Whiplash

by Tracey Farren

‘Hey.’ I fall back into bliss.

  Later, there’s shouting from down there on the road. Shouting in African. The boy’s against the sky, birds flying behind him. He jerks his line up, laughing. The fluffy puppy hits the window. Down again, Noel leans over, tryna see. Someone skids into my room. Her bib’s so bright it’s like a flipping light. The Shoprite car guard. She whips Noel off the balcony wall. Holds him tight like he’s a lucky, lucky prize. She rants at me in her funny French. I flick my hand, cluck my tongue. ‘Stuff off.’

  It gets me up, though. Sheez, I’m slipping. Lying around like you, Ma. I better do something before the day dies. I cross the railway line, go see Bonita.

  The room stinks of sweet weed. Bonita’s sitting up on the couch, staring at her two plate stove. That evil oke Merrick’s lying there, his head on her lap, his arm over her knees. I swear, sucking the hem of her shirt like a kitten. Josie’s on the arm of the couch, eating polony on bread. The smell of dagga and polony clash badly. Josie opens her sandwich, shows me she’s made a little skirt for her bread with lettuce. Geez, the smell knocks me. ‘Why don’t you open the windows, guys?’

  Sharonne’s voice from inside, ‘Because they don’t wanna get caught for dope.’ I go into the bedroom. Oh, God, she’s also eating polony. Sitting cross legged on a mat, leaning against her tightly made bed. A plain sandwich cut up in perfect squares. She uses a plastic straw to pick them up.

  ‘Just dope?’

  She shrugs, nods. She licks a finger, picks a crumb off her dress.

  ‘Bonita.’

  Bonita smiles at me, reaches out to stroke me.

  ‘Did you hear Annie got chucked out of a car?’

  A long wait.

  ‘Annie.’ She’s found the one.

  ‘Ja, Annie. She got badly roastied.’

  Merrick keeps sucking on Bonita’s shirt. Josie’s sucking on her crusts. My stomach’s freaked out by all this sucking. I pat my thighs, my arms. ‘Here. And here.’

  It must be ultra leaded dope cause after a long, long blank, she smiles, ‘Shame.’ Tries to stroke me again. Flip.

  ‘See you girls.’

  I’m gone.

  Useless. Bonita’s lost.

  Madeleine’s broken.

  That’s what men do. Ag, I know it’s nice when someone notices you. You’ve got this boyfriend and he actually listens when you talk. He knows your sister’s name and he knows to bring you Coke. I know what it’s like to have someone sleep against you, a dead hand on your hip, warm breath on your neck. But they don’t love you. They just wanna see what they can get. Keep you like a pet, till they lose respect.

  Sheez. Monday morning’s a battle. Even my bath water runs too wild. I line my stomach with milk, take my morning five. A shocking thirst hits me, like I’m full of salt. I down water from the bath tap. It’s the pills. It’s not like I don’t know. They make me feel like I’ve been in the sea for hours. But I haven’t swum since I was a kid.

  I let the bath water soak through my skin. Scrub off the top layer with the loofah I got at the P.E. Holiday Inn, that masters league hockey trip. I remember us girls called the okes ‘lazy aged steaks,’ cause that was what was on the hotel menu.

  The noise of the steam iron is mean. Tssh. Tsssh. Get to work. I iron my g-string. Choose khaki clothes cause I can’t face colour. Hollywood Skinner on the radio tips me into my day. The presenter tells us in her golden syrup voice that Pamela Anderson’s going on a Harley Davidson ride to raise bucks for Hepatitus C. She caught it from her ex, Tommy Lee, that time they shared a needle. Bastard didn’t tell her. And Jemima Kahn says she’s totally cool about that prostitute’s blow job, cause Hugh’s been in therapy ever since. He’s come a long way. Geez, what’s the big deal? I’d give him one to remember.

  He could sneak me in there. Say I’ve come to do the ironing. He’ll think I’m only good for one thing till we have this chat about how the Catholic church and McDonalds owns more land than anyone. I won’t tell him I heard it from a Greenpeace jump. He’ll be impressed by my knowledge. He’ll be touched by a perfect triangle of burnt skin on my arm, from the iron. He won’t be able to get me out of his head. He’ll organise lessons from an acting coach for a British accent. He’ll promote me to Public Relations. He’ll adore me, but he won’t be able to let the world know, cause his love for me could kill his image. But the poor guy lives in fear of me leaving.

