Embrace by Mark Behr Read Free Book Online Page B

hiding as I’d recently had for feeding the hornbills, I threw the handle into the long yellow grass beside the footpath. The next seven trips passed without incident and I packed the merchandise in the store room with the missing-handle pot at the very back, angled away from the door. Instead of going in to report the completed task I went to the sand-pit. With another kick Suz was banished to the side yard. I knew Bokkie wouldgo out to inspect the goods, but hoped that the longer I stayed away, the less likely she was to discover the damage. I played with my Dinky cars and started building a new guest camp beside the Black Umfolozi.
    ‘Kaaarl,’ I heard. She had found it. I ran to the store room, trying to look cheerful. She asked about the missing pot-handle and I said it had been like that when I fetched it.
    ‘Then why is it standing at the back, turned so that I cannot see?’ ‘It was the first one I brought down, so that’s why it’s in the back.’ ‘Well, I don’t have money to pay for broken things.’
    She told me to get Suz, because we were going to Watts’s store. ‘Why is the dog locked in the side yard, anyway?’
    ‘I’m playing in the sand-pit.’
    ‘Get her out. Were going up to the store.’ Letting Suz out I muttered that she had me in deep trouble and that if I got another hiding she would live only to regret it. I went into the kitchen, where Bokkie had already turned off the stove and was placing both irons on the sink. Up we went, Bokkie striding ahead, Suz trotting in the middle and me behind.
    At the store Mr Watts said he’d personally seen to the off-loading of eight clay pots, each with handles attached. Bokkie apologised for bothering and we headed back towards the footpath. She asked how I had broken the handle.
    ‘I didn’t break it off, Bokkie! I promise. Maybe it just fell off somewhere along the way.’
    Our eyes skimmed the footpath all the way home and to the store room.
    ‘Did you leave the path, Karl?’
    ‘No, Bokkie, I walked straight home. I promise, Bokkie.’
    Back up to the store. Nothing. Then, as we went down the path and the hornbills were going crazy in the trees around us, she reminded me of how I had lied about feeding the birds and how my lie had returned like Lena’s plastic boomerang to catch me out. For weeks she had been aghast at hornbill droppings and an occasional feather everywhere, inthe window frames, all over the veranda, in my bedroom. Discovering for the umpteenth time a ragged cut from the loaf of bread, she had at last asked, ‘Are you feeding the hornbills?’ I said no, I knew better than to feed any wild animal. Still I continued the feeding: lumps of porridge from Chaka and Suz’s bowls — a place the birds were too cowardly to venture near; pieces of bread, either stolen from the loaf in the kitchen or morsels snuck off my own plate while my mother wasn’t looking. I lured them into the house while she was in the kitchen, eventually feeding them in my bedroom. If they fought or screeched so that their sounds were sure to reach her, I’d hurriedly shoo them from the window.
    ‘Was that a hornbill I heard?’ Bokkie shouted from the kitchen. ‘Yes, Bokkie, it was just sitting here in the shade in my room when I came in to fetch my Mustang. It’s gone now.’ Soon the birds had become so confident they were flying into the open kitchen door, sitting on the bottom door, squeaking at Bokkie who chased them away. Soon I was waking in the mornings with the tick-tick-tick of their enormous bills against the glass pane of my bedroom windows. I feared a glass pane may shatter, a shard pierce me as I lay on my stretcher. This was a full-scale hornbill invasion. Soon it seemed my parents were content that the strange pattern of bird behaviour had developed spontaneously — probably because of the hornbills growing accustomed to me from the hours I spent in the bush with the dogs and in the front garden. Then, while I was sitting in my