Bom Boy Page 2

  Oscar walked up the steps; grudgingly taking in the palm-to-cheek bust of Cecil John Rhodes arranged on the top platform amidst imposing Doric columns. He turned to enjoy the view: the stoned terrace at the bottom of the monument; the curved stone wall; the forests with an army of towering skinny trees leaning away from the southeaster; and the familiar shapes and lines of the surrounding neighbourhoods.

  Visiting the monument had become a ritual of Oscar's since he'd arrived from Nigeria, two years ago, to start his PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology.

  The giant shrine to Rhodes contrasted with the simple life-size statue of the revered Moremi behind Oduduwa Hall back on Ile-Ife campus. Oscar remembered visiting the small courtyard as a little boy: a series of chalky statues memorialising Yoruba history. His favourite was Moremi: head bent, hands clasped together and resting on her raised thigh; the intricate detail of her braided hair in suku style. His father would lift him up so he could study the sculpted plaits.

  ‘That's the hairstyle of queens,’ his father would say for the hundredth time.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you see how all the hair bunches up in the centre like that? Only women who don't need to carry produce to the market can afford to plait their hair that way. Queens.’

  ‘Was Moremi a queen?’

  ‘Not in the beginning But she made a huge sacrifice and became one.’

  ‘How?’

  Oscar walked down and back towards the parking lot.

  Moremi's story had dotted his childhood with the consistency of birthdays. Oscar was surprised on arriving at the university to find that some of the people he shared a lab with had never heard of Moremi. Some of them didn't even know where Nigeria was.

  ‘I thought you were coloured,’ one had said, confused by Oscar's clay-brown skin and curly hair.

  He'd inherited little of his father's deep chocolate complexion; and his light brown hair and “oyinbo” mother had made him an easy target for teasing in primary school.

  The ignorance of his lab mates mixed with the opulence of Rhodes Memorial had brewed distaste in Oscar. Here in this country, he'd realised, they memorialised wealthy men – thieves; back home in Nigeria, simple people who sacrificed for the group.

  Many a late evening at the Varsity Rugby Club Oscar had found himself defending a country that faced derision amongst his South African colleagues. He needed every detail he could find to play the game of one-upmanship. The more beer consumed the more animated and irrational the conversation.

  ‘If Moremi got into a fight with Rhodes, she'd finish him off. Easy.’

  ‘Rubbish! There would be no fight. She'd be part of a mass of people building whatever Rhodes had the foresight to envisage.’

  ‘Ha! Foresight my ass! How much foresight does it take to steal land? Crooks!’

  Sometimes the evenings maintained a strained joviality, but often they ended in blatant tension. If his colleagues had listened Oscar would have told them, the way his father had told him, the story of Moremi who, leaving her only son and husband, offered herself as a prisoner when Ile-Ife was being invaded by neighbouring Ugbo warriors.

  ‘What are warriors?’ he'd asked his dad – he was six years old at the time.

  ‘Fighters. Soldiers. Now listen and don't interrupt me.’

  Oscar smiled and settled back into bed, enjoying how the springs bent towards his father's weight on the edge. He closed his eyes.

  ‘Once Moremi was captured, the King noticed how beautiful she was and married her. She joined his house and also became part of the town. She learnt all their secrets.’

  ‘What secrets Daddy?’

  ‘The things they were hiding. Now listen, as soon as she found out how to defeat them, she ran away from the palace and returned to Ife.’

  Where did she come to? Did she come here, to Road 7? Or did she come to Staff School hall? Or Staff club?’

  ‘Shhh Don't interrupt! She returned to Ife. Back then there was no Road 7 or Staff anything. She told the Ife army the secret and soon the Ugbos were defeated. Moremi then went to Esinmirin–’

  What is Esi… sin–’

  ‘E-sin-mi-rin. The Goddess of the river. Moremi went to her to make a sacrifice of thanks. An offering She gave fowls and bullocks and sheep but the Goddess demanded her only son.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Moremi threw her son into the raging river. Ife cried.’

