Girl just stood there, looking like she was seizing up.
“K. I said: you’re up.”
She snapped her head towards Tendeka. Tuned back in. Took her cue, leaned over, standing on tiptoes, and nicked the white ball light as candy-floss, so it floated, spinning, into the middle of the table. Smiled at Ten, and that ball just kept on spinning. Stepped back, set her cue down and started walking over to the bar, to me, while that white ball was still spinning. Damn.
“Hey! What the fuck?”
“Ah c’mon, Ten. You know I gotcha down.”
“What! Game ain’t even started. And what’s with this, man? Party tricks don’t mean shit.”
“It’s over, Ten.”
“You on drugs, Girl? You tweaked?”
“Fuck off, Tendeka.”
Ten shoved his cue at Rob, and rounded on Kendra. “You’re mashed, Girlfriend!” He grabbed her shoulder, spun her round, “C’mon, show me!”
“Kit Kat, baby. Give it a break,” Kendra says.
“Lemme take a look at you. C’mon.”
“Fuck off, Tendeka! Serious!”
People were rubbernecking. Cams too, though in a place like Stones they probably weren’t working too well. Owner paid a premium for faulty equipment.
Jazz was arguing with Ten, defending Kendra now. Not that she needed it. We all knew the girl wasn’t a waster. Even Ten.
Now me, I was a waster. I was skeef. Jacked that shit straight into my tongue, popping candy capsules right into my piercing. Lethe or supersmack or kitty. Some prefer it old-style, pills and needles, but me, the works work best straight in through that slippery warm pink muscle, into the bloodstream and salivary glands. That mouth of yours is the perfect disseminator. But, tell you true? Everything I take is cheap shit. Black-market. Ill legit. Not like sweet Kendra’s high. Oh no, Girl had gone the straightenarrow. All the way, baby. All the way.
“C’mon Ten, back off, man.” Rob was getting nervous. Bartender too, twitching to call his defuser. But Kendra-sweet had had enough, spun on Ten, finally stuck out her tongue at him like a laaitie.
Jazz sighed. “There. Happy now?” But Ten wasn’t. For yeah, sure as sugar, Special-K’s tongue was virgin. Never been pierced by a stud, let alone an applijack. Never had that sweet rush, microneedles releasing slick-quick into the fleshy pink. Never had her tongue go numb so’s you can’t speak for minutes. Doesn’t matter though. Talking’d be least of your worries, supposing you had any.
But then Ten knew that all along. Cos you can’t play the way Girlfriend did on the rof. Tongue’s not the only thing that goes numb. And Boyfriend knows it. And everything’s click-clicking into place.
“You crazy little shit. What have you done?” Ten was grabbing at her tough-like, and she was swatting back at him, pulling away as he tried to get hold of her sleeve. Jazz was yelling again, “Ease off, Tendeka!” Shouldn’t have wasted her airtime. Special-K could look after herself now. After those first frantic swats, only to be expected when she’s so fresh, something leveled. You could see it kick in. Sleek. So one instant she’s flailing about, and the next she lunges, catches him under his chin with the heel of her palm. Boy’s head snaps back, and at the same time she shoves him hard he falls backwards, knocks over a table on his way. Glasses smash and the bartender’s pissed. Everyone frozen, except Rob who laughed once, abrupt.
K gave Ten a look. Cocky as a street kid. But wary too. Not of him, although he was already getting up. Her battery was running low, you could see it when she first set down her cue. And Boy was pissed indeed. But that look, boys and girls, that look was wary of herself.
Ten was on his feet now, screaming. The plot was lost. He’d cut himself on the broken glass. Bleeding like paint splats on the wooden floor. Lunged at Kendra, who backed away, hands up, but still with that look. And Boy was intent on serious damage, yelling, not hearing his cell bleep first warning, then second.
