Tandia

by Bryce Courtenay

  The railway man shrugged. 'Ja, if she's got a pass it's"okay by me.'

  Geldenhuis clicked his tongue. 'No, man, she hasn't got a pass! I just want her to sit on a bench until some people come.'

  'You better give me your name and your phone number in case some other police come,' said the stationmaster.

  Geldenhuis wrote down his phone number and name and, tearing the page from a small spiral notepad, handed it to the official who turned and walked away without bidding him goodnight.

  Geldenhuis turned to Tandia. 'Don't try and leave here; you haven't got a night pass, and if some other police pick you up you'll be charged and go to the lock-up for six days. Just stay here on a bench, okay?'

  Tandia nodded; the thought of being apprehended again terrified her. Geldenhuis opened the boot and she lifted the basin to her head. Very little strength remained in her beaten body and she rose slowly to an upright position.

  'Can I go now please, sir?' she whispered.

  'Ja, go!'

  Tandia walked up the station steps into the building. 'Hey!' Geldenhuis called. The heavy basin on her head caused Tandia to turn slowly to face him. If he called her back again she knew she would surely faint. He stood with his elbow resting on the top of the open driver's door.

  'Yes, sir?' it was hardly a whisper and the white policeman would have had difficulty even detecting the movement of her lips.

  Geldenhuis patted the breast pocket of his uniform and grinned. 'Jus' remember, jong, in the eyes of the law you nothing but a whore!'

  Tandia turned and walked into the station building where she found a bench on the platform stencilled 'Non-Whites.' She pushed the basin under the bench and sat down on the deserted platform. She was unutterably tired but the joy of having finally escaped Geldenhuis overcame her weariness for a moment and she impulsively rose from the bench and pulled the basin out from under it.

  The two cotton shifts into which Apple Sammy, Tandia's kewpie doll, had been wrapped hadn't come undone when the basin had toppled to the road. Now she removed the doll and examined it. Apple Sammy had large, ingenuous dark-blue eyes which had faded somewhat and the once bright rose rouge on his cheeks was now only faintly discernible, but he seemed no worse for wear. Tandia adjusted the doll's legs and pulled at his tiny pink organza skirt.

  Tandia sat with the small doll clutched tightly to her chest and started to rock. She was too tired to try to think about what might happen next. Weariness overcame her and despite her fear of being accosted on the lonely platform, she fell asleep.

  Tandia wakened slowly. Her body ached terribly but her head, which also hurt, rested against a warm, wonderful softness. She felt herself cradled, as though she was being held in a comforting embrace. The experience was so unfamiliar that, at first, she believed herself to be dreaming. To add to the dreaming quality, a sweet-smelling perfume reached her nostrils. Slowly, tentatively, she opened her eyes.

  'Shhh, skatterbol,' she heard a woman's voice say softly. Tandia looked down. She still clutched Apple Sammy to her chest. She tried to sit up but the arm around her held her firmly. Frightened, she looked up into the caramel-coloured face of a very big and smiling woman with the longest false eyelashes she had ever seen.

  The woman wore an outrageously large purple hat decorated with pink ostrich feathers. Her pink satin dress stretched tightly over her enormous bosom, at the same time allowing a large amount of warm caramel flesh to spill out of its deeply plunging neckline so that her breasts looked as though they were trying to escape. The effect the woman created was of richness; and the strong, sweet-smelling perfume which Tandia now realised belonged to her, added to the opulent effect.

  'Don't be frightened, baby, I ain't going to hurt you none.'

  The words were clipped and staccato and sounded American. 'Name's Mama Tequila, pleased ter…meet'cha.' She offered her right hand for Tandia to shake.

  'Hi,' Tandia whispered, barely touching the hand with its long, shiny red nails. 'What's your name, honey?'

  'Tandia,' she cleared her throat, 'Tandia Patel.'

  'Tandia, that's a real swell name. You got no place to go? That's it, huh? You little orphan Annie sittin' on your fanny?' Mama Tequila had the raspy voice of a heavy smoker and now she laughed uproariously at her own joke, interjecting her laughter with a fit of coughing. She stopped laughing abruptly and reached into her handbag, a large purple leather affair that matched her hat. From it she withdrew a silver cigarette case. 'Smoke, honey?'

