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K. SELLO DUIKER

Thirteen Cents

Introduction by Shaun Viljoen

Ohio University Press

Athens

K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents: An Introduction

Shaun Viljoen

One Breezy Night Late in November

One breezy night late in November

and after the April elections

Two friends stood outside

admiring the moon

‘charming sky,’ said the one

to the other

‘What’s even more charming is that

whitey has finally allowed himself

to be surrounded by darkey and they

seem to be getting on,’ remarked

the other, staring into the night

At that moment a shooting star

blurred across the sky and both friends

saw it.

Wistful silence fell between them

the one not sure whether the other

had seen the meteorite. Then the

other opened: ‘Perhaps it’s not

about whitey and darkey anymore.’

The other assented.1

K. Sello Duiker’s poem “One Breezy Night Late in November” imagines what the April 1994 democratic elections, the first in South Africa’s history, meant for social relations that had been racialized since the landing of Dutch settlers in 1652 and hyperracialized since Afrikaner white minority rule took hold in 1948. In a reflective exchange between two friends in the poem, the initial thought of one about the historic turning point six months earlier asserts that the country will see racial reconciliation; the other responds unsurely, saying, “Perhaps it’s not / about whitey and darkey anymore.” In this tentative claim Duiker raises precisely what his astounding contribution to postapartheid literature has been—a provocative unsettling of the black and white, the categorical terms of engagement that marked human relations and writing under apartheid. Instead, as Meg Samuelson says of Duiker’s first two novels, his work “interrogate[s] borders—whether social, national or ontological.”2

The epiphanic moment in the poem occurs after “a shooting star / blurred across the sky” and a strange silence falls between the friends. As in the poem, all three of Duiker’s novels—Thirteen Cents3 (2000), The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), and The Hidden Star (published posthumously in 2006)—are marked by the presence of the supernatural, the surreal, the mythical, which layer and disrupt the real and comment on it. Narrative modes in the novels shift continuously between realist, hyperrealist, and surrealist, shunting the protagonist and the reader between different realms of consciousness and perception.

As in the poem, protagonists in the novels exist primarily as exceptional individuals, as an “I” rather than, as was the case with much (black) writing under apartheid in which the individual was metonymic of the greater (racial) community, as an “I” who is at the same time the “we.” If anything, the voices in the poem represent themselves and are at a distance from both “whitey” and “darkey,” identifying overtly with neither. There is an intimacy between the two friends, yet at the same time we feel a distance between the two, “the one not sure whether the other / had seen.” All three novels present us with protagonists who are extraordinary individuals, with Azure in Thirteen Cents being the most clearly solitary and relentlessly individual character, who does not belong to any one place or to any social group, and who defies attempts to categorize him.

Thirteen Cents is a searing, disturbing coming-of-age account of Azure, a twelve-year-old orphan who has traveled from his home near Johannesburg to eke out an existence on the streets of post-1994 Cape Town. Azure lives in an underworld of shack dwellers, drug dealers, and gangsters and is exploited, often in most violent and demeaning ways, by all kinds of adults for their own ends. He survives through prostitution, selling sex to older men. In The Quiet Violence of Dreams Tshepo is a university student who at the start of the novel has been institutionalized for cannabis-induced psychosis and who, like the younger Azure, is an orphan and tries to find a sense of belonging in a hostile, dystopic postapartheid Cape Town. However, violence, exploitation, and bigoted attitudes that prevailed under apartheid continue to resurface in his quest to find a way of being in the world. Tshepo joins a brothel for male-to-male sex to earn money but also to explore his own homosexual impulses and need to create a fraternity or family. In the end, Tshepo leaves Cape Town for Johannesburg to try to find a better life. The Hidden Star, written for younger readers, is set in a township on the outskirts of Johannesburg and employs a child protagonist: the young girl Nolitye, who is invested with special powers by a magical stone, embarks on a quest to battle forces of greed and evil and restore her true family, displaced by these evil impostors. In the final novel the narrative shifts between the modes of African folktale and gritty realism, linking assertions of the ancestral to a strong sense of injustice in the contemporary social order. Duiker reiterates this link when he writes about the meaning of his own name. He dropped his first name, Kabelo, and adopted his second name, Sello, as the first name by which he wished to be known. Sello, his grandfather’s name, is, he says, “a poetic name and it means lament! Someone who always cries out about things he sees—like injustice. It is a name that is very tied to ancestral voices.”4

Thirteen Cents was published a mere six years after the first democratic elections, when Duiker was twenty-six years old, to critical acclaim and wide readership inside South Africa and abroad.5 Of all the South African novels I have taught at undergraduate level, Thirteen Cents has proved to be the one that engages large numbers of young students. Is this because the novel speaks in such direct, frank, and contemporary terms about sex, sexuality, and addiction? Is it because of the manner in which we as readers are compelled to see the world from the point of view of the marginalized, abused, and exploited street boy narrator Azure, who represents what we see but dismiss every day of our waking life—those who are down and out and living on the far edges of monied, motorized, propertied society? Is it because, despite the horror and seemingly insurmountable odds stacked against him, Azure does not succumb to any of the dehumanizing forces that grind him down and the novel ends on a muted note of hope and the possibility of an alternative way of being in this world? This ability to engage a younger generation of readers seems to hold for places outside South Africa as well. According to Dutch writer Adriaan van Dis, who toured Indonesia in 2003 with Duiker as part of the Winternachten literary festival based in The Hague, Duiker’s “frank and sincere stories about sex and the dark side of city life strongly spoke to the young Indonesians.”6

