Whitethorn (48 page)

You can see the crowd thinks, with the doctor and the policeman suddenly making an appearance, something bad or serious has happened. This is confirmed when Doctor Van Heerden puts up his hands for silence, which is already there. ‘
Dames en Here
, Sergeant Van Niekerk and myself have come here tonight to try to make right a serious wrong.' He paused and looked down at the silent crowd. ‘Let me first offer my sincere congratulations to this young man, Gawie Grobler from The Boys Farm.' He turned to Gawie. ‘You have done well, son, and we are all rightly proud of you.'

Sergeant Van Niekerk is by now standing beside Doctor Van Heerden, and Meneer Prinsloo doesn't know what to do and looks at the
Dominee
, who points to his chair, showing that he must sit down. So Meneer Prinsloo sits down, but you can see he is not one bit happy.

Doctor Van Heerden doesn't even appear to see Meneer Prinsloo. ‘We Afrikaners are a proud people and a stubborn people and some may even say a narrow-minded people, but they mistake this for a single-minded people, a people with a purpose.' This gets a clap from the crowd. ‘But one thing you can never say about an Afrikaner is that we are an ungenerous people.' This gets a big clap. Doctor Van Heerden holds up his hand again. ‘In this town, at The Boys Farm is another orphan and I want to tell you about him. Recently he sat for an examination for a scholarship to a school in Johannesburg. A very famous school, believe me. Two thousand four hundred students sat for this scholarship, it is the biggest and perhaps the most prestigious school in the land. With an astonishing average mark of 95 per cent this boy, who is only eleven years old, won one of the three scholarships available. This makes him capable of achieving anything he wants in life, simply because it makes him one of the most gifted and brilliant young men in South Africa! But because his name is Tom Fitzsaxby and not a good Afrikaner name like Van Heerden, Van Niekerk, Prinsloo, Van Schalkwyk or Grobler, this community, as well as those people responsible for running The Boys Farm, have completely ostracised him.' Doctor Van Heerden stopped and looked around at the people below, and then turned around and looked at all the high-ups sitting behind him. Then he said, ‘I have served this town and this farming community for twenty years, and you have all been kind and generous to me, more so than I know I deserve. But tonight I am ashamed of us. Ashamed of my own
volk
. This bitterness towards a young orphan's name is a truly shameful thing and not worthy of the Afrikaner people.'

There is this silence that follows, and then a few claps, and then it's like sudden rain on a tin roof, all the clapping and cheering. Sergeant Van Niekerk steps forward and puts up his hand until finally there is silence except for one voice from the crowd who shouts, ‘Where is this new genius?' And the clapping starts again but then finally it stops. ‘Later you'll see him!' Sergeant Van Niekerk says. ‘But first I must tell you something else. I have known Tom Fitzsaxby since he was six years old and I consider him a very good friend of mine. But today he did something astonishing, you hear! Simply astonishing, and there is no other word for it.'

You could see the
Dominee
and Meneer Prinsloo were not happy, and they were scowling all over the place, and there's no smiles or clapping coming from the church elders either. Doctor Dyke has got his legs crossed and is looking up in the space above his head. But the district magistrate is clapping with the rest of the crowd, and even the
Dominee
doesn't have the authority to tell the doctor or the policeman to sit down, let alone make a fuss in front of an outside high-up like the district magistrate from Pietersburg.

The crowd has now become completely silent so you can hear a pin drop. ‘This afternoon my wife Marie went into labour quite suddenly,' Sergeant Van Niekerk began. ‘She and Tom Fitzsaxby were alone in Doctor Van Heerden's house. Marie tried to get to the doctor's phone but could only get as far as the kitchen because the pain stopped her from crawling further. So she called out to Tom who was outside in the back garden. Tom went into the doctor's surgery and called the hospital.' The sergeant turned to indicate Doctor Van Heerden. ‘But the doctor here is doing an emergency operation and he can't leave or the patient will die. The ambulance has gone out to fetch a farmer's wife, so can't be sent. I am in court with the district magistrate, Meneer du Plessis. Mevrou Van Heerden is out and can't be contacted. So the doctor tells Tom what he must do if he can't get there on time. And with nobody there, Tom Fitzsaxby delivers my baby daughter on the kitchen floor.'

