Spud by John Van De Ruit Page A

silence.
    ‘Not a word of this conversation leaves this dormitory’ We all mumbled and nodded in agreement. With a blowof Fatty’s foul breath the flames from the candles were gone and the meeting was over.
    Something is rotten in the state of Denmark! (But who really cares anyway – tomorrow I’m going home!)
    I dreamed I was swinging by a rope in chapel watching Reverend Bishop delivering his sermon. Suddenly I was spotted and then everybody was laughing at me. Boys, teachers… even The Glock. I’m not dead; I’m just swinging from a rope without any pants on. They’re all pointing, laughing and jeering because I’m a spud.
Friday 18th February
    Long weekend
    11:00   Hundreds of luxury cars lined Pilgrim’s Walk. Under the trees to the left of the driveway were two old smoky buses that looked older than Crispo. I boarded the Durban bus and through the dusty window I saw Rambo being hugged by a strong-looking man with a shaved head. The two of them then jumped into a green sports car and sped away. I sat next to Fatty (and nearly fell off the tiny edge of the seat that was left). The 158 kilometre journey seemed endless. Fatty fell asleep and breathed fish paste breath all over me. I didn’t mind because I was going home, but made a mental note not to sit next to him on the trip back to school on Monday.
    Mom picked me up at the Westville shopping centre looking hot and bothered and not at all pleased to see me. She said Dad was being impossible and had charged off to buy guns. She reckoned his fear of communists was excessive even by apartheid standards. When I arrived home I could see that Mom wasn’t exaggerating. Dad has converted our house into an army bunker. The garden fence is now barbed wire. The gates are ten feethigh and every window and door has been barricaded up with wooden planks. Dad has enforced a strict lights out rule from sunset to sunrise. (When else do you use lights?) Inside the house, hundreds of candles flickered, making the place look like a palm reading centre. Dad reckons the first thing the terrorists will go for is your electricity.
    It took ages for us to clamber up the ladder and squeeze my bags down through the trapdoor in the roof. Mom kept shaking her head and mumbling under her breath about madness following her wherever she went. We then struggled down another ladder and found ourselves in my parents’ bathroom which had a burning gas lamp perched on the toilet cistern.
    Seated at the dining room table, my father was furiously trying to put together the pieces of his new rifle, which he had just taken apart. In the dim candlelight he looked terrible. Unwashed hair, thick stubble, creased clothes and a mad look in his eyes. I suspect he failed to recognise me because he looked up at me, nodded vaguely and said, ‘Howzit, Bob,’ before returning to his gun.
    Besides all the weirdness it was good to be home, to enjoy some peace with no sirens and bells ringing every half hour. This peace was unfortunately shattered a little after four when Mom ordered Dad to clean himself up and stop behaving like an idiot. My mother’s book club was arriving at 19:00 and she wanted my father to take the planks off the doors so that her guests wouldn’t have to clamber onto the roof and into the toilet to get into the house. Dad sensed that he was on the brink of losing the argument and ran into the bathroom and locked the door. Mom continued shouting vile obscenities at him through it, but my father stayed silent, defiantly refusing to retaliate.
    18:50   Dad took the security planks off the doors and lounge windows, but refused to clean himself up. Heannounced that we’re now vulnerable to attack and spent the rest of the evening stalking around the garden dressed in his old army clobber with his new rifle at the ready. I went out to join him for a chat and found him leopard crawling near the hedge, listening in on a conversation that some people were having on the road. After a while