A Sport of Nature (6 page)

Bettie's laughter jiggled her like a puppet. —I want to swim and get a tan same like Hillela.— They all laughed—she flung her arm, wet hand extended, round Hillela and Hillela's head rested a moment under her cocked one, cradled against her mauvish-black, damp neck.

Sasha had his mother's insistence on facing the facts. —You wouldn't be allowed on the beach. Isn't that true, Hillela?—

—Well, Jethro's afraid of the sea anyway, but Emily used to go down early in the morning, when nobody was there.—

—They lucky, like I say. Miss Olga gave them a fridge for their rooms. Emily's pay is very high, very high. I wish I could be working for Miss Olga!—

—Better than your pay?—

—
Better
than my pay, Sasha? More than ninety pounds a month.—

—My parents wouldn't take you to a place where you couldn't even walk on the beach.—

Bettie wiped the sink with the absent vigour of a task performed through a lifetime. —I'm not thinking about walking, I'm thinking about money, what I must pay my mother for looking after my children, what I must pay for schoolbooks, for uniform, for church—

—We're not rich people like Olga.—

Bettie laughed. —Maybe you not rich, I don't know.—

—You know how hard my mother works to help—black people, I mean. And she doesn't get paid.—

—Yes, she works hard. I work hard and I'm thinking about money. Money is the thing that helps me. Are you going to lock up, lovey?—

She took out of the oven a pot containing her man's supper and a jug with the remains of the dinner coffee and went off across the yard to her room.

The two young people played the records they liked as loudly as they wished. They sat on the floor in the livingroom under rocking waves of the rhythm to which their pleasurable responses were adjusted by repeated surrender to it, as each generation finds a tidal rhythm for its blood in a different musical mode. Hillela gazed at her feet, transformed by the sun and sea into two slick and lizard-like creatures, thin brown skin sliding satiny over the tendons when she moved her toes. Her attention drew the boy's.

—What was all that about?— A tip of the head towards the dining-table.

She took a moment to make sure he was not referring to Bettie. —Someone was here when I came home today.—

—Someone we know?—

—Not you. You weren't here when she came before. Quite long ago. Before the Chief stayed.—

—But you don't know who?— After a moment he began again. —Were you there?—

—I was unpacking my things. They were on the verandah.— She bent her head and began stroking over her feet and ankles. —I heard them talking when I went to fetch a banana—

—And?—

—I was thinking about something else.—

—A-ha, some chap you got keen on at Plett, mmh?—

She mimicked Bettie. —Maybe, I don't know.—

He rolled onto his stomach and began playing with her toes to help her remember. —But you understand what they were talking about, now.—

—Well, I remember some things.—

—Such as?— He scratched suddenly down the sole of her foot and her toes curled back over his hand in reflex.

—Oh you know.—

—Me? How could I?—

—You heard what Pauline said, at dinner.—

—Yes. It's about someone on the run from the police, isn't it.— He traced down her toes with his forefinger. —Look how clean the sea has made your nails. You've got a funny-looking little toe, here.—

—Pauline told me that toe was broken when I was two years old, in Lourenço Marques with my mother.—

—Do you remember?—

—I was too small.—

—Not your mother either? What's she like?—

—No. —I suppose like Olga and Pauline—

He laughed. —Olga-and-Pauline, how's it possible to imagine such a creature!—

—She's a sister.—

—Well, yes. I don't remember her, either.—

—Sasha, would you say I look Portuguese?—

—How does Portuguese look? Like a market gardener?—

—My short nose and these (touching cheekbones), my eyes and this kind of hair that isn't brown or black; the way it grows from my forehead—look.—

He took her head in his hands and jerked it this way and that.

