Читать книгу Childish Things - Marita van der Vyver - Страница 8

It was dark in the hostel and as oppressively hot as it was every night. Not quite as dark as every night, I realised, after lying with my eyes open for a while. The moon had to be nearly full.

Simon would’ve known. His moods always became stranger as the moon grew. It was inexplicable, Ma said, it should actually happen to me because the moon was my ruling planet, but she thought it might have something to do with his rising star. Ma took things like that seriously. Simon only laughed and said he didn’t believe in the stars, it was because he was a werewolf that he was affected by the moon.

I turned on my side so that I could see Dalena’s bed. She was also lying on her side. Probably as soaked in sweat as I was. The smell of Peaceful Sleep hung stupefyingly in the air. As it did every night.

I was startled when I saw the whites of her eyes.

‘I thought you were asleep,’ I whispered.

‘Too hot,’ she whispered back.

‘Don’t you ever get used to it?’

‘To the heat?’

‘To everything,’ I whispered, ‘I’ve been in the hostel for almost two months and it feels as if I’m never going to adapt!’

‘You’re simply not a hostel child.’

‘Are you?’

‘I never had a choice.’ She sighed and turned on her back, folded her hands behind her head. Like the first morning she’d walked in here and thrown herself down on the bed. Bent her knees so that the sheet looked like a white tent in the dark. ‘We farm children had to go to boarding school from the start.’

We were quiet for a long time until I asked carefully: ‘What do you think of Ben?’

‘He’s all right.’ She turned her face towards me so that the moon shone on her cheek like a searchlight. Her skin looked as white as the sheet. ‘A bit too sweet for my taste.’

‘What do you mean … too sweet?’ Yesterday Ben had asked me, stuttering and stammering, to go to Heinrich’s party with him. I would have been at the party over the weekend in any case – but suddenly everything had changed. I didn’t know what to wear, I didn’t know whether I should borrow my mother’s curlers to put up my hair, I didn’t know whether my short hair would look stupid with a bunch of curls, I didn’t even know whether I still wanted to go to the party. ‘Can he dance?’

‘Not half bad.’ Her teeth were a white flash in her wide mouth. ‘But if you want to move beyond dancing … he’s terribly shy, you know.’

‘That’s OK,’ I said quickly.

‘I don’t think he’s ever kissed a girl properly.’

‘Oh, that shy?’ I couldn’t hide the disappointment in my voice. ‘Perhaps you can teach him something,’ Dalena comforted. ‘There’s always a first time.’

A few more moments of silence while I digested the information. ‘When was your first time?’

‘French kiss?’ Her body shook as she laughed. ‘In standard six.’

‘What’s so funny?’

‘I never even asked his name! It was at one of my sisters’ parties. He and I smooched all evening and it was only the next morning that I realised I didn’t know who he was. I was so happy to be given a French kiss at last that I didn’t mind at all who gave it to me!’

I took a deep breath, mustered all my courage. It was always easier to ask such questions in the dark: ‘And further?’

‘Further?’

‘What’s the furthest you’ve ever gone?’ My voice was so low that I could barely hear it.

‘That time in the shower,’ Dalena whispered. ‘With Miss Lourens’s brother.’

‘What did you do?’

‘We touched one another … He touched my tits and I touched his … you know … down there …’

I couldn’t utter a word.

‘And he became as stiff as a board.’

I didn’t dare look at Dalena but I knew she was looking at me. Pulled the sheet up to my chin because the room suddenly felt cold. My body was covered in goose pimples.

‘And then?’ I whispered urgently, afraid that she would fall asleep.

‘I had the fright of my life!’ She started giggling, her teeth white in the dark again. ‘I knew boys became stiff … but I didn’t know it looked like that.’

‘What … does it look like?’ It was the most important question I’d ever asked in my life.

‘Have you ever seen a donkey in rut?’

‘You mean, his thing hung on the ground?’

‘No, man, it doesn’t hang! It stands up straight! It gets longer and longer like … like Pinocchio’s nose!’

‘Like Pinocchio’s nose!’ I whispered, amazed, and tried to imagine this odd description. Without success.

‘Perhaps it also has something to do with lying,’ Dalena giggled. ‘A boy will say anything when he’s like that: “Don’t worry. I won’t put it in. I know what I’m doing. You can trust me …”’

‘Is that what Miss Lourens’s brother said to you?’

