hesitated. Oom Daan was having none of it.
“Go get your things. Now! And, boytjie,” Oom Daan caught hold of Grant’s chin and held it firmly, “listen carefully to me now: you must find your father’s cellphone. I’ve already been there in your house but I couldn’t find it. You must find it for me. There … there are some important numbers – you remember that I gave that phone to Sharkey? He says I must take it back. Okay, then?”
Grant nodded dumbly, as best he could with his chin held in a vice-like grip and his head still thick with the after-effects of Oom Daan’s cuff.
“I’ll come fetch you later with Hasie Viljoen’s truck,” Oom Daan said, in a gentler tone.
Grant swung out from under Oom Daan’s hand and walked quickly up the beach. He could hardly see where he was going. His head was spinning – from the blow and from the news – and the collective anxiety of the last four days was forming tears behind his eyes that he would not allow to fall.
He heard Oom Daan calling after him, “The Lord is your Shepherd, boytjie. He’ll take care of you wherever you go.”
“He can take care of me right here,” Grant muttered thickly to himself. “If you think I’m going anywhere with you tonight, old man, in Hasie Viljoen’s truck, you don’t know Sharkey’s son.”
Chapter 3
When Grant turned the corner and saw his house, with its low front wall and iron afdakkie, he felt a hard lump form in his throat. He didn’t want to leave it. And he couldn’t bear to think of someone else living in it. How many times had Sharkey said those words: “This house belongs to me and my boy. It’s not for sale.” Now why would he sell it? It just didn’t make sense.
He was thirteen. Old enough to fish, old enough to take himself to school, old enough to cook supper and sleep alone all night; but not old enough to take on the likes of Oom Daan and Hasie Viljoen. He knew that they would never let him stay in the house by himself. They weren’t like Sharkey. Or rather, the Sharkey he thought he knew. He didn’t know this new Sharkey, who would go to Lüderitz for a whole year without even saying goodbye – and worst of all, leave instructions for the house to be sold and for Grant to be taken to Cape Town.
He knows I hate Cape Town, Grant thought, kicking open the gate. He knows I can’t stand Uncle Roy’s huge, dead house and that creepy grandfather clock that ticks so loudly all day and night, reminding you of how bored you are.
All the way home he had tried to formulate a plan, but he couldn’t seem to think straight.
Hurry, he told himself, conscious of the impending arrival of Oom Daan in Hasie Viljoen’s truck, but his thoughts and movements remained slow and heavy.
Of only one thing was he sure, as sure as the very rocks his little house was made of – he didn’t want to leave the West Coast and go and live in Cape Town.
I bet you drank too much at the Paternoster Hotel, Grant said to Sharkey’s bleached wooden chair, the one he always sat in when he was carving. And you talked a lot of rubbish and then passed out and now everyone is believing your Old Brown Sherry talk. But not me. I know you, Sharkey.
Sharkey was Grant’s only real friend. He hadn’t made any good friends at the school in Langebaanweg because nearly all the kids there were the sons and daughters of army fathers. Not one of them had a father like Sharkey. So he spoke to them at school and played touch rugby some afternoons, but he never invited them home to his little stone house just left of the hardware store. What for? Sharkey was there. Except, he wasn’t there any more; he’d gone, without even saying goodbye.
“I’m alone,” Grant said out loud. The words, once spoken, unnerved him. For just a moment, the soft grey eyes of Tant Lisbeth came to him and he wondered if he shouldn’t just go and tell her everything and hope that she would solve all these problems. But then something hard and determined floated through the open door on the salty evening breeze and he was Sharkey’s son once more.
He roamed through the house, from the kitchen through the living room and into the small, low-ceilinged bedroom he shared with Sharkey. He looked at everything: the small wrought-iron beds, the knife-scarred table and the wooden chairs that had belonged to his mother’s mother. He opened the doors of the cupboards and pulled out the drawers – as if searching for inspiration, wisdom, someone to tell him what to do.
He was just about to leave the bedroom when he heard a strange noise, an electronic buzzing sound that seemed to be coming from under Sharkey’s bed. He crawled under the low, single-bed frame and looked about. There was nothing there that could make such a sound, only an old pair of shoes.
Then a thought occurred to him. He felt about for the ridge marking the trapdoor that was cut into the wooden floor. His fingers found it. He tucked them under the rim of the panel and pulled it up. He wriggled a bit further under the bed and reached his forearm into the secret hiding hole that only he and Sharkey knew about.
The first thing his exploration unearthed was his knife, the one Sharkey had given him on his thirteenth birthday. “You’re a man now,” Sharkey had said, “and a man must have a knife.” Grant forced the picture of his father’s face out of his mind. The memory of that birthday made him feel weak, as he felt when Tant Lisbeth looked kindly at him.
He felt around a bit more, in case Sharkey had stashed any bank notes there, rolled up tightly in rubber bands, as he sometimes did when he was saving up for something – like a new net or a new school shirt for Grant. He couldn’t feel any but his fingers did encounter another object, smooth and cold to the touch. He pulled it out, together with his knife.
Grant stared at his find in bewilderment. So he was right, that noise had come from Sharkey’s cellphone, the one Oom Daan had been looking for. The phone indicated that a message had just come through. The wooden floor had distorted the sound, but Grant had still recognised it. Now why would Sharkey’s phone be in the hiding hole?
Sharkey always carried two things with him: his knife and his cellphone, both of them for business purposes. “Accountants have their calculators, shopkeepers have their tills; I have my phone and my knife,” Sharkey had told him.
They were the tools of the smokkel trade Sharkey ran, the illegal fishing and trapping of crayfish he did on behalf of some hotels in the area and, of course, the tourists who happened to enquire at the Beach Café as to where they could buy fresh fish and crayfish in Langebaan.
Sharkey hadn’t wanted a mobile at first, but after Oom Daan had told him that he’d missed out on R200’s worth of business one day just because Oom Daan couldn’t get hold of him, he relented and accepted one of Oom Daan’s fancy mobiles. Now, you wouldn’t catch him without it.
So why would Sharkey leave home without it? And why was Oom Daan so keen to get hold of it? Grant squirmed back out from under the bed and went into the MESSAGES inbox of Sharkey’s phone. Maybe the message was from his dad. Oh, he hoped so.
It wasn’t; it was from FLASH. Sharkey didn’t keep a traditional bank account like most other people did. He relied exclusively on his cellphone cash transaction provider, FLASH.
Grant opened the message and read it. Impossible! He stood up. He had to check the content of the message. He couldn’t have read it right.
But when he looked again it still stated:
Your FLASH account has been credited
