Tea for Two - a short story

TEA FOR TWO

The Eastern Cape Government School is situated alongside the Eastern Cape Government Lunatic Asylum.

I have only just realised this because, now that I walk with bare feet, I am left alone to enjoy my break-time. I am, momentarily, ignored by the over-aged for their class farm boys.

The smell of the long-drop will no longer bring tears to my eyes and my under-teenage backside will no longer be booted, and I will not be forced to travel in the spinning innards of a garbage can.

I walk the earth as they do.

I am a fledgling member of the barefoot club.

I now walk with bare feet upon the same, drought stricken Kikuyu grass that the over-age for his class farm boy they call Pisskop does. I can see Pisskop now on the playing field as he selects a team to play touch rugby with. Pisskop is fourteen and is the hairiest bastard in the school. Pisskop has shown everyone his pubic hairs. That is why he is called Pisskop. He also owns a .22 rifle, and they say he can shoot a hovering Kestrel out of the sky three-times-out-of-three. That’s a lot of hovering Kestrels to die in one day I wanted to say, but I did not for fear of having my head forced into the long drop.

Pisskop’s feet are ingrained with the colour of the earth; red. He does not wash. When he gets on the school bus every morning, he is always scratching his groin or picking at his feet. I look out of the window of the bus trying not to look at Pisskop because he gets angry if I look at him.

But I am happy to walk the same earth as Pisskop because I am left alone to my own devices.

Around me the game of touch rugby is being played. Dust is being raised off the barren field by the players' naked feet and there is a lot of shouting and the occasional sound of a wet thump as the leather clad ball is kicked high up and over.

On the other side of the high, wire fence that separates the school, is the lunatic asylum. This, it seems, is common knowledge. I can see an inmate sitting on a fallen, blue gum branch. Behind him is the shape of the Government built asylum. It has a corrugated tin roof that is painted red and has a long veranda. There are iron bars across the windows behind which I can see the faint glimmer of mosquito mesh. I can see other pyjama clad inmates roaming about on the veranda. Some are not roaming at all. They are simply standing as if they are waiting for something or somebody.

There is a bed on the veranda but no-one lies on its black striped, piss stained mattress.

There is a smell of boiled cabbage and human shit wafting in the breeze; a smell that not even the scent of the nearby blue gum trees can defeat.

The inmate sitting on the fallen branch is pretending to be a tea-pot.

The game of touch rugby has turned into a brawl, and I watch Meneer Gerber, who teaches Judo, Hygiene, Mathematics, English, Geography, Science and Divinity, weigh in with his cane and the boys, including Pisskop, scatter leaving the main culprit at the mercy of Meneer Gerber. The Culprit tries to get to his feet. Already his nose is bloody. Meneer Gerber gives the Culprit two quick strokes with his cane across the back of his legs and the third somewhere across his spine because he’s trying to turn away and run.

“Are you blerry stupid, man, or what!?” Meneer Gerber shouts at the bloody nosed, now goose-stepping Culprit. “Answer me! Hey!?”

“Nee, Meneer!” (No, Sir)

“You are blerry stupid!”

“Ja, Meneer!” (Yes, Sir)

Meneer Gerber walks away, already reaching for his pipe that he always carries in the pocket of his khaki coloured safari-suit along with a copy of a Superman comic that he reads to himself when he’s meant to be teaching us.

The Culprit wipes his bloody nose and stands alone on the barren playing field. He is rubbing his legs and wincing against the pain of Meneer Gerber’s bamboo cane. Pisskop and the other children have wandered away.

“What the blerry Hell you looking at, Rooinek!?”The Culprit shouts at me.

I look away.

I am a Rooinek, a red neck, because I speak English and during the Boer War all the English were called Rooineks. This is because the African sun burnt their pale skin which was from England, where there is not much sun at all, a rose red.

The inmate has his arms pointed over his head. Slowly he bends from the waist, dips, and pours. In a semi-circle, one cup, then two, then a third and a fourth. Then back to the first cup.

I wonder what blend of tea he thinks he is pouring.

