foreman, who usually assigns them tasks light enough for youngsters. This morning they are to load a light truck with boxes of tinned goods, working on their own. When they have to load heavier items, sacks of grain, for example, they work together to lift the weight, and even then they struggle.
It is heavy going this morning. The boxes are compact, but bully beef isn’t light in bulk. The morning grows hotter and more humid. Sweat streams down Simon’s back and his shirt clings to it whenever he straightens up. He stands below the truck, passing boxes up to Jude. His brother stacks them with precision, pausing occasionally to consider how best to use the space. The dusty cardboard gives Simon hay fever. His eyes stream, he sneezes so often that the upper part of his throat behind his nose itches crazily. He hates this job.
He stops suddenly and puts down the box he is carrying, almost dropping it.
“Don’t do that, you little prick,” snaps Jude. “It’s a waste of energy to lift it and then put it down. You should rather have given it to me, and then rested.”
“It’s my energy,” says Simon defiantly. “I can waste it if I want to.”
Jude’s face darkens. He can’t bear contradiction.
“I know it’s your energy, arsehole. You can waste it if you want to. But it’s still a waste. That is an objective fact.”
“I don’t care if it’s an objective fact. It’s my energy and I want to waste it.”
Jude crosses a certain threshold: it would be more accurate to say that he falls over it. His face becomes congested, his voice grows ugly with an anger he cannot limit.
“I don’t believe you really mean that. You can’t tell me you really want to waste energy – that’s bullshit. It’s an objective fact that it’s bad to waste energy. You can ask anyone you like. You can ask Peter Berman, for example, you can ask Stanley Meyer, you can ask anyone – how can you say it’s good to waste energy? You’re talking shit! They’ll all tell you that, you can ask whoever you want.”
Jude’s voice makes Simon tired, with an ancient tiredness. How can he take on the whole of Port Elizabeth?
“I didn’t say that it’s good to waste energy. I said that it’s my energy and I don’t care if –”
“Now you’re contradicting yourself. First you say it’s good to waste energy, now you’re saying it’s not. You can’t even stick to a logical argument.”
Simon keeps quiet, knowing Jude is insane. There is no way he can win this argument. There is no way his brother might even understand what he is talking about. There is a danger too that Jude might hit him. He bends down to pick up the box again, and passes it up. I have to do this, he thinks, biting down his feelings. There is a lump in his throat, tears prick his eyes. But he will not cry. They carry on working in the suffocating air, and his rage is mute.
Eli
Jude grinds his stones. They are not precious, they are semiprecious stones. I know their names: agate, beryl, carnelian, chalcedony, jasper, tiger’s-eye. His tiger’s-eye is mostly brown, but sometimes green. His own are dark, even darker than a tiger’s, with dark rings under them. My mother dislikes the rings under his eyes and often says so.
In the museum are minerals that glow in the dark under ultraviolet light, feldspar and chrysoprase, some with even longer names. There is fool’s gold too. I know it is called iron pyrite, which fools mistake for real gold. Also cubic zirconia, black and glossy, razor-edged, and a geode cut down the middle, like a melon bearing jagged seeds of amethyst.
He glues the stones to a grinding stick. It allows him to press them against a carborundum wheel and shape them. He works on them for hours. His shoulders hunch up, his fingers cramp. When my mother calls him to the table for lunch or supper, he will not come. He is glued to the stones himself. My mother has to shout at him every time, and threatens to confiscate them.
He allows me to play with his box of raw pebbles. I don’t find them interesting on their own. They are only interesting if Jude is there to work them. He never allows Simon to touch them. Simon doesn’t go near them, and if he did, Jude would crush him. He often crushes Simon, who always ends up feeling sorry for himself. He looks like a clown then, with painted cheeks and sad eyes. Jude never crushes me. He likes to bounce up and down on my bed on his knees, growling out giant sounds, making me bounce up and down on the mattress. I laugh so hard I cannot breathe. When he tickles me it gets worse.
Jude grinds his stones in the playroom. It is a big room we never use for anything else except to play. It has sliding steel windows that are hard to open. Simon and David Goldberg can open them. They climb in and out of those windows all day long, I don’t know why they won’t use the door. David has flaming red hair and wildly freckled skin. It makes him look like an untidy leopard.
There are many strange things in the playroom. There are stilts that David and Simon use, walking about on the lawn. But they dare not go on the stoep with their stilts, because the stilts will slide out, they will fall and hurt themselves. There are also two pogo sticks, one red and one blue. David and Simon bounce around on the pogo sticks on the stoep, but not the lawn. If they tried to bounce on the lawn, they would sink in and get stuck. I don’t like pogo sticks or stilts. They are ridiculous and dangerous.
We have two mulberry trees in the back garden, one on each corner. On the corner nearest the sea there is a tall tree with small mulberries and leaves. On the corner furthest from the sea is a short, squat kind with huge leaves and fruit. It is easy to climb. It is really the Jankelowitzes’ tree, but it spreads over the low wall and much of it is on our side, above the compost heap. Every summer it is filled with boys like koala bears grazing on the mulberries, staring into the Jankelowitzes’ back garden where nothing happens except tall Jill Jankelowitz. She lies in the sun to tan, rubbing her nut-brown skin slowly with Brylcreem, pretending the boys aren’t there. They are too young to scare her, and their fingers turn purple and red, and their lips too. They are my brothers and their friends, and our cousins, and sometimes myself. But I don’t like to climb the tree when Jill is there. They have no swimming pool and she gets really sweaty and licks her lips too much. Do you know that the best way to get the stain of a red mulberry off your shorts is to rub it with a green mulberry?
We also have a guava tree in the back garden, in the middle, between the mulberry trees. This I remember well: its bark looks like smooth brown skin, although it is actually terribly hard, and the tree is thin, and unfriendly to climbers. Around Christmas the guavas are tight green nubs that swell gradually and soften and turn yellow. By autumn the tree is crowded with hundreds of ripe yellow guavas. Many of them are pecked by birds, leaving lesions in the pink meat inside. They fall off the tree when the wind blows, or maybe when they get too heavy, and lie in the grass until they rot, giving off an acid perfume. The long grass around the tree is dangerous to walk on, for fear of overripe fruit exploding under your feet or into the gaps between your toes.
As I write this, I recall that odour so intensely that I actually smell it.
Simon
Simon meets David Goldberg and Ricky Glaser on the field between the synagogue and the Torquay shopping centre. They walk down in the dark to the roadhouse at Pollock Beach. Business is slow tonight, though this is a warm Saturday evening. Only a few cars are in the lot, service trays attached to the windows, piled with hamburger wrappings and greasy bags of chips. “Barbara Ann” crackles out loudly, painting the world California. The air smells of brine, fried meat and onions, stale oil.
“What are you having?” David asks, speaking more to Ricky. He looks
