The World Beneath (4 page)

He hesitated on the threshold of the door into the back hall, one foot still on the red-polished
stoep
. Betsy raised her long head from the basket and regarded him mournfully. He raised his finger to his lips. She laid her head on her extended paws, ears folding like puddles of brown velvet over her short legs and onto the blanket.

He tore into the kitchen and skidded about on the cold tiled floor, gathering what he needed. He could hear the Hoover upstairs. His mother was in the hallway; that meant she had finished with all six bedrooms and would be down soon.

Two ragged hand-cut slices of brown bread — no time to use the tabletop slicer; between them he pressed thick pieces of ham and a smear of mustard. To this he added a tomato, a chunk of cucumber, a spill of salt. An apple. He used a tin plate, one of those kept solely for use by Goodman and his mother. By then the kettle had boiled, and he filled a tin mug with hot water, milk, a tea bag, a spoon, and three spoons of sugar. Then he was back on the path, gingerly balancing plate and cup.

The man had found the shed, half hidden behind the stand of poplars at the far end of the garden. He was sitting on the ground with his back against the door, which was overgrown with Virginia creeper. He said nothing, just took the food. He ate it fast, downing the tea in three big gulps, and only when he had the apple in his hand and had taken a big bite out of it did he stop and say, “Hey, thanks. What’s your name?”

“Joshua,” said Joshua. Greatly daring, he asked again, “What did you do? Why were the police —”

The man gave him an earnest look and laid a big hand over his small one. “Honest to God, Joshua, it’s better if you don’t know.”

“Please,” said Joshua. “I’d like to help you.”

“You already saved me.” And the man gave him a grin that didn’t quite reach his eyes. He looked wary. “Look, Joshua, I need a place to stay for a few days.” He gestured at his left leg, which the boy could now see was extremely swollen, stretching the ragged trouser leg.

For the first time, Joshua felt afraid.

“My name is Tsumalo,” the man said. “Tell me about this place.”

Joshua said slowly, “There is a Madam and a Master. There are no children. Then there is Mama, and Goodman the gardener. He only comes here two days.

“Mama is the maid,” he added. He fell silent for a moment, then continued. “This shed isn’t used. No one comes down here. There is a new shed for the lawn mower, and Goodman uses that when he comes.”

The man was quiet. He regarded Joshua closely, as if he was weighing up whether to trust him. Joshua could see that his arms, mostly bare under a torn and faded green shirt, were bruised and swollen. His feet were bare, and his trousers, which had once been khaki, were stained and torn at the hem.

“I’ve been on the run,” he said slowly. “They”— he said this with a jerk of the head —“are after me. I did something — something they didn’t like.”

“What?” asked Joshua, emboldened by the man’s sudden eloquence.

But Tsumalo hesitated. “Joshua, it’s safer if you don’t know. If they catch up with me, then they will arrest everyone who could have seen me, and that could include you. What you don’t know, you can’t tell.” He stopped again. “Do you know what we are fighting for?”

“No-o-o-o-o,” said Joshua slowly, reluctant to admit it. He thought of what Sipho had told him. “Well, a little bit —”

“We are fighting for freedom, Joshua. The whites have the power, and they don’t want to share it with us. They call it
apartheid
.”

He stopped and regarded Joshua again. “Do you know what a democracy is, Joshua?”

“No.” Again he was embarrassed. It was a word he had never heard before.

“In the olden days, people were ruled over by kings and queens, or by the leader of a tribe. Nowadays, in most of the world, people have a say in who rules over them. They can choose who they like. They can vote. And each person gets one vote.”

This sounded exciting to Joshua. He had heard of kingdoms when his mother read to him about Robin Hood, who robbed the rich to give to the poor, and about the evil King John and the brother he had exiled, Richard the Lionheart. But then Richard was also a king, and he was good . . .

“But here,” continued Tsumalo, “here only the whites have votes.”

