Leopold Blue (19 page)

On the last Saturday of the holidays, I bumped into Juffrou du Plessis in the Spar. She was at the check-out counter, in the entrance of the shop. I saw her first, and for a moment thought of ducking behind the pile of
Die Burger
newspapers and the stack of braai wood, but there was no escape. The ratio of grey to brown in her bun had tipped over the holiday in favour of grey. Beads of sweat glistened across her hairline in the breathless morning. Her navy-blue and white polka-dot dress clung to her legs. Before I knew it, I was carrying her shopping bags to her car.

She paused to catch her breath next to her white Toyota Corolla. ‘Something is different about you – what can it be? Taller? Maybe.' She studied me with an intensity that made me look at my feet. My green slip-slops were covered in red dust.

She was still frowning at me when I raised my eyes.

‘Your face is slimmer,' she decided disapprovingly. ‘It's hard for us,' she continued as she watched me lift her shopping bags into her boot, ‘seeing you girls turn into women, and leave without a backwards glance.'

‘Who said I was leaving?' My flash of confidence fizzled and popped under her look.

‘This town is no place for a bright thing like you. Every year we lose the best of our young people to the world. For those who stay behind, it's not a life of many choices.' She looked up at Bosmansberg behind us. It was impossible to imagine Leopold without Juffrou, but would she have left, had she been given the choice?

‘We prepare you as best we can. Education isn't about grammar and tenses. It's about knowing right from wrong. Understanding the bond with your family and your community is the most important lesson of all. That's your backbone.'

I couldn't listen to these words from the woman who'd gone out of her way to emphasise my family's apartness for as long as I'd known her. ‘Juffrou, you don't see my family as a part of the community. We're the trouble-making Englishers, remember?'

Juffrou looked wounded. ‘
Wragtie
child! For someone with a good brain, you can be very dense.'

She looked hesitant then, caught by a private thought, but dismissed it with a shake of her keys. ‘Let us not get ahead of ourselves – we still have two more years together!' She banged the boot shut, her familiar glower back in place. But before she reversed into the street, she turned back and winked.

I walked home, puzzling Juffrou's words. Perhaps Mum relied on Juffrou's disapproval as much as Juffrou relied on Mum's revolutionary streak. In a strange way they complimented each other.

I set up camp next to the pecanut tree. I had my Coke, Nik-Naks and chocolate digestives, my Walkman and, if all else failed, the irksome
Emma
to keep me company. I had pulled out our old red, green, yellow and blue-striped beach umbrella from the garage and planted it diagonally in the grass. It was my shield against the heat.

But not Simon. From the moment his eyes had met mine on the beach in Cape Town, my familiar jealousy and resentment had started to transform into a violent desire to fight him. But that was absurd. Instead I had stayed out of his way.

Now, a day before he was due to leave for university, he was suddenly beside me. I had forgotten Simon's ability to move in silence, as if his footsteps left no imprint on the ground.

‘My mother finally told me who my father is. Was.'

I shifted away. A black mussel shell had dropped out of the folds of the fabric when I'd set up the umbrella. I clutched it, pressing it into my skin.

Simon pulled out a cigarette. He lit it, holding it between his thumb and first finger, like the skollies who hung about outside the off-licence. I reached out and took it out of his mouth, stubbed it out on the grass and broke it in half.

He laughed and pulled out a handful of Wilson's cola-flavoured toffees and offered them to me.

I pushed his hand away. ‘You know I only eat the black ones!'

He shrugged, took one and put the rest away. ‘I thought that you might have changed your mind at some point in the last five years.'

How dare he discuss toffees! Why was he here? Hadn't he caused enough trouble for one holiday? I turned until I had my back to him. The mussel shell was cutting me open. I opened my hand and watched it fall to the grass.

Simon glanced down. We were back at the beach. I was looking at him, sitting alone on the sand, staring out to sea.

‘How could you, Simon?' I blurted out.

‘What?'

‘After everything else you've been given, how could you steal the one friend I've ever had? How could you be so cruel?'

Simon glared back at me, at first with disbelief and then anger. ‘What have I been given? I have had to prove myself worthy of everything I have, whereas you were born with it.'