Azure’s position as a twelve-year-old who turns thirteen in the novel situates him on the threshold of the world of adults and subjects him to the rites of passage that induct him into particular forms of adulthood—in this case a particularly exploitative, destructive social order. He is a critical outsider to this world and continually resists incorporation—“Grown-ups are fucked up,” he asserts (42). It is this significant turning from boyhood to manhood, this becoming thirteen to which the title alludes, that positions him as a critical commentator moving into and out of the dominant matrix of hierarchies and power. He is often drawn into and subject to this adult world and its values—“Men don’t cry,” he claims, “[a]nd since I’m nearly thirteen I mustn’t cry. I must be strong. I must be a man” (26). This slippage into and out of the dominant social order across its ontological and spacial borderlines subjects the reader, as it does Azure, to experiences and perceptions of this order from both the intimacy of the inside and the estrangement of the outside. This contradictory fluidity is intensified by the first-person narrative Duiker deploys. Azure not only narrates his story himself but often does so in childlike egocentric vocabulary and syntax: the frequency of the narrating pronoun “I,” probably the most frequent word in the text; the short, emotive sentences; and the clipped and spare dialogue. On the other hand, Azure’s experiences are anything but childlike and innocent. The code-switching between languages and between colloquial and taboo registers attests to the child’s harsh and very adult circumstances. The horrific verbal, emotional, and sexual abuse he is subject to stem from a world where self-interest, greed, addiction, and prejudice are rampant. Adults and their values have become the new oppressor, replacing the “whitey” who played that role in protest literature by black writers under apartheid. “[M]oney is everything” (18), Azure tells himself after he has been robbed of forty rands by the gangster pimp Allen, insightfully identifying the commodification and commercialization of social relations that rapidly overlaid race as the dominant line of fracture in postapartheid South Africa. As the title of the novel suggests, the destructive forces in Azure’s worlds continually work to reduce him to near nothing, to a meager thirteen cents, to an object whose value is merely monetary.

Azure’s physical appearance is as unsettling as is his narrative positioning. His blue eyes, to characters like the gang leader Gerald, are anomalous, given his dark skin, and provoke and interrogate stereotypical ideas of race, identity, and social hierarchy. Azure troubles the main racial categories of apartheid identity, “white,” “coloured,” and “black”—he is none of them and at the same time all of them.7 Not only do his looks defy inherited racial classification, but his dress sense has no regard for conventions that are racially associated. Azure’s childhood friend from Johannesburg and one of his few protectors, Vincent, warns him that Gerald is out to get him: “He thinks he’s white because he’s got straight hair and a light skin. If you show up with those shoes and your blue eyes, he’ll kill you. He’ll say, Who the fuck do you think you are? Trying to be white?” (39–40).

Gerald heads a hierarchy of destruction and evil equivalent to the evil witches MaMtonga and Ncitjana in The Hidden Star. His power resides in his control over others through relentless thuggery and brutality combined with his creation of financial, territorial, and emotional dependency that mimics supportive familial relations. After days of protracted physical torture and sexual violence inflicted on Azure by Gerald’s minions like Sealy and Richard, Azure is expected to pay allegiance to Gerald, who takes on the role of father figure and protector, claiming in fact to have killed Azure’s parents himself. The extraordinary power of the gangster is manifest in the manner in which he is able, in the mind of Azure and others, to transmute into the all-powerful dinosaur T-rex on the one hand, and into the form of ubiquitous pigeons on the other. To secure Azure as his own creation, Gerald insists he change his name to “Blue.” But Gerald and his world cannot finally make Azure belong. Gerald’s ignorance of the fact that “Blue” and “Azure” are essentially synonymous signifies his failure to rename the boy, and Gerald’s final destruction marks Azure’s triumph at resisting incorporation into Gerald’s world and its debased values. In this regard, the final assertion of the novel, “My mother is dead. My father is dead,” a disturbing refrain throughout the work that emphasizes Azure’s orphaned and dislocated state, becomes a positive and hopeful statement against false belonging and inauthentic values that the impostor father represented. The unambiguously happy ending of The Hidden Star tells of Nolitye’s final victory in casting off her false mother and being reunited with her real mother, whom she has rescued from the evil underworld: “‘At last we’re going home,’ Nolitye says gratefully. ‘Together’” (233).

Alongside the violence the young Azure experiences at the hands of adults, it is the sexualized nature of his existence on the streets that shocks and unsettles. Many readings of Thirteen Cents emphasize the fact that Azure engages in homosexual encounters with older men in order to earn money and survive on the streets. Azure confirms this reading when on numerous occasions he describes the encounters in graphic detail, but qualifies what is happening by stressing that he does what he does for the money, as a “trick.” However, it is possible to nuance this reading with one that also sees the novel as a bildungsroman of the boy’s sexuality in formation, with the exploration of inchoate sexuality, perhaps even homosexuality, as a subtext. The most protracted description of sex with a man is the one with the rich banker Mr Lebowitz. During this encounter, Azure distances himself and stresses that this is just another of many similar “tricks” he performs: “I know these bastards. I’ve done this a thousand times” (98). As he does on a number of occasions, he asserts a hetero-normativity when he says he gets it up by thinking of Toni Braxton. Yet, on a number of occasions during this encounter, there are, despite the ominous suggestion of being filmed and watched, hints at pleasure-taking, both in the comfort and warmth of domestic space and even sexually. Azure’s descriptions of moments of the encounter can be read as ambiguous and possibly, even subconsciously, taking pleasure. At one point also he feels a sense of pleasure during the encounter, but this is fleeting: “After a while the pleasure turns into sadness” (100). At another point, when they have a second go at it to the accompaniment of the “Winter” movement of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Mr Lebowitz talks of trees without leaves, which takes Azure into a reverie of his own: “Trees, I know trees. I listen to the music. It is too much. . . . This guy is trying to open me up” (107). Azure here briefly reveals that there is something hidden within him that he is reluctant or unable to face but quickly reverts to a defense of this response as his way of protecting himself from exploitative adults like Mr Lebowitz and Joyce.

