Читать книгу Going Back to Say Goodbye - Kenneth de Kok - Страница 11

One Friday afternoon I was over at Dessington’s making a kite. We split pieces of bamboo, tied the frame with cotton thread, glued the tissue paper with flour glue. Everything you have to do. It turned out okay but there was no wind so we left it on the floor of the garage.

His sister, Yolande, is always such a little nuisance. She was on the other side of the road in the Wheelers’ driveway with a group of girls making a racket. Peter shouted at her to shut up and all the girls started sticking out their tongues and teasing, calling us stupid and ugly – stuff like that. So he got out his catapult and pretended to shoot at them, but they knew he was just pretending and started jumping up and down and daring us to really shoot.

That’s when I fired a small stone high in the sky. They all looked up and when it came down it hit one of the girls in the face. She screamed and then they all screamed. She sat on the ground and the rest pointed at us. Then she lay on the ground. I saw blood on one of the girl’s hands. Dessington was pointing at me and yelling, “It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me! He shot.”

I jumped on my bike and raced home.

I put my bike in the garage and went straight to my bedroom, shut the door and slipped under the bed. I thought the best thing to do was hide. I knew the police were going to come. The kid was most probably in hospital already, fighting for her life. The phone would start ringing and first my mom and then my dad would start looking for me. Cars would fill our driveway. People would be knocking on the door. Her parents would be there, shouting and wanting to give me a hiding before the police arrested me. I didn’t know how to escape or what to do. Every second seemed to take an hour.

I wondered how long I could last without eating. I looked at the springs under the mattress. There was fluff hanging there and also a feather, bluish-green, so it must have belonged to Freddie, my budgie, who died right above me on my pillow one afternoon, his thin legs sticking up in the air. He’d been sick for two days, sort of sitting on the bottom of his cage. I had the same feeling now. No hope that things would ever get back to normal.

I wondered which kid I had hit. It wasn’t Brenda Wheeler or her sister, or Yolande. I can hardly remember most girls’ names, even the ones in my class. Maybe she was just visiting in the hols. Maybe her parents were rushing now from some other town to see her before she died or before they had to operate or something. Maybe I’d blinded her. I was crying, but quietly.

Someone opened my door. Mom said, “Anybody home?” I heard her walk down the passage. She asked Ingrid if she’d seen me. Ingrid said she’d heard me come in, but didn’t know where I was. My mother said, “Where does that boy get to?”

I lay dead still.

A car came up the drive. It was my dad; I knew the sound. A little later I heard him say, “Jean, I’m home.” Now I knew William was putting the teapot on the tray with the cup and milk and sugar and a plate of Marie biscuits or maybe a rusk. Dad would sit in his chair and smoke and read The Star and have cup after cup of tea. Then he’d go into the garden and walk everywhere, looking at everything, seeing if there was something to moan about. He’d even notice if I broke a small branch or stepped in a flowerbed.

When the phone started ringing he’d start yelling, I knew it.

The phone rang. Mom answered. She listened and spoke a bit. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. Then she hung up. It was quiet again.

I must have dozed off because the phone woke me. She spoke again. She hung up and phoned someone. I couldn’t stand it any more and got out from under the bed. I sat by my table and opened all my schoolbooks. I stared through the lace curtains into the garden and wished I was some other kid.

I heard my mom come down the passage. She stopped at my door and said, “Oh, there you are. Have you said hello to your father?” And then she walked away.

We had a normal dinner. I kept quiet. I ate the terrible cold mashed pumpkin without saying a thing. Mom and Dad spoke to each other most of the time. Dad said, “I’m going to turn in early tonight. I’m clapped out. Thank God it’s the weekend.” And that was that. Nothing happened.

Nothing happened the next day either. Every minute took an hour. Ingrid acted normal and I nearly made up my mind to tell her what had happened. The whole day I waited for the trouble to begin. All the stuff that was bound to be coming. Then I thought, maybe everyone’s waiting for Monday. I wanted to phone Dessington but didn’t; his mom or dad would answer and start shouting at me.

On Sunday I was beginning to think I’d imagined everything, but at the end of lunch, Dad, with a sort of empty look on his face, the sort of face a person makes when they are trying not to smile, asked, “Going to Peter’s this afternoon?” I said, “No. I can’t, it’s Sunday.”

“Oh,” he said. “I forgot.” But I knew they knew something.

A few weeks later when I was in the garden with my cattie, he said, “Careful where you point that thing.” And that was that.

I stayed away from Dessington. He didn’t phone or visit either. Later he told me that they took the girl to the dentist but there was nothing but a tiny chip. He said the girl’s parents phoned his parents and his parents phoned mine. He wanted to know if I’d got strapped. I said he was a girlie girl and a tattletale.

I can’t figure it out. Seeing as no one was badly hurt, Dad and Mom must have decided to let me off. The only thing is this: maybe my dad wants me to be rougher or something. Maybe he doesn’t want to discourage me.