Bom Boy Read online

  She thought she heard Oscar's voice in her sleep, imagined he'd been released and was standing beside her singing to Leke. She wanted to ask him something but sleep held her back.

  Something startled her and she awoke with a fright. For a second, with the morning light sneaking through the blinds, she didn't know where she was. The hospital TV was on mute but she could hear voices coming from the passageway, the squeak of wheels rolling on the floor. She thought of Oscar far away in a prison cell. Leke was still in the white crib beside her bed, an arm's length away. Elaine put her hand to her chest. She exhaled audibly, just as a nurse entered the room.

  ‘Everything okay, Elaine?’

  ‘Yes,’ she had to pat her chest to keep from crying, Yes, everything is fine.’

  ‘I'm writing to him.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Letters.’

  ‘He's just a baby, Oscar!’

  ‘I know, I know. When will he be able to read? Not just ABC, when will he be able to really understand things?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘They’re for him to read.’

  ‘Yes, and you can wait and tell them to him, face to face.’

  ‘It's too long. He'll need something in the meantime.’

  ‘I'll bring him to see you.’

  ‘No. I don't want that. He'll be two by the time I get visiting rights. I don't want him here. This is no place for a baby. It's filthy here, Elaine! And the smell… don't bring him here. Ever.’

  ‘But–’

  ‘I don't care. Don't come to visit with him. Please.’

  ‘Maak vinnig man!’ Another prisoner waiting for the phone moved up closer behind Oscar so he could smell his sweat.

  ‘A boy needs his father, Oscar,’ Elaine whispered, looking to the couch where she'd lain down Leke.

  She'd started work again, but she didn't know how to tell Oscar the money from Prof. Davis was gone, spent.

  ‘Please, Elaine,’ Oscar continued. ‘It'll be better that way. I can't let him see me like this. I can't let him remember this.’

  ‘He won't. He'll be too young.’

  ‘Doesn't matter. This is not the place for him. I'll be out, you'll see, the time will pass quickly.’

  Oscar's lie polluted the phone call. Elaine held the receiver between her ear and her shoulder, reaching her hand to stroke Leke's furrowed brow. The call went silent.

  Saturday 25th July 1992

  For Leke:

  ‘Am I Nigerian?’ I asked my dad.

  He nodded.

  ‘And I'm South African too?’

  My mother nodded.

  ‘How come we don't go there? And how come your skin is like that but Daddy and me are like this?’

  ‘Daddy and I.’

  ‘If you’re really my mother how come you’re oyinbo?’

  They never answered my questions so I decided to try ignoring theirs too.

  ‘Oscar, where are your school socks?’

  I nodded and got a smack from my mother.

  ‘Why did you bite Temilade?’

  I feigned as best I could the smile I'd seen too many times on their faces. My father gave me a lecture and sent me to my room.

  Later he would come to get me, while my mother went to bed. NEPA would have turned off the electricity. A naked candle poking out of a Star beer bottle, the wax dribbling over the blue label.

  Babalawo mo wa bebe

  If he'd already had a bit to drink he would be impatient with my bad pronunciation as I tried to repeat the words.

  ‘What are they teaching you in school?’ and ‘All that English with your mother all day – what a mistake. I told her to let me take you to Ekiti!’

  I loved my father. Maybe because he really talked to me, albeit he may have let slip what my mother referred to as “inappropriate details”. The point is he spoke freely to me and I felt important.

  ‘Bom Boy! Come here jo! Let me tell you a story.’

  He shouldn't have called it a story. He didn't have to pretend with me – I knew.

  Friday 27th July 2012

  Stretching his arm out of the car window, Leke pushed the buzzer. The camera flashed and he knew Marcus had seen and recognised him. The steel gates parted and as he pulled into the driveway and switched off Red he wished he hadn't agreed to come. He hated coming back here. He locked the car doors even though this was the safest house in Cape Town.

