What followed was often a treacherous game. Taking his subject gently into the strong circle of his thick arm Willem would adopt an almost fatherly tone, murmuring, ‘Come on , come, Joodjie, it’s about time I got you a bit tough. Let’s teach you how to take it, eh …’ Then he would begin, flicking Felix’s ears with his fingernails, perhaps, grappling knee muscles with timber-hard hands, punching biceps, blowing illicit cigarette smoke into his face. There was always the chance that his mood would push him across a certain boundary, and he would bring the burning end of his cigarette closer and closer to blistering point, until enough terror showed. Once he rubbed with a moistened thumb at a spot on Felix’s hand until the skin broke and was left to leak and fester …
‘I’m only playing with him,’ he invariably explained if any of the staff happened on the scene of his game.
With his new perspective, Felix judged that he would feel quite differently about such things if he had to undergo them again, far less negatively. After all, the bully only rarely inflicted a real injury. The way things appeared now, if Willem puffed smoke at him, the knowledge that cigarettes were strictly forbidden to the boys would add to his sense of grazing up against Life as he choked and struggled to turn his face away, a touch of admiration, a tickle of mirth at Willem’s bravado. And he played with the thought that the other ex-inmates of the Home, similarly broadened by experiences of life away from that protected hilltop, ought also to see the remembered Willem cloaked in this benign nimbus of revised appreciation. When, with the benefit of maturity and detachment, they recalled the things he had done to them, they ought to chuckle nostalgically, or even feel grateful.
There was, for instance, the tall big-boned fellow whom Willem once dealt a black eye. Granted some perspective, that boy might find the memory more than a little amusing – especially recalling that the bruises round his eye were outlasted by the days that Willem’s sprained hand first had had to be wrapped in sticking plaster – and laugh out loud while rocking on his callipered legs and crutches.
And the feelings of the dwarfish boy whom Willem had swung round in the air while holding him by the ankles should be, whenever he looked back on the incident, a surge of gratitude for a unique experience. Counting up the number of times his head touched the floor as he whirled round and round through that switchback circle, his gratitude should grow in proportion to Willem’s ingenuity and determination and strength. And so through the ranks of all who had lived in fear of the top dog’s whims. All would be able to recall his ‘punishments’ and ‘lessons’ in a light-hearted, positive spirit, instead of with the bitterness of victims. Ripeness had surely endowed them with the same genial balance that Felix now felt he enjoyed.
In those days, however, his outlook had been as distorted and narrow as any. It was as though, somehow, he had remained fixed for months and years in the after-effects of his first fright from Willem. As a new boy, he’d been jerked awake one night by the suffocating pressure of a heavy hand clapped over his nose and mouth while the dark simmered with giggling. While he kicked and squirmed, Willem muttered in his ear, as though giving some kindly advice, ‘Suffocation … You shouldn’t of told anybody this is what you scared of.’
He had led a gang of pyjamaed raiders from upstairs to give the smaller boys’ dormitory a little skrik, just for fun, just to remind everyone who was boss. But the shock had left Felix unnerved and bitter. In the shallow soil of his inexperience he had, after that, rooted an unrealistic tree of heroic righteousness. He conscientiously hated Willem with the abhorrence of a Round Table knight for villainy. He cherished dreams of revenge; and meanwhile, whenever it seemed possible to do so, he regarded it as an honour to foil the bully.
That was why, when he had seen him swinging that pigeon-chested boy by his ankles and heard the thump that came each time his skull bounced on the floor, he had burst noisily into tears and created so much surprise – and perhaps it had never before happened that one boy cried because of something that was being done to another – that Willem had stopped what he was doing and turned to growl, ‘What the blerry hell’s the matter with you …? Shut your bek or I’ll donner you,’ before stomping out the common-room.
And then there was Basil the Catholic boy with the good singing voice who slept in the bed next to Felix’s in the downstairs dormitory. When Willem had wanted to push Basil in his wheel-chair around the building to the quiet, hidden part of the lawn, and then to undo the hank of rope he always had hanging from his Scout belt and fold it into a thick lash, and then to have one of his henchmen take Basil out of the wheelchair and place him on all fours on the grass, and then to … When Willem announced that intention to his justice committee, Felix found that he had to intervene. He came out with, ‘No, Willem, don’t give him lashes. He’s weak, and you might damage him seriously.’
‘What the hell you talking about? You shut up. He’s got to be punished.’
‘Yes, sure. But Willem, listen, I know what … Just let us tell him that on Wednesday after supper you are going to take him there and do that …’
‘What you mean?’ Willem demanded. ‘He’s got to have his punishment. There’s got to be no stealing from lockers.’
Yes I know. But he will be punished.’ And then Felix explained how they would let Basil wait three days in suspense, and how at the end of that time, on Wednesday after supper, they would have him wheeled out to that hidden part of the lawn as though that were the time for it, and how only then Willem would tell him that he had been punished enough.
‘That won’t teach him not to steal.’
‘Oh yes, it will,’ Felix pointed out. ‘It will be even worse than the other.’
Willem looked at him suspiciously. ‘But listen here,’ he growled, ‘I’ll break your blerry neck if you tell him we not really going to punish him. Hoor jy?’ Then he told someone to go and fetch Basil into his presence.
The reason for Felix’s sudden promotion to Willem’s counsels was that it was his locker that had been robbed. It was his purse with his one-and tenpence in it that had disappeared. He had hunted for it and told the boys of his dormitory. The word had got to Willem, their policeman, judge and executioner, and he had summoned all the boys into the common room and commanded them to own up, and in the usual way had been met with a sheepish silence. Then he had ordered a search of all downstairs lockers. It was fruitless, but afterwards the purse had been found under Basil’s mattress.
The recovery of the purse satisfied Felix, but of course it also meant the finding of a culprit, and that demanded Willem’s judicial attention. ‘There’s got to be no stealing from lockers,’ he proclaimed. ‘Anyone who steals form lockers has got to be severely punished.’
Basil, the dormitory’s songbird, omitted his usual ritual of singing softly to his roommates after lights-out that night. In fact he remained very quiet during the whole of those three days leading to Wednesday evening. He sat drooping in his wheelchair, bothering to drive himself only when and where he was compelled to. His eyes avoided every face, and his answers to anyone who addressed him were short and absent.
When Felix saw that no one else was nearby he came close and said, ‘Listen, Basil, don’t be anxious about what is going to happen on Wednesday. Believe me, you don’t have to worry about it. I …’ Basil gave a start, thrust out his trembling lower lip, glared for a moment, then turned his head aside, without answering a word, and began to propel himself away. It was the same the other two or three times that Felix tried to pass him a hint about the real state of affairs. ‘Look, about old Willem and Wednesday after supper, you don’t have to …’ But each time a surge of blind fear and anger made it impossible for Basil to take in the comforting news.
On Wednesday at