Ruby Red Read online

  ‘Afrikaans.’ Julian said the word slowly and frowned. ‘One from the camp of our oppressors.’

  ‘Julian, he is not like that! Mother and Father had a problem with me having an Afrikaans friend at first, but he isn’t that way…’

  Julian dug his hands deep into his pockets and looked down at his feet. He shook his head. ‘I don’t need you here any more, Ruby. I will finish the painting from memory.’

  ‘Julian. Don’t do this. He isn’t a bad person,’ I pleaded.

  ‘Ruby. Please leave. I need to be alone.’ Julian’s voice was terse and clipped. He would not look me in the eye but focused on the ground and rolled his heels back and forth in his worn moccasins.

  I pulled off my panama hat so fast that its elastic strap snapped against my chin. I felt my eyes sting as I fought back tears and ran from the studio, a seagull in flight who thought that being different was okay. That stretching my wings open wide was what they had wanted me to do. Mother, Father and even Julian. But there were rules to be obeyed in their pristine air. Rules that on the outside claimed that acceptance of others was what was most important. But here they were. Hypocrites! Selective acceptance, according to their ‘open-minded’ beliefs. The very beliefs that had isolated and alienated me from my own peers. My head pounded with purple rage as I raced up the stairs to my room to call Loretta. The only real friend that I had.

  It was Johann who answered the phone. He recognized my voice instantly. Clearly not too many English meisies called their house.

  ‘Ruby,’ he said, sounding pleased to hear my voice.

  I felt my breath sucked out of me as he said my name. ‘Um, yes, Johann. Um, I was… is your sister home?’

  ‘No. Not yet but I will tell her you called.’

  ‘Okay. Thanks,’ I wanted to hang up the phone. I needed to calm myself. Julian’s anger and now Johann on the other end of the line. ‘Bye,’ I managed to get out.

  ‘Wait!’ he said suddenly. ‘Ruby. Don’t go. I would very much like to see you again.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I am sure that you are always in big demand with the boys at your school. Being so beautiful…’

  I practically choked.

  ‘But would you do me the honour of letting me take you to a drive-in movie this Saturday night?’

  A kaleidoscope of brilliant colour washed over me and I steadied myself by clutching the post of my bed. Turquoise. Violet. Emerald.

  ‘Saturday?’ I whispered.

  ‘Yes, this Saturday, unless you would rather not…’

  ‘No! Yes. I mean yes, of course!’ I took a gulp of psychedelic air. ‘It’s just that it is my school’s annual dance, our Disco Ball.’

  ‘Another time then…’ Johann sounded disappointed.

  ‘No, Johann, I mean, you can come with me, as my da-… Um, we are allowed to invite someone from another school to join us…’

  ‘A disco ball—’ Johann chuckled – ‘sounds like fun. We have a very formal annual school dance. Tuxedos and ball gowns.’

  ‘Ours is pretty different.’ My voice had finally found its way back to normal but I still gripped the bedpost. The colours swirled.

  ‘That sounds very nice. I accept the invitation. Thank you, Ruby.’

  ‘Johann.’ I suddenly panicked. ‘You will probably be the only Afrikaans person there.’

  ‘That’s okay. I can take care of myself. And you, of course, on Saturday night.’

  My hands could barely hold the receiver steady.

  ‘But what do I wear?’ he asked.

  ‘Something you can dance in.’

  Johann laughed. ‘Very well, a pink tutu it will be!’

  We hung up after I gave him directions to our house and told him that seven o’clock on Saturday night would be perfect. Johann was eighteen and had his driver’s licence and I was sure that Mother and Father would not object to him driving me to the dance once they had met him.

  I lay on my soft carpeted floor and felt a kaleidoscope of emotions to match the swirling colours.

  Yellow fear. Blue sadness. Orange joy. A bitter-sweet coming together for, in finding Johann, I was losing Julian.

