Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [33]
“But school was another story.” K shook his head. “The house-mistress gave me stripes my first day of school for insolence—I was five years old. You should have seen”—K held up a thick thumb—“welts this thick on my arse. The Old Lady was cross about that.” K paused. “She went into the mistress’s office on Monday morning and she told her, ‘Beat the little bastard as much as you want. But I see welts on his rear again and you will regret the day you laid a finger on him.’ ”
And then K got quiet and when he spoke again, his voice had lost its joking tone. “You know we went through three of the Old Lady’s wheelchairs. I used to tie them to the back of the tractor and take my sisters for rides over the tobacco fields. It was bloody funny until the wheels came off and then Mom would be furious and she’d say, ‘Wait till your father comes home,’ and then I’d shit myself, because Dad had a sjambok and Mom didn’t mind if he left welts on our backsides.”
K continued, “Anyway, after we’d scribbled all the wheelchairs, Mom decided it was too expensive to keep buying the things for us to tear apart. So she taught herself to walk using crutches. She could get around okay, but if she fell down, she was finished. She had to lie there until someone came to help her. But she was also an incredibly proud woman—incredibly proud. If she fell down in the garden and the Old Man was out in the fields and my sisters and I were at school, she’d crawl, hand over hand, all day to get to the veranda rather than allow a gondie to lay a finger on her. That’s how proud she was. But you know,” said K, pressing his thumbs into the palms of his hands, “she had these huge knots in her tendons from holding on to the crutches. Her hands were like claws. So when I was fourteen—I was at high school in Que Que by then, in Rhodesia—the Old Lady went to have her tendons operated on in Bulawayo.” K sighed. “She was forty-four years old and she died on the operating table.”
“Oh God.” I put my teacup down with a crash. “How awful.”
K said, “The headmaster called me out of class. He said, ‘Your mother’s dead. You can take the weekend off.’ So that was a Friday. I went on the train to Bulawayo for the funeral. I met the Old Man there, and my sisters. On Monday I was back at school.”
“That’s it?” I said.
“Ja,” said K.
“You must have been devastated.”
K shrugged. “Ja, ja. Of course. It was a mission. But it was worse for Dad. He was a shell after Mom died. That’s when he left Zambia and moved to Rhodesia.”
“You only had the weekend to get over your mom’s death.”
K nodded.
“Did you cry?”
“Not really,” said K. “But all my hair fell out. Even on my head. I was so bloody cold that winter, I wore underrods on my head and the master gave me the cane because he thought I was trying to be clever. I wasn’t. I showed him—‘Sir, I’m bald. My bloody head’s freezing’—but he still gave me stripes. Although it’s grown back on my head now”—K rubbed his hand over his hair—“but nowhere else.”
“How did your sisters cope?”
“Okay, I think.”
“Do you see much of them?”
“On and off.”
We drank tea in silence together for a while. The sun had fallen behind the escarpment and evening was starting to creep its way up from the river. “What are you doing tomorrow?” asked K suddenly.
I looked at the pile of notes, the computer, the spilling ashtray, and the pyramid of old teacups on the veranda. “I should really try to do something about this,” I said.
“Take a break,” he said. “Come out fishing with me.”
“I can’t stand fishing.”
“Then you sit in the boat and I fish.”
“I don’t know,” I said, feeling guilty already and looking at my computer again.
“Look, maybe a day away from it and you’ll come up with something to write.”
I hesitated.
“Come on. It’s too hot to work anyway.”
“Okay.”
“We’ll take your old man’s rig.”
So, the next day, just after breakfast, K arrived with fishing rods, a hat, a cooler, and a basket