Then his defuser kicked in. Higher voltage than necessary, but the bartender was peeved. Ten jerked epileptic. Some wasters I know set off their own phones’ defusers, low settings for those dark and hectic beats. Even rhythm can be induced, boys and girls. But it’s not easy. Have to hack SAPScom to SMS the trigger signal to your phone. Harder now the cops have privatized, upgraded the firewalls. It’s that or you can tweak the hardware so the shocks come random. But that can crisp you KFC.
Me, I defused my defuser. ’Lectric and lethe don’t mix. Had a cherry in Sea Point who pulled the plug one time. Simunye. Cost ten kilos of sugar, so’s it don’t come cheap, and if the tec don’t know what they’re doing, ha, you’re crisped. Or worse, disconnected. Off the networks. Solitary confinement-like. Not worth the risk, boys and girls, unless you know for certain the tec is razor.
So, there’s Ten, jerking to imaginary beats. Bartender hit endcall finally and Boy collapsed, panting, his phone still crackling. Jazz knelt next to him. VIMbots scuttled over to clean up the blood and glass and spilled liquor. Other patrons were turning away now. Game over. Please infra another coin. Kendra stood watching one more second, then also turned away, walked over to the bar where I was sitting.
“Cause any more kak like that, and I’ll crisp you too,” the bartender said as she sat down on the bar stool next to me.
“Oh please. Like how many dial-ins you got left for the night?” Kendra snapped, but she was looking almost as strung out as Ten.
“Yeah, well, don’t make me waste ’em all on you.”
“Just get me a Ghost, okay?”
Behind her, Jazz and Rob were holding Tendeka up. He made as if to move for the bar, but Jazz pulled him back. Not least cos of the look the bartender shot them. Boy was too fried to stir shit anyway, but said, loud enough for all to hear, “Sellout.”
“Get the fuck out, kid.” Dismissive. The bartender knew there was no fight left in him.
“Corporate whore!”
“C’mon, Ten. Let’s go.” Jazz started escorting him out.
Kendra ignored him. Girl had her Ghost now, downed it in one. Asked for another.
Already you could see it kicking in.
“Can I see?” I asked, mock sly-shy.
Kendra shot me a look I couldn’t figure, and then slid up her sleeve slowly, revealing the glow tattooed on her wrist.
The bartender clicked his tongue as he set her drink down. “Sponsor baby, huh?”
The logo was emblazoned not on her skin, but under it, shining through, with the slogan “Just be it.”
No rinkadink light show this: she’d signed up for nanotech that changed the bio-structure of her cells, made ’em phosphorescent in all the right places. Nothing you couldn’t get done at the local light-tat salon, but corporate sponsorship came with all the extras. Even on lethe, I wasn’t oblivious to the ad campaigns on the underway. But Kendra was the first I knew to get Branded.
Girl was flying now. Ordered a third Ghost. Brain reacting like she was on some fine-ass bliss, drowning her in endorphins and serotonin, the drink binding with aminos and the tiny bio-machines humming in her veins. Voluntary addiction with benefits. Make her faster, stronger, more coordinated. Ninja-slick reflexes. Course, if she’d sold her soul to Big Red Cola instead, she’d be sharper, wittier. Big Red nano-lubes the transmitters. Neurons firing faster, smarter, more productive. All depends on the brand, on your lifestyle of choice, and it’s all free if you qualify. Waster like me would never get with the program, but sweet Kendra, straight-up candidate of choice. Apply now, boys and girls, while stocks last. You’ll never be able to afford this high on your own change.
Special-K turned to me, on her fourth now, blissed out on the carbonated artificial sugars and the tech seething in her hot little sponsor-baby bod. “And one for my friend,” she said to the bartender. And who was I to say no?
Thozama is not a sheep. Not like these heads in their bloody packets at her feet, pink tongues lolling from their mouths, lips curled back revealing sharp and yellowed herbivore incisors, like a smile, like a
sneer, like men when you can’t tell what they are thinking. Like this man, Soldier, who has swung into the scalloped plastic seat facing her on the train and leaned over to introduce himself.
There are plenty of open seats. The trains going to town are gagging with people, literally choking them out onto the platform with every heave of the doors, but there are not so many heading back to Langa at eight fifteen in the morning.
