History Lesson by Tony Peake / Fiction / Untitled Books

That simple.

History Lesson by Tony Peake

‘This is a Christian country and what you are doing is disgusting. Disgusting and perverted.’

The essentials are these: when Tony was 16 and on a train between Johannesburg and Irene, where he then lived with his parents, he caught the eye of the man sitting opposite him and, before leaving the train, made an arrangement to meet the man in Pretoria under Paul Kruger's statue at one o'clock on the coming Saturday.
That simple.
Except it wasn't, of course. Histories seldom are.
It was the school holidays and Tony, who'd recently been introduced to it by one of his teachers, had been in Johannesburg to browse for music in a first-floor music shop in Harrison Street, between Jeppe and Pritchard. Dark and dusty and delightfully out of the ordinary, this new discovery was an Aladdin's cave of second-hand sheet music and records, the nature of which tended to make the other boys at school snicker at Tony's taste. Too musical - even then he'd been too musical. Too much Coward, not enough Beatles.
And indeed, on the day in question he'd unearthed a boxed recording of Conversation Piece that had been a particular find. A collector's as well as a 'conversation' piece, for not only did it feature Coward himself in the role of Paul, Duc de Chaucigny-Varennes, but a lush Richard Burton into the bargain. Accordingly, as Tony ran through the echoing concourse of Park station to catch his train home, he took special care that his find shouldn't get knocked, or - worse - fall to the ground and break. He went past the awkward alcove where, four years previously, John Harris, a teacher and member of the African Resistance Movement whose parents lived a block from Tony's in Irene, had detonated a time bomb during the evening rush hour, killing one old woman and injuring at least a dozen others in the process, before then himself becoming victim to the outrage of the authorities, who in short order caught and hanged him. And after pantingly he'd boarded his train, Tony placed it (still in its plastic bag) on his lap.
No risking the overhead rack, not on this occasion.
Immediately opposite him sat a spreading Afrikaans woman in a candy-pink dress. Except how did he know she was Afrikaans, given that she'd not opened her mouth? Well, first there was her dress. The unsubtle cut of it. And the material. Unmistakeably crimplene. Then her features, which evidenced a complacent coarseness that suggested the having of power, and the wielding of it. Though as it happened, one of the people injured by Harris's bomb had been a certain Clasina Vogel, who - if her name was anything to go by - must also have been Afrikaans.
Like Tony, the woman opposite had something on her lap. In her case, an open magazine. Huisgenoot. Proof positive.
He caught himself comparing her point by point with his mother. Dress, hair and make-up - none equal to the painstaking elegance of Mrs Peake, who once a month went shopping in Johannesburg and would return with yards of material and a judiciously chosen Vogue pattern, both purchased from Stuttafords, where she would also enjoy lunch. It was also where, on a recent, joint shopping trip, Tony had been titillated by the manner in which the male shop assistant had measured his inner leg for a pair of hipsters, latest fashion imperative. Then the pinning up of the material as per the pattern, the careful cutting and sewing of it, so that Tony's mother could set herself apart from all things local, such as the woman opposite, on the little that Tony's father was able to provide for the housekeeping from his government job in Pretoria.
Life was funny! That his parents should have come to South Africa in the first place, when neither of them seemed particularly to care for the country, certainly not in relation to home, which was England. Then to have found that they still needed to watch the pennies (pennies for them, never cents) when their post-war motivation for making the move had been that South Africa presaged opportunity. And in this way to have stamped their only son with an unwanted sense of confusion as to his identity. Was Tony essentially English, or finally South African? Never mind his sexual confusion, as yet unarticulated.
The train arrived at Germiston, where a sandy-haired man stepped into the carriage and took the seat next to the woman with the Huisgenoot. Tony guessed the newcomer to be in his early thirties. Guessed, too, from the man's colouring and a certain rawness of feature that, like the woman, he was Afrikaans. Except that interestingly, when it came to a masculine version of what, in the woman, he disdained, Tony felt a quickening. The squatness of the man's nose, the native fullness of his lips, the mat of hair on the fingers which lay splayed on the man's meaty thighs - all conspired to make Tony inch imperceptibly erect.
