Read Whitethorn for Free Online Page A

with a crash of glass, and there were these empty half-jack brandy bottles sticking out of pieces of newspaper scattered all over the road. The town kid jumped to his feet, retrieved his bicycle, mounted it and was gone like a rat up a drainpipe. On Monday morning at school he probably expected to get the shit knocked out of him by Fonnie du Preez or one of the other tough kids from The Boys Farm, but instead we all went up and congratulated him. That’s how we discovered that Mevrou went to bed with Doctor Half-Jack.
    The morning following Pissy’s absence was a nightdress morning and Mevrou snorted her ‘ Hurrump !’ and walked straight to his bed and brought her sjambok up and smashed it down on his pillow several times until she was panting, then she said, ‘ Genoeg !’ which means ‘enough’. As in, ‘Look, man . . . I’ve had enough, you hear! Genoeg !’ Then she slammed the sjambok down once more across the pillow as hard as she could so that the whack resounded through the dormitory, making us all jump. If your bum had been that pillow I can guarantee you’d have trouble sitting for days. This time some feathers flew out of the side of the pillow and up into the air. I watched as one was caught by a draught of air and sailed right up past my nose and turned and floated out of the window behind my bed four rows away from Pissy’s pillow.
    â€˜Kobus Vermaak has had an epileptic fit and somebody here is to blame! I want to know who it is! If you don’t tell who hit him then you all going to get in trouble, you hear?’ She looked around, her bloodshot eyes taking in each of us. The fly resting on her tits was moving up and down with her heavy breathing. ‘I don’t want you playing all innocent, hey! Somebody here knows, and if you don’t tell me who it is you all going to get the sjambok !’ She waited but only silence followed. ‘I’m going to ask each one of you, “Did you hit Kobus Vermaak?” and you going to look me in the face and if you done it, I’ll know. It’s no use, you can’t fool me, you hear?’
    I don’t think any of us would have known what an epileptic fit was. Certainly I’d never heard Pissy’s fits given a name like that. In fact, I was a bit surprised that fits had names other than ‘out of the blue’. How would we know one was different to the other? But an epileptic one was obviously bad and if it came about because you hit a person then I was to blame, one hundred per cent. But I had one thing going for me; nobody in the dormitory had seen me do it and I didn’t have to own up, although I wasn’t much good at duplicity. I’d have to try my hardest not to give anything away. But that’s the trouble, in my experience, when you try to conceal you often reveal. I could feel the fear rising up from my stomach, and filling my throat and my knees started to shake and my whole body trembled so that I was a dead giveaway.
    Mevrou started at the top bed and I knew I’d have to try to pull myself together before she got to me, but fear is something that’s hard to control, the harder you try the worse it gets.
    â€˜Dannie van Niekerk, did you hit Kobus?’ she asked. Dannie was the oldest boy in the dormitory, nearly twelve, and almost ready to be transferred to the senior boys’ dormitory.
    â€˜ Nee , Mevrou!’ Dannie shouted out his emphatic denial.
    â€˜Willem Oosthuizen, did you hit Kobus?’
    â€˜ Nee , Mevrou!’ came the equally vehement response.
    She continued down the beds. For once nobody was guilty so they could shout out their denial quick smart and with conviction. Then she came to my bed where I was shaking like a leaf, guilty as sin. I couldn’t even get the words out to confess and I could feel my eyes blurring with tears. I was truly shitting myself and wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d done a job