Whitethorn (57 page)

‘If I translate them and we charge fifteen shillings a thousand, you can use all the old ones you've written, can't you?'

‘I say, what a grand idea!' he exclaimed.

I wasn't fool enough to think this thought hadn't already occurred to him. ‘You make your original profit all over again plus one and sixpence, then the translation fee and tithe, that's another four shillings!'

‘Splendid!' he declared, clapping his hands.

‘You make your original profit and keep the one and six for the enemy factor
and
the 10 per cent tithe, and I keep the two and sixpence for each translation into Afrikaans.'

‘And you
don't
get the extra ten shillings for writing tracts, writing tracts,' he said, as quick as can be. He was twinning again, which was a sign that he was nervous.

‘Fair enough,' I replied, ‘but only when my Afrikaans translation income becomes greater than the ten shillings extra in my weekly wages.' I smiled ingenuously and shrugged my shoulders. ‘We taking a chance on each other, Sir, ' I said cheekily.

He pointed a bony finger at me. ‘Not correct! I am the one
taking
the chance.' A flash of yellow, purple and pink occurred and he extended his hand. ‘Welcome to the Born-again Christian Missionary Society, you seem to have an admirable grasp of the Heavenly Prophets aspect of the business
,
Tom,' Jellicoe Smellie said, welcoming me for the second time.

I needed to clear up one final detail. ‘Sir, what did you mean about, you know, Fitz and er . . . royal bastard?' I asked.

‘Astonished you don't know, Tom,' Jellicoe Smellie exclaimed. ‘Fitz? All Fitz's are royal bastards! Fitzgibbon, Fitzpatrick, Fitzgerald, Fitzsimmons, your name, all derive from an illicit liaison occurring at some time in the past with a commoner and royalty. A promiscuous lot, your English royalty. Not at all born-again!'

So, that's how the Government-owned and now right-royal bastard Tom Fitzsaxby came to be employed during his school holidays.

I'd like to say that once it got going and we'd printed samples of my translated tracts and sent them in envelopes, addressed in my copperplate handwriting, to all the Pentecostal and other faiths that preached in Afrikaans that business boomed. But it didn't. I was receiving the extra ten shillings without being able to justify it. Instead of the avalanche we'd anticipated, orders for my translated tracts were merely trickling in and I could only think it must be me. I was a lousy translator and I expected to be fired at any moment.

But after the second holiday spent in Jellicoe Smellie's employ, I came to realise that the Mechanical Evangelical Printing Press lay idle for most of the time. Dare I presume that Smelly Jelly's tracts were simply not good enough? I'd had my original suspicions, many of the words he used in his tracts were composed of three syllables and, besides, when he could find a fancy word or turn a simple sentence into a convoluted one, he never hesitated to do so. Finding equally complicated words in Afrikaans proved difficult, and probably made my translations even more obscure. The need to confess one's sins and become a born-again Christian required a reader of Jellicoe's tracts to be highly literate, and my pedantic translations would have been well beyond the comprehension of your average Afrikaner sinner seeking redemption.

Then one day while he was out, I was searching for a pencil sharpener in the drawer in his desk and I came across a bunch of tracts tied together with an elastic band. They seemed well used and somehow different from our own and so I began to read them. After a few minutes I paused to see where they came from. They were all American, from various charismatic faiths, though the majority came from the Assembly of God. It became obvious that Smelly Jelly had helped himself liberally to the themes and ideas contained within them, but that he wished to stamp his work with his own imprimatur. In the process he had lost the simplicity and directness and the dire warning and consequences of remaining unrepentant that was the hallmark of the American tracts. He may have been bonkers, but as it transpired, he had an educated and complicated mind and he simply couldn't think at the level of the repent-or-burn-in-hell vernacular of the American hot gospel tracts.

It was then that I had my big idea. I had practically teethed on the
Dominee
's well-rounded sermons and dire imprecations. I'd listened to hundreds of Sunday sermons while the beetle munched the beard grass. So I wrote my first tract, always bearing in mind my own people, the good citizens of Duiwelskrans and the
boere
in the surrounding mountains. I would think about how I might go about bringing Mevrou's six brothers, the Van Schalkwyk Six, now languishing in prison in Pretoria, to Jesus.

