by Ben Trovato
So I went into the toyshop and walked to the back and began tapping at the wall to see if there was a secret door leading to the bar. One of the sections sounded hollow so I banged on it. Lo, it opened. I took a step forward.
“Is this the portal that leads to the beer?” I enquired. A woman with a face that would have frightened the Gorgon stared me down. “This is the door to the stockroom.”
Perhaps there was some sort of secret handshake. I put my hand out and she closed the door. Wrong move. I was probably expected to answer three questions. But then why didn’t the keeper of the portal ask them? Silly cow. I shall have her fired. No. Even better. I shall buy the toyshop and stock it with alcohol. I will probably have to remove the toys. That’s it. A toyshop that sells alcohol but no toys. Or maybe alcohol that’s designed to resemble toys. Play with your drink. Drink your toys. You could unscrew Barney the Dinosaur’s head, stick a straw down his neck and suck on a purple cocktail. It’s brilliant. I’ll be rich in no time at all.
So, anyway. I thought I’d take a look around. Lego seems big this year. When I was a child, the options were limited. You could build a small red house with a green roof and a yellow door or you could leave the bricks lying outside your sister’s bedroom. Today, you could build Nkandla out of Lego. It would have been a lot cheaper. And certainly more colourful.
Something called a Belch & Barf Power Dragon took my fancy. It sounds like me on a Friday night, except this one comes with a Rolling Flame Attack. If I had this fantastic feature, I would dare anyone to shout at me about coming home at an hour ill befitting a man of my age.
I liked the Airbus A380 with detachable wings. Perhaps for the child who enjoys living dangerously by pretending to fly near Russian airspace. There’s nothing like realistic debris to crank up the fun. The box says, “Humane design for children.” And, “The more you play with me, the happier I will be.” I’ve tried that line before. It doesn’t work.
In the gun section, there’s a die-cast eight-shot revolver for R139. What a rip-off. I can get a genuine Glock 26 on the Cape Flats for less. Almost new. One careless owner. Slight damage to the serial number.
For the boy or girl who dreams of one day going to war, there’s a big section devoted to military hardware and personnel. Since it’s all made in China, you’d think the Red Army would feature prominently. Inexplicably, it’s all Navy Seals and Special Forces. The little plastic soldiers are very lifelike and their intelligencegathering capabilities are on a par with the real troops who keep rescuing hostages by getting them killed.
“Listen, buddy. Thanks to us, you are no longer being held by Yemeni terrorists.”
“Yes. But I’m also dead.”
“Oh, I see. You want your freedom and your life. Next time we won’t bother.”
Indeed. There is no pleasing some people. I suspect that’s why you get parents who deliberately bring their children into toyshops two weeks before Christmas. They are terrified of waking up on Boxing Day to find the little bastards stabbing at their jugulars with the sharp end of a Power Ranger because they didn’t get the Ninja Turtles they asked for.
The kids don’t get it. Why are you asking me if I want the radio-controlled dune buggy or the radio-controlled tarantula? Obviously I want both. What? I must point to just one? Fine. I’ll take the spider. What do mean I can’t have it now? Why the hell not? What’s that you’re writing down? Who do you work for? Fuck this. I want new parents.
Since they’re only five and can barely articulate the need to poo, they drop to the floor and thrash about and scream as if a sniper got them in the leg.
I moved to another aisle and found a model self-service gas station with a grinning white boy operating the pump. There’s also a cash register with a white girl behind it. These are not things you see in real life in South Africa, but when you do, you’ll know the country is going down the tubes. Or headed for greater things. I can’t tell anymore.
Disney, Barbie and Dream Dazzlers are going head-to-head on a range of, well, heads. Styling heads, they’re called. Dolls that have been amputated at the shoulders. Each comes with 14 implements to style their hair. In a decade from now, the unemployed will consist largely of women with perfectly coiffured hair standing at the robots waving combs at us in a vaguely threatening manner.