Now there's the most clapping and shouting and cheering of all, and I can see some of the women are crying. Even if I wanted to I couldn't tell them the truth, which was that the baby just plopped out while I was trying to hold Marie's legs, and she was busy kicking me halfway into next week, and at the same time she's hanging onto the cupboard door handles so hard that she pulled one of them off, screws and all. I wasn't brave at all, and crying all the time because I was so frightened seeing that long sausage umbilical thing coming out of her baby's stomach.

After a long while the cheering and clapping stopped and Sergeant Van Niekerk said, ‘Before you meet Tom Fitzsaxby I want to announce that my little daughter's name will be Saxby van Niekerk! If you all turn around, Tom Fitzsaxby is sitting in the middle compartment and isn't expecting any of this to happen.'

I just had time to duck below the train window because I truly wasn't expecting it. I know it sounds funny, but it was as if they were talking about somebody else. How can I put it? I knew it was me alright, but it wasn't, if you know what I mean? I wasn't used to having people pay attention to me, except Meneer Prinsloo and Mevrou and that was always bad. So people saying good things was something I'd never had in public, and it was as if it was another me out there on the platform, and the real, private listening and looking me was sitting hearing all of this in the train compartment.

‘Show your face, Tom!' I heard Sergeant Van Niekerk shout out. But I wasn't game to do it. ‘Please, Tom!' he said. So I put half of my face above the train window ledge and everyone laughed.

Then Doctor Van Heerden came into the compartment behind me. ‘C'mon, Tom, don't be frightened, son,' he said softly. ‘Now it's your turn for a bit of the glory around here.' He took my hand and we went down the corridor of the train and down the steps to the platform, and the crowd parted and I could feel hands touching me and patting me on the back and people saying, ‘Congratulations,' and smiling at me. We climbed up the ladder and I stood between Doctor Van Heerden and Sergeant Van Niekerk, and my knees were shaking worse than the time when Meneer made me pick up the already opened scholarship letter on the floor next to his shiny brown boots.

People were cheering all over the place. Then the stationmaster blew his whistle and said the train must leave immediately or it would miss the connection at Louis Trichardt. The
boere musiek
band struck up and played ‘The Maori Farewell', which later got called ‘Now is the Hour'. It had become a popular song after the New Zealand All Blacks' last rugby tour and had been translated into Afrikaans and was now used a lot for saying goodbye when a person left on the train. It was a lovely song, and after the
volk
had sung it they cheered a lot and the stationmaster dropped the green flag and blew his whistle, and the engine tooted twice then went ‘choof-a-choof' as Gawie Grobler and me began to move away from Duiwelskrans.

‘Goodbye, Tinker, see you soon,' I whispered. I could hardly remember when my beautiful little dog hadn't been at my side, because, you see, that wet sack floating down the creek was truly the beginning of my proper life. I said quietly, ‘
Sala kahle
, Tinker,' which means in Zulu, ‘Stay well, Tinker.' If Mattress had been alive he would tell you that it means much, much more than this when you truly love someone. The loneliness stones were already piling up and getting heavy in my chest.

Gawie Grobler began to cry, I was very tired and closed my eyes. The train wheels were saying, ‘Clickity-clack, what's in the wet sack, clickity-clack, he's caught his tenth rat, clickity-clack, we're closing the case, clickity-clack, they've rubbed off his face.' I didn't know the wheels could speak.

After a while I opened my eyes and Gawie was still crying.

‘You okay, Gawie?' I asked.

But he didn't answer at first, then he said with a sob, ‘
Ja
, I'm okay, Tom.' He hadn't called me
Voetsek
.

‘I think it must be very hard to be a genius, hey?' I said, trying to comfort him.

He looked at me and said in this small sort of voice, ‘
You
the genius, Tom. I'm
only
the Afrikaner Genius.'

‘No, I'm not!' I replied, surprised he would say such a stupid thing.

