A Separate Development E-Book

Christopher Hope

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Young Harry Moto has problems with fallen arches, crinkly hair that won't flatten down, a plump chest and, for a white man, unusually dark skin. Harry's appearance provokes mercilessly sarcastic taunting from his school mates but, living in South Africa, it is not surprising that it is his skin colour which eventually brings about his downfall...

Leseprobe

Author’s Note

On publication, A Separate Development was immediately suppressed by the South African censors, and possession of a copy became a criminal offence.

‘... Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am a beast, a Negro. But I can be saved. You are false negroes, you maniacs, savages, misers. Merchant, you are a negro; magistrate, you are a negro; general, you are a negro; emperor, old tease, you are a negro; you have drunk an untaxed liquor from Satan’s distillery. — This is a people inspired by fever and cancer. The crippled and the old are so respectable that they ought to be boiled. The most artful course is to leave this continent where lunacy roams to supply hostages to these wretches. I am entering the true kingdom of the children of Ham.’

Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

‘The trouble with Gawie Eramus,’ Koos said, ‘is that he is not really a white man. It doesn’t show in his hair or his finger nails, of course. He is not coloured as all that. But you can tell it easily in other ways. Yes, that is what’s wrong with Gawie. His Hottentot forbears.’

Herman Charles Bosman, Marico Scandal

Contents

In

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Out

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

In Again

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

IN

1

Let’s say it began that afternoon when I exposed myself to Mina Meintjies. That’s how she will remember it, I’m sure. I was standing on the edge of Jack Wyner’s swimming pool, that shapely blue kidney, under a hot sun, near the steps at the shallow end, balanced carefully on the curved lip which jutted a couple of inches over the water. Mina was looking up . . .

I think about where it all began because I have to do so. It is a question I am often asked and one I often ask myself — for reasons which will become clear, and possibly rather painful, as this statement of fact — I emphasise fact, for that is what it is — gets under way. I might add that I don’t wish to remember where it all began. I would prefer to forget. However, this is not allowed. If I am to have any hope of freedom, everything must come out. The theory seems to be that as long as it all comes out, a pattern will emerge which will enable others to work out just what it is that I have done. This I see as the ultimate sentimentalism of people increasingly desperate for a link, a connection with something — correction, with anything, that makes some sense. A country which has based itself absolutely on the sacred belief in sundered, severed, truncated, fractured, split, divided, separate selves now craves a detailed account of my development in the deluded hope that once all the facts are known the odd case that I am will swim into focus, there will be an intermingling, an intermeshing of parts and their insanity will be miraculously proved to be wise policy. It is a poisonous, romantic notion. In return I am offered freedom. It’s an offer which is positively presumptuous since they suppose freedom is theirs to give. I thought I’d had the dreadful luck to land in the hands of the police, but it is far worse than that: I have fallen among philosophers. What’s more, they are obsessed with hygiene in a very special way I’ve not come across since Jack Wyner lunched off the floor of his swimming pool. They plan to give me a shower.

Rich Jack Wyner! Not one but two garden boys, Freddie and Amos, who slouched around the garden sweltering in thick blue overalls and old felt hats; Freddie mowing the lawn and watering the ranunculi, Amos tending the pool, draining, scrubbing, plugging the cracks, fishing out leaves, putting in fresh chlorine three times a week. The swimming area was grassed and enclosed by a wooden trellis. In one corner, near the deep end, was a pumphouse, and in the other, an apple tree. Night and day the pump went, pushing the water through the filter, back into the pool, frothing out of a pipe set into the lowest of the steps in the shallow end. Entire water change each day (each hour?) Anyway, whichever, Wyner was damn proud of that filter. The pumphouse, bedded into the corner, bunker style, had a flat roof a foot or so off the ground, ideal for stretching out in the sun and catching your first summer tan.

I didn’t need the sun, due to my condition, but Yannovitch, a Yugoslav with a milky, freckled skin, swore by it — the angle of the pumphouse roof gave even exposure to the right solar rays, or something like that. I’d have said that he tanned badly, couldn’t take the sun. I’d have said so — but for the fact that I seldom talked about skin conditions or suntans. Seldom, if ever . . .

