‘What did you say your name was?’ the one with the incredible plait asked when she saw I was looking at her.
‘Mart.’ The porridge stuck to my teeth like wonder glue. ‘Mart Vermaak.’
Now all seven were looking at me. Where do you come from? Which school were you in? Do you know …? But as suddenly as the chorus of questions started, they forgot about me. Seven heads turned away from me. Seven voices chatted enthusiastically about the recent holiday.
I stared at the baked tomato skins on my plate – as horrid as the skin on a cup of coffee – and tried to remember exactly what it sounded like when a wave broke on a rock.
Another grey tiled floor in the bathroom, two rows of dirty-white basins opposite one another, two rows of lavatories and baths behind closed doors, and a few open showers against the furthest wall. What had happened to all the colours in the world? Even the girls around me seemed colourless, off-white in their summer nightgowns, as though I were looking at an overexposed photograph.
I brushed my teeth and thought about my holiday. Tried to recall the smell of suntan lotion, the screech of gulls carried away on the wind, the sticky feeling of sand against a wet body. Anything to get away from this unreal reality.
But all I could smell was the Clearasil ointment the girl next to me was using for her pimples. Looking at herself in the mirror with open-mouthed concentration, she was unaware that I was staring at her. All I could hear was water rushing out of taps and showers. If I closed my eyes, perhaps I could imagine it was the sound of waves.
When I closed my eyes, the sharp, foamy taste of toothpaste was on my tongue and I suddenly remembered that Nic’s mouth had tasted of peppermints and tobacco with a lingering aftertaste of salt.
A bell rang – another one – and everyone rushed out of the bathroom like cockroaches when a light went on in a dark room. I also changed into a cockroach.
In my new bedroom my unpacked suitcase and my empty school rucksack lay on the bed. On top of the suitcase were balls of crumpled newspaper in which I had wrapped a mug, a porcelain doll and a few other pathetic ornaments to remind me of home. I sat down on the bed and read one of the newspaper reports because I didn’t know what else to do until the next bell rang.
Our enemies must know that every single one we lose on the border, binds us more closely to our country, South Africa. So said the Minister of Police, Mr Jimmy Kruger, at the funeral of a young constable shot in Rhodesia.
I crumpled the newsprint and looked for a waste basket. Under the table there was a wire waste basket. Grey, what else?
When I looked outside, through the mesh and the bars, the unknown tree still flamed orange. Hundreds of tongues of fire licked at the deepening dusk. Further back, an orange bougainvillaea poured over the wire fence surrounding the hostel garden. And almost in front of the window grew a green shrub as high as a tree, with great white flowers which hung from the branches like inverted crinkle paper cups. I wondered whether it was these cups which gave off the heartbreaking odour.
I had to turn away from the window because my eyes were smarting with tears again.
So I sat and stared at the bare wall in front of me, absently stroking the coarse sailcloth of my rucksack. A grubby rucksack on which the names of friends and silly messages had been written with various coloured felt-tipped pens. I looked down and drew in my breath sharply. Next to me on the bed lay something which looked like a small heap of spilt salt. Carefully, because it was far more precious than salt, I tried to gather it into my cupped hand.
I let the sea sand flow back and forth between my hands while my holiday unreeled like a movie in my head. Actually much better than a movie because I could even smell the suntan lotion.
I had used the rucksack as a beach bag, packing it each morning with my towel, book, dark glasses and purse before I went looking for Nic. Don’t run after him, my mother warned endlessly, as mothers have always warned. But I didn’t run after him. I merely made sure that I was in the right place at the right time. There’s a difference.
I learned to read the weather and the waves. That’s what you do when you’re stupid enough to fall in love with a surfer. I knew when I could find him and where.
In the end I had to admit that he was more interested in the waves than in me. But at least he was more interested in me than in any other girl.
When the lights-out bell rang, I remembered the colour of his eyes. It was like those damp blisters you saw on kelp, blisters which burst with a soft plop when you trod on them.
London
16 June 1992
Dear Child
You have just turned sixteen, I realised today. As old as I was the day the photograph was taken at the Pretoria Zoo.
I dug it out – the only picture I have of all four of us – after I had read my son to sleep with Roald Dahl’s scary little verses. No, they don’t seem to frighten him. The crueller they are, the wider his smile. My innocent, bloodthirsty little boy.
He doesn’t know the date nor what it means. In the cool green land where his forefathers starved, it’s called Bloomsday by readers who know who Leopold Bloom was. In the hot country where his mother’s forefathers hunted and plundered – where politics have always been more important than books – it’s remembered for other reasons. He doesn’t know about the children who died or about the child who was born a short while before that day.
And now I’m staring at a photo of four terribly white teenagers on a yellow lawn, a cageful of monkeys in the background. The boys’ haircuts are brutally short, their bodies are awkward in army uniforms. The girls are dressed according to the fashion pages in the Afrikaans Sarie and the American Seventeen. One is wearing a halter-neck smock which bells out at her hips over jeans which hang even more widely over high cork soles, rather like an old-fashioned layered wedding cake draped in denim. The other one’s hair is hidden under a kerchief, her body under a patchwork pinafore dress, as if she had borrowed a maid’s outfit for the occasion. A rich man’s child in the clothes of the poor.
I wish I’d spent my teens in a more elegant age!
I have begun to write a story about that terrible time which I would like to dedicate to you, if ever I finish it. But I don’t even know your name.
Happy birthday, my nameless child. I hope your seventeenth year is better than mine was.
M.
We will fight and go forward with faith
‘So it is getting a little better?’ my mother asked, her eyes worried. Opposite her my young brother was sucking up the last of his chocolate milkshake so noisily that he could be heard in the street. She wore her usual martyred what-have-I-done-to-deserve-this expression, but apart from that ignored him.
‘I didn’t say that,’ I muttered, the straw clamped between my lips.
We sat in the Portuguese café next to the local movie house, the walls around us covered in old film posters. In front of me there was a grease mark on the red and white checked tablecloth, a large red plastic tomato filled with ketchup and a menu covered in plastic like a schoolbook. After three weeks in this dull town I had accepted the fact that there were no elegant coffee houses in Black River.
