She waited until he began to eat a drumstick, holding the leg bone in his fingers. He leaned forward so that he ate above the plate. His lips glistened with fat.
?I had sex the first time when I was fifteen,? she said. ?Proper sex.?
She wanted him to choke on his food, but his jaw only stalled a moment.
?I chose the boy. I picked him out. The cleverest one in the class. I could have had anyone, I knew that.?
He was helpless with the chicken half eaten in his hand and his mouth full of meat.
?The more my father prayed about the demons in me, the more I wanted to see them. Every night. Every night we had to sit in the lounge and he would read from the Bible and pray long prayers and ask God to cast the Devil out of Christine. The sins of the flesh. The temptations. While we held hands and he sweated and talked till the windows rattled and the hair on my neck stood up. I would wonder, what demons? What did they look like? What did they do? How would it feel if they came out? Why did he focus on me? Was it something I couldn?t help? At first I didn?t have a clue. But then boys at school began to look at me. At my body.?
She didn?t want the plate on her lap anymore. She plonked it down on the desk and folded her hands under her breasts. She must calm down; she needed him, perfect wife and all.
Her father would inspect her every morning like one of his men. He would not let her out of the door until he had approved the length of her skirt. Sometimes he would send her back to tie up her hair or to wash off some barely visible mascara, until she learned to leave a little earlier and apply her make-up in the mirror of the school toilets. She did not want to forgo the newly discovered attention of boys. It was a strange thing. At thirteen she had been just one of the crowd: flat-chested, pale and giggly. Then everything began to grow?breasts, hips, legs, lips?a metamorphosis that made her father rabid and had an odd effect on all the men around her. Matric boys began to greet her, teachers began to linger at her desk, Standard Sixes began to look at her sideways and whisper to each other behind cupped hands. Eventually she twigged. It was during this time that her mother began to work and Christine became part of a group who went to a parentless house after school to smoke and occasionally to drink. And Colin Engelbrecht had said to her from behind the blue cloud of a Chesterfield that she had the sexiest body in school, it was now officially accepted. And if she would be willing to show him her breasts, just once, he would do anything.
The other girls in the room had thrown cushions at him and screamed that he was a pig. She had stood up, unbuttoned her shirt, unhooked her bra and exposed her breasts to the three boys in the room. She had stood there with her big boobs and for the first time in her life felt the power, saw the enthrallment in their eyes, the jaw- dropping weakness of lust. How different from her father?s terrible disgust.
That is how she came to know the demons.
After that, nothing was the same again. Her display of her breasts was talked about, she realized later, because the level of interest increased and the style of their approach changed. This act had created the possibility of wildness, the chance of getting lucky. So she began to use it. It was a weapon, a shield and a game. The ones she favored were occasionally rewarded with admission to her room and a long sweaty petting session in the midday heat of Upington, the privilege of stroking and licking her breasts while she watched their faces with absolute concentration and cherished the incredibly deep pleasure?that she was responsible for this ecstasy, the panting, the thundering heartbeat.
But when their hands began to drift downwards, she returned them softly but firmly to above the waist, because she wanted to control when that would happen, and with whom.
The way
It was at the school sports day of her Standard-Eight year that she seduced the handsome, good and clever, but shy Johan Erasmus with his gold-rimmed glasses and fine hands. It happened in the long grass behind the bus shed. He was the one who was too afraid to look at her, who blushed blood red if she said hello. He was soft?his eyes, his voice, his heart. She wanted to give her gift to him because he never asked for it.
And she had.
10.
My name is Benny Griessel and I am an alcoholic.?
?Hello, Benny,? said thirty-two voices in a happy chorus.
?Last night I drank a whole bottle of Jack Daniel?s and I hit my wife. This morning she kicked me out the house. I have gone one day without drinking. I am here because I can?t control my drinking. I am here because I want my wife and children and my life back.? While he was listening to the desperation in his voice, someone began to clap, and then the dingy little church hall resounded with applause.
He lingered in the dark outside the long, unimaginative building, instinctively taking an inventory of exits, windows and the distance to his pickup. The Yellow Rose must have been a farmhouse once, a smallholder?s home in the 1950s before the high tide of Khayelitsha pushed past.
Below the roof ridge was a neon sign with the name and a bright yellow rose. Rap music thumped inside. There were no curtains in the windows. Light shone through and made long tracks across the parking lot, joyful lighthouses on a treacherous black reef.
Inside they sat densely bunched around cheap tables. He spotted a few European tourists with the forced bonhomie of nervous people, like missionaries in a village of cannibals. He threaded his way through and saw two or three seats vacant at the pinewood bar. Two young black barmen busied themselves filling orders behind it. Waitresses slipped expertly up to them, each wearing a yellow plastic rose flapping from the thin T-shirt fabric above their chests.
?What?s your pleasure, big dog?? the barman asked him in a vaguely American accent.
?Do you have Windhoek?? he asked in his mother tongue.
?Lager or Light, my friend??
?Are you a Xhosa??
?Yes.?
