civilians left to kill? Until there is no blood left to flow? The most likely candidate for such a tactic is Unita, which has kept guerrilla operations going year after year with massive logistic and military support from Pretoria.

  Pierre was right, after all. He had the irritating habit of always being right. Now I wonder whether he would have been able to forecast how long South Africans would still have to wait for a free election.

  Imagine it, my dear child. Just imagine it!

  M.

  Take the best from the past

  It was break and we sat on the concrete slab behind the girls’ lavatories, our backs against the rough brick wall, bodies in the narrow strip of shade next to the wall, legs stretched out to brown in the sun.

  ‘I don’t want a farmer’s tan,’ Dalena said, and took off her white socks and black school shoes.

  ‘If a prefect sees you, you’ll be in trouble again.’ Suna sounded jealous as she watched Dalena wiggling her toes in the sun.

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’ Dalena still hadn’t acquired the compulsory lace-up shoes. My feet are too highly arched, she told the teachers. She had even obtained a medical certificate somewhere, attesting to this peculiar foot problem. ‘Any minute now they’re going to forbid us to take off our jerseys when we’re too hot.’

  My feet were sweating in my dusty school shoes. I looked up and saw a dense cloud next to the window above my head. It was caused by the wild girls in matric taking turns to stand on a toilet bowl and blow their cigarette smoke out of a high window, ostensibly to prevent the prefects from smelling it when they walked into the cloakroom. Actually, everyone in the school, from the standard sixes to the staff, knew that a few matric girls from the special class stood on a toilet bowl to smoke during recess. The problem was that no one knew how to punish them. The headmaster wanted to keep them in school until the end of the year (for the sake of the school’s good name, of course) while Maggie and her wild pals were clearly doing their best to be expelled before the matric exam. As a result everyone pretended not to notice the clouds of smoke next to the lavatory windows. Even on days like this, when it seemed as if the building was burning.

  ‘And what about the stupid rule that says boys and girls aren’t allowed to speak to one another during recess!’ Suna said. ‘Except in that small spot where a prefect can overhear every word.’

  The permitted ‘case square’ was precisely in the centre of the play-ground – where everyone could watch the couples who were silly enough to want to be together during recess – and it was guarded like a concentration camp by a cordon of prefects.

  ‘You’d think they’re scared the kids are going to tear off their clothes and jump one another,’ Suna giggled.

  ‘Don’t underestimate the influence of pop music,’ Dalena said in the sombre voice which the headmaster used in the hall every Monday morning. ‘Don’t imagine Black Sheep High School will escape the Communist Onslaught.’

  Suna, still giggling, peered round the corner of the cloakroom wall and dug an elbow into Dalena’s side. ‘Hey, did you see that old Hein and his new flame are also among the lovers these days?’

  ‘The one he hitched up with at his party?’ I asked inquisitively.

  ‘When he couldn’t get Dalena,’ Suna grinned. ‘Jolene was the only other girl not wearing a bra.’

  ‘But she’s only in standard seven!’

  ‘Ripe in the morning, rotten at night …’ Suna muttered like an old woman talking to herself.

  Jolene was one of those girls seemingly born with flawless adult breasts. Not even the children who were at junior school with her could recall a time when she was flat-chested. Not that her breasts were unattractively large like Laurika’s. They were just big enough to upset every schoolboy’s hormones whenever she arrived at a party without a bra. Which evidently happened at every party.

  ‘She’s a flirt,’ Dalena said. When Suna and I both looked at her, she added quickly: ‘And that’s not sour grapes. I wouldn’t know what to do with Heinrich Minnaar if he was handed to me on a platter!’

  ‘What’s wrong with Heinrich Minnaar?’ Suna undid her shoelaces and pulled her socks down over her heels. Theoretically she was still wearing shoes and socks. ‘He’s not bad looking.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with him,’ Dalena sighed. ‘He’s a sweet guy. I don’t like sweet guys.’ Suna still didn’t look convinced. ‘He’s the kind who’ll send you soppy Valentine’s Day cards. I know, I got one last year. And red carnations.’

  ‘What’s wrong with Valentine’s Day cards and carnations?’ I wanted to know. No one had ever sent me a Valentine’s Day card. Or given me any kind of flower. Except my father when my tonsils were removed, but that probably didn’t count.

  ‘It’s not the cards or the flowers, Mart, it’s the soppiness.’

  Sometimes I wondered whether I would ever draw level with my roommate. She hastily tucked her feet under her school uniform when she saw a girl in a black prefect’s blazer approaching, but the prefect didn’t even glance in our direction. Probably afraid of seeing the clouds of smoke above our heads.

  ‘I hear you’re also going to be chosen at the end of the year.’ Suna gazed suspiciously at the departing black blazer. ‘As a prefect, they say.’

  ‘Says who?’ Dalena virtually snorted with indignation.

  ‘The kids, who else? After all, it’s the kids who choose the prefects.’

  ‘Yep. And Father Christmas is a fat man who comes down the chimney once a year! Do you really think the teachers will allow someone like me to be a prefect?’

  ‘But it’s –’

  ‘Forget it. Why do you think nine out of ten prefects are the biggest shits in the school? Do you think the children have such bad taste?’

