Ruby Red Read online

  On most days I rode my bike to school, weather permitting. My gym shoes on, my school dress tucked carefully under my legs to stop it from blowing up and embarrassing me. I would pull my long dark hair into a tight, high ponytail that I instantly took down once I’d jumped off my bike on to school property. I would wind my way down the wide avenues, taking the street’s bends and curves in my stride and enjoying the quiet of 6.30 a.m., for school began at seven. These were the moments of the day I relished almost as much as my afternoon time with Julian, when my mind was opened by the crisp winds that filled my head with blissful emptiness, before maths formulas and history dates and literature quotes would claim that space from it.

  In those solitary early morning hours I would ride peacefully for most of the way, but in the final minutes, as I pedalled up the last hill with my breath coming in faster and faster gasps, I felt suspended between my solitude and the noise of active life. Below me was the bustling clamour of students, now racing in grey-and-blue uniforms to make it through the prominent stone gateposts that marked the entrance into the school quadrangle.

  In less than a minute I would be carried in on the wave of other student cyclists and satchel-carrying teenagers rushing to the first morning class. On some days I would backpedal furiously and hold myself still on the top of the rise for once I freewheeled down the hill I became Ruby, popular girl at school. The longing to really be known by someone would fill me with a sickening dizziness that would cause me to almost topple to the ground.

  ‘You can’t run your life only on emotions,’ were my father’s concerned words to me when I told him that I sometimes felt overwhelmed with the difficulty of keeping our lives at home a secret. ‘To have control in our lives we have to take control of our emotions. Keep them close by, but never let them run the show.’

  I tried to take his words in, tried to stop my thoughts and fears from taking over, but I was not enough like my father. I suppose that was why he could represent a murderer and an innocent abused black man all in one week. His feelings didn’t impair his legal mind, didn’t cause him to buckle under his personal convictions.

  ‘Stay calm, stay clear, don’t show yourself,’ I told myself firmly as I lifted my foot from the brake and sailed down the hill, joining the throng.

  ‘Hey, Ruby!’

  ‘See you in fourth period.’

  ‘Catch me at the tuck shop later.’

  The words of my friends whizzed by me.

  I smiled back.

  Now I was one of them.

  Chapter Three

  Halfway through geography class, Desmond’s hands began to stroke my hair. Smooth, even stokes that I knew were his signal to have me turn round. I never did. After a few unsuccessful minutes he would lean forward on his desk and try to get as close as he could to my ear.

  ‘C’mon, Ruby, turn round. I wanna show you something…’

  His breath felt warm and smelled like spicy cinnamon. Telltale wrappers of gum always filled his ink well. He reeked of good breath and old money, but not necessarily of good breeding.

  Our desks were miniature oak antiques, purchased when the school was first built after World War I. We never had enough room on the desktop for our large textbooks and I often wondered if perhaps students had been smaller back then. I tried to imagine them racing through the same gates and quadrangle. I wondered too if there were annoying rich boys like Desmond Granger who thought that everyone and everything was his right to claim.

  ‘I have something for you, Red Jewel…’ Desmond pressed his fingers into my shoulder.

  I shrugged his hand off and let out a sigh of annoyance. ‘Des… stop!’ I hissed back.

  ‘Can someone tell me what the three main exports of Ecuador are?’ Miss Radcliffe turned and faced the blackboard and wrote in big letters ‘EXPORT?’.

  ‘Rubies!’ Desmond shouted out.

  The class tittered and I felt my cheeks grow hot. I kicked back at Desmond’s chair.

  Miss Radcliffe spun round and shot Desmond and me a marble-eyed glare with her beady eyes. ‘You two need to stop playing footsie and…’

  ‘We’re not!’ I blurted out.

  The class tittered again.

  My best friend, Monica, rolled her eyes at me and gave me that here-we-go-again look. She tossed her long blonde mane in Desmond’s direction and shook her head at him. A combination of a flirt and a scold.

  Monica and I were opposites. She was light while I was dark, both in hair colour and personality. This was probably why we were drawn to each other on the first day of kindergarten. I had cried while she had smiled and blown her mother a kiss as our parents made a hasty exit from the cheerful classroom. With tearstained cheeks I had followed Monica into the sandpit where we spent the entire year playing together. We did not see each other again once we started at separate ‘big schools’ but found each other again on the first day of high school. We picked up where we had left off, minus the buckets and spades.

