LITMIR.BIZ

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counter, resting on his elbows, between the cash register and a fan which swung to and fro like a human head. Every three seconds a breeze blew through his dark hair. There were two similar fans in the far corners of the café, high above the tables, but they seemed to make no difference. My grey school uniform clung to my thighs and there were damp circles of perspiration under my arms.

      Behind the owner’s head hung the only poster which didn’t advertise a movie. It was the kind you saw in travel agents’ windows: a big colour picture of a deserted beach with palm trees. Like somewhere overseas, I thought longingly. Lourenço Marques, it said in heavy black letters across the blue sky. That was where LM Radio broadcast from.

      The man had sad eyes. He reminded me of the café owner in a book I’d read during the holidays, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The name caught my attention in the bookcase at the beach house between all the other books that had stood there for years, fading in the sun. I had wanted to tell Dalena the plot but she lost interest when she heard that it didn’t have a happy ending.

      ‘Gone with the Wind,’ Ma sighed again, her eyes on an old poster.

      ‘They don’t make movies like that any more,’ Niel and Lovey said quickly before Ma could say it.

      Ma didn’t even seem to hear.

      ‘Have you heard from him again, Ma?’

      ‘Simon?’ My mother ferreted in a crocheted bag with wooden handles and took out her pack of Cameos. ‘Two letters in one week! He must be terribly homesick.’

      ‘I miss him.’

      ‘So do I, Mart.’

      Ma swallowed the last of her tea and lit a cigarette. Equality? asked the woman in the Cameo advertisement, peering at the camera through thick false eyelashes. Onlymen are born equal. We’re different. Like our cigarettes. She was beginning to look a little bored. Ma, not the girl in the ad.

      Actually, all four of us were a bit bored. It was Friday but because the school was holding a sports meeting on the following day, the hostel children weren’t allowed to go home on the Friday afternoon. Ma felt sorry for us and had come to see us. But when she and Lovey drove to the farm later on, Niel and I would have to remain behind.

      ‘A Friday in the hostel!’ We will not give up the fight against terrorism and Communism, I read in the newspaper lying in front of my mother. We will fight and go forward with faith until we have achieved a just peace. The Minister of Police had spoken at the funeral of an adjutant who had been killed with three other policemen on the Rhodesian border. ‘It’s terrible!’

      ‘It’s going to be fun!’ Niel smiled with Ma’s dark eyes, adult eyes in a pointed little-boy’s face which made him look even more like a poison dwarf.

      ‘I wish I was a year older,’ Lovey sighed. ‘Then I would’ve been in the hostel too!’

      ‘I wish I was two years older, Lovey, then I need never see a hostel again!’

      ‘My name is not Lovey,’ she said as usual.

      ‘Sorry, Lovey,’ I said as usual.

      Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, I read on a poster in the corner where the matric boys were sitting. Now that was a smart movie. Bob Dylan’s music.

      ‘If you want to go to Stellenbosch, Mart,’ Ma said and drew an ashtray set in a miniature tyre towards her, ‘you’ll have to stay in a hostel.’

      ‘No ways, Ma! I’d rather go to an English university. Then I can do as I like even if I have to stay in residence.’

      ‘You’ll break your father’s heart if you don’t go to Stellenbosch.’

      ‘He broke mine,’ I replied, ‘the day he dropped me in front of the hostel.’

      ‘Don’t always exaggerate, Mart. It’s not that bad.’

      ‘How do you know how bad it is, Ma? You’ve never been in a hostel!’

      It sounded sharper than I’d meant it to but Ma didn’t react, simply tapped her ash neatly into the little car tyre. Goodyear was written on the rubber. A good year for whom?

      ‘Well, I listen to you talking … about your roommate, the way you …’

      ‘If it wasn’t for Dalena I’d have committed suicide by now!’

      This time she reacted.

      ‘Don’t say things like that, Mart.’ A forefinger tap-tapped the cigarette. This was a sure sign that you had to watch your step. She didn’t lose her temper easily, my father was the quick-tempered one, but the day she did lose her cool … Don’t push me, she always said. Don’t push me.

      ‘If it wasn’t for Dalena I’d probably have run away.’

      ‘Lady and the Tramp!’ Ma’s petulant mouth opened, her eyes pleased. ‘Do you remember it?’

      She knew I wouldn’t run away. I would moan and groan, I would threaten and sulk, I would cry every evening until my eyes were sore. But I would endure and persevere.

      I was nothing if not her daughter.

      ‘This is wild country,’ Pa said with the pride of a pioneer in his voice. ‘Wild but beautiful.’

      They were standing on the veranda, grilling meat and looking out over banana trees which stretched as far as the eye could see. Closer to the house, next to the swimming pool where I lay reading in the sun, the thin trunks of a few pawpaw trees towered above the pinks and purples of the bougainvillaea and the scarlet flowers of the hibiscus. I turned on to my back to catch the sun on my front.

      ‘Look, way across there, where it’s hazy, lies the Kruger National Park.’ Pa gestured, a beer bottle in his hand and a silly little cloth hat on his head. Prisoner of Love was printed in red on the white material. He swallowed a mouthful of beer and deftly turned the grill. ‘You can hear the lions roaring at night.’

      ‘I’ll be damned!’ said his friend from the Cape.

      ‘I kid you not,’ my father confirmed. ‘Sometimes the hippos come and drink at the swimming pool.’

      The man from the Cape gave an uncertain laugh. I turned up the radio so that I wouldn’t have to listen to my father’s tall tales. Wiggled my bottom to the beat of Mick Jagger unable to get no satisfaction. Tried to concentrate on my book again.

      Dalena had told me to read it. Which should have made me suspicious immediately because my roommate wasn’t the world’s greatest reader.

      ‘Has it got sex in it?’ I’d wanted to know.

      ‘It’ll make your teeth curl.’

      ‘In Afrikaans?’

      ‘Man, Andre P. Brink is not like other Afrikaans writers.’

      The way in which she accented the P made the name sound elegant and exotic. ‘I’m telling you, it’s hot stuff. Nude scenes.’

      I didn’t want to show any interest. But when my mother took us back to the hostel on the Friday afternoon, after our visit to the Portuguese café, I asked her to stop at the library.

      ‘Have you got Ambassador by Andre P. Brink?’ I asked the old lady behind the counter.

      ‘The Ambassador.’ She looked at my grey school dress and her heavy eyebrows rose like twin helicopters above her spectacle frames. ‘Aren’t you a bit young for such a difficult book?’

      ‘It’s for my mother.’ Without turning a hair. Sometimes I took after my father.

      So here I was lying in my holiday bikini next to the swimming pool, sweatily searching for the first nude scene.

      ‘This place is alive with snakes,’ Pa said. ‘As thick as my upper arm. Mambas. Green ones in the trees, black ones on the ground.’

      ‘What do you do if you come

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