No Lie Like Love by Paul Rawlins

Author:Paul Rawlins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 10/1/2012
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2012-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Slanqfontein

While they drove, Graham and Tokkie listened to the rugby over the radio. It was all Western Transvaal this year; there was nobody to stop them. They had a scrappy center who was always giving the “up yours” sign to the other team’s crowd after a try. Graham had the build for rugby, but he didn’t have the speed in his chunky feet.

“I played when I was a kid,” he told Tokkie when she asked. “Everybody did.”

Tokkie, Graham’s girl, lived in Kimberly, and when she wasn’t away at teachers college, Graham drove there every second weekend when he could. They would go together to pick up his dry goods on Saturday morning and spend the day at Riverton on the dam or just out at her grandmother’s place watching sports or the “A-Team” or some other rubbish on the television. Even once he had spent a day fixing plumbing in her flat.

“I can help,” Tokkie had said. But mostly she’d sat and read magazines.

This morning, though, she had wanted to turn around and go back out to the plaas, the farm where Graham was living with his grandfather. They were at Checkers, where Graham was buying mealie meal and tinned milk, soap, paraffin for the lamps, iodine for the sheep. Tokkie tossed in a paper sack of rusks and asked how was Oupa, his grandfather.

“Ag, always the same,” Graham said, scanning down the aisle. “I hear they’ve got milk in boxes now you keep on the shelf.”

“They’ve got powdered, here,” Tokkie said.

“I never liked the stuff,” Graham said. “It’s all we had in the Army.”

“It’s all anybody has in the Army. When’s your next camp?”

“December,” Graham said, “around Christmas.”

“That’s not fair,” Tokkie said.

“It’s not so bad.”

They piled the goods in the back of Graham’s little Toyota bakkie, in amongst odd boxes of tools and petrol cans, and that’s when Tokkie said again, why didn’t they spend the day at the farm, Slangfontein.

“It’s a long way for nothing,” Graham said.

“I’ve been worse places,” she said. “I want to see Oupa.”

“Well I see enough of him,” Graham said. “Why don’t you go, and I’ll stay here?”

“And do what? Sit in the back of the bakkie at the lake and get drunk?”

“I was thinking of going to the flicks,” Graham said. “Isn’t there anything playing?”

“Nothing new. We might as well go.”

Graham locked his jaw and headed for her flat.

Kimberly was a funny place, square blocks of square white houses and overgrown gardens in the old neighborhoods that reminded Graham of the towns in old American westerns, but at least it was town. Kimberly had been full of diamonds when the grubbers dug out the Big Hole, half a kilometer across and almost another half deep, by hand. The pool in the bottom now, the color of emerald tinted blue, was shaped like Africa, the shape of a big heart. There were still diamonds, but now Kimberly was a place people visited but nobody really seemed to want to be. A boneyard for leftovers from the old miners and the camp followers.

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