A Separate Development

Christopher Hope

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781848871670
• eBook ISBN: 9781782399674
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Young Harry Moto has problems with fallen arches, crinkly hair that won't flatten down, a plump chest and, for a white man, unusually dark skin. Harry's appearance provokes mercilessly sarcastic taunting from his school mates but, living in South Africa, it is not surprising that it is his skin colour which eventually brings about his downfall...

IN

1

Let’s say it began that afternoon when I exposed myself to Mina Meintjies. That’s how she will remember it, I’m sure. I was standing on the edge of Jack Wyner’s swimming pool, that shapely blue kidney, under a hot sun, near the steps at the shallow end, balanced carefully on the curved lip which jutted a couple of inches over the water. Mina was looking up . . .

I think about where it all began because I have to do so. It is a question I am often asked and one I often ask myself — for reasons which will become clear, and possibly rather painful, as this statement of fact — I emphasise fact, for that is what it is — gets under way. I might add that I don’t wish to remember where it all began. I would prefer to forget. However, this is not allowed. If I am to have any hope of freedom, everything must come out. The theory seems to be that as long as it all comes out, a pattern will emerge which will enable others to work out just what it is that I have done. This I see as the ultimate sentimentalism of people increasingly desperate for a link, a connection with something — correction, with anything, that makes some sense. A country which has based itself absolutely on the sacred belief in sundered, severed, truncated, fractured, split, divided, separate selves now craves a detailed account of my development in the deluded hope that once all the facts are known the odd case that I am will swim into focus, there will be an intermingling, an intermeshing of parts and their insanity will be miraculously proved to be wise policy. It is a poisonous, romantic notion. In return I am offered freedom. It’s an offer which is positively presumptuous since they suppose freedom is theirs to give. I thought I’d had the dreadful luck to land in the hands of the police, but it is far worse than that: I have fallen among philosophers. What’s more, they are obsessed with hygiene in a very special way I’ve not come across since Jack Wyner lunched off the floor of his swimming pool. They plan to give me a shower.

Rich Jack Wyner! Not one but two garden boys, Freddie and Amos, who slouched around the garden sweltering in thick blue overalls and old felt hats; Freddie mowing the lawn and watering the ranunculi, Amos tending the pool, draining, scrubbing, plugging the cracks, fishing out leaves, putting in fresh chlorine three times a week. The swimming area was grassed and enclosed by a wooden trellis. In one corner, near the deep end, was a pumphouse, and in the other, an apple tree. Night and day the pump went, pushing the water through the filter, back into the pool, frothing out of a pipe set into the lowest of the steps in the shallow end. Entire water change each day (each hour?) Anyway, whichever, Wyner was damn proud of that filter. The pumphouse, bedded into the corner, bunker style, had a flat roof a foot or so off the ground, ideal for stretching out in the sun and catching your first summer tan.

I didn’t need the sun, due to my condition, but Yannovitch, a Yugoslav with a milky, freckled skin, swore by it — the angle of the pumphouse roof gave even exposure to the right solar rays, or something like that. I’d have said that he tanned badly, couldn’t take the sun. I’d have said so — but for the fact that I seldom talked about skin conditions or suntans. Seldom, if ever . . .

“Old Amos gets our pool so damn clear I swear that you could eat off the bottom!”

Jack Wyner was forever rabbiting on about his hygienic pool. One day, when his folks were out and the pool empty and freshly scrubbed, he’d done just that. No plates, nothing. Straight off the cold stone: knife, fork, napkin — the lot; he’d enjoyed cold meats and salads. Just goes to show. It seems the salads spread themselves around the place a bit, but he managed.

Smoothly rounded Wyner, softly pink all over, much of his face carpeted with fine white down years after the rest of us began shaving. This showed up suddenly when the sun was behind him. Fat Jack, seal-sleek, smooth as a bar of new soap, and smelling, so faintly that you almost didn’t notice it, of sick. Three ovals piled up: bottom, belly and head, this last capped by a slick of hair so well greased the comb-teeth paths set hard from ear to ear in perfect curves. His legs dropped out of beautifully cut natty off-white shorts, too long by far, with zippered money pocket, button-down back pocket and no turn-ups. Slightly wet but luckily rich, his means made up for his dampness. An open, honest, anxious guy who’d begun life as a class schloep, a toady, before he’d come over to us, the bad eggs of the class, the boys, as old Donally put it, from ‘rough surroundings’: Rick van Dam, John Yannovitch, Theo Shuckel and myself, give or take one or two others, hangers-on and easily shaken off.

