He was thirteen. Old enough to fish, old enough to take himself to school, old enough to cook supper and sleep alone all night; but not old enough to take on the likes of Oom Daan and Hasie Viljoen. He knew that they would never let him stay in the house by himself. They weren’t like Sharkey. Or rather, the Sharkey he thought he knew. He didn’t know this new Sharkey, who would go to Lüderitz for a whole year without even saying goodbye – and worst of all, leave instructions for the house to be sold and for Grant to be taken to Cape Town.
He knows I hate Cape Town, Grant thought, kicking open the gate. He knows I can’t stand Uncle Roy’s huge, dead house and that creepy grandfather clock that ticks so loudly all day and night, reminding you of how bored you are.
All the way home he had tried to formulate a plan, but he couldn’t seem to think straight.
Hurry, he told himself, conscious of the impending arrival of Oom Daan in Hasie Viljoen’s truck, but his thoughts and movements remained slow and heavy.
Of only one thing was he sure, as sure as the very rocks his little house was made of – he didn’t want to leave the West Coast and go and live in Cape Town.
I bet you drank too much at the Paternoster Hotel, Grant said to Sharkey’s bleached wooden chair, the one he always sat in when he was carving. And you talked a lot of rubbish and then passed out and now everyone is believing your Old Brown Sherry talk. But not me. I know you, Sharkey.
Sharkey was Grant’s only real friend. He hadn’t made any good friends at the school in Langebaanweg because nearly all the kids there were the sons and daughters of army fathers. Not one of them had a father like Sharkey. So he spoke to them at school and played touch rugby some afternoons, but he never invited them home to his little stone house just left of the hardware store. What for? Sharkey was there. Except, he wasn’t there any more; he’d gone, without even saying goodbye.
“I’m alone,” Grant said out loud. The words, once spoken, unnerved him. For just a moment, the soft grey eyes of Tant Lisbeth came to him and he wondered if he shouldn’t just go and tell her everything and hope that she would solve all these problems. But then something hard and determined floated through the open door on the salty evening breeze and he was Sharkey’s son once more.
He roamed through the house, from the kitchen through the living room and into the small, low-ceilinged bedroom he shared with Sharkey. He looked at everything: the small wrought-iron beds, the knife-scarred table and the wooden chairs that had belonged to his mother’s mother. He opened the doors of the cupboards and pulled out the drawers – as if searching for inspiration, wisdom, someone to tell him what to do.
He was just about to leave the bedroom when he heard a strange noise, an electronic buzzing sound that seemed to be coming from under Sharkey’s bed. He crawled under the low, single-bed frame and looked about. There was nothing there that could make such a sound, only an old pair of shoes.
Then a thought occurred to him. He felt about for the ridge marking the trapdoor that was cut into the wooden floor. His fingers found it. He tucked them under the rim of the panel and pulled it up. He wriggled a bit further under the bed and reached his forearm into the secret hiding hole that only he and Sharkey knew about.
The first thing his exploration unearthed was his knife, the one Sharkey had given him on his thirteenth birthday. “You’re a man now,” Sharkey had said, “and a man must have a knife.” Grant forced the picture of his father’s face out of his mind. The memory of that birthday made him feel weak, as he felt when Tant Lisbeth looked kindly at him.
He felt around a bit more, in case Sharkey had stashed any bank notes there, rolled up tightly in rubber bands, as he sometimes did when he was saving up for something – like a new net or a new school shirt for Grant. He couldn’t feel any but his fingers did encounter another object, smooth and cold to the touch. He pulled it out, together with his knife.
Grant stared at his find in bewilderment. So he was right, that noise had come from Sharkey’s cellphone, the one Oom Daan had been looking for. The phone indicated that a message had just come through. The wooden floor had distorted the sound, but Grant had still recognised it. Now why would Sharkey’s phone be in the hiding hole?
Sharkey always carried two things with him: his knife and his cellphone, both of them for business purposes. “Accountants have their calculators, shopkeepers have their tills; I have my phone and my knife,” Sharkey had told him.
They were the tools of the smokkel trade Sharkey ran, the illegal fishing and trapping of crayfish he did on behalf of some hotels in the area and, of course, the tourists who happened to enquire at the Beach Café as to where they could buy fresh fish and crayfish in Langebaan.
Sharkey hadn’t wanted a mobile at first, but after Oom Daan had told him that he’d missed out on R200’s worth of business one day just because Oom Daan couldn’t get hold of him, he relented and accepted one of Oom Daan’s fancy mobiles. Now, you wouldn’t catch him without it.
So why would Sharkey leave home without it? And why was Oom Daan so keen to get hold of it? Grant squirmed back out from under the bed and went into the MESSAGES inbox of Sharkey’s phone. Maybe the message was from his dad. Oh, he hoped so.
It wasn’t; it was from FLASH. Sharkey didn’t keep a traditional bank account like most other people did. He relied exclusively on his cellphone cash transaction provider, FLASH.
Grant opened the message and read it. Impossible! He stood up. He had to check the content of the message. He couldn’t have read it right.
But when he looked again it still stated:
Your FLASH account has been credited with R50 000
Grant sat down on the bed, trying to grasp the significance of what he’d just read. Despite his old-fashioned ways, Sharkey was on the cutting edge when it came to banking. Oom Daan had introduced him to the cellphone banking concept that he used because, as Sharkey had explained to Grant when he showed him how to use it and shared his secret code with him, it was “Daan’s way of keeping things anonymous”. Whoever ordered fish or crayfish from the Beach Café simply deposited money into Sharkey’s FLASH account. The account number was the same as his cellphone number. When Sharkey wanted to use that money, he simply downloaded it to Oom Daan’s FLASH account. Oom Daan then either gave him cash out of his till or Sharkey bought food and other provisions from the Beach Café with it. He never downloaded the virtual money in his FLASH account into a normal bank account like most other people did.
Although Grant didn’t always know what amounts were being deposited, he was very sure that it had never held anything more than about R200 or R300 at a time – the price of a few fish or crayfish. Where had such a huge amount as R50 000 come from? And why did Sharkey need to go to Lüderitz to work if he had R50 000 sitting in his cellphone account? And why, oh why, sell the house!
Then a horrible thought gripped him: That’s why Oom Daan wanted Sharkey’s cellphone! He knew about the money and he wanted it for himself. He wanted it so badly that he had even gone into their home when no-one was there, to look for it. Hadn’t he said so himself?
Usually Langebaners didn’t mind their friends coming into their homes when they weren’t there, but normally this was just done to drop something off or to wait around for the owner of the house to return. Even in Langebaan it would be considered unacceptable to enter someone else’s house in order to rifle through their things.
Grant looked at the face of the phone again. He counted the noughts and checked the commas. Yes, it was definitely R50 000. Then it dawned on him: he knew Sharkey’s secret code. If there really was R50 000 in Sharkey’s FLASH account, he could get to it, use it to travel to Lüderitz and speak to Sharkey himself, face to face.
Yes, he would hide out tonight amongst the dunes, and tomorrow he’d head straight for Lüderitz – wherever that was.
Grant’s spirits soared. The