Читать книгу My name is Vaselinetjie - Anoeschka von Meck - Страница 13

The days became weeks, then months. Vaselinetjie couldn’t get used to the strange life at the children’s home with its wailing sirens, squabbling children and sullen matrons. She kept to herself as far as possible and spoke only when absolutely necessary. The September school holidays brought a measure of relief when some of the children left. She spent most of the time on her bed, reading her library books. She was glad when school resumed. At least the final term was a short one and there was the prospect of a nice long holiday just around the corner.

Oh, she was counting the days! Just wait till she told her ouma and oupa what it was like at this place! The swearing and the cursing, the second-hand school uniform and the cheeky, disrespectful children. She felt certain her oupa would remove her immediately and put her back in her old school.

When she lay on her back in her secret place – inside the swimming pool, which had been empty for years, and where no one would ever think of looking for her – the same pictures kept running through her mind. She’d be sitting in her own room, reading the back pages of You. It would be night-time and she’d open the window wide to listen to the cries of the nightjars. It would be Sunday and she’d go to church with her ouma and oupa and sit in the pew between the two of them and breathe in the smell of Stasoft. Ouma Kitta always poured in an extra measure when she rinsed Vaselinetjie’s clothes.

And then there would be the food. Lots of food. Everything she had been longing for. Golden, freshly baked rusks so big that they made your coffee mug overflow. Curried vetkoek and afval with large chunks of potato and a huge helping of soetpatat. Not to mention Jan Ellis pudding and Ouma Kitta’s home-made bread with thick slices of goat’s milk cheese and fig jam!

Her tummy growled when she thought of the food. Here at the home she never felt really full. The food simply stuck in her throat. Either because she was convinced that the other children were staring at her, or because she was too homesick to eat. And when she did manage to eat, the helpings were so small that she was still hungry when she got up from the table.

At night she sometimes dreamed of food, and in the morning Killer would tell her that she’d made weird chewing noises in her sleep. At school she saw the children from the home ask the town children for food, or stealing or simply taking their food.

Once she discovered someone’s sandwich on the hand basin in the toilets. Only one bite had been taken from it and she wanted it so badly that she waited until the last girl had come out of the cubicles before hiding it under her jersey. But in the end she was too ashamed to eat something that another person had chucked away. It made her feel like trash herself.

Sometimes she stood behind the tuck shop during break just to breathe in the warm smell of hotdogs and pies. At other times, when her hunger was almost unbearable, she avoided the tuck shop. What if she couldn’t control herself and ended up stealing something too?

Auntie Whiskers’ breath smelled like old cheese. Luckily her eyes were nearly always glued to the TV screen when she spoke to Vaselinetjie.Every matron had a diary in which she wrote down everything for which the head, the other matrons or the children might report her to the ANC.

Pictures of Steve Hofmeyr adorned Whiskers’ diary and all her files. She told the girls she would like to have his babies and made them listen to his CDs. Then Killer would make a face at Vaselinetjie and Albie behind her hand and pretend to get a violent stomach cramp and throw up. It was their private joke.

“Vaselinetjie, have you seen your social worker yet?” Whiskers asked now.

“No, auntie,” she answered, panic setting in.

“She means, yes, matron. Mr Kedibone has called her in. She just doesn’t know he’s her social worker.” Killer poked Vaselinetjie in the ribs.

Vaselinetjie remembered the black man with the scar on his forehead. All through the interview she had done her best to ignore it. The boys said someone had attacked him with an iron bar, and then he had killed the man and buried him in his back yard and built a chicken coop over the grave so that the police dogs would smell nothing but chicken shit.

“Why do I need a social worker?” Vaselinetjie whispered.

“Vaselinetjie, are you really such a fool? Wake up, girlfriend! And get with it!” Killer declared impatiently and stalked off.

After this Vaselinetjie became even more withdrawn. She spent most of the time lying on her bed and at school she sat in a toilet cubicle during breaks with her feet against the door to keep it closed. If Killer thought she was too stupid to be her friend, why would the other children want to be friends with her?

Nazrene and her group kept pestering her. “Hey, girl, don’t you owe me something?” Nazrene called over the wall while balancing on the cistern of the cubicle next door.

“Voertsek!” She was no longer afraid of the Diergaardt girl who refused to leave her alone. Her sorrow was far greater than her fear.

“Are you upset because you’re an orphan?”

“What do you mean, orphan?”

