Firepool

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Hedley Twidle. Firepool

Hedley Twidle

About the Layout

A History of Adverse Reactions

Twenty-Seven Years

Getting Past Coetzee

Indefinite Delay

A Useless Life

Remain Yours. James Demetrios Tsafandakis

A Cold Country Where the Sun Shines

Nuclear Summer

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the N2

Firepool

Notes

Acknowledgements

Summary

About the Author

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Experiences in an Abnormal World

KWELA BOOKS

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This version of transition we did experience; it saturated us. On every other (non-Mandela) day in the day room, matrics would sprawl like Caligula over six-seater couches and juniors would stand at the back as we all soaked up The Bold and the Beautiful. American soap operas and sitcoms and blockbusters were being beamed in from our rebranded national broadcaster, dissected with great relish as we ate our quarter loaves stuffed with NikNaks and drained huge quantities of Fresca, Fanta Grape or Sparletta Creme Soda.

Because my arms were skinny and could snake into people’s lockers, I stole the Hustler – a magnificent issue with two glossy blonde ‘lesbians’ on the cover – and spirited it away to the Butterfly Lab. The Butterfly Lab was a secret room that our progressive biology teacher had given me and a few other high-achieving academics keys: a life-­saving place where we could escape from cricket-match scoring or cross-country in the long, drowsy afternoons. Tucked away upstairs, it was a teak-lined room filled with drawers of pinned insects behind glass, little piles of dust below them where the museum beetles had eaten the specimens hollow. There was a smell of chloroform from the killing jars, and hydrogen peroxide from the bleaching of small mammal bones for biology projects. All that plus this astonishing Hustler of airbrushed lesbians and farting dwarves and real penetration – some important afternoons unfolded there for me, hidden away.

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