  Chapter Fifteen

  With the exhibition the following week, I spent every afternoon after school helping to get the gallery ready. Thandi and I counted all the RSVPs to the midnight inaugural showing and well over two hundred guests were coming. Word was spreading fast through the art world that this new young artist from Soweto would be the emerging bright star from the dark world of the townships. Mother had invited a number of art critics and patrons, prominent black political activists as well as well-to-do whites from the northern suburbs. The combination would be ideal, she had said, and word was that people were clamouring to get a personal invitation. Mother always handpicked the crowd and would not budge when it came to who was and who was not on her list. It was not out of some sort of snobbery that she screened each and every invitee. She needed a safe crowd, with as close to an assurance as she could get that no police informers would show up unexpectedly. She usually kept the number of guests coming to a manageable size but Julian’s upcoming exhibition seemed to have taken on a sizeable life of its own. ‘Thandi, Ruby, Dashel!’ Mother yelled from somewhere in the gallery, her voice reverberating and bouncing off the oval gallery walls in long, rounded syllables. ‘Meeting in my office, pronto!’

  When we were all assembled, Mother went over the plan for the evening for the hundredth time that week. Drinks and hors d’oeuvres would be passed around as well as champagne and wine. There would, of course, be the ‘fake trays’, as Mother called them, which would be stacked neatly in the back kitchen and ready to go, if the unpleasant and unlikely need arose. The ‘unpleasant situation’, as she called it, was a police raid. Since the crowd of patrons would be an illegal mix of blacks and whites, the black patrons would all quickly be handed the ‘fake trays’ to carry, as if they were staff and not guests, if the police suddenly descended on the gallery. There was, of course, nothing illegal about a black person passing hors d’oeuvres around at a party. The task of handing out the trays fell on Thandi, me and Dashel. We had experienced a raid once before during Dumali’s exhibition opening last year and had hurriedly passed the trays off without a hitch, but it had been an unnerving and frightening few minutes that I hoped would never happen again.

  Mother was about to go over the introduction of Julian at the opening. He was to step out at an appointed time from a side gallery into the Gallery Grande, but her instructions were interrupted by the sound of heavy-soled boots trampling across the quiet gallery floor. The footsteps stopped for a moment before continuing. Then a man’s voice echoed through the gallery.

  ‘Is anybody here?’ he bellowed.

  Mother sighed. ‘Not now, whoever you are…’ she said under her breath.

  ‘I’ll go.’ I rose from the plush couch and headed in the direction of the man’s voice.

  I found him in the small first gallery. His back was turned away from me as I approached. He was staring at an abstract painting of a tap dripping water. The artist, a well-known eccentric who took inanimate objects and transformed them into sexual parts of the body, had developed a huge following and Mother always carried a few of his works in the gallery.

  ‘Is this what I think it is…?’ he asked, without turning round as I approached.

  He was a tall man with broad shoulders and wore a light khaki suit.

  I had learned from Mother never to explain what a particular painting meant, but rather to draw the interpretation out of the patron so that he or she felt engaged and competent in their own assessment and understanding of what they were looking at. Art was, Mother always said, purely subjective.

  ‘What do you think it is, sir?’ I asked politely. He turned and looked at me. Dull grey eyes and short black hair that looked stark against his pasty white face. He had an upturned nose set over a thin mouth.

  ‘You look a bit young to be working here,’ he said ac
cusingly.

  ‘My mother owns the gallery.’

  ‘And she lets you look at filth like this!’ He wagged his finger at the wall.

  ‘It’s a tap,’ I said.

  ‘Like bloody hell it is. It’s a man’s private parts hanging out there for everyone to see.’ He snorted.

  I felt the familiar accordion-like squeezing in my stomach and bit down hard on my lower lip. ‘Is there something in particular I can help you with, sir?’ I said in a polite but firm manner.

  ‘No, just looking, just looking around.’ He clasped his hands behind his back and began moving through the gallery, stopping at each painting, squinting, then stepping close up to them. Sometimes he sniffed the air around him or scratched the back of his neck before moving on to the next painting. I followed at a respectable distance behind him. I wished that Mother or Dashel would come to my rescue but neither appeared. Mother often left me to deal with visitors to the gallery and I had even made a sale or two of my own in the past.