“Old Amos gets our pool so damn clear I swear that you could eat off the bottom!”

Jack Wyner was forever rabbiting on about his hygienic pool. One day, when his folks were out and the pool empty and freshly scrubbed, he’d done just that. No plates, nothing. Straight off the cold stone: knife, fork, napkin — the lot; he’d enjoyed cold meats and salads. Just goes to show. It seems the salads spread themselves around the place a bit, but he managed.

Smoothly rounded Wyner, softly pink all over, much of his face carpeted with fine white down years after the rest of us began shaving. This showed up suddenly when the sun was behind him. Fat Jack, seal-sleek, smooth as a bar of new soap, and smelling, so faintly that you almost didn’t notice it, of sick. Three ovals piled up: bottom, belly and head, this last capped by a slick of hair so well greased the comb-teeth paths set hard from ear to ear in perfect curves. His legs dropped out of beautifully cut natty off-white shorts, too long by far, with zippered money pocket, button-down back pocket and no turn-ups. Slightly wet but luckily rich, his means made up for his dampness. An open, honest, anxious guy who’d begun life as a class schloep, a toady, before he’d come over to us, the bad eggs of the class, the boys, as old Donally put it, from ‘rough surroundings’: Rick van Dam, John Yannovitch, Theo Shuckel and myself, give or take one or two others, hangers-on and easily shaken off.

Most afternoons, except for Wednesdays, along with some of the girls from the Convent of Our Lady of Sorrows, we’d go swimming at old Wyner’s shack up on the Ridge. A damned sight better than risking the public baths, a real pit of a place, used during the week only by snotty-nosed infants and octogenarians in bathrobes and purple rinses whose first impulse on entering the water was to piss the place yellow as jaundice. The Superintendent fought back with double-strength chlorine. Result? Open your eyes under water and you went blind for five minutes, arriving home with flamingo-pink eyes that would have done an albino proud.

Big Dottie Baker, incredibly well-developed and kind with it, a gentle, moony face, looking rather like the Queen Mother, all face-powder and soft, round creases, was there on those afternoons at Wyner’s. Mary Smithson came too, when she felt like it. A nervous, fidgety girl inclined to jump at the least sound with a giggle that was almost a squeak, but not unpleasant. Jet black hair, very slender, a bit flat maybe, but her face was fantastic with large blue-grey eyes. She never said much and little at all when other people were speaking, but the eyes watched, darting this way and that, less eyes than strange tropical fish that swam in her face. Every so often I caught the eyes on me, though they’d flicked past my ears and were gone the instant I noticed them. Everybody knew that she loved herself. So what? She was exquisite. And then there was Mina Meintjies, as often as not, who spent a lot of time sitting on the steps of the shallow end where the inlet pipe bubbled, keeping her eyes open.

About four o’clock, hot for September, my arms folded carefully across my chest, and the sun dead centre on my back. Yannovitch slept on the pumphouse roof. Shuckel and Dottie sat at the deep end of the pool, their legs dangling in the water, saying nothing. Conversation was never Theo’s strong point. You could barely see his forehead under his thick red hair. His face was choked up with freckles. Good at brooding, old Shuckel. Some girls found him sort of intense. Often it made them want to mother him. Maybe deep down they knew what he was — just an incredibly slow guy, with the makings of an intellectual. He read all his father’s books. Rumour had it that his folks had taught him to speak German.

Van Dam was the only one swimming. Probably because Mary was still in the water, alone in a rounded corner of the pool with her arms flung out behind her on the stone lip, beautiful white wings, with her wet hair pushed behind her ears, delicately treading water. Whenever she allowed her legs to drift near the surface I’d see them through the clear water, moving shakily. Seeing her at rest, maybe even attentive, must have decided van Dam that the time had come to impress.

Even though I knew van Dam in those days as my good friend, if not my best, who would deny that he could be incredibly stupid? For one thing he set this huge store by prowess. He was a husky guy, inches taller than the rest of us and almost a foot over Yannovitch (a sore point that) with a fine head of hair. Dutch yellow, Yannovitch called it. A useful jibe. At his most boring van Dam wanted you to know all the time what a big deal he was.