I overheard one kid say to his mother, “But it’s only R399!” Spoilt brat. I once got a peach pip and two chicken feathers for Christmas and I was so grateful that my mother let me wash the dishes for the rest of the year.
My Friend Cayla is blonde, blue eyed and costs R999. “The smartest friend you’ll ever have!” says the box. Given our education system, there’s every reason to believe it.
All the dolls except one were white. The black doll was called a Waterbaby. “Feels like a real baby!” What you mean is it feels like a real white baby. Obviously the instructions are different. No dummies or bottles for this little succubus. “Fill baby with warm water.” Are all black people full of warm water? I think the men might be, going by the number lining the freeways with their willies out. We should call them weeways.
Eventually I was asked to leave the toyshop. Not because I got caught looking up Barbie’s skirt. I would never do something like that. I had simply overstayed my welcome.
The rest of the mall was full of people with downturned mouths, dead eyes and the sartorial nous of a Northern Cape goat farmer. Aware that their shopping experience might include being stabbed or shot, nobody bothers dressing up anymore. No point risking the good clothes. Blood is so damnably hard to get out. I’ll just dress like a factory worker from Uzbekistan.
The very old seem to be allowed out at this time of year in greater numbers than usual. They have a lot of questions about stuff that doesn’t concern them.
“But what does it do?”
“It’s a dongle, madam.”
“A what?
“A DONGLE! It connects you to the internet.”
“Internet?”
At this time of year, it’s quite acceptable to elbow the elderly aside. Some of them probably still enjoy a bit of the rough stuff. Good luck.
LOYALTY CARDS – A SEASON TICKET TO HELL
All eyes were on America as voters streamed to the polls. And there was widespread rejoicing when the results came in. That’s right, folks. California, Massachusetts, Maine and Nevada voted to legalise marijuana for recreational use. They certainly need the weed because it looks like The Creature is going to serve his full term.
“Good morning, Assassinations R Us. We are experiencing high volumes of calls right now. Please hold the line for the next available assassin.”
I’m still trying to understand how nearly 60 million Americans voted for Donald Trump to become the most powerful man on the planet. That’s almost 50 per cent of the electorate. Or, in their case, the expectorate. They went into the voting booths and spat out their venom. Sure, it was a broken socio-political system that poisoned them in the first place, but the right person to fix things would have been Bernie Sanders. The Democrats have only themselves to blame for losing the White House to a confederacy of dunces. The dumbing down of America is complete and Jarvis Cocker’s 2006 anthem “Cunts Are Still Running the World” has never seemed more appropriate.
It’s all smoke and mirrors and sleight of hand, anyway, and it’s becoming harder to judge what’s really in our best interests. Political shysters and corporate shills are up on their soapboxes vying for our attention, our money and our votes. Turn on the radio or television and you’ll find chiselling dissemblers of every stripe shouting about what’s good for us, why we need this more than that, why one god is better than the other.
Extremism is the new apathy and we can expect to see a blind lashing out at seen and unseen enemies the world over. Speaking of irrational behaviour, I once had a girlfriend who asked me to shoot her if she ever got a Clicks ClubCard. She even had the gun for it. I found the idea rather exciting and suggested she pay for me to go on some sort of
shooting course. She got quite angry at this point, not because I’d asked her to pay, but because I’d have to be a dribbling moron to miss. Apparently I wouldn’t be taking her to the woods and setting her free, then stalking her and firing whenever a clear shot presented itself. Apparently I’d do it at home, while she was asleep. That didn’t sound very sporting at all and I had to inform her that all deals were off. She wouldn’t have sex with me for a week after that. Well, it felt like a week. It was probably only an hour.
I never really understood why she had such a pathological aversion to a Clicks card. Yes, getting any store card is an appallingly middle-class thing to do, but then so is recycling, and we don’t necessarily believe the garbage-separators who live among us should die. They’re a pain in the arse, sure, but they do have a right to live. Besides, if we’re going to elevate prejudice to that level, I’d say we start with the gluten intolerant.