I bit the inside of my cheek and stared at the ground. That was beside the point. ‘I don't want to talk about this.'

‘OK.' He shrugged his shoulders.

But the anger returned, more violent than before. ‘Who do you think you are, sauntering back after your fancy overseas trip, with your big fucking attitude?'

‘I thought you didn't want to talk about it.'

‘Perhaps you're too sophisticated for this silly old town anymore. But for your information it's not OK to have sex with someone on the beach.'

‘Why not?'

‘Why not?' I shouted. I knew there must be a perfectly good reason, but I was too angry to think of it.

Simon spoke again, his voice cold and mocking. ‘What's upsetting you, Meg? The fact that I was having sex on a beach, or that I was having sex with Xanthe?'

I smacked him in the face. He pulled back, his eyes wide but he said nothing. He didn't even lift his hand up to the red mark that spread across his right cheek. I sat back, struggling to push my breath back beyond my throat into my chest. I was shocked at how much my hand stung, but also at the satisfaction it gave me. I was shocked that as soon as I'd hit him, my anger evaporated and I had to wonder why I'd done it.

‘Xanthe's not like you, Meg.'

‘I know, OK? I get it!' My cheeks were burning.

He frowned at me. ‘That's a good thing.'

‘How can it be a good thing when she's the one with the amazing life?'

He picked up the shell and traced its curved perimeter. ‘She's not that cool. It's all for show.'

I watched his finger. The curve of the shell reminded me of an ear. Maybe Simon was right. What actually lay behind those impenetrable, ice-blue eyes?

Beyond the striped canvas, high above, a fish eagle's cry pierced the silence, heralding in the early evening. ‘What about your dad, then?' I prompted, after a pause. ‘Your mother  … ' I searched the sky.

‘Father Basil has been preaching about forgiveness and transparency in the new South Africa, so Ma thought it time I knew.'

I raised my eyebrows. Those were dangerous words in a town like this.

‘She was right. He was a good-for-nothing
rubbish
.' His laugh was hollow and painful to hear. ‘I never thought that knowing would be worse than not knowing.'

‘It can't be that bad,' I mumbled, pulling at a tuft of grass.

‘It is,' he insisted, ‘because when you don't know you can be anybody. But when you know –' He sighed. ‘For the first time in my life I am ashamed of who I am.'

I realised that for as long as I could remember, I had resented Simon for infiltrating my family, as if he didn't deserve to be part of it. I had been wrong. What he didn't deserve was to feel ashamed of his family. Nobody deserved that, least of all him.

‘Your background means nothing, Simon. Look at Mandela.'

‘What about Mandela?'

‘Look where he came from. Now he has a Nobel Peace Prize and is set to be president.'

‘Meg, he was pretty much royalty. His father was the chief of his tribe.'

‘Oh. Not a great example, then.' I stole a glance at him. ‘Parents are heavily overrated.'

Simon smiled.

‘And at least your mum doesn't suffer from delusions of sainthood.'

‘She's doing something important, Meg. She's going out of her way to try and save the lives of people whom nobody else sees as important enough to bother with.'

‘I guess,' I shrugged. I hadn't thought of that before.

The milking bell rang across the river. Simon and I had made up and suddenly I didn't want him to go quite yet.

‘How did it feel coming back?' I asked.

He looked at the shell. ‘It feels like I'm a loose fossil trying to fit back into my original rock bed. Time and weathering and, exposure,' he paused for a breath, ‘have changed my shape. I don't fit.'

I didn't like that comparison. It reminded me of the little box at the back of Xanthe's drawer. ‘Or maybe it's like waking up to find you've turned into a butterfly. But essentially you're still a worm.'

Simon laughed but it died quickly. ‘I don't like the way my ma looks at me. It's like she's seeing a stranger. And sometimes she talks to me like she's speaking to  … '

‘To?'

‘A white person,' he muttered.

‘Simon  … ' I wanted to reach out and place my hand on the cheek I'd hit, but my arm didn't feel long enough.