  Miss Radcliffe straightened the glasses on her nose and bobbed in her crane-like fashion over to my desk. She had a long, wiry, coat-hanger-shaped frame that hunched forward, her head hanging lower than her shoulders, her long nose pointing towards the ground.

  ‘Ruby Winters,’ she tapped her long finger on my desk. ‘Desmond Granger, you are both school prefects, kindly behave as such!’ She turned on her spindly ankles and returned to the blackboard. ‘Now then, class… someone… the main exports of Ecuador!’

  I scraped my undersized chair as far forward as it would go, away from Desmond’s insistent fingers. Since we were eleven years old he had been trying to get me to meet him alone, after school, for an afternoon boat ride on Zoo Lake or even an ice cream at Butterworth’s Sweet Shoppe. Although Desmond was strikingly handsome and one of the most popular boys in the school, his rich-boy, overly confident air made him unattractive to me. But Desmond, who was always used to getting what he wanted, refused to give up.

  It had become the betting-joke of our matric class. ‘Would Des get Ruby to go on a date with him before our final school year was over?’

  A note flew over my head and landed with a whoosh on my desk. I quickly grabbed it and hid it on my knees out of Miss Radcliffe’s sight.

  ‘ “Cocoa and coffee.” Very good, Stacey. You must have done your homework.’ The chalk scraped painfully across the board as she wrote the words next to ‘EXPORT?’.

  I felt the hair rise like porcupine quills on the back of my neck.

  I’m coming over to your house tonight. No questions asked.

  Kisses

  Des

  PS Hey, come to think of it, does anyone ever get to come over to your house?

  I crumpled the note in my fist slowly so that it wouldn’t make any noise and draw attention. Without turning round I shook my head vigorously, hoping Desmond would get my fervent response.

  ‘Uh uh,’ he whispered, just loud enough for me to hear. ‘I’m coming… over.’ He snickered at his innuendo, then let out a loud snort-laugh.

  ‘Desmond!’ Miss Radcliffe squeaked, her head launching into a rat-tat-tat barrage of bobbing motion. ‘What in heaven’s name is the matter with you? Enough!’

  Desmond stood and pulled his tall frame to its full upright position. He straightened his blue-and-maroon school tie, then raised one eyebrow and stared with penetrating green eyes at Miss Radcliffe, now almost eye-to-eye with him as she stood inches from his desk, one hand placed firmly on her non-existent hip.

  ‘I do so apologize to you and the class—’ his voice as smooth and creamy-sounding as vanilla pudding – ‘but it’s Ruby’s fault, you see… she’s such a distraction. And I’m just a growing boy who can’t contain myself.’ His hand patted his crotch.

  Miss Radcliffe took a horrified leap back from him.

  The class burst into a din of raucous laughter. Some of the boys clapped and whooped as Desmond was led by a beet-red Miss Radcliffe to the principal’s office.

  As he was ushered past me
I heard his voice through the din, ‘You owe me, Ruby. All this punishment I take for you… Later, beauty.’ He turned to me and winked as he passed by.

  I looked away from his gaze and jolted my head to stare out of the window, forcing the jeers and laughter of my classmates to fade into the background. Our row of desks was closest to the large windows that faced a small side garden off the main quadrangle. I focused my eyes on a gardener in faded blue overalls as he bent to grasp the handles of a wheelbarrow that he had filled with weeds. He wore a wide-brimmed straw hat that looked like it must have once belonged to a fine lady, for there was still a cluster of wilted silk flowers in its centre. He stopped after a few seconds and pushed the feminine hat off his forehead and wiped his brow with the back of his hand, giving me a quick vision of his lined, dark face. He reached for his back and rubbed it slowly with his free hand.

  The old gardener must have felt my gaze because suddenly he looked up. He shielded his eyes from the sun’s rays and spotted me through the classroom window. I raised my hand ever so tentatively and waved at him just as Miss Radcliffe returned, minus Desmond, slamming the classroom door with a loud smack.

  The old man lifted his wrinkled hand and waved back. Then he smiled and tipped his straw hat towards me before grasping the wheelbarrow in both hands and moving slowly across the green expanse of lawn.

