Sex and Stravinsky (23 page)

For Jack, though it had been better fitted out since its days as an untenanted concrete hutch, his mother’s room couldn’t compete with what he thought of as the ‘big’ house, with its separate kitchen and living room and its special rooms for sleeping. And while his mother maintained the barriers, refusing herself ever to sit on the comfy living-room chairs; yanking little Jack off them with a click of her disapproving tongue, he, on her weekend visits away, curled up there on Josh’s knee, or joined the family in the dining room, where he enjoyed second helpings of Ida’s lemony chicken.

Jack, who spoke to his mother in Zulu, nonetheless spoke English with the Silvers in the accents of a white person – something that always made his visits to the corner shop a problem. And the problematical nature of Jack’s marginal status in a society so rigidly stratified by race had not bypassed the notice of Bernie and Ida Silver. But, being always busy and much preoccupied with more dramatic human problems among the dispossessed, they were not particularly hands-on with Gertrude’s child, whose dilemmas, for the moment, were fairly low down in the hierarchy of human suffering, examples of which they witnessed day by day.

‘Try not to steal that child from his mother,’ Bernie said warningly to his adopted teenage son. ‘Just take care, all right?’

Meanwhile, Ida’s solution was to raise up Gertrude with one-to-one classes in adult literacy, though Gertrude proved an obdurate pupil and faded out as soon as she could. Jack, on the other hand, thanks to natural talent and to Josh’s copious read-aloud time, could read
Little Bear
and
Cat in the Hat
and several of the Blue Pirate books before the age of four. He also loved the epistolary art, as he and Josh wrote letters to each other in an ongoing game in which they posted their efforts into a home-made, red-painted cardboard post box with a slot cut into the top. The box sat on the back veranda, alongside an old stone sink.

Dear Jack

Please will you come and play with me today?

From your loving friend,

Josh

Josh always used an envelope on which he wrote the Silvers’ address, followed by ‘Southern Hemisphere, the World, the Universe’. He made tiny pretend stamps cut out from magazine pictures and faked the graphics of the Post Office franking machines, including the bilingual exhortations to drive safely home. ‘DRIVE SAFELY/
KOM VEILIG TUIS
.’

Jack, though his mother regarded these items with suspicion, kept a shoebox of paper and fibre pens on a shelf above his pillow on the top bunk bed that had come to replace the cot in which he once slept.

Dear Josh

I will come.

From Jack

Then he decorated his letters with marvellous pictures of tractors and busily crashing cars. He drew Hannibal crossing the Alps with great numbers of elephants. He drew King Arthur and his knights in armour. He drew castles with moats and drawbridges. Jack drew tightrope walkers and clowns. He never drew Zulu warriors with assegais and shields.

Because the Silvers were oddballs, they never demanded of their maidservant that the boy be dispatched, as most black infants were, from the time that they were weaned; sent away as toddlers, back to the ‘native reserve’ – the reserve that, in Jack’s case, had now been redefined as the Bantu homeland of KwaZulu – because a native child was, by law, an unproductive unit who had no automatic rights of residence in town by virtue of parental employment there.

So Jack, devoid of peer-group playmates, lingered contentedly in the Silvers’ backyard through the period of his preschool life – until Gertrude one day without prior consultation simply, unilaterally, removed her son to his maternal grandmother and left him there, her precocious, urban, pale-skinned child, and she beat a hasty retreat. The removal took place towards the end of Josh’s 3rd year at university and in the very week of Jack’s own guest appearance in the drama school’s production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
; Jack, ‘the little changeling boy’, Titania’s ward, the stolen child. Gertrude took Jack, still dreaming of greasepaint, in the bus along that same bumpy road upon which she had once met Josh; Jack, who had no previous knowledge of rural life, had never met his grandmother, knew nothing of this eroded scrap of washed-up land on which those too old and too young were eking out a half-life at somewhere below subsistence. Gertrude had, thus far, always made her visits there without her son – and Josh’s invariable, eager offers of sleepover had made this easy for her. But now the time had come.

