The Innocence of Roast Chicken Read online

  I wandered on to the dim pathway, narrow in the entangled growth, and heard the hoarse croak of the Knysna lourie. So near it sounded but impossible to see its rich, shy beauty in the impenetrable bush.

  The sun watered through, greenish and murky. My feet made a shush-shush in the leaves, which lay like a heavy brown snowfall, thick and damp. They were slightly threatening to my bare feet, which curled at the thought of snakes underfoot. Above, Old Man’s Beard hung limp and musky, swaying in the slightest breeze. Wild figs dominated the cramped acacias. The fleshy grey arms of euphorbias rose above thick bushes, whose stems were lank and twisted in suffocating profusion.

  The path twined through the wall of vegetation and I followed it, clambering over the trees bent across the walkway. Cluttering the narrow area were coiled monkey ropes. Sweeping downward they came, through the muted sunlight and the sound of the birds.

  I wandered as far as the stream, seeping its gentle tears down the sides of the valley. Blackened stones crossed the path here, wet and moss-encrusted. They must have been set there a generation before, I thought, to hold human feet above the stream. Large boulders hulked, flat and inviting, beside the watery lilt. It was an enclosed world with its gentle rustlings, birdcalls and insect songs. If I concentrated hard, I thought I could just hear the grate of the generator, but nothing else of the farm.

  As I rounded the path’s tight twist to approach the boulders I saw Neil, mooning there in pensive posture. He was hunched on the largest boulder, his arms folded around his legs. A cigarette was dangling from his fingers. He glanced up sharply as I approached, but didn’t smile.

  ‘You didn’t see me here, OK?’ He made no attempt to stub out the cigarette and looked down again at the stream, his eyes glazed, as he flicked ash on the path.

  ‘OK,’ I said and crept on to a smaller boulder at his feet. The silence wasn’t comfortable – for me anyway. I was in awe of my handsome, golden brother. I wanted him to like me, with a yearning that made me obsequious. But I had no communication bridge for the gulf between our ages. He was largely unaware of me, while I always wanted to speak to him but never knew what to say.

  We sat like that long enough for my bottom to grow numb from the damp of the stone. I was no longer aware of the forest, its sounds or its smells. My concentration was centred on the lanky boy-man, curling smoke past his screwed-up eyes.

  ‘Have you seen the new people’s farm yet?’ His voice startled me when it came.

  ‘No, I don’t want … I didn’t know what it would look like. It’ll be different.’

  ‘Of course you don’t know what it’ll look like if you haven’t seen it, idiot.’

  He looked at me, his face twisted in habitual disdain.

  ‘Come, fool. I want to see how they’ve wrecked the place. You can come with me if you like.’

  He swung his blue-jeaned legs over the boulder and tramped his stompie into the path. Then he strode off over the twisting path without waiting to see if I would come. He was so sure that I would scramble to follow, as I did, running in little spurts to keep just behind his unheeding figure.

  Outside the forest canopy, the midday sun burnt the colour from the sky and created shimmers in the air before us. Suddenly he slowed his stride and dropped back to speak to me.

  ‘Do you know anything about the new people?’ he asked me.

  ‘Not really. I heard William’s son say he was cruel, that he doesn’t treat his boys nicely. But Ouma said they were lucky to get work.’

  ‘Hmph,’ he said, reining in his stride to walk beside me.

  The grass was clumped. Thorn trees were sparser; stunted, bent and dwarfish. We had reached the rim of the Zuurveld, what used to be the wild outer reaches of our farm. Even slightly dampened by that morning’s rain, the landscape here was a dusty tan, a far-reaching, tree-scattered loneliness. Winding its way across this veld was a new fence.

  And beyond it – a wasteland.

  Cleared of its sparse trees, the land was bare and grey in the heat of the day. Even the whispering old gum trees had been hacked down and in the middle of nothing, in the centre of a dusty vacancy, sat a house. Low and flat, it squatted with little pretension and no attempt at softening embellishments.

  ‘But it’s so ugly,’ I burst out, shocked by the aridity and the plainness of the house. It was a corridor of windows, each the same as the last, at the end of which was a larger picture window, providing a flat brown view from what must be the lounge.

