Free Short Story - A coffin afloat

...a free short story. To read collected stories, read Two Feet by Mark Roper or visit his website. And feel free to comment. 

Stories by Mark Roper

A COFFIN AFLOAT

By Mark Roper

When I was sixteen I lived in Swaziland. It is a small, mountainous country tucked between the Northern borders of South Africa and Mozambique. In my time, Swaziland was a true monarchy, but from what I now understand I don’t think even the present King knows what the country’s political status is. Corrupt comes to mind, but I digress, which I have a tendency to do. I apologize.

My stepfather had rented a farm. It worked oranges, avocados, cotton and grapefruit. As my stepfather was nearing bankruptcy, he went off in his Volkswagen station wagon to sell cheap, American cosmetics and so-called organic house cleaning products and left me to run the farm. But that is not what this story is about, though it will, at some point in time, deserve a telling.

Across the fence, the neighboring farm was called Paradise Caravan Park. It was not Paradise. It was anything but. It tried to offer traditional dwellings to wandering tourists – six beehive shaped huts lit by a single bulb with sleeping mats on the floor. Spend the night as a Swazi does I suppose the logo would have read if there had been an advertisement. Unfortunately, the huts had been thatched with immature grass so the cattle came from across the river and, nightly, would chew into the structures, much to the alarm of the few foreign visitors. The pool was green. It was occasionally visited by crocodiles and getting a crocodile out of a swamp-like swimming pool is not easy, I can tell you. But, again, I digress.

P, who was a few years older than I, looked after Paradise farm. His parents Mister and Mrs. J. managed the caravan park. P had a very, very large Afro even though he was white. He occasionally wore mascara which collected the day’s dust when he was riding the tractor. P and I became comrades in arms – we tried to run our farms even though we both knew that an orange or an avocado was a fruit you ate and not how it was meant to be cultivated: such as it is, in a faraway place somewhere in Southern Africa.

Mister J died in hospital. It was rumored then, and now, that he had been anechoic for twenty-four hours before anyone noticed. This was no fault of Mister J’s family, but of the hospital staff. He had been admitted a week prior for an extreme case of piles and a capitulating kidney. What was meant to have been a brief visit to those not so sterile wards was, alas, the end of Mister J’s journey: such as it is, in a faraway hospital somewhere in Southern Africa.

Many full and glorious clear moons prior, Mister J had told all and sundry that when he was to snuff it and was to become fodder for many invertebrates, he wanted to be buried on a hill outside the town. He had chosen it. He had visited it on many occasions to seek sanctuary from his wife, Mrs. J. It wasn’t much of a hill: more of a grassy lump, a knoll. But it did require a bit of a trek to gain access to its rounded peak. It was a knoll wanting and waiting to be a hill. However, the view from the knoll, in those times, was spectacular: it offered a panoramic view of an undisturbed, inhabited veldt. Miles upon miles of waving elephant grass crisscrossed by meandering game paths and the occasional smoke signals from a cluster of distant, grass woven huts. Mister J had chosen his resting place well. His head would face to the West, his feet to the East.

The funeral was on a Saturday. It was well attended. Mister J had many friends, even though his recent, and final, attempt of breeding the New Zealand white rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) for the tables of the locals had become an item of dinner and bar gossip. An ill wind had torn through Mister J’s self-built hutches and had sent a few hundred rabbits scampering off into the stormy night to mate, one presumes, with the local leporidae, the consequences of which, I'm quite certain, have deposited a breed of rabbits yet to be reckoned with. But, yes again, I digress.

The coffin was simple. It had brass handles. The local farmers had secured a labourer or six to haul the casket up the path to the peak of the would-be hill. Mister J was buried and Mrs. J, adorned in her usual purple attire, wept politely as her husband was buried amongst the awaiting invertebrates. The sun began to set in the West and we all trekked back down the would-be hill.

A month later Mrs.J. asked her son, P, to drive her to the grave of her late husband so she could pay her respects and place a bunch of flowers. P invited me and, as I had been quite fond of the deceased, agreed. P drove the Ranchero without its canopy on that day. Mrs.J. sat between us. She cradled a bunch of yellow blossoms that smelt of musty honey. She wore purple – even her nail and toe varnish was purple. It had been raining heavily over the last few days, and the day in question was warning of further downpours. P, as usual, drove the Ranchero as if the world and its problems were up his arse. P wanted to be David Bowie and that transition was somehow not working for him and he was frustrated. Perhaps he needed a haircut, but I never told him that.

The Heavens opened up as P slid the Ranchero to a jaw breaking halt at the side of the dirt road alongside the hill that wasn’t quite a hill. The rain hammered down. We sat in the cabin of the vehicle and waited. P leant forward and looked out of the side window nearest to me. He peered through the deluge toward the hill.

“Shit,” he said.

I looked. “It’s the coffin,” I said.

Mrs. J leant across me to take a look, too. She screamed. “Argh!” she screamed. Then she fainted. Her head went forward into the bunch of flowers she was holding. Just like that: as if she had been KO’d by a heavyweight.

