Alive Again Read online

  “I can’t wait for tomorrow,” he whispered.

  The lights had been switched off and the lazy chatter of the other girls who shared our dormitory had died down. I could hear by their breathing that they were all asleep. Maryke was in a bed next to mine.

  “Is he nice?” she whispered, leaning across to my bed.

  “The best,” I whispered back.

  “Good enough to kiss?”

  I said nothing, which seemed to drive her mad, because she slid out from between her sheets and jumped into bed beside me.

  “Come on, tell me. We’re friends, remember! Best friends.” Her voice rose.

  I tapped a finger against her mouth to remind her that we were not alone.

  Maryke tried a few more times to draw a confession out of me, but I didn’t budge. Instead, I asked her if she had found any eye candy. There was one, she said, with a giggle. He looked like Ryan Gosling and said he liked girls with green eyes and blonde hair.

  “Don’t let me kiss him long before you kiss Bheka,” she groaned, pleading one more time for a confession.

  When I tickled her and protested that I was tired, she got back into her own bed, pretending to be annoyed.

  If Maryke only knew that I had looked at Bheka’s lips and wondered how it would feel to kiss him! But that was my secret, and even my best friend had to accept that. If my relationship with him was going to develop, I would wait for the Big Kiss. Until the right time. The most romantic, perfect moment.

  Long after Maryke had settled down and fallen sleep, I lay awake, listening to the city sounds. Sirens, hooting, the shrill beeps of an ambulance. I felt so awake, so alive and I wished the sun would rise quickly so I could see Bheka again. I closed my eyes and saw the two of us together one day. Students. Walking hand in hand in Johannesburg.

  Eventually I fell asleep, my dreams filled with images of the boy with the brace and beams of light in his eyes.

  * * *

  The week went by fast as lightning. Every day there were debating competitions. Whenever Bheka took the microphone, I forgot about everyone else in the school hall.

  All I could see was Bheka. Searchlight eyes flashing all over the audience until he found me. Eyes resting lovingly on mine. But never long enough to distract him from his topic.

  All I could hear was Bheka. He had a voice which was never dull, never flat. It changed all the time, depending on his mood. It was a voice that carried me along, as if I were being swept away by a river. Just the week before, our Life Sciences teacher, Miss De Wet, had taken our class to walk the riverside trail in the Lowveld Botanical Gardens, not too far from school. She told us how the sound of the Crocodile River changed depending on the terrain over which it flowed. Bheka’s voice sounded like a river. Sometimes it flowed lazily, slowly, other times it rushed over cascades, and when he made a particularly powerful statement, it sounded like the sudden crash of a waterfall.

  I was helplessly, happily in love for the first time in my life. Swept along by my very own Special Boy.

  But when it was my turn to take the microphone, I pulled myself out of that river of love very quickly.

  “How can your brain even work when you’re in love?” asked Maryke, rolling her green eyes.

  I just laughed. I had never told her about my Place of Promises and that whenever my feelings for Bheka turned my brain into slush, I made a promise to myself again – a promise that I would remain sharp, alert, and guard my dream with my life.

  We had a busy programme that week. When we weren’t debating, we visited places of interest such as the Joburg Zoo, the Apartheid Museum, Gold Reef City, the Johannesburg Art Gallery and Hector Pieterson Square in Soweto.

  I particularly remember the day we visited the Apartheid Museum. Afterwards I had some time alone with Bheka. We were left all to ourselves in a mall for two hours to have lunch. Bheka and I slipped away from the group and found a restaurant with a garden where we sat under an umbrella, just the two of us.

  Maybe it was our mood – sombre and sad after witnessing so much suffering caused by Apartheid – that led to the conversation which followed. Holding nothing back, I told him about my father and my fear of the Bad Boys. He listened carefully, nodding every now and then without interrupting me.

  “Thank you for being a different kind of boy,” I said at the end of my long, emotional monologue. I was shivering, even though it was hot under the umbrella.

  He said nothing. But he did put his hand over mine. He held it there until the warmth of his touch seeped into me and my shivering stopped.

  Another outing took us past the University of the Witwatersrand.

