The Treehouse & Other Stories

Steve Elliott

The Treehouse and other stories

© Ellicott S.

For Rory

The Treehouse

The house boy tumbled out of the gate of the compound attached to the main house and sprinted down the path along the back wall. Sam heard Lydia, one of the house girls, call something after Johannes in Zulu. Sam was in the melee meal patch, being an explorer in an impenetrable jungle. He pulled some ears of corn aside and looked out at the street through the gap in the tall hedge that bordered the 1.5 acre grounds of the house on the 1st Avenue side. He saw a police car idling by. A policeman was looking suspiciously out of the patrol car. The lawman had a long sour face. It was only a glimpse and then the sour face was gone. Sam let the ears of corn fall back into place and continued his perilous journey through the forest.

On the far side of the forest lay Rork's Drift, and the cave in the mountain where the great Chief Shaka of the Zulus kept his treasure – diamonds and gold! Sam had to get there before sunset. When he got to Rork's Drift, he stood on a mound and scanned the surroundings. There was no one down at the tennis court or up at the swimming pool (sometimes Lake Victoria, or the great Limpopo River). Sam wondered where Johannes had run off to in such a hurry. He thought about the treehouse they were going to build. They had selected the tree but Johannes had said that one of the branches would need a support pole; they would organise that soon, on his day off. The treehouse would have a tin roof, floorboards, a window, and a rope ladder leading up to an entrance big enough for small boys to enter. Sam had always wanted a treehouse. It would be his lookout post, his crow's nest, his very own inviolable space.

His treehouse daydream was rudely interrupted by his mother calling from the house. She was probably on the warpath about homework, or something equally tedious. Sam decided to disappear and deal with her later, at supper. He opened the small trapdoor in the back wall that led under the house, and crawled into the three-foot high space that lay under the floorboards. The ceiling was far too low for it to be called a cellar. Furthermore, there was no access to the space from the house. It was a dark place – the mysterious cave of Zulu Chief Shaka.

Sam had found some interesting treasure in the cave during the months they had been living in the big house on Central Street. They had moved from London to Johannesburg the previous spring, in 1967. He had come across some old comics dated 1964. He had blown the dust off the comics and read them with interest. But the best find, a truly exciting discovery, was a Zulu warrior shield and some statuettes of African heads. These relics were now displayed on a shelf in his room: real booty for an 11-year-old boy from Blackheath in South London.

He crawled towards the centre of the space. He didn't like to go further to where it got the darkest at the far corner of the large house. Who knew what demons might be lurking there? But that was probably where Shaka kept his best treasures and artefacts. In the deepest darkest part of the cave. On this occasion, Sam decided to be brave and crept on. Then he heard movement and his heart leapt into his mouth. He saw the whites of someone's eyes, staring at him in panic. It was Johannes, looking as though he were in fear for his life. 'Go, go! Foot-sack!' he hissed, making frantic shooing motions with his hands.

Sam was terrified by the anguish in the house boy's voice. He scuttled out, came panting round the side of the house, crossed the brown grasslands of the veld that was the front lawn, and sidled up to the entrance, hoping to avoid his mother. He stood listening on the wide stoop, amid the cane furniture, which might provide cover if he was threatened with interception. He looked at the front door and glanced back at the circular drive and Central Avenue beyond the two iron gates to the property. The drive was lined with mature jacarandas in a riot of purple blooms. A beige Mercedes turned into the drive. Sam waved at the car which seemed to be coming round the curve faster than usual. It came to a halt, throwing up gravel. Sam's father jumped out and ran up the steps of the stoop. 'Hello Sam,' he said, hurrying by. 'Had a good day?' He didn't stop. 'Tell me about the cricket match later.' Sam followed his father into the hallway and watched him sprint up the stairs and disappear into his parents' room. At a much slower pace, Sam climbed the stairs and made his way to his own room at the opposite end of the house. Two large guest rooms, three bathrooms, a spacious airing-cupboard and a box room separated him from his parents. The arrangement suited him just fine.

