Tandia

by Bryce Courtenay

  Mama Tequila worked her hard but Tandia didn't mind; she'd always worked hard and now she learned to do with less sleep. She'd never been a big sleeper; her early childhood terror as she lay alone in the shed at the house in Booth Road had conditioned her. She began to find ways to be indispensable at Bluey Jay, not simply as a room maid but in a number of other chores as well. At first she had to practise laughing when one of the girls said something funny, but after a while she found that buried all these years inside her was lots of bubbling laughter. Driven at first, by the circumstances surrounding her, to seem gregarious and happy rather than naturally quiet and timid, Tandia now found that she was posing less and that laughter and involvement was coming naturally to her. At sixteen her body had suddenly shaped into its female lines. Curves which had been threatening to arrive seemed to wait almost precisely for her sixteenth birthday. Then they shaped her torso and rounded her hips into a tight lithe woman's shape. Her legs, always unusually long, now seemed to fit her body naturally. Each day she seemed to grow more beautiful. The girls at Bluey Jay had all been picked by Mama Tequila because of their looks. But they all understood that Tandia wasn't of the same clay. With her green eyes and perfect skin, she was destined to be a beautiful woman. They cherished this thought among themselves; Tandia was going to be too beautiful to ignore, even in South Africa.

  For her part, Tandia carried her beauty with a naturalness and lack of affectation that endeared her to them all. She simply saw it as a contribution to the atmosphere at Bluey Jay, an abstracted thing which she could use to full effect in her new environment.

  From Juicey Fruit Mambo she learned to run the bar and from Mama Tequila she learned how to hustle customers. A shilling glass of Scotch was five shillings at Bluey Jay and Tandia could convert it into a double and look abject at her mistake, making such a beautiful mess of trying to pour the extra Scotch back into the bottle that a customer would beg her to stop and be happy to pay ten shillings for his drink. She could water drinks perfectly for drunks and, if they were sufficiently drunk, get them onto cold tea without them knowing the difference. While the kaffir with the gold teeth had to be watched like a hawk, no customer ever thought of Tandia cheating them. At first Tandia was simply the late afternoon barmaid relief for Juicey Fruit Mambo, but after just a few weeks Mama Tequila announced at a chew the fat chat that Tandia had achieved solo status in the saloon bar.

  It happened one Sunday morning when Tandia, like all the other girls, had appeared in her chenille dressing-gown in the kitchen. It was unusual for Tandia to be dressed this way, but Mama Tequila hadn't remarked on it. Tandia was usually up hours before the rest of them, dressed and doing her homework and already in the kitchen to help when she appeared to cook breakfast. Mama Tequila made a mental note to take her temperature after the session. Tandia up this late and still not dressed was obviously not well and she knew, since the day of the Herman the Hottentot affair, Tandia would rather die than complain of not being well.

  Her announcement that Tandia was to be allowed the third billet in the bar was a singular honour. The girls showed their delight by getting up from their chairs and crowding around her.

  Tandia flushed with pleasure. She loved the important feeling working behind the bar counter gave her, and to be put on an even footing with Juicey Fruit Mambo and Mama Tequila as custodian of the saloon bar was an unexpected honour. She'd been up and about since dawn, and now she stood up. Closing her eyes briefly and taking a deep breath to contain her terror she allowed the dressing-gown to slip from her shoulders. She stood before them in her pink gymslip and stockings, standing on her toes to simulate the effect high heels would give her. She had taken eight inches off the skirt of her gymslip and the tops of her stockings could just be seen held with the pink ribbons of her suspenders. Her blouse was unbuttoned to show the curve of her breasts and she held herself in a provocative pose, her body slightly turned with her hands on her hips and her left shoulder thrust forward. Six months previously she might have looked like a young girl playing at being a femme fatale, but now she was provocatively sexy. Mama Tequila who seldom showed surprise at anything drew back and then burst into applause. Unthinking, she slipped into her American vernacular, 'Baby, you just the sexiest thing I ever did see!' she said, with obvious admiration. The girls all clapped and laughed and Marie ran from the room and appeared a few minutes later with a new pair of white highheeled shoes which she made Tandia put on. It was the biggest move Tandia had ever made on her own and it felt good.