The closest we come to the young teenager reflecting more objectively on his sexuality and a possible alternative sexuality is when, toward the end of the novel, before his final ascent up the mountain, he interrogates his contradictory sexual impulses:

I never dream of doing it with a woman. I’m not a moffie. One of the bastards once asked me if I was a moffie. And I told him that I’m not a moffie. But it’s strange that I never dream of doing it with a woman, not even beautiful Toni Braxton. And the other guys are always saying that it happens to them. I just lie about it and say that it happens to me too even though it never has. (171–72)

The reiterated denials, “I’m not a moffie,” suggest the young boy’s repression of the disturbing possibility of its opposite—too traumatic a thought for someone his age and in his context to admit. By reading against the grain of the narrator’s own claims, or finding contradictory moments on its surface, this bildungsroman then is as much about survival and a sense of self on the urban edges as it is about marginalized sexuality in formation (rather than an assertion of a particular set sexual identity). Like Azure, Duiker himself discourages reading the novel as being about “gay identity” when, in response to a question with regard to his own sexuality, he responded: “I’m a writer and interested in every aspect of human relations and identity. The whole thing is not an issue for me. My first novel, Thirteen Cents, did not have a gay character and neither will the third. I really don’t want to be pigeon-holed.”8

The explorations of homosexuality in Duiker’s second novel, inflected with an array of other issues about young urban identity and belonging, makes such a subtextual reading of Thirteen Cents more plausible. He was in fact composing the two novels at the same time. Duiker’s own interrogation in his fiction and poetry of the inherited boundaries of conventional identities and of limiting, categorical thinking, as well as his crisscrossing of languages and narrative modes in his work, would further corroborate such an interpretation. In addition, such a reading queers the dominant interpretation which insists that the homosexual encounters are, on Azure’s side, simply to survive. It also challenges homophobic and moralistic readings of the novel, like that of Osita Ezeliora, whose emphasis on “survivalism” precludes any such exploration of sexuality in Thirteen Cents and condemns its exploration in the subsequent novel: “Duiker’s transition from survivalism as the ideological propellant of homosexuality in Thirteen Cents to its glamorisation in The Quiet Violence of Dreams incites a perception of his narratives as literary sabotage of Africa’s moral sanity, historical memory and cultural development.”9 The notion of homosexuality as “un-African” implicit in Ezeliora’s view continues to undergird often violent repression of any sexual practice perceived as nonheteronormative in South Africa and on the African continent.10

Thirteen Cents is as much about Azure’s interrogation and exploration of the temporal and spacial dimensions of his urban world as it is about the social and sexual dimensions. In the final third of the novel Azure makes two ascents up Table Mountain, which rises out of the heart of Cape Town and towers above it. These episodes are marked by insistent movement up and out of the cityscape and again down and into its innards as Azure tries to overcome the debilitating forces that engulf and consume him on the streets. Not only does his quest for a life of belonging beyond these destructive forces allow him to literally rise above them, but it also helps him imagine, through intensely sensory, hyperrealist11 dream sequences, a different genealogy and a new city as the old is being destroyed before his very eyes.

On the mountain he experiences intense sensations and fantastical images, and his graphic and primordial dreams are shot through with elements of his real life. In an extended dream (the whole of chapter 17) he finds Saartjie, “a woman who looks like she lived a very long time ago” (139), whose name and figure invoke the ancestral Southern African Khoisan woman Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman.12 She is at times maternal and protective of him, defending him against the omnipotent and diabolical T-rex, whom she claims is his father and her husband. She in turn is daughter to the terrifying Mantis who eats the sun, and she also claims Azure is the son of the sun. This private mythology and chain of being the boy dreams up is intermingled with his real past—T-rex is a figure from popular film culture and also a transmogrification of Gerald. In his vision Azure creates a new genealogy for himself to restore his dead mother and father. The imagined alternative is one deeply entangled with real history and African folklore, but also marked by contradiction, terror, and destruction, as is his real life. The destruction of the evil Gerald in the dream is paralleled by the destruction of the real Gerald when Azure descends the mountain. The novel ends on an apocalyptic note; Azure, once again on top of the mountain, either imagines he sees or actually sees a giant explosion in the sky and fire falling to earth, and a tsunami sweeping away the city below. The ending, on the surface, is one of destruction and negation. But the mayhem also holds a moment of reassurance for both Azure and the reader: “I know what fear is . . . I have seen the centre of darkness . . . I know his secrets” (my emphases). The young boy has come through the apocalypse, and has attained greater self-knowledge and knowledge about his world. Azure’s final assertion, “My mother is dead. My father is dead,” is no longer merely an ever-present refrain; it is now also an acknowledged fact that the boy begins to grasp. Still completely alone, but with clarity of mind, he can, the ending suggests, begin again on the clean slate emerging beneath his feet.