“Hey Moto! Any of you guys — how many lengths of this bath can you swim under water, hey? You go fifteen with me? Bet you can’t. Ah Jeez, man! Listen, I’m tired of these old games. Why don’t we play something new? Ever tried hockey with golf clubs, or golf soccer? Don’t say you won’t when you mean you can’t. S’easy. I’ll be captain, okay?”

Trouble was he couldn’t keep up with his own variations. It was hell being caught out by van Dam, off the wall, “. . . one bounce, left-handed, and that is out! Or have you forgotten the rules?” — Disagree, and there went the ball, whap! into the rosebeds. He’d wipe his watering eyes, climb onto his bike and go home without another word. A bad loser.

The water was thrashing worse than a shark attack, gouts of it thudding into the corners of the bath. I gathered that van Dam was attempting that difficult and exhausting stroke known as the butterfly. From a drowning position a couple of inches below the surface he would jump into the air with a tremendous kick, flinging his arms forward. He was seldom airborne more than a moment before gravity took him by the short and curlies and he’d bellyflop and sink, his hair floating weirdly. In all, a flight of maybe eight inches. Luckily I didn’t have to watch. A choking grunt as he left the water and the impact of his return kept me posted. Pretty soon he was spending most of the time submerged. Obviously he was well on the way to drowning. There was consolation in that. And Mary’s eyes were closed.

In a world where every prospect pleased, only Kenny Darling propping up the gate was vile, in khaki shirt and shorts of the white-hunter variety, floppy khaki hat, green lining around the inside brim, reading . . . Lives of the Saints or The Acts of the Apostles. He wangled himself into these swimming afternoons on the strength of having been close to Wyner before he came over to us.

At school they said he couldn’t swim. Van Dam, whose mother was friendly with Darling’s old lady, said that his body was terribly disfigured by a huge purple birthmark stretching from nave to chaps, or somewhere, and he was too embarrassed to strip. As far as I could see he just came along to disapprove. A runty, thin sort of chap with the strangest skin, bluey-white it was, colour of swimming pool water, with a sheen to it as if it were pulled too tight, and almost transparent. If the sun got to it, red boils grew on nose and neck and it flamed in red patches, dropping off in chunks.

“To look at him, you’d imagine that if you got really close and peered you’d see his insides moving about — like those clocks in glass cases, y’know, with their workings grinding away.” Shuckel told me this quite seriously. “Except that nobody will find out. He’s so completely horrible from the outside — who’s going to get up really close and stare? Not counting you, Moto old chap, who are Arab enough for anything. Care to take a peek?”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Shuckel knew how wary I was on the subject of skin. Everybody knew it. Not that my skin was at all sensitive, you understand. Alas, no. But inside my skin I was sensitive. Shuckel gave way to these flights of fancy without a smile. If Kenny showed up at the pool, Yannovitch’d spend some time barracking him from his roost on the pumphouse roof.

“What! Not swimming, Mother’s Little . . .?”

We had these names for him: “Mother’s Little” or “Mommy’s Little”, also, “Little Darling”, after the song they were playing a lot on the radio.

“Grab your costume, Little Darlin’. Paddle your tootsies. Be my guest. Or is it your time of the month?”

Maybe we were too hard on Little Darlin’. He was kind to me once. On a stinking afternoon, we had been making mercury barometers in the science lab, having been kept late after school and I’d slipped out to keep an appointment for a bit of nose to nose with this big giver called Jennifer Katz, behind the cricket pavilion. They said she was more precocious than most, being Jewish. An incredibly pretty girl, her father had said that she wasn’t going to marry no ruddy goy. That’s why he sent her to the convent: Catholics didn’t count. Jennifer was making the most of things before she went off to join the Israeli army. She let me french-kiss her but held my hands tightly all the time.

While I was about my business, Brother Donally ambled back into the lab after a couple of quick nips in his room. Of course he called for me. The wise guys on the back benches were betting on the method of my execution. Mommy’s Little covered up for me with the most professional lie ever heard, Shuckel said afterwards.

