Blind Date at a Funeral (6 page)

(Soundtrack: ‘Africa' by Toto)

I woke up in the back seat of a Volkswagen Beetle. My neck was stiff, my body was aching and I was freezing. It can get really cold in the Karoo, especially if you are sleeping in a car.

Shivering, I extricated myself from the vehicle and stretched. I pulled a blanket around my shoulders.

I was in a little town in the Karoo called Prince Albert. The town was quaint but desolate and completely void of hustle and bustle. In those days it was a rather empty place.

The sun had just risen and both the sleepy town and the Swartberg mountains in the distance were bathed in the kind of golden light you only see in the movies.

I had slept in the car because I did not have any money for a hotel room. I had hitched a lift from two Rhodesian guys. They were driving back from Cape Town to Salisbury via Johannesburg in a blue 1962 Volksie. They had kindly offered me a lift and I had given them the last of my holiday money for petrol.

They wanted to take some of the back roads to Johannesburg and we landed up in Prince Albert. It was dark when we arrived and they parked in a gravel lot across the road from where they were rooming.

It was pitch black and the stars were so bright that it seemed, with outstretched hands, you could almost touch the Milky Way.

We were all exhausted after arriving and the guys went inside to get some sleep.

At first I rested my back on the bonnet of the car and gazed at the stars. I had never really seen a night sky like that before. I lay there for a while, marvelling at meteorites and shooting stars that moved silently across the velvet sky.

Then the wind picked up, so I climbed into the cramped back seat and tried to sleep.

The morning seemed to take forever to arrive because, during the night, I woke up a thousand times with lame limbs or because I thought I heard something outside the car.

Now I was happy it was morning and I marvelled at the magnificent sunrise. Leaning against the car, I closed my eyes and smiled. The early morning sun felt good on my face. I pulled the blanket even tighter around my shoulders.

‘I'm going to make a fire now-now,' said a voice behind me.

I got such a fright I almost jumped out of my skin. I spun around to see who was behind me.

The voice came from a man not twenty metres away. He was sitting on a wooden chair in the back of a bakkie.

‘Sorry,' he chuckled. ‘Did I mos give you a skrik?'

I nodded, wondering why on earth he was sitting on a wooden stool in the back of a bakkie.

He stood up and stretched. Then he climbed out of the back of the vehicle and reached over, taking the chair off.

‘I'm not mal,' he said, chuckling, ‘you know, sitting on the back of a bakkie on a chair like I was.' He was coloured and had a very thick accent.

I smiled, not quite sure what to make of him or the situation. I felt a little awkward and uncomfortable.

I looked around anxiously.

He picked up on this and chuckled again. ‘Don't worry, my bru. I'm a Kapie but I'm not a criminal.'

‘Ja, I know,' I said, lying.

He walked away and looked over his shoulder. ‘I'm just going to get some paper and wood, né?'

I decided it would probably be better to get back into the car and lock the doors. I sat inside the Volksie, hoping the Rhodesians would come out of the hotel and we could get going. I was expecting them any minute, because they said they wanted to get moving as soon as the sun rose.

The man came back a few minutes later and proceeded to make a fire in the veld near to where the car was parked.

I felt a bit dumb sitting in the car and got out to join the man.

The fire took quickly. The heat felt so good on my hands. I was glad I had joined him.

‘I know you are asking yourself why is that crazy ou sitting on a chair on the back of a bakkie,' he said.

‘Ummm, sort of,' I said.

‘Ja, well, my great-great-grandfather was a Khoisan from this area. He was a Rain Fetcher. He passed that on to his son and then it was passed on down to my grandfather and then my father.'

He paused and looked up into the clear, cloudless, Karoo sky.

‘Then, year before last, my father died so I had to come back here from Cape Town and take over the job,' he said. ‘From District Six to the Karoo. One way.'

‘What's a Rain Fetcher?' I asked, trying not to sound ignorant.

‘Ag, you know,' he replied. ‘I ask the spirits for rain. We always need rain here. If we did not have Rain Fetchers, this place would be like the Kalahari. Even the farmers here sometimes ask me to fetch the rain for them, even if they don't believe in spirits. Ha. They ask anyway, just in case.'

‘Why do you put your chair up there and sit on the bakkie?' I asked.

‘So the spirits can see me better,' he replied, seriously.

Just then the guys emerged from the hotel and we got ready to leave.

I would have loved to talk to him more. For a writer and story-collector, his apologue would have made an amazing book or movie.

I waved as I got into the car.

He waved back, lighting a cigarette.

‘Was that Hottentot giving you crap?' said one of the Rhodesians.

‘No,' I replied. ‘He was actually quite—'

‘Wow,' said the driver, interrupting me and pointing towards the dark clouds looming above the distant mountains in front of us. ‘Check that. Looks like we're in for some rain.'

(Soundtrack: ‘Funeral for a Friend / Love Lies Bleeding' by Elton John)

She was leaving the next morning.

I wasn't sure if I would ever see her again. I lay in bed, praying that her family would suddenly change their minds. That they would not move to England.

I didn't want her to go.

She was my first love. And that love was so deeply embedded in my heart it actually hurt when I thought about her, even if she was sitting in the same room as me.

I didn't want this magical time in my life to end. At fourteen, I was not particularly religious, but I begged God and the angels and Buddha and Shiva, and any other gods or near-gods or god representatives that I could think of, to help me out.

But unfortunately I did not pray hard enough, or I said the wrong prayers, because the family left as planned the next day.

