LITMIR.BIZ

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my eyes, the sharp, foamy taste of toothpaste was on my tongue and I suddenly remembered that Nic’s mouth had tasted of peppermints and tobacco with a lingering aftertaste of salt.

      A bell rang – another one – and everyone rushed out of the bathroom like cockroaches when a light went on in a dark room. I also changed into a cockroach.

      In my new bedroom my unpacked suitcase and my empty school rucksack lay on the bed. On top of the suitcase were balls of crumpled newspaper in which I had wrapped a mug, a porcelain doll and a few other pathetic ornaments to remind me of home. I sat down on the bed and read one of the newspaper reports because I didn’t know what else to do until the next bell rang.

      Our enemies must know that every single one we lose on the border, binds us more closely to our country, South Africa. So said the Minister of Police, Mr Jimmy Kruger, at the funeral of a young constable shot in Rhodesia.

      I crumpled the newsprint and looked for a waste basket. Under the table there was a wire waste basket. Grey, what else?

      When I looked outside, through the mesh and the bars, the unknown tree still flamed orange. Hundreds of tongues of fire licked at the deepening dusk. Further back, an orange bougainvillaea poured over the wire fence surrounding the hostel garden. And almost in front of the window grew a green shrub as high as a tree, with great white flowers which hung from the branches like inverted crinkle paper cups. I wondered whether it was these cups which gave off the heartbreaking odour.

      I had to turn away from the window because my eyes were smarting with tears again.

      So I sat and stared at the bare wall in front of me, absently stroking the coarse sailcloth of my rucksack. A grubby rucksack on which the names of friends and silly messages had been written with various coloured felt-tipped pens. I looked down and drew in my breath sharply. Next to me on the bed lay something which looked like a small heap of spilt salt. Carefully, because it was far more precious than salt, I tried to gather it into my cupped hand.

      I let the sea sand flow back and forth between my hands while my holiday unreeled like a movie in my head. Actually much better than a movie because I could even smell the suntan lotion.

      I had used the rucksack as a beach bag, packing it each morning with my towel, book, dark glasses and purse before I went looking for Nic. Don’t run after him, my mother warned endlessly, as mothers have always warned. But I didn’t run after him. I merely made sure that I was in the right place at the right time. There’s a difference.

      I learned to read the weather and the waves. That’s what you do when you’re stupid enough to fall in love with a surfer. I knew when I could find him and where.

      In the end I had to admit that he was more interested in the waves than in me. But at least he was more interested in me than in any other girl.

      When the lights-out bell rang, I remembered the colour of his eyes. It was like those damp blisters you saw on kelp, blisters which burst with a soft plop when you trod on them.

      London

       16 June 1992

      Dear Child

      You have just turned sixteen, I realised today. As old as I was the day the photograph was taken at the Pretoria Zoo.

      I dug it out – the only picture I have of all four of us – after I had read my son to sleep with Roald Dahl’s scary little verses. No, they don’t seem to frighten him. The crueller they are, the wider his smile. My innocent, bloodthirsty little boy.

      He doesn’t know the date nor what it means. In the cool green land where his forefathers starved, it’s called Bloomsday by readers who know who Leopold Bloom was. In the hot country where his mother’s forefathers hunted and plundered – where politics have always been more important than books – it’s remembered for other reasons. He doesn’t know about the children who died or about the child who was born a short while before that day.

      And now I’m staring at a photo of four terribly white teenagers on a yellow lawn, a cageful of monkeys in the background. The boys’ haircuts are brutally short, their bodies are awkward in army uniforms. The girls are dressed according to the fashion pages in the Afrikaans Sarie and the American Seventeen. One is wearing a halter-neck smock which bells out at her hips over jeans which hang even more widely over high cork soles, rather like an old-fashioned layered wedding cake draped in denim. The other one’s hair is hidden under a kerchief, her body under a patchwork pinafore dress, as if she had borrowed a maid’s outfit for the occasion. A rich man’s child in the clothes of the poor.

      I wish I’d spent my teens in a more elegant age!

      I have begun to write a story about that terrible time which I would like to dedicate to you, if ever I finish it. But I don’t even know your name.

      Happy birthday, my nameless child. I hope your seventeenth year is better than mine was.

      M.

      We will fight and go forward with faith

      ‘So it is getting a little better?’ my mother asked, her eyes worried. Opposite her my young brother was sucking up the last of his chocolate milkshake so noisily that he could be heard in the street. She wore her usual martyred what-have-I-done-to-deserve-this expression, but apart from that ignored him.

      ‘I didn’t say that,’ I muttered, the straw clamped between my lips.

      We sat in the Portuguese café next to the local movie house, the walls around us covered in old film posters. In front of me there was a grease mark on the red and white checked tablecloth, a large red plastic tomato filled with ketchup and a menu covered in plastic like a schoolbook. After three weeks in this dull town I had accepted the fact that there were no elegant coffee houses in Black River.

      ‘Doctor Zhivago,’ my mother sighed. ‘It was the only love story your father ever liked.’

      My eyes wandered to the posters on the wall while I fought the temptation to suck up the last of my milkshake as Niel had done. Love Story, I saw, and remembered how I had cried when Ali McGraw died so beautifully and giggled every time she said bullshit. Opposite me my twelve-year-old sister stared open-mouthed at Niel, which encouraged him to suck even harder.

      ‘Wow!’ she said with an American accent.

      ‘Shaddup,’ I hissed and tried to hide behind my mother as one of the matric boys at a table in the corner turned to look at us.

      ‘Children,’ my mother tried saying in my father’s voice. But it never worked.

      ‘Ma, he’s wearing his school uniform and he’s behaving like an elephant in a zoo!’

      ‘Tcha, old Mart is just scared one of her boyfriends at the table there at the back will think her brother doesn’t have any manners.’

      ‘Well, he doesn’t.’ I grabbed the glass away from him so fast that the straw hung in his mouth like a long, soggy cigarette.

      ‘Sheesh, where’d ya learn to grab so fast?’ he asked with something like admiration in his voice.

      ‘At table in the hostel. If you don’t grab you go hungry.’

      I enjoyed the slightly shocked expression on my mother’s face. She touched her bottle-blonde hair, stiff and sticky with spray as usual, and looked over my head at the posters. Niel burped, looking me straight in the eye. Lovey giggled behind her hand and my mother looked more martyred than ever.

      ‘You should’ve kept him back a year, Ma,’ I said. ‘Any idiot can see he shouldn’t be in high school yet.’

      He looked at me as if I’d slapped him. I almost felt sorry for him. He was the smallest in his standard six class and his biggest fear was that he wouldn’t grow much taller.

      ‘Never mind,’ Ma comforted as usual. ‘Simon only started growing when he’d almost finished school.’

      Hearing Simon’s name made me feel depressed all over again. My elder brother had started his National

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