You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (7 page)

But the girl screams, ‘Leave me alone,' and beats away the hand reaching out to console. Another taller boy takes the scarf and twirls it in the air. ‘You want your doekie? What do you want it for hey, come on tell us, what do you want it for? What do you want to cover up?'

His tone silences the others and his face tightens as he swings the scarf slowly, deliberately. She claws at his arm with rage while her face is buried in the other crooked arm. A little gust of wind settles the matter, whips it out of his hand and leaves it spreadeagled against the eucalyptus tree where its red pattern licks the bark like flames.

I cannot hear their words. But far from being penitent, the tall boy silences the bareheaded girl with angry shaking of the head and wagging of the finger. He runs his hand through an exuberant bush of fuzzy hair and my hand involuntarily flies to my own. I check my preparations: the wet hair wrapped over large rollers to separate the strands, dried then swirled around my head, secured overnight with a nylon stocking, dressed with vaseline to keep the strands smooth and straight and then pulled back tightly to stem any remaining tendency to curl. Father likes it pulled back. He says it is a mark of honesty to have the forehead and ears exposed. He must be thinking of Mother, whose hair was straight and trouble-free. I would not allow some unkempt youth to comment on my hair.

The tall boy with wild hair turns to look at us. I think that they are talking about me. I feel my body swelling out of the dress rent into vertical strips that fall to my feet. The wind will surely lift off my hair like a wig and flatten it, a sheet of glossy dead bird, on the eucalyptus tree.

The bareheaded girl seems to have recovered; she holds her head reasonably high.

I break the silence. ‘Why should that boy look at us so insolently?' Pa looks surprised and hurt. ‘Don't be silly. You couldn't possibly tell from this distance.' But his mouth puckers and he starts an irritating tuneless whistle.

On the white platform the policeman is still pacing. He is there because of the Blacks who congregate at the station twice a week to see the Springbok train on its way to Cape Town. I wonder whether he knows our news. Perhaps their servants, bending over washtubs, ease their shoulders to give the gossip from Wesblok to madams limp with heat and boredom. But I dismiss the idea and turn to the boys who certainly know that I am going to St Mary's today. All week the grown-ups have leaned over the fence and sighed, Ja, ja, in admiration, and winked at Pa: a clever chap, old Shenton, keeps up with the Boers all right. And to me, ‘You show them, Frieda, what we can do.' I nodded shyly. Now I look at my hands, at the irrepressible cuticles, the stubby splayed fingernails that will never taper. This is all I have to show, betraying generations of servants.

I am tired and I move back a few steps to sit on the suitcases. But Father leaps to their defence. ‘Not on the cases, Frieda. They'll never take your weight.' I hate the shiny suitcases. As if we had not gone to enough expense, he insisted on new imitation leather bags and claimed that people judge by appearances. I miss my old scuffed bag and slowly, as if the notion has to travel through folds of fat, I
realise that I miss Sarie and the lump in my throat hardens.

Sarie and I have travelled all these journeys together. Grief gave way to excitement as soon as we boarded the train. Huddled together on the cracked green seat, we argued about who would sleep on the top bunk. And in winter when the nights grew cold we folded into a single S on the lower bunk. As we tossed through the night in our magic coupé, our fathers faded and we were free. Now Sarie stands in the starched white uniform of a student nurse, the Junior Certificate framed in her father's room. She will not come to wave me goodbye.

Sarie and I swore our friendship on the very first day at school. We twiddled our stiff plaits in boredom; the
First Sunnyside Reader
had been read to us at home. And Jos. Within a week Jos had mastered the reader and joined us. The three of us hand in hand, a formidable string of laughing girls tugging this way and that, sneering at the Sunnyside adventures of Rover, Jane and John. I had no idea that I was fat. Jos looped my braids over her beautiful hands and said that I was pretty, that my braids were a string of sausages.