  ‘Ja, well, the guy’s cut all the corners, it looks like.’

  ‘But look, Neil, it doesn’t even have a stoep.’

  ‘Never mind a stoep. There are no drainpipes, or even a doorstep.’

  Without speaking, we followed the winding fence past drowsy groups of sheep. Picking up a small stick, I ran it along the wire fence, producing a ting-ting accompaniment to our walk.

  Ahead of us, on the other side of the fence, we could see a small cluster of square-built block buildings. And there, two shushing old gum trees had survived. This group, of what looked from our farm like a barn or shed and perhaps a dairy, had some sort of simple charm that the farmhouse lacked. Perhaps it was because of the shifting shadows of the trees.

  We gaped – I through the fence, Neil leaning on the top – trying to catch a glimpse of life beyond this new great divide. A small piccanin was playing in the churned mud beside a small enclosure, similar to our pigsty.

  ‘I s’pose that’s where they keep their pigs?’ I asked. ‘Must be. Can’t you smell them?’

  The small boy had scabbed knees and a torn khaki shirt. He seemed to be playing with two rounded stones. I waited for him to look up, then smiled and waved.

  ‘Molo,’ I called.

  The child stood, wiping his forearm across his snot-dried face, before turning and running. He ran in a wide circle around the buildings and disappeared to the back of them. We waited in silence to see if anything else would happen.

  ‘Joh-an-nes!’ The voice was pitched high, with an imperious upward tone at the end of the name.

  From the pigsty a figure rose, wearing a tattered T-shirt and khaki shorts. He ran in a curious jogging trot towards what I had supposed to be the dairy.

  ‘Ja, Ou Miesies,’ he said. He was barefoot. I was trying to figure out what it was that was different about him, from our boys, that is.

  ‘The stingy Dutchmen can’t even buy their boys decent overalls,’ muttered Neil, answering my unspoken question. He wasn’t speaking to me though, I think he was explaining to himself his own feeling of strangeness.

  The woman emerged then, holding a bucket. Her hair was a rigid grey, set in a firm hairnet close to her head. She was tall, and she held herself stiffly upright, her neck a taut line to her proudly pursed mouth.

  ‘Have you ever seen anyone walk so straight?’ I whispered, tugging on Neil’s belt loop so that he would remember his small companion. I wanted to feel part of his adult observations of the place, to feel a solidarity of purpose and superiority with him. ‘If she was at my school, she’d earn a white girdle after about two seconds flat.’

  I was referring to my school’s award for deportment. Neil smiled at that, filling me with happiness at the thought that I’d amused him. White girdles were a family joke. My mother warned constantly that I would never earn one unless I could learn not to hunch my shoulders and gaze at the ground watching for cracks, spaces and omens.

  The elderly woman noticed us, her head tilted slightly to one side as her eyes frisked us. With an imperious uptilt, her head gave us to believe we were ignored, beneath her interest. And to underline her haughty point, she turned slightly away from us.

  Standing on a slight rise, she spoke quietly to the figure hunched below her. Her mouth hardly moved as she spoke into the air above his head. I couldn’t easily hear what she said, and her Afrikaans was a bit fast for me anyway. But I wat
ched him nodding. With his back facing us, his nod tensed his neck and shoulders into an exaggeratedly subservient bob.

  ‘Shit, but she’s an old cow,’ exclaimed Neil, gazing at her with venom and shaking his head.

  ‘You’re telling me,’ I replied, smothering a giggle with my hand. I was pleased to be included in so grown-up a comment.

  As the boy turned and resumed his jogging trot, I saw with a sudden shock that he was Albert’s son, the one who was supposed to have been beaten. I remembered him from Christmases past, when he’d been younger and we’d taken the traditional photographs of us standing with all the farm’s children.

  What was it about his desolation, his bleak features, which made me think afterwards he’d had a doomed look about him? But that’s nonsense of course. I couldn’t even have considered the concept at eight. The very idea had never entered my world. But I remember feeling a desperation to reach him. I wanted very badly to communicate with him. The elderly woman had glided slowly back into the shed, her knees hardly bending.