But it’s more than just a bourgeoisie thing. Having a “loyalty” card in your wallet marks you as a sucker. You’re one step away from sending money to that handsome Nigerian you befriended on Facebook and whose sister will almost certainly die if she doesn’t get a new set of kidneys.
When it comes to the mugging that passes for commerce these days, there is no such thing as loyalty. They want your money and there are no depths to which they won’t stoop to get it. Shop owners factor in discounts when they set their mark-ups. Their profits are not only unaffected by giving you a pittance off your purchase, but they stand to make even more money because, with that piece of plastic in your wallet, you’re emotionally conditioned to not shop anywhere else.
It’s the questions that annoy me more than the cards. Tellers at an increasing number of chain stores mumble something as you start unpacking the over-priced rags and artery-thickening filth from your trolley. I get caught every time. “What’s that?” I say, leaning in to the cashier. I suspect they’re asking if I have a card, but because they’re mumbling I’m not absolutely certain that they’re not saying, “Your fly is undone” or “Would you like to go for a drink when my shift ends?”
There should be no questions at this stage of the transaction. Minimal eye contact and no heavy sighing. Just start ringing it up. If I have a card and forgot to produce it, that’s my problem. And if I have 17 items, don’t ask if I want a bag. It’s unlikely I would prefer to make nine trips to the car carrying everything by hand. If there are questions to be asked, I’ll do the asking. It’s called Pick n Pay, not Pick n Interrogate n Pay.
I bought hundreds of rands worth of groceries the other day. After paying, the teller pointed at the slip. “You get R1.40 off the next time you shop here.” I threw my hands into the air with a cry of “Praise Jesus!” before sinking to my knees and tearfully thanking management for their extraordinary generosity.
Be on your guard. Christmas is a shell game and there’s a lot of baiting and switching going on at this time of year. You might think that “Buy any 3 gifts & get the cheapest 1 FREE” is the deal of the century, but it’s not. Your reptile brain is responding only to the word “free”. That’s why it’s capitalised. It’s psychotypographically designed to turn your anterior cingulate cortex into the equivalent of a Labrador coming across a bowl of lightly boiled chicken thighs.
The other thing is that if you give someone a gift set, he or she will forever wonder if that was the free one. You might as well give them anthrax for all it says how much you care. I say he or she, but I really mean she. He wouldn’t care what it was or how much you paid for it. He knows he’s lucky to be getting anything considering the way he’s behaved all year.
PAINFULLY SCHOOLED IN THE FINE ART OF SADISM
There are certain phrases one hears when young that, decades later, still have the capacity to chill one to the bone. One of them is, “Bend over.”
It’s not what you might think. I have never met a Catholic priest, nor was there an Uncle Pervy in my family. I have been frisked and body-searched a couple of times, sure, but that’s when I was older and the officers were kind enough to keep the search external.
The instruction to bend over came, instead, from the headmaster of my high school. A cross between the Marquis de Sade and Genghis Khan, he was a firm believer in the principles of democracy. Not, obviously, to the extent that he believed black people should be given the vote. But certainly he felt his sheltered white charges deserved the right to choose the cane with which they’d prefer to be whipped. Not being whipped at all wasn’t among the options.
There were four canes he kept behind his door. Probably inside a hollowed-out rhino’s foot. They ranged from thin to thick, much like my classmates. The thinnest stung like buggery – not, as we have established, that I know what buggery feels like – while the thickest was more of a blunt trauma experience. Both left bleeding welts. Since this wasn’t a private school, none of us particularly cared about the aesthetic appearance of our bottoms. This was a government school. We were discouraged from exploring our sensitive sides, instead being shamed and bullied into playing the apex homoerotic sport of rugby.
But a mere lashing wasn’t enough for the Marquis. Upon entering his inner sanctum – that would be his office, not his orifice – he would briefly list the charges. Homework not done. Cheating in class. Hair too long. Legs too short. We had more chance of getting justice were a real kangaroo in charge of that particular court.