“She’s fainted,” I told P.

He started taking of his anorak. “That’s okay. She’s been doing that a lot lately,” he replied. He made a pillow out of his anorak and leant his mother’s head back onto it. “Oooh Aladdin Sane,” he started singing, his shade of mascara a matching purple to his mother’s toenails. Bowie soothed him so I let him sing.

Reddish brown rivulets of rain water were cascading down the hill toward our stationery vehicle.

“We can’t leave it like that,” I said. “It’ll wash away and bugger off down into the valley.”

“Shit,” responded P.

A quarter of the oblong shape of the casket protruded, like a tired obelisk, on top of the hill. Mister J’s feet were now pointing toward Heaven: towards the stars. It was a semi-flaccid and macabre silhouette against the brooding clouds. Globules of mud dripped off the coffin like warm ice-cream and even through the rain smeared window I could see the water bubbling about the base of the wooden box. Mister J, it seems, had been buried atop of an underground stream and now with the heavy rains, the stream was claiming its territory. The coffin had become a cork. It had, simply, popped out of the ground.

Mrs. J began to snore. When she exhaled, her breath stirred the tired petals of the yellow blossom she still clasped.

P and I were drenched with seconds. We slid and clawed our way up the hill toward the coffin. The mud sucked on our shoes and the rain flattened P’s Afro so that it looked like a badly knitted tea cosy. His mascara began to run and I wondered (seriously I did) what Bowie would have said. We reached the coffin that protruded like a drenched, inert, wooden missile.

The rain pelted down. P’s mascara became tears, so I thought. “We have to pull it out,” he told me.

“And then?”

“Load it up.”

It was his father in there. His mother snored in the cabin of the Ranchero, her breath infused with the scent of a yellow flower. “Pull”, said P.

So we pulled. We grabbed the coffin by its brass handles and heaved against the suction of the mud as the rain poured down and the scent of Africa’s earth bubbled in our nostrils: a scent like no other. We slipped and fell as we grappled with the wooden box and the dull thud of Mister J’s inert body within the casket was audible above the sound of the rain: like dull, sullen thunder.

With the coffin above ground, we stared at it. I looked down from the crescent of the hill toward the parked vehicle. Mrs. J was asleep; her head nestled in P’s anorak like a child in her comfort blanket. Out in the valley, the rain moved in waves, sheets, as it does in Africa. Cloaked in mud and water, the wooden box squatted defiantly.

“We can’t carry it,” P said. “It’s too heavy.”

“Uh-uh,” I agreed, the mud sucking at my heels as if it were a disorientated octopus. “We can slide it,” I offered.

A coffin, in mud and rain, is not a sled. From what I can fathom, the sled originated either in Holland or in Canada, but not in Africa. That is because they had snow. We had mud. Pushing a casket, downhill, even with the assistance of a deluge of rain and free running water, was no easy task. The box, weighted by old man J’s body, had a mind of its own. With P on the left and me on the right, we tried to guide the casket down the hill. It slew left and right and, at some point, even tried to overturn itself. In order to stabilise what was now becoming a projectile, P planted his weight onto it. He sat on the top of the coffin. He weighted it down. He sat on the body of his dead father and used his feet to guide, to stabilise the muddy projectile. This enabled me to steer it from the rear toward the awaiting vehicle, where Mrs. J was, alas, coming out of her stupor.

I can presume the sight of two men, one her son, sliding down a muddy hill, one astride the coffin containing her deceased husband, the other bent over like a hunchback, was suffice to knock her out again. She fainted, her head dropping forward into her bunch of flowers.

“All this fainting can’t be good for your mother,” I told P.

“It’s her medication,” he replied. “Anti-stress tablets.” P dug in his heels and brought the coffin to a halt near the Ranchero. Still it rained; still the mud clung to our boots and hands and P’s mascara ran down his long face in ink stained tears.

Between us, we carried the coffin to the rear of the vehicle. P dropped the tailgate and we managed, on the third attempt, to load the casket as if it were a medieval battering ram. The tailgate just managed to close with some argument as the wooden box wasn't a perfect fix. We managed to rectify this problem by putting the toolbox under the head of the coffin so it was raised, so it leant upward in the rear of the Ranchero. We slid our way back into the cabin.

“Where are we going to take it?” I asked P.

“The morgue I think.”

Mrs. J woke up a few minutes into the drive. The rain was thinning. We rode in silence. Then she looked over her shoulder through the small window that was there, looked back to where she could see the propped up casket that rattled against the metal toolbox.

“I hope he’s not getting wet,” she said. “He hates being wet. That’s why we left England.”

Copyright Mark Roper 2014.

Swaziland: King Mswati Snubs His Own Airport

Swaziland: King Mswati Snubs His Own Airport

...if only his father was alive today!!