I could not sleep the night before she left. The ache in my chest was keeping me awake.

As I lay counting sheep I heard the sound of silkworms. They were in a shoebox under my bed. They were crunching away at the pile of fresh mulberry leaves I put in the box before I went to bed.

Thankfully a school friend gave the mulberry leaves to me, because there were very few of those trees in my neighbourhood. If I wanted to get some leaves, I had to go down the street and around the corner, down a few blocks, and around another corner to a garden behind a high fence. On the other side of the fence was the tree.

Unfortunately, it was a little dangerous and somewhat difficult to acquire the leaves because of the woman who owned the house. She did not like little kids climbing over the fence and absconding with Spar bags filled with handfuls of leaves for their silkies.

Sometimes she would arrive home just as we were making our escape from her garden. She would swerve her car across the road and jump out and confront us.

One time she cornered my friend and I just as we scrambled over her fence.

‘Hey, little boy!' she yelled. ‘You do not have permission to take the leaves off my tree!'

‘What leaves?' said my friend, hiding the white plastic bag behind his back.

‘My mulberry leaves,' the woman said.

‘Ag, how do you know?' said my friend.

‘Because your mouth is bloody purple!' she screamed.

I looked over at my friend and indeed his mouth was purple. Not only were his lips mulberry-stained but the whole area around his mouth was purple too. It looked like the face of a drunken woman who had attempted to apply lipstick while driving over a series of speed bumps.

He quickly licked his fingers and tried to wipe the mulberry stains off his lips with the back of his hand.

‘And you there, whistling Dixie,' she said, pointing at me. ‘Don't look so smug. Your face is purple too, you little shit.'

My friend and I looked at each other and we burst out laughing. We both must have been a sight with our purple-stained fingers and mouths. It was always very hard to pick mulberry leaves without sampling the plump, delicious, juicy fruit.

‘Give me those leaves back,' she yelled, lunging at my friend.

My friend bolted, and, with me right on his tail, we ran in the opposite direction to my house just in case she followed.

‘I'll wring your little legs,' she yelled after us.

We ducked around the corner and hid in the garden of a house that belonged to a classmate of ours. Then, after the coast was clear, we climbed out from behind the bushes and nonchalantly sauntered back to my house to feed the silkworms.

I had pretty much grown out of the silkworm phase by the time the love of my life announced to the kids in the neighbourhood that she and her mom and brother were moving to England.

I'll never forget the day she told us she was leaving. She was so excited. I was so devastated. It felt like someone stuck a knife into my heart. I was so desperately in love with her I could hardly think straight.

It was true love.

We were best friends, she and I. We did everything together. We were pretty much inseparable before she moved to the UK.

We had been going steady, dating for over three years. Actually let me qualify that. I was going steady with HER for three years. Sadly, she didn't even know we were dating. And to my knowledge, she still doesn't. You see, much to my dismay, she loved my younger brother, not me. This complicated my one-sided romance with her immensely.

‘I love her,' I told my brother one day.

‘Hey, you can have her,' he replied. ‘I just like to kiss her, that's all.'

Ouch!

I mean, truth be told, she knew I was in love with her. It was painfully obvious. I was like a puppy with his tongue hanging out when I was around her. And she took full advantage of that. She had me wrapped around her pinkie finger. She played with my world like it was a little toy.

I tried everything in the book to get her to fall for me, but she only had eyes for my brother. The crazy thing was that my handsome, blue-eyed little brother had a bunch of girls after him and he didn't particularly care one way or the other.

‘Why don't you just tell her you love her?' he said, shrugging his shoulders.

Easy for him to say.

Which brings me back to the night before she was leaving and the sound of silkworms.

I decided to take my brother's advice and tell her that I loved her before she left. I was going to get it off my chest. I was going to give her my love to carry to England.

I didn't know how to tell her though. I didn't want to write a letter, because I knew she would show it to her older brother, who was my idol. I didn't want him to think I was a blithering idiot. Which I was when I was around her.

It was very expensive to phone overseas in those days so I knew I would not be able to tell her over the phone once she had arrived there.

That's when my little sister came to the rescue.

‘Look at this,' she said earlier that day as I was walking past her room.

She lifted the lid of her silkworm box and pointed inside.

‘Look what Mommy and I made,' she said, excitedly.

My mom had cut a heart shape out of cardboard, glued it on to the top of a pin and pushed the pin into the bottom of a shoebox. She then put a silkworm on the heart and as the little silkworm crisscrossed the cardboard, looking for a way off, it spun a beautiful, paper-thin, silk heart.

Then it hit me. I needed to give the girl a silk heart to take with her to England as a token of my love.

I bought a bunch of silkworms and leaves from one of the kids down the street.

I punched some holes in a shoebox with my yellow Bic pen and put the silkworms and mulberry leaves in the box. Then I cut a small heart out of cardboard and glued it to a pin, which I stuck into the bottom of the box. I took a little silkworm that had started spinning and put it on the heart.

I closed the box and put it under my bed.

I lay awake all night with the most awful pain in my chest. Without knowing it, I was experiencing deep grief. In truth, I was not only pregrieving the loss of my first love, I was grieving a magical time that I knew, deep down, I would never have again in my life.

I finally went to sleep with the sound of silkworms in my ears.

I woke up the following morning with the sound of hadedas in my ears. The day had come to say goodbye. I had butterflies and I was nauseous.

A group of us kids and a few parents from the neighbourhood huddled around the car to say goodbye. There were tears and laughter from the group, with promises of being in touch and never forgetting and always being friends.