Most afternoons, except for Wednesdays, along with some of the girls from the Convent of Our Lady of Sorrows, we’d go swimming at old Wyner’s shack up on the Ridge. A damned sight better than risking the public baths, a real pit of a place, used during the week only by snotty-nosed infants and octogenarians in bathrobes and purple rinses whose first impulse on entering the water was to piss the place yellow as jaundice. The Superintendent fought back with double-strength chlorine. Result? Open your eyes under water and you went blind for five minutes, arriving home with flamingo-pink eyes that would have done an albino proud.

Big Dottie Baker, incredibly well-developed and kind with it, a gentle, moony face, looking rather like the Queen Mother, all face-powder and soft, round creases, was there on those afternoons at Wyner’s. Mary Smithson came too, when she felt like it. A nervous, fidgety girl inclined to jump at the least sound with a giggle that was almost a squeak, but not unpleasant. Jet black hair, very slender, a bit flat maybe, but her face was fantastic with large blue-grey eyes. She never said much and little at all when other people were speaking, but the eyes watched, darting this way and that, less eyes than strange tropical fish that swam in her face. Every so often I caught the eyes on me, though they’d flicked past my ears and were gone the instant I noticed them. Everybody knew that she loved herself. So what? She was exquisite. And then there was Mina Meintjies, as often as not, who spent a lot of time sitting on the steps of the shallow end where the inlet pipe bubbled, keeping her eyes open.

About four o’clock, hot for September, my arms folded carefully across my chest, and the sun dead centre on my back. Yannovitch slept on the pumphouse roof. Shuckel and Dottie sat at the deep end of the pool, their legs dangling in the water, saying nothing. Conversation was never Theo’s strong point. You could barely see his forehead under his thick red hair. His face was choked up with freckles. Good at brooding, old Shuckel. Some girls found him sort of intense. Often it made them want to mother him. Maybe deep down they knew what he was — just an incredibly slow guy, with the makings of an intellectual. He read all his father’s books. Rumour had it that his folks had taught him to speak German.

Van Dam was the only one swimming. Probably because Mary was still in the water, alone in a rounded corner of the pool with her arms flung out behind her on the stone lip, beautiful white wings, with her wet hair pushed behind her ears, delicately treading water. Whenever she allowed her legs to drift near the surface I’d see them through the clear water, moving shakily. Seeing her at rest, maybe even attentive, must have decided van Dam that the time had come to impress.

Even though I knew van Dam in those days as my good friend, if not my best, who would deny that he could be incredibly stupid? For one thing he set this huge store by prowess. He was a husky guy, inches taller than the rest of us and almost a foot over Yannovitch (a sore point that) with a fine head of hair. Dutch yellow, Yannovitch called it. A useful jibe. At his most boring van Dam wanted you to know all the time what a big deal he was.

“Hey Moto! Any of you guys — how many lengths of this bath can you swim under water, hey? You go fifteen with me? Bet you can’t. Ah Jeez, man! Listen, I’m tired of these old games. Why don’t we play something new? Ever tried hockey with golf clubs, or golf soccer? Don’t say you won’t when you mean you can’t. S’easy. I’ll be captain, okay?”

Trouble was he couldn’t keep up with his own variations. It was hell being caught out by van Dam, off the wall, “. . . one bounce, left-handed, and that is out! Or have you forgotten the rules?” — Disagree, and there went the ball, whap! into the rosebeds. He’d wipe his watering eyes, climb onto his bike and go home without another word. A bad loser.

The water was thrashing worse than a shark attack, gouts of it thudding into the corners of the bath. I gathered that van Dam was attempting that difficult and exhausting stroke known as the butterfly. From a drowning position a couple of inches below the surface he would jump into the air with a tremendous kick, flinging his arms forward. He was seldom airborne more than a moment before gravity took him by the short and curlies and he’d bellyflop and sink, his hair floating weirdly. In all, a flight of maybe eight inches. Luckily I didn’t have to watch. A choking grunt as he left the water and the impact of his return kept me posted. Pretty soon he was spending most of the time submerged. Obviously he was well on the way to drowning. There was consolation in that. And Mary’s eyes were closed.

In a world where every prospect pleased, only Kenny Darling propping up the gate was vile, in khaki shirt and shorts of the white-hunter variety, floppy khaki hat, green lining around the inside brim, reading . . . Lives of the Saints or The Acts of the Apostles. He wangled himself into these swimming afternoons on the strength of having been close to Wyner before he came over to us.

At school they said he couldn’t swim. Van Dam, whose mother was friendly with Darling’s old lady, said that his body was terribly disfigured by a huge purple birthmark stretching from nave to chaps, or somewhere, and he was too embarrassed to strip. As far as I could see he just came along to disapprove. A runty, thin sort of chap with the strangest skin, bluey-white it was, colour of swimming pool water, with a sheen to it as if it were pulled too tight, and almost transparent. If the sun got to it, red boils grew on nose and neck and it flamed in red patches, dropping off in chunks.

