Брайс Куртенэ - The Power of One

I kept wetting the towel for Big Hettie and got her two Aspro from her handbag. She told me to scrounge around because she might have some peppermints in there. I found half a packet, and she said, ‘Give me a couple and try one yourself, Peekay.’

I took two large round white peppermints out of the pack and put them in her hand and popped a third into my mouth. At first nothing. Then, pow! I lasted about two good sucks and then spat the peppermint into my hand, it was like swallowing fire! I watched Big Hettie suck away happily. Talk about courage! But I must say those peppermints cleaned up her breath a treat.

Big Hettie and I just lay there, she on the floor and me on the bunk. She talked about her life, which seemed to have been quite a good one, but with some sadness also. Mostly she talked about men.

‘Men, Peekay, are a good woman’s downfall. Most of them are rotten but you’ve got to have them anyway. Without a man a woman’s life is more rotten than with one. It’s no use pretending you don’t care, that you’re stronger than a man. Because even it if is true, it means nothing except loneliness. Men are pigs who sleep with Kaffir women and get drunk and beat you up. But a good beating never hurt and sometimes it’s the only way those stupid men can show you they love you. It’s stupid, heh?’

I tried to imagine a man beating up Big Hettie. ‘My granpa couldn’t beat up a flea,’ I said, trying to comfort her. Big Hettie stood six foot seven inches and weighed nobody knows how much. Even the Judge with all his stormtroopers couldn’t get the better of her.

‘Once I loved this little flyweight,’ she continued. ‘That’s how I learned about boxing, Peekay. It was during the great depression and you couldn’t find work nowhere, man. Me and that little flyweight, we used to travel all over the Transvaal and once to the Orange Free State to fight. There was never another flyweight to fight, the Boere like to see the bigger men and so he always had to fight way out of his division. A middleweight usually. If he was lucky he’d get a welterweight, but it didn’t happen very often.

‘That little flyweight of mine was game and he loved to fight, but you can’t give away that much weight and he used to take some terrible poundings and nearly always lost. Afterwards I’d patch him up and he’d make me talk to him about the fight. Blow by blow, where he was good and where he went wrong. I’d tell him how he was always winning, which was true, he’d be a mile ahead on points and then the big ape he was fighting would catch him a lucky shot and put him away. And he used to look at me and say, “Next time, Hettie, you’ll see. I’ll win for sure.”

‘And then we would buy a bottle of cheap brandy and drive out of the town we were in and sit in the back of the Model T and get drunk. When he was drunk it was his turn to replay the fight, only he’d get it all mixed up in his head and he’d think he was still in the fight and I was his opponent and he’d beat the shit out of me. And I always let him, because he had to have some wins for his pride.

‘Then when I had taken a beating and he had counted me out, we would drink some more and replay the fight again, which this time he won fair and square. We would then find some nice place behind some bushes and take our blankets and make love. I’m telling you, Peekay, most men can’t get it up when they’re drunk, but not my flyweight, he could go all night. What a man he was. They were good times. Oh, oh, such good times.’

Big Hettie’s story worried me no end. Here it seemed big always beat small, except in a set-up. ‘Hoppie was smaller than Jackhammer Smit and he beat him fair and square,’ I said, somewhat defensively.

‘Ja, that is true, Hoppie has brains. My flyweight had mashed potato for brains. But I loved that little fleabite until the day he died from taking on one big ape too many.’ Big Hettie’s eyes welled with tears. ‘He was coming out for the sixth round when he staggered and fell, the crowd booed and booed, but he never faked anything in his life and I knew something terrible had happened. He had a brain haemorrhage, just like that. I carried him out of the hall in my arms and we sat on the grass outside in the fresh air with lots of stupid people in a circle looking down at us. But I didn’t see any of them, just my darling little flyweight. And then he died right there in my arms.’ Big Hettie was sobbing softly.

‘Don’t cry, Mevrou Hettie, please don’t cry.’ I quoted Nanny, ‘Sadness has a season and will pass.’

She stopped sobbing after a while and dabbed at her eyes with the damp towel. ‘He was the best. The very best of men.’ She said it so softly I knew she was speaking to herself.

We talked about this and that deep into the hot morning. Big Hettie did most of the chatting as I had developed into a listener. Once I had been a regular chatterbox but school had changed all that. A person of my status was not expected to talk much, and besides, listening is a good camouflage. I soon discovered that it is also an art. You learn not simply to listen to what people say. It’s what people don’t say that is important. If you listen hard enough you can hear the most amazing things going on behind the speaker’s voice. Quite often there is a regular conniption going on. It takes years to make a good translation of this secondary soundtrack and as a small child I could only define it as friendly or otherwise. For camouflage reasons this is often sufficient.

Around noon Hettie dozed off; this time her breathing was much better. Outside the compartment window the bushveld baked in the hot sun. The sunlight flattened the country in the foreground and smudged the horizon in a haze of heat. It is a time when the cicadas become so active that they fill the flat, hot space with a sound so constant it sings like silence in the brain. While I couldn’t hear them for the clickity-clack of the carriage wheels I knew they were out there, brushing the heat into their green membraned wings, energising after the long sleep when their pupae lay buried in the dark earth, sometimes for years, until a conjunction of the moon and the right soil temperature creates the moment to emerge and once again fill the noon space.

In the heat the compartment seemed to float, lifting off the silver rails and moving through time and space. Through hours and days and weeks and years, off the blue planet, past the moon and the sun, into centuries and millenniums and aeons. Skirting planets, weaving through the stars. Coming finally to a black hole in space, further even than the mind can think, beyond even the curve of infinity and the silver cord which rings the cosmos. There I would remain safely hidden until I could grow up to be welterweight champion of the world.

‘Are you asleep, Peekay?’ I opened my eyes to see Big Hettie looking at me. ‘A glass of water if you please.’ She ran her tongue over her dry lips and removed the towel from her forehead. She handed me the towel and I gave her the glass of water which she gulped greedily. She handed the glass back and I refilled it. ‘You’re one in a thousand, Peekay,’ she said gratefully.

I wet the towel, folded it and placed it over her head. ‘One in maybe even a million,’ she sighed. I could see she was restless and kept licking her lips. ‘What’s for lunch, do you think?’

‘Meneer Venter hasn’t been yet, Mevrou Hettie,’ I answered.

‘Ag man, I didn’t mean that lunch. A person can’t eat a train lunch. Breakfast is tolerable, lunch unbearable and dinner unthinkable. Open up my hamper, Peekay, and let a person hear what is inside.’ She laughed. ‘I’ll tell you something, I wasn’t concentrating too well when I packed it last night.’

I withdrew the slim bamboo rod threaded through the wicker and opened the large basket. Inside was enough food to feed an army. ‘Tell me what we got in there, darling,’ Big Hettie said anxiously.