Free Karoo Boy by Troy Blacklaws Page B

Then he bites the pipe and climbs back inside the bakkie. The diesel motor catches and throbs deep.
    The farmboys wave to Jim as they go. He gets an old Castrol tin and uses cardboard as a brush to sweep the tobacco into the tin. He empties the tin into a bin with a swinging lid, and then settles on his beer crate again.
    The ice in my mouth is now melted enough to swallow it.
    – Do you think you’ll be happy here? I ask my mother.
    I am thinking of her painting, and whether she will find the inspiration. She puts down her gin and tonic and sighs:
    – Dee, I can never be happy again. Perhaps there will be moments of happiness, but there will always be the pain.
    I too feel the undertow of pain tugging at my feet, drawing me down to shadowy, kelpy depths.
    – Aren’t you at all happy now, with me?
    – I love being with you, Dee. But you’d have to be blindfolded not to see how cruel life can be.
    I chew my straw to stop myself crying. I will never be enough to make my mother happy.
    My mother turns to history, perhaps to cheer me up.
    – You know there was a time when Delarey Straat, in front of us, was called Victoria Street. After the Second World War, when Malan came to power, the Afrikaners changed the names of streets to honour their boer heroes. This was their way of mocking the English who killed their women and children in the camps, and tried to kill their language.
    Lulled by the lilt of my mother’s voice, my mind drifts to the sea. I look down from a seagull’s view of the tidal pool at St James. Beyond the lagoon calm of the water, the Atlantic crashes against the breakwater.
    Standing on the breakwater at dawn, our backs to the vast blue of False Bay, Marsden and I wait for the big wave. I see a shark finning through the still water of the tidal pool. I shout: shaaaaark. But it is too late. The wave breaks. I drop to my stomach. The wall is as sandpapery as coral under my skin.
    Then the wave is over and I jump up to call out to Marsden, who is in the foamy pool. Beyond him is the shark. Marsden sees the fin and freestyles like crazy towards me. The shark zones in on the wounded-fish sound of his kicking. I catch Marsden’s hand and yank him out. The shark veers away, skimming the wall. I look into his cold, cat eye, before another wave breaks and we drop to the wall again. When the foam clears, we see the fin at the shallow end, as if the shark surfed the wave in. We run along the wall to shore before another wave breaks.
    Three coloured men come walking along the beach and we point out the shark. One man runs over the rocks and comes back with an old tennis net. Two of them unroll the net and drag it across the pool, from the deep end in, sweeping the shark to the shallows. Though there is a gap under the net the shark feels trapped. Then the third man wades in and clubs the shark on the head with a long wooden oar. The shark tosses his head towards him and he skips aside, lithe a s the mongoosey snoekseller dodging motorcars. He clubs it again and skips away again, until the shark sinks.
    They drag the shark ashore by the tail, slit his white stomach to spill his guts. Some they toss to cawing seagulls but the rest they bury in the sand for stray dogs to dig up. They tie the shark to the long oar and two of them hoist the oar onto their shoulders. The third man, the clubber, rolls up the tennis net as if he has just played a set or two. They wave totsiens to Marsden and me.
    Then we cycle home for breakfast, picking up fresh Portuguese rolls and the Cape Times at the Sea Breeze Café for breakfast. My father reckons it happens sometimes, by a fluke of the tide, that a shark is washed in, but they are usually sandsharks and their teeth are too far back to take a bite out of you.
    – And one day, perhaps, Delarey Straat will be called Mandela Street, or Tambo Street. So you see how history is in flux.
    The history teacher at Klipdorp High, Meneer Jansen, has this way of killing history stone dead. He