Out of Shadows Read online

  “I’ll come,” Simpson-Prior stood eagerly. “I’ll sleep over on your side.”

  The boy didn’t even pause to think about it and turned Simpson-Prior’s trunk right over, spilling everything.

  “Why would I want a poof like you next to me? Your breath stinks.”

  That was my first encounter with Ivan Hascott. It wasn’t going to be my last. Not by a long shot.

  We continued unpacking our stuff. I checked my watch and glanced at the door but couldn’t hear my father coming, and as the minutes went by I realized he wasn’t coming back at all, that this time he hadn’t even let me start counting before ripping off this particular tape.

  Nelson kept himself busy, taking his time over everything.

  “Are you okay?” I asked him.

  He nodded. “Ja. Fine. Thanks for helping.”

  “Anytime. See? We’re like brothers already.”

  And if someone had told me then how badly I would actually come to let him down—and in the way I did it—I would never, ever have believed them.

  THREE

  Our official introduction to the house involved us being herded into the common room where Mr. Craven, our housemaster, was waiting.

  I can’t recall exactly what he said that night, though. A greeting. A welcome. Some acknowledgment that as the third years, the youngest in the school, we might be feeling homesick but that wasn’t anything to dwell on because we’d get over it, there was a lot to take in and a lot to find out so if we didn’t know anything we mustn’t hide in a corner; we should ask.

  Then he left and a senior called Taylor took over. He was tall with wide shoulders, a strong jaw, and sandy hair. Handsome. Stern yet fair. Matter-of-fact without menace. Everything about him said Head of House. His tie was different from anyone else’s. In fact, the two other sixth formers behind him—Greet and Leboule—weren’t like him at all. They just eyed us in a way that made us feel like intruders while Taylor welcomed us new boys to Selous in a smooth and controlled voice.

  “Forbes, Heyman, Burnett, Willoughby . . . Those are the other houses, each named after an important person”—I straightened my back, strangely pleased with my father for telling me that—“and I daresay the boys in those houses might try and kid you that theirs is the best. But they’d be wrong. Selous House is the best house in the school, in the best school in the country. No one can take that away from us, so take pride and don’t let the house down.”

  He went on to read out the study room list. There were only ten boys to each room, and Simpson-Prior was already frantically wetting his lips because our names had been read out with Ivan’s, while Nelson escaped and was placed in the next study along the corridor.

  The parquet floor reeked of polish, instantly establishing itself as the smell of New Term. Simpson-Prior pushed past and grabbed the best cubicle and pointed me to the one in front.

  “Go there! Go there!” What Ivan had said about his breath was true, it was as if he had rotting meat in his teeth, plus he followed certain words with a fine spray of spit. But I felt sorry for him because he seemed more afraid than anyone else. I’d thought I was going to be that person, being in a new school and a new country, but I wasn’t. “We can swap prep easily,” he said.

  I put my tuck box onto the desk, which made a loud creak.

  Ivan came in and sneered at us before taking a cubicle on the other side of the room. He had a red mark on his cheek as if he’d been hit.

  “Shit. Not you two,” he said.

  Before I had a chance to react, a more senior boy—the only black boy in the house I’d seen other than Nelson—suddenly rushed in and twisted Ivan around. Ivan lost his balance and fell to the floor.

  “Don’t walk away from me,” the senior barked. “I know it was you. If you ever push Nelson around again . . .”

  Maybe he didn’t know it yet, but clearly Nelson had someone else looking out for him. I felt strangely jealous, and a little bit alone again.

  Ivan was belligerent.

  “So what if I did? Why do you care?”

  The senior boy glared. His tongue—bright pink against his deep brown skin—darted like a snake’s to lick his lips.

  “Things are different now. You lost the war. It’s not how it used to be, remember? So I’m warning you, white boy.”

  And he stole a packet of Chappies bubblegum from Ivan’s tuck before heading out.

  Ivan got up and pushed his shirt back into his trousers.

  “What the fuck are you looking at?” his voice growled. He marched right up to me, blocking the light from the window while Simpson-Prior slipped back out of the room.

