*
“So how was it?” I asked Kim on the way to assembly.
“Huh?” Kim didn’t look her sparkling self.
“How did it go? You and Brendan at the drive-in…and the split panties.”
We took our places in the standard 9 line.
Kim shrugged her shoulders. “So so.”
“That doesn’t sound very enthusiastic for a first date. What did…”
“Ssshhht,” a prefect hissed, and Miss Pembleton started the prayer.
In maths Kim got a bollocking from Mr Cuthbert because she couldn’t explain Pythagorasses theorem. Mr Cuthbert took his glasses off and thundered: “I warn all of you. The jacarandas are in full blossom and you know what that means.”
Huh? What have jacaranda blossoms got to do with maths?
After the lesson I asked Jason the maths genius of our class.
“It hasn’t specifically got to do with maths,” he grinned. “We’ve just got this saying in South Africa, that if you only start to study when the jacarandas are blossoming it’s too late, because the end of the year exams are just around the corner.” He glanced at the door, quickly took a gum out of his mouth and stuck it under his desk.
Mrs Pienaar, the history teacher, made her entrance on skinny legs, clasping her bag with bony arms on her plank-flat front. Her colour scheme was like her hair, grey and brown. Nobody knew her age. Could have been anything from 40 to 60.
“Good morning class,” she croaked from the hight of her platform. “The jacarandas are blossoming, so let’s revise a couple of things.”
During the next 30 minutes Niko from Cyprus, who was sitting next to me, frenetically took notes. The poor guy was expected to write the exams although he’d only been in the country for a few months. His English still wasn’t so hot because at home they only spoke Greek. I was exempted, Gott sei dank, because I’d go back to Germany and finish my schooling there. I wrote a letter to Friederieke while Mrs Pienaar waffled about the Groet Trek. I was just telling Friederieke about jacarandas and exams when Niko punched me in the ribs.
“Let’s hear what our exchange student has to say about this,” Mrs Pienaar purred through her thin lips.
This – what???
“Ehm, where should I start Mrs Pienaar?”
“It’s always good to start right at the beginning.”
Hell, the beginning of what?
A decade of German schooling had taught me the art of bluffing. If Mrs Pienaar wanted a beginning I could give her the beginning. I was quite clued up about it because last Christmas my uncle Rolf had given us a fat book about the history of the world. “In the beginning there was the Big Bang,” I started. “The universe expanded from one single point to its present vastness and it’s still expanding. Our solar system emerged about 4,6 billion years ago. It consists of the sun in the centre and 9 planets circling around it. Life on earth started about 3,5 billion years ago when the first amino and nucleic acids were formed…”
Why is old girl Pienaar getting so white in the face?
“…and the way all the different species developped is explained in the theory of evolution…”
Mrs Pienaar hit her bony fist on her desk. “We don’t teach this… this …this theory here.”
“Oh, then what theory do you teach here?”
Mrs Pienaar got quite agitated. Red spots began to glow on her pale cheeks. Her mouth crinkled into a self righteous pout.
Looks like Perlman’s boxerdog’s poephol.
She stuck her index finger up into the air. “We don’t teach any theories here. We teach the truth and the truth is written down in the bible.”
Mich laust der Affe. Looks like she takes the bible verbatim.
Mrs Pienaar got up from her chair and instructed us to study page 78 while she would get something she had forgotten in the teachers’ room. At the door she turned round. “By the way, Mathilda, just now we were revising Adolf Lüderitz, the founder of the colony which became German South West Africa in 1884.”
As soon as she was outside Jason stuck his gum back into his mouth. “Here goes the old liar,” he said. “Forgot something in the teachers’ room, my arse. She is going for a smoke; can’t get through one period without her nicotine fix.”
“She’ll probably need a double dose,” Liza said. “That theory of yours upset her quite a bit, hey Mathilda.”
“It’s not my theory, a guy called Darwin first wrote it down more than 100 years ago.”
“Oh Darwin,” Brian said. “I’ve heard about him. “He maintained our ancestors were baboons.”
Hells bells, these guys don’t even know the most basic facts of life.
Fortunately the conversation turned to the latest cricket match and the bell rang before Mrs Pienaar came back. She probably needed a triple dose.
During the break I tried again to get Kim to talk about her drive-in date but all she said was that guys were weird and had damn double standards.
In the afternoon we foreigners sat through another lesson of Afrikaans. Mevrou van der Bijl explained once again, that in the youngest member of the Germanic group of languages the verb is not inflected to express differences in person or number, and the only time it changes is to form the past participle by using the prefix of ge, the ge being pronounced like the ch in loch. Niko hung on Mevrou’s lips to secure his future in this country. He knew that without Afrikaans he wouldn’t even get a matric. The 2 sisters from Bristol also showed an increase of motivation since their parents had applied for permanent residence, because South Africa was such a marvellous place, filled with exceptional opportunities, wide open spaces, cheap servants and blue skies. Our class had shrunk a little bit because the Dutch kids had been sent to a boarding school in Swaziland, where they didn’t have to learn Afrikaans and shared their classroom with kids of all races and denominations.
“…and in Afrikaans we have no grammatical gender or case…”
I finished my letter to Friederieke. Next to me Luciano from LM was working on a new song that would make him famous once he’d start his career as a singer in Portugal. Every now and then he beat a couple of bars with his fingers on the desk. Mevrou usually raised her eyebrows and said: “Hou op”, which means ‘stop it’. Luciano never reacted because he never learned one word of the language of the White African, except ‘fok julle almal’ from Lettie the coloured tea lady, who never stopped swearing. A fly buzzed across the window and a little lizard walked up the wall.
