Читать книгу My name is Vaselinetjie - Anoeschka von Meck - Страница 15

The day before her grade 7 year began Vaseline realised: “Even though it’s been only six months since I left home, I’ve already become someone else. I’m changing into someone completely different from the Vaseline who used to recite poems to Ouma and stuff Oupa’s pipe.” It was in the girls’ toilets that she explained this to herself, while studying her reflection in the cracked full-length mirror. Only a few long shards of mirror remained.

The mirror was so old that the back had flaked off. When you looked at yourself there were little holes all over your body. She turned sideways and pushed out her bum to see if she had Bushman-holle or Boereboude. She’d heard the big girls talk like that when they teased one another about their backsides.

Despite everything, she was looking forward to going back to school the next day. She was proud of the fact that even in this dreadful place she had done well enough to be awarded a “Most Improved” diploma at the prize-giving ceremony.

If she had still been at her old school, Ouma and Oupa would have been sitting in the front row and as soon as they arrived home, Oumie would have propped up her diploma on the sideboard and a tin of condensed milk would have been waiting for her on her pillow.

That was the old Vaseline in her old life.

She thought of the night of the prize-giving. What the people had thought they were seeing had not been the truth.

She rested her forehead against the cold mirror. “I am a two-face …”

She had two lives and two voices. And one of them was fading, slowly being buried at the back of her heart. Her words and her face didn’t go together any more. And if your various parts didn’t go together, you were like a chameleon on a Smarties box. That’s what Killer said.

On the verge of tears, she asked the mirror: “Am I what the other children say I am, hey, Killer? A bastard whitey?”

Whiskers instructed everyone to look at the notice board, where Mr Hefner, the head of the children’s home, had posted the names of those children who had to move. At the beginning of each year some kids were moved from one house to another. If you were unhappy in your house and burst into your social worker’s office without knocking often enough, you might be allowed to move.

Sometimes children were moved to a different unit because they became too friendly with each other. “Petting pals,” Kitcat called it.

“There will be no funny business under any circumstances whatsoever. You’ll have enough time and opportunity for that in jail,” the head said when he found a child in someone else’s bed. Mr Hefner also frowned upon kids sharing a blanket in front of the TV in winter.

The matrons had instructions to confiscate the little ones’ dolls. The legs and arms were removed and locked in the pantry. Vaseline had noticed a box of these arms and legs in Whiskers’ pantry. When she’d asked the others what it meant, they’d giggled and told her not to be disgusting.

Being moved just as you’d become used to your bed and your duvet, your locker and your cupboard, your roommates and even your matron probably made you feel more lost than ever, Vaseline thought on her way to the notice board. Cut off from everything. In this place you soon learned not to get attached to anything or anyone.

She ran her finger down the list of names. She had to move to another house, but Killer and Albie were staying behind. She really didn’t want to be parted from Killer. Even if she snapped at her sometimes, she liked the way Killer always explained what was happening. And when her things went missing, at least she knew by now where Albie would be hiding them.

She went to her room, emptied out her cupboard and packed her suitcase. Her new room was in the opposite wing. She’d be on the second storey, facing her old house, overlooking the bathroom window.

Her new matron was Mrs Claerhout. She couldn’t stand being called “Auntie”. “You and I are not related, understand?” She was very strict and had a son, Colin, who was in high school and who was notorious for his smelly farts.

“His farts are so bad, they’ll blur your vision,” Killer warned, watching Vaseline pack.

“And he always blames it on the girls when his mom is around,” Albie added. “We call him Colin Cork, ’cause he needs one up his butt.”

Mrs Claerhout articulated her words as if she was giving a language lesson and was very neat. At first Vaseline was thrilled to be in her house, because she was a coloured lady and her voice sounded a bit like Ouma Kitta’s. Mind you, Ouma would never speak through such pinched, painted lipstick-lips, Vaseline thought.

At night Mrs Claerhout wore a hair net on her head, because she relaxed her hair, the other girls had told Vaseline. When Mr Hefner summoned Mrs Claerhout to his office, Colin Cork went ape-shit. He chased the girls around with his mother’s hair net pulled over his face. It gave them the creeps to see his tongue squirming through the holes.