  His father always took long pauses as he neared the end of his stories.

  ‘To comfort her, make her feel better, all the children of Ife took Moremi as a mother. So you see Oscar, you have two mothers, always remember that,’ he patted the blanket, a sign that he was about to get up and switch the lights off

  ‘Does that mean I got born two times?’

  His father just smiled.

  Parents never answered the important questions.

  The sun dipped; a translucent orange peel coiled through the stone pines, the silverleaf and the rugged fynbos in the nature reserve. Oscar checked his watch again, almost time. He walked back down to campus and set out. In his car he switched on the radio although he couldn't hear it, his head was pounding; a jet of water gushing between his ears.

  Friday 20th July 2012

  ‘Date today?’

  Leke heard a woman's voice ask as he walked down into the reception area of his office. She was bending over the desk, holding a pen, poised above the open page in the visitors’ book.

  Lewis the guard rattled off the date as Leke walked past towards the entrance.

  ‘Nice shirt,’ the security guard said as Leke clocked out and pushed open the glass door.

  A colleague coming behind him laughed. It wasn't a compliment, but a jibe at Leke's clothing and his routine of wearing the same dark grey pants and white short-sleeve shirt every day of the week. Apart from the grey pants he had a pair of black pants and a light blue shirt with long sleeves and missing buttons. He washed the shirts once a week and the pants every two weeks at the laundry near his home.

  Leke's lack of wardrobe became an issue for some of the staff, with people complaining to his manager that he was “unhygienic”. HR tried to address the matter by circulating the company dress code as well as running a one-week campaign on “tolerance in the workplace”.

  After that, apart from the disguised teasing and his coworkers’ exaggerated avoidance of being near him, Leke was left alone.

  The walk from the Western Medical Fund office to Leke's home was thirty minutes but it took him fifty on a Friday because he made a stop.

  Leke watched the pavement as he walked, and his long legs swung a slow easy gait. He felt like whistling but he'd never picked it up as a child, and now was too embarrassed to try. When he was around others whistling he studied them, hoping to catch on to the secret, but when he was alone again and tried it, little but a flush of air released from his lips.

  As he'd entered manhood, Leke made fewer trips to the barber shop Marcus used in Claremont. Marcus realised he couldn't force him and didn't want a fight. Fights with Leke were wordless, just his steely defiance and head set to the side looking down.

  So the curly afro was left to grow, twisting bronze coloured strands standing out from his head like crooked wires. His hair was the colour of his eyes and his skin and the effect evident and striking enough that, for a short period when he first arrived in high school, he was awarded the nickname Brownie.

  At the technikon Leke's silence and the manner with which he moved his tall slender body across the student piazza, greeting no one, were mistaken for arrogance.

  By the time Leke'd graduated from tech he knew all about programming he'd learnt the quiet language of computers and was satisfied to do that for a living He had also, by then, learnt to speak loud enough to be heard, he'd transitioned like an amphibian into an uncomfortable adulthood. Maturity thrust on him the need to disguise his dreams and dreaming world and “make it”. Nights still swallowed him whole into far-off voyages, his sle
ep populated with intense friendships, kissing and other intimacies his daylight life were barren of.

  Over the past decade the suburbs adjacent to trendy Observatory, Salt River and Woodstock, had gone through a process of re-development. Families that had lived in the area for generations were bought out by large developers and the wealthy. Main Road, running from Mowbray into the city centre, was now a long commercial strip with low-rise apartment blocks, offices, fashion stores, galleries and restaurants. Organic food markets in old warehouses and light industrial buildings spread out from the main road towards Queen Victoria Street and the railway line. This creep of gaiety ended abruptly at a set of traffic lights beyond which began a sliver settlement – an off-cut, somehow missed by the gentnfication project. Single-storey houses arranged amidst a series of cul-de-sacs and one-way streets – Wandenleigh was Leke's neighbourhood.