He couldn't concentrate on his homework – 'Arithmetic! Yuk!' He went to the window and looked out at the jacarandas. The cricket news wasn't too bad. Father would be pleased to hear that he had batted at Number 5 and scored a creditable 27 before being caught in the slips. And in the opponents' innings he had fielded at second slip and taken a fine catch to gain revenge for being caught out in the very same place. He was annoyed about it though; it was a stupid error: the ball was wide, why dab his bat at it? But Father should be reasonably pleased. Then he thought about Johannes. What had frightened the house boy out of his wits? The Zulu warrior reduced to a mouse!

Sam had had to get used to many confusing things since his arrival in South Africa. He recalled Johannes' crouched body and wild fearful eyes under the house. Was it some kind of bantu custom? They had a lot of those. The family hadn't been in Johannesburg a year and it was a far cry from grey, drizzly old London, which was a familiar place in its customs and traditions. Africa was full of surprises and a huge contrast. Sam had come with misty-eyed, Tarzan-inspired expectations of the continent. His friends at school in London had been envious, thinking his life would be one long safari. However, his first school had been a disaster and he didn't think his friends would envy his experience there. In the hullabaloo of leaving London and arriving in Johannesburg, his parents had taken temporary accommodation. After their triumph in the theatre, and all the publicity, they moved to a smarter residence in salubrious Lower Houghton.

At first, they enrolled Sam in an Afrikaans school, a big mistake. Literally everyone hated him, or at best was supremely indifferent. He learned fast what it meant to be ostracized, to be held in utter contempt. No one tried to make friends and help the new English boy orient himself. At the end of the fourth day of his harrowing ordeal, he was approached by a small group, whose spokesman was a ginger-haired Afrikaner of about 12 or 13. Sam never actually learned the boy's name. 'My opa was murdered by you lot. Englander!' said the boy, poking Sam in the chest. 'Englander!' His gang's murmurs were laced with hostility, ominous as a Greek chorus. Sam had no idea what the boy was talking about. He knew nothing about the Boer War that had ended 67 years previously: the English versus the Afrikaners. The boy went on about the 'murdering English invaders', and the group closed inexorably around Sam. He was saved by a teacher who happened to be passing. The teacher dismissed the muttering, belligerent group, telling them to 'Foot-sack! Now!' The teacher, a tall, athletic-looking man, watched the grumbling group of boys depart and turned to Sam, who was standing there ashen-faced. He had been sure they were going to give him a good thrashing. 'Go home, son,' said the teacher, curtly. 'Tell your parents, you're in the wrong school!'

It was the only kind thing anyone at that school ever said to him. Sam took the teacher's advice and told his parents that he flatly refused to return to 'that place!' His parents were aghast. They got on the phone to some people they trusted, who revealed the political nuances, and explained their horrific blunder regards their choice of edcational establishment for Sam. Some strings were pulled and they got him into another, 'less extreme' school. He heard them say it was 'more Europeanized, and liberal in its outlook.' He was confused that there appeared to be two kinds of white people in South Africa. And many of them had servants, or if they didn't, they treated people of colour as servant-class.

The most confusing thing about his new life in Johannesburg was what Sam called the 'No Blacks!' The signs were everywhere – in English and Afrikaans; everything was segregated: buses, trains, taxis, cinemas, theatres, schools, and even park benches! The signs said: 'NO BLACKS!' There had been no such draconian rules in London. Sam thought it was daft. He himself had a friend who was black: Pete from Trinidad & Tobago. They used to go on the bus together to the Oval cricket ground, where black and white cricketers played against each other. Here, however, he was forbidden black friends. Except Johannes was a friend, wasn't he? Okay, he was 26 years old but he was still his Zulu 'friend'.

Johannes had mended Sam's bike. He had shown him how to make a slingshot. They had cut the V-shape from a branch of one of the trees in the garden. Johannes had shown him how to light a fire with just twigs and dry grasses. Johannes was strong, supple, lithe, and full of energy. He could throw a cricket ball with amazing accuracy.

Johannes was the gardener. He mowed the lawns, kept order at the pool and tennis court, and left certain areas more jungle-like, overgrown, thicketed with bamboo and other exotic shrubbery – a playground for Sam. And he could run like the wind. He would give Sam a good headstart but still beat him from the tennis court up to the pool – a serious dash across a wide lawn and up a winding path through the rockery. Johannes would be standing by the finish, the deep end, and Sam would come running up and leap into the pool. They had done this race a number of times. On a hot afternoon, after a taxing foot from the court, it was the best feeling to plunge into the cool waters. Sam remembered the first time they held the Race and he had leapt into the pool.

