Читать книгу Childish Things - Marita van der Vyver - Страница 7

‘So it is getting a little better?’ my mother asked, her eyes worried. Opposite her my young brother was sucking up the last of his chocolate milkshake so noisily that he could be heard in the street. She wore her usual martyred what-have-I-done-to-deserve-this expression, but apart from that ignored him.

‘I didn’t say that,’ I muttered, the straw clamped between my lips.

We sat in the Portuguese café next to the local movie house, the walls around us covered in old film posters. In front of me there was a grease mark on the red and white checked tablecloth, a large red plastic tomato filled with ketchup and a menu covered in plastic like a schoolbook. After three weeks in this dull town I had accepted the fact that there were no elegant coffee houses in Black River.

‘Doctor Zhivago,’ my mother sighed. ‘It was the only love story your father ever liked.’

My eyes wandered to the posters on the wall while I fought the temptation to suck up the last of my milkshake as Niel had done. Love Story, I saw, and remembered how I had cried when Ali McGraw died so beautifully and giggled every time she said bullshit. Opposite me my twelve-year-old sister stared open-mouthed at Niel, which encouraged him to suck even harder.

‘Wow!’ she said with an American accent.

‘Shaddup,’ I hissed and tried to hide behind my mother as one of the matric boys at a table in the corner turned to look at us.

‘Children,’ my mother tried saying in my father’s voice. But it never worked.

‘Ma, he’s wearing his school uniform and he’s behaving like an elephant in a zoo!’

‘Tcha, old Mart is just scared one of her boyfriends at the table there at the back will think her brother doesn’t have any manners.’

‘Well, he doesn’t.’ I grabbed the glass away from him so fast that the straw hung in his mouth like a long, soggy cigarette.

‘Sheesh, where’d ya learn to grab so fast?’ he asked with something like admiration in his voice.

‘At table in the hostel. If you don’t grab you go hungry.’

I enjoyed the slightly shocked expression on my mother’s face. She touched her bottle-blonde hair, stiff and sticky with spray as usual, and looked over my head at the posters. Niel burped, looking me straight in the eye. Lovey giggled behind her hand and my mother looked more martyred than ever.

‘You should’ve kept him back a year, Ma,’ I said. ‘Any idiot can see he shouldn’t be in high school yet.’

He looked at me as if I’d slapped him. I almost felt sorry for him. He was the smallest in his standard six class and his biggest fear was that he wouldn’t grow much taller.

‘Never mind,’ Ma comforted as usual. ‘Simon only started growing when he’d almost finished school.’

Hearing Simon’s name made me feel depressed all over again. My elder brother had started his National Service a month ago. Now I was the eldest in the house with this poison dwarf of a baby brother, and a sister who believed that life was a movie in which she played all the leading roles.

The Portuguese café owner was leaning forward behind the counter, resting on his elbows, between the cash register and a fan which swung to and fro like a human head. Every three seconds a breeze blew through his dark hair. There were two similar fans in the far corners of the café, high above the tables, but they seemed to make no difference. My grey school uniform clung to my thighs and there were damp circles of perspiration under my arms.

Behind the owner’s head hung the only poster which didn’t advertise a movie. It was the kind you saw in travel agents’ windows: a big colour picture of a deserted beach with palm trees. Like somewhere overseas, I thought longingly. Lourenço Marques, it said in heavy black letters across the blue sky. That was where LM Radio broadcast from.

The man had sad eyes. He reminded me of the café owner in a book I’d read during the holidays, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The name caught my attention in the bookcase at the beach house between all the other books that had stood there for years, fading in the sun. I had wanted to tell Dalena the plot but she lost interest when she heard that it didn’t have a happy ending.

‘Gone with the Wind,’ Ma sighed again, her eyes on an old poster.

‘They don’t make movies like that any more,’ Niel and Lovey said quickly before Ma could say it.

Ma didn’t even seem to hear.

‘Have you heard from him again, Ma?’

‘Simon?’ My mother ferreted in a crocheted bag with wooden handles and took out her pack of Cameos. ‘Two letters in one week! He must be terribly homesick.’

‘I miss him.’

‘So do I, Mart.’

Ma swallowed the last of her tea and lit a cigarette. Equality? asked the woman in the Cameo advertisement, peering at the camera through thick false eyelashes. Onlymen are born equal. We’re different. Like our cigarettes. She was beginning to look a little bored. Ma, not the girl in the ad.