  ‘Hello,’ I shouted. ‘Molo, Johannes. Don’t you remember us?’ I was curling my fingers into the diamond spaces in the fence, pulling myself higher and pressing my mouth through one of the holes. Johannes turned once, his trot arrested briefly. As his dark eyes aimed at us, I felt a piercing cold, a force of hatred so strong I thought suddenly I might vomit.

  That’s how I recall it, anyway. I know it sounds a bit much when I talk about it now. But remember, I was a suggestible child, sensitive to atmospheres and magic – evil and good.

  ‘Come on, let’s walk back past the house once to see if we can see anything else. I don’t think he remembers us. It doesn’t matter.’

  Neil’s casual arm on my shoulder seemed a comforting, protective gesture. I didn’t want to move in case he thought I was shrugging it off. I wanted to hold it there to ward off the hatred that I felt was prying at me, peeking into my vulnerable being to get at me. I wonder if Neil felt anything – he never said and I never asked.

  As we wandered slowly back along the sad fence, we both saw the Baas that we’d heard about. He was bending over a sheep not far from our perimeter. He was wearing gum-boots, belted khaki shorts and a shirt.

  Large-bellied, he was dark and, I suppose, handsome in a big-boned way. He had piercing blue eyes under startling brows, but his hair was shorn to bristles, back and sides. On his forehead it flopped forward in what we derided as a ‘Dutchman kuif’.

  ‘Middag.’ His voice was rough, a bear growl.

  ‘Middag, Meneer,’ I replied. Neil drooped his eyes in a look of veiled animosity and mumbled: ‘Howzit’. I think he wanted to proclaim his distance from this man by an inappropriate greeting – but without the outright rudeness of ignoring him.

  ‘Bloody rabid rockspider,’ he muttered as we moved from the fence. As if to impress upon himself and me the violence of his feelings, he spat suddenly on to the dust. ‘You can see the man’s nothing but a hairy rope?’

  ‘What do you mean, “rope”?’ I asked.

  ‘Thick, hairy and twisted,’ he said. ‘You can see what kind of people they are just by looking at them. They’re not like us. They’re cruel and they treat their Africans badly.’

  Pausing to take a breath, he stopped walking and faced me. ‘They’re the kind that keep apartheid in this country. They vote Nat just ’cause their fathers and grandfathers did and they’ve got no brains to think that the government’s wrong.’

  I nodded, wondering if it wasn’t perhaps lunchtime. Seeing the direction of my gaze, Neil glanced at his watch.

  We were late for lunch and sprinted back in the direction of the farmhouse. Neil was holding one of my arms and pulling me along with such force that in places I left my feet and soared above the ground, laughing again. I don’t remember seeing William’s son ahead of us, I must have been concentrating on the flying ground and sky. But suddenly Neil stopped and I jerked to my feet.

  ‘Howzit, John. How’s your school going?’

  ‘I’ve left,’ he said abruptly, without looking at us. His eyes followed his worn shoe which was tracing a pattern in the dirt.

  ‘But shit, man, why? You’d got as far as Standard Six. Why stop now? You had so many plans.’

  ‘Ag, what’s the point anyway?’ he said, looking up suddenly at Neil, his eyes two flaming points. ‘What’s the point of going on with Bantu Education? All it’s teaching me is to be a boy. And all I can ever be is a boy. It’s different for you. Life must be good for the klein Missie and Ma-aster.’ His mouth was a sneer.

  ‘Ag, man, don’t be like that.’ Neil’s face was a mix of boyish hurt and eager concern.

  William’s son, striding from us again, stopped to throw over his shoulder: ‘Anyway, I have to get work now. The ou Miesies says I have to get work from that hard Baas next door.’ He paused and, his voice filled with bitterness, finished: ‘He’s full of apartheid, that one.’

  Neil didn’t reply as John began to trot across the veld, back towards the warm safety of our farmhouse and the happy boys’ room.

  Neil sighed, walking slowly now, his face scrunched into a tight frown. My stomach had tightened and I felt the spectre of the ugliness approaching again, darkening the threatening day. And this time it wasn’t on the next farm.

  ‘I suppose it’s hard for him,’ I said suddenly, wanting to take away the anger, to put things in perspective for myself. I wanted the farm back in its place.

