Johannesburg next month.’ I stared through the window. I was tired of seeing only green all day. It was supposed to be autumn but in this region the plants evidently took no notice of seasons. ‘Here in the back of beyond we probably won’t be able to get it for years.’
In the Cape the trees would be losing their leaves now, the vineyards turning gold and the weather becoming a little cooler each day. Here it was always hot, hot and green. So hot and green it was enough to make you puke. We drove past a clump of the burning trees that also grew in the hostel gardens. Long brown seed pods hung from the branches like Christmas decorations out of season. Flamboyant, Pa had said when I’d asked him what kind of tree it was. No, I don’t mean the tree’s appearance, I said, I want to know what it’s called. Flamboyant, Pa had said again, a flamboyant flamboyant – like a sweet sweet or a sore sore.
‘What do you think of the kombi?’ I asked.
My brother’s upper arm bulged every time he changed gear. The muscles in his arms were as new to me as the car. That’s why National Service was a good thing, Ma said. It changed boys into men. It also changed them in other ways, I had decided over the past weekend.
‘What’s the idea?’ Simon switched on the car radio, pulled a face when he heard boeremusiek and immediately switched it off. ‘A kombi is a great car for a surfer. But if Pa wants to be a farmer, why doesn’t he buy a pick-up or a four-wheel drive?’
‘You know Pa doesn’t really want to be a farmer, Simon! He likes the idea of living on a farm, but surely you don’t expect him to do a farmer’s work, do you?’
‘Well, who is supposed to do it?’
‘Who do you think?’
‘Ma?’ Simon shook his head. ‘She’s going to leave him one day.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so.’
My father had ostensibly bought the car for my mother – handing her the bunch of keys like an engagement ring, beaming at his own generosity – so that she could ferry bananas to the farm stalls in the district. And then occasionally he could ‘borrow’ it from her over a weekend, he had suggested, to transport a few friends to a rugby game in the city. Surely more practical than a pick-up?
Ma said if he’d wanted to be practical, he would’ve bought her a new washing machine. But my mother’s favourite song was the one Shirley Bassey sang so passionately: I love you, hate you, love you, hate you … Every time Ma heard it on the radio she sang along, just as passionately, even though she was usually off-key.
‘And now for something completely different.’ Simon took a cassette from his jeans pocket, smiled as if he’d produced a rabbit from a hat and pushed it into the cassette player. ‘Jesus Christ Superstar!’
‘But that’s …’ I swallowed to keep the shock out of my voice, tried to sound as worldly as my roommate. ‘Isn’t it banned?’
‘Everything that’s fun in this country is either banned or sinful.’ He definitely sounded different, I decided. ‘One of Pierre’s pals smuggled it in from LM.’
I listened in silence to the unfamiliar music and wondered whether this Pierre, whom I was going to meet shortly, didn’t influence my brother too much. But I would never say it. I didn’t want to sound like my mother.
‘Not bad at all,’ I mumbled when I saw Simon giving me a side-ways glance.
I wasn’t exactly keen to meet my brother’s new friend. He sounded like the kind of guy who acted older than his age, and such guys always made me stutter and stammer like an idiot in standard three. But they had both come home for a few days, for the first time in three months, and Simon wanted to visit Pierre that afternoon. And I had to admit that I was flattered when he asked me to drive to Black River with him.
‘Pierre has also seen quite a number of flicks that are banned here,’ Simon said, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel in time to the music.
‘Dirty movies?’
‘No, man, good ones, like Hair … Clockwork Orange … Last Tango in Paris …’
‘I hear it’s disgusting,’ I said before I could stop myself.
‘What?’
‘That Tango one,’ I said. ‘One of the guys in my class saw it in LM. He said it was too awful. There’s a scene where the man rubs butter on the girl’s bottom …’
Simon burst out laughing.
‘What?’ I looked through the window on my side so that he couldn’t see me blush.
‘Do you know that Pa read Lady Chatterley’s Lover years ago?’ Simon shook his head, his fingers quiet on the steering wheel. ‘And all he can remember is a scene where the lovers evidently stick daisies up one another’s arseholes.’
‘What are you trying to say?’
Simon waited until the song that was playing ended before he replied. ‘Pierre says Last Tangoin Paris is a brilliant movie.’
Pierre definitely had to be a pervert, I decided, becoming more and more uncomfortable about the meeting which lay ahead. The tarred road made a wide curve past a large blue lake and dense plantations of pine trees where sunlight threw long fingers of light through the shadows. I could easily imagine we were travelling somewhere in another country, Canada maybe, somewhere where you were allowed to listen to ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ in a car.
Pierre was tall and dark but not what I would call handsome. Too thin, I thought, too serious, with hollow cheeks and black eyes set too deeply in their sockets. That was my first impression.
His room was in the garden where he could play his music loudly without irritating his mother, he said. The walls were painted a dark blue, almost blue-black, and the curtains were drawn. You would never guess that the sun was shining outside. I sat on his bed, bored, and stared at the blue electric bulb which hung above a bookcase. If one could call such a contraption a bookcase.
The crowded shelves looked as though they’d been cobbled together by someone who knew more about literature than carpentry. I tried to read the titles of a row of tattered paperbacks in the weak light. I recognised some of the authors’ names even if I hadn’t read them: Tolstoy and Flaubert, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce and Scott Fitzgerald … but there were a great many names I had never heard of: Durrell and Fowles and Updike … It was impossible for anyone of Pierre’s age to have read so many books. It was simply a brag, as my Grandma Farmdam would say.
Simon and Pierre sat on the floor next to the stereo, sipping beer and discussing the army. They had forgotten about me. And the longer I had to listen to their stupid army stories, the angrier I got. Not only with them but with myself as well. Why didn’t I simply get up and go for a walk in the garden?
Ma said if you ever show a man that he’s boring you, he’ll never forgive you. But what would Simon and Pierre do if they had to listen to Dalena and me talking about lipstick or nail polish for an hour?
I turned my head to look at the posters on the walls. Not the ones you’d normally expect to find in a boy’s room, of pop stars or pin-up girls with stars on their bare boobs, cut out of magazines like Scope. Above the bed there was a poster of Beethoven and next to it an unknown black man with a clenched fist,