He looked up. ‘She didn't need to tell me about my dad. I think she did it in case I start forgetting who I am.'

‘No!' Marta wouldn't be that cruel. But without Simon Marta was alone – a small woman shrinking with age.

‘Why won't she talk to Angel?'

Simon shook his head.

‘Why not?' I insisted, ready to argue Angel's case, but the look on his face stopped me.

He sighed. ‘It's not my battle, Meg. That one at least is not mine.'

‘Do you think that going away to school and overseas has changed you? Do you think your essence has changed?'

He was quiet for so long that I wondered whether I'd spoken my question out loud. Then he turned to me, his brown ochre neck tilted to the side, with a smile that made me smile back.

‘No,' he said.

Simon had escaped Leopold and travelled overseas, but he was still alone. Perhaps lonely was not the same as being alone.

‘Remember when I went to school in Cape Town and I wrote you those letters? You never replied.'

I looked at my stubby fingernails, feeling ashamed. I had been so jealous of Simon for leaving, for being singled out, that I had not replied out of spite. ‘I still have them,' I said. ‘They're very funny.'

‘Will you write to me this time? Tell me everything that's not happening in Leopold?'

Something inside me jumped at the idea. He'd tell me about life at university, about things I needed to know. But I was also afraid. I thought back to my dream at the beach, of being pulled further out to sea, away from the receding shore. ‘Oh, Simon, you're going to be too busy with your new life to reply.'

‘For every letter you write, I'll write back. OK?'

‘OK,' I said, meaning it.

In the late ripeness of January, too early in the summer to even dream of the cooler days of March and April, Simon reached across the diagonal pole of the beach umbrella. He turned my chin so that I could see him – his straight nose, his jaw, wider than before, and his eyes. I knew his eyes well, I recognised the intensity, the quickness, but there was a new darkness I felt I understood.

His lips touched mine for a moment, although it didn't feel like that. It felt like talking and laughing and dreaming in the same moment, carried on a current that pulsed between us. I was sure he felt it too.

‘I have to go and pack,' he said.

I looked down to hide the glowing red that spread up my neck. The imprint of his lips fizzed. The current throbbed around my body, stuck inside. A gecko's severed tail writhing about uselessly.

He held out a yellow piece of paper folded into a square. ‘This is my address.'

‘OK,' I said, avoiding his eye.

‘Bye,' he said.

I looked up. ‘Karraboosh.'

He laughed, raised a hand in a single wave, and walked away.

Early on Monday morning Dad made his daily walk around the house, closing all the shutters. It was not something you could sleep through, but this morning I was awake long before his face peered in through my window.

‘It's going to be hot as hell today,' he said with a glint in his eye, a deranged sailor forecasting stormy seas. ‘The barometer's doing the Loop De Loop!' He bolted the shutters and my room plunged into slatted green darkness.

I reached for the yellow piece of paper next to my bed.
Ernest Oppenheimer Halls of Residence, 8 Trematon Place, Parktown.
In two years I would be giving my address to Beth. If only it were today!

What would I say to Xanthe? I couldn't ignore her. I didn't want to.
‘Hi Xanthe, I'd like to be your friend, but from now on it will be different.'
I could imagine the look on her face. It sounded worse than something out of
Beverly Hills 90210
. ‘
And by the way, I don't mind about the beach thing anymore.'
I shuddered as the throbbing sensation I'd felt under the pecanut tree returned. As I was about to leave me room I hesitated, then grabbed the folded paper and stowed it in my pocket. A talisman.

At breakfast the Raisin Bran scraped down my throat. In the end I gave up and stared at my mug of tea.

‘A new year!' said Dad, appearing in his rugby shorts and “I'm too sexy for this shirt!” T-shirt. Both he and Mum were unnecessarily cheerful. They didn't even try and hide their relief at the start of another term.

‘The year of the “A”,' said Mum.

‘The year of leaving Meg alone,' I said.

‘How would I fill my time?' said Dad, reaching across the table to pick up newspaper.

‘Get a job?'

Dad laughed. He yawned and stretched his arms over his head, revealing under his sexy T-shirt a hairy belly.