Yet another African country falls foul to corruption -- a damn, damn shame. Back in the days we were taking sanctuary in Swaziland to avoid the apartheid mayhem -- now it seems the opposite.
The fact is, he didn't need an aeroplane in the first place.
Grumpy.


allAfrica.com: Swaziland: King Mswati Snubs His Own Airport

Please visit the following site to read how it USED to be in Swaziland or simply give the novel TWO FEET a read -- set in the 1960's it highlights the GOOD of the country.  Thanks.

When it was good...

Kindle Countdown -- low priced books

Mabuza once told me that if there are holes in the road you often travel, stop and fill them in, for this will help the man travelling behind you.

Was Mabuza my Madiba? Probably. This was South Africa, and we all needed guidance on what was a bumpy road. 


...the novella TWO FEET is on a Kindle Countdown for the next three days -- perfect stocking filler so I am told!!

 A compelling collection of stories reflecting an adolescent’s memories of an unconventional upbringing in Southern Africa during the 1960’s.

   Allowed to roam the veldt under the protective wing of the Swazi Warrior, Mabuza, the boy’s journey is merged with humour, witticisms, anecdotes and insights from having to navigate the potholes that are left behind by the abrupt disappearance of his father.   

   From learning how to walk with bare feet and how to deal with the unorthodox teaching methods of Meneer Gerber, the reader is transported into a boy’s world where dreams triumph over reality. Set beneath the bigness of the African sky, the stories are pivoted by the boy’s imagining of his father convalescing in a distant hospital, where a natural remedy might be the potion for us all.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Two-Feet-Mark-Roper-ebook/dp/B00D368NT8

A FREE chapter from the novella, TWO FEET -- enjoy.

A WORM UP YOUR BUM

 …I’d lie on my bed at night scratching and scratching at the thin, angry line that showed the worm’s path under my nine-year old skin. I knew it as a sand worm. The worm is microscopic, and it gets under your skin and begins a merry-munching - journey day and night. Yes, especially at night. (The Africans’ have a theory that it is heading for your brain so the best time to catch it, is when it makes its final dash across your eyeball). I’ve tried burning the wiggly-bastard with the fiery tip of a cigarette and even a candle flame. I attempted toasting it, but that didn’t work, so I tried sticking a heated pin in its squiggly path but all it did was squiggle to the left or right and keep going, heading for my ankle. It has two heads, so the German doctor in town mumbled through his nicotine stained beard. He gave me a salve, an ointment, to rub on, but this seemed to encourage the wiggly- bastard to double its rate of eating.

So in the end you, Feet, on the advice of Mabuza, took me across the swollen Matsapa River to visit the Sangoma, the witch doctor. He’s as wise as the combined occupants of a zoo and has a skin as gnarled as a sun dried Granadilla. He lived in one of three beehive huts surrounded by a sad maize crop and had the plume of the Sobhuza bird, as red as a plum, glued to his forehead with what looked like candle wax. He stank. He stank of cow shit and some crappy white man’s skin cream that the maidens recently started to apply to whiten their black skins. He had soft hands and the whites of his eyes were an ancient, scroll-like yellow.

I sat on the ground in front of him and raised my barefoot off the hot, red earth so he could get a good look at the wiggly- bastard. The Sangoma, not in the least perturbed, looked at my foot and crawled back into his hut, his withered buttocks for all to see. Inside the murkiness of his abode, I could just see the shapes of an assortment of dried leaves, herbs and roots hanging from the rafters. I could smell through the usual aroma of wood smoke, the sweetness of marijuana. I glimpsed the pinkness of a child’s doll lying on the floor near the arched doorway. It was naked, and its limbs had been darkened by fire. Then the Sangoma appeared in the doorway, so I dropped my gaze, feeling guilty for looking into his world.

On his knees, he gestures for me to raise my foot. This I do, and he cradles it in his, alarmingly, soft hands. He then spits on my foot; a huge projectile of phlegm that splatters right on target right where the worm crawls. I wince as the liquid slides off my flesh like egg yolk and plops onto the dry soil. But I know he’s watching me so I try to keep eye contact as he rubs the phlegm into my skin, over the worm’s track, and while he is doing this, I’m wondering why that baby doll is in the hut and why its limbs are singed? Then the Sangoma pulls out the rusty needle he has between his teeth and aims it toward you, Feet, toward you, you wiggly- bastard worm. I tense and my toes curl, awaiting the stab of the needle. Nothing happens. I open my eyes as I sense further movement from the Sangoma in front of me. He is digging deep into a leather pouch that is around his waist, tied amongst the braided leather strips and beaded thongs. He removes a chipped, white shirt button tied to a piece of thread and in my nine year old brain I’m imagining that he is going to sew that button onto my flesh.

