Whitethorn (24 page)

You could have knocked me down with one of Piet Retief's tail feathers. Gawie Grobler had been spying on me all the time! He knew I went down to the library rock to read and no doubt also knew that's where I wrote my stuff for Miss Phillips. Here I was all the time thinking I was safe. I remember sometimes Tinker would start to bark at something in the thorn bushes, but I always thought it was a bird or a lizard or something like that. There were all sorts of little creatures that lived around the library rock, sometimes the
dassies
, the rock rabbits, would come out and Tinker would get very excited. Goodness me, it was probably Gawie Grobler all the time. I didn't know what to say. If I refused, which I didn't know if I even had the right to do, I'd have him as my enemy and he was the one boy who had never given me a hard time. He'd also recently tried to defend me over the flag business.

‘I'll pay you ten shillings,' he said suddenly.

‘Ten shillings!' Where would someone like him get ten shillings? He wasn't even old enough to work on a farm during the holidays. Ten shillings was an amount more than any boy from The Boys Farm could have in the world that wasn't first kept by Meneer Prinsloo until they left the place.

He held out his hand and in it was a one-pound note. ‘It's yours, the one that fell out of your pocket at the water pump but since then a miracle has happened to it. Finders keepers, hey?' he said, reminding me of the rule that applied to everything on The Boys Farm.

‘Where did you hide it?' I said, remembering the search and how we'd all been undressed and even dug up the muddy ground and lifted the stones and sticks lying about.

‘In my bum hole!' he laughed.

‘You stuck it up there?' I cried. ‘Up your arse?'

‘
Ja
!' he giggled.

‘Didn't it hurt?' I said, starting to giggle myself.

‘No, it was only paper, but I was really scared, man! What if, when we were all standing naked around the pump, with my
poep
hole blocked with paper, I suddenly farted – it would have come flying out!'

‘And everyone would make a dive for it and it would be all covered in shit!' I yelled happily. Then we started to roll around in the grass laughing and Tinker started barking and jumping all over us. It was the best laughing I'd ever done in my whole life. Eventually we stopped and I had to ask, ‘What was it like when you took it out?'

‘Magtig
! That was the miracle! The ten shillings that fell out of your pocket had all of a sudden changed into a pound!'

‘And you went and washed it?' I asked somewhat stupidly.

‘
Ja
, it wasn't too bad, they made of stuff that's not like ordinary paper and you can wash them and they don't disintegrate, and the shit came off easy as anything.'

There was a moment's silence between us. I admired him greatly for his ingenuity but at the same time thought that, in the end, it was originally my pound that had disappeared up Gawie's bum. But there wasn't much use pointing this out to him.

As if he read my thoughts he looked at me with a serious expression and said, ‘That's why you getting your ten bob back,
Voetsek
. Because I put
your
ten bob up my bum where it miraculously turned into
my
pound.' He tried to conceal his laughter. ‘So the other ten shillings that was made while it was in there belongs to me!'

You have to admit that was clever talk. ‘Okay,' I said. ‘Stick it up your bum again and see if two pounds come out! Then I can have my pound back and you'll have your very own pound!'

Gawie laughed. ‘Okay, we quits, but I'm still keeping ten bob. Have we got a deal?'

‘What? With the money or reading my books?'

‘Both,' he replied.

With a person who could make me laugh like we just did I felt obliged to say, ‘Yes, it's a deal.' I extended my hand. ‘Shake a paw.' Gawie Grobler knew he had me over a barrel all the time anyway. He was in a position to do several things. Report the presence of the pound to Meneer Prinsloo with the consequences I've already outlined. Keep the pound for himself and I couldn't do very much about it except to tell Japie Betzer that he'd had it all the time and have Japie beat him up and take the pound from him. On the other hand, I would rather have had Gawie own my pound and give me ten shillings than the horrible Japie Betzer taking the lot. Furthermore, Gawie could reveal the whereabouts of my library that was no longer protected by the dormitory ‘no-theft agreement' and so would almost certainly be destroyed as a revenge for the Union Jack incident. Even at the age of nine I knew the books were far more important to me than the money. Ten shillings was a king's ransom anyway, more money than I could possibly imagine because the pound, in the brief period I'd owned it, was beyond my comprehension and was well beyond my capacity to keep it safe. Even the ten shillings was going to present a giant problem that, right at that moment, I had no idea how to solve.