Actually, all four of us were a bit bored. It was Friday but because the school was holding a sports meeting on the following day, the hostel children weren’t allowed to go home on the Friday afternoon. Ma felt sorry for us and had come to see us. But when she and Lovey drove to the farm later on, Niel and I would have to remain behind.

‘A Friday in the hostel!’ We will not give up the fight against terrorism and Communism, I read in the newspaper lying in front of my mother. We will fight and go forward with faith until we have achieved a just peace. The Minister of Police had spoken at the funeral of an adjutant who had been killed with three other policemen on the Rhodesian border. ‘It’s terrible!’

‘It’s going to be fun!’ Niel smiled with Ma’s dark eyes, adult eyes in a pointed little-boy’s face which made him look even more like a poison dwarf.

‘I wish I was a year older,’ Lovey sighed. ‘Then I would’ve been in the hostel too!’

‘I wish I was two years older, Lovey, then I need never see a hostel again!’

‘My name is not Lovey,’ she said as usual.

‘Sorry, Lovey,’ I said as usual.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, I read on a poster in the corner where the matric boys were sitting. Now that was a smart movie. Bob Dylan’s music.

‘If you want to go to Stellenbosch, Mart,’ Ma said and drew an ashtray set in a miniature tyre towards her, ‘you’ll have to stay in a hostel.’

‘No ways, Ma! I’d rather go to an English university. Then I can do as I like even if I have to stay in residence.’

‘You’ll break your father’s heart if you don’t go to Stellenbosch.’

‘He broke mine,’ I replied, ‘the day he dropped me in front of the hostel.’

‘Don’t always exaggerate, Mart. It’s not that bad.’

‘How do you know how bad it is, Ma? You’ve never been in a hostel!’

It sounded sharper than I’d meant it to but Ma didn’t react, simply tapped her ash neatly into the little car tyre. Goodyear was written on the rubber. A good year for whom?

‘Well, I listen to you talking … about your roommate, the way you …’

‘If it wasn’t for Dalena I’d have committed suicide by now!’

This time she reacted.

‘Don’t say things like that, Mart.’ A forefinger tap-tapped the cigarette. This was a sure sign that you had to watch your step. She didn’t lose her temper easily, my father was the quick-tempered one, but the day she did lose her cool … Don’t push me, she always said. Don’t push me.

‘If it wasn’t for Dalena I’d probably have run away.’

‘Lady and the Tramp!’ Ma’s petulant mouth opened, her eyes pleased. ‘Do you remember it?’

She knew I wouldn’t run away. I would moan and groan, I would threaten and sulk, I would cry every evening until my eyes were sore. But I would endure and persevere.

I was nothing if not her daughter.

‘This is wild country,’ Pa said with the pride of a pioneer in his voice. ‘Wild but beautiful.’

They were standing on the veranda, grilling meat and looking out over banana trees which stretched as far as the eye could see. Closer to the house, next to the swimming pool where I lay reading in the sun, the thin trunks of a few pawpaw trees towered above the pinks and purples of the bougainvillaea and the scarlet flowers of the hibiscus. I turned on to my back to catch the sun on my front.

‘Look, way across there, where it’s hazy, lies the Kruger National Park.’ Pa gestured, a beer bottle in his hand and a silly little cloth hat on his head. Prisoner of Love was printed in red on the white material. He swallowed a mouthful of beer and deftly turned the grill. ‘You can hear the lions roaring at night.’

‘I’ll be damned!’ said his friend from the Cape.

‘I kid you not,’ my father confirmed. ‘Sometimes the hippos come and drink at the swimming pool.’

The man from the Cape gave an uncertain laugh. I turned up the radio so that I wouldn’t have to listen to my father’s tall tales. Wiggled my bottom to the beat of Mick Jagger unable to get no satisfaction. Tried to concentrate on my book again.

Dalena had told me to read it. Which should have made me suspicious immediately because my roommate wasn’t the world’s greatest reader.

‘Has it got sex in it?’ I’d wanted to know.

‘It’ll make your teeth curl.’

‘In Afrikaans?’

‘Man, Andre P. Brink is not like other Afrikaans writers.’

The way in which she accented the P made the name sound elegant and exotic. ‘I’m telling you, it’s hot stuff. Nude scenes.’

I didn’t want to show any interest. But when my mother took us back to the hostel on the Friday afternoon, after our visit to the Portuguese café, I asked her to stop at the library.