My stomach lurches but the Sangoma doesn’t sew button to flesh. Instead, he swings the button like a pendulum over the worm’s phlegm covered path. My stomach and feet relax whilst the button swings left and right. I think he’s hypnotising the squiggly bastard. Then the Sangoma sneezes. I can feel the twin, moist streams of his hot air on my foot. Suddenly, the button stops swinging as if frozen in midair by an invisible force. The thread it hangs from has gone as tight as a fishing line with a decent sized tiger fish on it. Then the wise old man, as quick as a flea can jump, stabs down with the needle, right beneath the poised button, right into the worm’s trail. I yelp like a puppy, not because of the pain but because of the abruptness of his action. He drops my foot unceremoniously and puts out his soft hand. I see there’s a speck of blood on my foot as I hand the Sangoma the coins. He stands and shuffles off between his huts, scattering the wretched, half plucked chickens as he goes and I understand this as being my cue to leave.

So we do, Feet, heading for the river’s bank where the muddy water slides between the stepping-stones that brought us here in the first place. I notice that the fluffy seed pods on the reeds by the water are bursting like snow-flakes in the breeze, and that the green and yellow Cape Weaver birds are in full harmony as the males make their upside down nests; a harmony that may falter to a frustrated twitter when their wives examine the nests and begin to tear them apart if dissatisfied with the construction or location.

That night, and every night since, there has been no worm, no itching, no wiggly movement. For a few nights, I was still wondering about that singed, child’s doll back in the Sangoma’s hut. I had pink flesh. I had singed my own flesh to be rid of the wiggly bastard.

Now you can understand Feet, why most Africans never sit with their bums on the soil; why most squat on the heels in what may be construed as a rocking motion. It’s so you don’t get a wiggly bastard up your bum, Feet.
THE HOME OF MABUZA

Free Download - Two Feet

Two Feet is a FREE Kindle download this weekend on +Amazon.com -- so for all our shared sweat and tears, please, at least, add a review.

Every little bit helps as they say. 

 A compelling collection of stories reflecting an adolescent’s memories of an unconventional upbringing in Southern Africa during the 1960’s.

 

   Allowed to roam the veldt under the protective wing of the Swazi Warrior, Mabuza, the boy’s journey is merged with humour, witticisms, anecdotes and insights from having to navigate the potholes that are left behind by the abrupt disappearance of his father.   

   From learning how to walk with bare feet and how to deal with the unorthodox teaching methods of Meneer Gerber, the reader is transported into a boy’s world where dreams triumph over reality. Set beneath the bigness of the African sky, the stories are pivoted by the boy’s imagining of his father convalescing in a distant hospital, where a natural remedy might be the potion for us all.

   

  “I wanted to put up my hand and ask if God’s car had any gears, especially a reverse gear. I was thinking that a reverse gear would be a good idea for God’s car because if there were any mistakes to be fixed, God could just reverse over the mistakes and then drive forward again. This way he could fix the mistakes and make certain they never occurred again. But I did not ask. But I know I must. ”

   

 Mabuza once told me that if there are holes in the road you often travel, stop and fill them in, for this will help the man travelling behind you.

 

Free this weekend

Shopping in the wind.

...having recently endured a painful journey to the bowels of a cold, industrial, shopping mall, I thought it a wise thing to remind myself of how we once went shopping. So here's a FREE chapter from the novella, Two Feet, which roughly illustrates the days before malls, supermarkets and on-line shopping.

...about the size of it!

SHOPPING IN THE WIND

 But they did come and repossess the car. It was a red Mini-Imp, and the men that came were from a large, prosperous city across the border, and they didn't even stay for coffee. They just drove it off down the thin, corrugated and eroded dirt road that led down the hill onto the main road.

We stood and watched it go. “Shit,” is what my mother said.

We were left with a black bicycle, and on this bicycle I would pedal on the tarmac road to the local General Dealer every day. It was a long road bordered by pineapple fields, and the labourers working in those fields wore old, plastic fertilizer bags tied to their legs to avoid the sharpness of the pineapple leaves. They were like human scarecrows.

This was a good road. It had a few hills and a few potholes, but pedalling was easy especially on the way to the Store. I’d park the bike outside the Store where the hulking overhead diesel drum was positioned, and then walk across the dry patch of red earth where the chickens fed, and climb the few concrete steps onto the porch of the building. Here, a Cobbler and a tailor worked. The tailor had a milky eye and his left leg would furiously pump the plate on the floor to make the sewing machine rattle. He looked as though he was riding a bicycle to nowhere. The Cobbler, who wore a white shirt and a tie, had a tiny anvil and a mouthful of little black tacks that protruded from his lips like snakes’ tongues. Beside him were heaps of shoes that I thought would never cover a person’s feet or tread on a road again. But they did.

There is always a group of people gathered on the porch. A mother feeding her baby on her bosom, her head bent low over the infant to keep away the flies, an old man leaning on his cane peering from beneath the brim of his recently purchased hat, and another woman tying up her cash in a piece of cloth that she would thrust down her blouse for safe keeping.

The business of shopping was a muted, respected affair by customers in the Store. An aisle was approached with caution, almost in awe, bare feet scuffing on the concrete floor. Canned goods were held carefully in both hands, and the picture on the label was studied with the intensity of an art scholar. A bar of wrapped, Lux soap was sniffed and smiled at, and the bulky bag of Hullett’s refined, white sugar, stroked and prodded.