  I wanted to bolt from my seat and run to catch up with him. I longed to flee the screeching teacher and the tittering friends and the insistent boy who would not leave me alone.

  Perhaps, once I reached him, I would ask the old man how many years he had worked as a gardener for our school and what kind of flowers were his favourite. I was certain no one had ever asked him that question or even cared to know. He was an invisible black man working in the world of affluent whites. It occurred to me how strange that was. Black was such a strong noticeable colour and white closer to transparent. Or maybe through the eyes of others, black was a dark abyss. A infinite hole of nothingness.

  But, of course, I never got up the nerve to leave the classroom and catch up with him. Ruby Winters, school prefect, had to set an example. And right then Ecuador was waiting.

  Chapter Four

  My mother’s art gallery, simply named Annabel’s, was my after-school refuge when a day had been particularly hard. Here the world was defined by shapes and colours that spoke to me in a language far more meaningful than the squawking sounds that came from Miss Radcliffe. It was a place of canvassed anguish, splotches of emotion thrown on empty spaces, etched hope and joy in lightly pencilled strokes, and where, no matter how abstract some of the works were, everything made sense. Ever since I was a young child, each hushed gallery room was a haven of quiet comfort to me.

  It was there that I pedalled furiously to after school that day.

  ‘Mother!’ I yelled, my voice echoing through the stark oval reception area. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Dahling one, what’s the Mommy Emergency?’ Dashel, Mother’s assistant, came out from behind a large oil that he was about to hang in the Gallery Grande, the largest of the seven galleries that were arranged in a circular configuration off the reception area. Everyone called him ‘Dashing Dashel’ because he was just that. Coiffed greying hair, neatly groomed goatee and his classic black polo neck and pressed gaberdine black trousers were his ‘gallery uniform’, as Mother called it.

  ‘Lordy, but we are looking hot and bothered today, young lady.’ Dashel brushed a strand of unruly hair off my face.

  ‘Dash, it’s school,’ I blurted out.

  ‘Now, now, poppet, tell Uncle D everything. Annabel is tied up with the art critic from Die Vaderland.’ He flared his nostrils as if a bad smell had just passed under them. ‘You know, the Afrikaans newspaper.’

  ‘What do they want?’ I followed him into his stark black-and-white office.

  ‘God alone knows. Probably want a juicy story on our latest run-in with the police over Kumalo’s arrest outside the gallery.’ He swish-swished ahead of me and threw himself dramatically into the swivel chair behind his pristine desk and arched his neck back like a dying swan. ‘I am sick, sick of the blasted police.’ He ran a hand over his forehead as if there were beads of perspiration glistening there. ‘Why won’t they leave our poorest artists alone?’

  ‘Father says it’s because art is a more powerful weapon for change than guns.’

  ‘Well then—’ Dashel lifted his head up and looked me in the eye – ‘Kumalo is the biggest goddamned cannon of them all!’

  Christopher Kumalo had been Mother’s most successful protégé. He had come to her gallery almost three years ago with a tattered artist’s portfolio filled with extraordinary sketches of pigeons in various stages of death. Some were trapped on barbed-wire fences, their bowels exposed; others were flattened under the wheels of armed tanks, called ‘hippos’ because of their massive size, that rolled into the townships and brought with them uniformed men who shot at anything they chose, including children. Still others in Kumalo’s pigeon sketches lay emaciated and starving in dirty gutters. These were the riches that Kumalo brought Mother, for he himself was penniless and ailing from hepatitis.

  I remember the night that Mother brought Kumalo home and let him stay in our spare bedroom. She got him medical treatment from one of her politically active doctor friends, who came secretly, late at night, to check on his progress. Kumalo was already a man in his forties when, through Mother’s international connections, he reached artistic fame abroad almost a year ago. His fame in South Africa began to grow, much to the government’s chagrin. Kumalo lived covertly in our home and would leave our grounds under cover of night to return to Soweto to capture quick impressions of township life. He would return to our house at four or five in the morning when Mother, or sometimes I, would make him hot chocolate before he began sketching in rapid, earnest strokes the impressions and imprints from his night in Soweto. His haste to capture what he had seen, before the police got to him, made him a nervous, passionate and focused man. After his last arrest, Mother had him sent to stay with an art dealer in Cape Town, a much more accepting and liberal city, but still one where Kumalo would have to watch his back. Black fame brought with it dangerous scrutiny. His newfound fame had also put Mother’s gallery under a political microscope.

