Karoo Boy (17 page)

– Baleka baleka! Run run, some cry.

– Hamba! Go away, others cry.

A ladder runs up to the roof rack. I reach out for it. It feels as if my bones will jerk out of joint, but I hold on and swing my feet up onto the bottom rung. Beside my head is the back window that can be kicked out if the bus crashes. Faces squash up against it like gaping fish. I wonder why they do not tell the driver. The bus tries to buck me from the ladder as it hits the ribbed dirt road. Jolts run up my shins and up my spine, and I have to clench my gibbering teeth. Dust smokes up into my face, and when I turn to the window faces again, I feel my eyeballs scratch inside the sockets. I squeeze my eyes shut against the dust and cling on.

After a time, the bus grinds to a halt. I open my eyes to see that we are in the township of shacks and broken cars and pyramids of rubble and plastic bags fluttering on barbed wire.

Girls with baby brothers or sisters bound in blankets on their backs fill jerrycans and drums with water at a tap.

There is a shop with an ad for BB tobacco on the zinc roof. The roof is anchored by rocks against gusts. Below the roof, in the shade of the stoep, a pack of skinny boys chatter in Xhosa. Behind them, the words
Nobody makes better tea than you and Five Roses
. They listlessly throw pebbles at me, perhaps to see if I am alive as I hang on the ladder, covered in dust like clay-painted abakwetha.

– Hey, I shout.

I jump and they scatter. When I just stand there, they regather, stones in hand, just in case. Then Chaka runs up and does his spinning bobtail war dance. They scatter again, until they see he is after his own tail and not their heels. They giggle at the sight, and home in again.

– What is your name? say lips under a faded Chicago Bulls cap.

– Douglas.

– What do you want in this place?

– I want my dog.

Chaka has given up his war dance to lick the dust off my knees, but his stump of a tail still wags.

– Your inja has found you, says a boy with spiky hair.

– Yes, he has found me.

– What is the name of your dog? the boy in the Bulls cap wants to know.

– Chaka.

The Xhosa boys fall about laughing. They think it is fitting that the name of a Zulu king be given to a dog.

– How will you go back to town? comes from the Bulls cap.

– I don’t know. I have no imali for a ticket.

– We will walk with you. It is only five miles. But first, we do the township tour.

I follow the pack of barefoot boys down an alley between shanty shacks. A sweet smell hangs in the air. The boys suck their fingers and roll their eyes, so I figure it is dagga. They take me to a shack with a wood door. The bottom half of the door is padlocked, and the top is ajar.

– Jonga, jonga, they cry.

So I look, peering into the dark. A smell of pee mingled with rotting fruit, but I see nothing. As I turn away, some snaky thing darts out of the dark and latches onto my arm. It is a sinewy hand with long yellowed nails. I yell and writhe, but the nails dig deeper into my skin. Chaka goes berserk and jumps up to bite the hand. For a while he hangs by his teeth and then drops again when the boys stone him. I see drops of red where Chaka’s teeth punched through the skin. But still the hand holds me.

A face looms out of the gloom. A wild-eyed man with matted hair. He yips like a hyena at the sight of his dusty catch. I think he is going to drag me into the dark and eat me. Behind me I hear the boys giggling. Maybe they have fed white boys to the hyenaman before. The boy in the Bulls cap peels a banana and the man’s eyes swivel across to the fruit. The boy holds the peeled banana out and the hyenaman lets go of my hand and snatches the fruit. I fly backwards. The man shrinks into the shadows, and the last thing I see is half the banana hanging from his lips like a long white tongue.

Chaka licks my face and the boys reel with laughter as if they have drunk a drum of marula juice or something.

I turn and run. With Chaka at my heels, I wind my way through the riddle of paths that tunnel through eyeless tumbledown shacks.

– Baleka baleka! Run run, a girl calls from a shadowy doorway.

This spurs me on. I jump abandoned tyres and cracked jerry-cans and potholes. Then I see the girl again, clapping her hands with glee at the sight of a white boy and his dog boomeranging back past her door.

I am lost. I falter to a halt and stoop to free a stone from my sandals. Chaka licks my face with a hot panting tongue. But I jackinthebox up again when a voice calls after me:

– Hey boy! Wait for us.

I run on, imagining they have another game in mind. I fling myself around corners, dodging chickens and a woman carrying a cardboard box on her head.

