“Basi, you’re a perfect gentleman,” she said in English with a wide grin.
My father turned the page and read more of his paper.
“My friends will be there,” I persisted. “Papa?”
He turned another page, cleared his throat.
“I don’t think so, Nana.” My father called me Nana whether he was sad, happy, or angry.
At that time Aus’ Tselane was working for us. We were losing helpers at a steady rate that year—four people had already been dismissed by our mother for various reasons, which mostly boiled down to their inability to make our house as spotless as the one my mother had grown up in. She would say, “She only polished the floors once this week and not twice,” or, “I don’t understand why she doesn’t use the outside toilet every time,” and within weeks the woman would be sent back to her home—usually a small village in the north.
So Aus’ Tselane came in and picked up the dishes from our second course. I watched her long arms moving slowly and carefully as she collected each plate. I noticed the safety pins under her armpits neatly holding her dress together.
“Please? Please can I go?” I whined again, slumping forward.
My mother’s attention had shifted to Aus’ Tselane. She leaned back in her chair and smoothed the table again with her perfectly manicured right hand. Basi was reading something at the back of our father’s newspaper.
“I—”
“Shhh, Naledi!” my mother interrupted. “Can we eat in peace, tu? Do you know how long it took me to prepare this meal and set the table? After the day I had? Tu . . . ” Her voice trailed off and she pursed her lips as she watched Aus’ Tselane come back with our sweets—glass bowls of custard and jelly on a long red tray. You could see she was taking special care not to let the tray fall.
My mother said, “Tselane, you can have the rest, nè?” and Aus’ Tselane gave her a long, slow, and graceful nod, so that it looked like she was attempting a bow. When she walked back out of the room she held the tray close to her chest and hugged it with both hands, which made Mama frown in disapproval.
Finally my father folded his newspaper into many small rectangles and placed it to the left of his bowl. He put his hand on top of the paper thoughtfully, as if steadying himself for his next move. He always did give full attention to his sweets. He was the type of man who would eat through a plate of pap and vleis without once glancing at what went into his mouth, but when the ice cream or custard and jelly came he’d put everything down and concentrate only on his bowl.
“Mmm,” he said, as always, his lips folded, the tip of his tongue licking. “Mmm,” was all he could manage.
“Papa—” I began again.
“Basi, will you be going?” he said, without looking up from his bowl, and my brother politely answered, “Eeng.”
After a pause—me holding my breath and kicking his feet under the table—Basi said, “You know I can watch her. I know all the boys at my school. They’re my friends,” he added, and I thought: Nice touch.
“That’s it then,” Papa said. “Watch out for your sister. Heh! With those eyes.” His eyes met mine as he smiled. “I don’t want any of those boys anywhere near my Nedi, OK?” He laughed, reaching out to pat my shoulder gently.
My mother frowned again and said, “Stay away from boys, Naledi. You’re too young. Lege ba re eng. At your age I would never have gone out at night to a place full of boys. Mammy would never have allowed it.”
So that was how I ended up going to the social.
The second significant thing that happened that day was that my parents saw Vera. Or, as everyone called her, Vera-the-Ghost. Vera was a tall woman who would have been in her late twenties if she had actually been alive, who was said to run along the edge of the main road at night stopping traffic, her clothes torn, her arms bare and skinny. If you stopped to help, they said, she would come banging on your window and beg for a lift home. With her standing so close, her face only inches from you, you would see that she was crying. “Sobbing like a small child or a woman in mourning,” people said.
My parents agreed.
“Her clothes were torn,” my mother told us the morning after they had seen her, as we were eating breakfast before school. “There was blood on her blouse.”
I shuddered in my school uniform as I sat there trying to chew the spoonful of cereal now dry in my mouth.
“She wore a skimpy little denim miniskirt,” she said. “And she was holding one of her shoes in one hand. Just waving it in the air furiously, like she was trying to tell us something.”
My father was reading his morning paper as he stood near the sink, but he lowered the paper. He spoke slowly, his voice soft and sad. “She just ran into the middle of the road. Just like that.” He stared at the floor in front of him. “I almost hit her with my car.”
No one said a word for a minute. We all looked down, at our plates, picturing the scene.
“How did you know it was her?” Basi asked thoughtfully.
“Well,” my father said as he folded the paper, composing himself. “My hair . . . stood on end.”
My mother said, “And my skin felt taut.”
“And then she was gone.” He snapped his fingers. “I said, ‘Climb in and I’ll take you home,’ but she was gone.”
“Just as suddenly as she had come,” said my mother. “It was my first time seeing her and really, I’m telling you . . . ” Her voice trailed off and she shuddered visibly, like it was all happening again.
People spoke about Vera-the-Ghost with such concern that one was always left desperately sad after hearing the story. I remembered how the year before I had been at Ole’s house when her parents told us about Vera. Ole’s mother was folding a blanket after doing the washing. She stood there with it clutched to her chest, shaking her head in disbelief. “Ai!” she said miserably. “Mara, whose child is she?”