  ‘Are they still going to try him?’ I plunked myself down in the cool leather chair across from Dashel’s desk. The backs of my sweaty legs attached themselves like octopus tentacles to the soft, buttery upholstery.

  ‘Your brilliant father will get him off on some legal technicality, don’t worry. Now what’s bothering you, sweet thing?’ Dashel took a sip of mineral water from a crystal tumbler.

  ‘Nothing… it’s really nothing. Not compared to other things…’ My voice trailed off.

  ‘It was important when you came leaping in here like a frenzied impala.’ He ran his finger along the rim of the glass. ‘Stop being so damn perfect. There’s room for only one saint in this gallery and that space is already taken by your mother.’

  ‘It’s about a boy, Uncle D.’

  ‘Yes, I know all about boys…’ He flashed me a pearly white-capped smile. ‘Heaven knows, sometimes I wish I didn’t.’

  ‘He’s handsome, smart and confident.’

  ‘Sounds pretty dreamy to me—’ Dashel raised a well-groomed eyebrow – ‘and obviously rich if he goes to the same school as you.’

  ‘I can’t stand him. He won’t leave me alone!’ I felt the damp creases behind my knees begin to itch.

  Dashel stood, sauntered round his desk and positioned himself on the arm of my chair, carefully rearranging his trouser legs. ‘Now then, is it a fever we’re having or a menstrual moment, dahling one?’ He touched my forehead with the back of his cool hand.

  I let out a deep breath and lay back on the soft leather. ‘You don’t understand. No one does.’ I closed my eyes and breathed in the smell of pottery lacquer and pine-scented floor cleaner. Then the subtle fragrance of perfumed mandarin
s filled my nostrils.

  ‘What doesn’t anyone understand?’ Mother breezed in. I didn’t even have to open my eyes to know that she was standing looking down earnestly at me. She touched my arm lightly and patted it a few times. Her hands were small and delicate like a Japanese porcelain doll’s.

  ‘Ruby, you look awful…’

  ‘Gee thanks.’ I squinted up at her.

  ‘Thandi!’ Mother called out in a sing-song voice in the direction of the gallery kitchen, ‘Be a love and bring Ruby a glass of that fizzy lemonade to drink, will you?’

  ‘Yes, I come now, madam,’ Thandi’s voice echoed back, her voice travelling through the uncluttered and spacious oval rooms in loud circular motions that bounced back like a boomerang.

  The gallery’s main staff of two had been working for Mother for many years. They were like family to me. They had watched me change and grow since the day I sat and scribbled with crayons on the gallery walls much to my mother’s alarm. Dashel had called my first artistic expression a ‘brilliant kindergarten-inspired mural!’.

  ‘Hai, but you are looking awful, Miss Ruby!’ Thandi whistled through the two vacant spaces in her mouth where her front teeth should have been.

  ‘Thanks.’ I reached up and took the drink from her. ‘Mother said the same thing.’

  I gulped down the fizzy soda, its coolness swirling against the back of my throat while three pairs of eyes watched with overly protective concern. I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was until the last drop was gone.

  ‘Methinks our young lady has been revived.’ Dashel went to sit behind his desk with a triumphant flourish.

  ‘Yirra, man, but you is looking too thin to me, Miss Ruby. God’struth!’ Thandi was a big-boned Cape-coloured woman with wiry bunches of hair grouped together and tied with festive strips of cloth like haystacks. She had worn her hair that way since she first came to work for Mother almost ten years ago. Being a person of ‘mixed race’ was difficult enough but being a Cape coloured in Johannesburg was even worse – unless, of course, you were Thandi, and got to live in the large back room of the gallery and, in return for free board, kept the gallery immaculate. Cape coloureds were generally looked down upon by blacks and whites alike. Being of mixed blood, they belonged in neither group. They were a lost people in many ways. They often drank too much and developed their own strange jargon, a mixture of English and Afrikaans and black languages. Most of them lived in the Cape Province but Thandi had fallen in love with a Sotho dockworker, Hendriks, and had followed him to Johannesburg when he was found to have no legal papers for living in the Cape. He fled before the police could catch him with Thandi close at his heels.