Ruby Red Read online

  ‘He was a bliksem! A tsotsie. A good-for-nuthin piece a nuthin!’ she would cluck and hiss through the gap in her teeth if anyone ever asked her about Hendricks. ‘Hell, I used up all my own bleddy cash for rides in the backs of stinky lorries to get ons here!’ She would shake her head so vigorously that her hair-stacks would bounce against each other as if they were caught in the path of a powerful hurricane.

  We all knew better than to ask her about the man who had left her, literally, in the middle of a busy intersection on their first day in the ‘City of Gold’. Fortunately for Thandi that intersection happened to be right across the road from Mother’s gallery.

  ‘Ruby sweetheart.’ Mother knelt beside me. ‘What’s the fuss all about?’

  ‘She’s in love!’ Dashel exclaimed.

  I jumped to my feet almost knocking Mother to the ground. ‘I am so not! Dashel, I told you, I hate him!’

  ‘Ruby, lower your voice.’ Mother dusted herself off and rose to her petite five foot one inches.

  ‘So much passion, dahling… a fine line between love and hate. Uncle D knows about these things.’ Dashel placed a hand over his well-preserved heart.

  ‘Yirra, but you are an angry one today. Like hot piri-piri sauce!’ Thandi licked her finger and placed it on my cheek, then quickly pulled it away as if it had been scalded. ‘Tzzz.’

  ‘Why doesn’t anyone understand?’ my voice came out weak and quivering.

  ‘Come.’ Mother led me out of Dashel’s office. ‘Honestly, you two ought to know better.’ She gave them both a withering stare. I followed her tiny light steps to her office, which was an oval pod of warmth and bright colours.

  When I was comfortably settled on her oversized apricot couch I told her how miserable I was at school because of Desmond. I had planned on telling her that he had threatened to show up uninvited at our house that night but decided that she had more than enough to worry about at the moment. I would face that horrible situation when it arose.

  ‘I know how it feels when people try to make your life miserable. Deliberately.’ She said the word slowly, as if it were painful to get each syllable out of her small bow-shaped mouth. ‘The journalist from Die Vaderland who just left was trying to get me to admit that I was wrong to let artists cross illegally into Sandton. It’s such a ridiculous joke.’ She ran a small hand through her wispy blonde hair. ‘It’s absurd that on this side of Rulin Road you are in Sandton, but on the other side of the street you’re in Johannesburg.’ She looked at me with her pale-blue eyes. ‘I told the reporter that the police ought to have better things to do than lie in wait on the gallery side of the street to catch my artists who have legal passes that allow them in Johannesburg but not ones that allow them into Sandton.’

  ‘That’s how they got Kumalo last time, Mother. Isn’t it?’

  She sighed and drummed her fingers on her red lacquered desk. ‘Yes. They arrested him as he crossed the street.’ She smacked her hand hard on the table. ‘The imbeciles. See, Ruby, there might be a fine line between love and hate, I don’t know. What I do know is that there’s a fine line on this very street and we are on the side of danger.’

  ‘I’m glad you sent Kumalo to Cape Town. What about Julian?’

  ‘Ah, Julian. I won’t let him walk from the bus stop to the gallery ever. Much too risky now.’ She flipped through a stack of mail that was piled on her desk. ‘Now about the boy… whether you love him or hate him is not what matters. What matters is that you don’t give him the power to ruin your day or make you not want to go to school. See, then he has won.’ She tore open a large blue envelope with a pointy fingernail. ‘Don’t let him win, Ruby.’ She tossed the empty envelope into a wicker basket and smiled up at me. ‘You are, after all, my daughter and nobody gets the better of us Winters girls. Not prying journalists or snotty, spoiled boys.’ She gave me a long-lashed wink.

