Читать книгу Yellowbone - Ekow Duker - Страница 11

Everyone was pleased when Teacher’s parents left and went back to Ghana. Even Teacher looked relieved. Karabo missed Paa Kofi but she was glad Ma’ama was no longer in the house. They hadn’t gone to church when Ma’ama was there because the charismatic church they went to wasn’t up to Ma’ama’s evangelical standards. She said it was Karabo’s mother’s fault that Teacher had turned his back on the Methodists.

‘All that raising of hands in your church,’ Ma’ama said. ‘It’s not right. It’s not as if God was sitting up there, twirling around on the ceiling fan like a pigeon that’s flown in through the window.’

The church Karabo and her parents attended was called the Latter Day Church of Holy Fire. It was a large and inescapable presence in Mthatha, although the building itself was rather small. The Nigerian pastor whipped himself into a fervour every Sunday and swept the congregation, ululating and swaying, along with him. Pastor Fola Adebayor’s eyes blazed with righteous fury when he was in full oratorical flight. His sermons were suspiciously like entertainment. Karabo looked forward to it at the start of the week but, although she’d never admit it, she couldn’t help thinking that maybe Ma’ama had a point.

Karabo’s mother Precious set the rhythm to life in the Bentil household. On Mondays and Tuesdays, she would be strangely reticent, as if she’d just moved into the house and was restrained by her new surroundings. By Wednesday, she’d be dropping oblique hints about the perils of an ungodly life and Teacher would nod wisely in agreement. By Friday she’d be clapping her hands as she did the housework. And by Sunday, oh Lord! by Sunday she’d have worked herself into a lather and be singing hymns at full blast. It was as if she was on a celestial parade ground, not living in a little three-bedroomed house with tufts of withered grass masquerading as a lawn.

On Sunday mornings as they got ready for church, Karabo and her parents listened to hymns on the radio. Then they’d go to church and sing the same hymns all over again. Her mother was always resplendent in a buttoned red jacket atop a black skirt. Karabo particularly liked the white satin sash her mother wore across her chest, for it matched the little bobble hat perched on her head. She looked like she was dressed to do battle, which in a way she was. As for Teacher, he always went to church in a suit and tie, even in summer when it was thirty degrees outside. Sundays were when Karabo got to wear little white dresses and shiny black leather shoes with decorative perforations in the leather. Her mother and father both laughed when she said her Sunday clothes made her look like a girl.

‘But you are a girl,’ her mother cried.

But Karabo didn’t want to be a girl. She wanted to be like Teacher.

One morning when they were about to set out to church, a man shuffled up to the Bentils’ gate. Karabo was almost fifteen by then and she no longer wore little white dresses or the shoes with the perforations. She went up to the gate where their dog, Saddam, was leaping up and down in excitement.

There were kernels of white hair scattered about the man’s head and his fingernails were chipped and encrusted with a dark residue. Karabo could hardly hear him speak over Saddam’s excited barking.

She shouted at him through the wire. ‘We don’t have any jobs.’

He smiled at her suddenly, exposing wet gums in a startling shade of red. His teeth, at least those that still remained in his head, were a gnarled mix of brown and yellow. Karabo shuddered. It was like looking into the mouth of an animal.

‘No piece job,’ she said, criss-crossing her arms a few times to make sure he understood. She could tell from the slouch of his shoulders and the battered shoes he wore that he had no real conviction that they would have a piece job anyway. He stood there staring at Karabo until she began to feel uncomfortable. ‘No job,’ she said again and took a step back. She was glad the fence was between them. Then she turned and walked towards the car where her parents were waiting. She could feel the man’s eyes on her.

‘What did that old man want?’ her mother asked.

The man shuffled away and Saddam followed him, barking madly all the way to the corner of the yard where the palm trees stood in a tight, bearded clump.

‘A job.’

‘He should go to the ANC. Maybe they will give him a job,’ Teacher said mildly.