  One of the teachers on the bus put up her hand. “Quiet, please!” she called out. “On our right is Wits University. Some of you may study there one day.”

  I will never forget that moment. A surge of tears welled up inside me. A pain I cannot describe – a pain which was bitter and sweet – wrapped itself all around me. I pretended to look for something in my bag, my head hanging low so that Maryke and Bheka, sitting on either side of me, couldn’t see my eyes fill with tears.

  The bitterness was caused by a flash in my mind’s eye. My mother’s sad face. A face which told the story of dreams that had been shattered. But there was a sweet side too: my dream of studying law. I quickly wiped the tears from my eyes. One day, Nandi Dube would indeed study there, I thought as we slowly drove past the campus.

  Bheka was not fooled by my rummaging in the bag. “Your dream is making you emotional,” he whispered.

  I nodded. He smiled. I smiled.

  But then, suddenly, the Bad Boy fear came over me again. Like so many times before, I could hear my father’s words: I will make sure you get married long before matric …

  Bheka must have noticed the shudder of my shoulders. Once again, all he did was cover my hands with his, until the summer day and the warmth of his hands drove the chill away.

  That moment in the bus would have been a good moment for The Kiss, if we had been alone. And for the rest of that week there was so much activity that the perfect moment kept eluding us.

  Much too soon it was time to leave. Saying goodbye to Bheka was extremely painful. And yet, mixed in with the pain was a wild kind of happiness that I had actually been lucky enough to meet my very own Special Boy.

  In the school parking area, while Bheka waited with Maryke and me for our bus to arrive, he put his arms around me. “Parting is such sweet sorrow,” he whispered, quoting the famous line from Romeo and Juliet.

  I nodded. That line summed it up perfectly.

  He promised to phone. And to write at least one letter every week. He held my hand, stroked my cheek, hugged me a million times and in between he took photographs of me to use for a portrait, which he promised to post as soon as he had finished it.

  When the bus had arrived and our luggage had been loaded, we embraced for a long time before I tore myself away. Maryke was already in the bus. The driver was yelling at me to hurry up.

  As I got in, Bheka called out, “Nandi, my girl like no other!”

  His words echoed in my mind all the way back to Mpumalanga, as I relived every single moment we had shared. Maryke, of course, wanted to chat. And she especially wanted to know about The Kiss.

  “How did it feel to kiss him?” she asked softly so the other passengers would not hear.

  She was speechless when I said it had not happened. There had simply never been the right moment. But I was not worried. My first kiss would be so special that the earth would move under the whole of Mpumalanga, I said.

  Maryke rolled her eyes. She had kissed the Ryan Gosling lookalike but it turned out he was kissing other girls too.

  “You’ve met a Special Boy but you didn’t kiss him. Weird,” she said.

  The Kiss may not have happened, but I was happier than I had ever been in my life. To crown it all, I had won the prize for best debater among the girls in my grade. When Mr Bongani had announced the winners, he had said that Nandi
le Dube’s speaking and reasoning skills were so good that she would be a brilliant lawyer one day.

  As the bus made its way down Schoemanskloof and the flat, green highveld gave way to granite outcrops, aloes and paperbark thorn trees, Maryke asked, “How will you live without him?”

  “We will SMS when I can afford airtime. He will phone. And we’ll write letters,” I replied.

  “I know you would really like your own laptop,” said Maryke. “But maybe it’s just as well you don’t have one. Emails aren’t romantic, but soon you’ll have old-fashioned love letters you can keep for the rest of your life.”

  4

  Bheka’s letters were all written on blue paper.

  “Blue is the colour of heaven,” he wrote in his very first letter. “And you have brought heaven right down to earth.”

  How will I ever forget the thrill of going to fetch the post, the key wet in my sweaty palm, my heart racing? Would there be a blue love letter lying in the dark cubicle of the postbox?

  The disappointment when there was nothing was deep. As deep as my happiness when a thick, blue envelope lay in my hand.