He tapped the folded newspaper on my head in farewell and disappeared in the direction of his study with a mug of coffee and the newspaper under his arm.

‘Come
on
!' Beth hopped about in the doorway of the kitchen, her satchel already on her back.

‘Don't wait for me,' I muttered.

She disappeared, back up the hill to school, to the newly white-washed building, to the mass of girls, the shiny-floored corridors, and the notice boards that would be cleared of last year's artwork and lab reports and sports fixtures. Ready to start again.

Eventually Marta shooed me out of the door. ‘Get!' She flicked her dust cloth. ‘Leave me in peace.'

The break-of-day freshness was already burnt off. As I reached the Main Street I caught tannie Ester's eye, clutching her basket like Mrs Tiddlywinks, on her way to open the library.

‘Lekker dag
!
^[*]
' she called before disappearing into her air-conditioned sanctuary. Across the road hotel staff hurried through their outdoor jobs. Two of them beat a pair of runner rugs that hung looped over the outside beams of the front verandah. They pounded away with long-handled brooms, causing dust clouds to rise up above them and hover for a moment before settling back into the rugs.

A little way along Witbooi and Mr Pretorius from the bank leaned over the churchyard wall, peering into the graveyard. I crossed the road to have a look.

‘That bladdy dog,' Witbooi rasped. ‘Give me a gun and I'll shoot him
fokken
dead.'

‘Come now,' chided Mr Pretorius. Kaptein, the police dog, had found a nest of starlings in the night. I turned away.

Marta, with her instinct for trouble, had caught up with me. ‘Go to school before I smack your bottom!'

I laughed and turned up the path next to the graves. As I left them behind I heard Witbooi say: ‘Mr Pretorius, you must write a letter of complaint. That dog is a menace. Mauling a nest of birds to death is against the new constitution.'

‘Write to Mr Mandela,' said Marta, ‘Tell him we've got Dr Basson's dog here in Leopold.'

At the top of the churchyard I paused for a moment in front of the four little graves in the corner. I hadn't visited them in a long time. If I too forgot about them, their faint imprints on the world would be scuffed out forever, as if they had never lived.

The first day of school traffic rumbled by – cars and dust-sprayed bakkies, even one or two lorries. As I reached the bottom field one of the groundsmen was busy on a tractor, painting white lines back onto the field. I stopped. What a satisfying job, to create a perfectly straight white line against a green field, to look back at the other end and see such unbroken precision.

The school bell rang. Latecomers swelled around me before being sucked into the buildings ahead.

Juffrou's classroom was a clamour of laughing and hugging and six weeks of gossip. Elmarie sat on one of the front desks, whispering something to Isabel. As I squeezed past her, she stopped and glanced at me.

‘What?' I said.

Instead of replying, she turned over her shoulder and looked towards my and Xanthe's desks. They were both empty. Xanthe had not yet arrived.

‘So?' I said, looking at Elmarie. Her skin was better this term. From far away you wouldn't see the spots.

But she hadn't been looking at my desk – her gaze was on the next row along, on the back two desks, which up until now had been empty.

There was a new girl sitting there, a city girl you could see by the smirk on her face. On the far side of her sat Xanthe.

I looked back at Elmarie. She was waiting for an explanation. Of all the scenarios I'd rehearsed while waiting for morning, this was not one of them. I pushed past her to my desk. The wooden seat shrieked as I sat down sat down in a rush. I blinked. This is fine –
this-is-fine-this-is-fine-this-is-fine-this-is-fine-this-is-fine
.

Girls wandered back to their desks, happy to be with their friends, oblivious to my private misery. What a big-fat-bloody-fucking fool you are, Margaret Bergman! And yet at the same time I was expecting Xanthe to slip in to the desk beside me, muttering: ‘Madgie, where the fuck have you been?' The din of voices died down. I could make out the sound of the new girl's voice.

‘Oh my God,' she said. ‘Look at them all!'

There was a pause, and a short laugh from Xanthe.

‘Did you go away for New Year?' said the new girl.

‘No,' replied Xanthe, in Alan's
‘Enough now, Shirl!'
voice. ‘I was at home.'