At the rear of the store, alongside gardening implements and paraffin lamps, shoes for men and women, made in Taiwan, beckoned. The shoes were never tried on for size but measured against the foot, the brightness of the shoe’s plastic alluring. The appearance of high heeled shoes would cause much stifled giggling.

The weighing of maize meal, sugar or flour by the Store’s owner was a solemn affair, the customer having ordered it, not by weight, but by what he or she could afford. As the grocer’s scale shifted on its fulcrum, so would the head of the customer, as if mentally trying to balance the brass contraption by telepathy. When the scale righted itself, the customer would do likewise with his or her head. Then the maize or flour would be poured into a paper bag and fastened with cello-tape. Whatever money the customer had was offered to the store owner as payment. It was accepted that the store owner would count out what was needed, and the balance be returned. A sticky sweet or two always concluded the transaction.

If a can of paraffin was listed on my mother’s shopping list, the road and the ride home was a challenge. Paraffin was an essential fuel. It kept the deep freeze and the fridge cold and the hurricane lamps alight when there was a power failure. The bag of meagre groceries I could hang on the handlebars, but a five-gallon metal container filled with paraffin was heavy and cumbersome, and the only place for it was between my legs on the hard saddle so I’d peddle off with knees and elbows wide like a frog in mid-flight and my backside almost touching the rear tyre.

The road I travelled was often shared with one or two eighteen-wheeler railway trucks.  Red, monstrous and loud, they travelled across the country transporting cattle, timber and sugar cane. Long before they came into sight the tarmac beneath the bicycle’s front wheel would vibrate, and as fate would have it, we’d meet on the downhill, so there was no time or place for stopping. Feet would start pumping wildly on the pedals and my backside would take to the air and the paraffin would begin sloshing left and right as the grocery bag began to scream and tear against the spokes of the front tyre.

To this day I don’t have a clue why I thought going faster would save me from the metallic beast that was coming up behind me. It is what boys do.

The driver of the monster would purposefully sound his foghorn as he neared. The sound of the tyres and the metal was ferocious as the vehicle passed, like a freight train coming out of a tunnel and crossing a steel bridge. It felt endless. It was a red blur out of the corner of your eye. The handlebars of the bicycle shuddered like a jack hammer in your hands. The tarmac was a dark blur, and the yellow grass on the verge becomes a spray of colour without shape.

Then the wind, the gale, the blizzard, the hurricane hit.

It came off the passing vehicle and slammed into you as you quickly tensed your flailing knees, and sphincter muscle, around the five-gallon paraffin can. You try to turn the bicycle’s juddering wheel into the wind with no success. You bend your head so low you are just short of chewing the metal of the handlebars.

Then you are in the ditch, and you are being watched by a group of labourers that work in a pineapple field dressed like human scarecrows. The bag of sugar you bought has exploded on the hot tarmac, and the bar of Lifebuoy soap has disintegrated against the fence-pole, and the bicycle has curled up some twenty feet away shaped like a modern sculpture.

But you are still holding the five-gallons of paraffin to your chest as if it were liquid gold.

Which it was.

 *****

Mabuza once told me that when travelling on any road and there is a fear of being struck from behind by an ill wind, get off the road.

*****

Visit the home of shopping!

The Confused Kingdom

Here's a quick update on an earlier Blog - Two Feet, Where in Africa? in which I offered some trivia regarding the Kingdom of Swaziland, the locale of the novella.

It seems, according to the +Mail & Guardian King Mswati III has been sent a political message via God on how to rule his country:

Africa's last absolute monarch King Mswati III has announced his tiny mountain kingdom has a new political system – a "monarchial democracy".

I'm no political genius (is anyone? and if so, please stand up and be counted!) but this reads somewhat contradictory, doesn't it? But so do most things political I suppose --

OR, perhaps, the King has been participating in his country's main export which grows with abandon and keeps even the birds flying high.

OR, as Mabuza would have said:

Mabuza once told me that no matter what path you are walking, looking left and right as well as in front of you is always a good thing to do.

Learning to walk. Free chapter.

...learning to walk is one thing, learning to walk with no shoes is another. Back in the good old days, walking bare footed was a norm...you somehow felt connected to it all but the times have changed and I seriously wonder if today's Health and Safety idiots are busily compiling further rules to justify why kids should NOT walk with bare feet. Anyway -- so be it:
Enjoy the free chapter from TWO FEET and, yet again, I'd greatly appreciate your comments. This is NOT a difficult thing to do -- at the end of the chapter, is a little box...just add your X!! And please note, all the novels can be borrowed for FREE --
...enjoy your journey.

LEARNING TO WALK

If you wore shoes – as I did for one day only -- at the local Eastern Cape Government School, you were ridiculed and beaten, so you did not wear them. You went home and put them in the cupboard and ignored them, as shiny and black and tough as they may have been, forever more.