* * *

Sello Duiker’s life (1974–2005) straddled the dying days of apartheid and the post-1994 period. He was born in the iconic Johannesburg black township of Soweto, the place synonymous with the student revolts of 1976 that helped break apartheid’s stranglehold on the country. His father and mother were part of the growing black middle class and both had degrees. His father’s job with an international company relocated the family to England for a while.13 Duiker credits his mother, an avid reader, with sparking his interest in books.14 His parents of course wanted their firstborn to be well educated, sending him to a reputable Roman Catholic school in a neighboring “coloured” area. “It was at [this] time,” he says, “[that] I was becoming aware of my race. I discovered that in the coloured community there was a lot of politics around hair, the smoothness and the colour.”15 As a schoolboy in his teens in the equally turbulent 1980s in Soweto he says he was “witnessing necklacing [and] kangaroo courts.”16 Duiker, like all South Africans, lived with the legacy of violence resulting from more than three and a half centuries of colonial and apartheid domination and divide-and-rule.

After school Duiker traveled for two years, first to the United States and then to Europe, working for a while as a dishwasher in Paris and also on a farm in France, and it was during this time that he started writing longer pieces of prose.17 In Paris he visited many art exhibitions and, he says, was struck by the Made in Heaven exhibition of American artist Jeff Koons, in which explicit and graphic images blurred the borders between art and pornography.18 When he returned home in 1995 he started a degree in journalism at Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape, which he felt would enable him to explore his desire to write. It was during his years as a student at Rhodes that he became interested in the lives of children living on the streets and started writing full-length fiction seriously. He tried but was unsuccessful at getting a manuscript published.19

He then moved to Cape Town in 1998, where he studied copywriting. During his two-year stay in the city he continued to explore his curiosity about street children, living, by chance Duiker says, with them for three and a half weeks when he was asked to help find a boy who went missing.20 As a result of this long absence from his studies he was expelled from his college and in fact institutionalized in a psychiatric institution for two months. On his release he wrote the first draft of Thirteen Cents in less than two months.21 The experience of living on the streets undoubtedly helped him capture street life in Cape Town with impressive verisimilitude—a hallmark of the novel which, like the work of Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marachera, shocks and provokes. At the same time he was working on the manuscript of The Quiet Violence of Dreams, which had already been accepted by Kwela Books but which his editor there, Annari van der Merwe, insisted he revise.22 He returned to Johannesburg, where he completed Thirteen Cents and took up work as a freelance journalist and advertising copywriter, and also as a scriptwriter for the popular television soap operas Backstage and Isidingo.

While his life straddles the apartheid and postapartheid eras, Duiker’s work has been firmly located by literary scholars as part of the postapartheid period,23 dated often as starting in 1994 or even a bit earlier, in 1990, with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. Much recent scholarship about South African letters has focused on attempts to characterize postapartheid society, literature, and culture and question what is distinctive in comparison to life, literature, and culture under apartheid. For Michael Chapman, this period of transition is marked by “anxieties and confusions about matters of identity in relation to massive socio-political change.”24 Seminal to the literary debate have been the claims by writer and critic Njabulo S. Ndebele, whose essay “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa,” first published in 1986, led the charge against black protest writing under apartheid, which he labeled “spectacular,” with writers taking their cue from the “visible symbols of the overwhelmingly oppressive South African formation.”25 He characterized fiction by black South African writers as follows:

The spectacular documents; it indicts implicitly; it is demonstrative, preferring exteriority to interiority; it keeps the larger issues of society in our minds, obliterating the details; it provokes identification through recognition and feeling rather than through observation and analytical thought; it calls for emotion rather than conviction; it establishes a vast sense of presence without offering intimate knowledge.26

Postapartheid literature moves away from the exterior binaries and the protesting voice to a preoccupation with the inner, the intimate, the individual, and the intermingled ordinary. It is, Andries Oliphant argues, a move away from “instrumentality” to “explore the new freedoms promised by the transition.”27 A new generation of novelists like Phaswane Mpe and Sello Duiker took up this newfound freedom and were seen as creative pioneers at the beginning of the new century, not only because of the focus of their fiction on contradictory entanglement of new and old, but also because they were seen to be “more formally innovative.”28

In an attempt to characterize South African writing, both pre- and post-1994, David Attwell discusses the uneasy yet pervasive distinction often made between white writing and black writing, particularly under apartheid, and concludes that “tension, instability, and negotiation across a historical and cross-cultural divide permeate South African writing.”29 Duiker, speaking in interviews about his literary influences, points to a range of Southern African and international writers across lines of color and gives reasons for these identifications that have more often than not to do with questions of tension and instability. Bessie Head looms large in this regard, and Duiker says of her: “Bessie Head . . . [is] a ‘coloured’ South African writer. She was born from a white woman and rejected by her . . . by her own mother. Her strong identity as a ‘coloured’ woman is reflected in her writing.”30 He states that Head’s novel A Question of Power inspired him to become a writer because “[h]ere is this person who was rejected by her community and took refuge wherever she could. I related to that, to her trying to find her feet.”31 Other literary works Duiker claims were important in shaping him as a youngster were Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born, and the iconoclastic work of Dambudzo Marechera.32 Duiker’s Azure is remarkably similar to Okri’s exceptional spirit child Azaro in The Famished Road (1991), and the Nigerian’s negotiation of realist and surrealist styles clearly inspired the young South African. Sam Raditlhalo also suggests that Azure/Blue alludes to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970).

