Embrace (47 page)

‘I will. You won’t say anything, will you . . . to Lena?’

‘No, of course, if you’d prefer me not to . . . It will be nice having you home. Want to come in and say hi to Mum? She’d like to see you.’ ‘Maybe tomorrow?’

‘I’ll come to Bowen for the beach, if it’s sunny.’

‘Can we kiss one more time?’

‘A small one.’ We pecked, and she swung around and disappeared through their front door.

Turning to leave I knew there was no way we’d be going to the beach alone. That much had already been clear at home. A stream of lights was coming down Dan Pienaar Hill. Traffic from the Drive-In’s ten o’clock show. Drive-ins and cinemas, so everyone said, were not going to survive the coming of real TV in January.

It was obvious — also from Alette’s letters — that over the preceding two years while she and Lena had been going to Port Natal together by train, a substantial bond had developed. It was confounding to me, for they took different subjects at school and seemed to have little in common: Lena spent her days on the sports fields, disliked academic life and couldn’t even clap the most basic rhythm, let alone carry a tune. Alette didn’t dream of touching a netball ball, a hockey stick or of venturing onto an athletics track. She thrived on academics and music was her life. It’s the travelling together by train, that’s all, I told myself as I made my way back.

It was a sweltering day and Bokkie said we were not leaving the house without hats. Bok sat in the lounge reading the newspaper. He asked whether we wanted a lift to the beach and we said no, we’d walk. The girls shaved their bikini lines in the bathroom and I collected the cricket bat and tennis ball from the servants’ quarters that served as our store room. When the girls came into the kitchen dressed in shorts and bikini tops Bokkie told them to go and cover themselves because they were not walking to the beach looking like tramps. What has become of the spirit of Christmas, my mother moaned as she rinsed the empty cool-drink bottles. Christmas no longer exists, she answered herself, it’s nothing more than a holiday for fun-seekers and sun-worshippers, that’s all, for crass commercialisation and expensive presents. A far cry from the days when they were too poor in the Molopo to even think of gifts — let alone imagine themselves strutting through neighbourhood streets half nude. What is becoming of this world, she asked, the writings on the wall, just as the Bible says: no more morals, instead a civilisation worshipping Mammon and the sun! I resented Bokkie for what I knew was her hypocrisy. The minute we disappeared and her housework was done, my mother would be in her shorts and out working in the garden, soaking up the sun on her bare arms and legs. If it were not for her bad ear and the fact that she couldn’t swim, she’d spend her every free moment in the pool. She, more than even the girls and I, loved the sun, loved walking half naked. In the bush she would wear the teeniest tops and shorts or minis. On occasion she would hang washing clothed in only her panties. It was clear that our code of dress had nothing to do with our own morals. Instead morals had everything to do with the eyes that might witness us in a state of undress. My mind shot back to Umfolozi and Mkuzi, where I could clearly remember my mother as a less complex woman. Where she smoked; where she and Bok danced at night — before the Dutch Reformed Church taught us it was a sin to dance, a sin to enjoy food, to smoke, to dream. To live.

Already from St Lucia I had loathed Sunday school; in Toti I had started hating church, finding brief pleasure only in the drama of the occasional prayer meeting where I would be the one child who prayed aloud amongst the adults, reading off prayers — for rain, for peace, for love, for forgiveness, for the poor — which had taken hours in the writing. But since leaving the bush, Bokkie had seemed to buy into the Church lock, stock and Bible. What had become of the mother I had liked as much as I had loved? Now I loved her, but felt unsure about whether I actually liked her. And Bok, did I love him or like him or neither? It was chilling to wonder whether perhaps I neither liked nor loved my father. The recognition that my mind could even entertain such a separation shocked me. This, like those terrible thoughts I’d had of Bok at Lake Malawi, was something never to be said out loud.

The bottom of the big polystyrene cooler box was stacked with ice cubes. Inside, in Tupperware lunchboxes, went the sandwiches and two plastic bottles of mixed Oros. Lena, Alette, James, Bernice, her boyfriend Robert and I. We walked — while I thought of the difference between loving and liking, whether one could love without liking; you could like without loving, yes, but what about the other way around — down past the bird sanctuary, beneath the railway bridge, across Kingsway High’s sports fields, dashed across the South Coast Highway. Smelt the water the instant we ascended Kingsway even before we could look down and see the deep Indian Ocean. Not a breeze, just the big unbroken blue taken up by the light blue of the sky, the sound of cars and screams and shouts and laughter from thousands of people in the water and on the beach.