Learning the art of walking barefoot was a necessity for any child who did not want to be ridiculed and beaten or put in a metal rubbish barrel and rolled down a hill or have his head held over the school long drop (outdoor toilet) and forced to inhale, exhale and inhale as a barefoot farm boy twice your age kicked your backside as if it was a rugby ball.

Shoes were for the sissies and the rich, and as schoolboy law forbid either, that was that.

Barefoot, or die.

For the soft-soled, pink-fleshed farm boy, the initial steps are agony. The dusty sand offers heated granules that swamp your naked flesh and the hard trodden areas on the path to the milk shed are as hot as the plate on a stove, so you start your learning by hopping from foot to foot which is witnessed by the herd boy who daily washes the milk cans who quickly and politely turns his back on you, but you can see by the movement of his shoulder blades that he is laughing.

You retreat to the steps of your porch, which is cooler in the shadow offered by the jacaranda creeper where the bumble-bee flit to and fro and there you start to breathe again.

Tomorrow you will have to take the bus to school, and you know that if you wear shoes you will be staring into the long drop as some barefooted, bigger-than-you farm boy kicks your backside so you step back off the porch and you avoid the loose gravel but you adopt a form of hopping because, in your mind, you think this is how the native children that you have seen running to school do it.

You are wrong. The red earth is now blistering hot, and you feel your toes curl away from the heat, so you take unusually long strides toward the soft ground where the dogs sometime rest when the heat gets to them, but you don’t see the masticated bone on the ground, and when you step on it, you bite back pain and, again, retreat to the porch where you collapse onto your soon to be kicked backside and hold your aching feet in your hands.

Thus far, you have learnt only to hop, and it is guaranteed that the herd boy who washes the milk cans has already told the tractor driver who is now telling the maid that he is hoping to marry, that the white farm boy cannot, or does not know how to, walk properly.

I have surrendered and have sounded the horn of retreat. On the stoep, I begin putting on my veldskoens, but as I am doing up the leather laces I have a picture of those children that I see every morning running to the small school on Old Man Ford’s farm (the one with the red tin roof that has no glass in its windows and the playing field is as barren as a bush pig’s hole) in my mind.

As routine as a school bell, these children run, daily, some miles down the length of the main dirt road that navigates past the farm gate. It is a wide road that is covered with corrugations, stones and jaw-breaking potholes. The children run barefoot carrying their slates or a tatty exercise book. They are always smiling and will always wave to you as you drive past in the school bus.

I study this picture in my head as my hands pause over the laces of my veldskoens. I think of their faces, and I am seeing, in my mind that they run with their heads held high; that they are proud to be running barefoot on that road to school. They are focused on what lies ahead for the day, their eyes darting left to right occasionally in case they may see a bird’s nest with eggs in it or the silver of a hub-cap that may have fallen off a pot-hole dodging car the night before.

They are not watching their feet on the ground. They are not running on the ground. Their feet are not touching the sharp, granite stones or the rusty lid of an abandoned sardine can or the heated granules of sand or even the hard cowpat left there by stray cattle.

This is I realise, about mind over matter.

I take off my veldskoen and stand with my bare feet on the waxed surface of the stoep, and I look toward the milking shed where the herd boy is no longer washing the empty cans. A thin spiral of smoke is coming out of the chimney on the roof of the tin sided hut where the water is boiled for milking. To the left of the path the fence there is covered with Granadilla plants and to the right there is a space dotted with clumps of khaki weed and stinging nettles. I focus on the milking shed, the door of the dairy, and the thin spiral of smoke. I keep my back straight. I step off the stoep and onto the sun-baked path.

I get to the milk shed in seconds flat, but I know I never did wince with pain once.

I spent the remainder of the day walking around the farmhouse with a straight back and head held aloft and ignoring my naked feet. Because of this posture, I was soon nicknamed “Skolomanzi” by the herd boys. This is the name they have given to the Blue Crane birds that wade in the shallows looking for fish, frogs and snakes.

That night as I step into the tepid, soapy water left in the bath, I shout out with pain. I rest my bare, no-longer-to-be kicked backside on the edge of the bath and look at the soles of my feet. They are red and inflicted with razor-like cuts.

When I sit down in the school bus the next day, I make certain that my bare feet protrude out into the aisle so that their lack of leather covering can be seen by all, especially the pimple faced over the age of his class farm boy seated across from me.

“Hey,” he says to me.” How come you wear your blerry hair so long? Hey? Just like a blerry girl, man! Sis!”

I stare out of the bus window hoping to see the native children running to school.

Two Feet - a free chapter

THE SOUND OF A HAGGIS??

...DOES A HAGGIS HAVE A SOUND?? READ FOR YOURSELF. 

This is what I imagine.

My father was dying from a diseased lung, liver or kidney.

Whichever the ailing organ was, it’s decaying state had been described to him as having the texture of a Haggis.

That is how the Indian doctor, from Calcutta, had described the infected appendage.