  I swear I nearly burn myself for real. Hollywood Skinner’s over, they introduce a guest. Dumisani Gumede. God’s truth, the name shocks me. Same as Dumi from Hibberdene. I switch the iron off. Turn the radio up cause Noel’s awake, making car engine sounds. But this guy’s slick, this Dumisani. His voice paints a white smile. It can’t be him, this charging bull, packing in as much info as possible. The radio guy’s quiet cause Dumisani talks up a spell like he’s personally tryna feed the world. He works for a food aid set up. He talks about stuff like redistribution, says we’re all citizens of the globe. He says his organisation’s got credit card promises from all over the world, plus free transport to get food to people with empty bellies. Except he calls them ‘impoverished’ and ‘famine struck’. He says thirteen different countries have already signed up to give free food or big discounts.

  The last time I saw my Dumi was in the library. Hibberdene, just when they said blacks could also get books. Graham had banned him from the house long ago. I was meant to be looking for stuff about cows in religion, but I was jumping up like a dog at a fence, tryna grab the Fair Lady off the top shelf. I hadn’t heard Dumi’s laugh for nearly two years, but I knew it straight away. I fell back into a square chair with dark wooden arms. I was so glad to see him I wanted to stick onto him, hug him. But I slapped him instead, on his leg, so prickles stood out on his skin. It’s like the air around us took a split second breath. Dumi had muscles in his legs now and his shoulders looked like they’d been stretched sideways and pinned. He was barefoot in the library, the Car mag in his hand.

  ‘I’m looking for cows.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘You know, when the Zulus cut their throats?’ I tried to explain. ‘And the people in India think the cows are their grannies and train drivers go to jail for running them over, even if they can’t stop in time …’

  He chucked himself into the next door chair. ‘Okay, I’ll tell you the Zulu part.’ Dumi’s voice hadn’t broken yet and he didn’t smell like a man. He was still the boy who had helped me with my knitting, held my beetles for me, danced in the horsebox at the back of the café. He started telling me about lobolo, how men pay for their wives with cows.

  ‘So they swap their daughters for cows?’

  ‘Yes. A man with many cows can take many wives.’

  ‘So for a girl, all they get is this?’ I stuck my fingers up like horns, made him laugh so Mrs. Frick, the librarian, brushed past in her flowery dress, all aggro.

  ‘Tess, they get meat, they get milk. It’s … better than money.’ I went all sly, ‘And the man? What does he get?’ Geez, Dumi got embarrassed. He shut up, looked down at the floor. Me, I laughed, crazy as usual. A funny picture in my head. ‘Ja, that’s good! A cow, a cow!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s a good swap.’ I was laughing, imagining one day I disappear. Graham looks outside and all he sees is a cow in the yard. I laughed so much Mrs. Frick started coming for us. So I stuck the strap of my bag into my mouth, shut myself up. And Dumi told me a whole lot of Zulu stuff. He wrote down the words, Shela uzonquonywa. It means, Be my Zulu wife. He told me how the man’s family slaughters an extra cow to welcome the bride home and the girl puts some money in the cow’s cut open stomach to say, ‘Hi, I’m part of your family now.’

  ‘What else about cows?’ I asked. He sat and thought like a wise old man. Told me about how in the old days the men in a new fighting troop used to kill a bull with their bare hands, to ask their ancestors to make them strong.

  ‘Geez.’

  Dumi nodded. ‘It was cruel. They stuck their fingers in
the bull’s eyes and they squeezed its … its …’

  ‘Balls?’

  He nodded, shy. ‘But they say it was quick. The old men taught them how.’

  I got five out of twenty cause I only did the Zulus, not the other cultures. I cried down at the duck pond, in the school grounds. I didn’t want the kids to call me Waterworks, cause I cried for nothing in those days. But Angie saw me and told my teacher, Mr. Naidoo, the first Indian teacher ever in our school. He came to speak to me nicely. I told him I got all the info from a real Zulu and he changed the mark to fifteen.

  I burn my eyes brand new with Safyr Bleu. Brush my teeth, suck some Triple X mints. I can’t remember why Graham banned Dumi. All I remember is Gladys’s face. It was stiff, stiff, like an African carving. When I got home from school, Dumi wasn’t there, waiting on the stairs. Gladys was at the table, polishing the buttons on Graham’s uniform. I dropped my bag, went looking for him. ‘Dumi? Du-mi!’

  Gladys waited till I came back and asked, ‘Where’s Dumi?’

  She didn’t look at me. Her lips were stiff, stiff. ‘Dumi is not coming again.’

  I stared into her face, varnished bloody stiff. ‘Why?’