Away from the clutter of holiday-makers we found a spot of open sand where we spread our towels. Most people were crowded around the small platform from where pop music was being played by a four-man band. After a quick dip we heard over the speakers that the go-go dancing competition was about to start. The prize: dinner for two at the Poseidon restaurant. We went over to watch. The line-up included two Kuswag girls with whom Lena and Alette had been in class before they left for Port Natal.

Alette cracked up: ‘Oh my Loooord! Riet Malherbe and Chantelesee Visagie!’

‘Common as crap.’ Lena laughed as the contestants, many on platform shoes, trooped onto the small stage.

Chantelesee Visagie looked familiar, but having been away from Kuswag for two years and with them always my senior I wasn’t quite certain. Her yellow tanga barely covered her breasts, the strings as if asking to be pulled swung wildly against her shiny brown thighs. The band — Hammond organ, drums, guitar and voice — played ‘Clap Your Hands and Stamp Your Feet’, and the line-up of girls and middle-aged women began gyrating their hips, jiggling their breasts, shaking their arms and shoulders. The audience roared, some laughed and the Look Theres shouted encouragement. My eyes ran along the legs, the breasts. Chantelesee, so I thought, at only fourteen or fifteen — though Alette and Lena later guessed her around twenty-five because she had failed school about ten times — was certainly the best dancer and the most attractive. She had full breasts, which swayed rather than bobbed while she go-goed, and long thin brown legs, smeared in suntan oil. She kept her back upright as if she’d swallowed a rod, at the same time allowing only her breasts to sway, her belly and her leg muscles to quiver. Behind us a Look There called in Afrikaans: ‘You practise that in bed, little sister.’ And the men around him cracked up.

‘Jirre dis common, Lena! Like bleddie Indian mynahs!’Alette said, suppressing her laugh. ‘We got out of that school at just the right time or it might have been you or me up there!’

‘Bugger you,’ Bernice laughed, poking Alette in the back. ‘All of us in Kuswag aren’t like that!’

‘Bokkie would rip the skin off your backside if you did go-go on the beach!’ Robert said.

‘I’d be grounded for a year!’

Measured by the applause at song’s end, the judges announced Chantelesee indeed the winner. Beaming from ear to ear her figure glided over to the MC to collect her tickets. She kissed him and again the crowd roared. Behind me the Look There hollered: ‘Bring me a piece of that cake.’ And the three girls around me glared at him, shared glances, and Lena’s upper lip curled as though she was ready to snarl some angry phrase.

After the go-go, it was Miss South Coast Legs 1975. We implored Lena to go up as she would certainly win. She refused, scowling that she wasn’t going on parade as though she were some cow on auction to Free State farmers. Besides, she didn’t have her platforms here. We followed the competition — almost all its participants on cork platforms or high heels — and afterwards agreed that the woman who eventually won her dinner for two at the Poseidon wouldn’t have stood a chance had Lena been on stage.

‘For a weekend in Mauritius or the Seychelles, all expenses paid,’ Lena chirped, ‘but not for an el cheapo dinner at the Poseidon.’

Swimming, playing beach cricket and lazing in the sun, we fried. Instead of suntan oil, my sisters and I rubbed our skins with Break Fluid. Alette was unable to hit a single ball during cricket and we were in stitches at the histrionics that accompanied her every attempt. James bowled underhand, thinking that might help, but still she swung, scooped and dangled the bat as if the instrument were designed specifically to highlight her awkwardness. She screamed each time the ball left our hands and fell down in giggles after another swing that had again gone nowhere. Lena’s batting, in contrast, had us in sweats as we ran, dove, sprinted and dashed across open stretches of sand or tiptoed in amongst Look Theres’ umbrellas and towels.

Bernice and Robert spent most of their time on their towels to one side, with Robert occasionally rising to return our ball. They held hands, rubbed Break Fluid on each other’s skins and occasionally kissed. It thrilled me to see Bernice, plump and proud as a spring chicken in her floral bikini, kissing him, lying on her towel gazing into his eyes, her knees touching his. She was so obviously in love. I thought of Dom and told myself to forget. Recalling
Groen Kormg,
from sick-bay in July, I suddenly wondered whether Bernice and Robert were having sex. The thought of her getting pregnant and everyone saying she had to get married set my mind spinning. Perhaps, as Stephanie had said, she could not have babies after the poisoning in Mkuzi. Maybe just as well. Please let Bernice be infertile. Ashamed of my thoughts, I tried to think of something else. I wondered whether I could pluck up the courage to tell her she should desist from having sex with Robert, that they could just use their hands . . . I saw and felt James’s eyes going to the front of my Speedo; wondered whether he was homosexual as I’d overheard it speculated by parents, uncles and aunts.

