PART ONE

Surely the darkness will hide me

The week my mother died, a white lion escaped from the zoo and prowled the streets of the suburbs for four days, gripping the city in an electric hold of fear and excitement. Old ladies in nursing homes clutched each other, startled from their knitting or card games as the TV stations kept live footage of helicopters scanning the road grids. I imagine those old ladies dreaming at night about the big cat stealing into their institutions, upsetting pots of boiled cabbage and grabbing dull matrons by the throat. Perhaps they secretly hoped that the beast would hop onto their beds, put a curious paw on their heads and settle down for the night—giving the old dears the biggest excitement they’d had in decades.

Uncle Joe coiled his arm around my father, who was limping like an injured man. I was outside the ward listening to my iPod, playing the Chili Peppers at full blast to try and drown out my sobbing sister. She yelps when she’s really upset, and her voice tinkles like shattering glass. In that moment I wanted to punch her, rage stabbing at my solar plexus. For a long time it was the only feeling that reverberated through the numbness that had already been there for months.

‘My boy.’

My big bear of a father slumped next to me and patted me absent-mindedly on the head as if I were a friendly dog.

I knew she was gone.

It was Uncle Joe who led me into the room and shooed everyone out. I held her hand for a long time until mine got all sweaty. I let go and pawed the damp onto the back of my T-shirt.

The cancer had gnawed away at Mom for two years, the cycles of chemo and radiotherapy buoying her briefly, until the next little tumour decided to pop up in a liver segment or a vertebra or a lung lobe. I only cried the day of the mastectomy. In some sick way I looked forward to the days she had chemo. I’d sit with her while the crimson cocktail soaked itself into her veins and we joked they were giving her raspberry juice IV.

A therapist I saw for a while told me that was a normal response. Ja, I’d shrug, but where were the great talks, the Tuesdays With Morrie? Thursdays At Chemo revolved around Scrabble and pep talks about my impending final year at high school. Only once did she mention the cancer directly, on her first day at the hospice.

“Cal, if you date a girl someday, and you’re… you know, close…”

“Close?” I squinted at her. A Black Southeaster was blowing and rattled at the windows.

She smiled. “You know, intimate. I… this thing… just consider giving her a monthly breast exam, okay? It’s quite easy to do…”

“Mom!”

We stared at each other and my face flushed as the corner of her mouth turned upwards. “Sorry. Overshare.”

“Can I have a moment?”

I needed to go outside and smoke. So I double-clutched three and puked in the big potted cycad outside the oncology ward. I’d started smoking six months before with Anders Kowalski, who could smuggle in cool imported Davidoffs from his dad’s corner café.

I don’t remember much of the funeral. I’m not going to bore you with the psychobabble: you can guess I was in shock and all that. There were the standard sloppy kisses and hugs from aunts and cousins I hadn’t seen in years while a priest and a Dominee sat in the study with my dad drinking whisky. Everybody was Very Concerned About Caleb. I was flavour of the month or something. At least Sarah was about to finish varsity, people whispered, and was going to get engaged to Dave. Dad’s dental practice would keep him busy, but, ag shame, the poor boy was starting his Matric and now he had lost his mother. And, as is the fate of flavours of the month, all the Very Concerned disappeared as December sauntered sweatily towards January.

After the funeral, my sister's boyfriend took me for what he thought was my first drink. I tried to be like whatever and downed the Heineken with gusto but then got a headache so couldn’t nurse anything more. I stared across the bar while Dave lectured me in his button-down collar and sweaty pits, talking about “manning up” and “not losing sight of the finishing line”.

"You gotta give it hundred percent now little man, one hundred percent." Dave licked a fleck of spit from the corner of his mouth. I loathed my sister’s boyfriend with his Colgate smile and talk-show-host hair. "You know what I'm saying?"

"Ja."

"You gotta go get your energy out. Swimming's too lonely a sport and a man can get lonely playing all that piano."

"Mm."

"It's never to take on a team sport. Will teach you some... responsibility." He sounded the word out extra slowly, as if he were reading aloud one of those awful motivational posters that have single word headings in all caps.

"Responsibility," I said, nodding, looking over his shoulder at the news crawl on the bar's flat screen TV. The rogue lion had been found wandering in the woods next to the country club and was now safely in custody.

The end of Form IV came quickly, the exams an endless procession of papers. I spent the summer sleeping late and lurking around the mall, wishing Cape Town would just fuck off for once with its beaches and mountains and vineyards that threatened to make my life look shiny and happy.

I wanted dark.

I wanted mist.

I wanted silence.

None of this would happen.

At some stage I sat down in front of the piano and opened Bach’s Prelude and Fugue No. 1, the first piece I had to master for my final music exams. I don’t really like Baroque music but I respect old Bach, and that first prelude is beautiful. My music teacher, Mrs Geordadis, told me that another composer had written a melody above it and turned it into an Ave Maria, ‘thereby coating a perfectly subtle piece of Protestant industriousness in a cloying syrup of French romanticism,’ or something like that. Mrs G used to teach English as well, and liked to talk in extended metaphors. She stopped after she got agoraphobia from ending up lost in the Kalahari Desert on a walking tour. Ever since, she had limited herself to teaching music, preferring one-to-one contact in the small soundproof music rooms.

Christmas came—the bright, harsh Christmas that sweats and boils in the peak of the Southern Hemisphere summer, best spent barbecuing and dunking screaming children in the pool. My family, however, always has to have the full Northern fanfare at lunchtime. We tried to cook my mother’s gammon and sort of succeeded. In typical MacLeod style, we then buried all our feelings in sleep deprivation from an achingly long Midnight Mass and a fog of wine and glut. Then we collapsed in our rooms and slept the afternoon away.