Bending over for one’s beating wasn’t nearly enough to slake Genghis’s insatiable hunger to punish the young. One was also expected to put one’s head beneath his desk. The reflexive straightening up upon each lash meant a righteous crack on the back of the nut.
Ah, yes. I’m very proud of my alma mater. St Bastard’s in Durban North produced a solid crop of brain-damaged sadomasochists with low self-esteem, many of whom went on to carve out careers in journalism. More bludgeon than carve, to be honest.
Then, just as things were about to fall apart, that rough beast Democracy, its hour come around at last, slouched into Pretoria to be born. The National Party government had by then instructed white schools to select one of four models – A, B, C or D. Almost all opted for C – semi-autonomous with additional funding from parents and alumni.
The ANC has since scrapped the classification, but whenever white people come across a functioning government school, they nod and whisper, “Must be model C. Bet the principal’s one of us.”
A newspaper headline caught my eye this week. It said, “Top Limpopo school goes to the dogs.” When I was a bright-eyed newshound at the peak of my bacchanalian powers, the low-slung snarling alcoholics on the subs desk were friends of neither cliché nor idiom. A headline of that ilk, were they to write it, would almost certainly have led into a story about a dog school.
I bought the paper on the strength of this headline because I believe dogs should go to school. In the foreseeable future, the smart people of Earth will be living on other planets in our solar system under the gentle but firm hand of Emperor Musk. Dogs, being smarter than humans, will have to take charge. But they do need a certain amount of schooling first. Their table manners are atrocious and their driving skills even worse. Their unpleasant butt-sniffing, territory-marking habits also need work. What do I care, though? I’ll be stardust blowing about on the sunny side of Uranus by then.
Returning to the newspaper and its lazy headline. The metaphorical dogs are in fact pupils at the once-exalted Settlers Agricultural High School. They appear to have turned rogue.
Raymond Read, an old boy, warned his former classmates against visiting the school. “There’s barely anything left to see,” he cried. “You’ll just end up ruining your day.”
Some parents have begun pulling their kids out, saying the former model C school is awash in sex, drugs and alcohol. This sounds like the best school ever. Not for me, obviously. I wouldn’t want anything to do with sex, drugs or alcohol if it meant also having to write exams. Or wear a tie.
The fees are around R30 000 a year. Presumably th
e school governing body came to this figure after factoring in the cost of rehab and childbirth. Oh, wait. There is no governing body. They disbanded. This is also good news. A word like “governing” harsh any kid’s mellow.
The school, and indeed the town itself, might never have existed had it not been for Lord Alfred Milner’s rural settlement policy after the Anglo-Boer war. You spoke English and wanted a farm, Uncle Alfred would give you one. Thanks to you and your ilk, Alf, we’re the ones who now have to bear the brunt of Julius Malema’s orchestrated outrage.
Founded in 1969, Settlers was the only English-medium high school in the province offering agriculture as a subject. Along, presumably, with your bog-standard Eurocentric studies underpinned by hollow doctrines of imperialism and empire.
The school badge has an owl sitting on a plough, symbolising the importance of ensuring that birds also do their share of work around the place. Their motto – “non nobis sed posteris” – means “Get off your arse and stop being a nobhead”.
There’s not much information on the town. An advert for Settler’s Service Station says, “Purchasing a tractor is not a matter to be taken lightly.” It’s what I’ve been telling people for years but they just laugh and walk away. Sometimes they run.
There are four residences accommodating just over 400 boys and girls “in a safe rural environment”. This must be one of the few places in South Africa where it’s safer to be in a rural environment than on school grounds.
“We try to create an atmosphere of a home away from home,” warbles their website. “Learners are encouraged to bring their own colourful duvets and pillows and even bright curtains.” Of late, learners are encouraged to bring their own Rizla papers, vodka and K-Y Jelly. Progress is a marvel to behold.