After nearly five years on The Boys Farm I had my first real friend. He still couldn't be seen with me except when we were marching to and from school, and even then he had to be careful, but we were to spend many happy hours reading and discussing books together and he started doing all the same homework Miss Phillips sent me. After a while I wrote to her and asked if Gawie could also send his work and Janneke Phillips graciously agreed, although I would later realise that this must have placed an extra strain on her own workload. The next two years were the happiest I could remember. Still plenty of
sjambok
and Mevrou, but that was nothing compared to the loneliness that didn't happen anymore.

Now I know you're thinking about that pound, because unfortunately Gawie's bum didn't
poep
it out in two separate notes. He now shared the same dilemma as I had originally stumbled onto, how to turn one pound into two ten-shilling notes without someone noticing that two kids from The Boys Farm were walking around with a fortune in their pockets. We discussed every possibility and the most appealing one was to go to Mr Patel at the Indian shop on the edge of town because Meneer Prinsloo had once said that you couldn't trust him as far as you could throw him, and he'd steal the gold out of your teeth. We reckoned that he was somebody who wouldn't tell, because Indians don't have the same God, or maybe not even a God, so they didn't care if you'd stolen the money and wouldn't ask questions. What's more, we didn't have any gold in what Doctor Dyke with his horse pliers had left of our teeth.

‘But Mr Patel won't just do it for nothing,' Gawie reasoned. ‘Remember, he's unscrupulous.' It was a word we'd just learned in the new book Miss Phillips had sent and I'd looked it up in my dictionary. It means having no scruples, so then we had to look up scruples. What it said was ‘a regard for the morality or propriety of an action'. And we knew the ‘un' in front meant it was just the opposite. So that was a perfect word to describe Mr Patel, the Indian whose shop was called Patel & Sons so his sons were probably just as bad as him. I must say Gawie looked a bit smug because he was the first to use the new word. Later in my write-a-sentence-from-a-word-found-in-the-dictionary lesson I wrote, ‘Mr Patel is an Indian who owns a shop named Patel & Sons and is unscrupulous.' Miss Phillips wrote back and said she didn't like the sentence because it insinuated that because Mr Patel was an Indian he was unscrupulous, and that this was a racial slur. She asked, ‘What evidence do you have to prove your point?' So then we had to look up ‘insinuated'.

‘We'll just have to buy something small,' I said. ‘Like a sucker each, that's only a penny.'

Gawie frowned. ‘But then we wouldn't have our ten shillings each, only nine and elevenpence.'

I could see his point. That missing penny had the effect of somehow reducing the fortune in one's mind. ‘
Ja
, but we'd have a whole sucker each,' I said. My thoughts went back to Mevrou Booysens at the Impala Café and the kiss I'd got from Marie, and the red sucker and the pineapple one. That had been about two years ago but I hadn't done a lot of kissing in the meantime, none as a matter of fact.

‘Maybe I'll buy two,' I said rather grandly. ‘A red one and a pineapple, it's better than green.'

Gawie thought for a moment. ‘You know how I gave you ten shillings for nothing because it came out of my bum,
Voetsek
?'

‘Yeah?' I said suspiciously, not seeing his self-proclaimed miracle quite like that.

‘Well, to say thank you to me, why don't you buy two suckers and give me one and I can still keep my ten-shilling note?'

‘You're cheating me, Gawie!' I protested.

‘
Ja
, I know, but I have to hurry up and get rich and you two years younger than me, man! You can easy catch up.'

I agreed to buy him a sucker from my ten shillings as I hadn't really thought much about becoming rich, and besides, it's not every day you can make a grand gesture and have a new friend at the same time.

