Whitethorn by Bryce Courtenay

from The Boys Farm always were.
    Mevrou let the lie pass, her voice became clipped and businesslike. ‘At the rock? The day du Preez had the accident, that’s when he pissed on you?’
    â€˜Yes, Mevrou.’
    â€˜Explain to me what happened.’
    Pissy looked down at his knobbly knees and even from where I was in the hydrangea bush I could see he was shaking. ‘I don’t like to, Mevrou,’ he said, his voice trembling.
    Mevrou sighed this big sigh. ‘Don’t make me angry, Kobus. Tell me at once!’
    â€˜He wanted to stand on the rock and piss down on me, like it was a nice joke.’
    In my mind’s eye I saw Fonnie with his big cock and a stream of golden piss cascading over the edge of the big rock on Pissy’s ginger head. Splash! Trickle. Of course, that’s not what happened and couldn’t have happened before I got there because I would have seen if Pissy’s head and his shirt were wet and I’d have smelled the extra fresh piss on him. So far Pissy was winning in the lying game and, I must say, was doing bloody well under interrogation.
    Mevrou drew back in her chair. ‘A nice joke? You let someone piss on you and it’s called a nice joke? You an Afrikaner from a proud people and you let a person piss on you for a joke!’
    â€˜Not to me , Mevrou, to him it was a joke,’ Pissy mumbled.
    She’d got that bit wrong. An orphan can’t be a proud anything even if he is an Afrikaner, which is better perhaps than being English, but if you just belong to the Government it’s not much to be proud of because there’s nobody who gives a shit about you. Also, the part where Mevrou said she’d treated Pissy like his own mother. He didn’t have a mother so how could she know about that, hey?
    â€˜You didn’t think it was a joke but you let him do it to you? You could have run away,’ Mevrou said.
    Pissy shook his head sadly. ‘You can’t, Mevrou, he’ll jus’ get you later.’
    It was a good point and she let him have it. There was no hiding place in The Boys Farm. They always got you in the end. It was best to take what was coming to you, even if it was unfair, otherwise it only got worse and worse.
    Mevrou sighed again. ‘So far all we’ve got is the pissing joke. Did he masturbate in front of you?’
    We all knew the word, although I wasn’t completely sure how it worked, you rubbed your cock and white stuff came out, but only if you were bigger. All I knew was that it was the worst thing you could possibly do on The Boys Farm. It got you sent to Meneer Prinsloo who would give you six of the best with his vicious, specially long bamboo sjambok . They said he’d stand way back and run at you, and each cut was like ten ordinary ones. God definitely didn’t like masturbation and Meneer Prinsloo said, ‘God forbids it and so do I.’ They put you in the tank afterwards, or if it was summer, in a small cupboard that was pitch dark. You could hardly breathe in there and you stayed for the whole day without food, just some water. Afterwards you had to kneel down and put your hand on the Bible and promise God you’d never do it again. I gasped at the very thought of Mevrou suggesting such a thing had occurred. But it was me who was in for a big surprise.
    â€˜He sometimes did it,’ Pissy said.
    â€˜In front of you?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Did he make you do anything?’
    â€˜Like what, Mevrou?’
    â€˜Like suck his piel ?’
    â€˜No, nothing like that, Mevrou,’ Pissy said, almost in a whisper.
    What a dirty lie! I knew it was a lie because of what Fonnie made me do and Pissy saying it tasted like boerewors. You could just tell he did it the way he said it was lekker and all. I just knew that Fonnie made him do it and Pissy didn’t even mind one bit.
    Surprisingly Mevrou didn’t make a fuss when I felt for sure Pissy was on the way to