These registers of experience are revolting, and seldom written about – or, at least, were very hard to find in print during the pre-Google era. I had to wait to discover the literary outlier Jean Genet before finding a rare expression of something that happened all the time at my school: ‘I bury myself beneath the covers• and gather in my cupped hands my crushed farts, which I carry to my nose. They open to me hidden treasures of happiness. I inhale, I suck in.’ But (he goes on), ‘only the odour of my own farts delights me … Even the faintest doubt as to whether an odour comes from me or someone else is enough for me to stop relishing it.’ This literary avant-gardism was part of our daily experience: crushed farts were carried to noses all the time, mid-conversation, mid-meal in the dining halls.
Orwell, Genet: laureates of male revulsion, both drawn to smell•. Orwell describes the school aroma as ‘a sort of compound of sweaty stockings, dirty towels, faecal smells blowing along corridors, forks with old food between the prongs, neck-of-mutton stew, and the banging doors of the lavatories’. Genet writes of spending hours ‘roosting’ on his boyhood long-drop, ‘mysteriously moved since the most secret part of human beings came here precisely to unveil itself’. Both willing to plumb the depths of self-abasement and corruption; both, at the same time, profoundly liberating writers. This is, I suppose, why I am probing these, the limit zones of disgust: political disgust, personal disgust, but also the intimate and democratic rankness of bodily disgust – in the belief that such an investigation might be a prelude to true metamorphosis, acceptance, love.
Once a year we had compulsory school photographs. We lined up in our respective subgroups: the choir, the Toastmasters Society, the complex hierarchy of sports teams adding to that huge visual archive of maleness that goes back generations. Crossed rackets, crossed oars, crossed arms – trying to fluff up the biceps from below with the knuckles as we stood there in our string vests. When we dressed up in our smart uniforms for the House shot, there would be two versions: the ‘normal’ photo and the ‘fuck-around’ photo. A clever attempt by the authorities to draw off the subversive potential that roiled around at such official moments, to fold the heterodox back into the orthodox.
Looking at one of them now, I see Johnno pulling a manic face while everyone else around him is being a model Milton boy. And then looking deadly serious while everyone else is hamming it up for the camera. There he is with brush cut and crinkly blue eyes: a joke with a time fuse•.
Johnno was the son of the deputy headmaster, and so he attended the school for free. His family lived on the grounds, and I would often stay with them over holidays, when the place shifted from being savage feudal principality to a benign landscape of rolling hills, pine forests and dams speckled by falling mist or rising trout. Johnno was the insider trying to get out – the tearaway, the class madcap. I was the outsider trying to get in – the straight man to his slapstick. On stage we did impressions of those in authority – awarded the licence that izimbongi and court jesters have. Our friendship had been discussed in staff meetings, his mother (a Zulu teacher – the whole family was fluent) told us with a chuckle – they were trying to work out who was influencing who.
Beginning together we were both skinny – about 50 kilograms, like most twelve-year-olds. But as I went into my dread metamorphosis, Johnno entered a bodybuilding phase. The swimming pool was next to the gym, and so while I broke the calm holiday surface and set the black lines snaking for some light crawl, he would be at work inside, lifting weights as slowly as possible, looking at every move in the mirror, loving it.
As time went on my dorm mates would arrive at the start of the next term having bulked up, with pecs and lats and six-packs, even that hulkish trapezoid of muscle beginning to show between neck and shoulder. It was something I experienced as a kind of obscure betrayal. Why did they think they had the right to change their bodies so easily? And why did I feel sentenced to mine, as if feeding it pre-workout supplements and whey shakes would be bad form?
Johnno adored mirrors. He would inspect his muscle groups with great attention, talking me through what he hoped to achieve with his quads or glutes. I avoided any reflective surfaces (still can’t look myself in the eye at the barber) and only ever ventured into the gym under the cover of darkness. I would creep secretly through the chapel to avoid detection, then down to the gym showers and wash there alone – not prepared to show myself any more.
Johnno’s chest expanded out like a steadily inflating rubber ball; he took to walking around in tiny underpants whenever possible. I covered mine up more and more; it seemed to be sort of caving in.
‘Are you, like, deformed or something?’
So said one of the First Team as he pushed me out of the way in a corridor, shoving my chest and finding it lacking.
Now a dermatologist was examining me in the sanatorium, which had these mortifying educational charts showing cross-sections of blackheads and whiteheads, of plugged comedones and angry nodules.
‘I see you have a case of Pectus excavatum.’
So this dented chest of mine, this torso that made it terrible when we played touch rugby, one team shirts on, the other shirts off – this was an actual thing. A congenital abnormality of the rib cage and sternum. Pectus excavatum. The quiet violence of that label, though. It sounded like something one might intone over a corpse.
‘Let me tell you something.’
I clung to what Thabo had said once, having seen me walking many times to the showers with a T-shirt on, then putting it back on straight after towelling off, still damp. He put his hand on my shoulder:
‘If a woman loves you, she will love your body.’
I count them among the ten most important words ever spoken to me.
If my situation was a tight one, there were those in far worse predicaments. We had a classmate over whose face acne played like an angry red tide, a crust of infection that he endured with great dignity and God knows how much pain. When his case – the worst any of us had seen – was being dissected one day round the pool table, a visiting Canadian exchange student asked us:
‘Why mock him for something that’s not his fault?’
It was a like a pill of pure truth, the kind of insight that could only have been produced in a different society, a different institution. It struck me with surprise: I hadn’t even been able to have that thought myself. There is, after all, a large residue of magical thinking and taint that surrounds acne. Why else are people so keen to blurt out that ‘It’s a spider bite!’ when a skin blemish appears. As if that is more acceptable, less of a moral lapse than an overactive sebaceous gland, or an upwelling hair follicle full of white blood cells.
One of my tormentors along these lines was a well-meaning woman who ran the laundry, to which us juniors had to lug sacks of our prefects’ sweat-hardened socks and chalky underwear. (A further paradox here: we were required to perform menial labour in a system where the menial labour was done by other people, people with darker skins than ours. Hence the strange and intimate ritual of itemising an eighteen-year-old’s laundry, then carrying it somewhere for someone else to wash.) When I had hauled it uphill, I would come under the concerned gaze of Auntie Nair:
‘Are you eating monkey nuts? You like monkey nuts, hey?’
No, I wasn’t eating monkey nuts. I carried on ticking off my prefect’s shirts, then mine, their collars spotted with blood.
‘Or chocolate? You mustn’t touch, mustn’t touch the face. Shame, man.’