Mrs Claerhout’s door opened into the passage of the main building like all the interior doors, and displayed a notice that said: Knock and wait to be admitted. If you didn’t wait for her to open the door herself, she’d chase you out on the spot.

When Vaseline reported to her new house, the door swung open before she could knock. Mrs Claerhout looked Vaseline up and down for a long moment. “Wait for me inside. You’re in room 2. Don’t touch anything and don’t let me catch you ogling my son,” she said and walked click-clack-click-clack down the passage.

Vaseline remained standing just inside the door. She looked around uneasily. The units all looked exactly the same, but the matrons added their own touches. Some made their units look attractive, but others left them more or less the way they had found them.

On one side was an open-plan kitchen with a small pantry leading off it. Adjoining the kitchen was a rectangular sitting room where the study desks were set up in rows. In the far corner stood an old television set, a couch and an extra bed. The TVs in most of the houses were out of order, because there were always kids who couldn’t leave anything alone and fiddled with the buttons until they wore out or somebody swallowed them. Before bedtime the children had to gather on the couch and the bed for evening prayers led by the matron – whether she believed the Dear Saviour would deliver her from this hellhole full of wicked children or not, old Whiskers always complained.

The carpet was least rundown in front of the TV and that was the spot to dive for when you realised someone was about to bash your face into the floor, Killer had instructed Vaseline.

Mrs Claerhout was a lady, Vaseline decided when she discovered that all the study tables had matching tablecloths. She knew Ouma would be really pleased to hear this. The curtains weren’t the usual children’s home issue either, but had big, cheerful flowers. Moreover, there were pictures on the walls and the school photos of past pupils adorned the pantry door.

One photo showed a crowd of people toyi-toying. Among the hordes dressed in overalls Vaseline could make out Mrs Claerhout and someone who looked a lot like Auntie S’laki. Just as she was bending down to take a closer look, a dreadful noise erupted behind her.

“Holy hell!” shouted an older girl with shocking orange hair. She rushed in, shoved Vaseline out of her way and fled into the kitchen, a group of big girls hard on her heels. Others, who weren’t part of the fight, were shouting and urging the fighters on.

More fearful onlookers crowded into the sitting room. “You guys, no! Stop it before Matron comes back and gates us all,” someone wailed.

Vaseline stood rooted to the spot as the orangehead broke free from the group. She stormed past Vaseline again and yanked open a kitchen drawer. “Die, you cunts!” she shouted, wielding a bread knife and leaping across the counter and back into the fray.

“Look out!” Vaseline screamed before she could remind herself to stay out of it. The rest of the girls turned tail and charged down the passage in a bid to escape, but the back door was locked and they were trapped behind the security gate.

Suddenly someone jumped out of the bathroom and whacked the orangehead hard on the side of her face with the sharp heel of a shoe. She keeled over sideways and blood streaked the opposite wall. Vaseline felt a wave of nausea rise in her throat.

Before Orangehead had hit the floor, the group was on top of her. They kept on kicking her, though she showed no sign of movement.

Vaseline swallowed hard to keep from throwing up. She pressed her hand to her mouth and sank down behind the kitchen counter. She cried soundlessly, pee gushing down her legs.

The same words kept running through her mind again and again: I have to get away from here. I have to.

Some of the younger girls who had not taken part in the fight now tried to escape through the front door. A black girl, Denise Toolo, whom some of the others called a he-bitch behind her back, had wrapped a belt around her fist. She was blocking the front door so that no one could get out.

The noise was so deafening that it took some time before anybody realised that Mr Hefner’s voice was blaring from the intercom.

“… those of you responsible for the incident in Mrs Claerhout’s unit …” the voice eventually got through to Vaseline, “… this is your final warning. If you don’t wish to lose all your privileges and be gated …”

She was surprised to hear that the voice didn’t sound concerned or angry. Actually, it sounded bored.

“Hefner!” hissed the butch girl and stepped away from the front door. Everyone scurried down the passage. They stood peering from the doorways, ready to deny that they’d been anywhere near the fighting.

Vaseline felt like sobbing with relief when Mrs Claerhout and Mr Hefner appeared. Now everything would be sorted out and peace would be restored, she thought, trembling.

All eyes followed the head’s progress. Slowly he came walking down the passage. The girl with the orange hair was still lying where they had left her. Vaseline noticed that her panties were showing where her skirt had hiked up over her thighs. No one bothered to pull it down.