  Mama Tequila made Tandia practise walking in the pumps. She was stiff for days afterwards but Tandia knew the effect was worth it and she could hardly wait to return from school the next day and to appear in her new guise in the saloon bar.

  Tandia had such a natural sweet innocence about her that the effect she had on customers was doubled. She was totally desirable and totally unattainable at the same time. The combination made her a formidable attraction behind the bar. For Mama Tequila made it known that, under no circumstances, was Tandia for sale. If anything this increased her desirability to the Bluey Jay regulars.

  With Tandia at the bar, customers not only increased but stayed longer and spent more. Just in case a customer lost the urge to use the upstairs services of the house or was drinking too slowly, Mama Tequila would give Tandia a signal by placing her hand over her glass. Tandia would wait until the customer was ready to order again. 'Same again, Miss Tandy.'

  Tandia would pretend not to understand the request and her eyes would grow big. She'd put her hands on her waist and lean back slightly with her left shoulder thrown forward, the way Mama Tequila had taught her. 'Oh, sir, not the same again! Last week was good, Jasmine says you were so very good and very nice to her also. But you can't have the same again!' Tandia would take a deep breath and giggle, 'So! This week we have a special treat for you! Doreen is going to take you today and she has some lovely, lovely surprises for you.'

  Tandia was never explicit nor did she talk dirty. She was becoming an actress who worked with body language and with her eyes. Words could only have cheapened the merchandise she had for sale at Bluey Jay. Tandia understood when Mama Tequila said that a whorehouse was a theatre of the mind, and she intended to be the perfect understudy to the leading lady.

  The client would laugh. 'That's not what I meant, Miss Tandy. Give me another drink.'

  'Certainly, sir, what will it be? Another lager? It will be waiting for you, a big cold glass with the foam running down the side, just how you like it. Because you going to need a long, cold beer when Miss Doreen is finished with you, believe me!'

  'That child, ain't she the limit!' Mama Tequila would shake her head and chuckle. 'Mister you take no notice dat little hustler! Miss Tandy you give the gentleman guest another beer before I take the strap to you, you heah?' The customers would wince at the sudden vision of someone taking the strap to Tandia. Mama Tequila would turn to the customer. 'I ain't saying she's not right, that Miss Doreen, she special, she the best, but she expensive.' Mama Tequila would lean over and whisper into his ear, 'For five pound she do anything, you hear? Anything you want!'

  At that moment Doreen would walk into the bar, signalled by a buzzer under the bar counter. Mama Tequila would say, 'Miss Doreen I want you to be nice to our gentleman guest.' She would roll her eyes. 'Real nice. He deserve the best you got, Miss Doreen, the best he ever had, you hear?'

  SIX

  Shortly after its win in the 1953 elections, the Nationalist government formed a covert police squad in all major cities whose job it was to track down the subversive elements in the urban black, coloured and Indian communities. To cover their activity, but also because the government saw a connection between the two, they were given the public brief of enforcing the Immorality Act. Both these aims, covert and otherwise, suited the career aspirations of Geldenhuis perfectly. He applied and was accepted into the special police unit known simply as the Special Branch, though the
unit was popularly referred to as the Spy and Thigh Squad, which later became abbreviated to its acronym, SAT.

  The appointment of Geldenhuis to SAT was his biggest career move yet. Meanwhile Tandia, the black slimmetjie whom, as a type, Geldenhuis so despised, had all but completed her secondary school education and aspired to enter university to read law. Geldenhuis too had been busy during the year, learning the Zulu language - a facility which in the years to come would make him a formidable interrogator.