  Tandia, who was completely overwhelmed by the presence of this large woman, shook her head.

  Mama Tequila helped herself to a cigarette, closed the case and tapped the tobacco end on its silver lid. She returned the case to her bag and then dug around in it to produce a regulation American army Zippo lighter. She flicked it alight and held it to the end of the cigarette, squinting through the smoke as she drew in and then exhaled. Then. she slipped the cover back over the Zippo and returned it to her handbag. She spoke with the cigarette between her lips. 'It ain't pretty like everything else, but it sure lights every time. I kind of like pretty things, but a pretty lighter that don't work is like a pretty woman that don't work.' She withdrew the cork tip from her lips. 'Ain't no good to nobody, leastways herself!' She chuckled, 'I bet you like pretty things too, hey honey?'

  Tandia didn't answer. She wanted to pinch herself to make sure she wasn't dreaming; nothing like this monstrous pink creature had ever happened to her before.

  'Sure you do, you a very pretty girl, pretty girls got to have pretty things, or they die!' She shook her head slowly as though talking to herself. 'There is plenty of time to be ugly.' She turned and looked directly at Tandia. 'You got to use pretty, while you got pretty, honey, that the rule of womankind!'

  Mama Tequila started to chuckle again, her breasts heaving. 'You see this big, hip-pie-pot-to-mass, honey? Well, once upon a time, I was just as pretty and dainty as you, baby.' She seemed to find this particularly funny, her laughter disappearing finally into a wheeze until she grew quite red in the face and started to cough. She threw the cigarette to the ground and bending forward brought both her hands up to cover her mouth. Tandia knew she ought to pat her on the back but she hesitated. She had never deliberately touched an adult female person before and now the idea frightened her.

  Mama Tequila glanced at her briefly between a spasm of coughing. Her eyes were teary from the coughing and her mascara had started to run; she seemed to be appealing for her help. Tandia took a deep breath and started to slap the large woman on her back. To her surprise Mama Tequila ceased coughing almost immediately. In a voice drawn thin after the paroxysm of coughing she said, 'Ain't nutting but coffin nails, them damned cigarillos!'

  She straightened up, dug into her handbag and produced an absurdly small lace handkerchief with which she wiped her eyes; then she held it to her nose and blew. She found a compact in her bag and proceeded to repair her make-up.

  Returning the make-up to her bag, she turned to Tandia, her face serious for a moment. 'This ai!,'t no place for a couple of high-class ladies, honey,' she rasped.

  Tandia instinctively liked the big woman. She wanted to go with her but her escape from Geldenhuis was still too recent. The idea of being tied to another human being she didn't know and whose motives she couldn't begin to discern, frightened her. 'Where we going to?' Instinctively she picked up Apple Sammy from her lap and clutched the doll to her chest.

  Mama Tequila didn't answer her directly. Instead she looked hard into Tandia's eyes. 'Look, kid, you a mess. You been beat-up bad.' She touched Tandia's face gently. 'Look what them mothers did to you!' She reached out and removed Apple Sammy from Tandia's grasp and placed the kewpie doll on her lap. Then she took both Tandia's arms, and drew them gently towards her. When she spoke again the toughness had gone from her voice.

  'You poor baby, them wrists, they are bad. We got to clean you up, honey
. We leave you like this you going to have yourself a pair of permanent bracelets.'

  Mama Tequila placed Tandia's hands back on her lap one on either side of Apple Sammy. Then she rose slowly from the bench and began to tug at her skirt, pulling the tight satin back down to her knees. She adjusted her hat in an imaginary mirror, her hands fluttering around its rim, a small tug here and a little pat there, like two busy brown spiders, the ends of their fat legs dipped in brilliant scarlet. She took a few steps towards the entrance of the station, and pushing two fingers into her mouth she let go a piercing whistle. She turned to Tandia. 'C'mon, kid, let's kick the dust, we're going home to Bluey Jay.'