  ‘Well, the teachers probably have a say …’

  ‘The only say. The children’s so-called choice is a joke.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked.

  ‘I asked Miss Lourens,’ she replied. ‘But she didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know.’

  The bell went, and I listened to the scurrying around the toilet bowl below the window. If my roommate wasn’t such a know-all, I thought irritably, my life might also be easier.

  Dear Diary, I wrote in my imagination, I’m bored. The history teacher was standing with his back to the class writing a long list of dates on the blackboard. We were doing the Great Trek, as we did every year, and every year I wondered what I was going to do one day with all this information about devout Voortrekkers and bloodthirsty black barbarians.

  ‘Take the Best from the Past, children,’ old Bull’s-Eye Pretorius replied when we asked him why we had to memorise all these dates, ‘and Build the Future on it.’

  He tended to speak his words with capital letters, especially when he referred to the Past.

  How can you build a future on dead dates? That’s what I would’ve written in my diary if I’d had one. Standing on the threshold of my sixteenth birthday, I felt an ur
gent need for a diary. It was the kind of thing you did when you were sixteen. But I didn’t know whether I could inflict it on my grandchildren. Surely the aim of a diary was to tell your descendants something about your life? And who would want to read a boring report on boarding school life in Black River!

  I could have lied, of course. Led my grandchildren to believe I had been a talented teenage poet in an attic in Paris, bothered every day by handsome men, their arms filled with carnations. And that every year my postbox had been overflowing with Valentine’s Day cards. But I knew it wouldn’t work. I had never even been in an attic, let alone Paris. And when I recently showed Simon a poem in which I tried to emulate the young Afrikaans poet Antjie Krog, he told me not to bother and to rather listen to more Bob Dylan.

  No, I decided, I would continue to write an imaginary diary. It was one way to survive the endless lessons about the Great Trek.

  ‘Blood River,’ Mr Pretorius murmured as though he were praying. ‘Who were the Leaders when the Vow was made?’

  He was really a sweet guy, as Dalena would’ve said, a small man with weak eyes and a soft voice. His problem was that he thought History was more important than the Future. I glanced at Dalena who was sitting diagonally opposite me. Her face was a study in concentration but I knew her well enough to know that she wasn’t hearing a word he was saying. She had the ability to look as though she was listening when she was thinking about other things. I was always caught out.

  ‘Mart?’ I jerked to attention behind my desk. Mr Pretorius tapped a ruler in his chubby little hand and tried to look severe. ‘Dreaming again?’

  My face was scarlet with embarrassment but I knew he wouldn’t punish me. I didn’t do brilliantly in his tests, but still better than most of the other children in the class. No matter how you looked at it, Black River simply wasn’t the kind of school that bred talented pupils like exotic blooms. It was the heat, I’d decided during the first month. You couldn’t think when it was so hot. If you lived here long enough, your mind started melting like butter in the sun. It was obvious that the headmaster and the matron had lived here for a long time.

  ‘That’s why we still celebrate the Day of the Vow.’ Bull’s-Eye blinked his eyes behind the thick spectacles as if he was becoming tearful. ‘We celebrate the Victory of Civilisation over Barbarians, of Religion over Heathens, of White over Black …’ He remained silent for a long time while his short-sighted eyes slid slowly over the faces in front of him. ‘Never forget, children,’ he finally murmured when some of us began wriggling uncomfortably, ‘the Future belongs to you.’

  I looked out of the long row of windows to where the country’s flag was hanging limply in the heat, the colours faded from too much sun. A prefect raised it every morning, after which a teacher said a prayer, and shortly before the last bell it was lowered again. It wasn’t that I wanted to be unpatriotic but to me it seemed like a waste of time. In this windless area the flag never fluttered so that it could be seen properly. It just hung there, as lifeless as the children in Bull’s-Eye’s history class.

  If I turned my head the other way, I looked straight at a collection of photographs of Boer generals with unruly beards, gaunt women and children in front of concentration camp tents, and all the Prime Ministers of South Africa since 1948. Verwoerd’s photograph was slightly larger than the others. Or did it just seem like it from where I was sitting?

  I rubbed my fingertips over the deep grooves in the wooden surface of my desk. The messages of generations of bored school-children felt like Braille under my hands but I couldn’t decipher any of it. I would’ve liked to know who had sat at this desk before me. I would’ve liked to know what had happened to the girls who had scratched their names in the wooden surface, or to the boys who had stuck the gobs of petrified chewing gum under the seat. Perhaps some had died by now? They were part of the history Bull’s-Eye would never teach us because it couldn’t be found in books. For all I knew, some other girl might sit here one day and wonder who I had been when I, too, had become part of this unwritten history.

  In front of the class the teacher’s voice droned on like an electricity generator, but all he managed to generate in me was an unbearable drowsiness. Diagonally opposite me Heinrich had rested his head on his arms and closed his eyes. If Bull’s-Eye caught sight of him now, he would creep up to him and suddenly, with great force, hit him across the head. He would bite his lip as he did so. Unlike most of the other teachers, Mr Pretorius didn’t seem to enjoy meting out physical punishment. Heinrich would get a hell of a fright, bashfully rub his hand over his dark hair, and with any luck stay awake until the bell rang in fifteen minutes’ time to announce the end of the school day.

