Ma needs a reason. I don’t blame her. I need one, too. Something to make sense of the senselessness, something to hang the pain on.
“Okay Ma. I’ll stop speaking to Nyasha. I won’t be her friend anymore.”
It wasn’t a complete lie. I hadn’t heard from Nyasha since the mincemeat incident, and I suspected that our friendship had died with the alleged stabbing. I probably should have called to apologize, but I was sick and I was dealing with my own shit. Ma said she didn’t think she was badly hurt. And anyway, I was the one who was fucking raped, so if anybody needed moral support it was me.
❖
When I got back to our flat that night, the “night of the rape” as Dr. Phakama would insist I say, Nyasha said I shouldn’t tell people what had happened. She said it would just give white people more ammunition, so they can scoff at us and say, “You see, we told you your people are animals.” She said the police would handle it, and I shouldn’t let the white doctors suck me into their self-pity. She said our country was still growing and adjusting, and that these things would settle with time. She said she was sorry for what happened to me, but that I should rise above it and be like the forefathers of the nation, who denied themselves for a greater cause.
I remember being furious. Why couldn’t Nyasha let go of her anger even for just a minute, when I, her friend, her sister, so badly needed her to put it aside and just hold me? Her hands were always so full of good arguments, unsettled debts, and old grudges that there was no room for anything else.
As usual I said nothing. I loved her and didn’t want to let her down, or the cause, the country, the forefathers. And maybe I had just made it all up. Maybe I wasn’t raped and was simply making excuses for the bad thing I was.
I was tired, and cooking after an overnight shift is never a good idea. But the lady at the pharmacy had said eating would help ease the ARV-associated nausea.
I’d written my prescription myself, the same script I’d written for so many women so many times that I could write it in my sleep. I needed to get on with the cooking now, but Nyasha kept on talking and talking and talking, explaining why the hatred between us South Africans and the rest of the continent was because of them, the white people. They had turned us against each other, and even at times like this we shouldn’t let them win. As she talked and talked and the nausea grew and grew, I started to worry I might have mixed up my doses or even left something out. And still she kept talking. I heard her and then I didn’t, and then my head started to hurt. Stop, I wanted to tell her. Stop, just fucking stop! I could smell my mincemeat smoldering on the stove, burning. It was making me want to vomit but I couldn’t get near it because there Nyasha was, in my way, talking and talking. If I did stab her, it was a mistake. I just wanted her to stop.
❖
You always think you’ll feel it coming, but you don’t. Maybe it’s because people like claiming they’d known, had an ominous dream the day before, or felt a chill. I don’t believe any of that. I think the day a bolt of lightning strikes you on your head is the day you’re preoccupied with a piece of skin on your fingernail, a little piece hanging off your nail bed, a tiny juicy piece you just can’t quite get a grip on with your teeth.
So you look back, you try to see if there were any signs, nudges. Maybe there were, or maybe you’re just making them up as you go along, searching in places you know you never even walked past, lifting up couches, looking under rocks. It’s a pointless exercise. Some things are completely out of our hands.
❖
Sometimes I forget. I get lost in the bassline of a song or the smell of lemongrass. At those times I’m just like everyone else. Then my mind asks, “Why are you so happy? Isn’t there something you’re forgetting?” And then I search and search and search, and I remember, oh yes, I was raped.
❖
I guess to some degree there’s a sense of relief. I used to wonder what that thing would be for me—you know, that mountain, that valley, that shadow, that dark night of the soul. That bad thing that’s waiting around the corner of everyone’s life, the one that catches you off guard, collapses your world, shifts the ground beneath your feet. Ma used to say, “Don’t be so negative. You mustn’t think like that. Nothing is going to happen to you. Trust in God. You’re just paranoid. Stop being silly. Are you premenstrual again?”
After Tshiamo’s death I stopped worrying as much. I’d had my lot of suffering, I’d drunk my cup of pain, eaten my bitter share of heartache. I thought God would move on to others, at least for a little while.
But You have a reputation. So I decided that if suffering was to come my way again, I wouldn’t allow it to be the end of me. If it was leukemia, I would write a best-selling memoir. If it was HIV, I’d become an activist. If I met my true love and he died on our wedding day, I’d take my twenty-one days of unused sick leave, cry my heart out in bed for three weeks, then get up and get back to it. Isn’t that how one should approach it? Logically, rationally, sensibly. Because even if I try to convince You, negotiate,
