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couldn’t actually sue us for anything. Plus they had insurance, so that was the end of it.
They kicked Abel out of the garage, which I thought was hilarious because the garage,
which was freestanding, was the only piece of the property left unscathed. I saw no reason for
Abel to have to leave, but they made him. We packed up his stuff, put it into our car, and
drove home to Eden Park; Abel basically lived with us from then on. He and my mom got into
a huge fight. “Your son has burned down my life!” But there was no punishment for me that
day. My mom was too much in shock. There’s naughty, and then there’s burning down a
white person’s house. She didn’t know what to do.
I didn’t feel bad about it at all. I still don’t. The lawyer in me maintains that I am
completely innocent. There were matches and there was a magnifying glass and there was a
mattress and then, clearly, a series of unfortunate events. Things catch fire sometimes. That’s
why there’s a fire brigade. But everyone in my family will tell you, “Trevor burned down a
house.” If people thought I was naughty before, after the fire I was notorious. One of my
uncles stopped calling me Trevor. He called me “Terror” instead. “Don’t leave that kid alone
in your home,” he’d say. “He’ll burn it to the ground.”
My cousin Mlungisi, to this day, cannot comprehend how I survived being as naughty as
I was for as long as I did, how I withstood the number of hidings that I got. Why did I keep
misbehaving? How did I never learn my lesson? Both of my cousins were supergood kids.
Mlungisi got maybe one hiding in his life. After that he said he never wanted to experience
anything like it ever again, and from that day he always followed the rules. But I was blessed
with another trait I inherited from my mother: her ability to forget the pain in life. I
remember the thing that caused the trauma, but I don’t hold on to the trauma. I never let the
memory of something painful prevent me from trying something new. If you think too much
about the ass-kicking your mom gave you, or the ass-kicking that life gave you, you’ll stop
pushing the boundaries and breaking the rules. It’s better to take it, spend some time crying,
then wake up the next day and move on. You’ll have a few bruises and they’ll remind you of
what happened and that’s okay. But after a while the bruises fade, and they fade for a reason
—because now it’s time to get up to some shit again.