  Leke stopped at Elias's shop on the corner of Nelson and Oxford. It was an eighteen-metre-square store called The Corner Shop. The rumour was that the shop was as old as Elias, that he'd been born there and any day now the old man would die there leaving on the shelves, amongst the odd wares he sold, a half-empty stippled bottle of calamine lotion, an ornate bird cage with the wire door missing and a multi-coloured selection of unpackaged toothbrushes. At the entrance of the store was a basket full of un-matched socks. Keen customers who had been drawn in by the “five rand a sock” poster complained, but Elias said socks didn't need to match if you were going to wear them with boots.

  In the corner of the shop was a thin mattress where, during the day, Elias arranged his goods of scarves, shoes and old collectable tins. At night he slept on the mattress with Whitie, the four-legged woman in his life. The Great Dane was eighty-four centimetres tall at the withers and just under one-ninety on her hind legs. Her shiny jet black coat ironically explained the choice of her name.

  People wondered how Elias survived but, while most of his stock never seemed to move, he sold a great number of heavy duty black bags to a loyal group of customers; to those who cared to garden, he sold flower seeds.

  ‘Elias!’ Leke stuck his head through the entrance of the store.

  ‘Come, come,’ Elias replied from somewhere at the back of the room.

  ‘I'm in a hurry today,’ Leke said into the shadows, shifting his weight from one leg to the other and peering in.

  ‘Come in, Leke.’

  ‘No. Can't stay, Elias,’ he shifted his weight again.

  ‘Whitie's in the back, Leke. You can come in.’

  Leke stayed where he was. Elias came out from the store-room and fiddled with the back doorknob. Leke understood this gesture was for his benefit. The week before the back door had been unlocked and the Great Dane had pushed through and frightened Leke. Today the door was locked – Leke stepped into the shop. The cement screed floor was covered with a weary zebra rug that looked as if it had crawled into the middle of the space and died there. The ceiling was blackened from an old fire and a blue portable stove stood near the mattress. Everyone knew Elias used it to cook, but he insisted it was for sale. An orange sign with white lettering in the shop window had once claimed that everything inside had a price – including the shop owner. One day a woman from another neighbourhood who came into his shop insisted she wanted to buy Whitie. After that Elias took the sign down.

  ‘Hey, Elias.’

  ‘Hey, Leke. Why the rush?’

  ‘Paying rent.’

  ‘Ah. Okay. I won't keep you. What today?’

  ‘Four O'Clocks. Five packs please.’

  ‘Four O'Clocks. Four O'Clocks. Always the same thing, how come? Look I've got Snapdragons, Sweet Peas, some Daisies,’ Elias pointed to pictures of various flowers pasted onto kebab sticks he'd planted in small flower pots and arranged on the counter.

  ‘No, just the Four O'Clocks.’

  Elias shrugged and took five packs of the perennial seed out of the drawer behind the counter.

  ‘Well, I guess some people like Roses, you’re a Four O'Clocks kind a guy,’ he chuckled at his own joke.

  Leke took out a brown envelope from his backpack, in it was the exact amount of money for the seeds. He placed the envelope on the counter and stared at it while he waited. The old man gave him the five packs and tucked one pack of Snapdragons into Leke's top pocket. He began to protest.

  ‘I insist. No charge. Just want you to spread out a bit,’ Elias was enjoying the young man's nervousness. He rubbed his thickened fingers over grey speckled jowls, wheezing from a lifetime of smoking. His hoarse laughter exposed yellowed teeth and a purple tongue.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome. Let me know when they come out, hey?’ Elias shouted as Leke left his shop and walked up Oxford bridge.

  When he got to his front gate he paused to catch his breath. Walking up the driveway he pulled out another brown envelope, identical to the one he'd given to Elias. It too had an exact amount of money in it. He walked up to the front door and knocked.

  ‘Who is it?’

  It was a Victorian-style house. The grey roof shingles reminded Leke of the scales of a fish, he imagined the tiles writhing. The pipes carrying the rain water from the roof down to the gutters were made of copper. At the back of the house a room had been added and to the side was the garage where Leke lived. He'd never been inside the house but he believed Widow Marais lived in the doorway. He imagined she had her whole life set up on the other side of the door that he knocked on every month. He made up a story that her husband had died of a violent disease and had, in his last minutes of life, run crazy through most of the house. The only part he never ran through was the doorway, so she moved her life into this threshold and was now waiting for her own death.