“Moto suddenly turned pale, Brother, began retching. First thought was that he’d inhaled evaporating mercury. As class monitor I ordered him out of the class immediately, Brother, and down to the cricket field, where he is recovering now, taking deep breaths. I hope I did right, Brother?”

“That Kenny’s a fine monitor,” Brother Donally beamed when I slunk back, “quick and mature in a crisis. A good man in a shellhole, to be sure.”

He’d been shell-shocked in one of the wars, I don’t know which, and wore a steel plate in his forehead. His left eye wandered wildly and he was palpably insane. He couldn’t have cared less about my condition, but he would never have forgiven himself if he’d not been in at the death . . .

“Feeling better, are you?”

“Yes thank you, Brother.”

“Don’t worry yourself, Moto. There’s always a next time.”

Darling’s saintliness was sickening. He served at the Church of the Resurrection the early mass at six-thirty all through the week, first mass on Sunday and then acted as coin collector and usher at all the others. After receiving communion, his hands folded at his chest, his eyes screwed up, blundering into people, cocking his head towards the choir gallery so that the light from the stained glass windows fell on his face, which, not having much colour of its own, changed like a traffic light, red to orange to green, he’d make his blind way back to his pew, there to fall on his knees and stay that way until the blessing, kneading his closed eyes with his fists.

I don’t think that Little Darlin’ ever got over Fatty Wyner’s defection and he was always sucking up to him in the most nauseating fashion. Once when Jack was going on in his usual way about the super hygiene of his swimming pool van Dam, who was feeling pretty mean that day, led him over to the poolside and pointed to little bits of green hairy algae beginning to sprout in tiny patches on the wall.

“There’s breakfast growing down there, Wyner. Look! This nice little bit’d make mint sauce for Sunday lunch.”

Wyner got very upset and rushed around yelling for Amos to come and clean away the gunge. That was when Mommy’s Little stuck his oar in.

“Don’t listen to him, Jack. If your pool grows mould you can be sure it’s clean mould. Rather like penicillin. If you don’t believe me I’ll eat some just to prove it.”

“I believe you, Kenny,” Wyner said gratefully.

With my arches on the hard lip of the pool, in pain, I swayed backwards and forwards hoping the exercise would do some good. My arches had been falling for years: from Gothic to Roman and then to such an all-time low that when I ran barefoot on a flat surface they slapped along like pieces of steak.

Van Dam had given up trying to be a butterfly and was standing in the centre of the pool with water pouring from his nose and ears, trying to retch quietly.

The sun was setting behind the apple tree and the lengthening shadows were beginning to chill the pool. But nobody moved. Shuckel and Dottie continued to brood side by side, paddling their feet. Mary rested on arms outstretched along the pool lip, trailing her legs of seaweed, head back, gazing blindly into the sun, her hair smoothed along her temples, shining, a seal just surfaced. Freddie had the sprinkler going on the lawn on the other side of the trellis fence and a little breeze carried the smell of wet earth and grass. I felt for a moment that if everybody agreed on it, things could stay like that forever.

In fact, as things turned out, I was wiser than I knew. I was never again at Jack Wyner’s swimming pool. After that the dark forces took over and my separate development began. This is a statement of endings. It is produced by a voice from the past. All my endings are here except the last and I would have said that the last might have been left to the imagination were it not for the clear instruction, often repeated since I began writing, that nothing is to be left to the imagination. Nothing. Very well, then, the least I can do is to hold them to that: I shall write until I drop.

Mina was perched about two feet from me, water up to her shoulder, sitting on the step directly above the inlet pipe which boiled and frothed up between her legs. The pipe gave out purified water with enough force to buoy you up for a few moments if you sat on the bubbling column. The bubbles bombarding the legs were a pleasant sensation. We all did it now and then. Mina did it all the time. Shuckel suggested that she was sex-starved and this was her way of catching a cheap thrill. She was a bony sort, prim, with a clear complexion and a square mouth. A nice girl, my mother said. High praise. The skin across her face was tight and showed off her cheekbones to disadvantage. Unlike the other girls she always wore a bathing cap when she swam. White, tight and sensible, she was forever yanking it down over her ears with a rubbery squeak, tucking away a stray lock. It was always a shock when she took off the cap and shook loose her hair to see that it was long and quite beautifully blonde. After the bathing cap it didn’t seem to belong to her. I thought of her as all skull.