  It hadn't always been like this. Marcus's fervour for locks, padlocks and watchmen came after Jane's death. Leke would repeatedly return home to an added security measure or to tradesmen trying to convince compliant Marcus to bulk up on something he already had.

  It seemed to work; despite a perpetual series of robberies in the neighbourhood, this house had never been touched. Still, Leke always locked his car door. When he'd been living in the house he'd always avoided getting in after dark – peace of mind eluded him.

  Leke watched Marcus as he unwrapped the take-away packets. He pushed the white plastic bags, damp from steam, to the side of the kitchen table and pulled the cardboard tops off the foil containers. The smell of steaming curry and basmati nee filled the small kitchen. Marcus's bony hands twitched, hands with reddish-brown marks across the white skin, wrinkled, he wiped them on his black trousers.

  ‘Let's eat,’ Marcus said looking up at Leke who rose and got two plates from the cupboard.

  He pulled cutlery from the basket near the sink and dried the forks with a damp kitchen rag.

  They settled at the table although Leke knew Marcus, as a rule, ate in front of the television when he was alone. He'd come home one evening and found him eating pizza, watching the National Geographic channel through his wire spectacles. Leke had sat beside him as he switched channels to Animal Planet and then BBC, back and forth, shovelling the pizza slices into his mouth. It had seemed reckless. Dirty plates and bowls with hardened brown specks spread across the rug and underneath the settee – each dish at a different stage of decay. Marcus hadn't shaved in a few days and white shoots covered his chin.

  ‘Happy belated birthday, son,’ Marcus said, setting down his fork.

  Leke's face remained flat, expressionless.

  ‘Here,’ Marcus raised his wine glass and the gold liquid caught the light from the hanging pendant.

  The clink of their glasses struck but then the silence took over again. Marcus shifted in his seat.

  ‘I… there's something I want you to have. Well, Jane always, you know, kept it… she asked me to make sure you get it… at the right time.’

  Leke put his fork down, the contents of his plate mostly untouched.

  ‘An envelope. It's for you from…from before–’

  ‘I don't want it,’ Leke frowned.

  He'd watched Marcus pull the envelope from a pile of innocent-looking mail.

  ‘Give it a chance, Leke.’

  ‘No. I don't want it,’ he picked up his fork but put it down again. ‘I don't want anything from before, I've told you. I need to go. Thanks for dinner.’

  He rose from the table and left the kitchen. Marcus didn't protest. The bang of the front door, the sound of Red pulling away and he was alone again.

  The large house his adopted son had once galloped around in seemed to swell to twice its size after Jane's death. It gobbled up the sound of Leke's feet stamping the old wooden floors; the sound of his laughter as he splashed in the bathtub calling for her to play with him.

  Although he was never much of a talker, for three months after her death Leke had stopped speaking completely. At first Marcus, ensconced in his own grief, hardly took notice. He worked late in his damp-smelling office at the university, crowding his mind with an unrelenting series of minute facts. He would start a paper on trace fossils and radiometric dating and lose himself in the pre-historic past, seduced by relics. Silent data he called it, he liked this – the quiet stories of rocks, no words just markings and lines. A speechless world – with Jane dead, talking had become ext
raneous.

  In those days soon after the funeral Marcus would arrive home late. The babysitter would be sleeping on the couch with the TV on mute. Marcus would turn it off and touch her on the shoulder.

  ‘Mr. Denton,’ it was always the same, she'd sit up and rub her eyes. ‘I didn't hear you come in.’

  Marcus would pay her and walk her out to her car. Back inside he'd turn off all the lights in the house and meander through it as if he were visiting an exhibition in a gallery. He didn't cry, but he'd put his index finger between his teeth and bite down. Before going to bed he'd pass through Leke's room – stop a while to watch him sleeping – collect blankets from the cupboard and settle in front of the television. On the couch was the only place he found a good night's sleep.

  Leke pressed his horn down, then flicked his indicators and overtook the lorry. Marcus and the envelope had disturbed something that up till then he'd succeeded in forgetting.

