Childish Things Read online

‘No, it’s the hypocrisy that makes me so bloody mad!’ Now her voice was as flaming mad as the biblical burning bush. ‘Everyone in the school carries on as if Hein and Jolene have committed the greatest sin since Adam and Eve in Eden! Meanwhile at least a third of the girls in standard nine and matric are no longer virgins or they can’t wait to lose their virginity! Or the only reason they’re still virgins is because they’re too scared their pals will think they’re sluts! And I don’t even want to mention the boys! You know how randy the whole lot of them are!’

  Suna laughed nervously. I hovered near the radio and turned up the sound louder and louder. By that time the lions in the Kruger National Park could probably have heard Abba singing ‘Waterloo’. But it seemed as if my roommate’s burning indignation had died down for the moment. She stared at the bread knife in her hand with a sullen mouth. I switched off the radio and walked to the opposite wall to switch on the neon light above the table. After flickering a few times it suddenly lit the kitchen as brightly as an operating theatre.

  ‘Do you really want to go on my father’s trip tomorrow?’ I asked in the heavy silence, in the bright light.

  ‘If we stay here,’ Suna said with a shrug, ‘we’ll have to swot history.’

  ‘If Simon is going, I’m going too,’ Dalena said determinedly.

  My father wanted to show the surrounding area to some friends from the city, offering a kind of guided tour in his new kombi, with the usual tall tales and exaggerations. He had suggested that we ‘grown-up children’ follow him on our own in my mother’s old Cortina. The other four had agreed immediately. And I didn’t want to stay at home on my own.

  ‘You don’t know my pa’s trips,’ I tried a final protest. ‘He stops at every third tree to drink a toast to all the gold prospectors and transport drivers who were mown down by mosquitoes and flies and wild animals. After a few hours everybody is tight and then they sing the old Transvaal Republic’s anthem and “It’s a long way to Tipperary”. And when they’re really drunk, “She’ll be coming round the mountain.”’

  ‘Sounds like fun,’ Dalena said.

  ‘It’s disgusting,’ I said. But I could see they didn’t believe me.

  ‘This is romantic country,’ my father said. He was wearing a checked Andy Capp cap for the occasion. ‘Romantic and wild.’

  Simon and I gave one another a quick glance. The adults had formed a half-circle round my father like the followers of a soap-box preacher, serious and nodding. With the exception of my mother, who stood to one side and looked as mad as hell.

  ‘I don’t think it was so romantic for all the people who died of malaria and bilharzia and other diseases,’ Ma muttered as she lit a Cameo.

  ‘Like the American Wild West.’ Pa moved his cap back, wiped off a film of sweat with the back of his hand, and pulled the cap over his forehead again. ‘Gold prospectors from all over the world rushed here. No one asked questions about your past. You were known merely as French Bob, German George, Jolly Joe, Sailor Harry …’

  Cocky Carl, I thought. That’s what they would’ve called Pa if he’d lived then.

  ‘That’s where the trees originated.’ Pa waved a hand to indicate the pines on either side of the wide tarred road. ‘Planted to provide props for the mine tunnels. Today these plantations form the biggest man-made forest in the world!’

  Simon and I looked at one another again and tried not to laugh. It sounded exactly like one of Pa’s exaggerations but, bored on the way here, I had paged through the tour guide in Ma’s Cortina and read out all kinds of useless information to the others. Among the trivia was the story about the greatest man-made forest.

  ‘That deserves a toast!’ cried Pa’s noisy friend from Pretoria; the one who had had so much to say about the hills on the horizon next to the swimming pool.

  ‘The trip has barely started,’ I whispered to Dalena, ‘and he already sounds tight.’

  But she didn’t hear me.

  The Pretorian stood between his wife and two children. They looked like a cartoon of an Afrikaans family in an English newspaper. One only needed to look at their hair. The father had a neat moustache and bushy sideburns, the little boy had a crew cut, the mother’s hair was teased and stiff with spray, while the little girl had two pigtails so tightly plaited she could barely blink.