On top of the pumphouse, which was the only place left with good sun on it, Yannovitch slept. His folks had come from Yugoslavia to South Africa with nothing, and as far as I could see they still had nothing, though they ate well. Stews I’d never tasted before, and wine with every meal. A yellowish wine, tart, and served very cold from a carafe by his old man who smiled a lot and spoke no English. “Cheapest place to get smashed in town,” Shuckel said. He could be totally heartless. Mrs Yannovitch spoke English all the time very well, and was a dumpling, only much, much larger and she’d hug us before, during and after the huge meals she set before us. The Yannovitchs had this crazy way with their servants. They didn’t seem to know the first damn thing about apartheid. A family of them lived in the backyard rooms. They often ate in the kitchen and seemed to share the house.

“It’s bloody embarrassing,” van Dam complained, “to go to the pisshouse only to find this dirty great coon’s beaten you to it and you know he’s used it because he’s still buttoning up when he comes out. Obviously they’ve got no idea how to treat their servants . . . coming from Yugoslavia.”

The Yannovitchs drove an old green, hump-back Dodge to Sunday mass. Parked in among the Vauxhalls and Morrises it looked like a kaffir taxi.

“Before my folks bought it, it was a kaffir taxi,” Yannovitch said calmly when I told him this, “and it’s gone down since we got it.”

He knew how to start the Dodge with silver paper and he used to steal it on the weekends and take us for late night hamburgers at the Swiss Cottage Roadhouse. I’m sure that his folks must have known, but they pretended not to notice because they were both crazy about little Johnny and pleased that he was hanging around with Shuckel, van Dam and me. Mainly, I suspect, because they thought we were all good Anglo-Saxon boys. Meanwhile, we were a Teuton, a Dutchman and only God knows what I was.

Yannovitch did not enthuse when I told him how I felt about Mary.

“There’s rocks in your head, Moto.”

“She’s been giving me the eye.”

“Crap. You don’t know what day of the week it is. That big guy — drum-major in the bugle band . . . what’s his name? Trevor Goble — don’t you know, she’s got the hots for Goble? Everybody knows that. Anyways she doesn’t give ice in winter. None of these convent girls give. You want to get a babe from the Southern Suburbs, like me. Do they go it! Hoowha!” He clicked his fingers and licked his lips.

“I’m going to ask her to the Matric Dance.”

“You’ve lost your marbles. Anyway, you can’t dance. You’ll end up flat on your arse.”

“I’ll learn.”

“Oh yes — ” his lip drooped so much that I saw two of his bottom teeth clearly — “I can just see you . . . toddling off to Tommy Williams’ Dance Studios, Saturday morning, pushing a couple of pongy bags around the room, slow, slow — Wait! What’s this? Gram’s stopped. Wind it up again. Right. On we go — quick, quick, slow . . .”

“Wake up, Yannovitch, she’s beautiful.”

He shook his head. “Not my type. I like knockers. A good pair. Something to hold on to.” He pushed me in the chest. “Maybe you don’t care about that. Maybe you’re big enough for both of you?” He stuck his right hand up in the air and scratched his armpit. “Ha, bloody ha!”

“Anybody who is happy with the plain average is going to be offhand about excellence.”

“Oh balls.”