  ‘Why are you home?’ Leke had asked Jane when he returned from school on his bike, not to the usual company of the house-keeper, Lightness, but to Jane in her bathrobe, her face gaunt.

  ‘To keep you company.’

  She'd smiled, not having to bend too low to hug him.

  ‘You’re sick again?’

  ‘No. Just tired.’

  Leke had known she was lying.

  ‘Where's Marcus?’

  ‘Daddy's gone away on a conference for the weekend. So it's me and you.’

  They'd stayed outside, spring had eased away for the kind of harsh sunny days Jane adored and Leke tolerated. They'd sat on the veranda, Jane rattling on, in between pauses where she caught her breath, about the flowers she would plant before the December holidays.

  ‘Star jasmine, Lek Trachelospermum jasminoides.’

  They'd smiled a secret joke at one another across the slatted garden table.

  ‘Maybe another vegetable patch to the side there, away from those hungry rubber tree roots. Goodness, I might have to get someone to chop it down.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I know I love it too, but look how it gorges itself. If we’re not careful it'll uproot the whole house.’

  After a short silence Leke'd asked, ‘What else will you plant?’

  ‘I've been thinking of a perennial maybe?’

  ‘Thought you said those were fakes. That they lived on and on which is not real life.’

  Jane didn't respond but looked out in the distance, beyond the rubber tree and head-height bougainvillea hedge that separated her garden from the neighbour's. She saw the tops of the other houses and Table Mountain presiding over the skyline.

  ‘I think I've changed my mind,’ she said still looking out over the view ‘Having something that will always be here seems like a good idea. I was flipping through my old copies of House and Garden… they did a spread once on the Marvels of Peru, Mirabilis jalapa. It seemed like a fair compromise.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Four O'Clocks, they open when the temperature drops in the evening and by morning they wilt. Perennial, but not really.’

  Leke looked confused but Jane wasn't really speaking to him. The sun reddened and Lightness came to ask if they wanted tea outside. Jane startled.

  ‘I'm feeling quite tired actually. I'll go for a nap.’

  At night she had let Leke sleep in her bed, an old practice they only ever revived when Marcus was away.

  By the time Leke entered the familiar cul de sac, his irritation had dissolved. Pulling into the garage he switched off the engine and left the keys in his lap. He closed his eyes and the memory released.

  He would refuse to sleep unless Jane lay down with him. In her bed they would curl together, Leke digging deeper and deeper into her stomach, his small skinny arms wound round her waist. She'd hold and kiss him and he would fall asleep to the sensation of her damp breath on his ear. So long as he could feel her breath everything would be fine. It was his job to continue feeling. As long as his ear was there, her breath would be there too. The next morning Leke had woken up and found the bed hot from Jane's fever.

  ‘Get me some water please, darling,’ Jane had said, pushing Leke out of the bed.

  When he'd returned with the glass, Jane was staring, unmoving, at the ceiling.

  Tuesday 5th November 2002

  A month after Jane's death, the Western Cape Earth Science Club invited Marcus to give a series of lectures on his speciality, trace fossils within the Precambrian period. He enjoyed the challenge of working within the span of this era, a field where fossil records were poor yet it accounted for eighty-seven percent of geological time.

  ‘Knysna,’ Marcus mouthed as he put down the invitation. They'd got married there. He checked the dates again, the trip was ten days long and he felt guilty at his eagerness to get away. He called the number on the invitation and accepted.

  It was an amateur palaeontology institution and they offered a small stipend, room and board. The town was overcome with holiday makers but there were a few people who were attending the conference, several had heard of Prof. Marcus Denton and read his papers in journals. The caress of academic success was a welcome distraction. He sent Lightness a text when he arrived and called home two days later.

  ‘He's not talking sir.’

  ‘What's the matter? Is he upset?’

  ‘No. He's just not talking. His teacher called to say they were sending him home.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He's not talking. When they call his name in class he says nothing.’