  Chapter Five

  There are certain moments in my life that I can stop and look back and say, Ah yes. It was that very day, that very situation, those very moments when everything took a turn in a certain direction, and my life, and that of my family, would be forever altered. That night became such a moment. Everything that happened thereafter would lead us on a path that we had not expected. I have often wondered that perhaps, had I known how important that night would be, would I have wanted anything to be different? Was there something anyone could have said or done that would have changed the eventual outcome? My answer has always been an unequivocal, No.

  Two things occurred, both announced by a loud knock on our large oak front door. The first was less of a knock and more of a savage scratching, like a chicken scraping its sharp claws on the hard surface. It was my mother who rose from the dining-room table leaving my father and me with half-eaten plates of cottage pie and gem squash. The time was eight o’clock and I could hear the deep, low sound of the grandfather clock in the foyer marking the hour as Father stood suddenly, pushing his plate back and dropping his white linen napkin on the freshly starched tablecloth.

  ‘Annabel, wait!’ He strode from the room after her. ‘Let me get it… how in heavens did someone get past the gates…?’

  It was on the eighth deep chime from the melancholy clock that I heard the door open and Mother’s voice, a shrill, anguished wail, filled the house together with the last sad chime. Eight. It said eight.

  ‘Julian, my God!’ she screamed. ‘What have they done to you?!’

  On hearing his name I sprang from my seat and raced to the front door. Mother was leaning over Julian who lay face down, hands splayed out in front of him across the threshold of the front door. Father was wrenching his red-and-gold tie from his neck and in one fast movement he bound it tightly round Julian’s bicep. A rivulet of blood ran boldly across his slashed fingers. There were deep gashes in his arms and each finger bore a purple-etched wound.

  Father unbuckled his belt, swiftly removed it, then bound it tightly round Julian’s other leaking arm.

  Ruby. It is your name. It is also the colour that we bleed. I heard Julian’s voice echo inside my head, remembering the words he had once said while I watched him paint a crimson sun over Soweto’s slums on a taut canvas.

  Blood. My name means blood, I thought as I twisted my table napkin tightly.

  Mother cradled Julian’s face in her hands as Father rolled him slowly over and slid him gently forward on to the smooth, polished entrance-hall floor, slamming the door shut and locking every bolt. I watched Father’s large fingers, stained red, and felt a rush of love for him. He would protect us all. Father would keep us safe.

  Julian moaned and tried to lift his head. I moved, as if in slow motion, to him. This was not happening, could not be happening. My eyes clouded as I wiped droplets off his cheeks, his eyes, his cracked, bloodied lips. The world was suddenly unclear as I looked down at him through a misty veil.

  ‘Who did this to you?’ Father whispered close into his ear. ‘Who, Julian, tell us… who?’

  It was not until ten days later and one hundred and forty-seven stitches that had been needed to sew up the damage to his young body that Julian was able to let the word spill from his swollen mouth: ‘Tsotsies.’

  Thugs. No one in particular. Just a band of roving young men with hunger in their bellies and hatred in their hearts from years of living the raw, hard life in a township. They turned their rage on one of their own. The tsotsies had perhaps taken note of Julian’s better clothes, his clean shirt and upright walk. They had perhaps watched from across the potholed dusty street as he sketched a woman carrying a large water pail on top of her head, a baby tied to her ample back. They knew what would hurt him most, what part of his being was sacred to him. His fine artist’s hands. Later he told me how the tsotsies held him down and sliced each finger, making sure to cut deeper into the right than the left. They had watched which hand needed to suffer the most damage, which wrist flicked deftly back and forth in charcoaled strokes. They wanted to ensure that Julian would never wear a clean shir
t again. Never capture an image on paper again. What they did not know was that Julian carried a secret weapon they had lost long ago. Passion was what kept him moving forward, kept him waking each morning and catching two buses to our house so that he could share his passion with the outside world. And his pain. A yearning for something better for himself, for all of his people. Passion is what brought him broken and bleeding back to our house that night. It would be more than a month before he could hold a piece of charcoal in his scarred fingers again, but when he finally did his work radiated a luminous pain that spun itself tightly round your heart. For the images that left his aching fingers were harsher and more hauntingly real. The tsotsies could tear at his limbs with their switchblades but they could not shear into his soul, and Julian’s passion seemed now to burn even more brightly.