  What did he write about? About school, friends, visiting Sun City when his father had had a business meeting, guitar lessons, tests. The book he was reading. A good movie he had seen. Getting a new brace. Sometimes he mentioned the pain in his foot at night. But he never complained. He filled his life with things that made him happy, he always said. And every day he worked at his art.

  He sent the portrait, just as he had promised. A charcoal sketch my mother said looked exactly like me. It was framed in a simple gold frame. He signed it and wrote these words in large print beneath the drawing: Nandi. A girl like no other.

  After I had pleaded for a self-portrait, he sent me a sketch of himself. Our portraits hung side by side on the wall of my tiny bedroom, where I could see us every day.

  Bheka regularly sent small sketches, and I sent back poems, such as:

  I dream of the boy with the searchlight eyes,

  I long for the touch of his hands.

  I love the boy with the searchlight eyes,

  he takes me to new, foreign lands.

  I put all his letters into a pink box. It had been a birthday gift one year, filled with a whole lot of small gifts my mother had put together for me: Lip Ice, hand cream, a chocolate with a message on it saying You are Special, a bar of soap, a facecloth edged with lace, and blue, dangly butterfly-shaped earrings. I remember the earrings well, because they matched the first “shop” dress I ever had. I was in grade 6 when my mother bought it. Before that, my mother had made all my dresses.

  There was nothing very special about the pink box. It was a shoebox my mother had covered with shiny pink paper and tied with a ribbon. But Bheka’s letters turned that box, now kept hidden under my bed, into a treasure chest which became a source of comfort on nights when my father was drunk. And whenever the fear of the Bad Boys came over me.

  At those times I needed Bheka’s letters in the same way that the dry, cracked earth of my mother’s vegetable patch needed rain at the end of winter. I would open the lid, shivering, hands shaking, and calm down as soon as I felt the smooth paper of the blue letters beneath my fingertips.

  On the back of each letter Bheka’s name was written in large, artistic handwriting, followed by his Johannesburg address. I must have kissed that name a thousand times. Even on nights when I could hear the sounds of drunken men, drunken Bad Boys, walking home down our street, I felt safe, my treasure chest open on my lap.

  * * *

  In April of that year, my father found a tree-felling job near Tzaneen in the Limpopo province, which meant that he would be away for several months. A few months of peace in our home.

  It was during that time that I had a brilliant idea.

  I belonged to Mr Khumalo’s club at school called The Dare To Be Different Club. The aim of the club, Mr Khumalo had said on the day it was launched, was to teach us to “think out of the box”. This would, in part, be achieved by club members going on outings in Mpumalanga. On these trips we would be challenged to “stretch our minds and deepen our imaginations,” as Mr Khumalo put it.

  I loved those outings. We criss-crossed our province. We spent, for example, a weekend on the escarpment at Pilgrim’s Rest to learn about the discovery of gold in 1873, long before gold was discovered in Johannesburg. Mr Khumalo had a way of using history to inspire and challenge us. On that particular outing he arranged for us to pan for gold in a stream, just as the diggers of old had done. It was a cold, damp day and we complained that we were hungry and wet. Despite our efforts, there was no hint of gold in the pans we were gently moving about in the water. But Mr Khumalo made us persevere out there in the drizzle until a few of us actually collected a tiny bit of gold!

  Later, warm and dry again, he asked what the panning had taught us.

  “Nothing,” said one boy, “except that panning for gold is no fun.”

  But Mr Khumalo didn’t give up. Eventually, we reluctantly admitted that it had taught us the value of perseverance. To get the “gold” out of life, one had to keep trying. To get good marks in tests, one had to persevere, even if the work was hard, he said.

  If Mr Khumalo hadn’t been so super cool, we would have avoided those weekends. But he had a way with us. He made us proud of who we were.

  He made it easy for us to believe in our dreams.

  * * *

  One such a Dare To Be Different weekend, a long weekend, as it happened, was coming up while my father was away in Tzaneen, and I thought it would be an ideal opportunity for Bheka to visit. Our club was going on a trip to the Kruger National Park. Bheka had never been to the Kruger, and when I suggested the plan, he immediately asked his father’s permission. His father agreed. All I had to do was ask Mr Khumalo.

