Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [61]
He is lying at the side of the field. His face and hair are wet. He looks around for his bat but cannot see it.
‘Lie and rest for a while,’ says Brother Augustine. His voice is quite cheery. ‘You took a knock.’
‘I want to bat,’ he mumbles, and sits up. It is the correct thing to say, he knows: it proves one isn’t a coward. But he can’t bat: he has lost his turn, someone else is already batting in his place.
He would have expected them to make more of it. He would have expected an outcry against dangerous bowling. But the game is going on, and his team is doing quite well. ‘Are you OK? Is it sore?’ asks one of his teammates, then barely listens to his reply. He sits on the boundary watching the rest of the innings. Later he fields. He would like to have a headache; he would like to lose his vision, or faint, or do something else dramatic. But he feels fine. He touches his temple. There is a tender spot. He hopes it swells up and turns blue before tomorrow, to prove he was really hit.
Like everyone at school, he has also to play rugby. Even a boy named Shepherd whose left arm is withered with polio has to play. They are given team positions quite arbitrarily. He is assigned to play prop for the Under-13Bs. They play on Saturday mornings. It is always raining on Saturdays: cold and wet and miserable, he trudges around the sodden turf from scrum to scrum, getting pushed around by bigger boys. Because he is a prop, no one passes the ball to him, for which he is grateful, since he is frightened of being tackled. Anyhow, the ball, which is coated in horse fat to protect the leather, is too slippery to hold on to.
He would pretend to be sick on Saturdays were it not for the fact that the team would then have only fourteen men. Not turning up for a rugby match is much worse than not coming to school.
The Under-13Bs lose all their matches. The Under-13As too lose most of the time. In fact, most of the St Joseph’s teams lose most of the time. He does not understand why the school plays rugby at all. The Brothers, who are Austrian or Irish, are certainly not interested in rugby. On the few occasions when they come to watch, they seem bemused and don’t understand what is going on.
In her bottom drawer his mother keeps a book with a black cover called Ideal Marriage. It is about sex; he has known about its existence for years. One day he spirits it out of the drawer and takes it to school. It causes a flurry among his friends; he appears to be the only one whose parents have such a book.
Though it is a disappointment to read – the drawings of the organs look like diagrams in science books, and even in the section on postures there is nothing exciting (inserting the male organ into the vagina sounds like an enema) – the other boys pore avidly over it, clamour to borrow it.
During the chemistry class he leaves the book behind in his desk. When they return Brother Gabriel, who is usually quite cheery, wears a frosty, disapproving look. He is convinced Brother Gabriel has opened his desk and seen the book; his heart pounds as he waits for the announcement and the shame that will follow. The announcement does not come; but in every passing remark of Brother Gabriel’s he hears a veiled reference to the evil that he, a non-Catholic, has imported into the school. Everything is spoiled between Brother Gabriel and himself. Bitterly he regrets bringing the book; he takes it home, returns it to the drawer, never looks at it again.
For a while he and his friends continue to gather in a corner of the sports field during the break to talk about sex. To these discussions he contributes bits and pieces he has picked up from the book. But these are evidently not interesting enough: soon the older boys begin to separate off for conversations of their own in which there are sudden drops of tone, whisperings, outbursts of guffawing. At the centre of these conversations is Billy Owens, who is fourteen and has a sister of sixteen and knows girls