French cigarettes. And when I wasn’t reading, I would write romantic Afrikaans poetry which I would declaim with great feeling to madly attractive Frenchmen with black eyes and sunken cheeks who naturally wouldn’t be able to understand a word …
‘I’ve thought up a name for myself.’ Lovey’s voice broke into my dreams of the future.
‘You’ve got a name,’ I said irritably.
‘How would you like it if everyone called you Lovey?’
‘I can’t imagine anyone ever calling me Lovey,’ I sighed. ‘I probably don’t look like a Lovey.’
‘Well, I wasn’t stupid enough to tell the kids at my new school that you call me Lovey.’
‘And now they call you Loulene?’
‘Hm-mm.’
Slowly she shook her head while she drew patterns on the wet paving with her forefinger. Bit her full lower lip as Ma did when she wanted to hide her feelings. But it had always been easier for Lovey to show her feelings than to hide them.
‘What’s wrong with Loulene?’
‘Nothing. It just doesn’t suit me. A name is like a dress, it has to suit you.’ She dropped her voice to make the most of the dramatic moment. ‘I told them my name is Bobby.’
‘Bobby?’
‘Yes. Like that song Simon always sings. “Me and Bobby McKay”.’
‘McGee.’
‘Yes, that one.’ A blinding smile lit her face. ‘Don’t you think it suits me?’
‘Bobby Vermaak!’ I muttered and turned on my stomach to read again.
‘Better than Lovey Vermaak, don’t you think?’
‘The army is a strange place,’ Simon wrote from Potchefstroom. ‘I wanted to be a parabat, remember, so I’ll have to go to Bloemfontein when I’ve done basic training, but now I’m beginning to wonder whether it’s such a great idea. I mean I’ve got this picture in my head of a paratrooper all the girls will fall for, but perhaps I’m the only one who’s going to fall, hard, out of an aeroplane. No, I’m not becoming a pansy. I’m just wondering.
‘I’m reading a book Pierre lent me. Catch-22, I think you’ll like it. I told you, didn’t I, that Pierre is the guy who grew up in Black River? He was expelled in standard nine, I heard the other day, because he told the headmaster that he was an old fart, can you believe it, so his parents sent him to a private school in Pretoria and he did standards nine and ten in one year. And last year he hitch-hiked across the country. I’ve never met a guy who asks so many questions. Or has so many strange opinions.
‘He says the Americans saw their arseholes in Vietnam. Solidly. He also says the whites have seen their arseholes in Africa, but we’re still arguing about that.’
‘Here a man eats meat,’ Pa said. ‘Beef, venison, lion …’
‘Snake?’ asked the man from the Cape, who was beginning to grasp the game.
‘Snake,’ my father said. ‘Only last week we had a snake barbecue.’
‘No, really, Carl, now you’re talking shit.’
‘Not so loud, there are children around,’ Pa said primly. ‘Come and have a piece of sausage meanwhile.’
‘I saw a monster of a snake next to the road this morning,’ said the Pretorian and swallowed some beer. ‘Easily six feet long. A car had driven over its head but its body was still wriggling when I stopped.’ Another swallow. The man knew how to expand a story. ‘I put it into the boot. Thought I could play a little joke this evening. Leave it under Jake’s bed with just the tail showing …’
‘No, dammit, man!’ One could almost hear the sigh of relief in the Capetonian’s laughter. ‘What would you have told my wife if I’d had a heart attack?’
My father joined in the laughter.
‘But now I’ve had a better idea,’ the Pretorian said. ‘I think we should grill the snake this evening. Then Carl can show us how he does his thing.’
‘I second the motion!’ laughed Jake-from-the-Cape, even more relieved.
My father was no longer amused.
‘We can do that,’ Pa said, his eyes on the grill, ‘but I’ll have to inspect the snake first. You can’t throw any old snake on the coals.’
‘Come on, Carl, it’s too late to chicken out now!’
Jake-from-the-Cape slapped my father on the back. My throat closed as though I were choking on a piece of snake meat. The man shouldn’t have said that.
‘Chicken!’ My father’s voice rose as it did when he was losing a court case. ‘Ha! You’ll swallow your words tonight, Jake my man! Along with a nice mouthful of grilled snake!’
‘Bye, bye, Miss American Pie,’ Don McLean sang over the radio. ‘Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry …’
I sang along, moved my shoulders and kicked my feet as if I wanted to swim through the music.
‘Why did the guy take his car to a lavatory?’ Lovey asked, lying next to me with her eyes closed.
‘I’ve also wondered.’ I thought she’d fallen asleep. ‘But Simon says when you sing, the words don’t have to make any sense. He says if everyone sang more and said less the world would be a better place.’
‘Not if everyone sings as off-key as you do,’ Lovey mumbled.
I pretended not to have heard. Just listen to old Bob Dylan, Simon said. Oh, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now. It was actually better if the words were a bit jumbled, Simon said. Then it sounded deep.
London
14 July 1992
Dear Child
I hate zoos. But I was so homesick today that I dragged my child to a zoo. Since I started writing my story last month, I’ve been homesick all the time. Or heartsick, as I prefer to call it. (There’s an Afrikaans word that describes the feeling better, but I can’t bring it to mind.) I thought I would feel better if I saw a few other exiles from Africa but that depressed me even more.
A rhinoceros behind bars in a London zoo is a pathetic sight. It simply stood there, immobile, staring crossly with its small eyes at the visitors. Its rough, dirty-grey skin reminded me of the heels of the children at Cape Town’s traffic lights, those begging hands and drugged eyes which used to appear behind my closed window like visions from hell. I couldn’t take it. It was one of the reasons why I fled. I didn’t want to live in a country where children looked like that. And yet, when I stood in front of the rhino today I wondered which one of us felt less at home here, in the heart of London.
I grabbed my child’s sticky hand and walked unseeingly to the lion cage. In the innocence of his two-and-a-half years, he, in any case,
