These Are Not Gentle People by Andrw Harding

Author:Andrw Harding
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Maclehose Press
Published: 2020-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

19

They Were Blood

AS THE VAAL River curves towards Parys from the north east, it splits into two branches. The upper section is broad and rocky; the lower stream is narrower and fast. It gushes through the woods, past the town’s sewage treatment plant and the White Giraffe River Cottage, then swings back up to re-join the main branch just beyond a narrow footbridge. The Parys suspension bridge, built in 1919 and recently refurbished by local businesses, once led directly from the town onto a big idyllic island. In a nod towards Paris and a famous pedestrian bridge over the River Seine, its wire sides are covered with thousands of padlocks, some of them rusting, almost all marked with the names of couples – Richard and Aimee, Oscar and Renata – and with hearts.

These days the far end of the footbridge is boarded up, and the island itself has been turned into a private luxury estate, renamed Golf Island. A poster by the concrete steps warns visitors not to feed the monkeys.

Wealthier farmers like Vicky van der Westhuizen, a few local lawyers, and retired businessmen from Johannesburg – lured by the scenery and by Parys’ reputation (enhanced by the idea of living within a wind-sheltering crater) for clement weather – own homes in the well-manicured estate. Over the years, several of Simon and Samuel’s township friends picked up casual work on the island as gardeners or security guards.

From the bridge it is a fifteen-minute, zig-zagging walk due south across Bree Street and through town to Parys’ primary and high schools, each occupying a large suburban block on either side of Schilbach Street. The high school – motto, Each to His Own – is no longer segregated in the old-fashioned sense, but the class photographs in the dark hallways reveal the extent to which language now performs a similar function. Afrikaans for the whites. English for the blacks. Many of Tumahole’s new elites – politicians, civil servants, teachers, police – send their children here to be educated by what remains an exclusively white teaching staff, something which the current headmaster suspects may be “part of the appeal”.

Magistrate Pillay had put her daughters in the primary school and was astonished to discover it was still named after H.F. Verwoerd, the former South African prime minister and architect of apartheid.

In the winter months of 2016, the head girl at Parys High School was struggling with her health. Alicia Prinsloo, a gentle, forthright, scholarly figure, had been to see doctors and a psychiatrist; she had even been hospitalised before she was diagnosed with stomach ulcers and then with shingles – a nervous disorder brought on, certainly, by the stress of her father’s upcoming murder trial.

After Captain Prinsloo’s arrest, Alicia and her younger sister, Arne, who was a keen musician and singer, had avoided school for a week. When they returned, the senior boys were still showing each other pictures of the scene on their mobile phones, some of them bragging about what they’d done. The girls could hear the chatter everywhere.

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