‘Have you got Ambassador by Andre P. Brink?’ I asked the old lady behind the counter.

‘The Ambassador.’ She looked at my grey school dress and her heavy eyebrows rose like twin helicopters above her spectacle frames. ‘Aren’t you a bit young for such a difficult book?’

‘It’s for my mother.’ Without turning a hair. Sometimes I took after my father.

So here I was lying in my holiday bikini next to the swimming pool, sweatily searching for the first nude scene.

‘This place is alive with snakes,’ Pa said. ‘As thick as my upper arm. Mambas. Green ones in the trees, black ones on the ground.’

‘What do you do if you come across one?’ The man from the Cape was beginning to sound sceptical.

‘You wet your pants!’ my father laughed. I peered towards the veranda over my dark glasses. Pa shook his head and bent down to turn the grill again. ‘No, the black people here know how to deal with snakes. Never Die – he’s the boss boy – always carries a long stick. He can crush a snake’s head with one blow’

‘That’s probably why his name is Never Die,’ said Pa’s other friend who came from Pretoria.

Silently I sang along with Mick Jagger. I didn’t know what I would’ve done without LM Radio.

‘Mart, you must be careful of the sun!’ My mother warned from the edge of the veranda where she had appeared with a bowl of salad in her hands. ‘Else you’ll be crying in a vinegar bath tonight.’

‘Oh, Maa!’

‘It’s just a thought.’ Ma was wearing a trilobal skirt over a matching floral bathing suit. Her dark glasses could have belonged to Jackie Onassis. The clusters of red cherries hanging from her ears looked real enough to eat. ‘But remember it’s not the Cape sun.’

I placed the open book over my face. The black letters swam in front of my eyes. I felt the sweat running down my stomach and filling my navel.

‘Gosh, but the water looks good.’

The voice of the Pretorian sounded closer, as though he were standing next to my mother. Ma’s high-heeled cork sandals creaked as she walked away. It was quiet for a few moments, but I had the feeling that someone was watching me. I peered past my book and saw the man leaning on the railing of the veranda. ‘Nice hills on the horizon.’

‘Yes.’ My father gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘I’ll have to buy a shotgun one of these days to keep the boys at bay.’

‘I’d like to see her in a few years’ time.’

Did the bastard think I was deaf? I lay without moving as though I’d fallen asleep.

‘Mart is a quiet child,’ my father said, ‘always has her nose in a book. Lovey is going to give me grey hairs, I can see that already. She’s the wild one.’

‘My name’s not Lovey!’ Lovey called out from somewhere, ran down the stairs and jumped into the swimming pool with a splash which sounded like applause.

I was so grateful for the distraction that I didn’t even mind getting wet, just tried to keep the book dry by holding it above my head. I turned my back to the veranda and watched my sister bursting through the surface of the water like a glittering trout.

‘I caught her in the bathroom the other day, shaving her legs,’ my father said, sounding annoyed. ‘With my razor! And she’s not even in high school!’

Lovey climbed out of the swimming pool, straddled me and shook herself. The drops of water scorched my skin like dry ice.

‘Come on! Look what you’ve done to the book!’

‘What are you reading?’

‘Nothing you’ll be able to understand.’

‘How do you know?’

She sank down on the wet paving next to me. Her skin was as brown as a nut, her body still unformed, but her nipples already showed darker under the tight bikini top. She winked at me as if she knew what I was thinking.

‘You must ask Ma to buy you a bra.’

‘I already have.’ Not ashamed about it at all, as I had been. ‘I wear it to school.’

I pulled the damp book towards me, tried to read again. The frangipani tree behind me smelt as stickily sweet as Ma’s hairspray. All around me on the paving the creamy-white frangipani flowers had been dropped as though the scent had become too much even for the tree. It was difficult to concentrate on a book – even one with sex in it – when the trees around you smelt of hairspray and the sun burned your bare legs and the plants were so green that it seemed as if you looked at the world through dark glasses even when you took them off. Now I understood why everyone always said people overseas read more than people in Africa.

That was yet another reason for living in an attic in Paris one day: to read lots of books while eating long loaves of French bread, drinking cheap French wine and smoking strong French cigarettes. And when I wasn’t reading, I would write romantic Afrikaans poetry which I would declaim with great feeling to madly attractive Frenchmen with black eyes and sunken cheeks who naturally wouldn’t be able to understand a word …

‘I’ve thought up a name for myself.’ Lovey’s voice broke into my dreams of the future.

