Childhood murder

Based on a true story

Tom became fearful when his father picked him up from school, Boksburg High. He could tell straight away there was something wrong again with dad. It was often in the evenings that something was not right about his father: it could be seen in his father’s face through the windshield of the car as he pulled up outside school to pick him up. That stupid look. Stupidity easily marries cruelty, violence, brutality. Owl-eyed, his father had magnanimously pushed open the passenger door for Tom and Tom sidled in. Tom could not smell the liquor. Perhaps because he was so used to it, just as he no longer (if ever) smelled the cigarettes mom and dad smoked. Tom had not yet made the association between drinking and stupidity, and the latter’s marriage partners. He just felt the dread.

The next dread, or the same dread that thickened, was that they were going to Christo’s cafe tonight on the way home. Dad always deliberately stopped at this petrol station, because the Greek man who ran the cafe next door, Christo (everyone called him Christo) he regarded as a friend and made a point of buying the evening newspaper, bread and milk from him. Even now, after the recent murder. So tonight his father announced they were going to pay respects to Christo, because it was Christo’s lovely Greek wife, Teressa, who had recently been killed. Dad wanted his son to be there to pay respects, because that was part of learning to be a man. This was back in the Seventies. Several men had held up the couple while they were closing the shop one night. They had grabbed her and demanded Christo open his till. Christo had instead pulled out a gun and a man had slashed the side of Teressa’s neck with a knife which appeared from nowhere. One of the men had shouted to the accomplice with the knife, “What have you done? We just wanted the money!” They turned to see the gun clatter to the floor. They may have noticed Christo’s face at that moment. But they could not, even if they had seen his face, imagined or seen the face the way Tom did when he heard his father telling the story in the lounge two nights later before they watched TV shows. Tom would have seen Christo’s face for what it was: strangely white and frail, ephemeral as peach blossoms, slowly crumpling in an invisible freeze, shedding the last vestige of welcome and humour which all his customers, including his father, had always received. This was the face Tom saw the next time he saw Christo.

Tom loved the sparkling smell of the shop: the fragrance of sweets and chocolates fighting with the fruit that was always polished and waiting in large wooden boxes. And of course the inky odour of comics. Captain America, X-men, Spiderman, Daredevil. But now father and son stood in front of bowed Christo, whom Tom was sure did not need his father’s sympathies, if such they were. “You’ve just got to pull yourself together,” dad was muttering to Christo. “Come on, you’re a Greek, dammit; things can turn around. You can turn things around”. Or rather, Tom’s father stood in front of Christo, while Tom stood uncomfortably somewhere behind, not wanting comic books or anything else, intuiting far more than his father as he watched Christo’s pale face, now a shade of yellow with grief and exhaustion, as Christo both served and ignored his father. Christo’s big grin and throaty chuckle had gone to heaven to be with Teressa. Eventually, feeling he had sorted out matters that come with unexpected widowerhood, dad shuffled together his bags of groceries and whistled to Tom, who had gone over to look at the comic books simply because he could no longer watch. Whistled to him like a dog: Tom used to like that because the same whistle had always been used to call their five dogs on the huge plot of land surrounding their home and Tom, when he was younger, would run up with the animals to the stoep where his father waited, sometimes with their food, sometimes not. He had loved to pretend he was one of the mutt gang: feral, a character out of his beloved Rudyard Kipling books. When dad had friends around for a braai, he would brag to his friends about the solidarity between son and father: that his son would come at the sound of a whistle.

Tommy would stop whatever he was doing when he heard his father purse his lips and flute. Once he trotted out onto the balcony where his father and friends lounged with cans of beer, and Bruce the Labrador and Scruffy the mongrel were already there, sniffing inquisitively at the half-finished plates of steak, boerewors and potato salad. “Hi Dad, you called?” Dad looked at him and grinned smugly at his chums, having won a bet. “Nothing, Tommy, just checking,” came the slur, a slur which suggested the coming grand nuptial of stupidity and cruelty. It was indeed like a marriage. When two young, innocent partners come together in holy union, they are ignorant of who the other is. Ignorant of themselves: the truer selves that are shoved into the spotlight as the marriage progresses and romance recedes. It resulted, as Tommy well knew, in smashed crockery, burned dinners and to hell with you, you bastard, look what you have done to your son. You are killing him.

