Ruby Red Read online

‘Yeah, Ruby Red!’ they jeered in unison.

  Thoughts flooded my mind: Don’t speak. Run. Ride. Fly. Anything. Just get away. Fast. Don’t answer. Don’t say a word. Protect. Close in. Shut down. Think about something calming and something thrilling. I forced my head to fill with images of Julian and Johann Duikster, back and forth, back and forth. The faces of understanding and exhilaration. The wonderfully known and the achingly unknown. I walked faster and faster with Clive’s bobbing books and curls keeping up beside me.

  A sudden jolt of pain as something was thrown at me from behind.

  ‘Leave her alone!’ Clive spun round as a plum hit the back of my head.

  I could feel its juices drip down through my hair and on to my neck but I didn’t flinch. I didn’t want to show that I was affected by them and their hateful actions despite the dull throb that pulsated in the spot where the fruit had landed. My eyes stung and a flame of something new, something indescribable, began to burn inside me.

  ‘The black-loving commie is bleeding red!’ one of them chortled, and they all laughed just as the bell rang for the beginning of the next class.

  ∗

  As we got to the lab I asked Mr Morrison, the biology teacher, if I could be excused. From the sour look on his pock-marked face I could tell that he was about to say no so I quickly added, ‘A female issue, sir,’ which I knew he would not challenge.

  He gave me a terse nod and I hurried down the empty corridors to the girls’ bathroom.

  Once I’d made sure I was alone in the bathroom I went into one of its grey disinfectant-smelling stalls. The tears came hard and fast. I tried to stop them but they had a mind of their own and ignored my feeble attempts to dam them up.

  What flooded over me was a feeling more than humiliation at the hands of Desmond and his friends, more than doubt about how I would cope with finishing my final school year, more than the fact that my family’s beliefs were being questioned and judged. What I felt was truly alone at Barnard High.

  Janice was sweet and Clive tried to be understanding when I explained that no one was allowed to come over to our house. But the truth was they did not know me. Really know me. No one did.

  Although we had only met once and she was a class behind me at school, the girl I felt closest to was Loretta. There was a creeping understanding and openness in our half-English, half-Afrikaans exchanges on the phone.

  As I splashed cool water over my face and took a paper towel to my sticky neck and hair I felt suddenly brightened by the thought of the plans that we had made for the upcoming Saturday afternoon. Loretta had invited me over to her house, and Father had agreed to drive me there. Since his and Mother’s initial objection, they now both seemed more than obliging to help get me and Loretta together. A joint show of support for my new Afrikaans friend. And ‘black-loving commies’, as Desmond called them, had to treat everyone as equals.

  As I made my way back to the biology lab I heard a distant sound, the low put-put of a lawnmower outside. Through an open window at the end of the corridor I caught sight of the old gardener in his floppy flower-adorned hat methodically mowing the furthest school lawn. He seemed intent on the task and I wondered if in his world of seeds and flowers and fertilizer, he knew of schoolchildren being forced to learn in a language they did not speak or understand. Did he simply live in his meagre back room on the school property and never leave, or did he travel every Thursday, the unofficial day that most servants and black workers had off, to Soweto to visit his children and grandchildren, who cried to their old Papa that their lives at school were soon to change for the worse.

  ‘Miss Winters, why are you wandering the corridors and not in class?’ A stern voice came from behind me. I turned round and was face to face with our school principal.

  ‘M-Mr Dandridge,’ I stammered, ‘I had to use the girls’

  ‘Well, hurry on then, no dilly dallying. You’re a prefect and prefects have to set a good example.’ He raised a chubby hand and shook his finger at me as if he were reprimanding a small dog. He waddled away in his ill-fitting navy suit. I took a deep breath before entering the biology lab and straightened my school tie. It was askew, like everything else in my life.

  I got through the rest of the day with no further incident, but I could barely focus on the rest of the afternoon classes. Dashel’s arrest filled my every thought. Who had caught him? And where? Dashel was not ashamed of being homosexual but I also knew that he was very discreet and careful. He never flaunted his romantic life and the few men I had met with him at gallery openings were always introduced to us as ‘my good friend Basil’, or ‘my close friend Brian’.

