Free Karoo Boy by Troy Blacklaws

with the gypsy hair on a bicycle.
    She, barefoot girl, now in black sandals and white socks, reads on a bench in the schoolyard in the shade of a plane tree. Some of the seeds have fallen and split under soles, spilling a film of fluff on the stone paving. There is a circus of skipping and tagging and jostling going on around her. But she is still, as if the shade of the plane anchors her.
    I stand and stare at her. Her eyes jerk away from the book because a horsefly or something stings her calf. Through the laughter and babble I hear the smack of her hand on her skin. She spits in her hand and rubs it in. I wish I was close enough to see the speck of blood. Instinctively I look around for a Muizenberg lollyboy on a bicycle. Ice is good to take the sting away, but there are no lollyboys on bicycles in Klipdorp. Before I can think of another plan, she is lost inside her book again.
    I walk past her, fingering the seeds in my pocket. I whistle and swivel my head as if the schoolyard is full of exotic things: flamingos and macaws, instead of bricked-in kids. As I reach her, I chance looking down. Her head is bent. She wears rubber bands in her hair like Marta, not pink but green to match her school gym. The hem of her gym has been let out. It is a bottle green while the rest of her skirt is faded to olive green. Between the lip of her skirt and the book is a shadowed gap. The book is bird-winged in the wedge of her knees. It has the red blur of a library stamp on the edges. I catch the title from the top of the page she is on: Born Free .
    And then I am past her, my heart drumming and my head giddy. I look back at her and know she is in Kenya, running with lions on the beach sand, lions old man Santiago dreams of, countries away from me and the other kids in the school. I wish I could follow her there and run with her and the lions, the sun flaring in her gypsy hair and the Indian Ocean salt on her skin.
    In my mind, she runs in Marta’s watermelon bikini. Or in green panties. In the short time I have been at Klipdorp school I have discovered that girls have to wear green panties to match their uniform. Green hairbands, green gyms, green panties and no lipstick or mascara. Boys may wear underpants of any colour because they zip up, but girl’s skirts flip up in the wind like Marilyn’s.
    Another thing I have discovered is her name. Marika. Magic.
    The bell goes and I have Meneer Bester for PT. He played rugby for Natal in his time and has a skew, flat nose. Nowadays he spends the summer by the pool with his shades on. He chucks a waterpolo ball into the pool, then parks off in his deck chair. Now and then, he randomly blows his whistle, maybe so the classroom teachers will think he has a hard job.
    In the water I am as fluid as the rugby boys are on land. Like a penguin, so swift in the waves after an ungainly plod across the sand. But this only deepens their mistrust of me. They do not pass the ball to me and I end up swimming alone under water, coming up for air at the wall and sinking again to swim another length under water. As I glide, my stomach skims the tiles and I yearn to stay down forever, cool, enveloped, time-warped.
    The platanna frog is clever. He knows we are going to shoot him when he comes up, so he stays down till we give up. Dirkie reckons a platanna slows his breathing down, or breathes through his skin.
    Under the water, skimming the tiles, I feel as if I can breathe through my skin.
    I come up to find the pool deserted. Meneer Bester’s deck chair flaps in a gust of wind. I am late for Meneer de Wet’s class and I am suddenly scared, as my father is not there to chase fear away. He has sailed to Malindi, or maybe Mombasa, and may still sail beyond the horizon of memory.
    Marsden, my frogkiller brother, steals back among the black pines of the past.
    Meneer de Wet has a hooked nose and darting eyes. He reminds me of the buzzard on the roof.
    – You’re the new boy in town, he says, but I cannot turn a