  ‘Very interesting, yes…’ he said, scraping his heavy boots across the spotless floor and leaving dark-soled imprints. ‘Lots of black artists show here, am I right?’ He stopped in front of a canvas of a boy standing beside a rickety bike, his tattered clothes blending into the rubble and smokestacks of the township behind him.

  ‘Some,’ I said. ‘Sir, is there any artist in particular that I can interest you in?’

  ‘All.’ He moved on. ‘I am interested in all. Especially the black ones.’ He spat the word ‘black’ out like it had a bitter aftertaste.

  My stomach squeezed tighter, a sickening feeling filling my insides with a horrible certainty. I was face to face with an undercover policeman.

  ‘Exhibitions?’ he said. ‘Any coming up that I might want to attend?’

  ‘No,’ I said curtly.

  ‘You sure? I had heard there was one just round the corner…’ He shook his head. ‘Funny… I must be mistaken.’

  ‘Yes. You are.’ I took a deep breath.

  ‘What’s your name?’ He turned his dull grey eyes on me and I felt them boring into my head.

  ‘Ruby,’ I said. ‘Ruby Winters.’

  ‘Well, Ruby, you tell your mother that she has a very clever daughter and that, if she’s as smart as you, she’ll do what’s best for her gallery.’ He gave me a thin smile. ‘For her daughter’s sake.’ He turned on his heels and strode out of the gallery. I stood transfixed, unable to move a single muscle, my eyes blurring on the tarnished marks that his sturdy boots had left behind.

  That night after dinner I told Father about the incident with the undercover policeman in the gallery. Julian was conspicuously absent from the meal and I was afraid that the reason he was not there was because of me rather than a painting he needed to work on, which is what he had told Mother earlier.

  ‘Cancel! Absolutely not, David!’ Mother tried to raise herself above her petite stature to meet Father’s eyes. ‘Julian has worked too hard for this. I will not let fear and veiled threats affect my life or the operation of my gallery.’ She placed her hands on her hips and looked up at Father who turned and walked towards the liquor cabinet in the living room and poured himself a drink from a cut-crystal carafe filled with amber liquid.

  ‘They know about it, Annabel. They’ll raid. There’ll be arrests or worse…’ He downed the drink in one quick gulp and slumped into a brocade-covered chair.

  Normal. Keep things normal. Talk about school.

  ‘I got an A in my history test,’ I said brightly, but neither one was listening.

  ‘This is so not like you, David. The man I married said that he would never back down. That we had to live and maybe die for what we believed in.’ Mother stormed over to his chair, her face just inches from his.

  ‘That was before…’ Father said.

  ‘Before what?’ Mother raised her voice.

  ‘Before Ruby. Before we had a child, Annabel,’ Father said softly.

  Mother stood slowly and turned to look at me. It seemed she had not been aware of my presence in the room until that very moment. She blinked once or twice as if she needed to get me in focus.

  ‘Ruby, darling. You understand, don’t you? You’ve been such a big part of all this. You’ve become Julian’s muse. And look at all the time you’ve put in at the gallery for the exhibition…’ Her voice trailed off as her eyes filled with tears. ‘The show must go on – you understand.’ Her voice quavered. I stood unmoving even though she opened her arms wide for me to go into. It was her artists that mattered most to Mother. I just had not realized it until that very moment.

  ‘Yes, Mother. The show must go on,’ I said, and turned away. Father’s angry words followed me as I ran up the stairs, two at a time, to my room.

  ‘Well, I’m not condoning this one, Annabel. Blast it! You’re putting us all in jeopardy. Including your star Julian!’ He must have thrown the tumbler down hard on the floor for the sound of glass shattering rang out behind me as I fled.

  I lay on my bed and listened to the melancholy whistling note of a dikkop bird outside my bay window. I remembered Father telling me once that some people believe its plaintive drawn-out notes are a sign of misgivings, but he thought its notes were hauntingly beautiful. I felt the chill of the night air and tried to hear the same pleasing sound that Father found from the little bird, but I could not.

