by Jen Thorpe
‘Yes. I’m still alive. I wish you wouldn’t call me young lady. Yes, I’m taking them. They’re just beta blockers, Mom. You make me sound like I’m about to die or something. I don’t think they quite qualify as “medication” either. Anyway, how are things with you, Mom? What’s new?’ Ruby began to scratch her arm, glad she’d cut her nails the night before.
‘Well, your brother is, of course, doing really well. He’s off somewhere with a “stan” at the end. Not sure which one. One without a war. Anyway, he’s there to try and get them not to dig great big holes in the ground and take the gas out. Don’t know why a diplomat has to do that. And why so far away? In any event, apparently it’s really bad for the water. So that’s what he’s doing.’
Ruby let her mother continue. She only phoned her about once a month. They lived over a thousand kilometres apart, but with the phone pressed to her ear, Ruby felt that wasn’t far enough. The news was never about her mother, always about others. It was easier to pass judgement that way.
‘Your father, well, he’s the same. Still sitting behind his desk researching insects. I’ll never understand why one of the world’s greatest minds would want to look at bugs all day. And your aunt has been gallivanting off with her latest toy boy. He’s about your age – great body. But still. Tina could be a little less obvious about her midlife crisis …’
Distracted, Ruby started to organise what she’d need for the application sorting, the phone clamped to her ear. After a few seconds of silence she realised that a response was expected.
‘Sorry, Mom. I missed that last bit. Noisy this side.’
‘It doesn’t sound noisy. I asked whether you’ve finally found a man yet.’
‘No, Mom. Still just me, I’m afraid. Do you still nag Jeff like this?’
‘It’s different with sons and daughters. You know that. Besides, Jeff is all the way around the world doing important things … Not that you’re not also doing important things … But you know what I mean. What’s new at the Centre?’
Ruby took a deep breath and tried to let her mother’s half-hidden insult go. ‘We’re doing a study on fear that starts next week. It’s funded by the Ministry.’
‘Oh, god. Got all your forms in order?’
‘Of course. Wouldn’t want them to look bad when they report back to Parliament.’
‘But I read in the paper the other day that they’re slowing their funding.’
‘Even though we’re doing their jobs for them.’
‘Exactly. Bloody hell. Makes me so angry … Anyway, let’s not complain too much. You never know if they’re listening.’
‘God, Mom, don’t be so dramatic!’
Mel arrived at the door.
‘I’ve got to go, Mom. Mel is here and we need to start preparing for the study.’
‘Well, don’t leave it for so long before you call next time. You know me and your dad like to know what’s going on in your life. And whenever I try your cell phone it just rings and rings. I’m not sure that I’ve even got the right number. And take your meds. And I love you.’
Thank god for caller ID. ‘Sorry, Mom. I’m just very busy. I’ll call you soon. Send love to everyone.’
Ruby untangled herself from the mess of the phone cord which she had frantically wound around her chair and her arm while speaking to her mother. Through the glass doors of her office she could see that Welly and Fairouz were waiting in the boardroom, eating muffins topped with a substantial amount of icing. She looked at her health muffin at the end of the table, alone on a giant plate, and felt relieved to have made the right choice.
‘I’ll be two minutes, Mel.’
She tore the Post-it with the note to call her mother into tiny pieces, gathered them up, and deposited them in her bin. Then she walked through to the boardroom and sat down at the table, sighing loudly. Welly, Fairouz and Mel were all sitting on one side while she sat on the other.
‘Your mom?’ Mel asked.
‘Yup.’
‘Ag, shame, moms just want to make sure we’re all right. I’m sure she loves you.’
‘Thanks, Fay, I’m sure too. Anyway, enough about that. Let’s begin. First we need to come up with a way to choose participants. Any ideas? I can’t believe we had so many applications.’
‘What about age?’ said Welly, scanning through the forms. ‘No, actually most people are in their mid-thirties, so that won’t help.’
‘What about if we just shuffle them like cards and deal out sixteen?’ Fay looked hopeful, but they knew they’d never get away with that.