  After that night Julian moved in permanently with us. Safe behind our substantial gates, where thugs could not cut away jealous pieces of him.

  The second knock at the door came right after Mother had taken Dr Jacobs upstairs to tend to Julian. Dr Jacobs, a portly, bald-headed man who had been our family doctor since I was a young child, was bounding up the stairs, stethoscope swinging wildly, black doctor’s bag slapping against his stout legs within twenty minutes of Mother’s insistent call. ‘Not Baragwanath, he’s not putting foot in Soweto ever again… Get here now! He’s damn near bleeding to death!’ Mother had slammed the phone down.

  I was about to go up the stairs after Mother but a loud bold knock on our front door caught me off guard mid-stair-flight. ‘Don’t let anybody in!’ Mother raced up the stairs after Dr Jacobs and shouted down at me without turning, ‘Especially if it’s the police… Ruby! Oh God…’

  I felt slippery and slow, turning, as I did, on unsteady legs that carried me somehow to the front door.

  ‘Who is it?’ came out of me in an unnaturally high-pitched tone.

  ‘It’s the man of your dreams…’ the voice through the door answered.

  I didn’t recognize it through the heavy oak-panelled door and asked again who it was.

  ‘Oh, Ruby… I told you I would be here tonight. A certain little note from me to you…’

  ‘Desmond. No!’ I said softly, and leaned an icy cheek against the door. ‘Please no,’ I whispered to myself. ‘Not now, please not tonight.’

  Desmond rapped loudly on the door again. ‘C’mon, it’s impolite not to let a guest in… especially one that you’re expecting,’ he chuckled. ‘Don’t be rude, Ruby,’ he laughed. He banged loudly and raised his voice, ‘RUDE RUBY!’

  I looked down at the remains of smeared blood that covered the foyer floor and quickly unbolted all the locks and opened the front door just enough to squeeze myself through to the outside flagstone patio, then shut the door tightly behind me.

  An overpoweringly strong smell of musk and pine filled my nostrils. Desmond was dressed in neatly pressed khaki trousers and a royal-blue cashmere sweater. He looked perfect, undamaged; he wore his wealth well and had probably come straight from dinner at the Country Club, where his family had donated funds for an indoor swimming pool. Desmond was the fastest backstroke swimmer in our school.

  He grinned down at me from his superior height. ‘Wow, you look…’

  I watched his eyes travel down my unkempt bloodstained shirt, then up to my dishevelled hair. I placed my hands over the near browning stain on my shirt breast pocket.

  ‘Desmond, there was an accident here tonight… I can’t let you…’

  ‘What kind of accident?’ Desmond cocked his head and held me in his green-eyed gaze.

  ‘A bad one.’ I looked away. ‘Someone got hurt.’

  ‘Someone like who?’ he asked with piqued curiosity. ‘A family member, a servant?’

  ‘A servant,’ I blurted out. ‘The gardener.’ I flashed back to the old gardener at school, wiping sweat from his brow. ‘He cut himself quite badly on some shears… there’s blood…’

  ‘Better put him on a bus to Baragwanath. He can’t get treatment at our hospitals.’

  ‘It’s taken care of,’ I said sharply.

  ‘Well then, what’s the problem?’ He moved closer and touched my hair. ‘Mmm, I think I like you a little messy. Let me in, wild thing.’ He leaned forward and brushed his lips against my hair.

  I took a step back and felt the doorknob jab into my back as I pushed Desmond away.

  ‘How did you get through the gates? You really need to leave!’