  Julian’s show, I knew, would go on and I would not have wanted it any other way. But there was a deep feeling brewing like rain clouds in my centre. It was Father who was my protector against the world. The one who would put nothing before my safety. I felt something inside me burst with pelting pain. I was flooded with the realization that before me was a sea of named and unnamed artists who saw Mother as their shelter while she, in turn, gave them her unwavering commitment to their safety and well being. The picture of Loretta’s mother holding on to her so tightly came to me in that moment, and I knew by the protective angle of her arms round her daughter that had she still been alive she would have been Loretta’s sanctuary, and would have always put her daughter’s safety first.

  Chapter Sixteen

  With the Disco Ball just days away, school was a veritable buzz of excitement. I had to go to Miss Allison, the school’s administrative secretary, to give her Johann’s name and to tell her which school he attended. That was the protocol if you were bringing someone from an outside school. She gave me a quizzical look over horn-rimmed glasses when I said the word ‘Steunmekaar’, but I was ready for the onslaught of snide remarks and comments. There was no one I would rather be bringing to the dance than Johann.

  With each passing day at school I felt more and more alone. Those who had originally stood by me in the ‘Desmond and Ruby standoff seemed to have deserted my camp and only Clive and Janice were my school companions now.

  ‘I can’t believe it!’ Janice practically jumped into my lap when I told her who my date for the ball would be. ‘He’s the grooviest! Ohhh, I can’t wait to meet him.’ She danced around me, swaying her hips, the pine needles popping and crunching beneath her feet. We had taken to spending lunch break at my new favourite spot, which was at the far end of the rugby field. Since my encounter with Desmond and his gang I preferred eating as far away from the rest of my class as I possibly could.

  Clive, who lay stretched out on the grass, was a lot more concerned about my choice of partner for the ball.

  ‘Jeez, Ruby, you’ll have more than a plum thrown at you!’ He shook his head. ‘It’s not just that he’s any boy from Steunmekaar, for heaven’s sake, he’s the captain of their rugby team. All the boys at our school know who he is and what he looks like.’

  ‘He’s the captain of the swimming team too.’ I punched Clive on the arm teasingly.

  ‘It’s not funny, Ruby. C’mon, you used to be the most popular girl at school and now you go out of your way to be the most unpopular…’

  ‘Ouch! That was mean.’ Janice gave Clive a stern look. ‘Ruby doesn’t care what other people th
ink.’

  ‘Well, maybe she should start caring…’ Clive kicked at the ground, sending pine needles scattering in all directions.

  ‘You don’t have to be my friend, Clive, if you don’t want to…’ My throat closed around the words as if the pine needles had stuck there.

  ‘Of course I want to!’ He threw his hands up in the air, his curly hair bobbing wildly. ‘Look, I’ve never been a part of the “in” crowd. I’ve always been a bit of a misfit.’ He plonked down on the ground beside me. ‘But you, Ruby, you’ve always belonged. I’m sorry. I guess I don’t quite understand why it doesn’t bother you.’

  ‘She has us.’ Janice sat down next to me and put her arm round me.

  ‘Yes, she does.’ Clive did the same. ‘You two are like my new family—’ his voice faltered – ‘since my real one’s falling apart.’

  I put my arms round them both and we sat there, holding on to each other for just a brief moment, while across the field I could hear the distant sound of laughter and excited chatter from the rest of our class. I wished that I could tell Janice and Clive that the truth was I had never really felt that I was a part of the popular crowd. I wished too that I could share with them the description of Julian’s painting of me and the upcoming midnight gallery exhibition, but I couldn’t. And, as I let them go, I felt a sudden sadness for what would never be. Open words without hidden secrets. It was no wonder that I didn’t feel the loss of popularity. It had been a burden I had carried around for a long time, a tiresome responsibility instead of a source of joy and a pleasure. Popularity had meant hiding the truth from a greater number of people. A constant ducking and diving behind excuses and flimsy explanations. Yes, my father was a lawyer. Yes, my mother owned her own business. Yes, we led normal suburban lives just like everyone else, except no one could come over and no one could ever know our real truth.

  Even Monica had never fully known me, I realized sadly.

  I looked from Clive to Janice and back again. My loyal pals. ‘You two are the best,’ I said, and meant it.