‘Mel? Any ideas?’ Ruby watched Mel lick thick pink icing off her teeth.
‘What if we sort them by those smiley faces, and throw away all the really sad ones? Realistically, they probably need more help than we can offer anyway.’
‘We can’t throw them away … But let’s at least sort them. You never know.’
The straight-line-face pile had only forty applicants – substantially fewer than the other piles. When the piles were all organised on the table, Mel, Welly, Fairouz and Ruby gave each other a look that was mutually understood. Looking at forty forms seemed so much easier than studying the applicants from the other piles.
The happy and sad forms were pushed aside, and they began to choose sixteen participants from the forty remaining people. Welly got all those younger than twenty-five, Fairouz considered those between twenty-five and forty, and Ruby looked at those over forty. Mel went downstairs to begin sending the ‘thanks but no thanks’ emails to the masses, taking the remains of her muffin with her. Ruby, Fay and Welly each selected six they liked until they had eighteen forms between them.
Ruby reached for her muffin and broke a piece off. She put it in her mouth. It was dry as the Sahara, and when she tried to swallow she felt the sides of her throat glue themselves to one another. She had a powerful urge to cough. Fairouz and Welly looked on, amused, as Ruby rallied her strength, attempting to retain her pious expression, and then smiled back, eyes watering.
‘So who do we get rid of?’ she asked, trying to breathe normally.
‘What if we do a lucky draw?’ said Welly.
‘You mean pick two and get rid of them? Randomly?’ said Ruby.
They looked at each other, all wondering how they would translate this rashness into logic in their report to the Ministry.
‘Well, what if we divide it so that we have the same amount of men and women?’ Ruby asked.
Welly and Fairouz nodded. The Ministry loved it when their studies were gender balanced – it looked good for them when they reported back to the President. Luckily, they had eight women and ten men. Welly removed the youngest man’s form from his pile. The man’s name was Piet Pietersen. He was afraid of the moon. Fairouz picked another at random from her pile, and they were done. The process had taken less than an hour and they were all pleased with themselves.
‘Okay, so from here … Welly, you message the men. Fay, you message the women. I’ll let the Ministry know that we’ve gone through rigorous selection criteria and have chosen this group. We’ll send them the full details next week once we’ve seen if anyone drops out.’
Fay and Welly left to go back downstairs and Ruby returned to her office. Glad it was over and that the others were gone, she tipped her muffin into the bin and lay down on her couch to read through the proposal for the next study, leaning to the left slightly to avoid the bruise she’d got from falling over the day before. Half an hour later, she walked downstairs into Fay’s office.
‘All done?’
‘The messages are sent, we’re just waiting for replies.’
‘Let’s wait and see then, shall we?’
5
Nazma
Metathesiophobia: Fear of changes
Nazma was in denial about several things, one of which was that working at the kiosk was going to become her full-time job. It was supposed to be a temporary job until she found a real one, but she had worked there almost every day for the past three mon
ths. She wanted to be a pastry chef, and spending her days in the kiosk with its stale food was like being an artist and having to do colouring by numbers. But she had scared herself out of possibly ever being able to get a proper job. In this city – in any city in South Africa – you had to be able to drive. Transport fascism had doomed her to a life of working for her parents.
To keep herself busy Nazma conducted daily kiosk experiments. This morning it was an exercise in measurement. She was balanced on tiptoe, on her left foot, with the smell of curry spices and cigarettes drifting into her nostrils, tickling the hairs and reminding her brain where she was – in a tiny train-station kiosk waiting for her world to change.
Her left hand was outstretched, its painted nails pressed up against the wall in front of her. Beneath this hand were jars of brightly coloured sweets. Their labels described multiple ingredients in Chinese, and their logos announced names like ‘Healthy Love Vitamins’ and ‘True Fruit Colours’. Next to them was the stack of cigarette cartons from which loose cigarettes were handed through the bars to those in the throes of nicotine addiction.
