Kitchen Boy by Jenny Hobbs Page A

hymn again. They sang it when they went off to war and whistled it when they came home. Johnny was so different. Tougher. More cynical. Ruthless in a way he had never been as a boy, though even then he liked to win. Bowling hard green monkey oranges with Bobby Brewitt down the dirt track to the sawmill, one boy on either side of the middelmannetjie, each desperate for his to go furthest. Firing pellet guns at upside-down tins on the fence posts, yelling ‘Gotcha!’ when they hit one and it spun around.
    Bobby never had a chance against him. Not when they were chasing the mongoose round the grain sacks in the storeroom to see who could grab and hold it without getting bitten, or hitting ripe naartjies in the orchard with long sticks to see how many they could knock down, or even climbing the iron ladders of the railway trucks, Bobby’s playground. Johnny always held the mongoose longer and tallied more naartjies and was first to reach the top of the ladder. And when he told Ma afterwards, she’d clap and say he was her champion – casting sideways looks at his father that went unnoticed. That’s why Johnny rushed off to war the moment he finished school, she realises: to be a real champion. And he’d come home a hero, with medals.
    But she’d noticed the spectres in his eyes and the times when no one could reach him. He refused to talk about what happened when his plane was hit or in the prison camps, though once he’d let slip that he’d seen things so terrible he couldn’t think of them without vomiting. Barbara suspected that he had told Shirley some of it, having seen her sometimes drop the placid cow act and look at him with speculating nurse’s eyes, as though trying to gauge his temperature or whether he’d had a bowel movement.
    An old memory slips into her head, as it has been doing more often these days. What would her life have been like if Maurice had come back? She remembers that night on the screened sleeping veranda where a bed had been made up for him. Johnny was packing his kitbag next door, and their parents were asleep on the far side of the house. Maurice’s pleading hissed in her ear. ‘Please, Barbs. You’ve got to let me do it. I might be killed and I’ve never done it. Please, Barbs. You’re the only girl I can ask.’
    ‘Do you love me?’ The age-old bleat of a cajoled woman. She was fifteen and he was leaving for war in the morning.
    ‘Of course. Yes. I love you. Come on, please, just let me –’ Beseeching as his hands burrowed into her bra and slid up her thighs. ‘Please, Barbs. I love you. My folks love you. I’ll marry you when I get back. Please. Now. Now. ’
    Maurice was a sugar farmer’s son; he and Johnny had gone to boarding school together, so she’d known him for years. Of course she’d let him do it: a furtive coupling that was over in minutes and left her feeling sticky and used. Barbara Kitching, ex-virgin, sucker for sweet talk. If he’d come home, she could have been a sugar farmer’s wife living in luxury, instead of a lonely old elocution teacher with nothing but vivid memories. As she mouths the words of the hymn, she is dying for a cigarette.
    ‘He will make good his right – to be a pilgrim.’ The organ and the voices pause again, then forge on, ‘Since, Lord, thou dost defend – us with thy spirit –’
    On the other side of Barbara, Dr Bridget Kitching listens to her breathing. There’s a noticeable buzz of emphysema, not surprising after all those years of smoking. It’s crazy the way people persist with dangerous habits.
    Bridget has her own demons to deal with today. J J gave her hell about abandoning Hugh and Sam when she went back to medicine and joined a team researching multi-drug-resistant TB at King George V Hospital.
    ‘I didn’t abandon them. Don’t you remember that Hugh divorced me? And of course Sam stayed.’
    ‘You started the rot by leaving them in the lurch. Damn poor show.’ And he’d refused to have anything more