These years of rural exile have etched themselves upon Jack’s brain. They have made their way into the bone and marrow of his being. The grim, joyless grandmother, the ragged, teasing children – several of them, apparently his own nieces and nephews – offspring of a feckless adult half-sister he never knew he had; the hovel that smelled of grass and mud and unwashed bodies and rags stiffened with ancient sweat, where he was required to sleep on the floor along with all the others; all under a low grass roof from which bugs and crawlies dropped on to his face and limbs in the night. Angry red itchy bumps made their appearance on his arms and legs, where they remained as a semi-permanent fixture. He was soon dressed in rags himself, because Grandmother had seized her chance to sell all his good town clothes.

School was a barefoot three-mile walk to a windowless garage-type construction, laid out with rows of backless benches, where the children sat jammed up in rows before a teacher who had, himself, not gone to school beyond the age of fourteen and often reeked of drink. Sometimes the teacher would fall asleep with his head down on the table, allowing the bolder students to creep away before their time. Jack discovered himself devoid of techniques for bonding with other children and it did not help that his reading and writing were glaringly proficient, while those years older than himself were spelling out monosyllabic words in time to the teacher’s dreary tap-tap at the blackboard. All classroom learning was by rote and most of it – for want of paper – was chanted out loud. The teacher kept a big stick and frequently lashed out. Grandmother also kept a stick and she lashed out as well.

Some days he had to skip school and take a turn minding Grandmother’s goats. He didn’t care too much for the goats but he preferred them to the schoolroom. He disliked the smelly intimacy of drawing the goats’ milk, and then the hazardous prospect of carrying it back – what with the terror of spillage, or the other children grabbing the pail to slurp at it before he had made it home. Grandmother would always notice if there was less milk than there should have been and she’d have cause to reach for her stick.

Grandmother, like all the malevolent hags in storybooks, appeared to have only one tooth. Her cheeks were shrivelled. Her eyes had a yellowy film. She went in for mean-minded pinches that left purple bruises on his skin. She grabbed his ears and cackled. Everyone was in threadbare clothes, including Grandmother herself and the teacher. Some of the smaller boys wore grown-up men’s jackets for want of more appropriate clothing; jackets that hung below their knees and were vastly too wide on the shoulders; snot-encrusted cuffs covering their hands.

Food was maize porridge that sometimes came with sharp soured milk curds, or with a smear of sludgy greenish veg. Just occasionally, the porridge came with little bits of animal: chicken’s feet; a boiled head; washed-out innards like those big rubber bands on Bernie Silver’s desk. Oh do not think of Bernie’s desk. Not now; not any more. Everywhere had flies because no one had a fridge and there was no electric light. The lav was a box over a reeking hole in the ground into which small children had been known to fall and drown. His shrunken homeland was a hell of dust and turds and flies, and of the sort of green-eyed watchfulness that can accompany extremes of deprivation. Jack hated the smell of the fermenting grains when Grandmother made her vats of beer. He hated all things to do with local rituals; with skins and feathers and gall bladders tied in a person’s hair, or the skeletons of snakes. There were bent-up old men with bleary eyes and head rings and feathers, who would babble around smoky fires about ancient and glorious times before the white man came and took the land. For toys, the children played in the dirt, skimming dusty stones with dustier hands into dusty hollows in the earth.

Then one day it was three years on and Jack spotted his chance. Kept behind as a punishment for he cannot remember what, Jack observed that the teacher was once again asleep, with his head upon the table. But on this occasion something else was lying there as well. There was a letter, addressed to the teacher, and the envelope, he could see, bore an unfranked stamp. Jack approached and reached out with care, because the teacher would always beat his pupils more readily after he had been drinking. Letters had not been a feature of Jack’s life, not since Josh and the red-painted post box, but in a moment the item was in his pocket and he had tiptoed from the schoolroom.

