Tandia

by Bryce Courtenay

  Even Sophiatown was a surprise to Tandia. She'd never before witnessed a multiracial society and while poverty was evident everywhere, this place on the fringe of the big time had a non-interfered-with look about it. By contrast, Cato Manor, where she had been born and brought up, was an orderly urban slum kept under the heel of authority, which bred a passive resignation in its inhabitants. Cato Manor had none of the dynamism of this place on the high veld where the air seemed lighter and where the sky, a washed-out blue, seemed higher.

  She'd warmed to the dusty-ankled, bright-eyed ragamuffins who'd run behind the car, yelling and cheering their progress. Some rolled hoops made from the spokeless rim of a bicycle wheel, guiding them with short sticks held into the grooved rim; others pushing skeletal motor cars shaped entirely out of bits of wire and driven by long sticks, each attached to a small wire steering wheel with which the driver turned the wheels. Catapults dangled around the necks of the kids, bouncing on their chests as they ran.

  Juicey Fruit Mambo had slowed right down to navigate the ruts and the puddles of dirty rainwater and the kids were thumping the back of the car with the flat of their hands as they cried a good-natured welcome.

  Tandia sensed that the people, the crowd who had gathered around them when they'd stopped outside Madam Flame Flo's home, were different. For the first time she felt she belonged to something larger and more important than herself, that she was to be given a reason why her life was turning out so well. It was silly she told herself; how could she feel so much about this place? She hadn't walked more than fifty feet, the distance from the street into the dark cool house. And yet she sensed all of these things clearly. It was as though Sophiatown was the first place that made perfect sense to her in her life, this dirty little township where the spirit of her people rose above the squalor, the thuggery and the exploitation.

  'So what do you think, ousie?' Madam Flame Flo leaned with her elbows on the dining-room table, her chin resting on her hands. 'What do you think about a brothel for coloured folk in the new township they calling Coronationville they making for us? Give us your honest answer. Not what you think you'd like me to hear! No soft pedalling you hear? What do you say, hey?'

  Mama Tequila had settled herself down to some serious eating. 'Sshhh! Flo, not so much talk! You like a blerrie machine gun!' She had reverted to the Transvaal pronunciation of the word 'bloody', switching automatically from the more anglicised Natal 'bladdy'. She wiped her mouth with the butter-stained napkin around her neck and brought her coffee cup to her lips. She took a lingering sip from the cup. 'It all depends, Flo, what kind of whorehouse you want,' she said finally.

  'The kind that makes lots of money! That the kind I want! What other kind is there?'

  'Ja, of course, but in this new place you got only coloured trade. That means trouble, because you can't run a good whorehouse with only coloured people. You most likely got to run a BB-TM!'

  'So, what's so wrong with that? In a BB-TM the money comes fast. No fancy overheads. Like you in the war. Jesus! You was raking in cash like it was going out of style!'

  'Ja, jong, but soldiers and coloured people, they not the same thing. A soldier comes to a BB-TM because he's away from his home and his girl or his wife, or because his platoon they all also going. He needs a woman, he got dirty water on his chest and he want to get it off. A coloured kerel goes to a BB-TM when he's drunk because if he not drunk he's-a natural freelancer who thinks he can get it for nothing. And when he's drunk he likes to fight and to gamble. So now what you got? You got trouble, you hear? You too old for that, Flo. Too rich also. Look! You can't open a house 'like Bluey Jay no more. You know how many coloureds come to Bluey Jay?' She held up three fingers. 'Three, they all rich. If I had to depend on coloureds there would be no bums bobbing in the beds, I can tell you that for sure, jong. It would be a no-go show, I'm telling you!' Mama Tequila paused and held up her hand. 'I know what you going to say and ja, I agree, here there is more coloureds than Durban. But all the same, to run a nice house you got to have rich. And also, without white you going nowhere, man! The white man is the one who likes to have black pussy! With him you can run a nice quiet house and make him pay. And you can't have no white whores for the coloured people, not because there not plenty around, but because the authorities say they can't live in this new place you going, what its name, this Coronation place? Also white whores they trouble, man, they poor whites who got no hygiene and they big friends with doctor brandy and Mary Jane!'