  In what seemed like a matter of moments a tall, very black man appeared. His head was completely shaved and a jagged scar ran diagonally across the top of his shiny scalp to just above his left eyebrow. It looked as though the skull had been cracked open and then clamped until it grew back together again. The eye directly under the scar was only half open, a condition which seemed permanent as the skin around the eye was puckered like the top of a leather drawstring purse. The tall black man smiled as he approached Mama Tequila and Tandia noticed that his two front teeth were missing but the incisors on either side had each been filed to a point and were made of gold.

  'This is Edward, King George, Juicey Fruit Mambo, honey. He is my driver. Just call him Juicey Fruit Mambo. Never mind your basin, he'll bring it.' Mama Tequila started to walk away. 'Now you just follow me, baby,' she called; she seemed to alternate the two endearments 'honey' and 'baby' as though she hadn't quite decided which suited Tandia best, though 'baby' seemed to be winning.

  Juicey Fruit Mambo grinned at Tandia. He reminded Tandia of a horror story she'd read as a small girl in a book she'd borrowed from the school library. It had been entitled 'Doctor Weirdwolfe's Tales of the Supernatural'. The scariest story in the book was about a monster named the Master of Evil who lived in the under-world with a huge and grotesque wet nurse who cared for the monster children of his victims. They all lived in a giant tent made from the membraned wings of vampire bats, surrounded by a garden of carnivorous plants that fed on birds and bats and flying insects, reaching up on coiled stems to snatch them from the very air itself. The Master of Evil would come up into the above-world through the foul-smelling city sewers, into the dark, cold, misty streets where. he would waylay young women returning from the tavern at night, biting them on the right breast with his two gold incisors so that nine months later they gave birth to boy monsters.

  From infancy these children were unable to bear bright light and screamed until they were placed into a dark cupboard; where they would lie quietly all day. But when night came, especially when it was a full moon, they would howl like wolves. Each year, on St Crispin's day, the children born to the Master of Evil were put out into the icy streets to die. Mysteriously, by morning there was never any sign of them. People claimed they had been gathered up by the Master of Evil who would take them back to his terrible wet nurse, who fed the children on blood from her breasts.

  Then, when they were grown up, the Master of Evil would file and cap their teeth with gold like his own and send them out to hunt alone in the dark alleys in the above-world. The story ended with the warning that, at that very moment, in the city where the reader dwelt, lurking in the foul-smelling sewers was a Master of Evil waiting to sink his golden incisors into young women returning from the taverns late at night.

  It was quite a silly story really, but Tandia could recall being very frightened that such a dreadful creature was waiting in the dark sewers under Durban. The road outside Patel's house was the only paved one in the township and thus contained a stormwater drain, from which the Master of Evil might appear at any moment, within yards of where Tandia lay in the iron shed in the back yard.

  Juicey Fruit Mambo bent from the waist and scooped up Tandia's basin. He held it in front of him as though it was a tray filled with precious things charged especially to his care. Tandia thanked him softly and, picking up Apple Sammy from the bench, she followed the large, pink woman out of the station building.

  Directly below the steps, where Geldenhuis had parked the police car, now stood a large black motor with its engine running and its back door open. Mama Tequila stood at the car door and waited for Tandia to reach her before she got in. She patted the seat beside her. 'Come, baby, you're safe in Mama's big, black, shiny Packard limousine. Come sit here with Mama, honey.'

  The back of the car smelt of expensive leather, not unlike Patel's boots when they were new. Tandia sat wide-eyed and nervous on the edge of the back seat with her hands tightly gripping the seat in front of her. Mama Tequila took Apple Sammy from Tandia's lap and placed the doll between the two of them. 'She a proper lady riding in a limousine now, honey,' she said and then, as though to demonstrate how a proper lady sat, she closed her eyes and fell back into the soft leather, exhausted.

  Tandia heard the slam of the boot closing and moments later Juicey Fruit opened the driver's door and slid behind the wheel. 'Home to Bluey Jay,' Mama Tequila instructed wearily without opening her eyes, 'We gonna take Miss Tandia here into our everlovin' care.'

  The big car climbed away from the flats of Cato Manor station towards the Berea, away from the poorer parts of the city into the heights above Durban where the posh white people lived, a part of town where Africans, Indians or coloureds weren't allowed to live even if they had all the money in the world.