  He'd named her the Rhododendron because, although she looked frail on all encounters with her, she'd talked hard.

  Leke had first seen the Rhododendron plant at a flower show Jane had taken him to at the National Botanical gardens.

  Jane had studied Botany. Leke didn't know what happened but he realised she had never worked as a botanist; he grew up knowing his mom was a part-time Science teacher at a boys’ school in Rondebosch.

  Her love for plants never changed though and Leke spent most of his childhood in her large garden, first rocking in a crib as she worked the soil and then planting with her. The flower show was a special occasion and Jane wore a hat and her favourite dress which was purple and pink chiffon. Leke liked putting his cheek to the fabric whenever she hugged him.

  They'd walked between the flower beds, holding hands and Jane had explained each display, the name of the flower, the family it came from and under what conditions it thrived.

  ‘This is the Rhododendrum ponticum Leke,’ she'd pointed at a collection of flowers and Leke forgot the icecream she'd bought him and listened. The flower reminded him of Jane's dress, purple and wavy in the light wind.

  ‘It has poison though, don't be fooled by its appearance,’ and she'd clasped the back of his neck with her thumb and forefinger, sucking her tongue as Leke giggled from her touch.

  ‘Rent,’ Leke shouted at the one-hundred-year-old hardwood door.

  ‘Put it through,’ the Rhododendron screeched.

  She was going blind and never left her house. Once a week her niece, Esmeralda, came by, not on a visit of care, Leke thought, but rather to see if her aunt had made it through another week. He heard the widow slap her cane against the flap in the door where the postman shoved the mail. He pushed the envelope through, but didn't hear it hit the floor.

  ‘Bye,’ Leke said.

  Widow Marais growled.

  There was a thick hedge along the side of the house that divided the Marais compound into two unequal halves. Widow Marais's half was wild with overgrown bush. Leke crossed into his half, cutting through the hedge, careful not to scratch his ankles on the plant's thorns. If he hadn't needed to pay rent he'd just have used his own private entrance. That was one of the things that had attracted him to the place. The a
dvert had said:

  Small converted garage room. Separate entrance. R800 per month. Toilet. Shower. Sink. Available now Phone Jeanine Marais 021 448 5813.

  Leke had called.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Uhm… I'm calling about–’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The garage room?’

  ‘Still available. How old?’

  ‘I… you mean–’

  ‘Age Your age?’

  ‘Twenty-five,’ he'd lied.

  ‘Children? Pets?’

  ‘No. No.’

  ‘Job?’

  ‘Yes, I–.’

  ‘Where?’

  Leke gave her his manager's phone number. He'd been working there for almost a year and felt he could now afford to rent a place of his own. The next day Leke called Jeanine Marais back as she'd asked him to.

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘How soon?’

  ‘One question.’

  It had been the reason he'd responded to her advert and if she'd thought it odd, she hadn't cared enough to argue. The next day Leke moved into Widow Marais's “garage room”, bringing all his possessions with him: his atlas collection, his small wardrobe of clothing, his mattress, his dark blue backpack, and Red, Leke's dearest friend – an old rusting Volvo 200 series station wagon.

  The entire garden on Leke's side had been plucked out and as he walked, his half-worn brogues left muddied shoe prints on the rose-coloured brick paving. A two-metre high wall with flecks of grey paint peeling off protected the space from the Cape Town winds, the silence created a chilling stillness. Beyond a squat wooden gate, swollen with the winter rains, the end of the cul de sac was exposed. Leke entered his studio.

  Inside his small home his eyes adjusted to the darkness. He pulled a cord hanging by the door, and a fluorescent light lit up the space.

  It was a deep double garage that had been turned into a studio flat.

  This was part of Widow Marais's confusion when Leke asked if he could park his car inside the flat. Not in the driveway but actually inside.