‘Cool,' said the girl. ‘What did you get up to?'

I held my breath. This was the moment when Xanthe would laugh, call my name and everything would return to normal.

‘Not much,' said Xanthe.

With that Madge slipped away silently, without so much as a backwards glance.

All of it came to nothing. In the end I was still only Meg, the English girl, with the empty seat beside her. I clamped my hand around the folded paper in my pocket.

I felt Xanthe looking across at me. I didn't need to see her face to know it would be scornful, as if to say, ‘
I did warn you, you knew I wasn't good at this
.' It was true. Maybe she had been like this all along. Maybe I'd constructed the Xanthe I'd wanted out of somebody quite different.

Juffrou du Plessis huffed into the classroom, carrying a pile of textbooks. She let the books drop to the floor next to her desk with an almighty thud that brought the class to silence.

She caught her breath, then turned to Isabel. ‘What's keeping you, child?' she said with exaggerated patience.

‘Juffrou?' asked Isabel.

‘Hand out the books!' said Juffrou and left the room.

Da
d believed in stories. He said each one of us was born with a story, that it was ours to live. Simon's story was a hero's one, but it demanded a great deal of him in return. I thought of Mum, a British–South African Joan of Arc. My story wasn't going that well. Sitting alone, the desk beside me once again empty, I realised that the difference between Simon and I was that he was trying to be the best at what he was, not somebody else. It seemed laughably simple.

I knew something that the girl who'd sat here, alone, six months ago didn't. I'd rather be alone than uncomfortable trying to be somebody else. ‘Xanthe is cool,' I told that girl, ‘but she isn't that brave.' And her parents, and Stuart and Judy, for all their beautiful homes and lifelong friendships, weren't brave either.

‘Meg!' Elmarie rattled my pencil case.

‘What?'

‘My dad says he's going to phone your mum.'

Not today, please God. ‘Why?' I asked.

Esna swung around. Isabel stopped to listen, balancing the pile of books on the edge of my desk.

‘He's going to ask your mum to come do a clinic on the farm, to teach the volk about her disease,' said Elmarie.

‘Why?' asked Isabel.

‘He says the last thing he needs in this life is for them to start dropping like goddam flies,' said Elmarie.

Esna gripped Elmarie's arm, her eyes wide at the impending apocalypse. Isabel started to say something, but Juffrou walked back in and she hurried away.

‘So,' continued Elmarie, shaking off Esna's hand, ‘Maybe when your mum comes to our farm, you can come too. To visit.'

I looked at her, registering slowly. ‘Maybe.'

Juffrou stood at the front of the class. She mopped her forehead with a hankie and tucked it back into her dress. She looked about the room, examining each of us in turn. Her eyes rested on the empty desk next to me, then shifted across to the new girl and Xanthe beside her. Juffrou's eyes narrowed. I knew that her glare was a protective one, but I still felt shame prickle my skin.

When the bell rang, I was the first one out of the classroom. Instead of turning left for science, I kept walking, out of the building, down the hill. I caught my breath on the Main Street, my tears smeared hot and sticky on my face.

Mum stepped out of the old coloured entrance to the post office. She turned towards me carrying a large box. It would be from overseas, from Bibi. I waited for the anger, but found nothing. Instead I heard Simon's voice,
‘She's helping people whom no one else sees as important enough to bother with.'

I smiled.

She stood in front of me, her eyes taking me in. ‘When I was fifteen Bibi and I went to Paris for the weekend without telling our parents.'

‘What?'

‘I was in so much trouble,' said Mum, laughing, ‘
worlds
of trouble when I returned.'

‘Paris! Was it worth it?'

Mum's lips twitched, but she didn't say anymore.

I looked up at Bosmansberg, so close that it could be leaning in to hear the story too. Mum followed my gaze. The prospect of going anywhere, let alone Paris, seemed so ridiculous that we started laughing.

‘Walk with me,' said Mum, shifting her box onto her far hip and threading her arm through mine.

We started up the Main Street – past the library and the off-licence and the Volkskas bank. Soon we would be at the top of the road. There we would turn right and make for home.