'Come on in, Johannes,' shouted Sam. 'The water's great!'

Johannes stood at the edge. He was barefoot, wearing brown khaki shorts and a white singlet. His arm muscles were sharply defined, dark ebony, glistening with sweat. He was lean, spare, fast and agile as a cat. He clapped his hands together and said: 'No Sam! I can't do it. My business with the pool is to clean it and make sure the filters are working.' And he remained standing pool-side, with the sun behind his back casting him into a silhouette, in the attitude of a servant, waiting, while Sam splashed about in the pool.

His mother and father had told him that Johannes was the house boy. Sam thought this an odd title since Johannes was never actually in the house. He looked after the grounds, and there were a lot of them to look after. The house (the cleaning and cooking) was the domain and responsibility of the house girls: Lydia and her young cousin Sara. All the 'natives' lived in the compound, an outhouse of four rough rooms that was attached to the main house by high walls but separated from it by a spacious courtyard. The back entrance to the house was in the courtyard, up a flight of stone steps to a stoop that led to the kitchen.

Sam went back to his desk and looked at fractions and a tiresome arithmetic problem: If an army of 10,000 ants lost 43.7 percent of its forces in a battle with another army of 15,000 ants which lost 33.3 percent, how many ants would be left on the field after the battle? Suddenly, he realised how to solve the problem; it wasn't so hard. You had to know that 33.3 % was one-third, and that sort of thing. Decimal points and fractions loomed large in his education. He polished off the problem and there was still 20 minutes until supper, after which his parents would go to the theatre.

The ants reminded him of how he had recently come across Johannes doing something odd on the back stoop. It was dark and Sam had just come in, stumbling from the garden, after some jungle adventure involving a lion, encountered in a clearing, and a desperate getaway up a tree. He had fallen out of the tree when he overestimated the strength of a branch. The lion had vanished and Sam limped home through the gathering darkness. He went via the old oak tree and visualized his treehouse up there in its stout branches.

It was dark when he finally got to the house. He stood in the gloom of the courtyard assessing his condition. He tried his leg. It hurt a bit but he would be okay. The cuts on his knees were nothing, a perennial feature, anyway. He felt the lump on his head and then noticed Johannes scooping stuff into a skillet. The stoop, a kind of stage in front of the dark auditorium of the courtyard, was lit up with a reddish golden light from the kitchen. Johannes cut a fantastic figure in the dramatic lighting. Sam forgot his bruises and stared. He walked forward a few paces and saw that Johannes was scooping ants into the skillet. They were large flying ants, which had just lost their wings, and were now crawling all over the stoop, wing-less and vulnerable.

'Why are you putting ants in a frying pan, Johannes?' asked Sam.

'To fry them!'

'What?'

Johannes grinned. 'And have them on toast. They're delicious,' he said.

Sam was horrified. That wasn't baked beans on toast by any stretch of the imagination! 'You eat ants! On toast?' he squeaked.

'Of course, they're nutricious, and tasty,' said Johannes simply, as though it were obvious. Sam was impressed but decided he wouldn't try eating ants on toast just yet. The diet was another confusing thing about Africans. Johannes said they also ate other insects and worms. Apparently, you could buy them like a packet of crisps for five cents in the black townships. Sam was thrilled that he had a friend who ate ants and worms, although he himself decided he would stick to stuff like baked beans on toast, sausage and mash, Shepherd's Pie, and so on, for now.

After a quick review of his treehouse plans, Sam went down to supper. He wondered if Johannes was still cowering under the house. Peter, his two-year-old brother, was being fed by Sara. She would soon bundle him off to his cot, singing Zulu lullabies and clicking away at him in the strange, percussive articulation of the Zulu tongue. He could see his mother at the end of the dining-room table. Her head was in her hands. His father intercepted him at the bottom of the stairs. 'Sam, a word, man to man!' he said, urgently. 'Your mother's had a bit of a scare, a nasty moment down near the village. So behave, be kind to her… And don't ask any difficult questions about this bloody country!'

'What happened?'