I stood on the edge of the pool punishing my arches on the stone lip, teetering there, setting up a rhythm. Fixing my eyes on the bubbles surging up in a fizzing swarm beneath Mina, I began my special chest-expanding exercises, being careful to keep my arms folded so the elbows covered my twin chests. They were my greatest problem. The colour of my skin was bad enough. Maybe, I admitted to myself in the small hours, I wasn’t a white man at all. Maybe I was a coloured — or a mulatto (a word I preferred because it at least had a ring to it); a coloured, O.K. — but a coloured with breasts? Now I mean to say that physically, in the manly sense, I was orthodox. One might even have described the area of my chest as nicely broad. But the fact was that my breastbone divided my front like a river running between two low hills. Seen from the side, which is mostly the way I saw myself in front of the mirror, I was struck, and struck damn often let me say, by the fact (facts) of what were, well . . . breasts. Nothing major, you understand, or in the least pneumatic, or sagging. But a pair of small ones, certainly, on either side of my breastbone, fleshy hillocks (hummocks?), mounds, anyway, gently swelling things topped by nipples. It didn’t much help knowing that otherwise I was fairly normal: for God’s sake I was even shaving my moustache and I positively bulged out of my swimming costume, a small men’s of course, in order to advertise, AND at the last measurement in the bogs at school during small break I’d found I had half an inch on Yannovitch. Quite something . . . still the facts remained. The moment I took off my shirt my bosoms knocked hell out of every credential I could muster.

I got desperate and told my mother.

“Don’t you know that adolescents always have trouble with growing glands Harry?” she asked pleasantly. “I hope you’re not thinking that you can do without your glands.”

I developed little concealments; hung my towel around my neck when we were swimming so the ends kept the old bust under cover. Or I folded my arms, and always sunbathed lying on my stomach. Even so, the word spread. Guys used to cycle past my place shouting. “Come on out, Jane Russell!” and “Give us a feel, Harry!” My mother finally got the message and took me along to a doctor who diagnosed something that sounded like one of the seven deadly sins; it was called Pectus Excavatum.

“Clack’s the name, rhymes with quack. Sunken sternum. Not an unusual condition, though notable in your case. Will go on as the chest fills out. Can be helped by exercise. Wherever you are, exercise. Think of yourself as a steam train, a dirty great locomotive, heavily loaded and starting up a steep hill: Deep breath in through the nose, now h-o-l-d it! Then out, s-l-o-w-l-y . . . choof-choof-choof . . . Do they tease you much at school?”

“No, no, not very much.” I caught my mother’s eye. She frowned and I knew she was about to tell him about the Jane Russell gag. “Well, sometimes I’m asked my bra size.”

That was one my mother hadn’t heard. She gasped.

Dr Clack laughed gently to himself. “It’s a funny old world. Half the young ladies who come to see me would give their eye-teeth to have your problem.”

He produced a bottle of thick, black, gluey syrup. “Apply to the offending parts morning and night. But rub in well because the stuff stains.”

That was true enough. It stained. It stained right through my vest and shirt front — in the middle of geography, we were discussing the Detroit automobile industry, I remember — and there appeared quite quickly, like developing pictures, two black ghastly advertisements for my secret shame. Shuckel was entranced. “It’s just like the Holy Shroud!”

Winters were all right. I was decently swaddled. But summers brought in fresh surprises. I worked at my exercises as religiously as I prayed to Jesus, Mary and Joseph that I wouldn’t die suddenly in state of mortal sin and roast in hell for ever. I puffed my all on the bus, in church, while I ate, in the classroom and in the bogs. If I remembered to keep the choof-choofs to myself then it was a secret exercise. But I did not always remember and I suppose it was this that got Mina Meintjies interested enough to look my way.

Choof! She bobbed among the bubbles like a ping-pong ball. Then her face, usually taut-skinned and flat, had an accident. It was rather like the way in which a perfect beach hit by a sudden wave is wrenched; her mouth opened really wide, her teeth stood out over her lower lip and her googly eyes slid down to my waist somewhere. Choof?

My bathing costume had this pretty loose elastic around my waist and the thighs, well, groin, actually, and I had the horrible thought that maybe the elastic had perished or something, or the strain of chest and arch exercises combined with the fact that it was the cozzie designed for a stripling pressed into the service of well-endowed Harry Moto had done it, or undone it. Anyway, when I looked where Mina was looking, there was a well-known head with its circumcised collar pushed enquiringly into the world. From where I was standing it seemed to me the sort of look a tortoise might wear, enquiring and cautious. There it was for all the world to see, dream of virgins, terror of mothers superior, absolute rebuttal of my girlish chests. Pushed enquiringly, I say, when seen from above with an owner’s fond eye. From Mina’s point of view, who knows, it might have been more true to say that it thrust brutally, or aimed, or even, if she had any imagination, leered and winked? Maybe she saw it doing all these things at once, and all at HER?