‘Can we be friends again?' he said hoarsely.

‘
Ja
, of course,' I replied.

We shook hands.

Gawie grinned, his eyes still wet. ‘Maybe we both geniuses, hey?'

Then we laughed and laughed until our heads came off.

He pointed to me, ‘
Rooinek
!'

I pointed back and said, ‘
Surrogaat
!'

‘
Voetsek
!'

‘Third Class Rooster!'

‘Genius!'

‘Afrikaner Genius!'

Then, all of a sudden, at the exact same moment, we both started to blub.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

Everylasting Love

NOW I SUPPOSE YOU'RE expecting a whole heap of stuff about going to a posh school. But I've decided against that because everyone has already read a book about going to boarding school, like the one I've already referred to,
Tom
Brown's Schooldays
. Oh, by the way, I have to correct what I said about the Bishop's College probably being much the same as that because I was wrong. Boarding school was very good compared to Tom Brown's story and also compared to The Boys Farm. The food was much better and you hardly ever got beaten, and then only for proper things done wrong. Even though I was the youngest, once again I discovered a surprise about myself, this was that I was tough. What wasn't tough at The Boys Farm was tough here, I won't say butter wouldn't melt in my mouth, nothing like that, but when it came to defending myself I wasn't scared, and I had a mouth that could fire verbal bullets very accurately, if it had to.
Voetsek
was one person, Tom Fitzsaxby was quite another.

I'm only telling you this because maybe you'll hear me say things that I wouldn't have said before. I can't think of an example, you'll just have to wait and see. The thing was that at The Boys Farm, if a guy wanted to have a go at you he wouldn't do it alone; the kids would work in a pack. Unless it was a Fonnie du Preez. Here at the Bishop's College it was one on one, so you knew if you had the courage you had a good chance to defend yourself. You'd put on the gloves and go into the gym and settle the matter. Not that I was much of a boxer, but at The Boys Farm you had to do it, and so I wasn't scared of putting on a pair of boxing gloves.

The guys at the Bishop's College had never boxed, so even though I was smaller, on the few occasions I was required to stand my ground and fight it was only against a single opponent and I was able to give as much as I got. In life a person doesn't mind getting a hiding fair and square because afterwards you can still walk away with your self-respect intact.

While I had always been a loner, I now had to be a different kind of loner from the one I had been on The Boys Farm where my ‘lonerness' was caused by being a
Rooinek
and not an Afrikaner. At a boarding school for rich English-speaking kids there were three reasons I had to hide and be a loner. The first was that I was illegitimate, a fact I hadn't previously known, thinking my mother had simply left me at the orphanage because she and my father couldn't afford to have me. But two days before I left The Boys Farm, Meneer Prinsloo had called me into his office.

‘Tom, Doctor Van Heerden is writing behind my back to Pretoria about you staying with him in the school holidays. Now, Pretoria wants to know what I think because I am your
surrogaat
father. Without my permission, you coming back here every school holiday, you hear?'

‘
Ja
, Meneer,' I muttered, looking down and shuffling my feet. The idea that I would be forced back to The Boys Farm at the end of every term filled me with horror.

‘But I'm a generous man, and I'm going to tell Pretoria it's okay by me because you been nothing but trouble to us here.' He picked up a sheet of paper from his desk. ‘This is a copy of your birth certificate and it says here “Born out of wedlock”, do you know what this means?'

‘
Ja
, Meneer.'

‘It means you a bastard,' he said gratuitously.

If he expected me to react he had about as much chance as a snowball in hell. I was long past caring what he or Mevrou said about me, but afterwards it worried me a lot. Being an orphan with parents somewhere or even dead is different from being illegitimate, meaning that you were not only not wanted but were a mistake in the first place. You can tell a lie with a clear conscience if you're an orphan because you don't really know what has happened to your parents, but when you know they didn't want you in the first place it's a different kind of lie and one you've got to live with forever. So this was my first worry at the Bishop's College, what kind of lie to tell if I was forced to explain. The second reason was because I had no parents, I had no home. The third was that I had no money.