She would go earlier if she could; it takes all day to prepare the smileys, but the butcher in Salt River only opens for trade at seven, which means that on a Monday, she must leave at five, because now that her house has arrived, she lives in Delft.
Get a house, lose a neighborhood. She knows people who have sold up their neat little brick houses from the government and moved right back to Langa or Nyanga or Khayelitsha, back to a shack, because it’s better to be among people you know, better to be twenty minutes to town instead of an hour, better to get water for free, even if from a shared public tap, than to have to pay bills, all the bills that come with houses.
So she lives in Delft, but her customers are in Langa, where they have been for these past eight years. Sometimes she will sleep at a friend’s for the week and only go back to her house on the weekends. She has a trolley at the station waiting for her to load it up with heads and trundle them to her stall in the hub of Chinatown.
The name is misleading. There are no Chinese people here, like there are no Spanish in Barcelona overlooking the highway or Serbs in Kosovo, where the shacks lean stubbornly against the sharp slope running down to the small tributary of the Black or the Liesbeek or some other dead river bloated with garbage. These are names picked from the news, from the Olympics, from the genocide.
Older settlements are named for the struggle, like talismans of protection. But where is that communist when the paraffin fires tear through Joe Slovo every summer, turning the clutter of shacks into a maze of heat and smoke, flames riding the wind like boys on the train, leaping between rooftops, eating up the shacks. Where is Joe then? Thozama can tell you: dead in the ground, with all the other promises.
She has a good spot in Chinatown, on a corner between her friend, Nosingile, who sells mealies, a good complementary business, and a stall, rigged with shadecloth and plastic chairs, that sells phone calls and airtime. Sometimes the boys complain about the flies that cloud around like miggies . They say it drives customers away to the competing phone container down the way, but Thozama says no, it’s the opposite. The heavy smell of the boiling mutton soaks into the air, lures people by their noses so they come floating in on the breeze. They should pay her commission.
The train rattles and sways through Maitland industria, warehouses and factories slipping away past the window that only opens halfway, that is greasy and scratched and jaundiced. There is a fat blue fly maintaining a holding pattern of misshaped rectangles over the bags of sheeps’ heads. The flies always manage to find the blood. She waves it away.
“You sell smileys, Mama?” Soldier says, as if it is not obvious. She is not overly concerned. He is too old to be trouble. Forty-five, she reckons by the sag of his face, the creases like gutters on either side of his mouth, and it is only the start of the day—she has no money yet to hide in her bra—or tuck into her panties, because the tsotsis on the trains are getting more brazen. Besides, a bag of heads is too much work to be worth stealing.
It takes all day to prepare. It is a procedure. You need patience and a fridge to store them in and a place to cook them where the neighbors will not complain about the smoke or the smell.
First you must wash them and squeeze out the excess blood. You must stuff the nostrils with newspaper to stop the flies, always the flies, getting in. Then cut off the hair with the edge of a sharp knife. She could be a barber given the precision with which she does this, shaving men’s scalps instead of mutton, but there are already two hair salons near her corner in Chinatown, dueling businesses run by two girls who used to be friends, who have set up right next to each other, out of spite as much as anything else.
Once the hair is removed, you burn the heads in the fire, a quick tsss-tsss, and then scrape them again, this time with a metal rod that has been lying in the coals. Then they must be washed and scraped once more, with steel wool to get rid of any last stubborn straggles of hair, because customers will judge the quality of your meat by how clean the heads are. Then you take your axe, cut the head in half—she splits a skull with one blow—and set it to boiling with the others, in a metal drum on the fire. And then wait for the lunchtime traffic.
Smileys are a delicacy. Or used to be. Now, any man, single men mostly, with no wives to cook for them, can buy for only twenty rand for a half; men like this Soldier, for instance.
“You’re playing with me,” she says in answer, nudging a bag full of heads with the toe of her shoe.
“I’m sorry, I can see. I was making conversation. Maybe finding a new place to eat?” Is he flirting with her? Why, when she is almost twenty years his senior?