Duiker epitomizes a new generation of South African writers who succeed more easily in creatively transgressing the old black/white divide that Attwell and others identify and attempt to bridge. The writers he names as making their mark range widely, asserting a cosmopolitanism and nonracialism rather than privileging merely the racial, nationalist, or Pan-Africanist. During Duiker’s years of travel immediately after school he says he discovered the works of J. M. Coetzee, Breyten Breytenbach, and Doris Lessing. Duiker’s work also invites wide-ranging comparison. There are striking similarities between Azure and Michael K, the protagonist of Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K (1983). A comparative study of the two novels would cut across the racial writing divide, as would, for example, a comparative study of a string of South African boy bildungsromans, from Es’kia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue (1959) to Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples (1995), to Thirteen Cents and Michiel Heyns’s The Children’s Day (2002). A comparison between Thirteen Cents and Patricia Schonstein’s Skyline, published in the same year as Duiker’s novel, about a young girl’s encounter with urban dwellers in Long Street, Cape Town, could invite a gendered analysis of postapartheid relations in the inner city. Such comparative, thematic analyses might go some way toward filling the gap identified by Rita Barnard: “There are, to date, surprisingly few critical works . . . that consider South African literature in a broad thematic way, and there are fewer still without the modifiers ‘black’ or ‘white’ inserted in the title.”33 Duiker’s life, vision, and work certainly invite such nonracial explorations without diminishing the way questions of race still affect our lives.

Sello Duiker took his own life in January 2005, just about a month after his friend and fellow writer Phaswane Mpe had died.34 A few days before Duiker’s death, van der Merwe had sent him her edited version of The Hidden Star through the post, but it failed to reach him; his last novel ends by realizing the quest his first protagonist Azure had begun and fleetingly glimpsed from the top of the mountain: “home is never far away when you believe in it” (233).

A Note on K. Sello Duiker’s Use of Language

Andries Oliphant outlines the effects of colonial and apartheid rule and ideology in South Africa on the domain of literature:

Linguistically, Apartheid crystallised the colonial imperatives of segregation and white supremacy into rigid ethnic divisions between English and Afrikaans, on the one hand, as well as between these languages and the indigenous languages, on the other. This, as Msimang (1996:51) states, produced three distinct literary systems consisting of the two literatures in English and Afrikaans, separated from each other and placed at the apex and centre of the system, and the nine literatures in the African languages, located at the periphery and below English and Afrikaans.35

This separation and hierarchy of South African literature along language lines under apartheid begins to be challenged, to a certain extent, in the post-1994 period. Writers still choose one of the numerous languages used in South Africa as the language of their text (English, Afrikaans, isiZulu, and isiXhosa as the main ones), but there is now a greater mixing of languages, particularly in dialogue, in many creative works. Duiker continues to write in a tradition of Anglophone African writers, epitomized by Chinua Achebe, who choose to write in English rather than in an African language but at the same time make English serve their local and particular creative purpose. Nationally, Duiker follows in the South African novel tradition of writers like Peter Abrahams, Es’kia Mphahlele, Nadine Gordimer, Richard Rive, Alex La Guma, and J. M. Coetzee. Like these writers, Duiker inflects Standard South African English with other languages; in Thirteen Cents he combines English with regional dialect prevalent in the Cape that mixes English and Afrikaans with Sotho and Xhosa names and words in the narrative. Duiker can be seen as continuing the modern novel tradition in English, as Es’kia Mphahlele sees it, initiated by Peter Abrahams:

Peter Abrahams . . . had become acquainted with the Negro authors of the Harlem Renaissance in the New York of the 1920s and the new consciousness that was to create a new kind of writing by Blacks. It was a rediscovery of an identity that echoed their African origins. Theirs was a style that captured the immediacy of an experience with vivid and concrete imagery, in all its harshness, in all its resonance of the fact of Black survival.36

Yet Duiker goes much further than any of these writers, crossing three conventional boundaries of fictional representation—he graphically depicts sex between child and adult, he does so specifically in relation to homosexual acts, and he uses expletives and the language of insult in a sustained manner that goes beyond merely inflecting the prose with local color.37 Dehumanizing language is a violent assault on the human spirit, and Duiker attempts to capture this onslaught and resistance to it in authentic detail. He says: “I don’t go out intentionally to shock. A lot of what I said could have been toned down. But violence is so much a part of our culture that if I had toned it down it wouldn’t have been authentic.”38

Unlike Mark Behr, for example, a South African novelist resident in the United States, who in his recent fiction Kings of the Water (2009) generates simultaneous translations of Afrikaans phrases within the text and a glossary of terms for his international readership, Duiker writes Thirteen Cents in the first instance for a younger, local audience, assuming his readers are familiar with the non-English terms. The absence of authorial mediation between the language of the story and readers also suggests Duiker’s desire to construct an uncompromising, true-to-life account of a harsh reality. It gives his fiction a contemporary and naturalistic quality, much like the linguistic code-switching and cacophony of languages that one finds in popular South African TV soap operas and recent South African film.

The glossary that follows is intended to help readers decode the meaning and nuances of certain key terms in the novel not in English.