Tom was now uncomfortable with the dog whistle, but preferred to hide under it, as under an old blanket. A blanket that should have been thrown out a long time ago by his mother, but which nevertheless still served a purpose. Father and son went out into the parking lot at Christo’s, where the Peugeot squatted, filled with petrol, windshield and rear window cleaned. Dad roared off in the car but within seconds came to a screeching halt as a man-shadow flitted past the front of the car and huddled under a tree. Dad peered at the man standing in the shadows. Tom could see he was a good-looking young man with a carefully wrought hairstyle. On both sides of his head three grooves in his coarse black hair had been neatly shaved out. The effect was striking, accentuating the man’s fine cheekbones, and was surely seen as very attractive among the young ladies, Tom thought. “Good evening,” Tom’s dad said in Zulu to the man. “Good evening, baas,” replied the man back in his native tongue (except for baas), clearly relieved by the friendly exchange. Tom’s father then asked in English, “Are you having a good time?” “No, no,” replied the man in English, uncertain how to respond, then suddenly said, “I am just waiting for my friend. He works at the petrol station,” pointing in the obvious direction. There was a silence which Tom’s father held in his hands while the stranger stood with hands empty: hands which were rubbing each other nervously while he wondered what Tom’s father was going to do or say next. The stranger stared at Tom in the car, then back at his father. “I asked,” said his father in a louder voice, “what are you doing here?” as though the answer had not already been suggested. The man did not know what to say, and put his hands in his pockets, and tried laughing, perhaps to regain the original welcoming tone in the car driver’s voice. Tom’s father then yelled, “It’s after dark! Go back to your location, you stupid – – !” The car roared off again.

Tom studied the ugly word his father had used to identify or insult the stranger; it was no matter which one. It was like finding a snake in a tree where one had expected to find a bird nesting. The conversation with the stranger had started off in such a welcoming manner, but from the beginning Tom had known better, known what the outcome would be. He studied his upturned, soft, pink palms, as if the awful word were in his hands, the same hands that had eagerly flipped through comic books or tousled his dogs’ furry heads. The emptiness of his hands suggested the word he had heard: one he could not bring himself to say.

Three weeks later on the weekend the police arrived at their home on the plot near Carlos Rolfe’s Pan in Boksburg. This was nothing very unusual; around the spacious houses were extensive farmlands, hectares of bush and a glistening spider’s web of tin-roofed structures which were easy hideouts for criminals and illegal immigrants from nearby countries. Many illegals were cheaply employed by the plot-owners and farmers.

“Dag meneer,” said the young policeman politely to Tom’s father. The officer had not needed to knock on the door as the dogs had started barking furiously at the arrival of the police van. “Good day to you,” said Tom’s dad in Afrikaans, beaming. “How can we help you?” “Do you know this person?” the policeman asked, as another officer brought a prisoner out of the back of the van. The dogs went into a frenzy and both Tom and his father shooed the animals away. “He may have been involved in the murder at Christo’s,” the policeman ventured. “Oh ja,” said Tom’s father. Everyone in the area knew Christo’s and what had happened. Tom recognised the prisoner immediately. The neat rows razored into the sides of the prisoner’s head had partly faded with new hair. Tom remained silent, perhaps because, as he’d many years later reflect, he had recognised a fellow hider under blankets. The prisoner only looked at the ground, after once glancing at Tom for a few seconds. In his eyes there was nothing. But Tom was sure for a second he had recognised Tom. But, already then, without knowing the words to express it, Tom knew that that acknowledgment may have led to a spark of life. Of kinship.

Tom’s father, ex-military, a John Wayne fan always happy to please fellow gun-slingers, strode up to the policeman’s prisoner, who shrunk even more. “Hold your head up!” the young officer snapped. The prisoner raised his head. “No, I don’t know him,” Tom’s father finally said with honesty and conviction. “I have never seen him before.”

Extract from a work in progress, an autre-biography