lady in a long white nightdress that clung to her body. She too had very red lips and was smoking a cigarette; the smoke from the cigarette curled up on to the face of the clock where it turned into running writing. The running writing said ‘C to C for satisfaction.’ I had never been up as late as this before and my eyelids felt as though they were made of lead.
The next thing I remembered was Hoppie tucking me into my bunk between the nice clean, cool sheets and the pillow that smelt of starch. ‘Sleep sweet, old mate,’ I heard him say.
The last thing I remembered before I fell asleep again was the deep, comforting feeling of my hands in the boxing gloves. ‘The equalisers’, Hoppie had called them. Peekay had found the equalisers.
FIVE
I woke up early and lay in my bunk listening to the lickity-clack of the rails. Outside in the dawn light lay the grey savannah grasslands; an occasional baobab stood hugely sentinel against the smudged blue sky with the darker blue of the Murchison range just beginning to break out of the flat horizon. The door of the compartment slid open and Hoppie, dressed only in his white shirt and pants with his braces looped and hanging from his waist, came in carrying a steaming mug of coffee.
‘Did you sleep good, Peekay?’ He handed me the mug of coffee.
‘Ja, thanks, Hoppie. I’m sorry I couldn’t stay awake.’
‘No worries, little boetie, there comes a time for all of us when you can’t get up out of your corner.’
I didn’t understand the boxing parlance but it didn’t seem to matter. To my amazement Hoppie then lifted the top of the small compartment table to reveal a wash basin underneath. He turned on the taps and hot water came out of one and cold out of the other. He kept running his fingers through the water until he said the temperature was ‘just right’.
‘When you’ve had your coffee you can have a nice wash and then I’ll take you to breakfast,’ he said.
‘It’s okay, Hoppie, I have my breakfast in my suitcase,’ I said hastily.
Hoppie looked at me with a grin. ‘Humph, this I got to see. In your suitcase you have a stove and a frying pan and butter and eggs and bacon and sausages and tomato and toast and jam and coffee?’ He gave a low whistle. ‘That’s a magic suitcase you’ve got there, Peekay.’
‘Mevrou gave me sandwiches for the first three meals because my oupa didn’t send enough money. Only last night we had a mixed grill when I should have eaten the meat one,’ I said in a hectic tumbling out of words.
Hoppie stood for a moment looking out of the carriage window, he seemed to be talking to himself. ‘Sandwiches, eh? I hate sandwiches. By now the bread is all turned up in the corners and the jam has come through the middle of the bread. I bet it’s peach jam. They alway have blerrie peach jam.’ He turned to address me directly, ‘Where are these sandwiches?’ I pointed to my suitcase on the seat below my bunk. He stooped down and clicked it open and from the case removed the brown paper package tied with coarse string.
‘As your manager, it is my solemn duty to inspect your breakfast. Fighters have to be very careful about the things they eat, you know.’ He unwrapped the parcel, splotches of grease had stained the brown paper. He was right, the bread had curled up at the corners. He removed the slice of bread uppermost on the first sandwich and sniffed the thin brown slices of meat, then he replaced the slice. He dug down to the bottom two sandwiches; the jam had oozed through the middle of the brown bread while the outside edges had curled inwards dry and hard.
‘Peach!’ Hoppie said triumphantly. ‘Always peach!’ He looked up at me, his eyes expressionless. ‘I have sad news for you, Peekay. These sandwiches have died a horrible death, most likely from a disease they caught in an institution. We must get rid of them immediately before we catch it ourselves.’ With that, he slid down the window of the compartment and hurled the sandwiches into the passing landscape. ‘First-class fighters eat first-class food. Hurry up and have a wash, Peekay, I’m starving and breakfast comes with the compliments of South African Railways.’
I flung the blanket and sheet back to get down from my bunk and looked down at my headless snake in horror. Hoppie had removed my pants before putting me to bed. My heart pounded. Maybe it had been dark and he hadn’t noticed I was a Rooinek. If he found out, everything was spoiled, just when I was having the greatest adventure of my life.