In the right corner, beneath her outstretched right arm and directly beneath her right hand, was the old-fashioned cash register. Its numbers had long since worn away from vigorous pressing in countless sales. Nobody needed receipts from here, and when they did they didn’t get them.
Above her right arm and hand was the shelf where the newspapers stood. The shelf itself was not much to look at. It was painted white but the paint was peeling, and every now and then she would have to dust curls of paint off the pies and other baked goods before she heated them. It was so poorly lit inside the room that nobody noticed any of this, so she and her parents hadn’t bothered to repaint the shelf. The peeling paint was perhaps a chemical aversion to the news in the papers. Die Son, Daily Voice, and other sources of shock journalism screamed headlines such as ‘Baby eats poisoned cat and survives’, ‘Father says mother drove him to the brothel’, and ‘Strange sex a growing market’.
She found the size of the newspapers appealing. They weren’t too big to unfold comfortably, and she thought that this simple design was perhaps why they sold so well. They were easy to hold on public transport or in a crowded space. A while back she’d picked one up to read. The headline that day had been about a soccer star who had hired a tokoloshe to help him defeat his opponents. Nazma had wondered if the tokoloshe was like voodoo, where you have to believe in it for it to work, or if he could work on you whether or not you believed in him. Thinking about this had made her feel quite nervous, and she’d had to sit with the door open and her feet up on the stool for the rest of the afternoon. She didn’t read the papers any more; she didn’t need the extra stress.
Another source of dismay inside the kiosk was the food. Abigail, Nazma’s mother, told those outside the bars that the baked goods, normally pies or samoosas or sausage rolls, were made fresh every day. Abigail’s earnest voice, bovine eyes and the low prices of the pies allowed customers to convince themselves that she was telling the truth. Technically, on Mondays and Thursdays, she was. On the other five days of the week they were freshly reheated, paint curls dusted away. Nazma always worried that someone would complain about the paint or get food poisoning or something from the pies. She made sure to dust them extra well each time before putting them in the microwave.
The microwave was near-prehistoric. It had weathered the move from Tongaat and was now underneath Nazma’s right foot. The distance from corner to corner in the kiosk was only a little more than a metre: she probably could have taken the chance and put her left foot up to become fully suspended above the floor, but didn’t want to descend into complete lunacy. After all, the microwave’s clock told her it was only ten in the morning.
So there she was, part spreadeagled, in the four corners of her tiny train-station kiosk. The yellowish glow from the uncovered bulb cast a strange light on all the items in the store. This was lucky for Nazma because if it hadn’t made everything look so unappealing she suspected she might have become obese from eating all of the pies herself, one at a time, day in and day out. Obesity from comfort eating was one of her more realistic fears.
Julius, the station guard, was standing on the platform trying to see her movements through the security bars. He had seen her attempt to put her foot over her head before, as well as various other acrobatic feats, but this was new. She seemed to have truly lost it this time. He radioed his colleague at Newlands to tell him she was at it again, and then continued to watch with interest. He wondered how long before she flung the door open in a panic this time.
Her experiment to touch four shop corners while standing in the middle of it had proved less time-consuming than she had hoped. Thinking she was unobserved, Nazma took down her hands and foot after one last consideration of moving her left foot to join them, wondering if she could balance up there like Spiderman. She brushed down her hair, sat back down on the stool, and waited. It was too much. She opened the door and stepped out, despondently breathing in the fresh air. Julius felt sad too, as his show was over sooner than expected. He got up and walked towards the subway.
As she stood in the doorway, Nazma began to daydream about baking. Her favourite recipes were for simple things. Apple crumble, vegetable soup, butter chicken curry, muffins, crunchies, vetkoek and biscuits. She missed spending days in the kitchen preparing food for her family, as she had done to practise while she was studying. Now, because she wasn’t bringing in any income, she was relegated to working here, serving warmed-up food and stale chocolates. She contemplated suffocating herself with a pie, but instead returned inside and slumped a little deeper into her stool. She noted a possible next experiment: slouching as far as she could without falling off. The thought of living with her parents and working in the kiosk forever made her feel light-headed, and she put her head between her knees.