“But that’s not fair!”

“No. No, that’s not fair, Joshua, and we are fighting to change it. We want one man, one vote.” And he paused. “And one woman too, of course.”

For a brief and wonderful moment, Joshua imagined his mother living in the big house, waking up in the bay-windowed master bedroom with its gray silk bedspread and its fancy cream-and-gold-painted dressing table with the curly legs and the triple mirror. But just as he got to the part where he had to think who would bring her tea in, her strong Five Roses tea with the sweet Carnation milk —

“Hey,” said Tsumalo. “Your mother will want to know where you are.”

Joshua smiled at him. “I will bring you blankets and food tonight. Don’t worry. I will look after you.” And he ran off down the path, heart thudding with excitement.

But when Joshua got back to the house, there was trouble. “Where have you been?” shouted his mother, grabbing him by the arm. It hurt. Her face was all twisted up as if she was in pain. He had never seen her look like this.

“Mama, Mama,” he said, “don’t worry, I’m fine, I was just . . . I was just”— and he was going to say that he was clearing the filter basket, but she saw his hesitation and pounced on it.

“Where were you? Where?”

She hadn’t been able to find him. There had been talk of the police wagon cruising the streets looking for a fugitive.

“I thought —” she said.

She hadn’t known what to think.

So he told her. He told her that the man whom the police were hunting was in their garden, in the old broken-down hut behind the poplar trees. That he was injured. That Joshua had taken food to him.

“No!” she cried, crushing her fist to her mouth. “He cannot stay! It will end badly for us. For all of us.”

She crossed to the sink, washed her hands, and dried them. She peered into the kettle’s shiny surface and wiped her eyes. She straightened her
doek
. And when she was ready, she took his hand and said, “Take me to him.”

Down the garden path they went, past Goodman’s shed, which was painted green and had a camp chair outside by the neat row of outdoor brooms and rakes, each suspended on their hooks. Through the gap in the hedge, on down to the overgrown part of the yard where the compost heap was, and where the path was overarched by a tangle of wild, dusky pink bougainvillea, and to the row of poplars, and behind them, to the old shed.

As they approached, Tsumalo emerged, his head festooned with cobwebs that he was attempting to brush out of his eyes. He froze as he saw them.

“What are you
doing
?” Joshua had never heard his mother speak like that to anyone. She seemed different this afternoon.

The smile vanished. He put his hands out in a placatory gesture. “I do not mean to bring you trouble. The boy said —”

“The
boy
?” Beauty sounded scornful. “You mean to say that you are taking your instructions from a boy?”

Joshua was shocked. He drew away from his mother.

Tsumalo did not look at him. He said again, “I do not mean to bring you trouble. But I would beg you —”

“Do not
beg
me,” she cut in.

Tsumalo said again, “I beg you for shelter. I promise you I won’t stay long. If they find me, I will swear no one knew I was here.”

“And they will believe you?” But Beauty’s tone had softened imperceptibly, and Joshua knew that by now she had overlooked his height and his commanding presence and seen, as he had, the bruises, the injuries, the swollen leg, the ragged clothing, the bare feet.

Both of them paused for a moment, looking at each other, and into Joshua’s mind came irresistibly the sentences from the Bible that he had heard in Sunday school, back home:
“For I hungered, and ye gave Me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave Me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took Me in . . .”

And as if she herself had heard these words, Joshua’s mother dropped her gaze to the ground at her feet.

“You can stay. But you are not to leave the shed; the boy will bring you food.”

She crossed the few paces between them, took Tsumalo’s left hand in hers, and ran practiced fingers gently over the swellings, grazes, and bruises on his arms; her fingers hovered near the cuts on his lip and beside his swollen eye.

“Joshua, run quick now and get a basin with hot water and some towels, and the Dettol.” She did not look at him. “Make sure the Madam doesn’t see you.”