Jos was bold and clever. Like a whirlwind she spirited away the tedium of exhausted games and invented new rules. We waited for her to take command. Then she slipped her hand under a doekie of dyed flourbags and scratched her head. Her ear peeped out, a faded yellow-brown yearning for the sun. Under a star-crammed sky Jos had boldly stood for hours, peering through a crack in the shutter to watch their fifth baby being born. Only once had she looked away in agony and then the Three Kings in the eastern sky swiftly swopped places in the manner of musical chairs. She told us all, and with an oath invented by Jos we swore that we would never have babies. Jos knew
everything that grown-ups thought should be kept from us. Father said, ‘A cheeky child, too big for her boots, she'll land in a madam's kitchen all right.' But there was no need to separate us. Jos left school when she turned nine and her family moved to the village where her father had found a job at the garage. He had injured his back at the mine. Jos said they were going to have a car; that she would win one of those competitions, easy they were, you only had to make up a slogan.

Then there was our move. Pa wrote letters for the whole community, bit his nails when he thought I was not looking and wandered the veld for hours. When the official letter came the cooped-up words tumbled out helter-skelter in his longest monologue.

‘In rows in the village, that's where we'll have to go, all boxed in with no room to stretch the legs. All my life I've lived in the open with only God to keep an eye on me, what do I want with the eyes of neighbours nudging and jostling in cramped streets? How will the wind get into those back yards to sweep away the smell of too many people? Where will I grow things? A watermelon, a pumpkin need room to spread, and a turkey wants a swept yard, the markings of a grass broom on which to boast the pattern of his wingmarks. What shall we do, Frieda? What will become of us?' And then, calmly, ‘Well, there's nothing to be done. We'll go to Wesblok, we'll put up our curtains and play with the electric lights and find a corner for the cat, but it won't be our home. I'm not clever old Shenton for nothing, not a wasted drop of Scots blood in me. Within five years we'll have enough to buy a little place. Just a little raw brick house and somewhere to tether a goat and keep a few chickens. Who needs a water lavatory in the veld?'

The voice brightened into fantasy. ‘If it were near a river we could have a pond for ducks or geese. In the Swarteberg my pa always had geese. Couldn't get to sleep for months here in Namaqualand without the squawking of geese. And ostriches. There's nothing like ostrich biltong studded with coriander seeds.' Then he slowed down. ‘Ag man, we won't be allowed land by the river but nevermind hey. We'll show them, Frieda, we will. You'll go to high school next year and board with Aunt Nettie. We've saved enough for that. Brains are for making money and when you come home with your Senior Certificate, you won't come back to a pack of Hottentots crouching in straight lines on the edge of the village. Oh no, my girl, you won't.' And he whipped out a stick of beef biltong and with the knife shaved off wafer-thin slices that curled with pleasure in our palms.

We packed our things humming. I did not really understand what he was fussing about. The Coloured location did not seem so terrible. Electric lights meant no more oil lamps to clean and there was water from a tap at the end of each street. And there would be boys. But the children ran after me calling, ‘Fatty fatty vetkoek.' Young children too. Sarie took me firmly by the arm and said that it wasn't true, that they were jealous of my long hair. I believed her and swung my stiff pigtails haughtily. Until I grew breasts and found that the children were right.

Now Sarie will be by the side of the sick and infirm, leaning over high hospital beds, soothing and reassuring. Sarie in a dazzling white uniform, her little waist clinched by the broad blue belt.

If Sarie were here I could be sure of climbing the two steel steps on to the train.

The tall boy is now pacing the platform in unmistakable imitation of the policeman. His face is the stern mask of
someone who does not take his duties lightly. His friends are squatting on their haunches, talking earnestly. One of them illustrates a point with the aid of a stick with which he writes or draws in the sand. The girls have retreated and lean against the eucalyptus tree, bright as stars against the grey of the trunk. Twelve feet apart the two radios stand face to face, quarrelling quietly. Only the female voices rise now and again in bitter laughter above the machines.

Father says that he must find the station master to enquire why the train has not come. ‘Come with me,' he commands. I find the courage to pretend that it is a question but I flush with the effort.

