am going to hurt you! he says, now much closer.
Die, pig, die, I say softly, my dry lips clinging helplessly to each other. I had heard it a few months before at the church camp when two cleaners had a fist fight behind the dustbins, die, pig, die. I had put it away and say it now.
There is a sudden whoosh, like the wing of an eagle. Aunt Gagiano stops next to me with her massive Peugeot.
I know you’re just a stone’s throw from home, but get in before you melt in this sun, she laughs.
I get in. And I shiver like after a bath in winter.
Don’t pay attention to that Fudge child, he’s just hot air, the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, says Aunt Gagiano.
She stops in front of her home.
Do you want to come inside for orange juice? she asks.
No, thank you, I shiver.
It is only the empty yard next to her house and then it’s our house. Twenty child’s steps, but it takes me a hundred long years before I push open our gate. Not once do I look behind me. I am a little ghost, forward, forward.
I never saw him again. Two weeks later, just before first break, the school principal came to our class and explained in a soft voice that Fudge wouldn’t be coming back to our school, he’d had an accident the day before, he’d been on his bicycle on the Bothmaskloof pass. The principal said it was good to be sad and if anybody wanted to go home, they were welcome to do so.
I went to sit on a low wall outside and opened my lunchbox. Inside was brown bread with peanut butter. I couldn’t believe it, my mother knew I didn’t eat peanut butter, I don’t eat it, I don’t eat it. But she still didn’t stop, once a week it was in my lunchbox. I couldn’t believe it.
Luxurious
Technically I am still little, only three years out of toddlerhood. I am unsatisfied and uncomfortable, but I assume everything will be explained to me at some later point, so I keep quiet as much as possible, I wait like a good boy to be told how things work. All I want to do is round up everyone in town and yell, hysterically and uncontrollably, Right! It’s time! Tell me what is going on! This is wrong! What are you hiding? Why is this lasting so long?
What lasts too long is my darkness and my heaviness. Already I can describe the hours of my day to every rock in the front garden and every reed out back by the failing vlei. Ordinary. Ordinary. Bad. Bad. Very bad. Breathless. Suspicious. Better. Ordinary. Almost good. Bad again. Very, very bad. Dead as a dodo. Still alive. Slightly better. Sleep.
ALMOST GOOD is therefore the best time of my day, that’s how well I’m doing. GOOD or very good is only at Grandmother’s house, not here. So I have to explain to myself: I cannot do what other children do, they are lighter and do not have a Big Grey. The Big Grey lives in my schoolbag. (Where else? The heaviness begins every morning when I pick up my bag, Saturdays are lighter, Sundays the grey starts to pile up again.) What the Big Grey looks like when it is in the darkness of my bag, I don’t know. As soon as I start walking, my bag shakes, the Big Grey finds little holes and starts to leak outside. Like a poisonous fog it hangs around me, then starts to form corners until the gloom is square like a big cardboard box that leaves only my head and feet uncovered. This box becomes heavier and lighter, bigger and smaller, it makes me walk slower, get stuck in doors, stumble over stairs, bump against walls, it makes my fingers stupid near the piano, makes sure that I never learn how to hug or embrace someone, never, ever run into someone’s arms. I know it’s not my imagination, I can hear them whispering – certain walls, the empty house on the corner where the tar ends, the gateposts in front of the church: Here comes the heavy child! Shh, he has his darkness with him!
I tell myself a time will come when a being, gigantic and vivid, possibly clad like many heroes in metal, fleet of foot and very clever, will appear, faster than a falcon. He will grab the Big Grey with a sweep of his arm and take it to the penal colony where all grey must live.
This being does appear, waiting in the hallway one afternoon after school, dressed in a brown pinafore with a mustard-yellow cardigan. It is my mother. In her hand is a roll of bright paper with a sheet of brown paper around it. She holds it towards me. My name and our address are typed on the brown paper.
What is it? I ask.
It’s the magazine we saw in the Huisgenoot, my mother says, Don’t you remember? Your father said we could order it.
Carefully I remove the brown paper, careful, careful, I’m going to save it. I roll the magazine open. There is a soft noise and the fern in the hallway shivers, it is the flight of the Big Grey, first to the front door and then back into my bag.
This is not like when the piano appeared, that moment was a step into a new doorway; this thing I am holding now is a luxury. We live simply; something with your name on, something that is delivered so your grey can flee, is almost unreal.
Bollie was a magazine for children, full of comic strips, among others the adventures of a hare family with Bollie the leading character. I devour every word and picture, afterwards I cannot remember even one story, my joy is the paper, the colours, the way Bollie and his life are drawn, the way the ink shines on the pages, the way the paper rustles, the way something smells when it is brand new, when it was packaged before it could lie on a shop’s shelf or be handled without care.
Again and again Bollie was delivered, a whole afternoon and a whole evening without grey. I treasured it like jewellery, hid it before my little brother could damage it, paged through it again and again, imagined myself living in a place where dining tables looked like those of the brightly dressed hare family, where puddings and cakes were as big as the guests, where raisins spilled out of loaves of bread and steam rose from mugs of hot chocolate. Even today my family still uses it as an adjective: Bollie book biscuits, Bollie book bread, Bollie book towers.
Later there were more magazines, Patrys, Tina, Panorama. Patrys was full of activities, facts and things you could cut out; it would break my heart to cut up one of my treasures, I only cut out things when my mother was done with her magazines. Tina was exclusively for teenage girls and for me, how it ended up in our home, how my father allowed it, I do not know. Panorama was a big magazine with expensive paper, full-page photos of nature – in which I had no interest at all – and articles in a language that could not appeal to any child, but it was delivered in a big envelope without any folds and it smelled of promise, new and mysterious. I handled it as though it was a message from a far-off place, a document for the nobility.
The Big Grey would always stay with me, and later I would become smarter and think up many escapes, but in that little town of my early school-going years and countless realisations, paper was my first luxury and constant salvation. On magazine days the stones and reeds knew, here it is VERY GOOD.
Paper is the bringer of messages, the shepherd of the earth’s biggest stories, the proof of artists’ immortality, somewhere homes are made of it, everywhere food is eaten from it, somewhere it is worn as clothing, it brings birthday wishes and Christmas greetings, it fans people cool, it is proof that you passed, it wraps presents.
After the first magazines many envelopes followed. I floated when I excelled, yelled when I won something, got a fright when I disappointed, was disgusted when I got my first call-up papers for the army. Later there were cruel papers, rejections of love, poisonous newspaper reviews, reminders of student debts.
But at first there was only joy. And then, soon after the first Bollie, my father’s and my life changed.
It