  Marcus looked out the window. There was a church across from his boarding house, not the one they'd said their vows in but –

  ‘Where's he now? What's he doing?’

  ‘I left him in his room, he's looking through his books.’

  ‘Put him on the phone.’

  ‘You didn't say goodbye to him. I told you that would cause trouble with a child.’

  ‘He's hardly a child, Lightness. I left him a note, I needed to beat the traffic’

  Lightness made a sound of disapproval.

  ‘Put him on the phone.’

  He waited while she put the phone down. The Zimbabwean woman had worked for Jane's sister, raising her four kids. By the time they decided to adopt Leke the kids had grown up and left the house. Two lived in Canada, one emigrated to Australia and the other lived in Durban. Jane was not particularly close to her sister but she was offered Lightness as a “life saver”. On meeting her during a large family reunion Marcus was immediately jealous of the easy way Lightness had with both adults and children. He heard someone pick up the receiver.

  ‘Hello? Leke, it's Dad!’

  There was no response.

  ‘Leke!’ he sang, trying something he'd heard Jane do.

  ‘You cannot raise a child over the phone, sir.’

  ‘Put him back on, Lightness.’

  ‘Haven't you heard me? He's not talking. When are you back? You must come now.’

  ‘I don't think it's such an emergency.’

  ‘I just give him food when I think he's hungry. I don't know what he's thinking. I don't want to leave him alone in his room at night. He needs you, sir.’

  How strange, Marcus thought as he wiped his eyes, his hands temporarily obscuring the view of the white church – to come all this way to cry.

  ‘Sir?’

  He cleared his throat.

  ‘Soon. I'll be there soon, Lightness.’

  He stayed in Knysna for the duration of the conference, calling home every two days to find out that nothing had changed.

  He started his drive back to Cape Town after 2pm and stopped in Swellendam to spend the night, telling himself that driving in the dark was a bad idea. The following day he set out late again and arrived back in Cape Town at dusk. Driving into town along the N1 he ignored the men selling car phone chargers and wire versions of “The Big Five”. He dropped his speed to avoid the hidden cameras and, after passing the Pinelands off-ramp, turned towards the unive
rsity, putting off arriving home, hoping Leke would be asleep by the time he got back.

  If anything, Marcus had missed the campus and his office. He stood in the doorway for a few seconds then switched on the lights and ran his fingers over the hulking books on his desk, two massive rocks as book ends.

  On the way home from the university he stopped at the ATM. Leke was asleep when he arrived, Lightness fraught with worry.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Nothing You can leave now, I'll be fine.’

  ‘Nothing? This child needs help, sir. A normal doctor, or even I can take him to my doctor.’

  ‘Oh please, we don't need that charade again.’

  In the last stages of her sickness, Lightness had convinced Jane to allow her Sangoma to bless and guide her.

  ‘It's not a charade.’

  ‘I'm his father. I say he's fine.’

  She picked up her bag.

  ‘I have something to give you.’

  He handed her a thick envelope which she took, looking confused.

  ‘Sir?’

  He cleared his throat.

  ‘What's this?’

  ‘I think it's better if we…I think it's–’

  ‘I won't leave him. I've done nothing wrong.’

  ‘Please. Don't make this difficult. I need to be alone.’

  ‘What of the boy? What does he need?’

  ‘He needs me, you said so yourself. I promise I'll take care of him.’

  She left, water running from her nose.

  Marcus walked through the house. The door to Leke's room was cracked open and he could hear a strange shuffling He pushed the door open and found Leke, his back to the door, playing on the floor. Marcus had seen him playing this strange game before – Leke sitting with his legs open, tearing strips of white paper and twisting the strips and then shuffling them around on the floor. The box of Lego Marcus's sister had brought for him remained unopened in the corner. Marcus stood still for a while in the doorway. He sighed and stepped into the room,

  ‘Hey there,’ he walked towards the bed and hugged Leke.