  The other married couple were younger and better looking with a small child on the woman’s hip. The man wore white trousers and white shoes and a shirt as red as an hibiscus flower, unbuttoned to show a forest of black hair. My mother couldn’t take her eyes off the forest. The woman wore red slacks and red shoes, with a small white shirt unbuttoned almost as far as her husband’s. My father pretended not to notice her cleavage.

  ‘To the gold prospectors,’ Pa said solemnly and lifted the glass in his hand, ‘who made this wild country a little less wild for posterity.’

  ‘To the gold prospectors!’ the Pretorian repeated Pa’s words. He looked at my father the way Pa would look at a Springbok rugby player. Almost adoringly.

  The women also lifted their glasses, the older woman meekly, the other one giggling, and took a careful sip or two. Ma smoked with a petulant, angry red mouth and tap-tapped her cigarette with her forefinger. If I hadn’t known about her operation, I would’ve sworn it was the wrong time of the month for her.

  Obviously she was already worried about how the lot of them were to get home in the afternoon. Pa was too much of a cowboy to be a good driver, even when he was sober. After a few drinks he imagined he was John Wayne and had to prove his manhood behind the steering wheel. And the more tactfully Ma might suggest that perhaps she should drive, the more indignantly he refused. Who had ever heard of John Wayne giving up his horse to a woman?

  From where I was standing, the furthest away from my mother, I could watch everyone. Suna was staring open-mouthed at my father. Dalena was staring open-mouthed at Simon. Pierre was staring at nothing while occasionally bringing a bottle of beer to his mouth. I didn’t know what he was thinking but it definitely wasn’t about gold prospectors. Lovey and Niel sat in the kombi and read the comics in the Sunday papers. They had also heard Pa’s peculiar history lessons to the point of boredom.

  ‘It’s going to get worse,’ I said to Dalena, but again she didn’t hear me.

  I walked back to Ma’s Cortina. Betrayal, I thought, that’s what it is.

  ‘Knock it back, there’s a long, long trail awinding,’ Pa called and hurriedly emptied his glass.

  ‘You know, Mart, your father would’ve been a good teacher,’ Suna said when we were following the kombi in Ma’s car again.

  ‘Yes, when it comes to talking rubbish he can probably hold his own against any teacher.’

  ‘Count your blessings,’ said Dalena who was sitting next to Simon in the front, her bare feet on the dashboard. She wore frayed denim shorts so skimpy that her buttocks were visible under the fringing. Her father would take the skin off those buttocks if he could see her like this. ‘Let me tell you, he’s an angel compared with my father.’

  I decided to ignore her and started reading the Sunday paper. From the corner of my eye I saw Simon moving his left hand from the steering wheel to one of her bare buttocks. I didn’t know what had happened between the two of them the previous evening, but the smile that was pasted to her face this morning made me suspect the worst.

  ‘Do you know you can land in court if you distract the driver’s attention from the road?’ Pierre asked Dalena.

  ‘Or worse,’ I muttered. ‘We could all land in hospital.’

  ‘Genuine,’ Pierre said. ‘I read in the newspaper that a Bloemfontein speed cop pulled a car off the road the other day because the driver’s girlfriend had smoothed his hair. He evidently gave her the ticket.’

  ‘Shame,’ Suna said. ‘It could only happen in Bloemfontein.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ Pierre said.

  Dalena sat with her eyes closed, her feet tapping on the dashboard to the beat of the music. It was Simon’s favou
rite, Bob Dylan, who wailed over the loudspeakers as if he had a dreadful cold. But that was simply the way he sounded.

  ‘Everybody must get stoned,’ Simon sang along. ‘Everybody must get stoned …’

  ‘Camel, anyone?’

  Pierre leaned forward between Suna and me, with the soft packet of cigarettes in his hand. Dalena took out two, one for her and one for Simon, and lit both with the same match. Suna used two matches to light one cigarette and started coughing after she had inhaled the smoke, not nearly as practised as Dalena. I regularly lit cigarettes for my brother, but now it seemed as if I had to pass some or other test and tests made me nervous.

  ‘Not for me, thanks,’ I mumbled, my nose in the newspaper.

  ‘If you read newspapers all day,’ Suna said, leaning unnecessarily far across Pierre’s body, ‘you’ll miss everything on the way.’