His father looked tired. 'Your mother is an actress,' he said. 'She will of course have to tell you all about the drama herself, and relive the experience for all our benefits. Let's go in.'

They went into the dining-room and sat down. Sam was given to understand by his mother that she had been mugged while strolling back from the village, where there was a small shopping mall, a café, a dentist and a chiropractor. She had been to the dentist for a filling and was feeling a bit woozy. She was walking back home round the golf course, and suddenly, in a shady spot, a black man appeared from the shadows, snatched her purse and ran off.

'Imagine my shock,' said his mother.

'What did you do?' asked Sam.

'I screamed, of course!'

'Of course!' said his father.

'What would any woman do in such circumstances? I screamed at the top of my lungs: STOP THIEF!'

It so happened that his mother's practised dramatic projection managed to conjure up a nearby police car and the thief was apprehended. 'My God,' said his mother. 'What those two white policemen did to that poor black man…' She suddenly burst into sobs. Sam looked down at his plate. He didn't like to see his mother crying. He didn't know what to say. At last, she dried her eyes and continued her narrative. The black thief, 'a dirty kaffir', according to the policemen, was severely beaten in front of her eyes and then bundled, bloodied and bruised, into the patrol car.

'I feel so guilty,' she said. 'I would gladly have given him the 20 rand I had in my purse. What a paltry amount to get beaten to death for.'

Sam was interested. 'Did he die?' His father glared at him. His mother ignored the question and went on, 'If only he had asked. Instead, he received a brutal beating that I brought down upon his head. I told the police that! I told them I would've given the poor man the money… gladly… I would have given it!'

His mother complained strenuously to the police before they drove off that their arrest methods were far too robust. The senior policeman looked at her strangely. 'Thank you, Mrs. Green,' he said. 'If we need to contact you about this case, we have your address.' Then the police car drove off.

'I told them I'd complain about their brutality to a higher authority. You should have seen the look that policeman gave me! He said: “We don't encourage love of kaffirs round here.”'

The conversation that followed didn't interest Sam. It was funny how his parents talked about things as if he wasn't there. Of course, he didn't understand everything they spoke about. It seemed the gravity of the situation precluded his regaling the family with his exploits in the cricket match. His parents usually discussed the Civic Centre Theatre, which his father had been managing since their arrival in Johannesburg, and where his mother acted. Sam didn't usually listen to their dramas, back and onstage, but his ears pricked up when he heard his mother mention Johannes' name. She told her husband that Lydia and Sara were worried about Johannes' papers and could the 'Baas' – i. e. his father – kindly do something about it. What papers? wondered Sam. Then the subject got changed. His father began ranting about some critic who had written in an Afrikaans newspaper that he was a 'political undesirable', and that the 'pornographic liberal filth' he was pedalling at the Civic Centre had no place in a white South Africa. His father was indignant. 'Philistine!' he roared. 'Well, he obviously doesn't like Harold Pinter, does he?' his mother remarked, studying her eyes in her compact and powdering her nose.

All of this went over Sam's head. He finished his dessert – apple crumble and custard – and asked to be excused. Tension was in the air. The apple crumble and custard hadn't tasted as good as it usually did. Lydia cleared the table and gave her mistress an imploring look, but her mistress was too busy staring at herself in the mirror of her compact. Sam said good night to his parents, donating a peck on the cheek to each. About twenty minutes later, his parents got in the Mercedes and drove to the theatre.

The next day, after school, Sam was dying to ask Johannes what the pantomime the day before in the space under the house had been about. He also wanted to ask him about the treehouse, but the house boy had made himself scarce. He asked Lydia and Sara, but they were vague about his whereabouts. 'Some errands, Master Sam,' they told him. Perhaps it had something to do with materials for the treehouse. Johannes had gone off to get them. That was it! But Sam crept into the gloom of Shaka's cave just to check that Johannes wasn't there, engaged in some secret rite, under the house, protecting it with special Zulu spells and charms. Then he wandered around his domain, through the apricot trees, and past the grapevines where he stopped and plucked a small bunch of red grapes. He chewed the grapes, spat out the pips, and surveyed the sturdy oak where his treehouse would soon be lodged. He moved across the lawns, the vast sun-burnished grasses of the veld, and felt the baking afternoon heat on his back. He crept stealthily through the corn and circled the jackarandas. They made long shadows across the front lawn. He studied the dark red earth for signs – the hunter in his element, near the great Limpopo. The pool shimmered in the sunlight and he looked at himself and the reflection of the sky in its waters. Where was the Zulu? He sighed and trailed back to the house to do his homework.