The head turned to Mrs Claerhout. “Is this the kind of control you have over your house, Mrs Claerhout?” he asked disdainfully.

Vaseline noticed that the matron’s eyes had filled with tears and her hand was fumbling with the bunch of keys attached to her belt. “I’m sorry, sir, I had no way of knowing this would happen. There was no sign of trouble when I left the house,” she stammered.

The head’s tour of inspection included the bathroom. He was busy picking his teeth and he ran the toothpick over the walls where the paint was peeling. He walked straight past the groaning figure in the passage without giving the girl a second glance. For a moment Vaseline caught his eyes lingering on the girls’ underwear suspended from the hooks in the bathroom.

He made no mention of the fight, but took his handkerchief out of his pocket, shook it out, sniffed, refolded it meticulously and replaced it without blowing his nose. “You will clean this wall and wash off the blood, Mrs Claerhout, before anyone steps over that threshold again. I refuse to pay to have it repainted again.”

With these words he exited through the front door. Vaseline heard him locking it from the outside with his master key. Now everyone was trapped inside, Mrs Claerhout included.

“Gated” was a word that had soon become part of Vaseline’s vocabulary at the children’s home. “If you are gated, it means you’re not allowed to go out, even if you feel you could steer your trolley over a cliff yourself,” Killer had informed her during her first week. “Housebound” meant you were allowed to move around inside the house, but you weren’t allowed to step outside. “Roombound” meant you had to stay in your room, and “bedbound” meant you weren’t allowed to move even a toe off your bed. All punishment was recorded in your file, and you had to sign for it.

“Take her away!” Mrs Claerhout pointed at the orangehead, looking upset. She seemed too agitated by the head’s behaviour to pay attention to the girl, who was still lying in the passage.

None of the bigger girls were willing to assist, so Vaseline and the younger ones helped the knife wielder to her bed in Room 2, Vaseline’s new room. The girl was crying and Vaseline felt queasy when she saw the dark stickiness in her hair and teeth.

Mrs Claerhout watched, her hands on her hips. “If you want to wipe each other out, go ahead, by all means. You little sluts will go down long before you bring me to a fall. I’m not your playmate and I wasn’t born yesterday, believe you me,” she declared, and Vaseline imagined that she was looking straight at her. “You won’t see me again before tomorrow morning. I’m going to lock the door of my flat behind me now, and I won’t be coming out, no matter what I hear. You can bet your slut asses on it, come hell or high water. And when I open the door tomorrow morning I expect this mess to be cleaned up. You’re not the only ones with human rights, you know. Is that clear?”

With these words she slammed the door to her flat behind her. Dismayed, Vaseline heard the sound of a key turning in a lock for the second time that day.

Like a petrified mouse she shuffled back to the sitting room where she had left her suitcase. Who would be killing whom tonight? She planned to use her case as a shield.

But nothing happened. The fight was seemingly already forgotten. Everyone got busy with her own affairs. The bigger girls shouted across the passage, staking their claim for a bath as if nothing had happened. No one took notice of Vaseline. She dragged her case to Room 2 and headed for the only unoccupied bed.

“What are you looking at, hey? Have you got a smoke?” One of the big girls who had been a ringleader in the fight entered with the bread knife in her hand. She was wearing shortie pyjamas and she was very pretty, except for an unsightly scar that started at the corner of her mouth and ran all the way across her chin. Vaseline kept her eyes on her suitcase and shook her head.

The girl walked to the corner of the room, where Orangehead lay stretched out on her bed, groaning. “Eat me, Pizzaface!” she taunted, inserting the bread knife through the elastic of Pizzaface’s panties at an angle.

Outside the butch girl laughed raucously. She was walking down the passage, striking the wall of each room with her belt. All the doors had been removed.

“That bitch who thinks she’s Miss Universe is Tara Papadopoulos,” a soft voice whispered. For the first time Vaseline noticed that someone was hiding on the floor between Pizzaface’s bed and the next one.

“Tara never opens her mouth unless her butch roomie is with her, and Denise Toolo tries to suck up to the whiteys, and we all know what that means,” the voice continued to whisper. “If you’re going to be in this room, you’d better not sleep in your bed tonight. Those freaky bitches might come back for Pizzaface and then they’ll get us too.”