So that Thursday afternoon after my parents had told us about seeing Vera, I was speaking to Basi in the back room, my voice shaking.
“Those woods,” I told him. “They hold secrets.”
He looked up at me, knowing what was coming.
“I mean, we still don’t know whose body it was that you found that year.”
“She’s no one,” he said again, waving his hand as if to swat away the question. “No one named her. No one came looking for her. She may not even have been from here. She may have been . . . ”
I waited as he leaned forward to pick out a tape and compare it to a CD. Often when we spoke about the body, my brother had his mind on something else. The body had held its intrigue in my mind, but with him . . . well, he was hardly interested any more.
“May have been what?” I tried.
“Heh?” he said, searching my face to remind him what we had been talking about. “Oh,” he continued nonchalantly. “She may—” He lifted the tape, suddenly excited. “Here it is!”
“Basi!”
“Ja? Oh. She may have been, I don’t know . . . letagwa.”
This didn’t make me feel better. Maybe she had been a drunkard living on the street. Maybe. It seemed to help Basi dismiss her, but the story didn’t haunt me any less.
Basi casually flipped through the tapes neatly organized in a long red tin box that he kept in the back room. His fingers moved as if he were demonstrating a slow walk, one finger after the other across the tapes—occasionally pausing as he considered which one to use for the mix he was making. He did not look up at me; his eyes narrowed the way they did when he was doing his maths homework.
With his hands still holding the box, he hooked his foot around the leg of his chair and pulled himself closer to the bed. He took off his shoes before putting his feet up on the bed, as if our mother were watching him. Clearing his throat, he stared down at his watch and glanced quickly outside before he resumed flipping through the tape stack
. He was waiting for Kgosi, and I clung to the last few minutes I had with him. When he was out with Kgosi, only hunger pangs would bring him home.
I pulled my knees closer to my chest and pushed my back harder against the freshly painted wall, because this topic always made me shiver.
“She must belong to a family,” I said.
“No one claimed her,” he replied flatly and shrugged, pulling out a tape and placing it in the boom box. “There was nothing left of her. She rotted.”
The picture I imagined, that of maggots and decaying flesh, made me gag. I pushed my face towards the window and breathed in the fresh air.
Outside, the sun was a large red ball sinking in the distance, making the room darker as it disappeared.
“It’s horrible,” I said. “I read somewhere that serial killers sometimes wait years and years before they strike again. What if that person, the person who killed her—”
Then Basi was patiently saying, “Nedi, Nedi, Nedi,” and his chair was shifting towards me. Placing his hand gently on my leg, he said slowly, “Just do what I do. Forget it.” He looked into my eyes for a long while until I nodded.
Then he pushed his chair back, propped his feet back up on the bed and, holding up a white tape, casually asked, “Arthur?”
I lifted my chin from my knees. “With Luther? I don’t think so. How do you mix kwaito with R&B?”
“You’re right,” he said, putting the tape back in the box. He looked at me and grinned. “You’re absolutely right.”
As if he were remembering something he added, “If you get this scared, then I can’t tell you other things boys see when they go through the woods . . . ”
He looked up at the freshly painted ceiling and the new ceiling fan. I could sense he was drifting off and he was sad, and I understood that we were changing the subject, that I needed to let it go.
“Saw,” he said.
“What?” I asked, confused.
“Saw. In the past. When we used to go through the woods . . . back in the day.”
I shook my head and patted him on the back the way one of his friends would. “You still see them,” I said gently.
He gave a deep sigh and glanced at his watch.
I said, “Kgosi’s coming soon?”
At this he smiled before standing up and going to open the door. As the draught moved in I heard slow footsteps on the pebbles outside, and knew that to be Kgosi’s suave stride. I knew our time together had come to an end.
5
I HAD A BATH to get ready for the social, opened the windows so the steam would not flatten my hair, and scrubbed my face with a fruit-flavoured face wash. Afterwards, in my room, I stopped to notice the silence. Life around the house had come to a standstill, the calm of it almost lulling me to sleep, like hearing jazz or the blues after a big lunch on a Sunday afternoon.
My mother was at the shop helping my father close up, my brother was in his room getting ready—or so I thought, because his music was drifting softly from under his door—and Aus’ Tselane was listening to a Sesotho radio talk show, which was occasionally interrupted by some soft and slow music. From the outside room where she slept, the music blew in through my window with the cool evening breeze.
Up on the hill, in diEx, life was calmer than it was past the main road, after you crossed the woods. We were not in the suburbs, where things were always quiet and people ignored their neighbours, but we were close enough, and everyone did their best to make it feel like we were not in Kasi. There were walls surrounding homes and these walls were very high so that the average person walking past was not able to see into the yard. Sometimes you didn’t even see the bottom half of the house; sometimes you only saw the roofs.
