Childish Things
Marita van der Vyver
Translated by Madeleine van Biljon
Tafelberg
For all those who were there
When I think back on all the crap I learnt in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.
Paul Simon, ‘Kodachrome’
Flight 605
I had resolved never to write about my youth. After all, what can you say about the seventies – except to wish you hadn’t been there?
The sixties produced hippies and sex, the eighties yuppies and money. But the seventies? What can you say about platform shoes and trousers with absurdly wide legs, David Bowie’s hacked hairdo, John Travolta’s disco dancing and Abba’s music?
It was probably the most ephemeral decade in the history of the world. Disposable fashion, disposable dances, disposable music. And disposable lives in the warm country where I grew up. Young white boys shot on the border for the good of the nation and the country. Black schoolchildren shot in townships for another nation in the same country.
But eventually I realised what all storytellers have to realise before they can break free from the past: it’s not what you want to tell, it’s what you have to tell.
So here I am travelling through time, in more ways than one. Rushing towards a child I have never seen, while remembering the child I used to be. With another child next to me. And I am writing about my youth, about the seventies, about that country of contrasts.
You’ll have fun on the way
When I looked up she was standing in the doorway, two suitcases like coffins under her arms and a funereal cloud on her face.
‘Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away,’ she sang in a gruff boy’s voice and kicked one suitcase across the bare floor so that it slammed against the opposite bed. ‘Damn.’
I was so flustered that I forgot to wipe away the tears on my cheeks. She dropped the other suitcase heavily on the floor and flopped back on the bed, shoes and all. Not the regulation lace-up shoes but the prettier, prohibited ones with a strap across the instep. She folded her arms behind her head, sighed, and stared at the ceiling.
‘I’m Dalena,’ she said without looking at me. ‘I’m your roommate and I’m as disgusted with this dump as you are, so cry away.’
‘I’m Mart,’ I sniffed and gave my eyes a quick wipe. ‘Sorry, I’m not used …’ A vague gesture encompassed it all – the bare hostel room, the bars in front of the window, the unfamiliar trees in the garden, the humid closeness so early in the morning. ‘I’m not used to this.’
‘Never mind, neither am I.’ She turned her head and smiled at me over her elbow with the widest mouth I’d ever seen. ‘And I’ve been here for three years.’
Her eyes were a strange colour. Greyish-green. Or greeny-grey? Athletic legs, slender ankles and knees, decently curved calves. Muscular thighs under a school dress which had ridden up to the elastic of her panties.
She wasn’t wearing the prescribed large, grey bloomers, either.
‘In the hostel?’
‘Yep. But I schemed to be out of it this year. I talked my father into letting me lodge with the PT teacher in town. She’s nice, she would’ve given me more freedom than this place. I convinced my father that I planned to take my schoolwork “seriously”. Told him I was aiming for a few As in matric but that I didn’t have enough time to swot in the hostel. And he fell for it. But the teacher unfortunately has a dish of a brother … and yesterday my father caught us in the shower …’
‘You and …’ I couldn’t believe my ears.
‘Yep.’
‘Naked?’
She looked at me as though I was mentally deficient.
‘Do you shower in your clothes?’
Long ago, I remembered, Simon had a marble, shot with green and grey and almost as translucently bright as her eyes. When the light caught it in a certain way, there were yellow flecks in it as well.
‘And then?’
‘And then there was a helluva scene and I was disinherited – not for the first time – and here I am, back in the hostel!’
And I had been under the impression that children on the platteland were innocent.
‘The worst of it is that I can’t have my old room! It’s been given to someone else!’
When the breakfast bell shrilled unexpectedly, I immediately jumped up, but she remained lying on the bed. Stretched out.
‘Now I’ve got to sleep in this stupid room with you. You’ve probably discovered it’s right under the bell. No one else wants it, that’s why they give it to new pupils.’
She swung her legs down and sat on the edge of the bed, stretched arms resting on the palms of her hands like guy ropes to keep her upright while she looked me up and down. I felt as though I was facing a headmaster. But then she smiled, a smile that literally spanned her face from ear to ear like a long, beautiful bridge.
‘Whose table are you sitting at?’
I was so entranced by the smile that I forgot the matric girl’s name. ‘She has … huge boobs?’
‘Oh, Laurika. With that bunch of drears? Sheesh, no, you’ve got to get away from them.’ When she adopted a serious look her face was nothing special. Except for the colour of her eyes, perhaps. ‘Would you like to sit with me?’
I could only nod enthusiastically.
‘Stick with me, baby.’ As soon as she smiled, as she did now, her face became one you would notice in a crowd. ‘I can’t promise to make you famous. But you’ll have fun on the way.’
That’s how I got to know Dalena van Vuuren. And nothing would ever be the same again.
Since my arrival the previous day I had felt like a wild animal locked up in a zoo for the first time. Later I realised that an Afrikaans school hostel in a conservative platteland town could, in fact, be described as a kind of zoo. The windows were barred to keep inmates in and outsiders out. There were feeding times and visiting hours and sleeping times and even times when pupils were gated. Sometimes we behaved like animals, too.
Hideous, I’d thought when I first saw the hostel room.
A grey blanket on a grey iron bed, greyish linoleum on the floor and a greyish-white clothes cupboard. Empty, but with a musty smell emanating from its interior. The smell of lost dreams, I thought with the poetic licence of an almost sixteen-year-old. Actually, it was only the smell of stale food, I realised later: of cake and rusks and other edibles hidden behind clothes and gobbled in silence.
Even the walls had a greyish tinge. And bare, bare, bare. Not a poster or a painting or a postcard,