In the dim light Vaseline was able to make out that the whispering voice belonged to a girl with short black hair and lively dark eyes. “My name is Lolita, but everyone calls me Puck. It’s because I was in a Shakespeare play once. One day when I have a son I’m going to call him Puck too. You must have heard my name on the intercom at school. I’m the only one from the home who gets asked to carry messages. Have you heard them call me?”

“No,” Vaseline whispered back. She was afraid to switch on the light, so she unpacked in the dark.

Puck was talking like a lab rat on tik, without stopping to breathe between sentences. “I used to be on Ritalin, but the matrons complained I talked too hectic, which wasn’t like true of course,” she added, as if reading Vaseline’s thoughts. Her voice was so soft, though, that Vaseline struggled to hear.

“Pizzaface, yo?” Puck shook the orangehead. “Get off this bed, hear? Come, roll under my bed, it’s safer, okay?”

But Pizzaface just buried her face in her blood-stained pillow. Puck shrugged her narrow shoulders and motioned for the two of them to sneak down the passage to the sitting room, where all the lights had been switched off.

“The best place to spend the night is under the study tables, close to the curtains, where it’s darkest,” Puck said. Vaseline saw her take a can of Doom from the cupboard underneath the kitchen sink and tuck it into the front of her shirt.

“It’s to spray in their faces when they come for us. It can make you blind. Permanently.”

Long after Puck had fallen asleep Vaseline was still staring at the legs of the chairs. The yellow security lights were shining through spaces in the thin curtains, making streaks of light on the dining room floor. She lay listening to the sounds in her new unit. Someone went to the toilet without flushing it afterwards.

She could hear music coming from the very last room at the end of the passage. It was the only room with a door and she had heard the other kids call it the Holiday Inn, because of the luxury of privacy it offered. Only the prefects and the head girl got to stay in the Holiday Inn. Not only did they have a door, they also had a plug to use electricity for hair dryers and CD players. Tara was the head girl. Denise Toolo was her bodyguard.

Sometime during the night Vaseline woke, sat up and bumped her head on the edge of the table. At first she had no idea where she was, but then she recognised Puck’s shiny black hair in the dim light. Puck was muttering in her sleep: “No, please Mommy, no!”

Two days later Vaseline was in the TV room when she heard Pizzaface being called to the phonebooth on the intercom. She recognised Tara Papadopoulos’s voice. Prefects were allowed to use the intercom to make announcements when the matron wasn’t available.

Vaseline instantly smelled trouble. It’s a trap, she thought, some kind of ambush. Mrs Claerhout looked up from the magazine she was reading. Her expression revealed that she had exactly the same thought, but that she wasn’t going to do anything about it. She got up and went into her flat, closing the door behind her.

“Hee-hah, it’s for me, it’s my cousin!” Pizzaface stormed through the back door and charged past Vaseline like a giraffe at full speed. Someone had told Vaseline that Pizzaface’s cousin was also her boyfriend, but surely that couldn’t be true. Yuck!

Vaseline looked round anxiously for Puck. There was no one in the passage she could trust. She raced past the secretary to Mr Hefner’s office. But his door was closed.

Before Vaseline could reach the offices of the social workers, she heard the faint thumps that she knew so well by now. Though she was expecting the worst, her stomach still heaved when she turned the corner.

Tara’s sidekicks had cornered Pizzaface at the phone booth in the passage. While they held her, Tara was laying into her with her fists. Pizzaface gasped, groaning. With all her strength Tara brought her knee up between Pizzaface’s legs. Denise Toolo’s hand was covering Pizzaface’s face and mouth so that all she could get out was a hoarse cry for help. Tufts of orange hair lay scattered on the floor.

As Vaseline felt her blood boil over her brain, her fear of the older girls evaporated.

“Stop! Stop it!” she yelled and jumped on Tara from behind. She grabbed her by the hair and the head girl staggered into the phone booth.

Vaseline no longer knew what she was doing, only that if she stopped now, they’d be washing her blood from the walls. She felt her hands around Tara’s throat, but she wasn’t trying to strangle her. Instead, her fingers dug into the soft flesh in an attempt to rip out her windpipe.