The only passion that has not abated is his passion for cricket. He knows no one who is as consumed by cricket as he is. He plays cricket at school, but that is never enough. The house in Plumstead has a slate-floored front stoep. Here he plays by himself, holding the bat in his left hand, throwing the ball against the wall with his right, striking it on the rebound, pretending he is on a cricket field. Hour after hour he drives the ball against the wall. The neighbours complain to his mother about the noise, but he pays no heed.
He has pored over coaching books, knows the various shots by heart, can execute them with the correct footwork. But the truth is, he has begun to prefer the solitary game on the stoep to real cricket. The prospect of batting on a real pitch thrills him but fills him with fear too. He is particularly afraid of fast bowlers: afraid of being struck, afraid of the pain. On the occasions when he plays real cricket he has to concentrate all his energies on not flinching, not showing he is a coward.
He hardly ever scores runs. If he is not bowled out at once he can sometimes bat for half an hour without scoring, irritating everyone, including his teammates. He seems to go into a trance of passivity in which it is enough, quite enough, to merely parry the ball. Looking back on these failures, he consoles himself with stories of test matches played on sticky wickets during which a solitary figure, usually a Yorkshireman, dogged, stoic, tight-lipped, bats through the innings, keeping his end up while all around him wickets are tumbling.
Opening the batting against Pinelands Under-13 one Friday afternoon, he finds himself facing a tall, gangly boy who, urged on by his team, bowls as fast and furiously as he can. The ball flies all over the place, missing the wickets, missing him, evading the wicketkeeper: he barely needs to use his bat.
During the third over a ball pitches on the clay outside the mat, rears up, and hits him on the temple. ‘This is really too much!’ he thinks to himself crossly: ‘He has gone too far!’ He is aware of the fielders looking at him oddly. He can still hear the impact of ball against bone: a dull crack, without echo. Then his mind goes blank and he falls.
He is lying at the side of the field. His face and hair are wet. He looks around for his bat but cannot see it.
‘Lie and rest for a while,’ says Brother Augustine. His voice is quite cheery. ‘You took a knock.’
‘I want to bat,’ he mumbles, and sits up. It is the correct thing to say, he knows: it proves one isn’t a coward. But he can’t bat: he has lost his turn, someone else is already batting in his place.
He would have expected them to make more of it. He would have expected an outcry against dangerous bowling. But the game is going on, and his team is doing quite well. ‘Are you OK? Is it sore?’ asks one of his teammates, then barely listens to his reply. He sits on the boundary watching the rest of the innings. Later he fields. He would like to have a headache; he would like to lose his vision, or faint, or do something else dramatic. But he feels fine. He touches his temple. There is a tender spot. He hopes it swells up and turns blue before tomorrow, to prove he was really hit.
Like everyone at school, he has also to play rugby. Even a boy named Shepherd whose left arm is withered with polio has to play. They are given team positions quite arbitrarily. He is assigned to play prop for the Under-13Bs. They play on Saturday mornings. It is always raining on Saturdays: cold and wet and miserable, he trudges around the sodden turf from scrum to scrum, getting pushed around by bigger boys. Because he is a prop, no one passes the ball to him, for which he is grateful, since he is frightened of being tackled. Anyhow, the ball, which is coated in horse fat to protect the leather, is too slippery to hold on to.
He would pretend to be sick on Saturdays were it not for the fact that the team would then have only fourteen men. Not turning up for a rugby match is much worse than not coming to school.
The Under-13Bs lose all their matches. The Under-13As too lose most of the time. In fact, most of the St Joseph’s teams lose most of the time. He does not understand why the school plays rugby at all. The Brothers, who are Austrian or Irish, are certainly not interested in rugby. On the few occasions when they come to watch, they seem bemused and don’t understand what is going on.
In her bottom drawer his mother keeps a book with a black cover called Ideal Marriage. It is about sex; he has known about its existence for years. One day he spirits it out of the drawer and takes it to school. It causes a flurry among his friends; he appears to be the only one whose parents have such a book.
Though it is a disappointment to read — the drawings of the organs look like diagrams in science books, and even in the section on postures there is nothing exciting (inserting the male organ into the vagina sounds like an enema) — the other boys pore avidly over it, clamour to borrow it.
During the chemistry class he leaves the book behind in his desk. When they return Brother Gabriel, who is usually quite cheery, wears a frosty, disapproving look. He is convinced Brother Gabriel has opened his desk and seen the book; his heart pounds as he waits for the announcement and the shame that will follow. The announcement does not come; but in every passing remark of Brother Gabriel’s he hears a veiled reference to the evil that he, a non-Catholic, has imported into the school. Everything is spoiled between Brother Gabriel and himself. Bitterly he regrets bringing the book; he takes it home, returns it to the drawer, never looks at it again.
For a while he and his friends continue to gather in a corner of the sports field during the break to talk about sex. To these discussions he contributes bits and pieces he has picked up from the book. But these are evidently not interesting enough: soon the older boys begin to separate off for conversations of their own in which there are sudden drops of tone, whisperings, outbursts of guffawing. At the centre of these conversations is Billy Owens, who is fourteen and has a sister of sixteen and knows girls and owns a leather jacket which he wears to dances and has possibly even had sexual intercourse.
He makes friends with Theo Stavropoulos. There are rumours that Theo is a moffie, a queer, but he is not prepared to believe them. He likes the look of Theo, likes his fine skin and his high colouring and his impeccable haircuts and the suave way he wears his clothes. Even the school blazer, with its silly vertical stripes, looks good on him.
Theo’s father owns a factory. What exactly the factory makes no one quite knows, but it has something to do with fish. The family lives in a big house in the richest part of Rondebosch. They have so much money that the boys would undoubtedly go to Diocesan College were it not for the fact that they are Greek. Because they are Greek and have a foreign name they have to go to St Joseph’s, which, he now sees, is a kind of basket to catch boys who fit nowhere else.
He glimpses Theo’s father only once: a tall, elegantly dressed man with dark glasses. He sees his mother more often. She is small and slim and dark; she smokes cigarettes and drives a blue Buick which is reputed to be the only car in Cape Town — perhaps in South Africa — with automatic gears. There is also an older sister so beautiful, so expensively educated, so marriageable, that she is not allowed to be exposed to the gaze of Theo’s friends.
The Stavropoulos boys are brought to school in the mornings in the blue Buick, driven sometimes by their mother but more often by a chauffeur in black uniform and peaked cap. The Buick sweeps grandly into the school quadrangle, Theo and his brother descend, the Buick sweeps off. He cannot understand why Theo allows this. If he were in Theo’s place he would ask to be dropped off a block away. But Theo takes the jokes and jeers with equanimity.