—Yes, you look Portuguese—no, more like an Eskimo, that's it, or a Shangaan or a Lapp or a—

—I don't look like you, any of you, do I.—

—But why Portuguese?—

—She had a Portuguese lover.—

—But you were already born, two years old, you ass.—

—She could've been there before.—

—Did they ever say anything?—

—They only tell us what they think we ought to know.—

—And your father?—

—They wouldn't tell Len, would they?—

Sasha still had her head between his hands. —So you're not my cousin after all.—

—Of course we are. You dope. She's still Pauline's sister.—

He let go her head and rolled back on the floor. Slowly he began to play with her toes again. He spoke as if they had not been alone together all evening, and now were. —Maybe I'll also be on the run. As soon as I leave school next year, I could be called up in the ballot for the army.—

—You'll have to go.—

He rested his cheek on her feet. She put out a hand and stroked his hair, practising caresses newly learned. He moved in refusal, rubbing soft unshaven stubble against her insteps: —No.—

—Yes, you'll have to go.—

—I don't understand them. They send me to school with black kids, and then they tell me it can't be helped: the law says I've
got to go into the army and learn to kill blacks. That's what the army's really going to be for, soon. They talk all the time about unjust laws. He's up there in court defending blacks. And I'll have to fight them one day. You're bloody lucky you're a girl, Hillela.—

She drew away her feet and swivelling slowly round, lay down, her chin to his forehead, his forehead to her chin, close. Sasha, Carole and Hillela sometimes tussled all three together in half-aggressive, giggling play that broke up the familiar perspective from which human beings usually confront one another. She righted herself, eye to eye, mouth to mouth. The knowledge that they were cousins came up into their eyes, between them; she, his cousin, kissed him first, and slowly the knowledge disappeared in rills of feeling. It washed away as the light empty shells at the Bay were turned over and over by films of water and drawn away under the surf. He touched her breasts a little; he had noticed, living with her as a sister, that her breasts were deep and large under the token family modesty of flimsy pyjama top or bath towel tucked round under the arms. She slid the delicious shock of her strange sisterly hand down under his belt; her fingertips nibbled softly at him and, busy at her real mouth, he longed to be swallowed by her—it—the pure sensation she had become to him: for them to be not cousin, brother, sister, but the mysterious state incarnate in her. After a while they were Sasha and Hillela again; or almost. Light under the bedroom door showed Hillela was still up, preparing her books for the new term, when the parents came home; locked in the bathroom, Sasha had buried, with pants thrust to the bottom of the linen basket, his sweet wet relief from the manhood of guns and warring. Tenderness was forgotten: like any other misdeed undetected by adults.

Forgotten and repeated, as anything that manages to escape judgment may be repeated when the unsought opportunity makes space for it again.

Olga gave her a cheque (—Now that you're grown up I don't know what you'd really like—) and a package wrapped in Japanese rice paper with a real peony, under the ribbon, duplicating its peony motifs. The black students at the Saturday school (Pauline would have made the suggestion) gave her a pink-and-gold pop-up birthday card taped to a cigarette box covered with tinfoil. She was seventeen. Inside the Japanese paper package was the pair of Imari cats. Inside the cigarette box was an Ndebele bead necklace. Pauline picked up first one porcelain cat, then the other, and smiled, running her finger where she had found the cracks. The repairs were detectable as a fine line of gold.

—Real gold?—

—Oh yes, Hillela. But they've lost their value for a collection. Just a souvenir.—

Carole yearned for these porcelain cats. Hillela generously presented her with the undamaged one. Pauline was amused to see the pair parted, one with a space carefully cleared for it on Carole's bedside table, the other among shells and mascots and packets of chewing gum on the window-sill above Hillela's bed. —Now you've reduced their value still further. Don't tell Olga, for god's sake. You'll never make an art collector.—

When the two girls were alone Carole made an offer. —I don't mind swapping for the mended one.—

—No. I'd give them both to you, if I could.—

The Ndebele necklace fastened with a loop over a button, and the thread broke the second or third time Hillela wore it; the beads frayed off and in time rolled away into cracks in a drawer.
The wink of their glint under dust and fluff caught her eye: she had missed many Saturdays at the classes in the old church; without making any decision, it was understood that Carole alone would be accompanying her mother each week. Hillela and her new friend Mandy von Herz lied about where they were going or had been, even if the destination were innocent as a walk to the corner shop. They disappeared, even in company, into a privacy of glances, whispers, gazes past adults to whom they were either talking or appeared to be listening; an impatience sparked silently from them. Perhaps Mandy knew about Sasha; such secrets are binding as vows, affirm a buried solidarity even among crowds. Without mixing much with other girls, the pair were immensely popular at school, admired by those who could not keep up with their nerve. Hillela, an old lag, introduced to selected boarders the technique learned in Rhodesia for getting in and out of school at night. When discovered, they were too grateful for the freedom they had had, to mention her name.