Breathing deeply, she had to admit to herself that, on an ordinary day, there were some highlights in the kiosk. At seven-fifteen, give or take a few minutes depending on Metrorail’s daily delays, a train would pass through her station. Before its screeching brakes, the gentle tinkle of a tambourine and the steady throbbing of a drum would fill the air. The drumming came from the people in that particular carriage all stomping their feet in tune to the singing of the crowd. She had never left the shop to see what was happening in the carriage, nervous that the illusion she had of the magical musical train would be shattered by the revelation that it was just a group of ordinary people, singing an ordinary, comprehensible song. Or worse, that it was religious.
Nevertheless, she strained her ears each morning, waiting for the train to arrive. When she heard the music she would close her eyes and the light behind her lids would pulse red, warm yellow and soft orange. It was a daily dose of Zen before breakfast. While the warmth lingered she used it to psych herself up for the day ahead. When the train left the station she always felt lighter.
Now, she thought about the night before, and how strange it had all been. She remembered the long queue, the old man with his gilded stick and that strange woman who had watched them with the binoculars, the smell of the smoker’s shirt against her face. Not being able to go out alone at night meant she hadn’t really spent much time around men since she’d finished studying six months before. Public transport really limited a woman’s ability to get some.
Still daydreaming, she heard a scatter of pigeons and immediately straightened up into a posture of business prowess. The pigeons were her warning bells and were entirely dependable, if a bit mangy. She plastered her most inviting expression onto her face and leant forward, ready and waiting. Moments later her father, Zubair, appeared, gazing in at her through the bars. Julius, seeing him approach, turned back down the stairs to walk to the other side. He had learnt to avoid Zubair, not because he was bad-tempered, but because he was so very lonely. You could greet him with a simple hello and spend the rest of the morning trying to get away from his conversation and his desper
ate attempts to connect with another human being.
‘How have the morning sales been?’
‘Fine, Dad. Mostly Styvie blue and a few copies of Die Son.’
‘And what about the pies, eh? Good to have a good start to the day with some nutrition. Why are there no signs outside advertising today’s options? It’s Tuesday after all.’
‘Because we didn’t sell the entire Monday special, Dad. Despite the signs.’
The ineffectiveness of his signs was an intense disappointment to Zubair. He’d made the last batch himself after losing faith in the professional printed kind. He’d laboured with pen and ink, attempting various forms of handwriting on all different sizes and styles of paper. The only thing he didn’t change was the fact that they were frequently selling reheated pies.
He withdrew from the bars, extending his pelvis forward, gazing at the little roof outside the stall, and sighing loudly. Zubair was sporting Thai fishing pants which Abigail and Nazma tried to convince him were from the ladies’ section. His open sandals revealed his toes, polished like chess pieces. His walk was a hips-flung-forward purposeful stride. He always carried a bag of crumbs in his right hand, and placed his left hand on his hip, elbow out. Sciatica, he claimed, made him thrust his hips forward, and his ‘paining hip’ apparently made him rest his hand there and exaggerate his side-to-side wiggle. ‘Can’t be helped,’ Abigail would say with weary eyes. ‘His poor hip,’ she would proclaim on stronger days.
‘Nevertheless,’ said Zubair, ‘a new sign may entice people. Take down this old one and redo it. You know how people love to see a brightly coloured sign. Do it with those juicy Kokis.’
He walked away, leaving her to herself again. She fell back into daydreams for a while, the platform quiet between train stops. But soon she jumped as the electric tingling and singing – tsssssssssik tssssssik tsik tsiiiisssk – and the final ear-splitting screeching of the brakes announced the arrival of a train. She sighed and looked at her cell phone. Still no contact from the Centre. She reached for the Kokis and began to write a new sign. As she picked up the colourful pens, her phone peeped and, although her stomach was tense with worry, she forced herself to look.