So after school we ran down to Patel & Sons. The idea was to catch up with the kids from The Boys Farm afterwards, before they reached the front gate and we'd be in time for the line-up. Before we entered the shop Gawie said, ‘Let me do the talking hey,
Voetsek
. I'm eleven and you only nine and still a little kid.' I must say I was quite relieved and also impressed that Gawie was the one to do the negotiation because I had no idea how to go about dealing with an Indian person. We entered the shop that was full of everything you could imagine a black person would want to buy. I don't know about Gawie, but I was pretty nervous.

‘Good afternoon, boys,' Mr Patel said, smiling. ‘What can I do for you?' ‘Good afternoon,' we said back. We didn't say ‘Good afternoon, Meneer' like you had to with a white person grown-up. This was because while an Indian wasn't a black, but was a sort of halfway-up person but still a non-white that couldn't use a white person's lavatory, but different to a black and not so low. Mr Patel's skin was shiny and soft brown and he had black hair, just like a proper person.

Gawie slapped down our pound note and said quite calmly, ‘Can we have two red suckers, please?'

‘My goodness gracious, we are wanting two suckers and we are having one pound!' Mr Patel said, looking surprised. ‘Two suckers is two pennies and we are giving for them a one-pound note,' he repeated. He looked at us suspiciously. ‘And where are two boys that are walking with bare feet getting this one pound you are giving me?'

We'd guessed wrong. Mr Patel was a person who had scruples. My first instinct was to grab the pound note from the counter and run, but then I saw that Mr Patel had picked it up.

‘We didn't steal it!' Gawie protested.

‘I am not knowing this,' Mr Patel said. ‘One pound, that is a lot of money for one boy to have.'

‘It's both of ours,' I said, as if this immediately rectified the matter.

‘Together you are having this pound?' he exclaimed, now even more suspicious than before. ‘I am very, very worried, boys,' he said, shaking his head. ‘I am wanting your mother to come and see me. If she is telling me this pound is yours then I am giving you, on the spot, two suckers and nineteen and tenpence change.'

‘We don't have a mother!' we both said at once. Almost immediately I realised that this only got us deeper into the deep shit.

‘Your father, he is coming then?'

‘We're from The Boys Farm,' I said despairingly.

‘Then I am calling right away Meneer Prinsloo,' he declared.

‘No!' we shouted.

Mr Patel shrugged. ‘Who am I calling to be making confirmations about this two-red-sucker pound, boys?'

‘We didn't steal it!' Gawie protested again. ‘I swear it on a stack of Bibles.'

I wasn't in a position to remind him that Mr Patel didn't believe in the Bible. ‘Call Sergeant Van Niekerk,' I said suddenly. It just came out without thinking.

‘I am calling Sergeant Van Niekerk?' Mr Patel was obviously impressed. ‘At the police station?'

Gawie gave me a look as if to say I must have all of a sudden gone crazy. If I was, then it was too late. I nodded to Mr Patel who turned and went to the telephone on the wall and rang up the exchange at the post office and asked them to put him through to the police station. He waited and seemed to be listening, and then he hung up the phone.

‘Sergeant Van Niekerk is in the native location,' he explained. ‘I am telling you what I am going to do. For this pound I am giving you a receipt and I am keeping it until I am seeing Sergeant Van Niekerk. If he is explaining and you are explaining how this pound is yours then we are doing business, hey boys?' he smiled. ‘Now you are getting a
bansella
from me.' He put his hand in the sucker jar and took out two red suckers. ‘
Bansella
, boys, from Patel & Sons,' he announced rather grandly. ‘I must be having now your names for putting on this receipt forthwith and so forth.'

We gave him our names. ‘One Afrikaner, one English, my goodness gracious me, what have we got here?' He wrote out a receipt for our pound and gave it to Gawie. ‘Keep this safe, boys. If I am dying in the night then it is proving you have one pound with Patel & Sons. Tomorrow you are coming here after school and we are sorting this out. Goodbye and I am wishing you very, very good luck, boys.'
We had to run like hell and only just caught the kids marching back from school before they turned into the front gate of The Boys Farm. We didn't even have time to suck the sucker and so we had to save it and suck it in bed when everyone was asleep and hide the stick until the next morning.