  'Ja, okay, but what say we get only very pretty coloured girls? Just like you got at Bluey Jay. A pretty girl, no matter what colour, men always want?'

  Mama Tequila arched" an eyebrow. 'Flo, you know it already, a coloured man always wants what he can't get. He can get a coloured girl, he married to one! He want white pussy which is verboten. Even if your girls they real pretty, they still just like his wife.'

  Mama Tequila took another sip from her cup before continuing. 'Flo, darling, you seen it yourself on a Saturday night! Good Street, that a damn funny name, it a good street orright! It good for pretty coloured girls and black girls who are dancing the marabi dance and selling freelance pussy at cut rates! Darling, in a whorehouse you got overheads. First you got to buy yourself a nice place, because if you rent, the landlord is always putting up the rent. Then you got to pay the police, not just one kind of police, you hear? You got to pay the SAPS, the Black Jacks, the Ghost Squad, the Homicide Squad, the Robbery Squad and even the Special Branch. Then the gangs; killers like Kort Boy who runs the Americans, even the tsotsi gangs so you got protection from themselves. Then you got maybe fifty people who all got their hand out. The council and the health department, you name it. In a whorehouse pay-out day is every day!'

  Mama Tequila was warming to her subject. 'But all that's nothing, man! Because it's not so long before you get your first murder. Some drunk haut kap, wooden head, puts a knife in a girl because he think she looks like his sister or men fight over gambling and the guns come out.

  'Now you got blood. When a whorehouse got blood it got trouble. No more police protection. The police, the Homicide Squad takes over and the nex' thing you in the Rand Daily Mail and the Star and you got to close down. When you start again somewhere else, every time it becomes harder 'cause now you got a rep. Soon you only get scum, only the crud comes and then it only a matter of time before someone pull the trigger and the gun is pointing at you. Bang! You dead! You a rich, dead nice-time girl!'

  'Jesus!' Madam Flame Flo exclaimed. 'And I thought the shebeen business is bad! How come you never told me this before?'

  'You never wanted to run a whorehouse before, my darling.' Mama Tequila leaned forward, 'Flo, you rich! Go buy yourself a nice place, get somewhere where your daughter can come sometimes to see you, somewhere where nobody can see it's happening.' Flo sighed heavily. 'Ja, I dunno about that: 'Ag, man, you can find a place. What about Newtown or Fordsburg, they got coloured and whites living there a long time already?'

  'No, man, that all finish and klaar now! They kicking the coloureds out of Newtown and Fordsburg also, the same time they going to bulldoze Sophiatown. We all going to our own place. Indians one place, coloureds to Coronationville and the blacks going to Meadowlands and Diepkloof. That leaves the whites anywhere they want except not the places where the black and the coloured and the Indian folks been forced to live.' She laughed bitterly.

  Tandia, who had been listening to the conversation, for the first time really understood what Mama Tequila had been through to get to the point where she owned and operated Bluey Jay. Maybe she wasn't a good person, but Mama Tequila was strong and resilient and a fighter. Tandia knew she too had to be all of those things if she was going to succeed. She knew that the burning inside of her was about being these things. 'Excuse me, Mama T, and also Madam Flame Flo?' she said suddenly. Mama Tequila looked up in surprise. While she had accepted Tandia as being present in the room, in terms of her conver
sation with her sister, Tandia had been mentally screened out. She was there to have lunch but not to be a part of the discussion. Her look of surprise turned to annoyance' when Tandia added, 'I have an idea.'

  Mama Tequila smiled. It was the smile the wolf gave to Red Riding Hood. The girls at Bluey Jay knew it and knew also it didn't augur well for the recipient. 'Maybe you could go take a nice walk in the sunshine, Tandy?' she said, her lips pursed.

  Tandia opened her mouth and then thought better of it and began to rise from her chair. Some resilience hey? Just one Red Riding Hood smile from Mama Tequila and you weak as piss! No, bugger it! She sat down again and smiled prettily at both women. 'Swaziland! Why doesn't Madam Flame Flo open a whorehouse and a gambling place in Swaziland?' Tandia asked.