I
t was unbearably hot, and the top of the stable door was open to the night. Every now and then, a brown shiny rose beetle flew into the room at great speed, buzzing and banging against the walls and the bare lightbulb that hung from the ceiling before whizzing out again into the dark.

Across the dirt yard, a light was on in the kitchen; Mrs. Malherbe was making herself a cup of tea. In the corner of the big room, he knew, was a pantry, with shelves packed to the ceiling with biscuits and tea and rusks and flour and sugar and jam and preserves; there were also a fat-bellied fridge and a huge chest freezer, into which the Madam would lean on Saturdays to pull out a lamb roast to defrost for Sunday.

There was a big fireplace, though there was never a fire in it — fires were reserved for the living room — and there was plenty of room to slide around the polished red-tiled floor in his socks, if the Malherbes were out.

“Mama, why is Tsumalo in trouble?” Joshua was sitting on the bed with his exercise book balanced on his knee, frowning at the letters he was carefully forming.

Beauty looked up and stopped the knitting machine for a moment. “It is very difficult to explain,” she said.

She didn’t want to, he could see.

“Why did they hurt him like that?” he asked.

It had upset him to see how Tsumalo had winced silently as his mother had sponged the wounds and dressed them with the scarlet Mercurochrome, which was all he could find in the downstairs bathroom cabinet, and which somehow made them look much worse.

She had made him take his shirt off, and they had both gasped at what it revealed: a burn mark the size of a hand, blistered and suppurating, on his back.

His mother’s face had set like stone, and her mouth had gone into the hard straight line that told him she was angry.

“I will need a proper dressing for this,” she had said quietly.

The back of Beauty’s hand had once looked like that, when the iron had slipped out of her grasp. She had screamed, and Mrs. Malherbe had run in from the living room and taken her straight to the hospital.

Joshua ran for the big first-aid kit under the kitchen sink. When he got back, gasping for breath, he could see that his mother had been crying. Her eyes were red. She and Tsumalo were speaking quietly, but stopped when they saw him.

When she had finished dressing the wound, she stood and gently fed the shirt back over his head as he sat on the camp stool and put his arms through the sleeves as if he were a child. “Now the leg,” she said. Quickly she knelt and cut the ragged trouser leg. Joshua saw that Tsumalo’s leg was swollen and bruised from thigh to calf. Beauty frowned at it and looked up at the man sitting awkwardly on the camp stool. “Do you think it is broken?”

“I had to jump,” he said. “It was a long way down. I fell when I landed. I can put my weight on it, but it hurts.”

“Then you cannot go from here. You will have to rest your leg until it is better.”

She stood slowly and looked down at him.

“I will send the boy with food and clothing,” she said formally.

“Thank you, sister.
Hamba kahle
. Go well,” he said.

Joshua half raised his hand in a salute and turned to follow his mother. He didn’t feel like speaking. He could sense her anger, but he knew it was not for him. He wanted to catch her up and hold her hand, but he somehow knew she would shake it off.

At suppertime he took Tsumalo a plate of
tamatie-bredie
, lamb stewed with tomatoes, on a big pile of mashed potatoes and spinach; an old walking stick he found under the stairs; and, over his arm, neatly ironed and darned, some trousers and a shirt of Mr. Malherbe’s that had been put aside to be thrown out. His mother had always taken these clothes, made them good, and put them to one side for any of her relatives who might need them.

“Waste not, want not,” she said as she packed them away, something Mrs. Malherbe always declared whenever she decided they would have leftovers for supper.

As he went back along the path, he considered how he could keep the shed hidden. He would make the path look unused by pulling fallen branches across it; he would pull down strands of the bougainvillea. But as he got to the gap in the hedge, he had a better idea: behind the new shed, he found an old wheelbarrow with a broken wheel and tipped it up, as if it had just been propped against the hedge to get it out of the way.

He stepped back and looked. Now there was no gap. Or you couldn’t see it, anyway.