‘C’mon, Peekay, we haven’t got all day you know.’ Hoppie pulled his braces over his shoulders.
‘I am still full from the mixed grill last night, Hoppie, I can’t eat another thing, man.’ I quickly pulled the blanket back over me.
‘Hey, you’re talking to me, man, Hoppie Groenewald. Who are you trying to bluff?’ He took a step nearer to the bunk and ripped the blanket and sheet off me in one swift movement. My hatless snake was exposed, not six inches from his face. I cupped my hands over it but it was too late, I knew that he knew.
‘I’m not the next welterweight contender, Mr Groenewald, I’m just a verdomde Rooinek,’ I said, my voice breaking as I fought to hold back my tears. It always happens, just when things are perfect, down comes the retribution.
Hoppie stood quietly in front of me, saying nothing until his silence forced me to raise my downcast eyes and look at him. His eyes were sad, he shook his head as he spoke. ‘That’s why you’re going to be the next champ, Peekay, you’ve got the reason.’ He paused and smiled. ‘I didn’t tell you before, man. You know that bloke who beat me for the title in Pretoria? Well he was English, a Rooinek like you. He had this left hook, every time it connected it was like a goods train had shunted into me.’ Hoppie brought his arms up and lifted me out of the bunk and put me gently down beside the wash basin. ‘But I think you’re going to be even better than him, little boetie. C’mon wash up and let’s go eat, man.’
I can tell you things were looking up all right. Hoppie took me through to the dining car which had a snowy tablecloth on every table, silver knives and forks and starched linen napkins folded to look like dunces’ caps. Even the coffee came in a silver pot with SAR in running writing on one side and SAS done the same way on the other. A man dressed not unlike Hoppie, but without a cap and with a napkin draped across his arm, said good morning and showed us to a small table. He asked Hoppie if it was true that the light-heavy whom he was to fight that night had a total of twenty-seven fights with seventeen knockouts to his credit… a real brawler?
Hoppie said you couldn’t believe everything you heard, especially in a railway dining car. That it was the first he’d heard of it. Then he shrugged his shoulders and grinned. ‘First he’s got to catch me, man.’ He asked him about something called odds and the man said two to one on the big bloke. Hoppie laughed and gave the man ten bob and the man wrote something in a small book.
The man left and soon returned with toast and two huge plates of bacon and eggs and sausages and tomato, just the way Hoppie said it would happen. I decided that when I grew up the railways were most definitely for me.
‘Are you frightened about tonight?’ I asked Hoppie. Although I couldn’t imagine him being frightened of anything, I wanted him to know I was on his side. He had told me how it was with a light-heavy, and it was obvious the man he was going to fight was to him just as big as the Judge was to me.
Hoppie looked at me for a moment and then washed the sausage he was chewing down with a gulp of coffee. ‘It’s good to be a little frightened. It’s good to respect your opponent. It keeps you sharp. In the fight game, the head rules the heart. But in the end the heart is the boss,’ he said, tapping his heart with the handle of his fork. I noticed he held his fork in the wrong hand and he later explained: a left-handed fighter is called a southpaw. ‘Being a southpaw helps when you’re fighting a big gorilla like the guy tonight. Everything is coming at him the wrong way round. It cuts down his reach, you can get in closer. A straight left becomes a right jab and that leaves him open for a left hook.’
Hoppie might as well have been speaking Chinese, but it didn’t matter: like the feel of my hands in the gloves, the language felt right. A right cross, a left hook, a jab, an uppercut, a straight left. The words and the terms had a direction, they meant business. A set of words that could be turned into action. ‘You work it like a piston, with me it’s the right, you keep it coming all night into the face until you close his eye, then he tries to defend what he can’t see and in goes the left, pow, pow, pow all night until the other eye starts to close. Then whammo! The left uppercut. In a southpaw that’s where the knock-out lives.’
‘Do you think I can do it, Hoppie?’ I was desperate for his confidence in me.
