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the very day of the return as I unpacked in F Dorm, fuming at again being divorced from Dominic, Lukas and Mervy in G, the rumour about the tour reached me. A few hours later, as we stepped into Senior Choir’s first rehearsal, Mathison and Cilliers had made the announcement. Overjoyed, already seeing myself in the major cities of the world, I at once quit sulking about having only Bennie with me in F Dorm. Even to this enormous and’ boring repertoire I can submit, I told myself. Not a negative word. Think positive. It’s in your own hands. Silently I hoped, of course, that we would have loads of free time to spend at the stables and at the river. But in my diary, as if it would come true if it were written in ink, I asserted my resolve to make my contribution to the choir’s success. Instead of homework during prep, I wrote scenes of myself walking through snow in London; eating in dimly lit cafes in Paris and Stockholm where Dominic and I were sure to bowl over our host families and the other patrons with our unusual accents and our charm. In my diary I wrote about visiting the ancient galleries and museums of Holland and England, places that Ma’am and Dominic so often spoke of during Art class and to which I could bring only secondary knowledge gleaned from books. When not engaged in my alphabetical reading of encyclopaedias upstairs in the library, I studied the few texts I could find about the exotic and famous locations where we’d be performing over Christmas and New Year. New Year 1977 — I made a diary entry — you will remember me and my friends eating warm pastries as we walk laughing down the icy canals of Amsterdam. Not watching silly fireworks on the Toti lawn with the Brats and that nouveau riche Uncle Joe.
     
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    At night, unable to sleep after lights-out and, of late, masturbating, tired of reading beneath the sheets, I tried to drift into my dream of floating like a bird or a dandelion seed or anything that could glide, across the brown Mkuzi scrub. If that didn’t work, I went as often as I wished to the Zululand bush where Bernice and Lena returned fortnighdy from boarding school in Hluhluwe to spend the weekend at home. On alternate Friday afternoons after we moved to Umfolozi, Bokkie and I took the Peugeot station wagon and for an hour meandered along the dust road through the Corridor to pick up the girls from the bus at the Hluhluwe Reserve gate. The Corridor was where Bok and the other rangers sometimes came on horseback to dart rhino for the Save the White Rhino Campaign.
    At the approach of another vehicle, our hands automatically went to the window-handles. Winding up, waiting till the white dust was gone, then down again, letting the air spill back into the hot cabin. If we arrived at the gate before the bus, I’d walk around looking at the maids’ crafts. I asked if we could throw coins to the pickanins who stood a distance from the gate, waiting to dance and call ‘Sweeeeets, sceeeeents’ to the tourist cars and buses entering the reserve.
    ‘We don’t have money to wipe our arses and you want to throw coins. You’re just like your father. Forget it,’ Bokkie said and I dreamt of one day showering coins on the poor dancers with their tatty clothes and snotty noses.
    The girls were home for the weekend. Then on Sunday evenings we all returned to the Hluhluwe gate to drop them off I preferred it when the bus driver was off duty and we had to drop them at the hostel in Hluhluwe, as I could then see the comings and goings of the other kids. But invariably the bus was already at the gate, waiting. The forty-seater diesel, empty but for the driver and the two girls waving from the back window into the Peugeot’s headlights and the choking dust, would vanish into the night, not to return for another two weeks. Bernice, already accustomed to boarding in Grade One with Stephanie since the days in Tanganyika from before I could remember, seemed to take to the routine of being away