  ‘Temper, temper.’ He grinned. ‘Hot and bothered is such a good look for you.’ He encircled the back of my neck with his hand. ‘You will kiss me one day, you know…’ I pursed my lips together tight. ‘Yes, one day, Ruby… you will beg me to kiss you, but until then I’m going to have to partake without your permission.’ He pressed his body hard against mine and forced his tongue into my unyielding mouth as the doorknob jabbed fiercely into my spine. I heard Father’s voice calling my name from inside – ‘Ruby! Where are you?’ —as I clamped my teeth down hard on Desmond’s tongue. He let out a yelp and staggered backwards, covering his mouth. He looked down, disbelieving, into his hands where fresh blood had fallen.

  ‘I’m here, Father! Outside,’ I yelled back. ‘It’s okay, I’m okay!’ I shouted as I held on tightly to the sides of the front door for support.

  Desmond took a deliberate step towards me. His grinning confidence was replaced with an alarming sneer.

  ‘So…’ He wiped his blood-soaked finger across my mouth. ‘That’s how you—’ he made a deliberate circle around my mouth – ‘like it.’ Then he dragged his hand across my shirt making sure that he cupped my left breast harshly as his hand smeared a bloody trail down my shirt. ‘Bitch!’ Desmond spat a mouthful of injured spittle at my feet. He turned on his heels and walked towards the gates that hung wide open. Julian must have somehow managed not to lose his keys in the ambush, but in leaving the gates open he had allowed Desmond easy access to our home.

  Father was standing in the entrance hall as I slipped quickly back into the house. There was a mangled look of love and relief and bewilderment on his face as he saw me. ‘Ruby!’ He clutched me to him as I ran into his outstretched arms, his voice cracking as he held me close.

  Chapter Six

  How could it be that at a time when people were being mistreated, when children went hungry and families were divided and did not see each other for months on end and children in Soweto didn’t have enough pencils to hold in their stark classrooms, that we played hockey and won horse-jumping trophies and competed in swimming galas and sipped lemonade and ate homemade cookies at half-time during netball matches?

  Surely I could not have been the only one in the school cafeteria who noticed the bowed head of the young black girl, who must have been of school-going age, serving us steaming plates of hot bangers and mash. Did no other student notice the look of longing on her face as she took a furtive glance over at our glossy textbooks while she cleared away the plates? If there were such a student, he or she did not reveal themselves. Everyone seemed lost in the latest plans for the upcoming school dance as they shovelled food into their mouths without giving the young girl even a perfunctory nod of thanks.

  ‘C’mon, Ruby, you’ve got to co-chair the Disco Ball,’ my friend Clive urged.

  ‘Yeah, you and Desmond should co-chair and then it would be called “The Disco Brawl”!’ someone down the long cafeteria table yelled out.

  Desmond had returned to school after our bloody encounter and had made it clear to everyone that I was the number-one she-witch of the matric class and anyone who spoke to me would no longer be a friend of his. To my surprise, our classmates were fairly evenly divided, with many of the boys, long since jealous of all the attention Desmond got from the girls, happily siding with me, together with a handful of girls who Desmond had snubbed or ignored at one time or another. But the most hurtful act of all was my very best friend, Monica, who had tossed her long blonde mane and marched off to Desmond’s camp. I suppose I should have se
nsed that she had a crush on him because every time I’d mentioned how despicable Desmond was Monica had always found a way to defend him. Desmond knew how close we were and that the loss of my best friend would be a huge blow to me. In his calculated and manipulative way he had turned his magic charm on her and she was, it appeared, now under his spell. Monica, who never scratched too far below the surface and always took people at face value, was clearly totally oblivious to the fact that she was just a convenient weapon in Desmond’s war against me. From what I could see from across the cafeteria, they were now something of an ‘item’, with her spoon-feeding gobs of soft mashed potato into his not yet fully healed mouth.

  I felt a jolt of hollow pain. I had lost my best friend and had more enemies than friends at school now. Scrutiny of my life and the life of my family was the last thing I needed. We now had a black man living the life of a white man in our home. He dined with us, sat on the same upholstered chairs, ate off the same fine china plates and slept in a bed with the softest of sheets that were made of one hundred per cent Egyptian cotton in a room that was just down the hall from my very own.