“My heads are very clean, excellent quality. Like Woolworths. You should tell your friends.”
“Business is good then, Mama?” Soldier asks, and suddenly she is wary.
“So-so. Better at the end of the month, when people have money. But with the holidays coming, everyone is going back to the Ciskei, Transkei, then it’s very slow. Too slow.” She tsks and shakes her head, playing old lady down-on-her-luck.
“But, hey, these skollies, you must watch out for them,” Soldier says, like the thought has just occurred to him, when she can tell it has been sitting, waiting on his tongue, like that fat blue fly. “They’ll rob a woman like you, a businesswoman. They’ll watch you, coming to the station with heads, coming home with money. They’ll be waiting for you.”
“I’m all right. My cousin’s boy comes with me.” This is a lie. Her cousin’s son sometimes helps her at the stall, for ten rand for the day, for a pack of cigarettes, but it is too far to travel all the way to Delft, especially on the weekends when young men have other priorities.
“You know, Mama,” Soldier says, “these politics and what-what. They’ve messed us up. I’m not talking now with everything, but the old days, you know?”
She does know. The young people don’t see it. It’s all nonsense, they say, apartheid is over and done, leave it behind. But the past infests everything, like worms. They’ve cut down the old trees, the new government, but the roots of the past are still there, can still tangle round your feet, trip you up. They go deep.
“You know why they call me Soldier?’
“You fought in the struggle. Were you with MK?”
“APLA. The Azanian People’s Liberation Army. But when I came back from the fighting, when we were free, I applied to the police for work. But they said I didn’t have matric and what-what, so now what was I supposed to do. This is what I’m talking about, Mama, this is why I came to sit with you.”
The way he says it worries her.
“Because you see, people like me, we come back with all this training and what good are we in our community? We’re dangerous people, Mama. We were lions fighting that apartheid struggle, lions defending our communities, but what happens when you bring the lions into the kraal, among the sheep?”
“They eat them.”
“They eat them, Mama. These men, APLA, MK, the Transkei Defense Force, those Ciskei military wings, now they have nothing to do, they turn to armed robbery or hijacking. It’s easy for them, and that’s why we would rather use these men to initiate protection and defense. So we started the Anti-Crime Association.”
She has heard of ACA, of course. The man stripped naked and beaten in the streets, on the word of another man and a R150 “transport fee,” of the man found hanging behind the taxi rank, his eyes blindfolded. Vigilantes.
“So what do you want with me?”
“We are working hard. We are all volunteers. We work for free. Maybe sometimes the people in the community bring us some food.”
/> “That is what you want? Food?”
“No, no, like I was saying, a businesswoman like you, sometimes it is dangerous. We could accompany you. I could accompany you, get you home safe with your day’s earnings. The police are useless, you know. There are places they can’t go or don’t want to go. ACA doesn’t have to follow all the rules the police do. We’re more effective than the police. ACA doesn’t have any boundaries. ACA is everywhere. ACA is like the Scorpions, but better.”
“I thought you were lions, not insects?” She always had a problem with her tongue getting away from her. With smileys, the tongue is the part that is most savored.
“You joke, Mama, but this is very serious, very serious. Even Nelson Mandela said we must all engage in the fight against crime. But fighting crime costs money.”
“This is my station,” she says, getting up, trying to cut the conversation, burn it away like unwanted hair.
“I’ll walk with you.”
“No, no, it’s fine. My cousin’s boy . . .”
“You can’t be carrying those heads. They must be heavy. Let me help you.”
“Are you volunteering?” she snaps, but he is already holding her bags, following her out of the train onto the platform. She searches the crowd for someone she knows. But there is no one she recognizes, no one to help her.
“My trolley is behind here,” Thozama says, leading him round the back of the station, past the Diamond shebeen and the SASKO stage, where they are doing a roadshow with megaphones, as if the company had not been fixing bread prices all this time. “Those are the real criminals,” she says, nodding at the production where they are giving out prizes to make people forget.
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