Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [236]
Will I see him? Agaat asked.
You’ll see him in the air, you’ve always wanted to see what it looks like.
She glared at you.
You waited until Jak had pulled out the car, before you gave the signal. Agaat was ready, the house was locked. You opened the front and back doors simultaneously. You got in at the same time, Agaat with her baskets and tins, you with your cream-coloured handbag and the new shoes for which you’d had to stick plasters to your heels.
Jak was furious, he swore at everything ahead of him and overtook on double white lines up blind rises. In Swellendam he stopped with squealing tyres in front of the off-sales and bought a six-pack of beer, started drinking it immediately.
You didn’t even dare look back. You felt Agaat’s jaw jutting into your neck. Of all the summers of my life, you thought, this one is the ugliest. The hills were dry and dreadful, False Bay’s water flashed like steel when you crossed Sir Lowry’s Pass.
A curtain-raiser of lighter planes and gliders was in progress when you arrived. From far away you could already see the cars flashing in the sun, whole fields of them.
Can we please just try to find a little shade, you asked.
There was a separate entrance a long way further, a sandy road amongst the rooikrans bushes, the only greenery as far as the eye could see. You saw coloured people capering and dancing with bottles in the air when low-flying planes came by. You heard them holler, salacious comments for the helicopters that came and hovered on the spot in the air and double-decker Tiger Moths flying upside down. They were draped all over one another.
That’ll be the day that I’ll park my car for you amongst a crowd of drunken hotnots, Jak said, but we can drop her here so long, here amidst her family of the flats, then she can learn to speak a bit of Cape, will do her good, her sounding like the Farmer’s Weekly in an apron. Do you think one afternoon is enough for rehabilitation? If you could teach her, Milla, just imagine how quickly they’ll get on top of her.
That’s enough, you warned, but you knew it was in vain. This was Jak’s four-beer bravado.
Agaat is nice and grown up, isn’t she, he persisted, I thought that was why she came along today specially, and it’s high time, stands drying up in the stable like an unserviced mare.
Hey chickelay chickelee, Jak sang, and swayed his body behind the steering wheel, come sit by me, chickelay chickelee!
You didn’t know how he’d come upon the little song all of a sudden. With such an expression too, as he looked around at Agaat. Even when you were young, he’d never looked at you with such an expression, not even as a joke. And this was no joke. You were ashamed, in three directions.
Come on, Agaat, he taunted, while he drove slowly through the clusters of coloured people, gave them a fright and made them scatter by accelerating unexpectedly, what do you say? Have you seen anything that interests you yet? I’ll pay him for you, you know, so you can crutch him, a real city goffel with long heels and a gap between his front teeth and a shiny shirt! You’re stuck out there on Grootmoedersdrift without any company, if you’re satisfied, we’ll buy him for you. You’ve got the whole day to try him out. On appro.
Jak took his hands off the steering wheel and twisted and rubbed his palms in the air in front of him.
Ride the woolly, hip-hip hay, hip-hip hay! he sang.
The people yelled across the shiny BMW in the sand there, they pushed their tongues through their front teeth at Agaat, swore at Jak, hammered their hands on the roof.
It was a mistake, you realised. Not one of you should have come along. Jak was ashamed to drive with the coloured woman in the back of his car, he was ashamed of you sitting next to him in your big blue hat.
Amongst the vast wastes of motor cars he at last found a parking place.
Sorry! you signalled with your eyes at Agaat as you got out. You took ten