The result was almost impossible to believe. Orders started flowing in from all over the country and every new tract was snapped up. That is how I eventually became the Poet of Salvation in both English and Afrikaans. Most of the successful tracts translated back to English sold as well as their Afrikaans counterparts. The Mechanical Evangelical Printing Press was working overtime, and in two years it had been replaced with a bigger and better one made by Goose & Pratten, a UK engineering firm, which Smelly Jelly aptly named the ‘Gospel-gobbling Goose'.

I would pen a tract while at school and, because of my success, I now demanded and got a pound for every tract I wrote. I had gone from having no money to practically swimming in the stuff. But every extra penny earned had to be gouged from Smelly Jelly's Heavenly Prophets department. Beneath the leaning bony body, ink-stained linen frame, nervous word-twinning, sanctimonious prattle and sudden panic was an educated mind as cunning as a shithouse rat. Nevertheless, I couldn't complain, on that first day he'd seen in me an opportunity and I had, in turn, successfully exploited his greed.

However, on that first day of my employment I had an immediate problem. Another lesson learned at The Boys Farm was to never compromise your position, to appear to be vulnerable and to show yourself to be less than your opponent had assumed you to be. Humans crave status above most things, and dominance is the bully's way of obtaining it. I had no place to sleep that night and no money, but I couldn't bring myself to ask Jellicoe Smellie for the means to eat or sleep and by so doing diminish the equality of status that in my mind I believed we'd established.

I had all afternoon in which to find a safe place to sleep, and I already had a half-formed idea in my mind. Remember when I first came to Johannesburg when the train pulled into Central Station, and how I'd been overwhelmed by the size of the crowd and the hubbub and general business? When Miss Phillips failed at first to arrive and I thought for a moment that I'd been abandoned I'd wondered at the time whether a person could sleep in a place like this? So that's where I was headed, to seek out some nook or cranny in that giant building that might conceal me safely for the night. I carried a brown-paper shopping bag, one of those with two string handles. It contained a spare shirt and pair of grey shorts and a couple of pairs of underpants and spare socks, my toothbrush and a bar of soap I'd nicked from the school.

As I approached the station I noticed the same faceless hooded man I'd first seen when I was with Miss Phillips, seated on his box outside. More correctly, I saw his little dog first, so very like Tinker but with a brown patch on his chest. I had such a sudden and overwhelming desire to hold the little dog that my eyes filled with tears. I waited a few moments and knuckled the wet from my eyes. I felt that if I could just pat the little terrier once or twice, I'd be okay again.

The hooded man had his chin slumped on his chest, and may have been dozing. Anyway, he didn't stir and I knelt beside the little dog who welcomed my pat and was immediately friendly, placing his front paws on my knee, his tiny pink tongue lolling. I felt he really liked me and he nuzzled his nose into the palm of my hand as I fingered his collar. It was then that I got the shock of my life. On the tiny leather collar hung a metal disc, and I turned it face-up to read the dog's name. For a moment I thought I was hallucinating, because the inscription on the disc read ‘Tinker'. I started to weep silently, nuzzling the little dog's head into my thigh, the tears rolling down my face. I became aware of a series of frantic grunts and guttural sounds to my right, and looking up I saw the hooded man holding out a piece of paper and acting in a very agitated way. I didn't know whether I should depart in haste or accept the note he was proffering in his left hand and with increasing vehemence gesticulating with the stump of his right.

I accepted the small single sheet of paper and, brushing away my tears for the second time in several minutes, glanced at it. The handwriting was elegant and the note read:
I am
Frikkie Botha and you are
Voetsek
. I can't speak
.

It was written in Afrikaans, of course, as Frikkie couldn't speak English, the elegant hand came from Duiwelskrans school where he too had been educated, mostly with a steel-edged ruler across his knuckles, until the slant and formation of the letters were perfect. I was dumbstruck and it took me several moments to recover from this second shock.