“To look at him, you’d imagine that if you got really close and peered you’d see his insides moving about — like those clocks in glass cases, y’know, with their workings grinding away.” Shuckel told me this quite seriously. “Except that nobody will find out. He’s so completely horrible from the outside — who’s going to get up really close and stare? Not counting you, Moto old chap, who are Arab enough for anything. Care to take a peek?”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Shuckel knew how wary I was on the subject of skin. Everybody knew it. Not that my skin was at all sensitive, you understand. Alas, no. But inside my skin I was sensitive. Shuckel gave way to these flights of fancy without a smile. If Kenny showed up at the pool, Yannovitch’d spend some time barracking him from his roost on the pumphouse roof.

“What! Not swimming, Mother’s Little . . .?”

We had these names for him: “Mother’s Little” or “Mommy’s Little”, also, “Little Darling”, after the song they were playing a lot on the radio.

“Grab your costume, Little Darlin’. Paddle your tootsies. Be my guest. Or is it your time of the month?”

Maybe we were too hard on Little Darlin’. He was kind to me once. On a stinking afternoon, we had been making mercury barometers in the science lab, having been kept late after school and I’d slipped out to keep an appointment for a bit of nose to nose with this big giver called Jennifer Katz, behind the cricket pavilion. They said she was more precocious than most, being Jewish. An incredibly pretty girl, her father had said that she wasn’t going to marry no ruddy goy. That’s why he sent her to the convent: Catholics didn’t count. Jennifer was making the most of things before she went off to join the Israeli army. She let me french-kiss her but held my hands tightly all the time.

While I was about my business, Brother Donally ambled back into the lab after a couple of quick nips in his room. Of course he called for me. The wise guys on the back benches were betting on the method of my execution. Mommy’s Little covered up for me with the most professional lie ever heard, Shuckel said afterwards.

“Moto suddenly turned pale, Brother, began retching. First thought was that he’d inhaled evaporating mercury. As class monitor I ordered him out of the class immediately, Brother, and down to the cricket field, where he is recovering now, taking deep breaths. I hope I did right, Brother?”

“That Kenny’s a fine monitor,” Brother Donally beamed when I slunk back, “quick and mature in a crisis. A good man in a shellhole, to be sure.”

He’d been shell-shocked in one of the wars, I don’t know which, and wore a steel plate in his forehead. His left eye wandered wildly and he was palpably insane. He couldn’t have cared less about my condition, but he would never have forgiven himself if he’d not been in at the death . . .

“Feeling better, are you?”

“Yes thank you, Brother.”

“Don’t worry yourself, Moto. There’s always a next time.”

Darling’s saintliness was sickening. He served at the Church of the Resurrection the early mass at six-thirty all through the week, first mass on Sunday and then acted as coin collector and usher at all the others. After receiving communion, his hands folded at his chest, his eyes screwed up, blundering into people, cocking his head towards the choir gallery so that the light from the stained glass windows fell on his face, which, not having much colour of its own, changed like a traffic light, red to orange to green, he’d make his blind way back to his pew, there to fall on his knees and stay that way until the blessing, kneading his closed eyes with his fists.

I don’t think that Little Darlin’ ever got over Fatty Wyner’s defection and he was always sucking up to him in the most nauseating fashion. Once when Jack was going on in his usual way about the super hygiene of his swimming pool van Dam, who was feeling pretty mean that day, led him over to the poolside and pointed to little bits of green hairy algae beginning to sprout in tiny patches on the wall.

“There’s breakfast growing down there, Wyner. Look! This nice little bit’d make mint sauce for Sunday lunch.”

Wyner got very upset and rushed around yelling for Amos to come and clean away the gunge. That was when Mommy’s Little stuck his oar in.

“Don’t listen to him, Jack. If your pool grows mould you can be sure it’s clean mould. Rather like penicillin. If you don’t believe me I’ll eat some just to prove it.”

“I believe you, Kenny,” Wyner said gratefully.

With my arches on the hard lip of the pool, in pain, I swayed backwards and forwards hoping the exercise would do some good. My arches had been falling for years: from Gothic to Roman and then to such an all-time low that when I ran barefoot on a flat surface they slapped along like pieces of steak.

Van Dam had given up trying to be a butterfly and was standing in the centre of the pool with water pouring from his nose and ears, trying to retch quietly.

The sun was setting behind the apple tree and the lengthening shadows were beginning to chill the pool. But nobody moved. Shuckel and Dottie continued to brood side by side, paddling their feet. Mary rested on arms outstretched along the pool lip, trailing her legs of seaweed, head back, gazing blindly into the sun, her hair smoothed along her temples, shining, a seal just surfaced. Freddie had the sprinkler going on the lawn on the other side of the trellis fence and a little breeze carried the smell of wet earth and grass. I fel...

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