I held the rifle in the crook of my arm. I was playing with the safety-catch, flicking the little lever up and down. Safety on, safety off, safety on, safety off. We were looking for vervet monkeys. I was nine. My cousin was there, he also had a rifle, he was fourteen. And our friend Ashwin had come along for the walk. Ashwin didn’t have a rifle. His father was one of the workers on the farm. We were two white kids, armed with rifles, walking through the South African veld with a Black kid. Ashwin must have been my age, maybe a little older. He was small for his size.
Safety on, safety off.
We walked down towards the river where we knew the monkeys liked to spend their mornings. We walked slowly. I was hopeful that we’d shoot one. For each monkey we shot we were paid 5 Rand. 5 Rand was a lot of money when I was a kid. For a baboon we were promised R10. We were carrying .22 rifles. There was no way we were going to kill a baboon with a bullet the size of Christmas beetle. And anyway, for baboons you had to go into the mountains. But monkeys, they were everywhere, and they ate fruit from the orchards and destroyed water pipes that carried water to the camps where the livestock grazed.
The way my older cousin was carrying his rifle it was clear he didn’t think we’d be firing a shot that day.
Safety on, safety off.
I had never shot a monkey. Vervet monkeys live in troops. And they have sentries. While the troop is relaxing or foraging for food, there’s always one or two who sit on the highest tree branches and keep look out. These scouts see us coming from miles away and they keep the troop moving away from us, making sure that we don’t close the distance between us. Vervet monkey troops are like rainbows.
But today, today it was going to be different. My cousin and I had been on the farm for a week. My grandfather had brought us. This was his farm. He’d been born here. Most nights, after dinner, he’d sit in his reclining chair. When he sat on that chair, he’d remind us that, that was the very spot where he’d been born. This was his farm. Grandfather had his coffee mug, his dinner knife, his seat on the porch, his reclining chair in front of the fire. Scattered throughout the house were ownership prompts, reminders of who all this belonged to.
My grandfather was an understanding man. Newcomers who didn’t know any better were allowed an ‘ownership’ transgression. Maybe they poured their morning coffee in grandfather’s mug, or unknowingly sat in his chair; all very innocent. It fell on us veterans of the ways of the farm to be quick and point out that the chair, the mug, the knife weren’t for them, and we’d politely offer them an alternative, and then hurriedly remove any evidence of the transgression. However, there were times when we were too slow. I remember two occasions when an unsuspecting visitor found themselves on the wrong side of these unknowable rules. Both involved someone sitting on grandfather’s chair on the porch. On the first occasion grandfather quietly just found himself another chair without saying anything. When we arrived, he glared at us, and my cousin and I, we kindly suggested to the newcomer that they may be more comfortable sitting on this other chair. When the person moved grandfather stood slowly and walked over to his chair to assume his rightful place. The second time it happened, grandfather didn’t bother to sit elsewhere. Instead, he summoned me from my room on the other side of the house to come and resolve the misunderstanding.
If you transgressed a second time, you wouldn’t be invited back to the farm.
My grandfather also had a habit of signing everything he built. There’s a water tank behind the house. The little rainwater that happens to fall onto the roof of the house is funnelled into aluminium gutters and siphoned into this sun-bleached, asbestos water tank behind the house that sits on a cement plinth. On the corner of that plinth a date and my grandfather’s initials are written in the cement while it was still wet. His initials and dates litter the farm. My grandfather was into tagging long before graffiti was even a thing.
Grandfather died years ago, but on his farm his name everywhere. He’s everywhere.
During this specific holiday my grandfather, my cousin and I carried four wooden legs, and several heavy planks of wood along a ramshackle path to a faraway camping ground that hid near the edge of the north-western boundary line of the farm. When we arrived, we assembled a wooden table with screws, nails, and a hammer. We camped there for a couple of nights, ‘testing out’ the table as we prepared meals used it store items we didn’t want sitting on the ground.
That table is barely standing now, but grandfather’s initials are still visible near the corner edge, written in black marker.
There’s a spring near the camping site. I always thought that if the end of the world should come, I would go there and wait it out. When COVID did arrive, I found myself in Australia, unable to get to my isolated hiding spot. It’s hard to predict the end of the world.
Safety on, safety off.
Grandfather is back at the house. As the crow flies, we’re about 4 kilometres away from the house. We’re quiet, hoping that the vervet monkeys won’t hear our approach. They’ve been moving away from us for over an hour now. And I’m getting bored. I’m daydreaming about a girl who I go to school with. I wonder if she will ever come to the farm to go camping with me. She lives in Brazil so it’s unlikely.
I think about the 8-hour drive that awaits me tomorrow. Me, my cousin, and my grandfather in his white station wagon.
The rifle cracks. At first it doesn’t register that it was the gun in my hands that went off. I look down, slightly dazed. I wasn’t expecting that. My eyes follow the barrel to where the gun was aimed when it went off. I feel sick. The gun was pointed down and to my left. I was walking alone on the right-hand-side of the dirt road, in the wheel gutter. Ashwin was following my cousin on the other side of the road, walking in the other wheel gutter. The bullet I’d fired missed Ashwin’s leg by an inch. Had I held that rifle slightly more to the left that bullet would have hit Ashwin in the calf.
My cousin grabs the rifle from me, checks the safety is on, asks me what I was doing. He’s older and takes control of the situation. Ashwin, the small Black kid who wanted to come for the walk, to play with us is crying. I’m sure he thinks that I was trying to shoot him. I walk over to him. I’m shaking. He’s my friend. I don’t want him thinking that I would intentionally shoot him. I put my hand on his shoulder, I apologise. It doesn’t stop him crying. He steps away from me, slips out from under my hand. I remember his eyes wide, not with fear but with horror. This was South Africa in the middle of the 80’s and I was white. And I could see his thoughts racing. He thought I had fooled him into believing we were friends.
South Africa followed that bullet, that small .22 bullet, no bigger than a Christmas beetle and settled between the three of us. A boy whom I called my friend, who had ignored the fact that his skin shade wasn’t like mine saw that I had a gun, and that he didn’t. Three boys stood in a circle, in darkness. One was crying, the other was solving for what to tell the adults while the third was trying to come to terms with the fact that his carelessness had turned off the lights. A thoughtless squeeze of a trigger had dismembered the wilful dissent of three kids who wanted to be friends more than they wanted to be different, in a world where difference was everything. And the lie that I wanted to shoot a Black kid felt more real to that kid than the fact that I had been a stupid 9-year-old who should never have been holding a gun.
And I felt my skin and he felt his.
Ashwin joined a gang a few years later. He died before he reached his 20’s.