Patrick

He was born on a rubbish dump in the Sundays River Valley. Later with his brother he trapped guinea fowl for his grandmother and they slept in some bushes beyond the flattened polluted earth around the lean-tos. Skibenga cannibal his father named him on a stony hillside under euphorbias decked with shopping bags and his mother burned him with a coal iron saying sorry Veleli I didn't see you. At night he slipped alone into the wild places where the moon had shone on Bhaca refugees with bloodstained hearts lamenting the turmoil of the land, as they searched in one ragged river valley after another for sanctuary and did not find it, a pitiful horde of bony elbows and ribs and dogs beaten stupid yet faithful, stalking alongside in the thickets filled with scorpion and snake, to dart out and gulp the thin wormy excrement that was all the residue of a beaten, starving people. And death came quickly to tortoise and bird young stranded by bad timing before the staggering skein of desperation. But here beyond the warlands forced into servitude for the faint hope of an end to scavenging they settled, a dark omen of a distant clan, and they settled far and thin on white man's land. Even at his own home they settled, but for such his thoughts paid no heed. Instead his father raped his sisters and his mother drank the cheapest drinks and his grandmother despaired of the ubuntu values and with this basic training he planned a future however flawed until one day in the coldest winter when he and his brother and his father had already moved away to Soweto-by-the-Sea he walked alone to the city of eBhayi, across disparaged fields and on roads not good enough for a white main's spit until at the tender age of eleven he witnessed his first gang rape in the trees behind the bowling club. In the freezing dawn facing the gale off the southern ocean he successfully begged his first handout at a traffic light and accepted the brown coin with both hands in formal gesture and bowed in thanks.

Across the beachfront white people lived with a variety of customs including vices that could be purchased for a small fee fom black boys. This being the second activity he ruled out of his life, after drinking. He found a place to sleep beneath a five star hotel with a varying group of stinking street people but in reality they never slept properly for fear and cold and hunger and dreams and violence.

The video arcades and pool joints attracted him. For a single coin he could entertain himself a morning or an afternoon and they played wild games in the streets and their clothes lasted not more than seven days for such was the wear and they valued nothing, no item held the slightest meaning in their violent routines.

Patrick he told the white people to call him and they liked him for his smile however unlikely and they gave hime money and food for they were not all evil and they paid off their guilt in little ways however little they felt they owed. Indeed they liked him and even though he unwittingly stank to high heaven some of them let him into their homes and he became their true and honest friend even showing them generosity by buying them gifts with money he had begged and had no immediate use for. In return one of them taught him the alphabet and how to use it in both English and Xhosa and that is how he became a literate and sentient being with a keen desire to join the world of men and leave the midden of the streets. But he had a long time yet to live in it for the nightmare surrounded him and it was vast beyond foresight and there were many cruel and merciless fates to be chosen in abject humility from the forces that strove to crush him.

Do you want to go to school he was asked and yes he said. Then you must go back to your father and mother he was told but they don't love me he said. Then you must go to a place of safety and there they will give you all you need. I am frightened of the place of safety they will hit me. All right then I will arrange for you to go to another school. He could not go to another school until he had the care of a parent or guardian. A white person was prepared to become that guardian. The commissioner of child welfare in a sham known as child court denied that right quoting the group areas act and speaking from a high platform of moral disdain. If the department of child welfare would allow it the white person would pay a black private school a lot of money in a homeland for his education. The department did not allow this request even to be forwarded to a relevant authority in writing, and these useless efforts took all the time that was still left for him to become too old to enter any school.

One evening two policemen one white one black answered a call from a concerned neighbour and threatened to remove him from the flat of the white person who was looking after him. The black policeman terrified him with threats and tried to bend his arm over his head to guess his age but because of the slick blue nylon jacket he wore and because he was limp with fear the arm slipped off every time. The white person after watching this spoke very reasonably and was allowed to to take him to a friend who lived on a large plot and the following day threatened the caretaker of the block of flats with the law if the incident repeated itself for he knew that the caretaker and whoever had complained were in cahoots. He left him with a copy of that part of the group areas act that said that a black person could stay as a guest in the home of a white person for ninety days of any calendar year. The caretaker was a spineless son of a bitch and not a peep was ever heard from him or his friends again.

Later he went to the place of safety for it was a wise and last option and he trusted the white person's belief that however unbearable and painful it was to be some good would come of it but in fact no good at all came from it because the black stooges in charge there had no belief in others let alone themselves. They washed him and they shaved his head and they clothed him in coarse khaki with no shoes and they marched him among squadrons of other washed shaved khaki barefoot children and indeed they did hit him and they surrounded him with a high barbed wire fence, through which one day his now older and sullen brother amid a band of sullen youths, stared, and over which he leaped by running full-tilt across a roof at night after eighteen months of learning not the slightest thing and he walked back to the streets of the city. But now becoming an adult in a world where he was likely to to be the biggest danger to himself.

He went to the five star hotel again and unknown to him it was now a four star hotel which was indicative of the poverty of the region and he found the same old friends except the white person who had left the city forever. He made friends with lots of other white people and they mostly found him amusing but felt their good intentions proscribed and in fact they did him no damn good at all for they entrenched his existence in a world that to enter themselves would be an earthly hell. Be that as it may he washed dishes and he washed cars and washed not himself and he accepted gifts and he saved two hundred rand but this mass of possessions could not change his lot nor could it prevent him stinking like never before as his armpits gave him a new and bounteous identity. And he slept as before in those parts of buildings that architects never think of and were not designed for human habitation but nevertheless are paid for by the client and yet cannot be rented, with the lowest forms of life and of death as his bedfellows.

In recognition of his inner determination to reach upward a girlfriend of a white friend let him stay in an outside room and he was clean and fed and the compny was good and he was intelligent and loved and protected. After one year the original white person that he trusted returned unexpectedly and started sleeping with the woman who was looking after him and it felt like a family. Of course it didn't last long. But now the white person took it upon himself to educate and house the filthy creature who had returned to the streets but because of his own circumstances he had not a home that he owned. Accommodation was easy enough for there were many students in that city who would find interest in looking after such a one before they started on their real lives. But without education or any form of parental guidance he lived a double life both with hot water and lights and also of handouts in constant danger of police molestation until the white person bought a flat. And to the dark looks of the neighbours and those who believed he was a disgusting sodomite the white person turned the other cheek and took Patrick into his bachelor pad, and immediately became a troubled parent to a fifteen year old boy who was starting to go out of his mind...