Glossary

babelas (isiZulu, slang)—hungover

ba batla borotho (Sesotho)—they want bread

baksheesh (Persian, slang)—tips and bribes

bergies (Afrikaans, slang)—literally mountain people; homeless people who take shelter on the slopes of Table Mountain or on Cape Town city streets

braai (Afrikaans)—cookout, barbecue

buttons (informal)—Mandrax, Quaaludes

cherrie (Afrikaans, slang)—young woman or girlfriend

daai glad hare (Afrikaans)—that smooth hair

dankie (Afrikaans)—thank you

deurmekaar (Afrikaans)—crazy

eish (slang)—oh dear

gemors (Afrikaans)—a mess, confusion

hey voetsek (Afrikaans)—fuck off

julle fokken (Afrikaans)—your fucking

kaffir (derogatory)—native, black man/woman

kak (Afrikaans)—shit

kwaito (derived from Afrikaans)—South African mix of township hip hop, reggae, house music

laaitie (Afrikaans, slang)—young boy

los hom (Afrikaans)—let him go, leave him alone

maar (Afrikaans)—but

mageu (isiZulu)—traditional drink made from fermented maize

mahala (South African slang)—for free, free of charge

makwerekwere (isiXhosa, derogatory)—foreigners, outsiders, non-South Africans

mannetjies (Afrikaans)—little men

meisietjie (Afrikaans)—girl

mense (Afrikaans)—people

mnqusho (isiXhosa)—traditional meal of hominy-like samp (dried corn kernels that are soaked and coarsely pounded; generally cooked with beans)

moegoe (Afrikaans slang)—dope, fool, idiot

moer (Afrikaans, threatening)—to beat up; to fuck up

moffie (Afrikaans, derogatory)—faggot

naai (Afrikaans, slang)—one of many words for having sex; screw, poke

ouens (Afrikaans)—guys

oupa (Afrikaans)—grandfather

outie (Afrikaans, slang)—wiseguy

Pagad mense—PAGAD—People against Gangsterism and Drugs, Islamic vigilante group in Cape Town

phuza-face (isiZulu, slang)—an alcoholic

piel (Afrikaans, slang)—dick, penis

poes (Afrikaans, derogatory)—cunt

skyf (Afrikaans)—cigarette, puff, joint

spaza (slang)—small convenience store in township or

rural area

stop / zol / pilletjie (Afrikaans slang)—a joint

suig (Afrikaans)—suck

thula (isiZulu)—quiet or hush

Vaalie mense (Afrikaans slang)—(white) people from the old Transvaal province

veldskoene—(Afrikaans) usually handmade soft shoes made from untanned leather, field shoes

wena—(isiXhosa) you

windgat—(Afrikaans) windbag, someone who talks and boasts too much

yessus—from Jesus, meaning damn

voetsek—fuck

Works Cited

Attwell, David. Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006.

Barnard, Rita. Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Chapman, Michael. Southern African Literatures. Scottsville: University of Natal Press, 2003. First published 1996 by Longman.

Cornwell, Gareth, Dirk Klopper, and Craig MacKenzie. The Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English Since 1945. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

Duiker, K. Sello. The Hidden Star. Cape Town: Kwela, 2006.

———. “Interview with Bafana Khumalo.” In Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 22–23.

———. “Interview with Victor Lackay (courtesy of co-author Carl Collison): ‘I’m a Travelling Salesman.’” In Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 19–21.

———. “‘The Last Word’: Sello Duiker.” In Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 27–30.

———. “One Breezy Night Late in November.” In Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 62.

———. The Quiet Violence of Dreams. Cape Town: Kwela, 2001.

———. Thirteen Cents. Cape Town: David Philip, 2000.

Ezeliora, Osita. “The Novels of K. Sello Duiker and Phaswane Mpe.” In Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 164–75.

Mphahlele, Es’kia. Es’kia Continued: Literary Appreciation, Education, African Humanism and Culture, Social Consciousness. Johannesburg: Stainbank, 2004.

Mzamane, Mbulelo Vizikhungo, ed. Words Gone Two Soon: A Tribute to Phaswane Mpe and K. Sello Duiker. Pretoria: Umgangatho, 2005.

Ndebele, Njabulo S. “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies 12, no. 2 (1986): 143–57. Reprinted in Njabulo S. Ndebele, Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture, 31–54. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006.

Oliphant, Andries Walter. “A Changing Topography: Tracing Some Recent Developments in South African Writing.” In Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 230–50.

Raditlhalo, Sam. “‘The Travelling Salesman’: A Tribute to K. Sello Duiker: 1974–2005.” Feminist Africa 5 (2005): 96–104.

Rive, Richard. “Dagga-smoker’s Dream.” In Advance, Retreat: Selected Short Stories, 5–9. Cape Town: David Philip, 1989. First published 1983.

———. “Rain.” In Advance, Retreat: Selected Short Stories, 11–19. Cape Town: David Philip, 1989. First published 1983.

Samuelson, Meg. “Crossing Borders with Words: Sello Duiker, Phaswane Mpe and Yvonne Vera.” In Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 196–201.

Simonsen, Mikkel. “Realising the Gift: K. S. Duiker’s Shades of Identity.” Unpublished Honours paper, University of Stellenbosch, 2004.

Tamale, Sylvia, ed. African Sexualities: A Reader. Nairobi: Pambazuka, 2011.

van der Merwe, Annari. “Tribute.” In Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 5–14.

van Dis, Adriaan. “Tributes.” In Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 11–12.

Viljoen, Shaun. “Non-Racialism Remains a Fiction: Richard Rive’s ‘Buckingham Palace,’ District Six and K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams.” English Academy Review 18, no. 1 (2001): 46–53.

1

My name is Azure. Ah-zoo-ray. That’s how you say it. My mother gave me that name. It’s the only thing I have left from her.