‘Fortunately my father caught us in time.’ Dalena’s sigh hung in the air for a long time, like a soap bubble before it burst. ‘Otherwise I don’t know …’

‘And what does it feel like?’ I kicked off the sheet again. Smelt my own sweat. Almost as strong as the fumes of Peaceful Sleep. ‘I mean, if it … if it looks like Pinocchio’s nose … does it feel like Pinocchio’s nose, too?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never touched Pinocchio’s nose!’

She started laughing so much she had to push her face into the pillow to calm down. I giggled nervously too, frightened that a prefect or the teacher in the passage would hear us. Frightened that we wouldn’t be able to continue discussing this vitally important subject.

‘No, man, I mean … does it feel like wood?’

‘Wood? Are you out of your fucking mind?’

She shook with laughter again. I was getting desperate.

‘No, man,’ she eventually whispered, ‘it feels like meat! Like raw sausage. Raw sausage frozen hard. But of course it’s not cold …’

‘Like warm frozen sausage?’

‘If you can imagine something like that.’

I couldn’t.

‘Where is he now?’ I asked, to get the picture of the strangest sausage in the world out of my mind. ‘Miss Lourens’s brother?’

‘You may well ask.’

‘Didn’t you see him again?’

‘I told you, they all lie when they’re in that condition.’

‘All of them?’

‘I’ve heard my sisters talk about it.’ Dalena’s two older sisters, both at university, had recently become my most important source of information about this irresistible subject. (Through Dalena, as I had met neither of them.) And perhaps not even a trustworthy source because, according to Dalena, neither of them had gone ‘all the way’.

‘They say a man can’t think once his thing is hard. They say it’s your own fault if you let him go too far because then you can’t say no any longer. He goes quite crazy.’

‘Crazy?’ I swallowed heavily. I saw the shy, quiet Ben with wildly milling arms, foaming at the mouth. ‘How crazy?’

‘They say he’ll rape you just like that.’

The room was dead quiet.

‘But how can you tell … ?’ I took a deep breath like someone preparing to swim under water. ‘How far is too far?’

The silence continued. All I could hear was Dalena’s regular breathing. This time she had really gone to sleep, I decided.

‘I think it’s when you don’t want him to stop,’ she eventually replied, so softly that it sounded as if she were muttering in her sleep.

‘You can stay as you are,’ Dalena sang while she mixed coffee liqueur and vodka in three tall glasses. ‘Or you can change …’

‘Wrong song!’ Suna laughed on the high bar stool next to me. ‘This isn’t cane, it’s Red Russians!’

‘Black Russians,’ I said and watched Dalena pouring Coke into the glasses.

‘It’s all the same fucking thing, man,’ Dalena said in Janis Joplin’s world-weary voice.

Suna was overcome with a fit of giggling. I couldn’t help laughing as well. Nobody could swear like Dalena. Except, perhaps, Janis Joplin.

I could curse in my thoughts like someone who ate on the sly when no one could see her, but as soon as I said a swear word out loud, I spat it out like milk that had soured. And Suna was like someone on a strict diet who enjoyed watching other people eat. I had never heard her swear but she started laughing uncontrollably every time Dalena used a rude word. And Dalena cursed like a gourmet. She rolled the words around her tongue the way my father did with good wine.

‘Cheers, Mart.’ She handed me a glass after adding a handful of ice to it. ‘Let’s drink to Heinrich’s party.’

My stomach felt hollow every time I thought about the party but I knew it was too late to back out now. Suna and I were spending the weekend with Dalena because the party was being held on a neighbouring farm the following evening. Naturally, we weren’t supposed to be sitting in her father’s bar, but her mother had to spend a few days in hospital with some nervous complaint or other and her father was at a Broederbond affair, according to Dalena.

My father didn’t think much of this I’ll-scratch-your-back-if-you’ll-scratch-mine Broederbond. My mother said it was only be-cause they had never asked him to become a member. I thought it was just something else he could blame her for. Her father, my Grandpa Fishpond, had supposedly been a member of the more liberal United Party. And they probably thought she was English because she dyed her hair and smoked Cameos.