  Mr Khumalo said he had such a high regard for Mr Bongani that his son was more than welcome to join us, even if he was from another school. My plan had worked!

  Maryke had to miss out on the weekend because her family had other arrangements. “Please kiss him!” she said over and over while I counted down the days.

  The evening before he arrived my mother and I were sitting together knitting scarves. The Dare To Be Different Club often got involved in outreach work, and the scarves were for a small primary school in a very poor community near Komatipoort. Mr Khumalo had planned the route of our weekend outing to pass by the school so that we could deliver all the scarves and beanies which had been knitted by club members and their mothers.

  The house was quiet. My brothers had been sent to bed. All I could hear was the clicking sound of our knitting needles. My mother used the opportunity to quiz me about Bheka, as she had done so often. She listened carefully while I spoke, as if she had not heard anything about him before.

  “He sounds like a good boy,” she said softly.

  “Ma, I feel on top of the world. I’m standing on a high mountain and down below, everywhere I look, there are good things waiting for me,” I said.

  But soon I was to fall off that mountain.

  Broken.

  Body broken. Dreams broken.

  It is just as well we cannot see into the future, because if we could, my time with Bheka on the Dare To Be Different weekend would not have been the highlight it was.

  5

  We all met at school early on the Saturday morning following Bheka’s arrival. We were a group of about fifteen learners. Besides Mr Khumalo, our Life Sciences teacher, Miss De Wet, was also going along.

  “Miss De Wet is a walking encyclopaedia about plants, trees and animals. So ask questions, people! Questions build knowledge, you know that,” said Mr Khumalo, who was wearing the brightest Madiba shirt I had ever seen him wear. It was neon green with red flowers, and he was wearing bright-green running shoes with red laces.

  “Cool shirt, sir, and cool running shoes,” said Lindiwe, a new girl in my class.

  I was surprised to hear her speak. Lindiwe was usual
ly shy and quiet. I often wondered why she looked so unhappy.

  Mr Khumalo, who never missed an opportunity to tell us that he was a keen runner and cyclist, said, “The shoes are for my morning run in the Kruger. What do I always tell you?”

  “A healthy mind can only grow in a healthy body!” we chorused, laughing.

  After a while, taking off his gladiator sunglasses, Mr Khumalo asked for silence.

  “Cool sunglasses, sir!” called out Colin, a boy in a higher grade.

  Mr Khumalo put the glasses on the tip of his nose and pretended to look fiercely at us. A loud discussion about the gladiator sunglasses then took place, until Mr Khumalo asked for our attention again.

  “Okay, back to serious stuff, guys!” he said. He gave us a short summary of the route we would be driving. We would head for Kruger first and have lunch at the Skukuza rest camp. From there we would drive to the Pretoriuskop camp, where we would overnight. The next morning we would exit at the Malelane gate and drop the scarves and beanies off at Avuxeni Primary School on the other side of Komatipoort. Our last stop would be at the Samora Machel monument near Mbuzini. He wanted us to keep our minds, ears and eyes open all weekend so that we could learn new things.

  “This weekend,” he said, “you will be meeting two MAD people from the past, and a MAD dog.”

  “What?” asked Bheka in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear.

  We all burst out laughing.

  Mr Khumalo waited for our laughter to subside.

  “Did Nandi not warn you, Bheka?” he asked, pretending to be serious. “The aim of the Dare To Be Different Club is to make us all MAD.”

  More laughter erupted. Then Mr Khumalo put up a hand for attention and explained to Bheka that MAD actually stood for Make A Difference. Our club members had made a list of six characteristics of MAD people – people who make a difference to their own lives, their communities, their countries and the world.

  It had taken some debate, and it was a process that had taken place over several weeks. But eventually we had all agreed that MAD people have Drive (to work hard and long on their dreams); they are Brave (they don’t worry about what others think of them); they have Knowledge (they read a lot and ask questions and they don’t let a day pass without learning at least one new thing); they have Energy (they keep fit and have healthy habits); they have Ideals (their heads are in the clouds but their feet are on the ground) and they have Perseverance (they can go through dark times without losing hope).