I have blue eyes and a dark skin. I’m used to people staring at me, mostly grown-ups. When I was at school children used to beat me up because I had blue eyes. They hated me for it. But now children just take one look at me and then they either say something nasty or smile. But grown-ups, they pierce you with their stare.

I live alone. The streets of Sea Point are my home. But I’m almost a man, I’m nearly thirteen years old. That means I know where to find food that hasn’t seen too many ants and flies in Camps Bay or Clifton. That is if there aren’t any policemen patrolling the streets. They don’t like us much. Or if I fancy some fruit then I go to the station where the coloured fruit-sellers work. I don’t like them much because they are always yelling at us to move away. Most of them throw away fruit instead of giving it to us. But I’m not stupid. I know that they put funny things in the dustbins where we go scratching for food. I can smell their evil. I know a few kids who are under their evil spell. They make them walk the night spreading their evil. And some of them are so deep into their evil they can change shape. They can become rats or pigeons. Pigeons are also rats, they just have wings. And once you become a rat they make you do ugly things in sewers and in the dark. It’s true. It happens. I’ve seen it.

But like I said I’m almost a man. I can take care of myself. “Julle fokken mannetjies moet skool toe gaan,” the fruit-sellers yell. It’s easy for them to say that. I lost my parents three years ago. Papa was bad with money and got Mama in trouble. The day they killed him I was away at school. I came back to our shack only to find them in a pool of blood. That was three years ago. That was the last time I went to school.

I walk a lot. My feet are tough and rough underneath. But I’m clean. Every morning I take a bath at the beach. I wash with sea water. Sometimes I use a sponge or if I can’t find one I use an old rag. It’s just as good. Then I rinse off the sea water at the tap. It’s not that bad washing with cold water. It’s like anything – you get used to it.

My friend Bafana can’t believe that I saw my dead parents and didn’t freak out. But I told him. I cried and then it was over. No one was going to take care of me. He’s still a laaitie, Bafana, only nine years old and he’s on the streets. And he is naughty. He has a home to go back to in Langa but he chooses to roam the streets. He likes sniffing glue and smoking buttons when he has money. I don’t like that stuff, it makes my head sore. But I like smoking ganja, quite a lot actually. Now Bafana when he smokes glue and buttons he becomes an animal, really. He starts grunting and doesn’t speak much and he messes his pants. So whenever I see him smoking that stuff I beat him. I once beat him so badly he had to go to Groote Schuur to get stitched. I don’t like that stuff. It just does terrible things to your body.

I sleep in Sea Point near the swimming pool because it’s the safest place to be at night. In town there are too many pimps and gangsters. I don’t want to make my money like them. So during the day I help park cars in Cape Town. It’s not easy work. You have to get there early. Sometimes you have to fight for your spot. The older ones leave us alone, they get all the choice parking spots in the centre of town. It’s like that. I don’t ask questions.

I help people park cars and wash them if the owners let me. If you wash their car before you ask them most times they just swear at you because you’re a laaitie and they are big. You see it’s like that. That’s how it works here. You must always act like a grown-up. You must speak like them. That means when you speak to a grown-up in town you must look at them in the eyes and use a loud voice because if you speak softly they will swear at you. You must also be clean because grown-ups are always clean. And you must never talk to them like you talk to a laaitie. Like I can’t talk to them the way I talk to Bafana. I must always say “Sir” or “Madam”. It’s like saying “Magents” except it’s for grown-ups. And when I can remember I say “please” and “thank you”. Those two words are like magic, my secret. They’ve made me nice money every time I used them with a smile.

I work near a takeaway shop called Subway. On a good day I can make enough money to buy half a loaf of white bread with chips and Coke and still have two rands left over to buy a stop from Liesel who stays under the bridge.

She’s the only grown-up I trust because she asks me for money and always pays me back a week later. I also like her because she let me see how a woman looks like naked. She doesn’t tell lies, Liesel, not like the other people who stay under the bridge. All the skollies, gangsters and drunks with phuza-face also stay there.

Poor Liesel. I know what she does to make money. It’s not easy. That’s why I never ask her about it. And when she has a bruise or a cut under her lip I don’t say anything. I just pretend that things are like always, the same. We talk about kwaito and whether the Rasta who brings her stop will get good stuff like Malawi gold or Mpondo and we talk about other things. I like her a lot but she’s not my cherrie. She’s got her own outie. I don’t like him much. He’s a member of the Hard Livings gang.

2

Morning creeps in slowly. Bafana sleeps curled in a half-moon beside me. I get up to take a pee. I rub my eyes and let out a yawn as I piss. We sleep at the far corner of the beach. Above us is the swimming pool. It is too early for the public toilets to be open so I go a little further up the beach and do my business near a drain. Deep orange clouds cover the sky. Seagulls fly by and cry.

“Bafana, son, get up, we need to get breakfast.” I poke him. “Bafana . . . Bafana.”

I go on like this for about five minutes before he gets up.

“Wena, you must stop taking those stupid drugs. They are fucking you up. Look at you, you can’t even get up. You’re lucky it’s me. Somebody will think you’re dead.”

He moans and looks at me with a skew face.

“I’m hungry,” he mumbles.

“Ja, shuddup, you know what you have to do.”

“Wena, and your stupid rules.”

I slap the back of his head and he clicks his tongue at me.

“The sun is already out, hurry up. I’m also hungry.”

We take off our clothes and go towards the water only dressed in our shorts.

“Don’t make me drag you in there, son, we go through this every morning.”