The relentless absence of privacy in the village, along with the paucity of resources, meant that it was several days before Jack had managed to reseal the back of the envelope and fix a scrap of paper over its existing address with a smear of stolen schoolroom glue. He still knew the Silvers’ address by heart, though he left off ‘Southern Hemisphere, the World, the Universe’. He fed the teacher’s letter to one of the goats and his own letter was written on the yellowing, torn-out title page of the only book that he had snatched up from Josh’s bedroom three years earlier: a small paperback copy of
Treasure Island
; the version he’d made off with in preference to the more enticing but less portable illustrated hardback.

Dear Josh

I ask you please to come for me.
Please
. I ask you to come
soon
. I ask you to come
now
. I ask you,
please
,
soon
,
NOW
.

From your old friend, Jack

He entrusted the letter in a last daring minute to a young adult migrant worker, who was returning that day to his packing job in a Durban warehouse. Then he could do nothing but wait, and wait, and hope.

When Josh got Jack’s letter, he had just recently had good news about his application for a graduate scholarship in London. Josh had got himself a little car – his very own third-hand 2CV – along with a driving licence, and Hattie Thomas, his dance teacher, had become his constant companion. At this time, he still had hopes of persuading Hattie to leave the country with him and the two of them occasionally indulged in pleasant fantasies about flat-sharing in Pimlico – or maybe near Hampstead Heath?

‘Hey, remember little Jack?’ he said to Hattie, who had met Jack during the play rehearsals three years earlier and also, just once, on that weekend visit to the Silvers’ house when Gertrude was out of town.

Then Josh pulled the letter from his pocket.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘He needs us. He’s written me a letter at long bloody last. It’s written from this nowhere-land, but I’ve
finally
screwed out of Gertrude exactly where it is. The bloody woman, she’s such a lump, and getting anything out of her is like drawing blood from a stone. God only knows, I’ve given her umpteen letters for him – letters and books and all sorts of stuff – that’s whenever she’s gone up there on a visit, and I’ve never heard a single word back. Not until now. Anyway, let’s go. We’re going to drive there right now and get him.’

‘Does Gertrude know?’ Hattie said. ‘I mean –’

Josh fixed her with a look.

‘Of course she doesn’t know,’ he said. ‘I mean.
As if
.’

After a few false turnings and a quick stopover at a filling station where the shop afforded Josh the opportunity to buy a range of appeasement gifts for Jack’s grandmother – twelve tins of pilchards in tomato sauce, eight tins of evaporated milk, three spit-roasted chickens sweating in foil-lined bags and a tray containing eighteen nearly ripe peaches – the 2CV bumped into the settlement towards the end of the afternoon, raising clouds of dust. Everyone stopped and stared: ragged children with a plastic football; adults lingering in doorways; scrawny dogs. And, at a distance, the furthest distance, leaning on one mosquito-bitten leg against a red mud wall, was Jack, who was not staring. Beautiful Jack, taller, skinnier, wearing frayed khaki shorts and reading
Treasure Island
.

In his head, as he’d been doing for years, he was choreographing the story. Blind Pugh, coming up the hill. Tap-tap-tap. He waited for Josh to get out and approach him, with the cardboard box in his hands. Jack moved hardly at all. With his right hand, he gestured towards his grandmother’s hut. His face was like a mask. Then Josh, while Hattie waited in the car, proceeded to the doorway and made over the gifts, the pilchards and tinned milk; the sweating chickens; the peaches.

‘I come from Gertrude,’ he said and he hinted at a little bow. He spoke to the old woman in Zulu, which he’d once learned at dear Pru’s knee. ‘I’ve come to fetch the boy,’ he said.

Grandmother took possession of the tribute. She put it down in the hovel. Jack waited, leaning against the wall, as Josh took his leave. He fetched nothing, spoke to nobody, looked neither to left nor right. He waited until the courtesies were done. Then he followed Josh to the car and climbed into the back. Josh undertook a three-point turn, raising a further cloud of dust. He gave a swift parp-parp and waved his hand in the air through the open window. Jack stared, expressionless, into the back of Josh’s head. His hands were in his lap, holding the book.