The Sunday Times Fiction Prize
Dominique Botha, Vusi Pikoli and Mandy Wiener discuss their books, both shortlisted for the 2014 Sunday Times Literary Awards, presented in association with Exclusive Books
THE EXCERPT
‘YOU are too close to the water,” Paul whispered. “There are barbels in the mud. They will wake up if you step on them.”
He pushed past towards the sweet-thorn shade.
I saw a dead carp with its eye rotted away. Finches were chattering in the reeds. The water in the pan stank. “I don’t believe you.” “It’s true. Barbels aren’t like normal fish. They grow as big as men and they eat mud. When it’s dark, they crawl up to the house on their shoulders to graze on the lawn.”
I ran to catch up with him. “Ma says if you feed silkworms beetroot, they weave threads of crimson. Is that true? I mean, what does crimson mean?”
“It means red. Hurry up you spastic.”
I kept silkworms in a shoebox on top of my piano. Ma told me mulberries and silkworms came from China long before our country became the only one in the world. She said silkworms could be tricked into spinning hearts and clovers. If you left them in peace, they spun cocoons the colour of farm butter. At night pale-winged moths fluttered up against the shoebox lid and laid eggs stuck together like crochet beads. Then they died and moth dust silvered the cardboard floor. It was a long walk to the only mulberry tree that grew on our farm. Its roots were lifting the graveyard walls near the ruins of the old house and Pa was threatening to cut the bloody thing down. Ma said he should fix the wall instead.
Paul walked ahead along the footpath that ribboned through the long grass.
Leguaans lived around the pan. That was definitely true. They can whip you off your feet with their tails and they eat snakes, even rinkhalse or pofadders. Abram once killed a leguaan with his pickaxe and brought it to the house. Ma was upset. “He’s just going to use it for muti or some nonsense,” Pa said. Abram told me leguaans destroyed his fish traps. Even in death the giant lizard held fast to its electric colouring. The long nails at the end of the claws drew lines on the brick paving as Abram dragged it away by the tail.
“Look,” Paul said, pointing at some veld lilies sprouting in a groove of cracked mud. “A cluster of midday stars.” There were more blooming in the shade of the cemetery wall. I bent down to touch them. Paul went inside and lay down on the grave of our great-grandfather Paul Michiel Botha, which was the family name for first-born boys. The gate whistled on its hinges like a wire toy made by the piccanins at the stat.
“You shouldn’t do that,” I said, lingering at the gatepost.
Along the wall grew blue teardrop trees that tolled with singing pigeons. Ma called them graveyard cypresses. “Listen to the birds,” Paul said, closing his eyes and putting his feet up. He called them Sunday afternoon doves.
Our family tree had dropped many branches into the graveyard. Lots of Paul Michiel Bothas and their wives and children cut down by the Great Trek, the Great Flu and great age. I walked through the gate, sat down next to the smallest tombstone and trailed my fingers across remnants of chiselled High Dutch effaced by a century of rain. “What does it say?” I asked. Petronella Botha. 1880 tot 1887. Hier rust ons geliefde dogtertji, dees aard was niet uw lot.
“I could have been her twin, if I were born 100 years ago. Dutch sounds like Afrikaans spoken by a person who is mentally retarded.” Paul was 10 years old and could speak Afrikaans and English. Pa said that made you a true South African.