 “Spotted like a Haggis, “he had muttered as he stared at the ghostly image that was scorched on the grey and white sheet of X-ray in the room where only one fluorescent tube worked and the fly-strip, heavy with its catch, hung limp from the ceiling.

Through the rusty mosquito netted window, the earth was red, and the sky a brilliant blue, as it always is in Africa.

The Indian doctor, from Calcutta, had recently received a letter from his brother in Birmingham, England. In the letter, his brother had told him that he’d travelled to Scotland. In the letter, he had written down the ingredients for haggis.

These are the ingredients that were listed for the Indian doctor, from Calcutta by his brother from Birmingham, England:

1 sheep’s stomach bag

1 sheep’s pluck – liver, lungs and heart

3 onions

250g beef suet

150g oatmeal

Salt and black pepper

A pinch of cayenne

150mls of stock/gravy

My father would only have “humph-ed” in reply to the description because it was an accurate one and not one for debate. The Indian doctor, from Calcutta – who also owned the general Dealer Store and drove, occasionally, the only imported car – had no need to pull punches or dance the verbal tango with his words. He had seen worse. He would have, as the entire African continent, in his eyes, was ill and looking like a Haggis: dark and spotted and congealed. It was diseased. That is what he often told his wife when he helped serve the pot-bellied  runny nose children from behind the counter in their store. Occasionally he would add the word damn to this description, but that was when he was angry because the Leghorn chickens from the street had fouled in the shop or had stepped onto the bonnet of his imported car.

“Damn dark, spotted and congealed damn continent,” is what he said out loud, now more frequently than usual.

The hospital in which my father was dying was of Government design. That implied it had a corrugated iron roof and was built in the shape of a square with a courtyard and a broad porch. It had a tree in the centre of the courtyard and a concrete bench. The outside walls of the hospital were painted yellow with a green skirt. The hem of the skirt was now stained with the red of the earth, and the yellow had lost its yellow. The roof, that popped and whispered in the heat, was silver in colour and in the evening the branches of the tree would attract the hens to roost.

There was one tap of running water (attached to the borehole pump alongside the dirt road) in the courtyard. A not-so-ill patient would have been nominated to guard over this precious commodity. The tap leaked, and the pool of water attracted many worker bees during the day. On the porch, waiting patients would sit with their backs against the wall, and wait. Their babies would offer a chorus of sounds and the waiting men would spit lumps of phlegm from TB infested lungs into dirty rags.

 And they would wait, and wait for the doctor from India who was an extremely busy man.

My father would have been able to see these waiting, patient people from his bed in his private room. He would have been able to see them through the only door as he lay on his back on the rough, grey blankets and the over-starched linen. Perhaps he admired their patience, the occasional gesturing of mothers as they waved off insistent flies or pushed away the noses of ever-hungry, stray dogs. Perhaps he didn't.  He was, after all, an African himself – white skinned, but African, so these sights and sounds, were not foreign to him. Or then perhaps, he was looking and listening elsewhere by now; had reached that mental space where he was looking and hearing far beyond his present whereabouts. A little soul searching, I wonder, but also doubt.

My father’s room was painted the standard, government-issue of puke green: the colour of a growing lemon on a sick tree. The floor would be red and polished, and there would be a framed photograph of the country’s present dictator on the wall. The mosquito mesh over the window would be rusted. The ceiling would be sagging a little, shaped like a pregnant woman’s belly and there was a water stain in the shape of the island of Madagascar in the corner. He would have a small, white metal table beside him with a jug of water and a glass. That is all.

In my mind, this is the place where he was to die.

In his reverie, my father would listen to the popping and the sighing of the corrugated iron roof above him. He would listen to the chorus of babies and the occasional tap-tap of a nurse’s heel as she walked along the porch. At sunset, he would hear the waiting patients leave the hospital quietly and without dissent. They would return the following day as the sun rose. The smell of distant cooking fires would intrude into the room, flavoured with the taste of maize meal and curry. If and when it rained, my father would listen to the raindrops hammering onto the sheet- iron roof and perhaps as I did as a child, think of machine guns and advancing armies. He would smell and sense the air chill when it rained.

When the night came a nurse would have given him a paraffin lamp with a spluttering wick. In its light, he would have watched the dancing shadows on the walls and listened to the barking of stray dogs. My father did sleep, or at least, he tested sleep, but sleep, when you are dying, offers up darkness, and I think, if I were my father, I would have avoided that. Dozed, but not slept for fear of never awakening.

The Indian doctor, from Calcutta, would do his rounds three times a day. He wore a white jacket and had a stethoscope around his neck. He wore dark shoes that had hard heels so he could be heard approaching from a distance. Clipped onto his breast pocket were three biro pens (blue, black and red) and a little torch for looking into a person’s eyes. On his wrist, he had a fake Rolex watch that was sent to him by a cousin from Bombay along with three cans of sugared litchi and a photograph of a Bollywood starlet.

