karoo boy

chapter 1: seagulls

Christmas day 1976 in Muizenberg, Cape Town. The midday sun blazes down. The air smells of coconut suntan oil and ribs on the braai. Smoke drifts up to cawing, squalling seagulls in the sky. On the tyre-hardened earth, between the tar road and the sand of Sunrise Beach, we Thomas men and boys play cricket barefoot. The earth under me is piping hot, and I rock from heel to toe, toe to heel.

My father is bowling. He rubs the leather ball against his bermudas, so it will swing in the air.  He loves cricket and has high hopes that one of his boys, Marsden or me, will play cricket for the province one day.

I field on the far fringe of the parking lot. A sand yacht glides between me and the tomato-box wicket, risking the bone-hard ball.

Bulky Oom Jan, my wine farmer uncle from over the Simonsberg, turns the ribs on the braai with one hand and then licks the fat off his fingers. In the other hand he holds a dumpie of Lion Lager. If the fire jumps too high he douses it with a shake of beer.

The women lie on beach towels in the sand under the shade of wind-rippling umbrellas. The girls skip over waves at the water’s edge, or float on lilos.

I can see my mother’s red bikini and her butterfly sunglasses. I know she is biting the inside of her lip as she reads, and is dreaming of having her feet tickled, or of a drop of Tabasco on an oyster, or of plucking a periwinkle from a rock and sucking it out raw.

My twin brother, Marsden, lies in the shade with my mother, sketching. My mother sometimes calls him her little Picasso. He has an art scholarship for all his high school years, but the folks have to fork out the fees for me.

My mother just calls me Dee, although my name is Douglas. Douglas James Thomas.

My mother glances up from her book to wave at me. I wave back, wishing I was free to go in search of a periwinkle for my mother, but they are hard to find. You have to go up the east coast as far as Hermanus to find clusters of shellfish on the rocks. Oom Jan says it is the bloody coloureds who plunder the rocks. My father says it is the Transvalers from up north, Johannesburg way, who come down and ransack the Cape.

My eyes drift. If you want to be a journalist, my father often tells me, you need to have an eye for detail.

Behind me, coloured fruit sellers, sheltering from the sun under makeshift tents of canvas, call out their fruits: liichis bananas avocados.

A coloured fisherman dodges motorcars on the road, jiggling his catch of snoek, a fish as long and speary as a barracuda.

- Hout Bay snoek, Hout Bay snoek, just a rand, he raps to the motorcars. Just one rand for a barracuda-long snoek, for a taste of heaven when braaied in a dip of apricot jam, the way my father does it.

Some folk slow down to squint at the snoek. Others hit the gas as if to run the fisherman down. He skips aside, the way a mongoose jumps clear of darting snake fangs.

The ball bounces past me onto the tar road. I dash after it and a Ford bakkie full of jeering Transvalers hoots at me. A beer can clatters and spins across the tar, as if shot by a cowboy.

I throw the ball back to my father, hoping it will reach him without a bounce. The breeze coming off the sea pulls it down, short. I can tell by the jerky way my father rubs the ball against his bermudas that he is cross that my mind was not on the game. Then he bowls out cousin Dirkie, Oom Jan’s boy, splintering the tomato-box wicket. My father is smiling again.

We have all had a chance to bat, so my father calls Marsden, still sketching seagulls in the shade. He wants to stay in the shade, but my father and uncles and boy cousins taunt him until he drops his pencils in the sand. His rice paper blows away in the wind. Beyond the girls and the breakers, wind surfers plane across the bay. A hang-glider loops in the azure sky.

Dirkie, all sour-faced because he was bowled out, chucks my brother the bat. It is a Gunn & Moore willow wood bat. I have often sat out on the stoep in the evenings when the sun sinks behind the Muizenberg mountain, rubbing linseed oil into the wood. I love the smell of the oil and the wood.

Marsden looks around to get a sense of where the gaps are and then taps the foot of the bat in the sand. To anyone other than my mother or father, it could be me, bat in hand. To the onlooker, Marsden and I are xeroxed, one like the other.

Over the sound of the surf, the cawing of gulls, and the rev and hum of motorcars on the road out to Stellenbosch, I hear the bell of a lollyboy on a bicycle. I would love a granadilla ice with the black pips that catch in your teeth so you have to fiddle them out with your tongue.

I watch my father run up and let the ball go early so that it arcs high. For a moment it is lost in the white glare of the sun, and then I catch sight of it again just as it curves down towards my brother. I think he is fooling because he takes a wild swipe at it that spins him around. I hear a dull thud, like a swallow flying into a windowpane. My brother drops to the sand. His face is out of focus in the mirage haze dancing on the sand.

I hear my father’s raw cry and the earth goes wavy under my feet. My father runs to Marsden. He lifts my brother up in his arms, the way he carries firewood. He walks down to the sea, past the women who have abandoned umbrellas to clasp gog-eyed children. My brother’s head flops as my father’s feet sink into the beach sand.

My mother darts across the sand and clutches at my brother. But my father won’t let him go. He spins away from her and my mother’s nails scratch down his back.

My mother’s cries are a sky full of gaping-beaked seagulls.

My father wades into the water until the waves break against him and wash over my brother. My brother’s head lolls and my heart soars because the sea has revived him. But no, it is just the lilt of the wave that lifts his head, as if it were kelp on a rock.

Then I cannot see again, because my mother holds me against her cheek. The taste of her salt tears makes me cry.

My father is out deep with my brother, like a fisherman being pulled out by a hooked shark. Oom Jan wades in to drag him back to the beach.

Dirkie gawks at me. I smell the ribs on Oom Jan’s braai burn.

Bent over my brother, my father sinks to his knees in the sand. He turns to face us. There is something wild in his eyes.

My mother’s gaze is hard. I can see the bone in her cheek stand out.