‘The trees,’ he says, looking up, wondering at the sky so that the pale underside of his chin was exposed, ‘So tall. How can they be so tall? I remember they’d only just planted them when we were here.’
‘It’s been fifteen years,’ I said to the groom. He was sweating slightly in the Kimberley afternoon. ‘Let’s go inside.’
By land and by air we had gathered together in the old school chapel, where the statues of Saint Joseph and Saint Patrick still gazed down at us (but they were strangely shrunken; they were dwarfed in the afternoon light). And the bride, this beautiful full-grown girl, would swish past the small white statues in her long white wedding dress, and walk on up the aisle with a serene smile on her face. Her father would hold her arm but it would seem to the congregation that she was supporting him instead; he would be bent over like the tokoloshe, dwarfed like Joseph and stunted like Patrick, as brittle and white, with a heart of stone - because he would give her, and give her, and give her away.
But before that, at about three in the morning on the eve of the wedding, the groom and his wedding boys were stepping back from the bar. (’Where were you guys?’ I asked them, interrupting the story as we stood outside the chapel. As they talked they slid their fingers between their shirt collars and the tender flesh of their thickened necks; they scuffed at the gravel with their shiny shoes and smoked cigarettes. Ceremony made them nervous. ‘Oh,’ they said airily, ‘everywhere,’ and doubled over, looking at each other and laughing and then looking grim as the blood tried to circulate back through the cranial arteries, while their adult brains were shrinking and shrinking, preserved in alcohol and dwarfed inside the calcified cups of their skulls.)
Last night was heavy; last night was warm. ‘I bet,’ said one wedding boy lazily to the groom, ‘that I can still take you.’ The groom was outraged. ‘What?’ he said, puffing out clouds of Castle as he slid off his bar stool so that he could face the wedding boy upright. ‘Are you insane, man?’
The other wedding boys knew a challenge when they saw it: they slapped their solid thighs and laughed their deep men’s laughs. One of them snorted beer through his nose: it arced in a stream like a rainbow.
‘I’ll take you right now, you dickhead,’ said the groom. He reached out and shoved the wedding boy’s chest. ‘Where do you want to race?’
‘In the College pool,’ it came back, staggering a little and deadly serious. ‘Just like old times.’
They raced out into the road where their shiny big cars were parked, and then they coughed and roared out into the darkness, all of these boys in their tight new man-skins; they screeched into the black three o’clock, the silent, silent night.
When they got to the school grounds the wedding boys found that the intervening years had thrown up obstacles and spiked fences. ‘Well,’ said the groom, looking doubtful and thrusting out his bottom lip, still shiny with outrage and beer, ‘I don’t know so much about this.’ Behind him the College clock said midnight, but then it always did.
‘What?’ cried the wedding boy, who would have a hand-shaped bruise on his chest in a few hours, and wonder where it came from as he thrust his arms into his clean white shirt. ‘I always knew you were chicken! You’re going to let a little fence like that stop you from skinny-dipping on the night before your wedding? You’re already whipped, boy, that’s what you are!’
The other wedding boys whistled through their teeth and leaned against the fence like night watchmen, their eyes glistening in their sockets and the stars straining to listen.
The groom said, ‘That’s it, buddy,’ and stripped off his socks and trainers. They thudded to the ground in ones and twos as he hoisted himself up and began to claw and thumb shakily up the fence. The boys on the pavement turned their heads to follow him and the fence towered above: the groom was moving like a chameleon, with his fingers curled into fists. The wedding boys also began to strip off their socks and shoes, giggling and falling against one another, and then they followed him up into the sky.
When the spotlight was trained on the groom he was almost at the top, readying himself like a burglar to hoist his new weight over and jump down on the other side. He froze and hoped the way a chameleon does that it will blend into the background.
‘Mannetjie!‘ came the voice out of the dark. ‘Wat dink jy doen jy?‘ The groom peered down with his skin tightening around his organs, but the police were real.
‘I’m getting married tomorrow,’ he said, and the boys below began to laugh.