  ‘But he’s lucky,’ I continued. ‘Not many Africans go to school for so long. And he shouldn’t be so angry at Ouma. It wasn’t her fault they got too old to run the whole farm. It’s not her fault the man next door’s a rope. He shouldn’t blame her if he has to get work. It’s not fair.’

  He looked at me for a minute. I wasn’t sure what I could read in his expression. His face was a churning mix of quizzical, angry and slightly amused.

  ‘Maybe it’s all our faults,’ he said roughly, ‘for letting things happen. Don’t you know that’s what the Germans said in the war, that it wasn’t their fault and it wasn’t fair to blame them? But you know what? They were all guilty, for letting things happen. It’s the same here. We’re to blame, me and you.’

  1989 … 29th October

  ‘Long live the tried and tested leaders of the ANC! Long Live!’

  ‘Lo-o-ng le-e-ve,’ roars the massed crowd, thousands upon thousands of them.

  I cannot actually believe that I have allowed myself to be drawn into this pandemonium of hysterical hope. I won’t look at Joe because I can feel his eyes again, anxiously checking my reaction. I suppose he feels he should keep an eye on me in case my twisted sense of humour overpowers me and I mortify him for ever by yelling something outrageous like: ‘Long le-e-ve the Security Police of South Africa! Long le-e-ve.’ That would go down like an open sore in a sauna. Or perhaps he thinks I’ll find this rich and overpowering diet of faith and glory too much for my stomach and that I’ll vomit all over the stand.

  The force of the heat is pounding down directly over my head. Funny, everyone thought it was going to rain. Ads in the papers yesterday said: ‘The Welcome the Leaders rally will go ahead whatever the weather. Bring umbrellas.’

  This morning, I dawdled and procrastinated as much as I could. The sun was still somewhat watery when I got up, late, and headed for my wallowing sojourn in the bath. I spent a long time in there, floating naked in my watery womb. And I spent a long time preparing my shell – long drawstring skirt, big T-shirt, glasses, bun to hold the vulnerable wisps of hair in check.

  ‘Come on, Kate.’ I heard his voice outside the bathroom door. ‘I know what you’re doing. Please don’t try to hold us up any more. Please, Kate!’ His voice broke slightly on my name and he cleared his throat.

  ‘We’re going to go, no matter what. All you’re going to do is make us miss the most exciting part.’

  ‘What?
’ I yelled back, as I tucked curling tendrils into clips. ‘You expect it to start on time? Come on, Joe, that’s taking this optimism thing too far.’

  He waited then. I suppose he weighed the odds and decided not to risk provoking me any more. And so we reached Soccer City stadium by noon, just when the ‘cultural programme’ was meant to give way to the political rally proper. But even from the car park I could hear that the cultural events were still in full swing.

  The sun was soaring down on the gravel. Swirls and eddies of dust rose above head height as the crawling, bumper-to-bumper queue reached the parking area. Buses, I’d never seen so many buses in one place, hundreds upon hundreds of buses lined up in neat rows, disgorging thousands upon thousands of people.

  We began queuing almost from our car – truly, I could not believe we’d done this to ourselves voluntarily – shuffling along the high link fence to enter the stadium. Film crews and photographers strutted on the inside of the fence, greeting each other and passing clever comments. Oh, they were trying so hard to keep those tough, seen-it-all expressions in place. But the eager excitement kept flaring up on new blasé faces as quickly as it was being damped down on others.

  ANC marshals controlled the gate and reduced the queue to a shuffle as they arbitrarily pointed people to places in the stands.

  ‘Very democratic, isn’t it?’ I muttered as we finally reached the narrow gateway and wordlessly were pointed to the topmost, furthest stand from the platform which stood at the other side of the field.

  ‘Shush, Kate. Stop whingeing. There’s such good feeling on the ground here. Don’t spoil it.’

  ‘Oh no, it’s not that. I don’t really care to be nearer all those emotion-struck faces that I’m sure will preach at us from the platform. In fact, perhaps the marshal knew that – he read my mind. Otherwise why would he send the people just in front of us to the main stand near the platform and us to the farthest, highest possible stand? Ah, well, ours not to reason why …’