  She stared into the little buttons, kept polishing. I started wailing, ‘Why-yy …?’

  ‘Boss Graham said he is too big to play with you now.’

  ‘No-o. Why?’ I was crying like a baby by then.

  ‘Boss Graham doesn’t want him here. Boss Graham says it’s not right.’

  Maybe cause I put him in my family lists. I wrote them over and over on bits of paper. Merle Peterson, Graham Peterson, Tess Peterson, Angie Peterson, Gladys Peterson, Dumi Peterson, Lady Peterson (always the dog). Maybe Graham thought I meant Dumi Peterson by marriage, but it was really just Peterson by friendship. A kak feeling of wanting to cry laps at my throat, so I take a couple from my lunchtime bunch. I’m hungry as hell today. Maybe cause I remember Dumi’s mother’s spinach. She made it taste like saucy meat. We ate with our hands, steaming chunks of putu, with our fingers all hooked.

  When Gladys got fired, Graham had banned Dumi long ago already. But Gladys was still working for us. She’d been telling me about the army guns. The army gave guns to the Africans. On TV they said it was blacks against blacks. Men were sneaking into sleeping huts and ripping up families with bullets. Babies and all. Gladys told me all this stuff. I clucked like her, ‘Cha, cha, cha.’ But I didn’t really get it.

  Then Angie went and found a track behind our house. And a whole lot of empty food bowls. She told Graham what she found and that was the end.

  ‘That kaffir bitch is creaming me!’ he screamed. He said Gladys was stealing food and selling it to make extra bucks. Gladys did all the shopping, you see, cause it was too much for you, Ma. But Graham had noticed that the food money didn’t go so far suddenly and we kept running out of chicken drumsticks and marge and marmite.

  The day Gladys left she told me she paid for the samp and beans and the mielie meal out of her own money. All those bags I helped her lug home from the Cash and Carry, she bought with her own bucks. The rest she got from our fridge. She’d been feeding men, she said, who were hiding from the army guns. She didn’t say the ANC, but I knew it was them cause whenever they talked about Winnie Mandela on the radio, Gladys turned it up loud and sang under her breath for hours afterwards.

  Gladys helped you get up, Ma. When you started selling Sensual Secrets Leisure Wear. Gladys waited next to your bed when you took your stale tracksuit pants off under the blankets. Gladys smiled at me, a magician, ready to rush the whole pile into the top loader. You smelt mouldy, Mom, from getting old in bed. Like you came with instructions, Lay flat out of direct sunlight. Or maybe it was just the smell of the tea, even though you only drank half of each cup. You got out of bed for nearly a year. But when Gladys left, you sank back down under your blankets. You said your cancer was ‘flaring’. Flaring like those red hibiscus down at the duck pond where I went to cry for Gladys, so the kids wouldn’t see me.

  At the road, Aisha and Keith are fighting. Aisha takes off a high heel, chucks it across the road. Keith comes out of a Port Jackson bush, picks the shoe up. Holds it against his cheek, strokes it. She’s pissed off, stands all skew. I walk over there, ask Natasha to check out the cars I get into. Just the colour and make. It’s not like I’m asking her to get the number plate. Natasha says, ‘You should get you a pimp.’ She points into the bush, her pimp’s in there with Keith. But his appetite’s killing her, it looks like. She’s horribly thin. Too much mandrax, not enough food.

  ‘No way,’ I say.

  I buy bananas and rolls from the garage shop. Don’t wanna get like Natasha, those hollow thighs. I’m in denim shorts, denim top. A red mark on the collar. It’s a Calvin Klein shirt from the second hand shop. The stain bugs me, but it’s more beetroot than blood. And it’s just a drop.

  Swiss Family man Robinson picks me up. Another bright white from the Northern Hemisphere. A virgin, I swear, when it comes to the sun. They’re all over the place this time of year. They say they’re buying up the town with their fat francs. I’ve been with this Swiss oke twice before. Excellent English. Tiny weenie but a ghetto blaster brain. A publisher. Our last session I asked him what he did. He smiled like a nice uncle bringing Swiss roll for tea, ‘I read.’ That’s all he said, like if he told me, I wouldn’t understand.

  ‘You ready for some real life?’ I say this while I’m rolling down his condom. He’s stretched out on the back seat of his Volvo S60. He sucks in some air, not from my question but from the pull I give his penis to get it to fit. He smiles and in his smile, no jokes, I see two daughters and a wife. There in his glasses. Too many pills can turn you into a fortune teller, I swear. I hook a foot up on the arm rest. He holds my hips like the sides of a book. It doesn’t take long, but all the time, I’m drifting. I imagine him reading and as he reads the sentences come off the page, wind into his head. Inky words coiling into his brain. Some snuffling, snorting, thrusting going on, then his eyes bulge sunny side up, tuck into his lids, and he comes.