GO-GO DANCERS LIVEN SATURDAY STREETS: a Sunday paper publishes a photograph of two young girls, flying legs and hair, dancing in a shop window. So this is what Hillela is doing with her Saturday mornings, now.

But Pauline must have decided, with the wise counsel of Joe, to take it tolerantly, carefully, considering the girl's background. —What on earth is go-go dancing, darling? And whose idea was the shop window?—

—It's a boutique run by some friends of Mandy. They're paying us ten rands each.—

There would be no second time for the proud young wage-earners of the new currency just introduced; as Pauline said, how lucky they were to get off even once without trouble at the school; and this issue wasn't really one on which she could have tackled
the headmistress as she had over the waiter. (The headmistress must have been grateful that the girls' names were not published; there was no summons to her study.) Carole was the only member of the family who allowed herself to be openly upset by the incident. —You should see Hillela and Mandy dancing! You don't know! They're wonderful! You should just see them!— But one thing Pauline and Joe never feared was that Carole would be influenced by her cousin; like her brother Sasha, Carole was too well-adjusted for that.

Pauline was frank with Hillela, always frank: one of the problems with Hillela was that she never seemed able to explain what made her do what she did? Having got away with dancing in a shop window in a bikini with a bit of fringe bobbing on her backside, one Friday she did not come home from school and had not appeared by eleven o'clock at night. Carole confided later that she herself had ‘got hell' from her parents for not reporting earlier she had no idea where Hillela was. Pauline thought Hillela, as the elder of the two, must be allowed the self-respect of more freedom than Carole. The girls had heard it many times: I don't want to behave towards you the way Olga and Ruthie and I were treated when we were young, I'd rather take risks with you than do what our parents did to Ruthie.

But now a kind of dread came into the house; Carole could not explain what it was: —As if we'd done something awful—to you, or more that you were telling something awful to us … I don't know … — Pauline telephoned the von Herz girl's home. Her parents had been to the police and hospitals, already assuming disaster. They were not surprised to hear that Mandy's new best friend was also missing. —I have never liked this friendship.— The mother was frank, too.

—Anti-semitic cow. I could hear it.— A moment's distraction flared in Pauline. But the convention of action set by the other family provided an acceptable channel for the dread. The
feeling it was something about which nothing could be done was contained. Carole went along with Pauline and Joe to a police station. All the time Hillela's particulars were being given to a young Afrikaner policeman Carole was watching a white girl, a girl Hillela's age, with Hillela's little face, and big breasts shaking as she cried, a girl with blood dried dark like sap from a cut next to a swollen eye, being pawed helplessly, to comfort her, by restless and wary friends in the motorbike set. The light in that place where neither Carole nor her cousin had ever been was so strong that the shadows at midnight were the shadows of day. Boot-falls and clangings echoed from somewhere; shouts in languages Carole and Hillela heard spoken by the black waiters and cleaners at school, Bettie, Alpheus, Alpheus's mother, and did not understand. —The policeman asked all sorts of mad things. Did you take drugs. Did you go to discos in Hillbrow. Did you have any ‘previous convictions'—and all in the most terrible
japie
English, just repeating what he's been taught to say, like a little kid who can't even read yet.—

Two other policemen were swinging their legs where they sat on a table and a third flirted in Afrikaans, over the phone. How tall was Hillela Capran? What did she weigh? Any distinguishing marks? Pauline, her hair bristling with the static of anxiety, would not give Joe a chance to answer any questions, but had to turn to Carole for these bodily statistics that obsess adolescent girls, always weighing and measuring themselves. Pauline had brought an identifying photograph, yes; one of the three of them—her children and their cousin—with Carole and Sasha cut away.