Karabo caught his eyes in the rear-view mirror. They were uncharacteristically hard and flinty. Not many people knew how militant Teacher could be. He had an acute sense of social justice which he hid behind a soft-spoken manner and an endearing stammer. He wasn’t one to make placards at the kitchen table or march in the vanguard of a protest rally. He was more likely to be at the rear, walking slowly with a pensive look on his face. He had odd rules, too. He refused to give money to a beggar if he were kneeling down. Teacher always said a man should never kneel for anyone, no matter how hard his lot. There were a lot of beggars in Mthatha.

‘It’s Sunday,’ said Precious as they reversed into the street. ‘It’s not a day for politics.’

‘I’m sure that old man looking for a job would agree,’ Teacher said. ‘He should go looking for work tomorrow.’

Karabo smiled to herself. She wished she were as clever as Teacher. He had this way of disarming an opponent with a few well-chosen words that made them feel utterly incompetent. Not for the first time, her mother had nothing to say.

They passed a Land Rover heading the other way and they all turned their heads to stare at it. The driver, a white man, waved at them but none of them waved back.

‘Bill Harrison,’ Teacher declared and Karabo thought she detected a hint of bitterness in his voice. She glanced up at the rear-view mirror, hoping to catch Teacher’s eyes but he did not look her way.

‘I hear he’s emigrating,’ Precious said. ‘To Australia.’

Teacher was driving faster than before. The engine let out a high-pitched whine and the frame of the car rattled in protest.

‘And yet he’s still here,’ Teacher said. ‘He’s been emigrating for years.’

This time it was her mother’s eyes Karabo caught in the rear-view mirror. Something passed between them but she did not know what it was.

Everyone in Mthatha knew Bill Harrison. He was a quiet man with spindly legs and lank blond hair that had long retreated from a large, speckled forehead. He looked more like a tame accountant than a successful farmer. There was a time when it seemed as if every other person in Mthatha worked for the Harrisons. It was rumoured that Bill Harrison preferred women as his farm workers for the men were often turned away.

The Harrisons’ farm was not far from the Bentils’ house. In fact Karabo’s mother had worked there too for a while. She’d helped to look after the house many years ago when Mrs Harrison had fallen ill.

‘Maybe he hasn’t got his papers yet,’ Precious said.

Teacher discounted that suggestion with a harsh grunt.

‘It doesn’t take that long to get Australian papers. I could do it in three months and I’m not even white.’

‘I hear the black people in Australia have a hard time,’ her mother said. ‘I’ve seen pictures of them and some of them are very dark. As dark as …’

She stopped herself and looked away from Teacher. They drove the rest of the way to the church in silence.

The Latter Day Church of Holy Fire was an outwardly nondescript building made of galvanised metal roofing sheets. It used to be a warehouse and in summer the smell of chemicals seeped from the walls and made the congregation even more light-headed than Pastor Adebayor’s sermons did. It was full today, with more than two hundred people jammed into the wooden pews. The Bentils were lucky to find a space at the back, where they squeezed in between a woman with two babies on her knees and a man who was already asleep.

It wasn’t only Pastor Adebayor Karabo looked forward to seeing on Sundays. She hoped Inspector Thulisane from the Mthatha police station would be there too. With his slim-cut jackets and mirrored glasses, Inspector Thulisane could have been a model in a men’s fashion magazine. Or an actor in an American crime drama. Slick American crime dramas didn’t translate easily to Mthatha but somehow Inspector Thulisane pulled it off.

Inspector Thulisane served as an usher in the church. At collection time he carried the velvet pouch from pew to pew. He always assigned himself to the side of the aisle where Karabo was sitting. She thought that was rather cute.

That morning, when Inspector Thulisane came up and handed Karabo the pouch, his jacket fell open, revealing the polished black butt of a gun. Hawu! Karabo was so alarmed she almost let the pouch fall to the floor. Since when were guns allowed in church? She glanced at her parents to see if they’d seen the gun but their eyes were closed and their hands were raised to the ceiling in the exact pose Ma’ama disapproved of.

Karabo scrabbled in her pocket for the five rand coin she’d brought with her. As she dropped it into the pouch, she looked up and Inspector Thulisane’s eyes met hers. She saw an almost desperate pleading in them. It was the same look she’d seen on the odd-job man’s face that morning. She drew a sharp breath, not knowing whether to be furious with Inspector Thulisane or sad. Men had the strangest ways of signalling that they wanted to fuck.