Thus began a sort of sexual gavotte. As Tony shifted in his seat, so the man, instead of considerately contemplating the floor, or his shoes, or the passing flicker of suburban Germiston, chose instead to stare insolently at Tony, daring him to acknowledge and then return the look. A look that consequently flared between the two of them, making it plain that the man was keenly aware of the effect he was having. Even wished to stoke that effect, for what he did now was to slip his hand into one of his pockets, thereby leaving Tony in little doubt as to what nested between his thighs.
The woman flicked a page of her magazine. The man slid lower in his seat, the better to present himself. Tony looked away at what the window had to offer: a vista of brown veldt dotted with occasional blacks, many carrying parcels on their heads, who were often to be seen like this, at a distance, in passing, as they traversed the barren land in a stately gavotte of their own. The man began to stroke his leg. His own leg, that is, not Tony's, though it might as well have been Tony's, given how Tony's body was currently reacting to the man's every movement. Thank heavens, Tony thought, for Noel Coward, whose boxed Conversation Piece was at least masking the considerable upheaval occurring in his own lap.
The man essayed a smile: a lazy, inviting smile, which he then underlined by running a finger the length of his jutting jaw.
Tony shifted.
Still smiling, the man's eyes indicated his nether regions.
With the merest moue of his too-dry lips, Tony managed a brief smile of his own.
The man... but Tony wasn't to find out what the man would do next, for at this point the woman with the Huisgenoot heaved herself upright and hissed: 'Disgusting!' She was looking fixedly at Tony. 'This is a Christian country and what you are doing is disgusting. Disgusting and perverted.'
She shot as venomous a look at the man by her side, then swept into the adjoining segment of the carriage, where she lowered her offended bulk into a seat which, although obscured from the man sitting opposite Tony, nevertheless still provided her with a partial view of Tony himself.
Since she'd spoken in English, Tony wondered whether perhaps he'd got it wrong about the woman being Afrikaans - until it came to him that of course this was simply because she'd been able to pigeon-hole him as neatly as he her: not only as a pervert, but as an Engelse pervert to boot.
Meanwhile, the man opposite appeared to be relishing the woman's departure. Grinning broadly, he drew further, pointed attention to his trousers, and then leaned forward.
'Now that the bitch has gone,' he chuckled, choosing also to speak in English, though in his case, the thickness of his accent imbued his words with an almost lascivious quality, 'why don't you forget your parcel, hey, so I can get a better look at your other packet? See what you've been hiding. Hey! Or trying to hide.'
At which an errant madness took hold of Tony. Although aware that the woman still had her eyes on him, he let Conversation Piece slip and, mirroring the man opposite, placed his right hand firmly on his hipsters, the better to delineate what was straining at their mustard-coloured fabric.
'That's better!' breathed the man, eyes glittering.
The woman was still watching, but all at once, Tony didn't care. Neither for her, nor the possible consequences of his action. This was all that mattered. This singing moment, between him and a strange man. Their mutual attraction. That they could communicate in this way. So urgently. So nakedly. So - yes! - so purely and so easily. Wasn't it splendid? Magnificent? Even admirable?
The man spoke again.
'Do you go all the way?'
Now what could this mean?
'All the way?' echoed Tony, courage starting to ebb.
'Pretoria,' said the man. 'Is that your stop?'
Decisively, Tony shook his head.
'Where, then?'
There was a protracted pause.
'Why? Is it secret?'
Again Tony shook his head.
'So?'
'Irene,' said Tony at last. 'I live in Irene.'
'Irene!' cried the man. 'Very smart. And is there a place in Irene where we can go?'
'Go?' The ease of the encounter, its purity, its rightness, was moment by moment becoming less obvious.
'You know. You and me. Go.' The man's hand executed another illustrative stroke.
The woman, Tony noticed, although ostensibly engrossed in her magazine, was nevertheless keeping continued watch.
'Or,' said the man, hand still writing its own message, 'how about Pretoria?'
'Pretoria?'
A snatch of mocking, militaristic song started up in Tony's head:

