Then they told us, my sisters and me, we are leaving Naledi township, our grandmother’s house where we were born, and our grandmother’s coming with us to live in a suburb. That’s a place where whites live. Now anyone can live there. It’s not the same suburb where the Catholic school is our father drove us to on his way to his office in the city every morning; the school also used to be for whites, but now any child can go there, my mother says, long as the parents can pay high fees. The township school is a dirty place and the teachers are lazy, she says. You can’t learn English properly there, and there’s no hope of a good position like our father’s, when you grow up, if you can’t speak proper English, it’s the language of the world, she says.
So our uncle who has a transport business came with his removals van and my friend Meshak, Rebecca, Thandike and I helped the grownups load all our stuff. We also left some things behind, that kind of rubbish isn’t going to be what we need anymore, my mother said. Gogo still wanted her paraffin heater and her funny old sewing machine. The sewing machine, all right. My father lifted it in.
This house has rooms for everybody. Rebecca and Thandike share because they want to, they say it’s lonely to be by yourself. But I like the room, my room, with all my things around, just mine. I used to share with the girls in the township because Gogo had to have a place. Our big TV that was squashed up against the fridge in the room that was half-kitchen half-everything, the table and chairs and couch where we sat and ate our food and watched, looks the way it should be, here, in the room that has glass doors you can slide open. We kids sit on the carpet my father bought, thick and so wide and long it covers the whole floor, and that’s how you can follow sport with my father in his new chair with its special rest for his feet up.
Our houses in the township were all the same except that some had a pretty door because people wanted them to look nicer. But in this street in the suburb all the houses are different. Mama says some are very old, they’re built of stone, with an upstairs. Ours doesn’t look as old as that and there’s no upstairs, but in front you can’t see the roof because of a kind of white wall — curly shapes, something like the head of our mother’s and father’s new bed — that sticks up into the sky from where you know the roof really begins. Rebecca says she’s seen on TV houses like that when they show Cape Town and when she’s said that, it reminds me — so that’s where I must have seen what makes the house ours, that same wall. The feeling I get, where we’ve come to live now. There’s no swimming pool yet, my father says maybe next year. There’s a garden, all the houses in this street have these gardens, there’s a kind of lady made of stone or something standing where you can see right down the grass to the flower bushes and high trees from the glass doors that slide away. Plenty of room to play. But we don’t play there much. Mama tells us to but we don’t. We always used to play in the street in Naledi. There wasn’t a garden. In the garden you don’t see anybody. When we come home from school we sit around under the street trees on the pavement with our feet in the road, same as always although in Naledi it was just the dust, no trees, no smooth tar and gutters for the rain. Not many cars pass, just the Watchem Security one that patrols looking for loafers and thieves — Mama says everyone living on this street pays for this, to be safe, our father too. The people in the other houses come from work in super cars like my father’s only even better, and the gates of their places open by themselves, magic — we have gates like that, as well, my father has in his car the whachamacallit he presses to work them. There are other kids in the houses, white kids. They play in the gardens of course. We don’t know those kids, they don’t come out and tell us where they go to school, what they’re doing in those gardens. There’s just one boy, lives down the street, who comes out, riding his skateboard. He’s not black like us, he’s an Indian boy you can see, black the sort of way they are, so although his family have moved from the Indians’ townships to the suburb, like us, he also doesn’t know the white kids. He’s begun to come and sit where we fool around and watch him fly past, him showing off a bit. He never offers to lend me his skateboard. Thandike would be scared but Rebecca’s cheeky, she’s asked him and he said no, his parents don’t allow anyone to ride it but him. Because it’s dangerous, he says. And he’s only allowed to ride it on our street because it’s a quiet one and the downhill is just enough, not too much. So he doesn’t try it out anywhere else — I’ve told him there are much faster runs in the other streets, up and down hills in this suburb. I know. Because the very first day we came here, with Uncle Ndlovu’s van with our stuff, I was the first one to unload something, I climbed in and dragged out my bicycle that I’d got from my father for winning a merit prize at school at the same time he won his new great job. I rode off straight away, Mama and Gogo yelling after me, where’re you going, you’ll get lost, you don’t know this place. But I did know all these streets, which went where, and which one became that one, where to turn to reach this way back to recognise our new house with the fancy white front, or instead take another way. Like my bike had a map. Maps on the school walls. But they’re foreign countries.
So I dare Fazeel — we’ve told our names, Rebecca and Thandike too — to skate along with me all over, sometimes the downhill I know makes him fly so fast he even overtakes me on my bike, it’s a superbike, I can do all sorts of tricks on it, now. He jumps and lands smack on his board that’s running away from him, I pedal full-power, hands off, we zigzag round each other, the girls shout and laugh at us. It’s real fun. And all the time it’s in English, Fazeel wouldn’t understand us in Sesotho, we’re talking English every day at school and anyway where we live it’s the language of everyone, the one for the suburb, we hear the voices of the white people we don’t know, in their gardens. My dad (that’s what we’ve got used to calling him in English instead of Tata, although our grandmother’s still Gogo for us) also bought me a Superman helmet to wear when I’m on my bike, it’s yellow with red arrows. Rebecca loves it and I let her wear it sometimes while she and Thandike run and dodge around Fazeel and me when we’re having a competition in the fastest streets. I ride such a lot I’m getting to be a star, I could go on TV with the stunts I do. On the street where you can whizz down to the sharp corner that comes off from the main road, although you can’t see it the five o’clock traffic’s like the volume turned up full blast on a TV.
Look!
Fazeel’s just done something!
Man! Man! But fabulous! He’s jumped, turned himself right round, and landed back on the board! It’s wobbling but he doesn’t fall. The girls are shouting, Rebecca’s dancing her bottom around, my helmet’s too big for her, it’s falling over her eyes, stupid, she must give it back but I must show Fazeel, I must show them all, everybody in our suburb where we’re living, the streets I know — Look! Look! Look what I’m going to do now! They’re yelling, So what! What you think you are! Laughing gasping because I’m no hands, I’m full speed, and I’m bending back, I’m looking up at them, show-off Fazeel, show-off silly girls, upsidedown. Now the bike’s thrown me it’s on top of my legs I’m on my elbow. I’m shouting I’m okay, okay, don’t touch me. I’m going to get up right away. I’m going to get up but now there’s a terrible noise the volume is up, on me, the underneath of a truck—
Sometimes the Return is such a short one.
Hardly worth it? No-one can know. No-one is ever to have such knowing. And if a Return is supposed to atone for errors, wrongs committed, acts uncompleted in a previous existence, how could I atone, sent back briefly as a life of a child to the streets, to the house with the fake Cape Dutch gable where something was not realised: awry, abandoned halfway.