Another two months passed. I had to study hard at school since I had missed so much in the first two terms. Once, on the weekend, I went to visit my Uncle Vukile in Ottery. He was the uncle I’d met long ago at Mavusi’s funeral, whose cell number I had kept for all this time. He lived in a very poor shack in a tiny informal settlement, so small it did not even have a name. We did not speak much about my parents while I was there. But when I left, he gave me R200 – just like that! ‘Be a good boy, Mbu…’ he said to me. What a kind and generous person!

There were some weekends when I did not join Atie and Yamkela on our ‘walks’ as I had done in the past, because I was doing school work. But both of them remained my best friends. They never teased me about studying all by myself.

Still, I find it hard to forgive myself for the fact that on one particular Saturday evening, 23 October 2010, I once again did not join Atie and our other friends. I stayed behind in my little house, busy reading some stuff for English.

It was after ten o’clock that night when I heard some boys knocking wildly against the main gate and shouting my name: ‘Mbu, Mbu, vula – open! Something bad has happened to your best friend!’

I ran out and opened the gate as quickly as I could. The boys were all talking at the same time and it took me a while to get the full horrible truth: a boy from another gang, Thando, had teased Atie and called his girlfriend a slut. Atie had responded by saying that the mother of Thando was the worst slut of all in Masiphumelele. That, at least, was one version. Another was that Thando had started a fight with Atie over another girl that they had both tried to get together with. Thando had been very aggressive, maybe high on drugs. But Atie, who was younger and smaller, had hit him in the face. And then…

About what happened next everyone agreed: Thando had pulled a knife from his pocket and without any warning, stabbed it into Atie’s chest. Atie had collapsed immediately. Only then did an older neighbour intervene and call the police on his cellphone. The police arrived quickly and called the ambulance. They had just now driven off with Atie to False Bay Hospital, about ten minutes away from our township.

‘And how is Atie doing?’ I asked the boys anxiously. Nobody knew. I put on my jacket, locked the gate and ran with them to the entrance to the township, hoping we might get a lift to the hospital.

When we arrived at the taxi ranks we saw a police van parked there, blue lights flashing. An officer jumped out of the car and stopped us, maybe suspecting us of fleeing the scene. ‘We are friends of the boy who was attacked, and we want to go to the hospital to see him,’ we told the officer.

‘You’re not going anywhere!’ he shouted at us. We looked at each other, knowing that nobody would stop us from going in search of Atie. We were about to run away and take another route when we heard the policeman’s walkie-talkie beeping. A voice was talking from it in Afrikaans, but all the beeps made it difficult to get the sense of what the voice was saying.

Suddenly, the noise stopped, and the policeman looked at us sadly: ‘Hey boys, you don’t need to go anywhere. Your friend passed away on arrival at the hospital…’

We all stood as if paralysed. My brain felt numb. Atie, Atie, my best friend Atie, was dead! He was killed for nothing. Just a month before his sixteenth birthday. Atie, Atie, Atie…

We did not say anything to each other. Each of us walked home alone. When I turned from Pokela Road into our HOKISA road I saw a police van driving slowly towards the township entrance. I recognised Thando in the back of the car.

***

Yamkela suggested that I should write an obituary for our best friend. The funeral was two weeks later on a Saturday. His father was there and all his friends. I read the words aloud and later threw the paper into the grave, before it was filled up with sand. It was a few days later that I asked the Doc if he would help me write a book about my life. If I could ever achieve this, I wanted to dedicate this book to Atie.

To Atie and all the many other kids like him.

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