“…and Afrikaans has discarded the imperfect tense,” Mevrou announced as if it was a personal achievement.
When I was riding back from school, the roads were shimmering with heat and at places my bicycle tyres left traces in the softened tar. The spicy scent of the blue gums mingled with the sweet perfume of jacaranda blossoms. My gym was drenched in sweat before I was even halfway up the hill.
Just shows you that all that advertising talk about ‘stay dry in your armpits with our super hyper Dingsbums deodorant’ is a lot of kak.
Back home the thermometer showed 37ºC in the shade. Alpheus was washing Julie’s car. Ludwig had fetched him in the morning from the prison. Alpheus wore a helmet-like head gear he had made out of plastic packets and knee high rubber boots.
Boetie, the guy must have the most extraordinary micro climate around his toes.
In the house the fans were swirling cool air around. Clochard, who couldn’t take high temperatures, was snoring under the dining room table. Some flies buzzed lazily along the window panes.
Julie looked up from a painting she was doing and said: “Some friends of Jim Hawks from the Rotary Club have invited you to stay with them for a while. They are living on a farm in the Freestate.”
“Oh great. When do they say I should come?”
“During the Christmas holidays. And by the way, there was a parcel in the post for you. I put it on the desk in your room.”
The parcel was from the German Consulate. It contained exactly what I had asked them for.
r />
Halleluja
I changed into my costume singing Oh Baby Baby Balla Balla on top of my voice and baby baby balla balla-ed all the way to the pool, where half a dozen kids were splashing around.
“You are in a brilliant mood today,” Julie grinned.
“Yebo yebo balla balla Buxenknaller.”
Kim still didn’t want to talk about her date but it looked like she wasn’t thinking of much else. Mrs Pienaar threatened her with detention when Kim said that during the battle of Trafalgar in 1066, King Arthur kidnapped Lady Jane Grey, which caused the final outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars. Mrs Koeks was more human and sent Kim to the secretary’s office to get an aspirin after she had poured 3 cups of salt into the dough for a Strawberry Angel Cake.
I asked Coral what she thought was wrong with her sister. In Coral’s opinion Kim hadn’t hit it off with Brendan and was suffering from an extreme case of love sickness, completely unnecessarily, of course. You just had to take one look at Brendan to see he was nothing special, there were millions like him out there, where as her Johnny Bartlett happened to be the most extraordinary person breathing on this planet and… All of a sudden Coral’s eyes nearly popped out of her head. “You don’t think Kim is pregnant, do you?”
“It’s a bit early to tell.”
“I’d rather be dead than pregnant and not married,” Coral said grey in the face.
“Come on, we are living in the 20th century. One can always get an abortion on social or medical grounds, or whatever you call it in English. You know, you wouldn’t have the bucks to support a kid, your whole life will be buggered because you can’t finish your education, you’ve got a tubular pregnancy…something like that.”
“I don’t know,” Coral stammered. “I’ve never heard about all that stuff. I don’t think we’ve got it here. Abortions are only for rich people. They send their daughters to England and they have done it there. If your parents haven’t got bucks you go to one of those homes for unmarried girls, where life is worse than in prison, but that’s what you deserve when something like that happens to you, and you aren’t even allowed to look at your baby when it is born and it is given away for adoption, and you are an eternal disgrace for your family, and chances are you end up as a spinster because no guy wants to marry a tart.”
“And the fathers?”
“What fathers?”
“When there is a baby there has to be a father.”
“Oh, those fathers,” Coral scratched her nose. “I don’t know. One never hears much about them.”
“Isn’t it amazing that the guys always seem to get off scot free.”
“An abortion in this country – easiest thing in the world,” Julie said when I asked her. “But under certain conditions only. If a black guy rapes a white woman she gets her abortion before you can blink your eyes.”
“And the other way round, if a white guy rapes a black girl?”
“Hm. I don’t know. I’ve never heard about that.”
The next day during lunch break Kim exploded. We were sitting on the far side of the sports fields and, out of the blue, she smashed a coke bottle against a tree and yelled: “The bloody bastard.”
I was sure one could hear her right up to the school building. “Kim calm down, man. What ever he did it’s not worth getting so upset about it.” I hoped I was right.
“What do you know? The prick. I could kill him.” She thrashed a broken off branch against the tree and kicked rocks. I just waited. They say it’s good for people to let off steam. It took her a while to calm down.
“You know what that bloody bastard did?”
“Not yet, but I’m all ears.”
Kim put her hands on her hips and snorted: “We went to the drive-in and first everything was going fine. A bit of kissing and a bit of stroking…and then he discovered my split panties. I thought they would be a nice surprise for him and you know what he said?” She stomped disgustedly on the ground. “He said he didn’t want to have anything to do with a whore who showed off her cunt to the whole world.” Kim snorted again. “Does that make any sense to you?”
“Mebbe he didn’t expect this kind of signal and felt you were putting pressure on him.”
“Rubbish. Normally guys love it, you know.”
I didn’t know, but I didn’t feel like discussing my sexual experience with Kim. Looked like she was light years ahead of me.
“And then the whole evening was buggered,” she carried on. “I jumped out of the car and my cousins, who were also at the drive-in, gave me a lift home. I had to bribe them with 2 packets of cigarettes not to tell my folks, because they thought I was swotting for the exams with Peggy. Hells bells, what a fuck up. And all because that shit shot can’t handle split panties.”