At first he’d thought it was a pretty girl fooling around, dressed up in her mom’s heels. She teetered across the grass in a camisole that only just made it past her hips, plenty of shapely leg on show, a sling bag over her shoulder and long ropes of beads around her neck. The boys at the stream stopped playing and watched her pass. She smiled at them, waved, but kept walking towards William. Aw, fuck! Oh, Jesus, no! he thought as he recognised Chas. He saw the boys go into a huddle and confer. Then they advanced in a pincer-like movement and started to close in.
Chas was beatific, completely consumed by creating his twelve-year-old boy’s version of a catwalk model, except that, unlike a model, he was grinning, as if to say: “Look at me pulling off this stunt!” He knew William had recognised him.
William measured the distances, triangulated them. He could not reach Chas in time to save him. All he could do was prolong his friend’s doomed happiness; make sure Chas was completely relaxed when the blows rained down on him, as he knew they would. So William smiled back, a congratulatory, “Good on ya, mate!” kind of smile.
The boys fell on Chas, ripping off the jewellery and the camisole. William dropped the cage and sprinted towards them. One of the boys punched Chas. The group dragged the slim, dazed figure towards the stream. William caught up with them as they began plunging Chas’s head under the water. His boyish chest was covered in goose bumps.
“Stop, you fuckers!” shouted William.
“Why? He your girlfriend or something? You fucking queers! Fucking moffies!”
“Leave him alone! What’s he done to you? Why’d you take all his clothes off? Maybe you’re the fucking moffies.”
To his relief, he saw Emmanuel, tall and gaunt, wearing a black rain cape, loping across the grass towards them, hoe in hand.
“Careful,” said William. “Here comes Death the Reaper.”
The bullies were distracted long enough for William to wrap his windbreaker around the shivering Chas. He urged his friend to hurry, get up. Then Emmanuel reached them and escorted them back to Midden House.
“But what I don’t understand,” said Mrs Fawkes later, “is why they pulled your clothes off? Punching you on the nose I quite understand. I mean, it’s not very nice, but that’s what boys do. Did you see them, William? What happened?”
Emmanuel had gone off with the broken strings of beads to see if he could fix them. He had already binned the ripped camisole.
William didn’t know what to say. He’d heard about Chas’s Uncle Ernie, who’d killed himself in a Durban hotel room, whose name couldn’t be mentioned at Midden House, certainly not in front of Mr Fawkes senior, at any rate.
“They were low-class children,” he said eventually. “Afrikaners, I think.”
“Ah,” said Mrs Fawkes. “That explains it.”
Screened by the milkwoods, William’s dagga grew around his cottage in leafy abundance.
“Hello, hello, hello!” said Chas when William held his lantern above the plants. “It’s a veritable forest. What do we do now? Harvest some?”
“Shh,” said William. “They’re sleeping. Come inside for some highquality THC.”
They entered through the back door of the cottage and were greeted by Dib, who twirled her tail against their legs. The place smelt of cigarettes and dirty carpet. An electric bulb, attached by copper and zinc wires to four fresh lemons, burned weakly.
“Please feel free to use the toilet while you’re here,” said William.
“I’m fine, thanks,” said Chas.
“It all goes down into a tank underground and turns into biogas,” said William. “I’m nearly off the grid, but I still use the plugs occasionally.”
“You actually cook off the energy from your poo?”
William nodded eagerly. “No shit!” he quipped.
Chas surveyed the clutter William had accumulated in his bungalow. “This place has changed a bit since your folks were alive,” he said. “Are you storing things for a garage sale or something?”
Empty vodka bottles were ranged along the length of the window sill. The kitchen table was covered with dozens of empty Marmite jars, all spotlessly clean. William picked one up. “How can you throw away something that fits so perfectly into your hand? Come, I’ll show you where I hide the weed.”
Except for a narrow path that wound between the piles, the floor of William’s cottage was taken up with a mishmash of detritus. William had collected his treasures in large baskets or stacked them in piles against the walls.
“So, do you have plans for all this stuff?” asked Chas.
“A lot of the electronics I can fix. Take this, for example – a first generation PlayStation. Someone just left it out with their trash, can you believe it?”
Chas looked as though he could very well believe it, but said nothing.
Accompanied by Dib, William led Chas through the maze to what had perhaps once been a conventional bedroom, but now contained, in addition to the bed, all the larger things William had collected from tips and dumps: a pinball machine, a lawnmower and several TV sets stacked on top of one another. A ladder stood against the wall, protruding up into a dark hole where a square of ceiling board had been removed. As if she knew what they were looking for, Dib climbed the ladder ahead of them. Her cat’s eyes peeped at them from the attic.
“I went up there once to fix a leak in the roof, and Dib just loved it, so I left it open. Now I hide my valuables up here.”
“Valuables?” asked Chas. “Considering all the junk you’re hoarding, I’d be interested to find out what you consider ‘valuable’. ”
William went up the ladder and reached into the recesses of the loft space. He brought out a small plastic bank bag of dope and handed it down to Chas. Then he reached in again and brought out a heavy-duty cloth money bag. This, too, he handed down to Chas.
“Have a look in there.”
“Damn heavy,” said Chas. He pulled open the drawstring bag. “Fuck me, William! Are these real gold coins?”
“Kruger rands,” said William. “Every time I get paid for a job, I buy more. If I’m going through a really lean patch, then I sell a few.”
“So you don’t like paying bank charges?” asked Chas.
“I don’t trust banks,” said William.
After William had put the gold back in the attic they went outside to smoke a joint. William’s entertainment area consisted of a patch of paving made from salvaged bricks. Chas sat on the weathered sofa wedged against the wall of the cottage. William sat on a gnarled tree trunk. Their table was the old plastic crate containing the quail.
Chas peered into the quail cage. “How do you kill a thing like this?” he asked. “I mean, if you’re really planning on eating it? Do you blow its head off with a gun?”
William laughed. “There wouldn’t be any quail left if you did that. No, I believe that you pop its head off with your thumbs, or stretch the neck out and use a pair of scissors. I haven’t actually tried it.”
He frowned because it was a cruel thing, to kill an animal. Still, it was worse to eat meat you hadn’t killed yourself.
William