– Tixo, she cries as I run by and her hands shoot up to steady the tilting box.

I run past a man in a black Che beret and Biggles goggles doing karate at the slow, studied pace of a climbing chameleon.

I reckon I have lost them, when I spin around a corner and see them ahead of me. My heart pounds. There they stand, fingers peeking out of torn pockets. The boy in the Bulls cap whistles a birdcall, and somewhere behind me I hear an echo. I know they have me cornered. I finger the seeds in my pocket and glance around for an escape. I catch sight of Marsden reflected in a blind paraffin-tin window.

– Hey, it was just a joke, the boy in the Bulls cap calls across the gap. All he wants is a banana.

He comes towards me, followed by the shadow of another boy.

– My name is Joko, and this is Lucky.

Lucky, his spiky-headed shadow, nods his head and hitches up his shorts. They are a man’s shorts and have to be folded a few times to hook on his bony hips.

– Ndiyakubona, goes Lucky.

– I see you too, I go.

– And I am Tomorrow, pipes up a shorter boy with a mopani worm of snot peeping out of his nostril.

Joko glares at him. Tomorrow sniffs the mopani up into its hole again, and drops into the background of unnamed boys.

My fear ebbs. It is hard to be scared of boys called Tomorrow and Lucky.

– Come and have a drink, says Joko.

– Ya, come on, says Lucky.

– Okay.

We go past an outdoor school where only the teacher sits in a desk, surrounded by children. She looks comical, a big fat woman squeezed into a small school desk. She does not smile as the boys go by and nod at her. Her voice does not miss a beat:

– Swim swam swum, goes the teacher sandwiched into the desk.

– Swimswamswum, the children chant.

I wonder where they can swim in a bone-dry township so far west of the Zeekoe River, and hundreds of miles from the sea.

We go inside a dark shack. There is a table covered with a plastic cloth with faded London landmarks on it. Joko pulls up a rickety bentwood chair for me. He and Lucky sit on upturned Coca-Cola crates. Tomorrow and the small boys sit on the floor.

– I’ve been to London, I say.

– Did you drink tea with the queen? says Lucky.

– No.

– Why go all the way to London and not see the queen?

– Well, she lives behind high walls with her dogs.

– Dogs, Tomorrow echoes and sniffs his snot up again. You can tell it makes an impression on him that the queen has dogs.

– Is she also scared, like the whites in Jo’burg, with their dogs and high walls? Joko wants to know.

– No, there is nothing to be scared of in London, because no one is hungry. If you have no job the government gives you money, they call it the dole. There are beggars, but my father says they beg because they have dopped their dole away, or because they know they can trick the tourists.

– The government just give you the money?

– Ya.

– Even if you are black, they give you the money?

– Ya.

– Jesus. I tell you man, I’m going to London. Hello, Madam Queen.

He makes a bow and the others laugh.

– Did you see Liverpool play? Tomorrow wants to know.

– No, I never went to a football game.

You can tell they think I am crazy.

There are chipped glasses on the table. Joko pours Stoney ginger beer from a litre bottle and, when it runs dry, twists open a bottle of Coca-Cola. I get to choose first, and I go for the Coca-Cola. It is lukewarm. I wonder if they have ever had Coca-Cola with ice and a slice of lemon, or a Coke float.

When I put my glass down, Joko says:

– It is time to go.

I follow Joko and Tomorrow and Lucky and the boys, Chaka at my heels. In the distance we see the orange haze of a veld fire. We stand on the verge of the road, this side of the barbed wire of a farm border, and watch the black farmboys fighting the flickering flames, flinging down long sticks with rubber flippers wired to the ends. The fire has burnt from the tar road across a farm towards the distant koppies, a black sea under the moon.

Then we hear a sound smoke out of a nearby ditch and run up to it to find a black man lying beside a bicycle. Runnels of blood follow the furrows of his forehead. The whites of his scared eyes are bloodshot. Xhosa words spill from his mouth, a scattering out of clinking bones and shells. My dodgy Xhosa is not up to disentangling the words.

It turns out, Joko tells in a bitter voice, that the man, called Zeph, was cycling along when he saw a fire in the veld. He got off his bike. Just then a farmer came up in his bakkie and accused Zeph of flicking a match into the grass. No, baas, it was not me, went Zeph. He had once done a stint of sheep dipping for the farmer, Baas Aalfänger. Surely the baas would remember him, that he was a good worker. But Baas Aalfänger did not recall an individual black face. Instead he bade Zeph empty his pockets. Unfortunately for Zeph, he had a Bic lighter in his pocket. Aalfänger needed no more proof. He got a spade from the back of the bakkie and swung it at Zeph’s head. Then he broke his shins with the spade and left Zeph in the ditch for the jackals.