‘You’ve got a name,’ I said irritably.

‘How would you like it if everyone called you Lovey?’

‘I can’t imagine anyone ever calling me Lovey,’ I sighed. ‘I probably don’t look like a Lovey.’

‘Well, I wasn’t stupid enough to tell the kids at my new school that you call me Lovey.’

‘And now they call you Loulene?’

‘Hm-mm.’

Slowly she shook her head while she drew patterns on the wet paving with her forefinger. Bit her full lower lip as Ma did when she wanted to hide her feelings. But it had always been easier for Lovey to show her feelings than to hide them.

‘What’s wrong with Loulene?’

‘Nothing. It just doesn’t suit me. A name is like a dress, it has to suit you.’ She dropped her voice to make the most of the dramatic moment. ‘I told them my name is Bobby.’

‘Bobby?’

‘Yes. Like that song Simon always sings. “Me and Bobby McKay”.’

‘McGee.’

‘Yes, that one.’ A blinding smile lit her face. ‘Don’t you think it suits me?’

‘Bobby Vermaak!’ I muttered and turned on my stomach to read again.

‘Better than Lovey Vermaak, don’t you think?’

‘The army is a strange place,’ Simon wrote from Potchefstroom. ‘I wanted to be a parabat, remember, so I’ll have to go to Bloemfontein when I’ve done basic training, but now I’m beginning to wonder whether it’s such a great idea. I mean I’ve got this picture in my head of a paratrooper all the girls will fall for, but perhaps I’m the only one who’s going to fall, hard, out of an aeroplane. No, I’m not becoming a pansy. I’m just wondering.

‘I’m reading a book Pierre lent me. Catch-22, I think you’ll like it. I told you, didn’t I, that Pierre is the guy who grew up in Black River? He was expelled in standard nine, I heard the other day, because he told the headmaster that he was an old fart, can you believe it, so his parents sent him to a private school in Pretoria and he did standards nine and ten in one year. And last year he hitch-hiked across the country. I’ve never met a guy who asks so many questions. Or has so many strange opinions.

‘He says the Americans saw their arseholes in Vietnam. Solidly. He also says the whites have seen their arseholes in Africa, but we’re still arguing about that.’

‘Here a man eats meat,’ Pa said. ‘Beef, venison, lion …’

‘Snake?’ asked the man from the Cape, who was beginning to grasp the game.

‘Snake,’ my father said. ‘Only last week we had a snake barbecue.’

‘No, really, Carl, now you’re talking shit.’

‘Not so loud, there are children around,’ Pa said primly. ‘Come and have a piece of sausage meanwhile.’

‘I saw a monster of a snake next to the road this morning,’ said the Pretorian and swallowed some beer. ‘Easily six feet long. A car had driven over its head but its body was still wriggling when I stopped.’ Another swallow. The man knew how to expand a story. ‘I put it into the boot. Thought I could play a little joke this evening. Leave it under Jake’s bed with just the tail showing …’

‘No, dammit, man!’ One could almost hear the sigh of relief in the Capetonian’s laughter. ‘What would you have told my wife if I’d had a heart attack?’

My father joined in the laughter.

‘But now I’ve had a better idea,’ the Pretorian said. ‘I think we should grill the snake this evening. Then Carl can show us how he does his thing.’

‘I second the motion!’ laughed Jake-from-the-Cape, even more relieved.

My father was no longer amused.

‘We can do that,’ Pa said, his eyes on the grill, ‘but I’ll have to inspect the snake first. You can’t throw any old snake on the coals.’

‘Come on, Carl, it’s too late to chicken out now!’

Jake-from-the-Cape slapped my father on the back. My throat closed as though I were choking on a piece of snake meat. The man shouldn’t have said that.

‘Chicken!’ My father’s voice rose as it did when he was losing a court case. ‘Ha! You’ll swallow your words tonight, Jake my man! Along with a nice mouthful of grilled snake!’

‘Bye, bye, Miss American Pie,’ Don McLean sang over the radio. ‘Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry …’

I sang along, moved my shoulders and kicked my feet as if I wanted to swim through the music.

‘Why did the guy take his car to a lavatory?’ Lovey asked, lying next to me with her eyes closed.

‘I’ve also wondered.’ I thought she’d fallen asleep. ‘But Simon says when you sing, the words don’t have to make any sense. He says if everyone sang more and said less the world would be a better place.’

‘Not if everyone sings as off-key as you do,’ Lovey mumbled.