‘Hmmm.’ Suna licked her lips. ‘Where did you learn to drink this stuff?’

‘Mart told me about it,’ Dalena said. ‘She just looks innocent.’

‘At the seaside,’ I said. ‘With Nic.’

‘Who is this Nic you mention so often?’

‘Don’t ask,’ Dalena warned. ‘Unless you want to spend the rest of the evening hearing all about this fabulous guy you’ve never met. The brownest eyes, the broadest shoulders, the best-looking legs, the most unbelievable personality, the biggest …’

‘You’re lying, I never carried on like that, Dalena!’ The vodka probably also had something to do with the heat in my cheeks.

‘Have you ever listened to yourself, Mart?’

‘The biggest what?’ Suna wanted to know.

Now it was Dalena’s turn to giggle. Suna’s eyes widened. My cheeks got hotter and hotter.

There were certain words even Dalena wouldn’t use. When it came to sexual parts, male or female, she couldn’t even mention the biological terms. Even though they sounded so chaste in our pretty biology teacher’s mouth.

‘Penis!’ she’d whispered for the first time the other evening in our hostel room. ‘It sounds like a new kind of headache pill!’

‘And what about vagina?’ I asked, as always braver in the dark. ‘Doesn’t it sound like the name of an old maid? There was an old maid named Vagina, whose looks became finer and finer …’

Dalena had to put her hand in front of her mouth to stop laughing.

‘And testicles!’ I’d giggled. ‘Like something belonging to an octopus! He swings his dangerous testicles about to keep the enemy at bay!’

‘And vulva could’ve been a car. He climbed into his new Vulva and drove away.’

‘And uterus?’ We were both amazed by our daring. ‘Isn’t there a city in Holland called Uterus?’

‘Uterus and Clitoris,’ Dalena had announced in a dramatic whisper. ‘A Tale of Two Cities!’

‘Dalena exaggerates.’ I took a few quick swallows from the glass in front of me even though I knew it wasn’t a cold drink. ‘It was only a holiday romance.’

‘That’s what she tells you now!’ Dalena’s voice was louder than usual, even more like a boy’s. ‘After stuttering old Ben has won her heart.’

‘He doesn’t stutter, he …’ I fell into every trap she set for me. ‘He’s only shy.’

‘Ha!’ She gathered our glasses to mix another three Black Russians, confident as a cocktail barman behind her father’s counter. She was wearing a man’s maroon dressing gown in a silky material. She constantly said she couldn’t stand her father but she evidently couldn’t resist the temptation of wearing his clothes. ‘Let’s drink while we can. Don’t think we’ll get anything more than Coke and Fanta tomorrow evening. Perhaps a couple of sneaky beers for the boys, but definitely nothing for the girls! After all, nice girls don’t drink!’

‘Let’s drink a toast to Mart and Ben!’ Unlike Dalena, Suna’s voice had become higher and thinner. She sounded like a six-year-old girl. It could also have been the alcohol affecting my hearing. ‘To whatever may happen tomorrow night!’

‘As I know old Ben, bugger all will happen,’ said Dalena.

My body felt too light for the bar stool, my feet too far off the floor. I studied the walls around me hung with dozens of framed rugby photographs. Team photos, mostly, from Springbok teams to farm-school teams with no differentiation between famous and obscure players.

‘What are you going to wear?’ Suna wanted to know.

‘Sheesh, I don’t know.’ I could hardly admit that I’d struggled with this problem for over a week. ‘Jeans, probably. What about you?’

‘It probably doesn’t matter,’ Suna sighed. ‘I don’t have a date.’

Suna wasn’t ugly. She had long blonde hair and a great body and all; but she also had acne. Not badly, but as a result she suffered from a serious lack of self-confidence. The moment a boy looked at her she dropped her head and swallowed her tongue.

‘Oh, come on, Suna!’ Dalena bellowed. ‘I told you I’d make you look great with my sisters’ make-up. You’re going to look like Cinderella at the prince’s party.’

‘Cinderella had a fairy godmother.’ Absently Suna rubbed her pitted skin. ‘You can’t cast magic spells, Dalena.’

‘There’s nothing that foundation and blusher can’t fix. There’s absolutely nothing …’

And with this prediction my roommate fell off her high bar stool with an ear-splitting crash.