  ‘Tell me if you see something I haven’t seen before.’ I had difficulty in keeping the irritation out of my voice.

  Suna shrugged and blew a thin stream of smoke through her nostrils. She held the cigarette between two extended fingers, her little finger in the air as if she were a film star with long, red nails.

  ‘Leave Mart alone,’ Pierre said without taking his cigarette out of his mouth. ‘One of us must know what’s going on in the world.’

  ‘Why?’ Dalena asked, stretching her arms in a long and lazy motion above her head.

  How many times was she still going to betray me today?

  ‘It’s like someone keeping cavey.’ One corner of Pierre’s mouth moved up slowly. ‘She can warn us when the time has come to be scared. Like in that game, Wolf-wolf-what’s-the-time?’

  ‘Midnight,’ I said.

  ‘OK, give us the bad news. We can take it.’

  ‘“The Republic of South Africa is an inextricable part of Africa,” I read from the newspaper, “and we’ll simply have to find ways and means to live with Africa,” Mr Piet Koornhof, Minister of Sport and Recreation, said this week at a Republic Day celebration in Pretoria.”’

  ‘Hear, hear!’ Pierre laughed.

  ‘They’llstone you when you’re trying to be so good,’ Simon sang, pinching his nose between two fingers to try and sound more like Bob Dylan. ‘They’ll stone you just like they said they would …’

  I had never heard Pierre laugh so loudly. But I didn’t know whether it was at the Minister of Sport and Recreation or at me with my nose stuck in a newspaper or at Simon pinching his nose to sing along with Bob Dylan. With Pierre you never knew.

  London

  13 November 1992

  Bonjour, mon enfant

  I never did go to live in an attic in Paris. Or learn to speak French properly. Life, I read in a magazine recently, is what passes you by while you’re making other plans. Yes, I still allow magazines to lead me by the nose. From Seventeen’s fashion pages in my teenage years to Vanity Fair’s gossipy articles now that I’m supposed to be an adult.

  Oh, yes, and Vogue’s beauty hints, which I started reading for the first time after my thirtieth birthday. With the kind of hopeless hope with which someone suffering from an incurable disease devours all the latest research about her condition. Old age is an incurable disease, as you’ll discover one day.

  Life landed me in London where I at least learned to speak a better English than I ever dreamt of in Miss Muffet’s class in Black River. And where my son was born in February 1990, together with the New South Africa. Or so I thought.

  The birth of the New South Africa was announced almost three years ago but the delivery is still taking place, bloody and long drawn-out. They had barely walked into the labour ward when they announced to the world that a normal, healthy baby had been born. The world is still waiting anxiously. It’s beginning to seem as if the child might not make it.

  I married my son’s father, an attorney like my own father – come back, Freud, all is forgiven – because his firm wanted to send him overseas for a few years. Or perhaps we would’ve married one day in any case. But the overseas option forced two indecisive individuals to make a decision. We wanted to be together, didn’t we? We wanted to get out of the country, didn’t we? So, we might as well marry and leave together.

  Not for ever! We didn’t want to emigrate. Our friends in the Struggle would never forgive us. But to get away temporarily, for postgraduate studies or work, was Politically Correct. In our little white world the Struggle was a capital-letter issue.

  ‘Of course we want to live in a Democratic South Africa one day!’ we protested at elegant dinner tables and aesthetic barbecue fires. ‘We’re not running away from a Majority Government! We just don’t see our way clear to coping with the uncertainty of the Interim Period.’

  Call us when the revolution’s over?

  ‘Of course we’re looking forward to freedom, equality and brotherhood … sisterhood … personhood?’

  In the winter of 1988, the third year of the State of Emergency in the old South Africa, I was given the opportunity to go and live in another country (temporarily, of course). I’m so ashamed I shake my head, David Kramer sang over the slender black hi-fi as I packed my suitcases.

  By the end of that year I celebrated my first White Christmas in England with my husband. What a disappointment. The Christmas and the husband. It was probably asking too much to adapt to a marriage and a new, free country simultaneously. By the time our child was born – in the same week that Nelson Mandela was released from prison – we were no longer living together.