  For the first time I consciously registered the murky tanned color of Ivan’s face, which somehow made him look older, and his curling brown hair that was thick and rich and tinted by the sun conversely giving him boyish appeal. But then camouflage and contradictions were one of the dangers of Ivan, something I wouldn’t realize until it was much too late.

  He was waiting, so I asked, “Who was that?”

  For a moment I thought he was going to get me for earlier.

  “Told me his name is Ngoni Kasanka.” He smiled instead. “Remember it. He’s a bastard. I’m telling you, he’s going to be trouble.”

  “Why was he picking on you? Does he know you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “No. He’s more senior than us and that’s just the way shit rolls in a school like this, seniors can do what they like to us. We’re just squacks. Bottom of the heap. Don’t you know anything?”

  Then the smile disappeared.

  “But I know he’s only doing it because I picked on that Nelson. And I bet he’s already dreaming of being Head of House one day, Head of School if he can—I can tell he’s that sort—and God help us the day that happens.”

  “How come?”

  Ivan shrugged in a well-it’s-obvious-isn’t-it? kind of way.

  “You can’t have a Kaffir running things. It isn’t right. Don’t you see?”

  I blushed and shuffled my feet. My father had warned me the merest mention of the K-word was illegal and could send you to prison now.

  “Yeah,” I said. Anything to make him go away.

  “Don’t say ‘Yeah,’ you sound like a Pom. Open up.” Ivan pointed at my tuck box and hovered. I did as I was told. “Jeez, you haven’t got much, have you? Your folks must be tight.”

  He grabbed the packet of biscuits, the tin of condensed milk, and the only two bars of chocolate I had.

  The school ate all its meals together. Simpson-Prior and I sat with the other eight boys from our study room, and Ivan made sure we were at the bottom two places. No one spoke to us so I spent much of the time gazing around the hall and at the lines of tables with mostly white faces.

  Up on one expanse of wall there were wooden plaques with gold lettering displaying lists of Haven old boys, while another roll of honor was headed BRAVE BOYS WHO HAVE FALLEN: Banatar, F.G., Burnett House 1973; Fearnhead, T.E., Forbes House 1974; de Beer, W.S., Heyman House 1976 . . . In total I counted thirty-seven old boys who’d fallen and never got up again.

  As far away as possible from this list was a framed photograph of Robert Mugabe, because all schools and public buildings had to have the new prime minister on display. His black face beamed like he’d been caught at the end of a joke.

  A spoon came clattering to our end of the table.

  “Hey!” It was Ivan. “What are you two gawping at? We need more bread.”

  “Ja, more bread, stupid,” the boy next to him echoed, spraying crumbs from his mouth. His name was Derek De Klomp, and he hung on Ivan’s every word like a new best friend. He looked to me like a gorilla, with thick black eyebrows hanging like weights and swollen lips that never quite managed to meet.

  “Put some spoof into it, Simpson-Prior. Jislaaik! You are one ugly baboon.”

  The table laughed as Simpson-Prior consciously or subconsciously concealed his buckteeth, his small,
sproutlike ears burning pink. So I went, but in the steamy kitchen the African workers stared like I was coming to steal, and then one started shouting something I couldn’t understand and waved me away.

  When I went back empty-handed and tried to explain, Ivan snatched the plate. Less than a minute later he came back with a pile of thick white slices.

  “You’ve got to put them in their place,” he said.

  I didn’t know if he was talking to me or about me.

  Later, when we were getting ready for bed, Ivan came to our side of the dorm.

  “Kasanka says I have to stop pushing you around,” he told Nelson.

  Nelson looked scared. “I didn’t tell, Hascott. Honest.”

  “Good. So he shouldn’t hear about me ripping up your bed, then,” Ivan went on, and pulled Nelson’s sheets and blankets until they were in a pile, looking at me as he did it. When I opened my mouth to say something, he cut me off with, “Relax, Pommie, it’s only a bit of fun.”