Meneer Gerber is the only teacher that speaks English. That is why he teaches only the Rooineks of which I am one. I think there are less than thirty in the school. The Rooinek class consists of students of all ages: eight to twelve years old. Most are the children of farmers whose forefathers came on the ships in the 1820’s, but I think Max’s parents own the cafe where you can buy bread already sliced, so he is not the son of a farmer. Meneer Gerber is a knowledgeable teacher. During every lesson he makes us read a chapter from a textbook whilst he smokes his pipe and reads a Marvel Comic book which is usually a story about Superman.

I wonder if the inmate at the Eastern Cape Lunatic Asylum also serves sugar and milk with the tea that he is pouring.

Near the end of the class, Meneer Gerber will occasionally ask us questions on the chapter we have just read. There are usually twenty questions, sometimes less. If we get less than sixty-percent right, Meneer Gerber calls you to the front of the class, and he canes you. Usually it is three or four strokes across the backside, or he gestures for you to put out your hands, palms up and touching, and canes you there. This is the most painful. Especially if you need to continue writing with your pencil a few minutes later.

I wonder for whom the inmate is pouring tea.

Meneer Gerber does not allow any questions to be asked about any subject, especially Divinity. This is the only subject we do not have a text book about because Meneer Gerber can pretty much recite anything he wants from memory when it comes to stories about Jesus and God and Mary and Joseph and Moses. That is why I wrote earlier that he was a clever teacher.

I wonder why the inmate smiles the way he does as he pours his tea. It is a slight smile, almost soft as if he is being tickled by a feather. It is the smile I think, of a sleeping child. It is the same smile the Herd boy wears on his face when he is smoking that tobacco that has a seriously sweet smell.

Meneer Gerber has told us eight to thirteen year old Rooineks that we are all no better than Judas because of what we did to the Boer children and women during the Boer war. Meneer Gerber says it was we Rooineks that tied the women and children to the front of the trains so the brave Boers would not use dynamite to blow up the train line. Meneer Gerber says it was we Rooineks who built the first concentration camp and not the Germans. He insists that we Rooineks will always walk with guilty souls under the eyes of God and that because it is God’s Will, most of us will be cast out to sea before we become men and that we will spend eternity questioning our guilt.

I wish I can, but I am afraid to, ask Meneer Gerber the question about who created God and who was God’s father, but we are not allowed to ask questions, especially in Divinity class.

The inmate has stopped pouring his tea as I hear the school bell ring. He now sits with his hands folded in his lap. He looks calm. As if he is waiting for something or somebody.

Or maybe he is simply waiting for the kettle to boil.

 I wonder, dying father, as you rest on that thin bed with the rusty springs, listening to the creaking of the tin roof above and the distant cry of a child, if you would have had the answers to my questions.

I wonder how you would have answered those questions.

Would you have sat me on your lap and smiled as I asked my question?

Would you have felt proud even if my question was a stupid one?

Would you have been impatient with my youthful curiosity?

I wonder what questions you ask yourself now as you await the afternoon visit from the Indian doctor from Calcutta and the nurse from Abuja, Nigeria.

I think, as the flickering flame of the paraffin lamp beside your bed attracts a disorientated moth, you are asking the same question that I feared to ask Meneer Gerber.

Read the novella, TWO FEET at +Amazon.com  for more. 

Lost in Bankgok

Whilst stuck in the traffic here in Bangkok out of boredom I asked Siri where I was.
Here was the response:

...if that doesn't sum up "life" nothing does!!!!
Traffic in Bangkok is relentless -- when it moves, it is, from a foreign perspective, chaotic. An endless cacophony of vehicle and people movement, of disturbed ants. Then it freezes, and the smells take over. Wafts of frying food and sun blasted sewers, of human sweat and incense invade -- over loaded scooters line up like the starting grid of a Grand Prix. Dogs sleep, nonplussed.
Then it moves in a rush, a blast -- another block of weaving, concrete above, a bus so close you can exchange names -- then that pause, that wait -- passengers side saddle with no helmet and a street vendor crossing the road with pork still frying.
Smiling.
Accepting.
A great city.

Journey to nowhere

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

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