  Mama Tequila and Madam Flame Flo had both stayed alive and prospered because they could think fast and on their feet. The coffee cup in Madam Flame Flo's hand dropped to the table, spilling coffee everywhere as a look of astonishment crossed her face. 'Jesus Mary and Joseph!' She turned to her sister. 'You said she was a siimmetjie! Jesus! That the best idea! That the best idea I ever heard in my whole life!'

  Mama Tequila chuckled. Her scorn of a moment ago turned to approbation for the young girl who sat with them. 'This one is going to go a long, long way, I'm telling you, little sister, one day she going to be a somebody white people going to take a big notice of.'

  Swaziland was a British Protectorate, a small mountainous country coloured red on the map which looked as though someone had taken a polite bite out of the eastern side of South Africa. It lay some four and a half hours' drive from Johannesburg and was just beginning the tedious process of being handed back by Britain to its rightful owners. The independence of Swaziland didn't trouble South Africa much, for the tiny country was and would continue to be largely dependent on South Africa for its daily bread.

  Apart from forest products, sugar, iron ore and asbestos, the Swazi people had little to offer the Union of South Africa except the sweat of their backs. A part of the black labour which dug the gold in tunnels a mile below the streets of Johannesburg was Swazi. These indentured labourers were recruited to work in the mines on the Witwatersrand by the Native Recruiting Corporation for a minimum period of one hundred and eighty shifts. The Swaziland economy depended heavily on the repatriation of the money they earned. The mine labourers were paid almost no money while they worked and lived on the mine compounds. When they'd served their time - for life in the all-male dormitories where the men slept one above the other on concrete shelves and were fed like animals from giant cauldrons and who carried a copper bracelet with a number and not a name was a perfect simulation of prison - they were repatriated by overnight train to the Swaziland border, where they were paid the full amount of their six months' wages at a de-recruitment centre. The economy of this small, unimportant and very beautiful corner of Africa was based entirely on the export of sweated labour.

  While there was some speculation that an independent Swaziland would be a training ground for black terrorists, the Boers consoled themselves with the knowledge that they could choke off the livelihood of the Swazi people in a matter of days should they threaten trouble or become uncooperative.

  Tandia's suggestion was a stroke of genius, though it was early times yet. It might be ten years before Swaziland would be released from the paternal guidance and moral stricture of the British Colonial Service, it was time to buy land and start the business of making friends with the royal family. The King of the Swazi, King Sobhuza il, would, they felt sure, see no virtue in the South African Immorality Act and with the establishment of a brothel and casino would see an opportunity too good for his small country to miss. Mama Tequila and Madam Flame Flo instantly believed themselves to be the two people who knew just how to put this proposition to the middle-aged black monarch who preferred a leopardskin to a suit and who had been absolute tribal ruler of his people for thirty- three years.

  The two women were excited, Mama Tequila just as much as Madam Flame Flo. Mama Tequila wasn't stupid; she knew that events were catching up with her at Bluey Jay. She'd be lucky if she had another ten years. The Geldenhuis affair, the biggest and most dangerous threat to Bluey Jay's existence so far, was bound to have serious repercussions as Geldenhuis set about reaping his revenge. Bluey Jay was, she knew, an anachronism, a small island of defiance in a sea of defeat. Even this was an exaggeration. Mama Tequila knew you couldn't stay open without the tacit approval of some pretty high-up officials in the government, and now they were under increasing pressure and sooner or later would have to capitulate.

  In Swaziland there was a place for both sisters to start again. Mbabane, the country's mountain capital, was an ideal location for people coming from the Transvaal and Natal. All Mama Tequila's old clients would still be available to her on an occasional dirty twenty-four and the rest of the white male population could now get legit black weekend pussy no more than four hours' drive from their front door. The Van der Merwe sisters would be united at last. Flo would handle the casino and she, the one and only Mama Tequila, would run the whorehouse.

  Mama Tequila wanted more time to think, and she didn't want Flo to overwork her praise for Tandia's suggestion. Tandia was after all beholden to Mama Tequila, and the big woman wasn't about to let her off the hook too easily. She intended to build up a burden of indebtedness in Tandia before the little slimmetjie became a lawyer. A person never knew when a lawyer might be needed. Mama Tequila wanted a good, solid debt she could cash in if the time came and the need arose.

