?Hey!?
As he walked around to the other door, the man?s voice carried clear and shrill: ?Hey, you! Fuck you!?
8.
Your father abused you,? said the minister with certainty.
?No,? she said. ?Lots of call girls say that. The stepfather messed with me. Or the mother?s boyfriend. Or the father. I can?t say that. That was not his problem.?
She checked for disappointment in his face but there was none to see.
?Do you know what I would wish for if I had only one wish? To know what happened to him. I wonder about that a lot. What did he see to make him change? I know it happened on the Border. I know more or less which year, I worked it out. Somewhere in South West Africa or Angola. But what?
?If only I could remember more of how he was before. But I can?t. I only remember the bad times. I think he was always a serious man. And quiet. He must have . . . They didn?t all come back from the Border like that, so he must have been a certain kind of person. He must have had the . . . what is the word??
?Tendency??
?Yes. He must have had the tendency.?
She searched for something for her hands to do. She leaned forward and took the sugar spoon out of the white porcelain pot. It had a municipal coat of arms on the end of the curved handle. She rubbed the metal with the cushion of her thumb, feeling the indentations.
?The school held a fete every year. On a Friday in October. In the afternoon there were
Everyone would go, the whole town. After the games you would go home and dress up nicely?for the evening. I was fourteen. I borrowed some make-up from Lenie Heysteck and I bought my first pair of jeans with my savings. I had a sky-blue blouse on and my hair was long and I think I looked pretty. I sat in front of the mirror in my room that evening, putting on mascara and eyeshadow to match my blouse, and my lips were red. Maybe I used too much make-up, because I was still stupid, but I felt so pretty. That is something men don?t understand. Feeling pretty.
?What if I had taken my black handbag, walked into the sitting room and he had said, ?You look beautiful, Christine.? What if he had stood up, taken my hand and said, ?May I have this dance, Princess?? ?
She pressed the curve of the sugar spoon against her mouth. She felt the old and familiar emotion.
?That is not what happened,? said the minister.
?No,? she said. ?That is not what happened.?
Thobela had memorized the address of Khoza?s brother in Khayelitsha, but he didn?t drive there directly. On the spur of the moment he left his original route two off ramps west of the airport and drove into Guguletu. He went looking for the little house he had lived in with Miriam and Pakamile. He parked across the street and switched off the engine.
The little garden that he and the boy had nurtured with so much care and effort and water in the sand of the Cape Flats was faded in the late summer. There were different curtains in the windows of the front room.
He and Miriam had slept in that room.
Down the street, childish voices shrieked. He looked and saw boys playing soccer, shirt-tails hanging out, socks around their ankles. Again, he remembered how Pakamile used to wait for him every afternoon on that street corner from about half-past five. Thobela used to ride a Honda Benly, one of those indestructible little motorbikes that made him look like a daddy-long-legs on it, and the boy?s face would light up when he came around the corner and then he would run, racing the motorbike the last hundred meters to their gate.
Always so happy to see him, so hungry to talk and keen to work in the front garden with its sunflowers, in the back vegetable garden full of runner beans, white pumpkins and plump red tomatoes.
He reached a hand out slowly to turn the key, reluctant to let go of the memories.
Why had everything been taken from him?
Then he drove away, back to the N2, and past the airport. He took the off ramp and turned right and Khayelitsha surrounded him?traffic and people, small buildings, houses, sand and smells and sounds, huge adverts for Castle and Coke and Toyota, hand-painted signboards for home industries, hairdressers and panel beaters, fresh vegetable stalls alongside the road, dogs and cows. A city apart from the city, spread out across the dune lands.
He chose his route with care, referring to the map he had studied, because it was easy to get lost here: the road signs few, the streets sometimes broad, sometimes impossibly narrow. He stopped in front of a house, a brick building in the center of the plot. Building materials lay about, an extra room had been erected to window height, an old Mazda 323 stood on blocks, half covered by a tarpaulin.
He got out, approached the front door and knocked. Music was playing inside, American rap. He knocked again, harder, and the door opened. A young girl, seventeen or eighteen, in T-shirt and jeans. ?Yes??
?Is this the home of Lukas Khoza??
?He?s not here.?
?I have a message for John.?
Her eyes narrowed. ?What sort of message??
?Work.?
?John is not here.?
?That?s a pity,? he said, ?he would have liked the job.? He turned to go, then stopped. ?Will you let him know??