Jou kombers en
My matras en
Daar lê die ding,
Daar lê die ding,
Daar lê die ding.
We are marching to Pretoria,
Pretoria, Pretoria.
We are marching to Pretoria,
Pretoria here we come.
'I've got a place,' said the man.
'No, I'm expected, you see,' mumbled Tony. 'At home. You see, I...'
Again he paused, unable - or unwilling - to explain that his parents would be waiting for him. Not because this would make him appear too childlike; rather, it was that his parents didn't have business here, not in this context, a fact that actually made Tony feel relatively adult. That his life could sideline theirs.
'Okay, okay,' the man was saying. 'So how about the weekend? On Saturdays I'm free from midday. We could meet at one. How does that grab you?'
'But where?' asked Tony. 'Where would we meet?'
'Oom Paul's statue,' said the man. 'Underneath Oom Paul at one o' clock. What could be simpler, hey?'
The train was slowing and the woman with the Huisgenoot, whom Tony might have known would be getting out somewhere dreary like Kempton Park, was inexorably rising.
'It's perverts like you,' she snapped, pausing on her candy-pink way to the door to slap a final verbal injunction on Tony and his accomplice in crime, 'who bring this country into disrepute. But don't be fooled: we're always watching.'
Then the train shuddered to a halt and the woman dismounted.
I wish I could say with certainty what came next, between Kempton Park and Irene, but the truth of the matter is that here my memory becomes hazy, even as to the sequence of once familiar stations. There was more talk, obviously - though of what, I can't be sure - and more enflamed flaunting of that body part through which the entire incident was being most intensely registered. Until, as the train drew finally into Irene station, the plan for Saturday was reiterated: Paul Kruger's statue at one o' clock.
What could be simpler?
Something else I remember is that after the train had pulled out of the station, Tony remained on the platform for a while, listening to the sound of a single penny whistle being played by a single black man who was standing at the far end of the platform: the segregated end, the black end. Why the man had not boarded the recently departed train, or why - if he'd alighted from it - he was not now leaving the station, Tony would never know. All that was granted him was this brief glimpse of a single, segregated man who clearly loved being able to play his cheery, cheeky, yet also mournful, instrument.