I sat on the balcony in front of Dalena’s bedroom and looked out over her father’s farm. It wasn’t a toy farm like my father’s. Chris van Vuuren was a real farmer, not an attorney wanting to play at being a farmer.

Over the weekend I’d realised for the first time that Dalena’s father was filthy rich. You would never have guessed it if you saw her in the hostel. She wasn’t one for fantastic clothes or shiny bangles or anything that showed that her people had money. I knew what my mother would say: if you were used to money you didn’t have to flaunt it.

My people weren’t exactly poverty-stricken, but my father’s bank statement was always as unpredictable as his next scheme to make money quickly. Or to lose it quickly, which happened more often. At the moment things were going rather well with a farm and a swimming pool, but the Van Vuurens’ farm and swimming pool made ours seem like a suburban plot with a fishpond. The Van Vuurens not only had a swimming pool big enough to hold a school gala, they also had a jacuzzi and a sauna.

‘Jacuzzi,’ I said aloud to hear what this exotic word sounded like in my mouth. Almost as pretty as French. ‘Je t’aime, mon amour.’

‘What?’ Dalena asked behind me and I was so startled that the writing pad fell off my lap.

She stood at the French doors which opened out of her bedroom on to the balcony, yawned lazily and stretched her arms high above her head. She was wearing only the loose T-shirt in which she’d slept. Love is … I read on her breast, above a picture of two little dolls hugging one another on her stomach, with the rest of the sentence on her hips … being nice to her even if she’s grumpy.

‘I thought you and Suna were still asleep.’

‘So you sat talking to yourself.’ She blinked her eyes in the sharp morning light. ‘Anyone would think you were in love.’

‘Did you enjoy the party?’

‘Oh, it was OK.’ She dropped into the deckchair next to me, yawned again, stretched her bare legs. ‘You obviously enjoyed it.’

‘Where’s Suna?’

‘Probably still dreaming about how popular she was.’

She turned her head towards me, the grey-green eyes wide awake now, and smiled that impossibly wide smile. ‘She was a hit, wasn’t she?’

Thanks to Dalena’s sisters’ make-up and the low red lighting in the rondavel, Suna completely forgot about her skin problem. And once the boys saw how she could wriggle her body on the dance floor, she didn’t have any breathing space for the rest of the evening.

‘You didn’t look so bad yourself,’ I told her, my eyes on the sugar-cane fields which would soon start shimmering in the heat. ‘Heinrich virtually drooled every time he looked at you.’

‘Sheesh, he’s as much of a used-to-nothing as all the other schoolboys. If you wear a halter top, they know you’re not wearing a bra. It’s enough to give them wet dreams for the rest of the term.’

I had a vague suspicion of what she meant by a wet dream, but it sounded so awful that I didn’t want to believe it.

‘No way do I want to bother with schoolboys any longer.’ She got up and idled back to the glass doors. ‘I’ll leave them to you and Suna. I’m going to call someone to bring us coffee.’

In this house the whites did even less than in any other house I’d ever been in. A battalion of servants in crisp white uniforms moved as soundlessly as ghosts over the wall-to-wall carpets. As soon as you needed one, she appeared before you like Aladdin’s subservient genie. You didn’t even have to make the effort to rub a lamp.

It was a two-storey house which made me feel as if I were acting in a romantic movie, something about war and slaves in the American South. The balcony on which I was sitting, with its copy of Victorian wrought-iron railings smothered in purple bougainvillaea, ran right round the house. In the entrance hall, as big as a school hall’s stage, there was one of those sweeping staircases I’d only seen in the movies. It was the kind on which a beautiful actress in a ballgown would appear, standing like Lot’s wife for a moment before floating down like an angel.

I could see that everything around me had cost money, from the cold marble floor in the bathroom to the shaggy white rug which lay like a lazy polar bear in one of the guest rooms, but I had to admit that I didn’t admire many of the objects. I couldn’t help thinking of my mother and her widow’s jar of axioms. People who have the most money, she liked saying, often have the least taste.

Not that my mother could’ve run classes in good taste. When I’d shown her an interior decorating article in Sarie last year in which ornaments like the three porcelain ducks against our passage wall were disparaged as the ultimate in kitsch, she’d only laughed. But a month later the ducks had gone. Only three dark marks remained, minor monuments to years of motionless flight. My mother tried, after all, even if there were still many things in our house that would’ve driven Sarie’s interior decorator to despair.