The Indian doctor, from Calcutta, also wore a woman’s perfume. It was Chanel number five from Paris, France. A salesman had left the sample bottle at the shop months ago. The Indian doctor, from Calcutta, had told his wife that there was never a chance in Hell that they would ever sell such stuff in this “ Damn dark, spotted and congealed damn continent “ and that the salesman responsible would be in need of a new job shortly.

Always following the Indian doctor, from Calcutta, was a nurse from Abuja, Nigeria who was as thin as a bird and as dark as ebony. She was new and she did not like being in my father’s ward. He could sense that in her because she always looked away from him and found interest in her bare feet or in the map of Madagascar on the ceiling. What my father did not know was that this nurse, from Abuja, Nigeria, was feeling ashamed to see such a large, broad shouldered white man lying on a thin metal bed waiting to die. She was ashamed because she knew there was nothing to be done for this man. She was ashamed for him and others like him. That is why she looked at her bare feet on the red polished floor. She was ashamed to look death in the face. The little silver watch she wore over her heart (awarded to her at nursing school in Abuja, Nigeria) was to be used to count a man’s pulse, not to record its fluttering and ultimate demise.

The Indian doctor, from Calcutta, would use his stethoscope and listen to my father’s chest. “Breathe in, breathe out,” he would say. “And again, please." Amplified in his ears, the Doctor, from Calcutta, would hear the gurgling and dying of the Haggis. He would close his eyes to this sound as he listened and he would imagine himself driving on the long road to the city with the Bollywood starlet sitting beside him in his American car.

“Not good,” he would finally say. He would use the red biro pen to write on my father’s chart. “I will prescribe more pain killer. Understand, nurse?”

“Yes, Doctor,” the nurse from Nigeria would chirp in response as she studied the southern tip of Madagascar and wondered who lived and died on that part of the island.

“Are you sleeping better?” My father would be asked.

His response was in the negative.

“Eating?”

He responds with a shrug.

“This I can appreciate. The skoff (food) here is minimal, and the cook, if I may loosely describe him as that, is ignorant, but we do our best as I am most certain you can understand. Perhaps I must put you on a vitamin drip. That will offer you some nutrition. Yes, that is what I will do. I will order it, and it will come by the truck.”

And then the doctor, from Calcutta, would leave followed by the nurse from Nigeria and my father would remain in his bed, listening to a child crying somewhere in the hospital and his nose inhaling the ghostly scent of Chanel number 5 from Paris, France.

Two Feet - somewhere in Africa.

In response to Mr.S's comment/question regarding which country did some of the chapters of Two Feet take place? Thanks for your question, Mr.S. and your spending your time to ask !! Always willing to oblige.
When I scribbled Two Feet I intentionally kept dates and the name of places vague -- Africa is and will always remain a mysterious continent to me  -- perhaps because it is ever-shifting, forever in chaos, future events unknown.
Two Feet and its contents are primarily based in the mountainous Kingdom of Swaziland.

Where the hell is that you ask? 

If you peruse the map of Africa, drop your eyes down South toward South Africa. Swaziland is nestled, somewhat fragile, between the borders of South Africa and Mozambique (...in my day it was called Lorenco Marques,http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Lorenzo+marques , and was Portuguese territory and promised the best King sized prawns since the invention of sliced bread). Alas, the prawns disappeared during the intervention/invasion of the Russians, Cubans and the AK 47. I do have a memory though that when Lorenzo Marques gained its independence, on that historical day, as the new flag was raised, the flag-pole collapsed. Somewhat symbolic, I dare to add.
But I digress as always -- Swaziland's claim to fame, during my young years there, was that it boasted the longest remaining monarch ( I think it still does?) His name was King Sobhuza II Longest reigning monarch. Maybe I was naive ( I was 10 going on twelve) but life seemed pretty good under King Sobhuza II. Fruit, cotton and sugar cane was abundant and rumour had it the King was well into his 200th wife and tourism was on the up : especially as across the borders in +South Africa  both gambling and access to soft-porn and even a tantalising view of a woman's left or right breast, was religiously banned.
Swaziland jumped on the bandwagon and soon the valley of Ezulwini was festooned with casinos and a cinema that projected anything or anybody in the nude. My younger brother, not even sixteen, became the ticket seller, manager of the only Drive-In and its midnight attraction of French porn was well populated by porn starved South Africans. The Story of O being a major magnet.
Again I digress -- Swaziland was granted its independence from the United Kingdom in 1968. Much shield banging and drinking of corn beer heralded the event -- I was there and King Sobhuza II was festooned with the feathers of the Sobhuza bird. It was a momentous occasion and I would like to say the picturesque Kingdom has never looked back since. Alas, I read today that since Sobhuza's death in the 1980's, the country is now plagued by HIV and corruption. And that marijuana is now its major export -- ah well, another opportunity lost on my part. Marijuana in my time in Swaziland grew like trees -- even the birds flew higher than most. I don't jest.
So -- there you have it, Mr.S. -- Swaziland it was and no matter its present state, a country of many memories it will remain.

Thank you for your question --  I hope you enjoy the remainder of the read.

TWO FEET