  I felt a small heart transfixed by an arrow under my fingers. Age had made the names in the heart unreadable. I lowered my head. It looked like … Manie – Marie? – and Bet – or perhaps Ben? I looked at Ben who sat in the front row of the class like a good boy. And suddenly I wanted to cry.

  Dear Diary, what does it feel like to be in love? I thought I was in love with Nic but it was over so quickly that it must’ve been something else. I thought I was in love with Ben after he’d kissed me, but when I look at him now, such a goody-goody, I don’t feel a thing. Except for a little heartache that I still don’t know, at nearly sixteen, what it’s like to be in love.

  Maybe I expected too much. I had always thought first love would be like a long deathbed – like the dirty-mouthed librarian who had died so dramatically in Love Story – but perhaps it was more like a common cold: something that passed within a week or two of its own accord.

  ‘Is everything organised for the weekend?’ Dalena wanted to know. I was still gasping after hockey practice, too breathless to reply. In any case it was about the fifteenth time she had asked. I fell back on to the grass, my eyes closed against the sun.

  ‘You’re jolly unfit, aren’t you?’ She sat down, cross-legged, next to me, her breathing barely affected. ‘And you don’t even smoke!’

  ‘Hockey is supposed to be a winter sport!’ I burst out. ‘It’s a threat to one’s life to run after a ball in this heat!’

  ‘It is winter,’ she reminded me. ‘Or almost winter.’

  ‘It’s absurd,’ I said. ‘I should never have given my name to Miss Lourens. I should’ve said I play chess, like all the academic wrecks!’

  ‘You can always drop out and play chess,’ she reminded me. She paused meaningfully. I waited for what was coming. ‘But then you’ll never get to travel in the bus with the rugby players. Rugby and hockey always travel together.’

  ‘So what?’ I was coming round to her viewpoint. ‘The rugby players aren’t the only guys in the school.’

  ‘All the guys who play chess have pimples and thick spectacles. And all the girls weigh three hundred pounds.’

  ‘What a lie!’ I laughed.

  I sat up, still slightly breathless, and looked towards the hockey field where the younger girls were practising now. The rugby field was quite a way to the left of us but we could clearly hear the first-team players grunting as they pushed in the scrum. On the far side of the rugby field, next to a splash of purple bougainvillaea, a few standard nine boys were loudly encouraging the first team. Ben’s blond hair flashed like a mirror among them.

  Da Nang, Nha Trang, Qui Nhon, I heard in my head again. Since the Communists had moved over South Vietnam like a plague of locusts, I could hardly wait to read my father’s newspaper over the weekends. The names of the towns and villages overrun by the Red Locusts sounded as foreign and exotic to me as ‘jacuzzi’ and je t’aime. Da Nang, Nha Trang, Qui Nhon, Tuy Hoa, Bien Hoa …

  Like that counting-out rhyme of my early childhood: Eeny, meeny, miney, mo …

  ‘So, is the weekend OK?’

  ‘Which weekend?’ I asked and started laughing again.

  In three weeks’ time Dalena was spending the weekend with us. All she really wanted to know, every time she asked such a stupid question, was whether I was dead ce
rtain that Simon would also be there.

  ‘Now that basic training is over,’ my brother wrote from Potchefstroom, ‘the boys are beginning to look forward to the border. All except Pierre who says he should never have come to the army, he should’ve gone to live in another country. Some days I wonder where he gets his ideas. For instance, the other day he said out of the blue that we must stop referring to terrorists, we must remember that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. I ask you! How in hell can you think of your enemy as a freedom fighter? It makes them sound like heroes!’

  In the past couple of months, I read in the newspaper, there were approximately 300 terrorist incidents in Rhodesia. Freedom fighter incidents? During this time sixty terrorists, forty-one civilians and eleven members of the security forces were killed. Landmines were involved in eighty-seven incidents. Fortunately Simon and Pierre don’t have to go to Rhodesia, I thought thankfully. In South West Africa it was quieter and safer.

  ‘My father says bougainvillaea is also called the paper flower,’ I said when I saw that Dalena was also watching the standard nine boys next to the rugby field. ‘And the leaves have the bright colours, not the flowers.’

  ‘Dear Agony Aunt,’ Dalena sighed, ‘my roommate has a problem. She’s not interested in boys, she’s only interested in flowers.’

  I turned my head away from the purply-red paper flowers next to the rugby field and towards the hockey field where Miss Lourens was coaching the standard sixes. She had the best pair of legs in the school, the boys said. And they had more than enough opportunity to see more than enough of them because she taught Physical Training and usually wore a skirt which barely covered her bum. I wondered if Ben also …

  ‘What does Ben say?’ Dalena asked as if I had spoken my thoughts aloud.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said and bent my head to study my hockey stick. ‘He blushes every time he looks at me …’

  ‘And you blush every time you look at him. Forget it, no ways are the two of you going to get it together. You can’t survive on one French kiss for the rest of the year, Mart!’