  Simpson-Prior laughed like it was something cool, but if he thought it would win him favor he was wrong, because Ivan destroyed his bed as well.

  “See?” Ivan said to me, as if that proved he was right. “Just a bit of fun. Sleep well, girls.”

  At nine exactly our light was snapped off and we were told to get our heads down. Two of the sixth formers, Greet and Leboule, menaced the dorm in the dark for a full ten minutes to make sure there was no talking, Greet knocking a hockey stick against the ends of beds. No one dared do or say anything. They were the top of the school, all-powerful; they could do anything they wanted, so we lay still and hoped they’d just go away.

  Every morning, in the haze before waking, there was a brief moment when I thought I wasn’t there, that I was far away somewhere else—at home, in England with my grandmother, anywhere. Those were the best moments of the day.

  I wrote to my mother constantly, and almost all the letters started with the word “Please.”

  FOUR

  One morning at the end of our very first week, we were waiting for Mr. Dunn for the start of geography. He had told us all to go not into the classroom but around the rugby fields and into the bush slightly, over by Monkey Hill, where there was a special rock formation he wanted to show us.

  Geography was the only class Nelson and I shared, and as we walked together behind the rest of the class he pointed out what I thought were patches of weed in the grass and told me to step clear of them.

  “Why?”

  Nelson bent low and put a narrow finger to something growing the size of a large coin, with two points sticking up.

  “Devil thorns,” he explained. “Watch out for those. Tread on one and you’ll know about it, it’ll go right through your shoe. Hey, look! Lion ants!”

  Close by, miniature craters had pockmarked the sandy ground, and Nelson snapped off a blade of grass and gently prodded the edge of one of the indentations.

  “What are you doing?” I wanted to know.

  “Watch,” he said. “You won’t have seen these in England.”

  The tiny grains at the bottom of the hole started to shift. I thought he was making it happen somehow, then suddenly they lifted in a mini eruption and something too quick to see darted out, grabbed the end of the grass from Nelson’s fingers and pulled it down and into the sand. The grass wriggled as it went, as if trying to escape.

  “That’s so cool.” I’d never seen anything like it.

  “Lekker, hey?” Nelson agreed with a smile.

  “You didn’t wait,” said another voice.

  I smelled then heard Simpson-Prior coming up next to me. His feet landed too close to the lion ants and filled in all their holes, and Nelson got up and stood back slightly.

  Simpson-Prior hovered accusingly, sweating. The brown grass was taking a particularly harsh beating that day, and even though the sky was full of clouds they seemed too afraid of the bullying sun to get in the way.

  “I thought you were going to wait,” he said again.

  When I didn’t say anything he took my elbow and led me a few feet away.

  “Sorry about that,” he went on, meaning the yellowing bruise that Ivan and De Klomp had taken turns in kneading into my arm the night before.

  I hid my annoyance and made as if it was no big deal. Simpson-Prior had been caught whispering to see my work during prep and everyone in the study room had got a task for it. As far as Ivan was concerned it had been my fault.

  “Hascott’s right, we should have been more careful,” I said.

  “That’s not why he picks on you. He’s only like that because . . . You know.” Simpson-Prior checked over his shoulder and made his voice low. “Jislaaik! You’ve got to be careful what you say these days. He’s only like that because you’re friends with that Ndube. He hates him.”

  “Nelson? Why, what’s he done?”

  “He hasn’t done anything.” He smirked horribly. “He’s just, you know . . . I don’t know what it’s like in England but you don’t really make friends with them here. You will let me copy in tests, hey?”

  A bee flew close by and he ducked and swatted like a madman. Some of the other boys from the class jeered at him.

  “I’m always getting stung,” he explained to me proudly. “Once, when I was eight, a bee flew into our car and stung me five times and I didn’t cry.”

  “I thought bees could only sting once,” I pointed out.

  He paused before shaking his head. “This one stung me five times.”

  Suddenly the whole class erupted into commotion. I thought there were more bees but something rustled through the brittle scrub and I felt it move over my foot. By the time I looked, I saw the green markings disappear into the trees. I yelped and staggered backward into a bush just as Mr. Dunn appeared.