  Much as I tried to reassure myself that Father was handling everything, I jumped from my seat and raced to get my bicycle as soon as the last bell rang. I pedalled fast to the one place I knew I could get an answer.

  The Rosebank Police Station didn’t look much like a place of incarceration. Perhaps because of its location in one of Johannesburg’s posh northern suburbs, it had been designed to hide – camouflaged with its modern design and the circular fishpond, well stocked with giant orange koi fish. Once inside there was nothing modern or pleasant about it. Stark white walls, a row of benches where a few people sat huddled in groups. They were mostly black. A weathered wooden counter with a partitioned glass window that was now closed. A sign read RING/RING, which was the same in both English and Afrikaans, so I rang.

  After a few painfully slow minutes the window was opened by a young red-haired woman in plain clothes. I could feel her taking in my private-school uniform. Her eyes rested on the Barnard school crest on my blazer.

  ‘Yes, miss, what can I do for you?’

  I felt the sick feeling squeeze tight like a rubber band in my stomach again. I had to stop myself from wincing. ‘My uncle, I am here to find out where he is…’

  ‘Was he arrested?’ she asked, tapping her pen lightly on the countertop.

  ‘Yes, this morning… his name is Dashel.’

  She smiled. ‘Ah, but, of course, the charming Mr Dashel Bryant. He kept us all very entertained.’

  ‘Entertained?’

  Entertained was the last word I had conjured up for Dashel all day. Frightened. Hurt. Bewildered and humiliated were the ones that I had imagined.

  ‘Yes, he had us all in stitches with his stories; he even invited me to stop by the gallery before he left.’

  ‘Left…?’

  ‘Yes, miss. All charges were dropped.’

  ‘Dropped?’

  ‘Miss, are you okay? You seem a little…’

  ‘Fine, I’m fine.’ I shot her an unconvincing smile.

  ‘Perhaps a glass of water? Yes?’ She disappeared into a back room before I had a chance to object. I steadied myself with one hand on the countertop. The rapid shift from absolute dread to sheer relief was wreaking havoc with my senses.

  I downed the glass of water in one gulp and thanked the red-haired police lady behind the counter and was quickly on my bike again. The news that Dashel was safe and not behind bars filled me with elation and I whooped and shouted like I had when I was eight or nine and something had made me full of glee. I sat far back on the bike saddle and lifted my feet off the pedals, waving at everyone I passed by. Some of them waved back with a strange look on their faces. I must have appeared ridiculous but I didn’t care. For once nothing mattered except that Dashel was safe and probably back with Mother and Thandi, sipping tea at the gallery, which was where I was now headed.

  As I coasted down Jan Smuts Avenue I remembered the words that had been jeered at me earlier in the day.

  ‘Your family’s in trouble with the law,’ one of Desmond’s cronies had shouted.

  ‘Trouble with the law’ was something that was said to a tanned cowboy by a sheriff with a shiny badge in a Wild West film.

  Ruby Red. That’s what they had called me and, yes, that’s who I was. Ruby Red. Outlaw. Bandit. Desperado.

  I swung my legs off, patted my bike and swaggered through t
he gallery entrance, leaving my spurs outside.

  Chapter Twelve

  The first sound that reached me as I walked through the oval maze of galleries was laughter. It was coming from Mother’s office and was punctuated with the tinkling sound of glasses clinking together. It was reassuring to be able to identify each reverberating voice. Mother, a low soft chuckle, Father, a deep full-bellied bellow, Dashel, a high-pitched bray and Thandi, a roller coaster of earthy guttural tones that were punctuated with loud knee slapping. I paused in the office doorway, suddenly reluctant to go in, wishing I could bottle their joyous sounds in a beautiful porcelain jar. Something wonderful to open and inhale, like sweet perfume, when laughter was nowhere to be found.