  Soon they left the big walled houses and leafy streets of the Berea behind and drove down dark avenues of gum trees. The white bark on their perfectly straight trunks ghosted as the headlights caught and then lost them again. Once in a while they'd pass the shadowy outline of a house set back from the road and then they left the bluegums and for a short while they drove along the open highway on the road to Pietermaritzburg. Juicey Fruit Mambo finally slowed the Packard and turned into a small dirt road.

  The way was no more than a farm road, rutted and uneven in places so that Juicey Fruit Mambo seldom took the Packard out of low gear. Half a mile or so up this road he stopped at an imposing set of double wrought-iron gates set between two large white painted cement pillars. It was bright moonlight and it was easy to see that not even a wire strand fence attached to either side of the brilliant white gateposts. In fact, these posts were not white at all, but a violent pink in the light of day; now, caught in the bright headlights of the car they looked dazzling white.

  Juicey Fruit Mambo tapped the horn once sharply, even though a small boy of about eight years old holding a hurricane lamp was hurrying down the long curved driveway towards the gate. The boy was almost immediately followed by an old Zulu running on spindly buckled legs who carried a knopkierie and a short asegai in one hand and with the other held up his ragged khaki shorts to prevent them from falling down.

  The boy placed the hurricane lamp on the side of the driveway and swung the gates open just as the Zulu came to a panting halt and stood to attention at the side of the driveway. Still clutching his pants he gave Juicey Fruit Mambo and his passengers a toothless smile and saluted, touching the large wooden knob of his fighting stick and the blade of his spear lightly to his grizzled head.

  Juicey Fruit Mambo laughed. 'Go back to sleep, old man.

  Go back and dream of a hundred cattle and five fatbuttocked wives all of dem young with sweet milk in their breasts.' Pointing to the small boy, he added, 'Dis brave warrior will guard us well tonight, see, it is a miracle, his pants stay up on their own. So he has both hands free to fight de evil skokiaan.' He reached out and patted the small boy on the head and then pointed to the full moon which frosted the surrounding trees and silvered the surrounding landscape with a light almost as clear as day. 'Tonight, God has supplied de light. Do not insult him with your little lantern. If I had a newspaper and, if I could read, I would read by the light. Dere are no shadows in such a night to conceal danger. Is it too much to ask that you can walk by it?' He slip
ped the car into gear and moved into the long driveway leading to the house.

  Around a curve the lights of the Packard revealed a large mansion resting amongst several very big trees. The house was in darkness except for a solitary light which burned a dim welcome inside the arched doorway. The driveway led directly past the front of the house and Juicey Fruit Mambo continued past the front door and around the far side of the house. Caught in the headlights, Tandia observed what appeared to be a row of outhouses. Juicey Fruit Mambo drove past these to the very end and turned the Packard into a lean-to garage.

  Mama Tequila, who had remained with her eyes closed even at the gate, now opened them as Juicey Fruit Mambo switched off the ignition. 'Welcome to Bluey Jay, honey,' she said wearily.

  Juicey Fruit Mambo opened the rear door on Tandia's side. The very first sounds she heard as she stepped from the car were the croaking of a frog and the electric singing of crickets. Holding Apple Sammy tightly she stood waiting, sensing the alien space around her. The air was cool and she could smell the slightly damp earth at her feet and the cudlike odour of the grass. It made her think of Patel in his cold grave and she shuddered involuntarily. A sudden breeze arose and sent the leaves of the large trees around the house roaring. Just as suddenly the breeze stopped and after barely a moment of silence the frog and the crickets took up again. The sky, almost pewter in the moonlight, showed a few of the brighter stars and through the branches of a giant old wild fig tree she could see the speckled light of the moon. Tandia had never been in the country before and she found it frightening and very strange. Never mind the Master of Evil lurking in the city sewers, some very strange things could happen in all this space and loneliness, she thought.

  'Come, baby, it's late, we got to clean you up some and put you to bed.' Mama Tequila took Tandia by the elbow and they followed Juicey Fruit Mambo, who'd raced ahead to open the door and turn on a light in the small scullery which served as the back entrance to the house and which led directly through to a large kitchen.