Stargazer. Jan van Tonder

had a car and he kept hinting that he’d like to take one of my sisters to the drive-in. He wasn’t sure which one he liked best, so he called on all of them, and never got lucky with any of them. In any case, Pa wouldn’t have allowed the girls to go to the drive-in. He said it was a place where good girls turned bad. Meantime I knew Bella had been to the Bluff drive-in with Hennie – I’d heard her tell the others. But when she came back she seemed angry, not bad. “Can you believe it, he didn’t even buy me a chocolate or a cooldrink! Just fetched two cups of coffee, one for the windscreen and one for the rear window. Next thing I knew, all the windows were fogged up and his hands were all over me.”

      Ma disliked Hennie because he didn’t look you in the eye and because he’d pushed Riempies off his lap. There was something wrong with a person who couldn’t look you in the eye and who didn’t like animals, she said.

      Once Hennie took a photo from his wallet and showed it to Martina and the others. Erika said sis! and turned away, but Martina took a closer look.

      “Quite big for such a small guy, hey?” she remarked.

      Hennie laughed and winked at Martina. “When a girl starts making comparisons, she’s been around, or what do you say? Perhaps I should take you to the drive-in next time.”

      That was when they discovered I was in the kitchen, and hiding the photo would be useless. If Ma saw it, she’d wring Hennie’s neck. Our necks too, mind you. It was a photo of a naked Japanese lying on top of a woman, his willie pushed halfway into her. I’d never seen anything like it in my life.

      Hein had often told me what men and women do to each other and sometimes I couldn’t believe my ears, but this time I’d seen the photo with my own eyes. Hennie would never have showed it to me if I hadn’t caught them redhanded. He knew Ma would chase him away like a dog if I told her, so he had no choice but to show it to me.

      I would have liked to examine it a little longer, but he took it away and returned it to his wallet. “Horny already, and the lightie can’t even piss foam yet,” he said, glancing at Martina.

      If Ma heard him talk like that . . .

      I knew what horny meant, but I didn’t know what Hennie meant when he said I couldn’t piss foam. I couldn’t ask him in front of the girls, because then they’d know Hennie was right and I couldn’t do it, whatever it might be. A few evenings later Sarel and I were peeing outside. Sarel was Erika’s boyfriend. Suddenly I realised what Hennie had meant. Where Sarel’s stream hit the ground, bubbles appeared. By the time he’d zipped up and gone inside, the bubbles were still there. After a while they began to pop, but I remained there, watching until the last one had disappeared. That evening I decided I wouldn’t rest till I could do that too.

      Now the moon was shining and I was peeing and peeing. The light fell on a few small bubbles, but they disappeared so quickly that they didn’t count. I stood on my toes to get a little height. That was no good either. I shook my willie and put it away, adjusting my trouser leg. Perhaps if I stood on something taller. Like a chair. Or something even bigger.

      How about the roof? But people would see me there. I looked at Gladys’s kaya. Yep, that was the right place. High enough, and hidden among the branches of the wild fig.

      The wild fig was huge. Ma kept asking Pa to chop it down, but he refused. Once he said: “Vrou, Jonah had a miracle tree that gave him shelter, a kind of vine that came up in the course of a single night and wilted in the course of a single day – imagine what a tree like this would have been worth to him!”

      “Only because he didn’t have seven children, a husband and a mother’s washing to get dry, Abram!”

      I froze when I heard Gladys’s door open. It was one of those corrugated iron doors that clattered like the lid of a rubbish bin. She set down her large basin outside the shower room, took a bucket and crossed the lawn to the back door. I remained there without knowing why, until she returned to her kaya with the bucket of hot water balanced on her head. She didn’t see me behind the trunk of the wild fig. She went into the shower room without closing the door behind her. Boytjie was probably asleep and she was leaving the door open to hear if he woke up.

      A candle provided the only light inside the shower. Gladys undressed and kneeled, her bum resting on her heels. She scooped water with a tin can and poured it over herself. As she washed, her tits swung rhythmically from side to side. It reminded me of the lapping of the water in the harbour when a boat went past.

      Carefully I climbed through the fence. From the Ahlerses’ banana trees I’d be able to watch Gladys without being seen. My foot caught on the wire and it made a sound. Gladys looked up. I was afraid she might close the door, but she didn’t. She began to soap her body all over. Her hands moved over her glistening legs and arms, sliding into her armpits and over and under her tits. I imagined how slippery her skin would feel under the suds, and how soft where it yielded under her fingers.

      I’d never seen anything so amazing. Elsie and Helen were beautiful, yes, but I’d never seen them without clothes.

      Gladys needn’t worry, I’d never try to scare her again when she fetched her bath water.

      Now she was pouring water over herself once more. The creamy suds ran down her body. I sat down, because my back hurt from crouching among the banana leaves. The dry leaves rustled and snapped. Gladys raised her eyes and looked straight at me. My ears were burning, though I felt certain she couldn’t see me. She covered her breasts with her arm and blew out the candle. I heard her pouring more water over herself. It was quiet for a while. Then I heard a click as she closed the door of the kaya.

      As I was about to climb back through the fence, the Ahlerses’ stoep light went on and the back door opened.

      “Evening, Timus, where are you off to in such a hurry?” It was Oom Basie, Hein’s dad.

      I hated it when Oom Basie stopped me to chat. He always said the same thing over and over. He had a moustache and a big stomach and only one leg. He used to be a shunter, but when he lost his leg they gave him an office job. There were rumours that he’d hidden a bottle at work, a few hundred yards from the loco, where the lines ran into the stop blocks. The uncoupled trucks rolled free after the locomotive or electric unit had given them a push. If you sat with your back to the loco, you couldn’t hear the trucks at all as they rolled past you. Dead quiet, those iron wheels on the track, even with a heavy locomotive like a Garratt. Only when they passed over the joints did you hear them: ticktick-ticktick.

      It was a wonderful playground, but if a shunter was riding on one of the trucks, feet on the step, one hand on the grab handle, walkie-talkie in the other, you had to run like the wind, or he’d jump off and thrash you there and then. You couldn’t even complain at home, for what had you been doing there, the grown-ups would ask. It was the most dangerous place anyone might pick to play.

      The story went that one evening, after an appointment with the bottle, Oom Basie had to couple two trucks. He saw that the buffers weren’t lined up and aimed a kick at the one that was out of line. In a flash his leg was trapped. Taken clean off. Blood everywhere when they pulled the trucks apart. There wasn’t a doctor in the world who could stitch up the soggy mess between his ankle and his knee.

      Whenever Oom Basie got the chance, he insisted on telling the story. Braam said when he looked at Oom Basie he could understand why Fransien was the way she was. Fransien was Hein’s sister. No one wanted her for a girlfriend, though she always said she was going to marry Joon when she grew up.

      There were three people Fransien loved more than all the others put together: her mom, Boytjie and Joon. Though she was only fifteen, she’d left school long ago. Her mouth was slack and her tongue moved around like a puppy that had got stuck halfway through being born. When she spoke, only her mom and Joon could make out what she was saying.

      Behind Oom Basie Hein appeared. He must have heard his dad talking to me. “Take a look at this,” he said. “I bet you’ve never seen anything like it.”

      I looked round carefully. Ma didn’t want me even talking to Hein, never mind entering their yard. I wished