We sprinted into the sea, body-surfing, and Lena, James and I helda nervous Alette between us. It seemed Lena was no longer afraid of water, though I had no inclination to dive down and drag her under to assess her new bravery. Closer to shore, the two girls did what they called the dolphin — riding up a wave on their backs, then jiggling their arms and breasts. When a breaker rolled them they’d scream, ‘Oops. There goes my charlie!’ and hastily drag fabric back over the exposed skin. Their altered bodies were a source of fascination: at fifteen, Lena’s breasts were smaller, rounder, upright like miniature rondavels, while Alette’s were already larger, heavier, more like Bernice’s and Bokkie’s, though neither my sisters nor mother had large breasts. Bokkie and Aunt Siobhain had heard about the latest American thing: having breasts enlarged and they both said if they ever had the money they’d be right out there, having a bit of a lift.

Alette had to use suntan lotion — she wouldn’t dream of bringing Break Fluid near her skin — and after an hour or so, on went her T-shirt. James, his nose already pink and peeling, had taken to wearing a cap. He, like Stephanie, had Aunt Siobhain’s translucent Irish skin. Each time Alette removed her T-shirt for a swim, she asked Lena to smear her back with lotion. By noon she and James had to keep their shirts on, even for swimming, as they were being scorched right through the Coppertone.

Lena and Alette, I could again see, had become even better friends than I’d thought. A code of intimacy now existed between them from which I had been excluded. I felt no jealousy, only a hint of rather pleasing envy. Lena looked more content than I had ever known or perhaps cared to register: she was radiant, with red cheeks even over her tan, her short brown hair streaked white from the sun. Her eyes on Alette were soft and blue. I was happy for her. Proud of her.

Shadows of tall holiday apartments began stretching across the beach and we packed up and started the route back. At home we washed the sea water off in the pool. When James and I changed in the bathroom, he said my dick had grown since he last saw it and that I had almost as much hair as him. I turned my back. He asked whether I jerked off and I said no. I couldn’t wait to get out of the enclosed bathroom and away from my pink-skinned cousin. Lena and I together walked Alette home. We went inside and I saw Prof and Juffrou Sang. Juffrou Sang wanted to know everything about the inauguration of the Taal Monument and the Malawi tour, what our audiences had been like, what music we had performed.

And next year it’s the Senior Choir — the crowning glory!’

‘I’m not sure that I’m going back,’ I said.

Her jaw dropped: ‘Why? You’d be silly to leave now! Just when your voice must be at its peak.’

I said I’d think about it. She again insisted that it was, without a shadow of a doubt, worth my while staying in the Berg and that leaving before my voice broke would be a waste of years in training. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘you don’t know what will be left of your voice once it’s broken. I’ve heard boys’ voices — some close to as good as your little Dominic friend — changed to nothing but croaking after they became men. Use it while you’ve got it.’

‘I’ll give it serious thought, Juffrou,’ I said.

‘What about a solo in church on Christmas Day?’ she gleamed.

‘No, please not. My voice is tired after this year. There was the Eastern Cape Tour in April, then October to Paarl and now the Malawi one.’

‘We saw you on TV at the Taal Monument. Uh, who was that black-haired boy who did “Oktobermaand”?’

‘Steven Almeida. He’s Portuguese.’

‘Exquisite. I’ve never heard a voice like that.’ And she shuddered, showing her delight.

‘He’s a friend of mine.’ I told them to watch
Kraaines
on Christmas Day, when our pre-Malawi recordings would be broadcast.

I asked Lena how she liked Port Natal and she said she was very happy to be there. The kids of Port Natal had pride in the school and themselves, unlike the white trash of Kuswag. To illustrate the point she told me about Leon Lategan, brother of Anka, from whom she got her school uniforms: ‘Leon saw a kaffir wearing a Port Natal blazer that had obviously been discarded. So Leon bought the blazer for five rand from the kaffir and went home and burnt it. Now can you imagine a Kuswag kid taking such pride in their school uniform?’