– We have to get him to a doctor.

– No, we will look after him. If he goes to town the farmer will have him jailed. It is his word against a white man’s.

Joko spits the words at me, as if blaming me. Then he turns to Tomorrow and tunes them something in Xhosa. Joko holds his head, and each of them goes for a foot or a hand. Tomorrow picks up the bicycle. It is a black, fat-tyred, township bicycle, like the omafiets bicycles I saw in Amsterdam. They hoist him up on to the bicycle and prop him up with their arms. His head lolls as they wheel him along the edge of the tar, back towards the township.

– Goodbye, I call after them.

– Bye, calls Joko.

But he does not turn his head. At this moment I am just another white skin to him. Only spiky Lucky glances back at me. One hand hangs on to his shorts to keep them from falling off his hips. The other helps to steady the injured Zeph. No hand free to wave.

I begin to run. Chaka lopes beside me, tongue sliding across his grinning teeth.

A
SHOT BANGS THROUGH
the afternoon haze. Then another. Moses and I run from the junkyard, where the Volvo perches on bricks, bleeding black oil into a Koffiehuis tin.

As we round the corner a hissing tomcat darts by with its hair spiked up along the spine. I see the yahoo brothers jump into their bakkie and Isuzu out onto the road, revs howling, tyres smoking. Across the road Ou Piet Olifant shakes a tablecloth at the Isuzu, as if to shoo evil away, then hobbles over towards us.

A yowling floods my ears. I follow Moses round to the back. In front of his room half a dozen cats writhe on the floor. My eyes zone in on the flipped milk tin, and the seeping of cat blood into milk. Blood sifts through the cat fur in random patterns.

Moses plucks up a ginger cat by its scruff. With his free hand he catches the slimy guts as they snake out. He holds the head of the cat to his collarbone. I hear a sound, like a distant lowing, well up in Moses. Then he lets the guts go. He hoods the cat’s head with the blooded hand, and gives the head a twist, as if shutting a tap. Through the yowling of bleeding cats, I hear the bone snap.

He tosses the floppy-headed cat into the 40-gallon drum, among empty Castrol cans and rags stained with dipstick oil.

One by one, Moses holds the cats to his collarbone, so their fur lies against his cheek.

One cat, in the frenzy of dying, claws a tattoo into Moses’s skin.

M
ARIKA AND I CYCLE
north out of town, heading for Salem. She reckons her father will skin her if he catches her in the township. Still, she is keen to go. The sky is an endless blue canvas. A full moon hovers on the horizon, on the verge of ballooning into the blue sky.

North is the way to Johannesburg, through Bloemfontein, where Tolkien was born. Mister McEwan cannot understand how the mind that mapped out Middle Earth could have been born in such a barren, godforsaken place. For Mister McEwan, all the world south of England is godforsaken.

Marika rides along the yellow line instead of weaving across the road. I am not sure if it is the township ahead, or the full moon, casting a mood over her.

– It is a sign, Marika says of the moon. Like when it’s sunny and it rains.

– A monkey’s wedding?

– Ya, a monkey’s wedding, nods Marika.

– What’s it a sign of?

– A monkey’s wedding?

– No, the moon under a blue sky.

– It is a sign of magic.

But no moon magic can change things back to the moment before my father bowled the ball, before my life was halved:

Marsden taps the foot of the bat in the sand. A sand yacht flits by. The fruitsellers call their wares. The sound of the seagulls spears through the hazy hiss of the surf, a sound that ebbs out of mind, and then surges back again. And then, high over the humming bass of motorcars, the
ting ting ting
of the lollyboy’s bell.

We cycle past a donkey cart laden high with thorn wood. The donkey hide is raw pink where the ropes have chafed through.

Further along, a cow skull flowers out of the sand, but Marika hardly gives it a glance. Perhaps cows are not as exotic as lizards.

As we reach the outskirts of the township, a bus rumbles by. The wind sucks at us and voices fling from the windows. Then it is past and I see heads bob in the back window. I am glad I am not clinging to the roof-rack ladder.