Читать книгу My Only Story - Deon Wiggett - Страница 20

I am nervous and have been sitting in my car for a minute or so when two men in a panel van park next to me. As I get out of the car, so do they.

I breathe deeply, grab my microphone from the boot, and pre-emptively start a conversation with the strangers.

‘Is this where the office is?’ I ask in Afrikaans.

The men are now hauling equipment from the back of their van. They are a TV crew, and they have come to Grey to shoot a rugby preview. That is just the kind of place Grey is – camera crews coming and going.

‘We’re also going there!’ says the one guy, who is rounder than the other. ‘We will just walk along with you.’ It is hard to render in writing the exact tenor of us Afrikaans people’s hearty politeness.

‘Cool,’ I say, ‘let me tail you.’

‘Just make sure we don’t notice!’ says the other guy, who is taller than the round one, and all of us laugh heartily.

What follows is a chain of unexpected events. We approach the front door and, out of thin air, appears the small and delightful figure of Marzaan Venter, who turns out to be Grey’s marketing manager.

‘Hello-hello, youuuu,’ she says, and she inflects the vowels upwards first, then melodiously crashes them back down again. ‘Are you gooooood? Gooo-hood! … Other than the fact that it’s now winter again all of a sudden! I want to run away; I am not a winter person at all!’

Marzaan’s bundle of fresh delight is not what I expected at Grey. She shuffles us inside while cooing and caring and inflecting first this vowel, then that one.

We are now inside the main building – the heart of the beast – and Marzaan tells us to wait while she fetches Mr Scheepers. She means Deon Scheepers, the school principal. My two incidental companions start rummaging through gear, seemingly quite ready for the encounter.

This is a terrible turn of events. I have now totally realised I am being mistaken for a third member of the TV crew – probably on account of me holding a microphone. I should speak up, and quickly. Being welcomed by Principal Scheepers would be a terrible way to start an undercover mission.

‘I’m … here to look at your museum; I’m an ex-Paul Rooser,’ I pipe from the back, hoping it is sufficient explanation, but somehow not stopping. ‘I’m just curious about your school; I’ve never been here.’

‘Ooohhh!’ says Marzaan. ‘I can take you round quickly!’

‘That would be cool!’

‘No problem at all!’

The two TV guys and I part amid a thorough ‘Enjoy!’ and ‘Good luck!’ and ‘You too!’ and ‘Maybe we’ll see each other later.’ Then out Marzaan and I walk from the splendid building I so dreaded entering. I was only inside for long enough to tell my first lie and say goodbye to two strangers.

We walk down a pleasant, sunny pathway past a big and beautiful tree, on our way to the Grey College Museum in the building next door.

‘So sorry,’ says Marzaan, ‘I thought you were with them!’

‘I have a familiar kind of bearing,’ I say.

‘Ayyy!’ says Marzaan.

She is immensely and sincerely nice. I start telling her about my project around school newspapers as we step into the Reunion Building, built in the same style as the main building, but not from the same nineteenth-century materials. It is home to the museum, as well as Grey Together, a coffee shop for visitors.

‘I’m going to take you upstairs,’ says Marzaan, and then thinks better of it. ‘Or you could have a browse down here first, and I will go ask if Estie can take you round and explain everything to you. Is that good? I’ll go get her,’ and off she pops to possibly tell Estie, in Afrikaans, ‘WTF, but this guy from Paul Roos has arrived unannounced demanding to peruse the museum; please Estie, I’ve got the TV crew here, just figure this out?’

Downstairs, I shuffle around displays and glass-topped exhibition cases filled with sporting memorabilia from Old Boys: Ryk Neethling, Bismarck and Jannie du Plessis, Ruben Kruger, Ollie le Roux, Francois Steyn and a legion more. I will find no answers down here.

‘Oh, here you are!’ says Marzaan, popping out of nowhere. ‘This is Estie.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ says Estie, but she is older and more suspicious than Marzaan; before we go any further, she will know exactly what I want, thank you very much.

Marzaan says: ‘I said you’re Deon and you’re from Paul Roos, I don’t know if you’re from a company …?’

‘I am a documentary maker,’ I say, which is true. Then immediately: ‘I was in Paul Roos! Class of ’97. And what I’m busy doing is I’m looking at school and university media in the lead-up to 1994. I was the editor of our school newspaper and, um, there’s an interesting story to tell about how school newspapers were part of … little, much, it depends.’

I am a terrible liar. Also, I do not know when to stop. Have I mentioned Paul Roos yet? ‘Plus I’m a Paul Rooser,’ I say, ‘so obviously we have a long history with you, and so I was coincidentally in Bloemfontein anyway, so I thought, you know what, this is the perfect time. I have only just arrived here and already I’ve run into all the right people.’

Marzaan laughs cheerily and tells Estie about the mix-up with the TV crew, to whom she clearly needs to get back. Then she says: ‘Estie, can I leave him in your safe hands?’

Estie is fine with that, so Marzaan says to me: ‘If there’s anything you need, just pop in again at the main building. But I hope you get what you’re looking for!’

Estie leads me upstairs to the archives as I say how beautiful the museum is.

‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘It’s just never finished.’

At the top of the staircase, there is a glass door with a buzzer, and in Estie’s wake, I am waved through the final barrier.

I am on the inside. In these archives are the answers I am looking for. I will find myself a trove of evidence. This morning, in this high-school museum, I’ll crack the case.