just another myth adults want to believe.
In the souvenir shop, at the end of our visit, he asked me to buy him a plastic dinosaur. They don’t sell dinosaurs here, I snapped at him, unnecessarily impatient, fed up to the back teeth with this passion for a species that died out ages ago. Zoos are for living animals, I tried to explain more patiently. Why? he wanted to know.
Why, indeed?
I offered to buy him a plastic rhino. Or an elephant or a lion. He wanted a plastic dinosaur. Sometimes my son is stubborn – like any other toddler – but sometimes it seems as if his whole body becomes one solid unyielding mass. Then he becomes far heavier than he appears to be, totally immovable. That’s when he reminds me of Pierre.
The lion walked endlessly back and forth behind the bars, its mane tattered. It looked even worse than the rhino.
‘Leeu,’ I said to my son.
‘Leo,’ my English son repeated as though speaking of an astrological sign.
‘Roar, Young Lion!’ I ordered the lion, but it stared at me as uncomprehendingly as my son. ‘Rrroaaa! Rrroaaa!’
My son’s munching jaw stilled for a moment before he clapped his hands in excitement. Applause for a mother who behaved like an idiot.
Years ago there was a zoo below Rhodes Memorial in Cape Town. I don’t know if I ever saw it. Perhaps it was before my time. Perhaps my mother told me about it. But I swear I can remember an emaciated lion in a dirty cage near a freeway.
That is my earliest memory of a zoo. The others are even worse.
In junior school I went on an expedition, with a crowd of fellow pupils, to the Tygerberg Zoo. All I can remember is a bunch of wriggling snakes in a snake pit. I dreamt about snakes for months on end, woke up screaming night after night. My mother was at her wits’ end.
And then, of course, there was the visit to the Pretoria Zoo, the day the photo was taken which I told you about last month. I was a teenager, all long legs and private parts, sweating in a small cable car high above a hippopotamus enclosure with only the thin floor of the cable car and a helluva long drop between me and the hippo. With his skinny body in his ugly brown army uniform, Pierre made the car swing back and forth, laughing defiantly. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed to be in another place – any other place – when I opened them. When I dared to peer through my lashes again, I hung right above the rhino enclosure. It was probably the start of my perpetual doubt about the power of prayer.
‘Which is worse?’ I asked my son, a game I regularly play with him. ‘To be squashed by a hippopotamus or impaled by a rhinoceros?’
He squealed with laughter and even offered me one of his dinosaur sweets. He loves such horrible possibilities. Give him a story with a violent ending and he smiles from ear to ear. Dwarfs who tear themselves in half through sheer rage. Witches in burning shoes, forced to dance until they drop dead. Where did this bloodlust originate?
His African ancestors’ hunting spirit? Or the fighting spirit of his Irish forebears?
Only an hour ago I sent him to sleep with another pitiless fairy tale. So that I can continue my own pitiless story.
What does it feel like to be sixteen? I would like to experience that feeling again – really experience it, not just recall it superficially – so that I can tell my tale that much better.
I would also like to believe that you are well and happy, wherever you may be.
M.
Nights in white satin
It was dark in the hostel and as oppressively hot as it was every night. Not quite as dark as every night, I realised, after lying with my eyes open for a while. The moon had to be nearly full.
Simon would’ve known. His moods always became stranger as the moon grew. It was inexplicable, Ma said, it should actually happen to me because the moon was my ruling planet, but she thought it might have something to do with his rising star. Ma took things like that seriously. Simon only laughed and said he didn’t believe in the stars, it was because he was a werewolf that he was affected by the moon.
I turned on my side so that I could see Dalena’s bed. She was also lying on her side. Probably as soaked in sweat as I was. The smell of Peaceful Sleep hung stupefyingly in the air. As it did every night.
I was startled when I saw the whites of her eyes.
‘I thought you were asleep,’ I whispered.
‘Too hot,’ she whispered back.
‘Don’t you ever get used to it?’
‘To the heat?’
‘To everything,’ I whispered, ‘I’ve been in the hostel for almost two months and it feels as if I’m never going to adapt!’
‘You’re simply not a hostel child.’
‘Are you?’
‘I never had a choice.’ She sighed and turned on her back, folded her hands behind her head. Like the first morning she’d walked in here and thrown herself down on the bed. Bent her knees so that the sheet looked like a white tent in the dark. ‘We farm children had to go to boarding school from the start.’
We were quiet for a long time until I asked carefully: ‘What do you think of Ben?’
‘He’s all right.’ She turned her face towards me so that the moon shone on her cheek like a searchlight. Her skin looked as white as the sheet. ‘A bit too sweet for my taste.’
‘What do you mean … too sweet?’ Yesterday Ben had asked me, stuttering and stammering, to go to Heinrich’s party with him. I would have been at the party over the weekend in any case – but suddenly everything had changed. I didn’t know what to wear, I didn’t know whether I should borrow my mother’s curlers to put up my hair, I didn’t know whether my short hair would look stupid with a bunch of curls, I didn’t even know whether I still wanted to go to the party. ‘Can he dance?’
‘Not half bad.’ Her teeth were a white flash in her wide mouth. ‘But if you want to move beyond dancing … he’s terribly shy, you know.’
‘That’s OK,’ I said quickly.
‘I don’t think he’s ever kissed a girl properly.’
‘Oh, that shy?’ I couldn’t hide the disappointment in my voice. ‘Perhaps you can teach him something,’ Dalena comforted. ‘There’s always a first time.’
A few more moments of silence while I digested the information. ‘When was your first time?’
‘French kiss?’ Her body shook as she laughed. ‘In standard six.’
‘What’s so funny?’
‘I never even asked his name! It was at one of my sisters’ parties. He and I smooched all evening and it was only the next morning that I realised I didn’t know who he was. I was so happy to be given a French kiss at last that I didn’t mind at all who gave it to me!’
I