  He knew instinctively that future personal power lay in exploiting the Immorality Act, that the sexual apartheid of South Africa contained all the ingredients for achieving that power. Geldenhuis saw a situation where a white official in his imagination this was always a magistrate or person capable of influencing the affairs of apartheid - was sexually compromised by ruthless black activists seeking to subvert the system. He was convinced that sex would become the major weapon the terrorists would use to undermine the infrastructure of apartheid, and he set about building a reputation for himself as the guardian of white morality. He made frequent arrests, mostly on the waterfront where the hapless 'trick zombies' worked, bagging a mixture of customers, foreign sailors, white kids drunk and derring-do on a Saturday night out, fishermen and whalers and the general human flotsam of port life together with an occasional solid citizen, a minor public servant or a small shopkeeper. It was these respectable arrests which soon earned Geldenhuis a big reputation. The newspapers played them up and in the process destroyed the lives of a lot of little people and their families, while at the same time pandering to the righteous indignation of the 'thou shalt not commit adultery' segment of the white, Calvinist public, who saw adultery committed with a black or coloured person as the most venal of all possible crimes: a triple whammy which, in some minds, transcended even murder.

  Durban became one of the first cities openly to establish an Immorality Squad, and in less than a year it was being led by Detective Sergeant Geldenhuis. His appointment was a popular one; not only was he a diligent and persistent law officer but he had also recently gained some public notoriety by beating a black fighter named Gideon Mandoma. The twelve-round championship fight had resulted in a bitterly disputed verdict and Geldenhuis had taken the South African welterweight boxing title.

  Then Jamal Singh had been arrested. The Singh case had attracted widespread publicity, doing more to damage South Africa in the eyes of the world than anything previously perpetrated in the name of apartheid. The government and the Dutch Reformed Church saw it as the price to be paid for moral rectitude in a world which was clearly controlled outside of South Africa by the Jews and the Communists. Geldenhuis had hidden in the boot of Singh's car as the Indian businessman had driven off to keep an assignation with a white prostitute and had photographed Jamal Singh and his sex partner in flagrante delicto in the back seat of Singh's olive-brown Chevrolet. The barrister appearing for Singh had asked how Detective Sergeant Geldenhuis had known his client's designation. Geldenhuis had replied that it had been a matter of diligent detective work. Asked to explain this further, he had admitted to concealing himself in the boot of the car on several occasions. At the conclusion of the trial, which became known as the 'Cop in the Boot' trial, Jamal Singh had been sentenced to five years in prison. Geldenhuis had received a letter from the Minister for Justice, commending him for his diligence as an officer of the law and for his outstanding example as a member of the Afrikaner race.

  It was this letter which, seated at the bar counter at Bluey Jay, he now showed to Mama Tequila, with Tandia in attendance behind the bar. Tandia remained terrified of Geldenhuis who had been coming to Bluey Jay fairly regularly over the period she had been with Mama Tequila. She had told her about Geldenhuis wanting her to spy for him and, to her surprise, Mama Tequila had laughed.

  'Rule number one, Tandy, nobody has a name in a brothel. If a customer says his name is Pinocchio, next time he comes in you say, "Good evening Mr Pinocchio". If the police show you a picture of this guy you shake your head, you never seen him in your life before. That the one rule cannot be broken in a place like this.'

  Geldenhuis had tried on several occasions to get information from Tandia but she had simply invoked rule number one and smiled, though she'd quaked in her boots, saying she didn't know the identity of any of the people who came. After a while he stopped asking.

  Tandia was quite unable to explain to herself why she felt guilty when Geldenhuis appeared; guilty at having been raped. The totally irrational response that she was at fault, that somehow she had done something to have caused it to happen, refused to go away. Sometimes the memory of it struck her like a blow to the head, a physical thing she could feel. Then she would crawl up into a ball and try to think it away, wash it out of her system with tears that squeezed to the surface like shards of glass. Rape was not only a thing of the mind, an imagined hand which held her heart like an unforgiving sponge and squeezed until she felt the muscle and the sinew and the blood vessels popping out between her fingers as though, at any moment, it would split from the pressure and allow the life to explode out of her. It was also a great heaviness in her gut as though her stomach contained two large round river stones submerged in black bile which made her feel nauseous and too weary to rise from her bed. This second feeling was her fear, the never-ending malignant fear. It would come upon her the moment she set eyes on Geldenhuis.