When Sam came home from school the following day, he found out why Johannes had been so frightened. He turned into the gate and stopped, abruptly. He stood in the shadow of one of the gate pillars. He was startled and alarmed by what he saw. There were two police cars in the drive and two young white policeman stood stiffly by one of the vehicles. An older policemen was sitting on the stoop, talking to his father. He saw his mother come out and stand in the front doorway. She lit a cigarette and listened to the conversation between her husband and the police officer.

Sam decided to make a discrete entrance. He crept down the wall along the perimeter of the property. The jackarandas and the thick, luxuriant shrubbery hid his careful hunter-like progress. On his way to the house, he glanced to the right and was horrified to see Johannes sitting in one of the police cars. What was going on? The house boy's face looked as if he had received a beating. He had a blank expression and a far away look in his eyes. Sam stepped on a branch. It cracked sickeningly. He looked quickly at the policemen but they hadn't heard anything. He continued creeping through the foliage, and soon managed to get within earshot of the serious conversation on the stoop.

'Officer, I am terribly sorry for the mix-up, the hiccough with Johannes' paperwork,' said his father, lighting a cigarette from the one he was smoking. 'I'll fix it and gladly pay a fine for my… erm… administrative negligence.'

The policemen smiled a thin, mirthless smile. Sam was watching the scene, concealed in a bush near the stoop. He knew all the garden's strategic hiding places and how to get to them stealthily. He saw a cruel glint in the lawman's ice-cold eyes, and he knew from his heavy accent that he was Afrikaans. 'Mr. Green, there will be no fine,' he said.

'Ah, right,' said Father. 'Just get the paperwork sorted and stamped, then, eh?'

The policeman stood up. 'Mr. Green, I don't think you quite grasp the gravity of the situation, how serious this matter is.' He paused for dramatic effect and pointed an accusing finger. 'You, Mr. Green, were responsible for this kaffir. And it transpires this native has no right to be here at all. He has no pass! The kaffir girls are legal. They have their passes. But this kaffir, Johannes, has no pass.'

'No pass, and so?' said Mother.

The lawman looked round and took notice of the woman standing at the front door. 'Mrs. Green,' he said. 'Your husband has committed a serious crime. And by the way, we've had our eye on him for some time. We're putting a stop to his liberal and subversive tendencies. He's going down.'

'Going down?' said Father.

'For TEN YEARS,' bellowed the policeman.

'Prison!' gasped Mother, and then she fainted. During the ensuing fuss Sam melted into the house via the courtyard and the back door. Lydia and Sara were in the kitchen. They were crying. Then Peter, who had been having a nap, started yelling. Sara rushed out with Sam on her heels. They ran up the stairs together, Sam right behind the house girl, like two children racing up a hill. At the top, Sara stopped and said to him, coldly, a little out of breath, 'You didn't get Johannes a pass! It's very, very bad for Johannes… and the Baas! Prison! Lord save us! Very bad… Shocking! They beat Johannes!' She wiped a tear from her eye and went off to deal with Peter.

Sam drifted into his room, feeling numb, confused, and frightened – a helpless bystander at a calamity. Tears welled in his eyes and there was a tight knot in his stomach. He stared out of the window, out over Rork's Drift and across the burnished grasslands, at the sturdy oak that wouldn't be housing any treehouse any time soon.

The Russian Teacher

Summer blazed in Moscow – late August, a couple of months after his mother's funeral in Blighty. It was a sultry day in the Russian capital with blue skies and high cumulus clouds over the Kremlin. John Stevens was walking fast from the metro at the bottom of Tverskaya Street towards Red Square. Looming to his left was the massive block of the Four Seasons hotel; on the right a series of semi-circular domes caught the eye. They reminded John of flying saucers. They were, in fact, light sources for the huge subterranean Okhotniy Ryad shopping mall: retail outlets on three underground floors. Streams of shoppers were going in and out, like ants to and from an ant hill.