  'Ja, it is a good idea, but also it's got some problems.' Mama Tequila said in a flat voice. Flo was about to protest, but her sister raised her hand. 'Later! Later, you hear? Tonight maybe we can talk. One thing is good, with something like this you could have Stephanie with you?'

  'Ag, man, I was going to tell you before about that. She wants to get married.'

  Mama Tequila spread her arms out towards her sister, a look of resignation on her face. To anyone observing, as Tandia did, it would have seemed a curiously inappropriate reaction. Delight and congratulations might have been expected.

  Tandia was filled with curiosity at the prospect of Madam Flame Flo's daughter being married, but the expression on Mama Tequila's face told her not to become involved. Quite suddenly, Madam Flame Flo began to cry. 'Flo, no tears, you hear!' Mama Tequila snapped. Madam Flame Flo sniffed and blew into her napkin. 'It's so hard, ousie!' she said in a tiny voice. 'I know, but crying not going to help!'

  'She's, she's going to marry a Boer!' Madam Flame Flo blurted out. 'My baby is going to marry a fucking Boer!'

  'It's better than a fucking kaffir!' Mama Tequila shouted at her.

  'It isn't, ousie! I rather she married a tsotsi or a gangster than a verdoemde hairy back!'

  'Flo, lissen! When you gave her to the nuns to bring up like a nice little white girl, when you kissed her goodbye at that convent boarding school, it was all over between you and Stephanie. It was all over, you hear? You gave her to the' white world! You can't go blubbing to have her back now she wants to marry a Afrikaner!'

  Madam Flame Flo avoided her sister's eye and turned suddenly to Tandia. 'How old are you, Miss Tandy?'

  'Seventeen, eighteen this year.' Tandia replied.

  'Nearly the same. My daughter is nineteen, this year twenty.' She smiled at Tandia. 'She's not nearly as beautiful as you, but she has white skin, blonde hair and blue eyes, dark blue like the winter sky.'

  Tandia flushed. 'I'm sorry,' she stammered, 'I know how you must feel.'

  Madam Flame Flo sniffed again and wiped her nose. 'Ag, it's my own fault.' I deserve this,' she started to cry softly again. 'My beautiful Stephanie, she going to marry a white Boer bastard who's just like her fucking daddy!'

  'Flo! You want I should call Juicey Fruit Mambo and get back in that big Packard and go home? Because if that what you want you got to just keep on like this! You w
ant to run a brothel? Ha! You couldn't run a ring-a-ring-a-rosie contest! With Stephanie it's finish and klaar. We decided that long, long ago! You cry one more time, I'm going home, that for blerrie sure!' Mama Tequila dipped into her handbag and produced a tiny lace handkerchief. 'Here!' she snorted, holding it out to her sister.

  Madam Flame Flo took the hanky and dabbed at her eyes. She was embarrassed by her outburst and at the reprimand from her older sister.

  Tandia rose from her chair. 'I think I'll go for a walk,' she said quietly, in an attempt to extricate herself gracefully from the situation.

  'No, please, Miss Tandy, you stay,' Madam Flame Flo sniffed, pulling her head right back. 'I'm orright now, really, it's okay, all over.' She smiled through the last of her tears. 'You can be my daughter, you hear?'

  Tandia smiled back. 'What about being my Aunty? I'd like to have you as my Aunty Flo. But only if you call me Tandy.'

  'That's true,' Mama Tequila chuckled. 'No more Miss Tandy, this not the right place; just Tandy from now on.'

  'You got it!' Madam Flame Flo said smiling broadly.

  'From now on I'm your Aunty Flo and you just plain Tandy who is beautiful and clever and has nice manners also.'

  The crisis was over and Mama Tequila flipped open her cigarette case and removed a cork-tip, lit it and blew a cloud of smoke towards the ceiling. 'Ja, okay, Tandy, you go for a walk, but just be careful, you hear, all the bright boys and the tsotsis will want to make your acquaintance.'