  While some of the policemen were still regular customers, this was less and less true as the Immorality Act took effect. A police officer in the Transvaal had been given a four-year prison sentence on a morals charge and now, with the formation of SAT Squad, the code of honour which existed between policemen had been largely eliminated. No officer in the force was safe any longer.

  Mama Tequila didn't use her American persona with the police, for they were strictly about business: the business of survival. She'd been in business long before the Immorality Act and her connections with the Durban police force and judiciary went back a long way to friendlier times when a policeman could remove his khaki uniform and have a little bit of fun for a change.

  Mama Tequila wasn't silly enough to trust the police, even in the good old days, and the huge old safe at Bluey Jay contained at least one ten-by-eight, black-and-white photograph of each of her customers caught in a compromising position. Some of these photographs had turned brown with age and were mostly of policemen who had used her services when she ran her dockside BB-TMs. There was only one exception: Geldenhuis. Much as Mama Tequila had tried to suggest to him that a bounty of golden flesh was available to him at no charge, Geldenhuis had never used the services at Bluey Jay.

  'That's a very nice letter, you can't get more high up than that.' Mama Tequila proffered the letter to Tandia but Geldenhuis snatched it from her hands.

  Ag, it's nothing, I jus' got lucky.' He folded the letter and returned it to his wallet. He laughed suddenly. 'You know what I told Jamal Singh, I said to him, "You stupid bastard, if you want a stray fuck why didn't you call me!" But then I looked in his eyes and I knew all of a sudden that what he wanted was a white woman, it had to be a white woman. Sies, man! What a disgusting bastard! What could I do? I had to arrest him.'

  'You mean you was lying in that car boot just to warn him and then give him my address?' The sarcasm was apparent in Mama Tequila's voice.

  Geldenhuis flushed and picked up his beer and took a sip to regain his composure. 'Of course not, man. We knew he was doing it, that was one thing we knew for sure, but catching him, that was another thing! Always he would slip the police tail. I had to do something, man. You never know how many white women a bastard like that will do it to if you don't catch him and put him in gaol.'

  'Detective Sergeant, I been a whore a long time. I been a owner of a whorehouse also a long time. A black whore, a coloured whore, a white whore, they all the same. A whore is a whore! What make you think a white one is better than a black one? Their pussy, it work just th
e same.'

  'Ja, I see what you mean, Mama Tequila.' Geldenhuis said politely, 'but you got to understand, when a Indian wants to do it to a white person it's a political thing. "Look!" he's saying, "I'm just as bladdy good as you, I can screw your woman just like you.'"

  Mama Tequila kept the smile on her face, though Tandia could see that the back of her neck had gone a crimson colour, a sure sign she was very angry. 'I jus' got one word to say, Detective Sergeant. Bullshit!'

  For a moment Tandia thought she'd heard Mama Tequila incorrectly. Geldenhuis's blue eyes had assumed the dreamy, faraway quality she recalled from the interrogation room and she knew she'd heard correctly. It made her fear rise up and threaten to choke her. Her hand shot up involuntarily and gripped her throat in alarm. She was afraid to look at Geldenhuis, for she knew instinctively he would never forgive Mama Tequila's insult. But when he spoke his voice was perfectly controlled. 'You a coloured person, I don't expect you to understand.' Then he took up his beer. Holding the glass up in front of him as though he were about to propose a toast, he threw back his head and drained it, wiping the flecked foam from his mouth with the back of his hand. 'I need to see you privately, Mama Tequila.' He looked momentarily at Tandia and then turned back to Mama Tequila. 'Is there somewhere else we can go?'

  Mama Tequila returned to the bar about half an hour later. 'Give me a double brandy, Tandy.' Tandia reached for the VSOP bottle and measured the brandy into a small balloon glass. It was unusual for Mama Tequila to drink during the afternoon; she usually had her first snort around six.

  Mama Tequila took the glass and raised it to her lips, taking a slug straight down so that half the brandy in the balloon disappeared. She grimaced as she placed the glass back on the bar. 'Miss Tandy, we got troubles!' she said. 'What sort of troubles, Mama T?'