“Orphans are unwanted children who belong to Madiba and live in his orphanage so they won’t sniff glue and whore on street corners and upset the foreign investors who come here from overseas. And you’re one of them, you and all the other welfare cases from the home, so pay up, nè?”

Vaselinetjie had never heard the home being described in those terms. The welfare lady who had brought her there had mentioned that it was not an ordinary school hostel, but the word “orphanage” had never been used.

“YOU’RE A LIAR, NAZRENE!” she yelled and jumped up, but a small, nagging voice was speaking inside her.

Could it be true?

She had wondered why this hostel was so different and why the children didn’t go home for weekends like the boarders in Upington. Now she had to find out – from Nazrene of all people – that she and the other children in the home were nothing but discarded trash!

“I said voertsek!” she shouted and kicked the door with all her might. Nazrene and her friends laughed and left, shouting in-

sults.

No wonder everyone had lost patience with her for not knowing what was what! Everything she had heard was suddenly falling into place.

Vaselinetjie began to sob bitterly. So it had never just been a case of being sent to a school with boarding facilities. She had been sent away to an orphanage and her grandparents must have known all along! She doubled over on the toilet and held her stomach as if she wanted to squeeze the pain from her insides, but the ache grew steadily worse.

She understood now that the government looked after them and paid the matrons to check them over for lice and open sores. And if a child had weeping sores that wouldn’t heal, and coughed and kept everyone awake at night, the matrons had to wear rubber gloves. Then the head asked the president for extra money to look after the sick child. Those children had the whispered disease. They carried the ghost on their backs.

The bell announced the end of second break but Vaselinetjie continued to cry in her cubicle. “No, Oumie,” she sobbed, “noooo, I don’t want to stay here!”

For the first time she understood why every child had a social worker. It was their voices she heard on the intercom in the afternoons, summoning the children to their offices on the ground floor.

The social workers filled in forms that said what you were like, whether you were rotten to the core or whether there was still hope for you. They also recorded whether you’d been swearing and whether you were sorry about the language you’d used and who was going to pay for the windows you smashed when you kicked them in a fit of rage.

“It’s all about rands and cents,” the matrons kept telling the children, because that was what the head told them.

And if you’d been doing you-know-what and you had a bun in the oven, the social worker arranged for you to pop it out somewhere else. Then you missed a lot of school and usually failed your grade.

Everything she had learned during the past months was whirling through her mind.

“Don’t be surprised if the social workers cancel their appointments with you. They can’t keep up with the new arrivals. They spend their days on the phone, trying to persuade people to donate soup ingredients and nappies. Or even worse, begging them to take a child or two off our hands for the holidays,” Whiskers had warned them only the week before.

Vaselinetjie’s social worker had sent for her. The only black men that Vaselinetjie had ever come across were the ones that used to sit on the stoep of the off-sales at Keimoes on a Saturday morning. Tswanas. They were seasonal workers, Oupa had told her. Don’t go near them, he’d warned. They don’t speak our language and if you can’t understand someone’s language, you don’t know what he’s thinking.

Vaselinetjie knew Mr Kedibone drove a bright yellow car. The kids liked to look at the picture in the rear window. It was of galloping wild horses and it was very pretty.

“Sit,” motioned the social worker from behind his desk. “Do you remember me? I’m the one who collected your forms from your matron on your first day and took you to meet the head.”

“You’re Mr Verybony.”

The man shook with laughter. He pushed back his chair and rested his head on his knees. He seemed too big for the chair.

“Well, you’ve certainly given me a nice name, but actually it’s Ke-di-bo-ne. Do you know what it means?”

Vaselinetjie shook her head to show that she had no idea, but she managed a smile. His eyes were kind.

“The name tells of someone who has suffered through very, very hard times. Just as you are suffering now. It’s a strong name. We didn’t have time to talk the last time we met. What does your name mean?”

She repeated the story of her dry skin as a baby.

“Well, that’s a nice story too! Your name tells of the love your ouma and oupa have for you. Vaselinetjie, we have to talk about the holidays …”

Vaselinetjie sat motionless while Mr Kedibone spoke. She left his office without a word.

Back in her room she opened her cupboard and ripped off the home-made calendar stuck behind the door. There was only a week and a half left before the holidays would begin, but it wasn’t important any longer.

“Nothing matters any more! I will never, never ever care about anything again!” she screamed, burying her head in her clothes. She sobbed and pummelled her school uniform with her fists. Mr Kedibone had just told her that the government didn’t have the funds to send those children who lived far away home for the holidays. She’d have to stay in.