‘No, I'm tired, I'll wait here.' And he goes. It is true that I am tired. I do not on the whole have much energy and I am always out of breath. I have often consoled myself with an early death, certainly before I become an old maid. Alone with my suitcases I face the futility of that notion. I am free to abandon it since I am an old maid now, today, days after my fifteenth birthday. I do not in any case think that my spirit, weightless and energetic like smoke from green wood, will soar to heaven.

I think of Pa's defeated shoulders as he turned to go and I wonder whether I ought to run after him. But the thought of running exhausts me. I recoil again at the energy with which he had burst into the garden only weeks ago, holding aloft
Die Burger
with both hands, shouting, ‘Frieda, Frieda, we'll do it. It's all ours, the whole world's ours.'

It was a short report on how a Coloured deacon had won his case against the Anglican Church so that the prestigious St Mary's School was now open to non-whites. The article ended sourly, calling it an empty and subversive gesture, and warning the deacon's daughters that it would be no bed of roses.

‘You'll have the best, the very best education.' His voice is hoarse with excitement.

‘It will cost hundreds of rand per year.'

‘Nonsense, you finish this year at Malmesbury and then there'll be only the two years of Matric left to pay for. Really, it's a blessing that you have only two years left.'

‘Where will you find the money?' I say soberly.

‘The nest egg of course, stupid child. You can't go to a white school if you're so stupid. Shenton has enough money to give his only daughter the best education in the world.'

I hesitate before asking, ‘But what about the farm?' He has not come to like the Wesblok. The present he wraps in a protective gauze of dreams; his eyes have grown misty with focusing far ahead on the unrealised farm.

A muscle twitches in his face before he beams, ‘A man could live anywhere, burrow a hole like a rabbit in order to make use of an opportunity like this.' He seizes the opportunity for a lecture. ‘Ignorance, laziness and tobacco have been the downfall of our people. It is our duty to God to better ourselves, to use our brains, our talents, not to place our lamps under bushels. No, we'll do it. We must be prepared to make sacrifices to meet such a generous offer.'

His eyes race along the perimeter of the garden wall then he rushes indoors, muttering about idling like flies in the sun, and sets about writing to St Mary's in Cape Town.

I read novels and kept in the shade all summer. The crunch of biscuits between my teeth was the rumble of distant thunder. Pimples raged on my chin, which led me to Madame Rose's Preparation by mail order. That at least has fulfilled its promise.

I was surprised when Sarie wept with joy or envy, so that the tears spurted from my own eyes on to the pages of
Ritchie's First Steps in Latin.
(Father said that they pray in Latin and that I ought to know what I am praying for.) At night a hole crept into my stomach, gnawing like a hungry mouse, and I fed it with Latin declensions and Eetsumor biscuits. Sarie said that I might meet white boys and for the moment, fortified by conjugations of
Amo
, I saw the eyes of Anglican boys, remote princes leaning from their carriages, penetrate the pumpkin-yellow of my flesh.

Today I see a solid stone wall where I stand in watery autumn light waiting for a bell to ring. The Cape southeaster tosses high the blond pigtails and silvery laughter of girls walking by. They do not see me. Will I spend the dinner breaks hiding in lavatories?

I wish I could make this day more joyful for Pa but I do not know how. It is no good running after him now. It is too late.

The tall boy has imperceptibly extended his marching ground. Does he want to get closer to the policeman or is he taking advantage of Father's absence? I watch his feet, up, down, and the crunch of his soles on the sand explodes in my ears. Closer, and a thrilling thought shoots through the length of my body. He may be looking at me longingly, probing; but I cannot bring my eyes to travel up, along his unpressed trousers. The black boots of the policeman catch my eye. He will not be imitated. His heavy legs are tree trunks rooted in the asphalt. His hand rests on the bulge of his holster. I can no longer resist the crunch of the boy's soles as they return. I look up. He clicks his heels and halts. His eyes are narrowed with unmistakable contempt. He greets me in precise mocking English. A soundless shriek for Pa escapes my lips and I note the policeman resuming his march before I reply. The boy's voice is angry and I wonder what aspect of my dress offends him.