  “Jacklin!” he bellowed. “What the hell are you playing at? I said no talking.”

  The snake had slipped deeper into the leaves. It moved quickly, tail flicking. Everyone rushed around and talked at once.

  “Where did it go?”

  “What sort was it?”

  “Must be a python,” Ivan declared. “We get hordes of them on our farm.”

  “Or a boomslang. It looked like a boomslang.”

  “Hey, Ndube. Catch!” Ivan shouted, flicking something snake-sized at Nelson and making him leap. Ivan and De Klomp cut him with laughs. “Jeez, it’s only a piece of bark, you poof. Do one of your witch doctor dances, that should bring it out.”

  All the while no one had noticed that Simpson-Prior was now a few meters away and moving stealthily through the tall grass. He stopped to break off a bit of tree, snapped the end so that it was forked, and then gently stabbed the ground.

  “Eweh! Check it out,” he called.

  We rushed over. He’d pinned the snake down, and we all jumped as it thrashed around, but as soon as Simpson-Prior put his hands to it and picked it up by the back of the neck it suddenly came over all calm—sleepy, almost, like it had been drugged—and gently coiled its tail around his arm.

  Simpson-Prior’s eyes glazed. He brought the snake frighteningly close to his face.

  “Green mamba.” His cheeks glowed, and in that brief moment the usual drawn, tense expression had gone and he looked brilliantly happy. For no real reason I felt irritated by him, perhaps because for the first time he seemed less afraid than I was, and I wished I could be that happy.

  “She’s a beauty. And you found her.” He turned to me, and I felt guilty for thinking the way I was about him.

  “Is it dangerous?”

  Everyone laughed at me.

  “Deadly,” Simpson-Prior nodded.

  “Jeez, Prior, you are bloody penga,” Ivan said. “Kill it.”

  Mr. Dunn agreed, but Simpson-Prior pleaded and asked if he could just let it go.

  “Okay. But take it right out into the bush, as far away from the school as possible. And take that clown Jacklin with you.”

  The other boys groaned enviously. I asked if Nelson could come wi
th us but Sir said absolutely not.

  Nelson was standing on his own, looking adrift and wilting under Ivan’s gaze.

  “Please, sir?”

  Mr. Dunn rolled his eyes and nodded sternly.

  “Hurry up.”

  Simpson-Prior talked about snakes the whole way. I liked the fact that he was so enthusiastic but at the same time felt sorry for him because it made him even more different from most other boys, and anyone who’s different in school will always be a target.

  When we were far away, he crouched low and gently put the snake on the ground, readied himself, then leaped back. The mamba had already disappeared. Simpson-Prior laughed with relief.

  “Did you check? How quick she moved? Lekker, man. And you found her.”

  I think, though I can’t remember for sure, that it was a green mamba that killed Jeremy Simpson-Prior. Certainly a snake of some kind. But that was much later, when he was a young workingman doing the thing he loved in a game park down in the low veld, long after he’d run away because of what we did to him. His death, at least, had nothing to do with us.

  “. . . So I look down and this thing’s going over my foot, and it feels . . . weird . . .”

  The five-minute warning for Lights Out had rung. Most of the dorm were in their PJs and on beds while I was still buzzing with words tripping off my tongue. I must have told the story four times that evening and I didn’t mind one more in the slightest. Nelson was by my side, and Fairford and Lambretti and the Agostinho cousins listened intently, while Simpson-Prior waited for the part that involved him.

  “. . . and I swear, it checks around at me like it’s going to graze my leg, one time.”

  I was even talking like everyone else.

  “Meanwhile your machendes have shrunk to the size of a couple of peas,” one of the Agostinho cousins heckled.

  “And let’s not even mention the chocolate runway in your gudds,” Lambretti rabbit-punched me. Everyone roared.

  “Shut up, guys,” I said.

  This was great.

  A missile flew across the dorm. A shoe. Ivan was standing by the door.