  ‘The policeman was so sure that she was on her knees doing the act. I mean, if I hadn’t had the needle and thread hanging from my trousers button…’ Dashel downed the last drop of liquid in his glass as I walked in. ‘Ah… here’s our very favourite girl. Come join the celebration.’ Dashel put an affectionate arm round me and pulled me in for a hug. ‘Uncle D is free!’

  Mother came over and kissed my cheek with a flourish. ‘I called the school to give you the good news… did you get the message?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I worried all day… Can someone please tell me what happened?’

  Thandi shimmied towards me, her coloured hair ribbons rippling like jellyfish tentacles on her shoulders. She took my hands in hers and tried to get me to dance with her but I wasn’t budging. She smiled at me, revealing the large gap where her two front teeth should have been.

  ‘Baas Dashel is home getting dressed to come to the gallery. The house maid, Sookie, is fixing his trousers because the button broke.’

  ‘But he’s wearing them, his trousers, you see.’ Father filled Dashel’s empty glass again with champagne.

  ‘And, dahling one, what none of us knew was that your dear Uncle D was being watched, spied on with binoculars by a rather handsome and muscular policeman.’ Dashel swirled the champagne in his glass dramatically before taking a delicate sip.

  ‘They’ve had Dashel under surveillance too,’ Mother explained.

  ‘Too?’ I said. ‘Not just the gallery?’

  Thandi sat me down on Mother’s plush apricot couch and handed me a fluted glass. I shook my head – it was already swimming, floating in unexplained bubbles with giant question marks inside their orbs.

  ‘I don’t understand. Why was he arrested and then let go?’ I looked from Mother to Father for an explanation.

  ‘Because what the handsome policeman thought he saw was a black woman kneeling down in front of me, a white man, performing fellatio, when all sweet Sookie was doing was kneeling to sew a button back on to my trousers!’

  ‘Fellatio?’ I asked.

  ‘Oral sex.’ Father coughed and looked down.

  ‘The policeman’s binoculars only saw the naked top half of my body. He barged right in just as Sookie was done sewing, and arrested us both, with the telltale needle and thread still hanging from my lower region. Ghastly – the whole thing was just ghastly!’ Dashel put a hand to his forehead. ‘He tore my shirt after he made me put it on because I fought off being handcuffed. The uncouth brute!’

  Father finished the details of the story while I sat on the couch with my head on Uncle D’s unbruised shoulder. It felt good for us all to be together in Mother’s quiet gallery and I wished that Julian were here with us. Then our unconventional family would be complete.

  Father explained that while it was punishable by law for a white man and a black woman to be engaged in any sexual activity, they literally had to be caught in the act. The exuberant young policeman had raced into Dashel’s bedroom because he assumed that what they had been doing was breaking the law. When questioned by his superior officer at the police station about the details of what he discovered, and with Father throwing every legal ploy at the now nervous young man as he tried to build his case, he confessed that he had not seen anyone unclothed. When Dashel showed ‘handsome policeman’s’ superior the dangling needle and thread still attached to his fly button, they were forced to release both Dashel and Sookie, who was being held in a different part of the station reserved for black prisoners. It took several hours of paperwork before they were released, so Dashel passed the time entertaining the police station clerks. Dashel told us that when he was uncuffed and handed back his belongings he could not resist a parting comment to the arresting officer.

  ‘I looked him straight in his face and told him that I, Dashel Bryant, confirmed homo, would never do anything sexual with a woman no matter if she was black, white or purple!’

  ‘His face went quite purple, I daresay!’ Father added, and we all laughed.

  Over the next few days the relief that Dashel and Sookie had been freed in a country where suspects could be held without reason or cause for months and even years subsided. What began to sink in was the harsh reality that we were under police surveillance everywhere. It was not just the gallery and Dashel’s house in the quaint suburb of Norwood that were cloaked in the dark shadow of scrutiny. We now became aware that the police had stepped up their security forces and were watching us from outside our house, waiting to see who came and went and what possible illegal activity was taking place in our suburban home. They lurked in the lobby of Father’s office building and probably even, I suspected, followed me as I went about my life.