At supper that evening, Tony was asked about his day. Not surprisingly, he spoke only of Conversation Piece, to which, as allowed by his otherwise hectic thoughts, he'd spent much of the afternoon listening. This prompted his mother to remember Cavalcade, which she'd seen before the war, and his father to bemoan the cultural desert that was South Africa before proceeding to detail his day: meetings with this or that government official over this or that piece of propaganda, for Tony's father worked in the Department of Information, whose job it was to paint South Africa (be it through magazines, or short films, or educational events) in the most flattering of lights.
The obvious witticism that the evening's conversation cried out for - how cowardly of Tony to talk only of his record purchase - did not occur to him. Not even afterwards, while taking a bath, though by then, it has to be said, his thoughts were elsewhere. On promised lips, hands, thighs. Etcetera.
Later, in bed, Tony wondered how best to explain away a Saturday trip to Pretoria when he'd promised his father he'd help with the stone wall which he was, on the weekends, building around their property. For that Tony intended to meet with the man from the train was not in doubt. How could it be, when Tony felt so tightly wound? So primed to keep the promised time?
Paul Kruger, though - he did have doubts about Paul Kruger, whom just that term they'd been studying in history. Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger (1825-1904). More commonly - and fondly - known as Oom Paul. The old lion of the Transvaal. Father of the Afrikaner nation. Who, as a 10 year old, had set out with his family on the Great Trek into the South African interior so as to escape the British and their baleful influence. And who had later, in continued resistance to the British, become president of the Transvaal Republic. And who, in the wake of the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand, had railed and warned against the uitlander, or foreigner, who would indeed spell the eventual end of the breakaway Boer Republic.
Kruger, who stared stiffly from the pages of the history book, risible only in that his beard appeared to sprout not from his face but, in the Calvinistic fashion of that time, from underneath the line of his chin. And whose stern bronze form, top-hatted, caned, frock-coated and circled by four slouching sentries, brooded over Pretoria's central Church Square. Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger. The old lion of the Transvaal. Father of the Afrikaner nation.
Why was Tony, unAfrikaans Tony, uitlander by upbringing and, in this instance, sexual preference, making plans willingly to step into the centre of this particular spider's web, to meet at the brooding and beleaguered core of a brooding and beleaguered city whose annual profusion of flowering Jacarandas fooled no one, unless on postcards, as to Pretoria's essential chauvinism, its narrow-mindedness, its philistinism, its lack of natural beauty - the list was, in English eyes, endless.
Tony remembered the first words to be uttered by the man on the train: Now that the bitch has gone. In that thick, almost lascivious accent. Did Tony, whose entire upbringing (setting aside the compromised nature of its funding) had been dedicated to becoming other, did Tony truly want to ally himself to such crudity? Such crassness. Such - well, yes, such Afrikanerdom.
Thus, by degrees, did Tony begin to question the wisdom and appropriateness of keeping his promise to go marching to Pretoria. Of remaining that person, that stranger almost, he'd briefly become on the train. For wasn't his other promise, the earlier, more usual promise made to his father to help with the wall, of greater importance? Greater validity?
And though he continued, of course, feverishly to fantasise about the man - lips, hands, thighs - and to masturbate as feverishly while doing so, there was about his masturbation a quality of scourging: as if, by rising to his longings, he could mortify them. And yet on the Saturday he still hadn't absolutely confirmed to himself that he wouldn't be going to Pretoria - had, in fact, been imagining his meeting under Oom Paul's statue so vividly and in such detail that it felt almost as if the meeting had already taken place. Yet come noon, cut-off point for leaving the house if he still wished to be in Church Square for one o' clock, he remained in his gardening clothes and at his appointed task for the morning, which was the mixing of cement for Sixpence, he of the pre-decimal name, who would materialise every Saturday to help Tony's father with his wall.
'Come on, Tony!' his father called. 'Faster, lad! Can't you see Sixpence is ready for more?'
I can still picture myself that day. Tall, slim, mop of blond hair falling into my eyes, which are stinging somewhat from the sweat, my gardening shorts and shirt both khaki-coloured and, now I think about it, faintly Boer-like in cut and appearance. I can see and hear again the slop of the cement - I wasn't skilled at getting the consistency correct - and smell again hot Sixpence as he hovers patiently by my elbow with his wheelbarrow, waiting to take the next load to my father, whose place is always at the wall, since he is in charge of deciding which stone should go where.
Then my mother appearing with a tray on which stand two glasses of her home-made lemonade plus an enamel mug of tea and two slices of thickly cut bread meagrely smeared with jam. This for Sixpence.
'Lunch in an hour,' she says.
My father nods.
'You look flushed,' she adds, scrutinising me. 'In this sun, you should be wearing a hat.'
'Mad dogs,' I smile, 'and Englishmen. I'm fine, honestly I am.'
But she doesn't believe me.
'You don't look fine,' she says. 'When I bring you out your hat, I expect you to wear it.'
'This bloody cement,' sighs my father, 'is far too runny. Do concentrate, Tony, else this wall will never be finished.'
But eventually it is: the year before my father dies, in fact. Cement holding fast, the wall encompasses our entire property to a height of ten feet and becomes, in the eyes of my mother and myself, a monument to its maker. A virtual tombstone, if that's not too fanciful and macabre a way of putting it.
'Whenever I look at that wall,' my mother says, 'I think of your father.'
I, too. Of him and patient, hot-smelling Sixpence and a man on a train and a woman in a candy-pink dress. And, tangentially, of a young revolutionary I never knew called John Harris, whose bereft parents lived within sight of my father's wall. My complete childhood, in fact, the uncertain, unsimple history of a tall, thin, English-speaking youth, who lacked the courage shown by Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger (1825-1904) for venturing into the unknown.
.

Tony Peake is the author of the biography of Derek Jarman and two novels: A Summer Tide and Son to the Father. As a short story writer, his work has been widely anthologised. He has also edited a collection of short stories on the theme of Seduction. Currently he is at work on a new novel. Further details at www.tonypeake.com.

Friday, 5 September, 2008

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Issue 40 / January 2012

That simple.