‘Can you hear me, Frikkie?' I asked at last.

He nodded his head. I was suddenly lost for words. Where was I to begin? How could I ask him questions that simply required a nod in reply? So much water under the bridge. The Frikkie of the dairy, cows, vegetable patch and orange orchard. The Frikkie who'd allowed Tinker to live on the condition that I stayed
stom
over Fonnie du Preez and Pissy Vermaak. The Frikkie who'd beaten Mattress to a pulp in the boxing ring and, in turn, received a broken jaw. The Frikkie who referred to Tinker as ‘my little rat trap', and would brag about her prowess to everyone. The Frikkie who'd knocked me into the ground because I'd tried to cover up the fight over Miss Phillips' pound residing in Gawie's bum and confessed that the reason we were scrapping was that I'd stupidly said the Union Jack was prettier than the
vierkleur
, the hallowed flag of the Transvaal Republic. The Frikkie in his
Stormjaer
uniform, giving us ill-informed lectures on the latest German triumph while we watered the orchards or worked in the veggie garden. The Frikkie of the disastrously bungled railway bridge explosion and the cowardly Van Schalkwyk brothers. Then the Frikkie that followed the explosion as the notorious Faceless Man whose identity the newspapers had speculated over for three weeks. And now, finally, Frikkie the broken, the hooded beggar. The Frikkie who now sat before me, one hand reduced to a stump, and his little dog, who pathetically derived his name from my own beloved Tinker.

‘Howzit going, Frikkie?' I asked. ‘Fancy meeting you here. What a surprise, man.' I spoke in Afrikaans, of course, trying to sound cheerful.

Frikkie nodded his head.

‘You have a little dog and you've called him Tinker?'

Another stiff nod. I wasn't getting very far and an awkward silence ensued. Frikkie had a spiral notepad resting in his lap and now he started to write. He was a left-hander and it was the only means of communication left to him. He now wrote:
I saw you with a lady a long time ago.

‘I'm sorry, man. If I'd known it was you I would have stopped to talk,' I said.

He wrote again, tearing off the page:
What are you doing
here?

‘I'm going to school. I won a scholarship,' I replied.

It's nice to see you, Tom.

‘
Ja
, you too, Frikkie.'

We go back a long way.

‘
Ja
, since I was just a small brat.'

A series of glottal stops followed from Frikkie, these I took for laughter or, more likely, a chuckle.

Where you staying?

There seemed no point in lying to him. ‘
Ag
, as a matter of fact, right now, I don't know. It's the school holidays and, well, you see I'm broke. I thought that maybe I could find a place to sleep in the station here.'

He shook his head furiously, scribbled rapidly and ripped the page from the notepad.
No, man, the railway police,
they arrest you.

‘Maybe you know a place I can go, Frikkie? I've got a job, starting tomorrow. Perhaps somewhere that will let me pay them back in a week, a boarding house or something?'

He scribbled again. Not that it was
really
a scribble, like I said, he had a beautiful hand.
Come and stay with us, it costs
nothing.

I had no idea who the ‘us' was meant to be. Himself and the surrogate Tinker still at my side nuzzling me, or were there other people involved?

‘
Ja
, I'd be most grateful, thank you,' I said, accepting his generous offer.

He wrote again and handed me the note.
Tom, come back
at half past five. I have to wait here for the rush hour. Today is
payday and it's worth at least a quid to me.
I forgot to say that his spelling in Afrikaans wasn't all that good, but I've translated it here correctly into English.

I was a bit hungry, but it wasn't too bad, though I knew for certain that tomorrow I'd have to lower my dignity and ask Smelly Jelly for an advance or I was going to starve to death. I'd not had the opportunity to explore Johannesburg other than the time Miss Phillips took me to John Orr to get underpants and then the art gallery and the lunch where I tasted roast chicken. So I had a good time exploring around this big skyscraper place. All in all, it had been a wonderful day, I'd got myself a job and now I had somewhere to sleep, as for the food department, well, I wasn't that hungry, yet. But that's the problem with life, just when you not looking something bad happens, something you never going to forget in your whole life.