I pretended not to have heard. Just listen to old Bob Dylan, Simon said. Oh, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now. It was actually better if the words were a bit jumbled, Simon said. Then it sounded deep.

London

14 July 1992

Dear Child

I hate zoos. But I was so homesick today that I dragged my child to a zoo. Since I started writing my story last month, I’ve been homesick all the time. Or heartsick, as I prefer to call it. (There’s an Afrikaans word that describes the feeling better, but I can’t bring it to mind.) I thought I would feel better if I saw a few other exiles from Africa but that depressed me even more.

A rhinoceros behind bars in a London zoo is a pathetic sight. It simply stood there, immobile, staring crossly with its small eyes at the visitors. Its rough, dirty-grey skin reminded me of the heels of the children at Cape Town’s traffic lights, those begging hands and drugged eyes which used to appear behind my closed window like visions from hell. I couldn’t take it. It was one of the reasons why I fled. I didn’t want to live in a country where children looked like that. And yet, when I stood in front of the rhino today I wondered which one of us felt less at home here, in the heart of London.

I grabbed my child’s sticky hand and walked unseeingly to the lion cage. In the innocence of his two-and-a-half years, he, in any case, was more interested in the packet of dinosaur sweets in his other sticky hand than in any of the pathetic animals his mother wanted to look at. Children are supposed to like zoos but I wonder whether that isn’t just another myth adults want to believe.

In the souvenir shop, at the end of our visit, he asked me to buy him a plastic dinosaur. They don’t sell dinosaurs here, I snapped at him, unnecessarily impatient, fed up to the back teeth with this passion for a species that died out ages ago. Zoos are for living animals, I tried to explain more patiently. Why? he wanted to know.

Why, indeed?

I offered to buy him a plastic rhino. Or an elephant or a lion. He wanted a plastic dinosaur. Sometimes my son is stubborn – like any other toddler – but sometimes it seems as if his whole body becomes one solid unyielding mass. Then he becomes far heavier than he appears to be, totally immovable. That’s when he reminds me of Pierre.

The lion walked endlessly back and forth behind the bars, its mane tattered. It looked even worse than the rhino.

‘Leeu,’ I said to my son.

‘Leo,’ my English son repeated as though speaking of an astrological sign.

‘Roar, Young Lion!’ I ordered the lion, but it stared at me as uncomprehendingly as my son. ‘Rrroaaa! Rrroaaa!’

My son’s munching jaw stilled for a moment before he clapped his hands in excitement. Applause for a mother who behaved like an idiot.

Years ago there was a zoo below Rhodes Memorial in Cape Town. I don’t know if I ever saw it. Perhaps it was before my time. Perhaps my mother told me about it. But I swear I can remember an emaciated lion in a dirty cage near a freeway.

That is my earliest memory of a zoo. The others are even worse.

In junior school I went on an expedition, with a crowd of fellow pupils, to the Tygerberg Zoo. All I can remember is a bunch of wriggling snakes in a snake pit. I dreamt about snakes for months on end, woke up screaming night after night. My mother was at her wits’ end.

And then, of course, there was the visit to the Pretoria Zoo, the day the photo was taken which I told you about last month. I was a teenager, all long legs and private parts, sweating in a small cable car high above a hippopotamus enclosure with only the thin floor of the cable car and a helluva long drop between me and the hippo. With his skinny body in his ugly brown army uniform, Pierre made the car swing back and forth, laughing defiantly. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed to be in another place – any other place – when I opened them. When I dared to peer through my lashes again, I hung right above the rhino enclosure. It was probably the start of my perpetual doubt about the power of prayer.

‘Which is worse?’ I asked my son, a game I regularly play with him. ‘To be squashed by a hippopotamus or impaled by a rhinoceros?’

He squealed with laughter and even offered me one of his dinosaur sweets. He loves such horrible possibilities. Give him a story with a violent ending and he smiles from ear to ear. Dwarfs who tear themselves in half through sheer rage. Witches in burning shoes, forced to dance until they drop dead. Where did this bloodlust originate?

His African ancestors’ hunting spirit? Or the fighting spirit of his Irish forebears?

Only an hour ago I sent him to sleep with another pitiless fairy tale. So that I can continue my own pitiless story.

What does it feel like to be sixteen? I would like to experience that feeling again – really experience it, not just recall it superficially – so that I can tell my tale that much better.

I would also like to believe that you are well and happy, wherever you may be.

M.