A baby began to cry and his mother unbuttoned her dress to let him drink. No one batted an eyelid. I’d seen a woman do that before: when Boytjie was still drinking from Gladys. But she always covered herself with a blanket when Pa or Braam was near. Boytjie was Gladys’s child.
At last they started beating the drums: ke-boom, ke-boom, ke-boom-boom-boom. A few got up and danced, round and round the flattened circle. Very carefully I tried to shift my weight on the branch. Chips of bark fell to the ground. I was petrified.
One of the men, the one who’d been praying, suddenly spoke in a loud voice. Whether he was preaching, I couldn’t tell. Every now and again he threw back his head, as if to look up, but his eyes remained closed. The drums were still beating and the man’s voice was growing louder and louder. The drumbeats seemed to pass right through my body: ke-boom, ke-boom, ke-boom. The branch was hurting me and I had to shift my weight again. More bits of bark fell down, right beside the preacher this time. A chunk landed on his face. He opened his eyes, looked straight at me and fell silent. The drums died down too, one after the other. The dancers stopped and their faces turned in my direction. Then the preacher began to ascend, rising up towards me, higher and higher, until our faces were level. The next moment I was looking up at him. We were both on the ground. There was a tremendous pain in my left arm.
I flew up and bolted down the narrow path through the vlei, heading for home. I held on to my arm to keep it still. The pain was so awful that I was crying. My clothes were torn.
“Pa’s going to kill you,” Braam said when he saw me. “Where have you been?”
Because it was Sunday, the railway doctor’s surgery was closed. Braam had to take me to hospital by bus. To the Casualty Department at Addington. When he told me where we were going, I refused, because I’d had so many bad experiences there.
When we had toothache and the cavity became too big, the sore tooth had to come out. First you cried in your bed for nights on end. Ma put cloves or brown shoe polish in the hole to keep out the cold and she made you swallow an Aspro, but when that no longer helped, Addington was the only solution. You stood in a long line. When you reached the front, the doctor gave you a shot, and then you went to the back of the queue again. When you reached the doctor for the second time, he pulled the tooth. Sometimes the line was too long, and the feeling had returned by the time you reached the front. You didn’t get another shot, no matter how you screamed.
“Not Addington, please, Braam!”
“It’s got to be Addington, or your arm won’t mend properly.”
The doctor said I was lucky I was still so young. It was just a greenstick fracture of the radius and the ulna, that was why only the forearm needed a cast. He wrapped cotton wool and wet plaster bandages round the arm without hurting me at all.
Then came the people and their questions. But their stupidity was nothing compared to Joepie’s mom’s Christian duty. That was what had forced me to tell Pa everything. And when I got to the part where the Bantu rose up in the air, Pa threw his hands in the air and asked me how many times he needed to tell me that life wasn’t a story.
But I hadn’t been telling a lie: it really had been a Bantu who had broken my arm.
Ma and the others returned a week later. And what did they bring along from the farm? Not Oupa’s rifle or his whips or the grain bag filled with raisins from the shed or the big old dining table or the riempiesbank or the old-fashioned pedal-organ. No, they returned with Ouma. Ouma Makkie.
“What happened to all Oupa and Ouma’s nice things, Ma?”
“Divided among the children,” Ma said. “I sold my share to Oom Malcolm and Tannie Toeks. What’s the use of splitting up a dining suite piece by piece, anyway? And the money’s more useful to us than a few chairs.”
“But didn’t we get anything that belonged to Oupa, Ma?” I asked.
She ran her fingers through my hair and looked deep into my eyes. “How can you ask me that, my boy? What about Ouma? We’ve got Ouma now.”
As if Ouma didn’t have other children, rich children, who bloodywell had only two or three children in their big houses. We hadn’t asked for her to come and live with us. Now I had to take her for a long walk every day because Ma was afraid she might fall or get lost or something if she walked on her own. And worse: Braam had to sleep in the passage and I had to move in with Ma and Pa.
Sometimes I woke at night and they’d be talking. I heard things I’d rather not have known about.
“I don’t know how we’re going to manage this month,” Ma said.
“Don’t worry so much, Vrou. Let’s see which way the cat jumps.”
“I’d be grateful if it was only a cat, Abram, but it’s a wolf, and he’s not jumping anywhere, he’s at the door!”
“You say the same thing every month and we always manage in the end.”
“Because I scrimp and save, that’s why. Our oldest girls are having their birthday one of these days and where’s the money for gifts? Thank God they’re the last ones this year. I’m still paying for the others’ presents.”
“They’re all old enough to understand that we don’t have money for presents, Vrou.”
“Dammit, Abram, we never give them anything.”
When Ma swore, there was trouble.
“That’s not true.”
“When they were still at school, I bought them clothes – which they needed anyway, birthday or no birthday. Sometimes you should give a person something he doesn’t need, Abram, something that comes from your heart.”
Pa was silent. So was Ma. But after a while she said: “Can’t we just keep our tithe this month?”
“It’s not ours, Ada. It belongs to the church.”
“Oh yes, the church,” Ma answered. She sounded depressed.
I wished I could tell her that next year I’d be the only one still at school; and that Mara had told me she and Rykie wouldn’t mind if they got nothing besides their silver keys for their coming of age; and that at least now that I was in high school I no longer had to take part in the younger children’s cent collection at church.
If Ma and Pa weren’t talking about money, it was about Mara and Rykie’s party. And once I was awake it was no use sticking my fingers in my ears, I could still hear what they were saying.
“But that’s what coming of age is all about, Abram, beginning to make your own decisions.”
“As long as they’re living under my roof, they’ll do as I say.”
“We danced when we were young.”
“Danced ourselves right into a wedding, yes.”
Ma was quiet for a long time.
“Has it taken you all of twenty-one years to regret it, Abram, or did you just never get round to telling me?”
“I was on my way up North. I didn’t need a wife and child to worry about.”
Silence for a while. So long that I thought they’d fallen asleep. “Now Mara and Rykie have to pay for our sins?” Ma again.
“Do you want our daughters to end up in Point Road, Vrou?”
I knew about Point Road. It was a street on the city side of the harbour, where the nightclubs were. Where you found sailors from all over the world. No decent girl went there. Everyone smoked and drank and danced. That was a word better not mentioned in Pa’s presence: dance.