  On the way back I let time warp, nice and peaceful. Swiss Family Robinson puts on opera music. He says it’s Carmen. Tells me the opera was a flop in the beginning cause of Carmen’s low morals. But she charmed everyone. I try listen, but I day dream instead.

  He could divorce his wife. Leave her here in South Africa. She’d be happy to stay and arrange pretty salad on the plate with her cool, salad fingers. He could see his daughters in the holidays. In Switzerland I’d teach English just for fun in some brilliant green village. Mom would send me my books. She’d wipe them off with a wet cloth before she sent them, wipe off the smell of the Natal lizards. I’ll put some crinkly Swiss notes in her account to pay for the postage. She’ll use the extra money to buy fish fingers, put them in the deep freeze for when she doesn’t catch. Or buy extra tackle.

  He’s quiet now. The car has stopped. I must get out.

  Ag, my only books were old school books.

  There’s a business card in the hollow under his handbrake. I take it.

  He looks shit scared. ‘No, no. Please don’t.’

  But I hang onto it. ‘You never know. I was very good at writing essays.’

  He wants it back.

  ‘I’m not just a place to park your bicycle, you know.’

  He wants it back, but now he can’t ask.

  The loft is calling, the Princess wants me home. But I’ve gotto stay up, stay in the sun. Watch the cars, swing to one hip, turn out a foot. Swing to the other, click my fingers. Come and groove boys, let’s party in the day. Shake my hair to get some attention. The sun chews the sea side of my face. Some rubbish truck guys hit their palms on their fists. Bastards. I bend an elbow, clamp my arm, that almighty zap sign. Stretch up, swing round the lamp post. Bored girl looking for action.

  Aisha and her Keith go off for lunch. Natasha’s dad arrives on a bicycle and sits with her pimp in the bush. He looks just like her, her dad, cheeks sucked again
st his teeth. His eyes too bright. They’re drinking out of paper cups, watching Natasha for their next white pipe. Natasha hangs her head, her lower lids loose, looks like she’s tryna catch coins. Her thighs breakable, they’re so thin. Two men living off her bod. Geez, get some houding, girl. Get some self respect.

  I’m thirsty all day. Thirsty, thirsty. Get some Coke. The mechanic at the garage asks, ‘Where’s Annie?’ When I tell him Annie’s given up, his lights come on. He thinks he’s in with a chance, now that Annie’s turned into someone new. Ha.

  I drink it there, fill the bottle with water. Let my g-string stick way out my pants. Maybe pick up petrol station trade. There’s a red Hyundai having its tyre pressure done. He pulls off. Comes past again. Third time he stops, but damn Musica flies past hooting, a boy in his passenger seat. It scares Hyundai away, but I get him on his fourth pass. The power of a g-string, a sign of split flesh.

  A little Indian man. So keen he lies me in a bed of snails. A whole flippin convoy there in the Australian Port Jacksons. He hurts my shoulders, thin as he is. His knuckles sink into my arm joints.

  ‘Take it slowly,’ I say, cause I know that speeds them up, brings on a surge.

  That night I have the dream. Maybe it’s thirst that makes me dream of water.

  A big wind blows up. It’s home, but the colours are different. At home the dam is the colour of mud, but in the dream it’s shiny lead. The sun is yellow, like a Cape Town sun. It bounces off the Hustler pages. They’re torn out, spread out in the sun. Sahara, Fatima, Melissa. I know their names. Sahara on her knees, sucking in her stomach. Fatima’s on her side, her breasts look shy at the ground. One knee up, her hips unhinged for the camera, she flashes pink skin. Melissa bends down from her waist, her hamstrings stretched in lines like spines. Her head’s swung round so her fanny and her face are in focus. Her eyes are frightened.

  A big wind blows up, unusual for Natal. I dive to pin them down, but my hands are small on the glossy sheets. Graham’s in his wheelchair on the edge of the dam. His belly rests on his slack legs. His gold sign of Gemini glitters in his chest hair. He’s stuck in the mud. The wind blows up, ‘Get them,’ he shouts. Sadness cracks his voice, ‘Get them, Tess.’ The photos shiver and whip and lift up in the sky. Graham chucks his arms up, begs, ‘Run, get my girls.’