Under other circs, O.K. . . . I mean natch, I’d like to have shown everything I had to every girl I knew so that she would be happy and dream of what fate had in store for her. But it was not the right place. The run-up was wrong, the angle bad, the light failing, my audience not ready. I looked at Mina. She looked at me but not in the eye. Oh no! She wouldn’t do the decent thing and look away for even a second, time enough for me to manage a quick tuck for decency. Obviously I couldn’t stand there fumbling with myself while her eyeballs bulged as badly as I’m sure Bernadette’s did when Shazam! the Virgin Mary popped out of the rocky cleft at Lourdes. One sound from Mina, a movement and the others would all see it. And since, unlike the Virgin Mary, I couldn’t disappear, pouf! I did the next best thing. I dropped like a stone. Mina’s scream followed me into the water.

Afterwards when we’d all changed, we had tea in the garden, with Jack plying us with chocolate éclairs and Coke. The girls wore their convent tunics, shapeless, navy blue affairs with complicated drawstrings which when pulled tight at the neck gave them the look of those bags of Magaliesberg pipe tobacco, dark, greasy and pungent, which I bought to empty out the twak and keep my marbles in. Mary sat next to me and when she moved I half expected to hear the click of glass behind the cotton cloth. The other guys had changed back into school uniforms, khaki shorts and white shirts. I was wearing my Bobby Locke short-sleeved golf shirt in canary yellow I’d especially brought along in my satchel. Mary settled in her chair and licked chocolate off her éclair with a soft quick little tongue right there beside my ear.

“How nicely you tan, Harry. You’re browner than any of us.”

I stared at the arm she touched trying to believe it really belonged to me.

Mina made a noise in her nose like budgies kissing. “It’s nothing great, you know — Harry’s case. In fact there are thousands that wouldn’t give you twopence for it. He has a natural tan. It’s not something he tries for.”

“A permanent tan,” van Dam offered.

“A touch of the tarbrush,” Yannovitch declared.

Mina shrieked at that and threw up her hands in front of her face. But I saw she peered at me through her fingers.

I let it pass, very conscious of Mary’s hand resting on my arm and not daring to move in case I disturbed it. I felt intense, blood-pounding gratitude to Bobby Locke. I was amazed by the fetching way in which the cheerful shirtsleeve circled the bicep contrasting beautifully with the smooth brown arm. I flexed the arm to get the muscle up and then leaned back very casually, leaving the bicep centre-stage as it were.

“I think they’re jealous,” Mary said.

Van Dam gurgled. “Jealous! Listen. Let me tell you that when Harry first came to my place my mother thought he must be looking for work. She was on the point of offering him a job as a garden boy.”

“Shame on you boys — ” Dottie’s lip trembled — “You shouldn’t make jokes about people looking like natives.”

“No, that’s right,” van Dam nodded gravely, “the natives might not like it.”

Mother’s Little, whose heart pumped custard at the least opportunity, chipped in. “A man has his dignity.” Unwisely he pointed his finger at Yannovitch. “No matter what colour his skin is.”

Darling’s mother had made him silly in this way. Six foot in her socks, bosom like a streamroller, she was active in the Catholic Women’s League, fiend of the Cake and Candy Sales, and went about doing good with an iron will, succouring widows and so on. I had seen her at the weekly demonstrations held on the traffic island outside the University protesting against apartheid, standing with all the other old hens, heads dropped over their placards. Hers read: “I am a little black baby. In 3 Months I will die of Malnutrition.”

“Shut up Mommy’s Darling. Another peep out of you and I’ll break your skull and pour out the juice like a cokey-nut.”

I don’t know why he mispronounced that word. I’d told him a dozen times. Anyway, Darling got the message. He stood up without a word and walked outside onto the stoep where his bike was parked, took out his pump and pumped the tyres Yannovitch as per usual had let down.

“Shame,” Dottie murmured. “Why are you so horrible to him? He’ll go home now.”

“Good,” said Yannovitch. “It’s past his bath-time.”