AN AFRICAN SOCCER STORY
A SHORT STORY ABOUT A YOUNG BOY’S LOVE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL GAME
Evadeen Brickwood
Copyright 2014 Evadeen Brickwood
Cover: Birgit Böttner
Children of the Moon
Remember the Future Book 1
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Remember the Future Book 2
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Remember the Future Book 3
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referred to in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of the trademarks is not authorized, associated with or sponsored by the trademark owners.
An African Soccer Story
by Evadeen Brickwood
“One, two, three, four…”
Thulani was counting the ceiling lights again. There were eighteen of them. He had counted them three times already, but he was nervous and needed to occupy his mind. Or he would start feeling homesick again.
“Twelve, thirteen…”
They were square and covered in a thick layer of dust, the lights. The third one and the seventh one from the right didn’t work at all. The second one on the left and the, wait…, the fifth one were filled with dead moths. The ceiling lights were like friends by now, his only friends in this deserted, rundown train station. The darkness outside gave way to grey dawn. In the city the train station would be new and gleaming with the lights hidden in the ceiling. Just like in the movies he had watched about big, glamorous cities. But Thulani didn’t really want the big, glamorous cities. He was only sixteen and until the scout had chosen him for the sports academy, he had been a regular village boy. Doing what village boys do. Kicking a soccer ball around the field and along the roads with the other boys had always been part of it. Now he would have to study how to do it properly, his father said.
Thulani loved soccer. He thought how he couldn’t wait to run off with his cousins and his younger brother Alfred to kick the soccer ball around. Against the wall, into the street and around the neighbor’s house. It made him sad to think that he wouldn’t play with them for a long while. Until the holidays at least.
Grandma had told him that he would be a star and make lots of money and drive a big car. He wasn’t sure he wanted lots of money and a car. Although, buying Neo pretty jewelry and looking into her admiring, grateful eyes, that alone was worth a try. She would surely notice him then. The thought was enough to make him want to get up and run back home. Home.
Of course it would be late, the train. It always was. Not much, but a few minutes, fifteen minutes maybe. Where was he? Oh yes, twelve, thirteen. Thulani counted in his head and marked lamp thirteen in his mind. It had a big crack down one side. An old woman shuffled up the platform, panting heavily. She put down the bulbous basket that she had craftily carried on her head and waited stoically for the 6:42 train to arrive. Just like him.
Thulani looked up at the station clock. It had given up its ghost long ago. He still forgot that he was wearing a watch. A nice new watch, his uncle had given him at the farewell lunch yesterday. He pushed the sleeve of his new jacket back and stared at the watch. It was half past six already. Another thirty minutes farther away from home. He swallowed back tears. He couldn’t possibly cry now, Thulani thought angrily. He had to be grown up. After all, the scout had chosen him for the academy and footballers were real men. They didn’t cry.
There was only one platform between the two tracks. One of the tracks went north and the other one south for all he knew. He would be going south to the city. Where the old woman was going, he hadn’t figured out yet.
She was wrapped in a threadbare brown and green blanket; her shoes were worn and dirty. One of them was missing its shoelace. The woman must have walked far from her rural homestead to reach the station in time. Just like Thulani had. He didn’t recognize her. Perhaps she had just been visiting someone in another village and didn’t live around her. She looked at him now, unsmiling, obviously disapproving of how he lolled lazily on the bench with his feet on the duffle bag. Thulani remembered his good manners and sat up straight.
“Dumela ma.” Thulani greeted the old woman respectfully.
“Dumela monatije. The train will be on time today.”
She sounded tired, but her smile was warm. Not long now and her body would be warm too. The train compartments were usually heated in cold weather like this.
“Yes, ma, it will be on time.”
“Where are you going, young man?”
“Oh, I’m going to the city. To go to…school.”
No need to tell a stranger that he was going to a sports academy. He couldn’t even answer questions about it. Apart from the photographs on the brochures and the letter he carried with him, there hadn’t been much. The old woman fell silent, impressed by the boy who went to school in the big city. Slowly, one by one, other people arrived at the train station. Most of them were workers commuting into town as every weekday morning. Thulani felt warmer in the company of others. He missed his family.
There had been many tears at the party yesterday. He felt uncomfortable just thinking about it. He couldn’t remember when he had been hugged and kissed last by so many family members. His mother had acted as if Thulani would never come back from his trip and planted many desperate kisses on his young face and made a big show of him in the yard.
“Oh my son, my precious son…” She had wailed and found comfort in chitchat with her sisters and sisters-in-law. They had chattered loudly. Some of them were jealous, he knew. Auntie Nomsa from across the street had kept looking at Thulani from the corner of her eyes, while she was talking to two of the other village women. Their sons were just as capable, they were saying, so why had Thulani been chosen over them? It was written all over the women’s faces.
“You’ll buy us lots of nice things, eh?” Auntie Nomsa had come over and flicked his cheek in front of everyone. He‘d felt even more embarrassed.
“Mhm.”
“Ah, he’s too fancy already to answer his elders properly.” Her voice had been too shrill and the other women had shrieked with laughter.
He remembered the horror stories that went around the village of women being unfairly accused of causing ill fortune, of being jealous. Just two years ago, Sophie’s grandmother had been raving at her daughter-in-law Gugu, when lightening had hit her modest shack and set the thatched roof on fire. The fire was put out quickly by the heavy rains that followed and the damage had been small. But Gugu was accused of being jealous of the mielie crop in the yard. The story had taken a long time to die down and Gugu had looked unhappy for months.
But Thulani was a man and men were fairly safe from being accused of witchcraft.
“Let them be,” his father had said yesterday, “their turn will come.”
He often just knew the right thing to say. Who would say the right thing in the city?
They could be a pain, his family. But a good pain, like when he had nursed a sprained ankle or more recently when he’d hurt his knee. Everybo
dy wanted to know all the time how he was doing. Neo had also come to ask if he was better and his heart had jumped. He would miss them terribly. All of them. Even Sophie’s grandmother and auntie Nomsa.
Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen…
When he reached lamp number eighteen, Thulani decided to take a break from counting. He studied the walls of the rundown railway station instead and tested the cold air by breathing out in long deep draughts. White vapor appeared and vanished quickly, mingling with the grey background of dirty glass panels and dirty paint, chipping off the walls here and there. Could have been yellow at some stage, he thought.
Somebody had sprayed a message on a piece of wall opposite the platform. Most of the red word had chipped away with the