For the next week Vaseline did nothing but sit on her bed, or on the stairs, or in the public phone booth, reading and rereading her ouma’s letters. She kept all her letters of the past six months in a shoe box at the bottom of her cupboard.

After her conversation with Mr Kedibone she called home almost every day, reversing the charges, until Oupa was forced to tell her it was getting too expensive and it broke Ouma’s heart to hear Vaseline cry and plead on the other end of the phone about something they couldn’t do anything about.

“Oumie’s baby must be strong and stand on both feet,” Ouma sobbed along with Vaseline time and again. But Ouma never said the words Vaseline was longing to hear. That she could come home. That sending her away had been a terrible mistake and that she would never have to return to this awful place.

“We’re going to eat Kentucky,” and “My dad’s going to take us for Wimpy burgers,” the kids who were going home for the holidays boasted. And even though she and the others who had to stay in couldn’t care less about the treats they had in store, they couldn’t help overhearing.

“And check, hey, I’m packing everything, ’cause I’m telling you now: this place is never going to see me again,” one after the other vowed as they filled their suitcases and emptied their cupboards.

Some who were going to foster families would be back long before the holidays were over, and the others would sneer because their placements had failed. But at the moment that possibility was far from their minds.

“At least you escape from the home for a few weeks and you score some new clothes that the foster people allow you to keep because they feel guilty about not being able to stick it out with you,” Killer said.

Some children returned from the holidays with so much stolen goods that they continued to cash in for weeks – selling watches, sunglasses, jewellery and cellphones to the town children during breaks. With the takings they bought chips and pies at the tuck shop and shared the spoils with their buddies for as long as the money lasted.

“We’ve had enough of Madiba’s mieliepap-and-bread, mieliepap-and-bread,” chanted the kids who were leaving, laughing excitedly.

When the buses departed, Vaseline was standing directly under the notice proclaiming RIGHT OF ADMISSION RESERVED. Long after the buses had disappeared down the hill she was still kicking the posts rhythmically. If she could, she would carry on kicking until the entire home had been levelled with the ground. Brick by bloody brick.

At least anger was better than tears.

“Mail for Bosman. Bosman, mail!”

The social workers’ offices were closed during the holidays but one of them was always on call. For the kids who went bonkers because they had to stay in, or those who got the heebie-jeebies for no reason other than that their lives sucked.

The person on duty stuck his or her head through the doorway of the sitting room, prised apart the older ones who were busy giving each other hickeys, and handed out the mail.

Vaseline was glad it wasn’t Mr Kedibone today, because she’d still not forgiven him for making her look forward to the holidays in vain. Killer said kids at a children’s home learned to endure a lot, but hope was by far the worst thing. And the cruellest.

It was a parcel from home. She knew at once that Ouma had wrapped it, because the paper had been stuck down with a double layer of tape. And it must have been Oupa who’d tied up the parcel so neatly with string. In large, shaky black letters he had written: Miss Helena Bosman.

Hastily she ripped off the paper. There were lots of goodies inside. Shop-bought as well as home-made. She wanted to remain angry with Ouma and Oupa for making her stay at this place, but the more she dug around in the box, the more her anger evaporated and an aching sorrow began to pulse in her throat instead.

The parcel also contained toothpaste, shampoo, a new pink roll-on deodorant, moisturiser and a packet of disposable razors. She felt embarrassed to take it out in front of the strange social worker, because she hadn’t begun to shave her legs yet. There was also a gift from the church ladies: two snow-white facecloths decorated with hand-embroidered red roses.

And a letter with a green banknote inside. Earlier Vaseline had sent a message to Ouma, instructing her to hide any money they might want to send her in a toothpaste carton. Otherwise she would have to hand it to the social worker, who would give it to her matron. Then she would receive the money only as the matron saw fit. At a children’s home one was always short of money for the phone and for food. And for bribes, of course.

Politely Vaseline offered the social worker a packet of rusks, but the lady told her to hang on to it, for the other children would be lying in wait to make certain they also got some of the spoils.

She was right. Before Vaseline could disappear into her house, a few high school boys stopped her in the passage. “Hey you, what have you got there? Owe us a little something, ag please, Baby Girl!”

She didn’t like the boys – Killer said they were scumbags and dagga smokers – but she took out a packet of koeksisters with syrup so thick that it stuck to the plastic wrapping and offered it to them. She felt sorry for them and she felt sorry for herself, because they were all stuck in the same prison. This stark building with its empty passages, where the children dug out the cigarette stubs visitors had left in the shrivelled pot plants to smoke them again.