But Dalena’s mother had either never read Sarie, or she had enough self-confidence not to be dictated to about what she should have in her home. The walls were hung with pictures of children in ragged clothing, their eyes as large as plates with teardrops like transparent leaves clinging to their cheeks. Or stormy seascapes painted by someone who had obviously never seen the sea, with waves like blue flames topped by spumes like spoonfuls of whipped cream. At first I thought it was modern art, about which I knew nothing. But when I had another look at Dalena’s mother in a family photograph, with a purple haze in her hair and her mouth in a stiff pleat, I decided that she didn’t look like the kind who knew anything about modern art either.

I pulled my writing pad towards me to write to my brother. I would’ve liked to tell him what had happened at the party but I was scared that he would tease me. I would like to tell someone that I got a kiss after all, at the end of the party. And not just an ordinary kiss, mind you, Dalena.

It was while ‘Nights in White Satin’ was playing. We sat outside in the dark and … well, just sat, really. Ben wasn’t chatty, exactly. Not the kind of guy who would tell everyone what he got away with with a girl, I comforted myself. Dalena, of course, would say it was because he hadn’t got away with anything yet. If only Dalena knew!

That’s probably why he says so little, I thought afterwards, as speechless as he was for the first time that evening. He was saving his tongue for better uses. My mouth felt the way it did after I’d chewed too many sticky toffees. But I couldn’t stop smiling.

And my roommate didn’t have to know everything all the time.

London

8 August 1992

Dear Child

All I have to give you today is a small newspaper report. The older I get, the larger are the gaps in my vocabulary. I had thought that the opposite would happen: that in the final analysis I would be able to say everything that could be said, if I only continued to practise.

I had imagined that to put words to paper would be like fishing. The wider the experience, the bigger the catch. Now I know this is not necessarily true. It may happen that your net becomes worn over the years, and full of holes, and that you no longer want to take the trouble to mend it because you no longer care if the small fish get away – only the really big ones are still a challenge.

There are a few things I’m trying to say, just a few, but because I’m finding it so difficult to catch the right words, all the others slip through my fingers these days. I’ve never been good at small talk. I was always a fiasco with a cocktail in my hand among people I didn’t know well, but these days I even have trouble in talking to friends. If I can still speak of friends.

That’s probably why I have a growing need of these letters, to share things with you I can share with no one else, even if it’s only once in a while. (Or is it because I’ve started writing about my adolescence that I’ve developed a teenage need to have some kind of a diary?)

Heimwee. That’s the word I was groping for in my previous letter. Heim as in the German Heimat, wee as in weemoed, that indescribable longing for one knows not whom, where or what. Here is a little tale picked up in an Afrikaans newspaper about heimwee.

Afrikaans? Yes, now that it’s no longer necessary to hang my head in shame because I come from that accursed land, I sometimes dare to walk into South Africa House on Trafalgar Square where I page through old newspapers and magazines looking for – what? Faith? Hope? Love? What I usually find is suspicion, despair and hate.

But sometimes there is something I missed in the local press. Or perhaps I’ve grown so used to reading between the lines in South African newspapers that I can no longer interpret the lines in British newspapers.

London – What do you do when you’re in a strange country and your heart longs for your birthplace in Africa? You build yourself a mud hut in your backyard.

(A mud hut! I thought. And read on avidly.)

That’s exactly what Mrs Desiree Ntolo, a refugee from Cameroon did – to the annoyance of her neighbours and the local council in Dagenham, an industrial area east of London, which has instructed her to demolish the structure within a week. Mrs Ntolo built the hut entirely on her own.

(How? I wanted to know. How do you build a mud hut?)

Using a pick and a spade she dug stones and gravel out of her garden, watered the soil and trampled out strips of mud with her feet. A council spokesman stated that the hut could not be allowed to stand since it contravenes planning regulations, but Mrs Ntolo remains defiant: ‘The mud hut is in no one’s way,’ she said. ‘They must also consider my rights. If I can’t go back to Cameroon, I at least want something that reminds me of it.’

(Can you guess whose side I’m on?)

Love

M.