A Sport of Nature

— My parents wouldn’t take you to a place where you couldn’t even walk on the beach.—

Bettie wiped the sink with the absent vigour of a task performed through a lifetime. — I’m not thinking about walking, I’m thinking about money, what I must pay my mother for looking after my children, what I must pay for schoolbooks, for uniform, for church—

— We’re not rich people like Olga.—

Bettie laughed. — Maybe you not rich, I don’t know.—

— You know how hard my mother works to help — black people, I mean. And she doesn’t get paid.—

— Yes, she works hard. I work hard and I’m thinking about money. Money is the thing that helps me. Are you going to lock up, lovey?—

She took out of the oven a pot containing her man’s supper and a jug with the remains of the dinner coffee and went off across the yard to her room.

The two young people played the records they liked as loudly as they wished. They sat on the floor in the livingroom under rocking waves of the rhythm to which their pleasurable responses were adjusted by repeated surrender to it, as each generation finds a tidal rhythm for its blood in a different musical mode. Hillela gazed at her feet, transformed by the sun and sea into two slick and lizard-like creatures, thin brown skin sliding satiny over the tendons when she moved her toes. Her attention drew the boy’s.

— What was all that about? — A tip of the head towards the dining-table.

She took a moment to make sure he was not referring to Bettie. — Someone was here when I came home today.—

— Someone we know?—

— Not you. You weren’t here when she came before. Quite long ago. Before the Chief stayed.—

— But you don’t know who? — After a moment he began again. — Were you there?—

— I was unpacking my things. They were on the verandah. — She bent her head and began stroking over her feet and ankles. — I heard them talking when I went to fetch a banana—

— And?—

— I was thinking about something else.—

— A-ha, some chap you got keen on at Plett, mmh?—

She mimicked Bettie. — Maybe, I don’t know.—

He rolled onto his stomach and began playing with her toes to help her remember. — But you understand what they were talking about, now.—

— Well, I remember some things.—

— Such as? — He scratched suddenly down the sole of her foot and her toes curled back over his hand in reflex.

— Oh you know.—

— Me? How could I?—

— You heard what Pauline said, at dinner.—

— Yes. It’s about someone on the run from the police, isn’t it. — He traced down her toes with his forefinger. — Look how clean the sea has made your nails. You’ve got a funny-looking little toe, here.—

— Pauline told me that toe was broken when I was two years old, in Lourenço Marques with my mother.—

— Do you remember?—

— I was too small.—

— Not your mother either? What’s she like?—

— No. — I suppose like Olga and Pauline—

He laughed. — Olga-and-Pauline, how’s it possible to imagine such a creature!—

— She’s a sister.—

— Well, yes. I don’t remember her, either.—

— Sasha, would you say I look Portuguese?—

— How does Portuguese look? Like a market gardener?—

— My short nose and these (touching cheekbones), my eyes and this kind of hair that isn’t brown or black; the way it grows from my forehead — look.—

He took her head in his hands and jerked it this way and that.

— Yes, you look Portuguese — no, more like an Eskimo, that’s it, or a Shangaan or a Lapp or a—

— I don’t look like you, any of you, do I.—

— But why Portuguese?—

— She had a Portuguese lover.—

— But you were already born, two years old, you ass.—

— She could’ve been there before.—

— Did they ever say anything?—

— They only tell us what they think we ought to know.—

— And your father?—

— They wouldn’t tell Len, would they?—

Sasha still had her head between his hands. — So you’re not my cousin after all.—

— Of course we are. You dope. She’s still Pauline’s sister.—

He let go her head and rolled back on the floor. Slowly he began to play with her toes again. He spoke as if they had not been alone together all evening, and now were. — Maybe I’ll also be on the run. As soon as I leave school next year, I could be called up in the ballot for the army.—

— You’ll have to go.—

He rested his cheek on her feet. She put out a hand and stroked his hair, practising caresses newly learned. He moved in refusal, rubbing soft unshaven stubble against her insteps: —No.—

— Yes, you’ll have to go.—

— I don’t understand them. They send me to school with black kids, and then they tell me it can’t be helped: the law says I’ve got to go into the army and learn to kill blacks. That’s what the army’s really going to be for, soon. They talk all the time about unjust laws. He’s up there in court defending blacks. And I’ll have to fight them one day. You’re bloody lucky you’re a girl, Hillela.—

She drew away her feet and swivelling slowly round, lay down, her chin to his forehead, his forehead to her chin, close. Sasha, Carole and Hillela sometimes tussled all three together in half-aggressive, giggling play that broke up the familiar perspective from which human beings usually confront one another. She righted herself, eye to eye, mouth to mouth. The knowledge that they were cousins came up into their eyes, between them; she, his cousin, kissed him first, and slowly the knowledge disappeared in rills of feeling. It washed away as the light empty shells at the Bay were turned over and over by films of water and drawn away under the surf. He touched her breasts a little; he had noticed, living with her as a sister, that her breasts were deep and large under the token family modesty of flimsy pyjama top or bath towel tucked round under the arms. She slid the delicious shock of her strange sisterly hand down under his belt; her fingertips nibbled softly at him and, busy at her real mouth, he longed to be swallowed by her — it — the pure sensation she had become to him: for them to be not cousin, brother, sister, but the mysterious state incarnate in her. After a while they were Sasha and Hillela again; or almost. Light under the bedroom door showed Hillela was still up, preparing her books for the new term, when the parents came home; locked in the bathroom, Sasha had buried, with pants thrust to the bottom of the linen basket, his sweet wet relief from the manhood of guns and warring. Tenderness was forgotten: like any other misdeed undetected by adults.

Forgotten and repeated, as anything that manages to escape judgment may be repeated when the unsought opportunity makes space for it again.

Go-Go Dancer

Olga gave her a cheque (—Now that you’re grown up I don’t know what you’d really like—) and a package wrapped in Japanese rice paper with a real peony, under the ribbon, duplicating its peony motifs. The black students at the Saturday school (Pauline would have made the suggestion) gave her a pink-and-gold pop-up birthday card taped to a cigarette box covered with tinfoil. She was seventeen. Inside the Japanese paper package was the pair of Imari cats. Inside the cigarette box was an Ndebele bead necklace. Pauline picked up first one porcelain cat, then the other, and smiled, running her finger where she had found the cracks. The repairs were detectable as a fine line of gold.

— Real gold?—

— Oh yes, Hillela. But they’ve lost their value for a collection. Just a souvenir.—