  I rode to school every day that week no longer enjoying the winding roads and lush foliage but with one eye constantly looking, scanning beside me and behind me to make sure that no one was cruising slowly in an unmarked car watching my every move. Sometimes I felt their ominous presence fixing their steering wheel on my moving form and I would ride recklessly, dodging through traffic and swerving round pedestrians to try to get away. In those desperate moments to escape, Ruby the Outlaw took over and I imagined the dust cloud that would billow up behind me and choke them as they tried to close the gap. But my wild pony outsmarted them every time.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Saturday visit to Loretta’s could not have come soon enough. It had been a dreadful week with Mother snappy and anxious and constantly gnawing on the corners of her nails, which was most unlike her. Julian seemed irritable and frustrated since he had been advised by Mother and Father not to leave the house until after the exhibition was over for fear he would be picked up by the police on some false charge that would put him behind bars until after the show. He spent most of his time brooding and pacing and painting in the studio and declined hot chocolate late at night when I knocked on the door and asked if he wanted any. Father looked haggard and tired and spent many hours in his study with the door closed on whispered phone calls that he said he hoped weren’t being tapped.

  School was equally bad, with Janice out with the flu she had caught from her whiny brother, Gerald. Clive’s parents had suddenly let him know they would be getting divorced right after he finished high school and he was planning on failing every subject just to keep them together. Monica had even tried to speak to me in the tuck-shop queue but I had turned and walked away before she could get very near. A traitor was a traitor. I ate lunch all that week with a very glum Clive at the furthest end of the empty rugby field.

  I made daisy chains out of fallen dry pine needles while Clive swore off ever getting married and having children. The promise of Saturday was the bright light at the end of the bleak week tunnel.

  Late on Saturday afternoon, Father drove me through the unfamiliar streets of Randburg in virtual silence for the first fifteen minutes. I knew that, while he had decided to be agreeable about my newfound friendship, it was still worrisome to him.

  ‘So her father raised them alone?’

  ‘Yes. Their mother died when Loretta was five.’ I toyed with the smiley appliqué that was sewn on to my denim bellbottoms.

  ‘And she has an older… brother, is it?’ He looked in his rearview mirror for the umpteenth time. I knew he was checking to make sure that we w
eren’t being tailed.

  ‘Yes, he’s a year older. Matric. Like me.’

  ‘And her father does what, exactly, again?’ He gripped the steering wheel and made a sudden turn on to a wide tree-lined street called Hans Strijdom Drive. ‘Damn, almost missed it.’ Father glanced down at the directions Loretta had given me earlier that day.

  ‘He has an architectural firm that does mostly government developments,’ I said quickly, regretting instantly that I had mentioned the word ‘government’.

  Father snorted. ‘Ha! Government work…’ then shook his head.

  I wanted to apologize for Loretta’s father but I wasn’t quite sure why, so I said nothing, and we rode the last few blocks to her house in silence.

  ‘Here we are, five-six-five-three Groenwald Road.’ Father turned into a circular driveway and stopped in front of the flat-roofed single-storeyed beige house.

  I felt my pulse jump against the elastic gathering of my cheesecloth smock top. ‘Yes, here we are.’ I took a deep breath and planted a quick kiss on Father’s cheek. ‘Thank you. Really.’

  Father gave my hand a squeeze. ‘I’ll wait for you to go insi–’ Before he could finish his sentence, Loretta opened the front door and smiled her big warm smile.

  As she made her way down the grey slate steps to Father’s car I thought how much prettier she was than I had remembered. Perhaps it was the floral sunshine-yellow dress that swung loosely from her tall frame or perhaps it was just that everyone looked better out of school uniform, I did not know, but what I did know was that warmth radiated from her no matter what she was wearing.

  ‘It is my pleasure to meet you, sir.’ She put her hand through Father’s open window and shook his hand. I noticed that our phone conversations had definitely started to give her an ease with English that she did not have before.

  ‘Likewise.’ Father flashed her a smile and a look of relief crossed his face. ‘I’ll be back at nine to get Ruby, if that’s okay?’

  ‘She is welcome for any time as she wants.’ She caught her mistake quickly, ‘Askies, I mean for as long as she wants.’