  My husband immediately made plans to return to the New South Africa, together with thousands of refugees. As though he was one of them.

  I wasn’t ready to return yet. Besides, I was the mother of a child who had been born in Britain, and the wife of a husband whose ancestors had lived in Ireland, and the author of a ‘protest novel’ which sold well in Britain. (Actually only a story about a group of friends in South Africa but the shrewd English publisher marketed it as protest literature.) The British would hardly kick me out.

  ‘Divorced? No, not yet, we haven’t got that far. It’s quite involved, now that we’re living in different countries, so we’re waiting a while … We’ll have to see what happens. I’m not unhappy here. I get homesick, of course, but I’m not unhappy here. And it’s better for my child to grow up here. I’ll probably never feel completely at home but … oh, well, I never felt completely at home there either.’

  Is it too late to go and live in an attic in Paris?

  Je t’embrasse.

  M.

  The star appeared only once

  ‘No, I’m not sorry the holiday is over,’ Dalena said with her mouth full of cake. ‘I got terribly bored on the farm. Nothing to do, no one to see.’

  It was darker than usual, dark of the moon. We were devouring the chocolate cake Dalena had brought from home, flat on the linoleum floor between the two beds so that our crumbs wouldn’t fall on the sheets. Quietly, so that Miss Potgieter or a prefect wouldn’t hear us.

  ‘I’m crazy about doing nothing,’ I whispered. ‘And I don’t mind not seeing anyone.’

  I ate the thick slice of cake out of my cupped hand as if I hadn’t seen food for days. I remembered the horror with which I’d stared at the hostel children that first evening in the dining hall. And now, half a year later, I had become equally greedy.

  ‘Well, occasionally I ran across someone I know at the co-op. Like old Hein. But he’s so depressed since he’s not allowed to see Jolene that he’s quite useless!’

  Heinrich Minnaar wasn’t expelled from either the school or the hostel. His father must’ve used his influence, as Dalena had forecast. But his parents had forbidden him to have anything to do with Jolene. It was her fault, they decided, that their exemplary son had changed into a seventeen-year-old sex maniac overnight.

  ‘It can’t possibly work!’ I whispered indignantly. ‘That they’re not supposed to see one another! They’ll start imagining they’re Romeo and Juliet!’

  My roommate sh
ook her head.

  ‘No way, have no fear. In a month’s time it’ll all be over.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘Yep. Jolene isn’t the type to suffer like a martyred Juliet.’ She licked the last crumbs off her hand and cut another chunk of cake. ‘At the moment she’s enjoying all the attention. But as soon as it blows over she’ll find herself another Romeo.’

  Teenage love just wasn’t what it had been in Shakespeare’s time, I decided. I was so swept away by our setwork that I knew a great deal of it by heart. O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear! My Afrikaans tongue still stumbled when I tried to say the words aloud, but in my imagination I sounded like Queen Elizabeth whom I’d heard on Radio Today. My roommate wasn’t so easily swept away. Where’s the action? she wanted to know. Romeo talks so much it’s no wonder he finds it such an effort to get Juliet into bed.

  ‘I hear Maggie has invited Jolene to smoke in the toilets with her and her pals during recess! Can you believe it! A standard seven girl with –’

  Dalena froze, her body tense, ready to jump into bed, cake and all. Our ears were so attuned to the almost inaudible shuffle of Miss Potgieter’s slippers that she had never caught us out. Miss Potgieter was the needlework teacher who slept at the end of the passage. Or didn’t sleep: according to rumour she floated up and down the passage all night like a bloodthirsty bird of prey, looking for victims. During the day she was a harmless old maid with fluffy blonde hair and a beaky mouth like a baby chicken, but every evening after lights-out she changed into a gigantic owl that snatched up whispering, reading, nibbling hostel mice with her claws and tore them to pieces. We waited motionless while she moved past the bedroom door. Dalena’s teeth were white in the dark when the danger was past.

  I cut another piece of cake. Tomorrow I would hate myself again because I had so little willpower. But no one could bake a chocolate cake like Dalena’s mother – or rather, no one could bake a chocolate cake the way Dalena’s mother had taught her kitchen servants to do it.