You had to get used to hardly ever seeing your neighbours except when they drove out in their cars. There were cameras at some people’s gates and intercom systems so that every guest was announced before entering—which eliminated hawkers and the friendly neighbour who decided to come in on a whim. And, unlike in Kasi, most children played in their backyards instead of in the street. That, or they were indoors watching American comedy shows in English. Since you rarely saw or spoke to people around you, you knew your neighbours only by reputation: the lawyer who was the second youngest person ever imprisoned at Robben Island; the doctor who worked in the location’s first private hospital; the famous model; the owner of every bakery we knew. And then my father: the owner of the biggest and oldest supermarket in the location.
Although we never heard the noise from Kasi my mother would still point out, “We’re not far enough. The dust from Down There still makes its way up in August.” Down There or At the Bottom was another way we referred to the old houses. Or sometimes we’d say “ko motseng.”
I had many such moments of stillness in my room. I recalled that when I was younger and we lived down in the location, people would drift in and out of our house, coming by just to say hi or to borrow something or share some gossip. If someone had a party it might go on all weekend so that you were listening to the same tape over and over and over again, all day, all night, all weekend. If there was a fight at the party, or just on the street, you’d drop whatever you were doing to run outside and see what was going on. There were times when people didn’t finish getting dressed—men without shirts, women covering their bodies with a large shawl or blanket—because they’d had to hurry outside in case they missed something.
I would get quite nostalgic at these moments, thinking of the friends I didn’t see so often any more, or wishing someone would drift in and ask me what time the social started, what time was I leaving, and that they hoped I had a good time or I should come to their house the next day and tell them all about it.
I wore my new short miniskirt with the zipper on the side. My hair was perfectly curled with hot hair tongs, my blouse was red and black, and my shoes had heels—which would have made one or two teachers at my own school faint, but I was having fun. I applied my mother’s lipstick carefully and dabbed it with my little finger. I smoothed my skirt down with both palms and I combed my hair lightly for what must have been the tenth time. And then, very, very carefully, I sat in front of the mirror and hoped this wouldn’t crease my skirt. I threw my shoulders back and pushed my breasts forward—they were quite big at thirteen and oh! how perfect they looked in that blouse.
I thought of Ole, who sometimes came into my room when I was getting dressed and watched me in wonder. The last time she had sat on my bed poking at her breasts and saying with a sigh, “Don’t you wish they’d take their time growing?” I had laughed and said that I didn’t mind.
Now I imagined that she was down in Kasi, probably playing snakes and ladders or Monopoly with some boys at a corner shop. She had scoffed at the idea of going to the social. “I hate those boys at your brother’s school,” she had said. “They’re so irritating.”
I turned around to look at the bed, wishing I could share my excitement with someone. But I caught a glimpse of the time on the clock at the side of my bed and jumped.
As always happened when I was getting dressed—and without warning—my mind had become restless and I’d lost track of time. Basi joked about it. He’d smile and say in English, “I love how you dream for hours and then you’re shocked at how time flies.”
I stood up, re-examined the size of my bum and wished, as always, that it were smaller. I checked my hair and nails and shoes again. Then I said to the girl in the mirror, while imagining I was talking to a boy, “I’m Naledi.” I sucked in the corners of my lower lip and liked the look of it. Then I smiled to myself, wondering about the many cute boys who were now at their homes getting ready and what they would think of my short skirt and my curled hair, and I grinned at the mirror, giddy with anticipation.
When my mother arrived she stayed in her car and waited for me and Basi. I knew she was impatient, ready to get on with it. Mama’s
mind was always busy: deciding what the shop needed, what the house needed, what my father and Basi needed and what I should be doing better. But I was glad she didn’t come in because the distance between our house and my brother’s school stretched longer every minute I spent in the house. So it was with sheer glee that I ran downstairs, feeling like I was leaping into the most important and exciting night of my life.
When I burst out through the front door Mama stuck her head through the car window and said, “Where’s Basi?”
“Does my hair look OK?”
She paused and looked me up and down, frowning at first and then smiling faintly. “Is that my lipstick?”
I said nothing.
“Yes, you look fine . . . Where’s Basi?”
“In his room, I think.” I had my hand on the car door when I realized that I had only assumed he had been in his room. I hadn’t actually seen him or heard his footsteps in a long time. Though his music was still on.
My mother, very irritably, said, “I saw a group of his friends at the bottom and I looked but didn’t see him. They were shuffling around when they saw me, like they were trying to hide something.” Here she clicked her tongue angrily.
“They’re scared of you,” I said, trying to calm her. She liked people being afraid of her.
“I know,” she said, shaking her head distractedly. “They always seem to be hiding something from me.”
I knew right away that my brother must have disappeared down the hill some time between me being in the bath and me getting dressed, and I was quite stunned that he had not calculated the time well enough to make sure he would be back before Mama got home. That alone made me think that something was seriously amiss. My brother and his friends had inner alarm clocks. They moved through life without watches but managed to time everything in their heads and get it right without fault. In fact, when Basi received a watch for his sixteenth birthday he had worn it for a day or two before telling me, “Don’t tell Papa, but I can’t deal with this thing. It messes with my head.”
This Book Betrays My Brother Page 3