Joe Speedboat by Tommy Wieringa Read Free Book Online Page B

call the ‘the White House’, but which the plaque on the façade calls ‘Quatres Bras’. And Julius and Kathleen have a daughter, Picolien Jane: P.J. for short. After Joe and India, she’s the third exotic import at our school.
    We can’t believe our eyes. She wears a crown of boisterous blond curls that fall dazzlingly to her shoulders. All I can think of are oceans and foam, my diaries are full of her. Her skin is pale, her face broad, with slightly sloping blue eyes the likes of which I’ve never seen. Between classes the girls throng around her, running their hands over the corkscrew curls that bounce back like elastic when you tug at them. The girls all want to be P.J.’s friend. The way she talks gives everyone a thrill. Afrikaans, so close yet still so mysterious, makes you swing back and forth between hilarity and the chill that lovely language brings.
    She comes, we are told, from Durban. A name that will become as magical as Nineveh or Isfahan. The sky over Durbanis crisp, the salt on your skin tastes like liquorice. I think about P.J. walking through Durban; in my diary, the cockatoo cries and the monkey fiddles with his nuts. The sky there is definitely not like our own; P.J.’s eyes reflect horizons beyond ours, and secrets that truly signify something, not the fainthearted ruses we bore ourselves with. Real secrets, ones that have more to do with light than with the darkness in which we brood on festering sins with no hope of absolution, because the priest is deaf and can’t hear our whispered confessions. P.J. was born of a fusion of light, her skin is as pale as potato feelers in the cellar, she seems transparent, but her hair is all flaming wheat . . .
    There is a clear boom in presentations on South Africa.
    She says, ‘
Wat kyk jullie so vir my?
’ and that just has to be something special, for otherwise why would it make us all melt?
    While our parents sit flinching in pain and fear beneath her father’s lamp, as he wrenches, pounds and drills away in their mouths, we sit breathless in the light of P.J.’s countenance. Come on, say something else, make us shiver, don’t hold out on us.
    It was in those days that Joe first had his hair buzzed. He sat on an old engine block in the garage behind his house while Christof ran the clippers in swathes across his scalp. The thick hair floated to the ground, leaving only a shadow of itself with pale scars shining through. Now, with those slightly slanted eyes of his, he looked completely like a nomadic horseman of the steppes, an Uighur or a Hun: Joe the Hun on his tireless Mongol pony, a slab of raw meat tucked under the saddle. People sometimes asked him whether a Negro had ever played an active role in his family, or an Asian perhaps, for Joe’s features were a confusing convergence of specific racial traits. Joe was all things to all men, but what I saw most of all in that strange face of his was a horseman of the steppes.

The duo Joe & Christof was expanded to include Engel Eleveld, my endearing piss mate. It started the day Joe and Engel went fishing together in a scour-hole. Joe caught a pike; there are lots of them in those pools. Engel said his father had told him that you could see Our Lord’s suffering in the head of the pike. The fish’s skull contains bones in the shape of a hammer, nails and a cross. They tore open the skull but couldn’t find anything like that. Joe and Engel were friends ever after.
    As I said earlier, Engel was one of those people you might not notice for years on end, until suddenly you saw him with a kind of light all around. That’s how it was with Engel and the fairer sex as well. He never took part in the games of kissing tag, never passed love letters in class. Instead he drew aerodynamic wonders in his hardcover notebook, and made casual discoveries that would have knocked the world for a loop if only he hadn’t forgotten them right away.