I awoke at twilight and walked outside, padding around in the cool spot under the large plane tree in our garden. School would be starting in just under two weeks. Just one more year of humiliation. Maybe they’d spare me the heckling on the way to music class in the afternoon, or stop making comments about my skinny body at swim practice. I needed to steam through the year and get into varsity.

And now Mom wouldn’t be sitting around the table the day before school started, making Mom noises and humming Joni Mitchell quietly to herself while she darned the holes on my school blazer and helped me cover my books in thick clear plastic.

Mid-January: I was a senior, walking up the hill to the great wrought iron school gates. They were frightening, Gothic things in the way the metalwork wove around the school coat of arms with the wolf, cross, anchor and a book. Around this, in gilded lettering, unfurled the great motto Lux in Tenebris—Light in Darkness. I would always stop and read those words, thinking how beautiful even the most ordinary phrase could sound in a dead language. Lately, the gold leaf had been flaking off the “Lux” so that, in the shadows of the pine trees, it simply looked like it was saying “In Darkness”.

Apt, I thought, as a sudden gust of wind played with the tops of the trees.

I arrived for registration and sorting into classes. You had to stand in the front quad and be called into lines. Then you’d be led to your form classrooms for orientation, as if you were new arrivals at a concentration camp. They’d hand out all your prescribed books en masse and then give you ten minutes to put them in your assigned locker. Any longer and you’d have detention. Having an ex-army major for a headmaster made things run efficiently.

As I shuffled into the throng of students a few murmurs rippled down the ranks. A girl with rheumy eyes glared at me. One of the First Team rugby players came up to me and patted me on the back and murmured ‘Sorry about your mom, dude.’

I’d never actually spoken to Mike Delport before. I was wary of him, but at least he’d never called me “Piano Fag” like Frank Arliss, the beefy lock who with his high forehead and thick pelt of chest hair looked like a cross between an Orc and Frankenstein’s monster.

The first periods swam by, double Maths and then English lit. First break arrived. It had been a surprisingly uneventful day—until I went to my locker to fetch stuff for the middle periods.

“Crap.”

A cascade of books, gym clothes and stationery tumbled out.

The shit was starting again. My locker had been tipped by some dick, Level 1 of Nerd Torture. Guys and girls laughed as they passed.

One of the mean girls whispered to her posse. ‘Cal's still such a dork. Kind of sad.’ Their giggles echoed down the corridor as they walked to class, safe in their bubbles of imported make-up and shopping trips to London.

I gathered up my books. I heard someone come up behind me. I knew it was Frank by the looming shadow that put me in eclipse and the way he breathed in slow snorting gasps.

‘What do you want, Frank?’

I didn’t look up as I scrambled up the last bits of my stuff that had scattered across the cement floor.

‘This,’ he chortled, holding up a pink fluorescent pen. It was a marker I’d grabbed from my mom’s desk. My dad had left her study exactly as it was since the final time she’d been admitted to hospital.

‘Does Callie like pink?’

‘It’s just a highlighter. You know, for studying. Maybe you could use something like that?’

He came up to me, breathing in my face.

‘Studying what?’ he said, raising an eyebrow. ‘Gay porn? Faggoty music stuff?’ He mussed up my hair with his fist so that it stood in ten different directions.

‘Please stop,’ I asked, trying not to sound like I was begging.

‘Stop what, fag?’

I’d always been a prime target. Scrawny body, check. Glasses and geeky interests, check. Diligent student, check. I’d made peace with it early.

‘Gonna walk away again, MacFaggot?’

I turned around, grateful that it been mainly just a verbal jostling. Frank threw the marker on the ground and then stomped on it with his size 11 shoes. I clenched my jaw and scurried off to the boys’ bathroom and splashed water on my face. It was—like it had been so many other times—Arliss 1, MacLeod 0.

The bell rang and I pulled myself towards myself as best I could towards History class.

At least not too many people had come up to me doing the whole I’m-so-sorry-about-your-mom routine. It was getting tiring.

I was one of the first to walk into the class and chose a seat far back.

Students filtered in, and Mrs Le Roux started writing an outline of the year’s syllabus on the board. I busied myself with sorting out the chaos of my bag after I had hastily stuffed it with books.

‘You dropped this, dude.’

Next to me was a guy I’d never seen before, holding out my copy of Bach’s Das Wolhltemperirte Clavier.

‘Thanks.’ I reached out, staring a little too long at him. He was tall and built—half-surfer, half-rugby player. He had dirty blond hair and deep green eyes. There was an unreadable frown on his face.

‘Bach?’

He had pronounced it properly.

‘Ja,’ I managed. ‘Why?’

‘Bach’s pretty awesome. Wish I could play piano.’

He held out a hand. ‘I’m Chris.”

I stared at his hand. “You’re new,” I said, my voice flatter than I’d meant to sound.

“Yup.”

His hand was still out. I reached for it slowly.

His hand was warm as I shook it, reminding me how icy my hands were even in summer. Why was this jock talking to me nicely? Jocks didn’t do that. Mike didn’t count earlier because he was deputy head boy and knew my mom had died.

‘I’m Cal... Caleb. MacLeod."

‘Nice to meet you. I’m a Hathaway.’

I couldn't help myself. “Hathaway. Like, Shakespeare’s wife?”

“Literary and musical, I see.”

I felt my mouth open slightly, but then Mrs Le Roux started greeting the class formally as the last students came in. ‘Guess we’d better pay attention,’ said Chris, settling down at a desk next to me.

Well, that was fucking odd. It was just a matter of time before he’d join the cool group and I’d be just another geek to ignore or make fun of.

The lesson started, and we busied ourselves with the outbreak of the American Civil War. It was interesting, but when the period ended I noticed that I had been rubbing my hands over each other for the whole hour, thinking how warm the new guy’s touch had been.