“Yessus! Who said I have to wash every day?”

“Hey voetsek! Don’t give me shit. You know my rules. If you want to stay with me you have to wash. Now fuck off,” I say and push him into the water.

He shrieks.

“Thula, man. People are still sleeping. This isn’t town.”

I only go in up to my ankles and watch him scrubbing with a cloth.

“Do it properly,” I warn him.

“Eish maar, wena.”

After a while I let him go out and rinse off at the tap. He sits on a rock and dries off in the sun while I bathe. I think about all the things I plan to do today while I wash. My eyes sting from the salt water.

After washing we get dressed and go up Main Road. I know a woman who works at a restaurant called La Perla. She usually leaves leftovers for us near a bush. I’m the only one who gets the food because I don’t trust Bafana. He’s still a laaitie and sometimes he gets desperate when he’s on his stupid drugs. I’ve worked too hard to see someone mess up a regular meal for me. She’s nice, the auntie who gets the food for me. Her name is Joyce but she likes me to call her Auntie. She says I remind her of her son in Lichtenburg. Anyway, in exchange for the meal she sends me to the shop to do her small groceries. Or sometimes she sends me to the Post Office or she gives me money to buy her Die Burger. There’s nothing for mahala with grown-ups. You always have to do something in return. But I don’t mind because Joyce is nice.

We sit on a balcony overlooking the pool and eat. Joyce always packs the food into those McDonald’s plastic things and gives us spoons. We watch the morning swimmers do their lengths. As always the pool is a clear blue-sky colour. I love to swim and I’m dying to swim in that pool. But six bucks is a lot of money and you have to have a towel.

“We need to make some baksheesh today,” Bafana finally says after he’s had enough to eat.

“Ja, ja. What do you plan on doing?”

“But I thought we’re a team.”

“Voetsek! Don’t talk rubbish. You do this every day. When are you going to get it into your head that I’m not your mother? I’m only doing you a favour by letting you sleep by me. You know what would happen to you otherwise. You and your stupid drugs. Now you want me to work with you so you can buy your stupid drugs. You’re full of kak. Fuck off!” I push him and walk off towards the park and leave him to fend for himself.

I’m not his father, I say to myself. That laaitie is getting under my armpit, under my soft spot. I mustn’t let that happen, I tell myself. I’ve seen too many kids die and disappear. There’s no point in getting too close. Just now he gets an overdose from his stupid drugs. And then what? Now I must walk around crying because this stupid boy who has a home ran away to kill himself with drugs. I’m not stupid, man. If he wants to do grown-up things then I must leave him. He wants to play with fire, let him.

I walk towards a fountain near some toilets. Grown-ups are strange people. How can they put a fountain for drinking water outside a toilet? And I mean right outside the Men’s toilet. I drink some water and fill a plastic container, one of those fancy ones that sell fancy water. I wonder if that water tastes any different.

I walk further along the beach till I come to the moffie part of the beach. I sit on a bench and wait for a trick. I sit a long while before I hear someone whistling. Soon I’m walking back with a white man to his flat. When we get inside the lift he tells me to take off my shoes. I know the routine. Once inside his flat he will expect me to strip off at the door. We go in and I begin to take off my clothes at the kitchen door.

“What’s your name?” he asks as he stares at my nakedness.

“Azure.”

“Interesting name,” he says drawn by my blue eyes.

I grin while he strokes my face. He leads me through the house and we make our way to the bathroom. The house is clean and warm. I walk carefully as though careless footsteps might disrupt the cleanliness. He takes off his clothes and his piel bounces in front. I shudder to look at it and wait for him to lead me into the shower. But I know his type, he probably just wants to play, nothing else.

“Why are you so quiet?” he says while the water runs.

“I’m just listening.”

“To what?”

“Your house. It’s so quiet.”

“Oh that. Do you want me to put on some music?”

“No, I like it like this. Please.”

He rubs the soap quickly between his hands and slides his hands on my back and bum. I’m forced to smile. That’s what they expect. Grown-ups, I know their games. I smile. He slides his hands around my waist and touches my belly. Not so quickly, I say to myself before he goes any lower. I bend down to pick up the soap.

He gets out to dry himself and leaves me with a few minutes of heaven with warm water and fresh-smelling soap. I slide the soap all over my body, blowing bubbles when I can, a silly grin that only I can enjoy on my face. The water falls on me with pleasure. I tingle with cleanliness.

“Are you coming? I’m waiting,” he says after a while.

They don’t like you to know their names, in case you bump into them in the street. Most times they don’t even nod or say hi, they walk past as if they don’t know you.

“Come now, I’ve got things to do,” he says in a serious grown-up voice.

I turn off the taps and shake off the water still clinging to me. He slides the door open and hands me a towel. A fresh-smelling light blue towel. I sigh with pleasure as I dry myself. His eyes follow my every move.

“Come now, we must get on with it,” he says a little anxiously and grabs the towel. I walk behind him as we both walk naked towards the bedroom. Morning light pours in through fancy curtains with slits. Above his bed there is a framed poster of a young boy taking a piss. There’s a dreamy look in his eyes as he looks towards us while pissing. I look around the neat room with awe while his piel begins to grow.

“Lie down,” he says and lays me beside him. Then he starts playing with me. I have to concentrate hard to get excited. I think of Toni Braxton and Mary J Blige. They usually do the trick for me.

We use a lot of baby oil. I close my eyes while he moans a lot.

“Tell me when you’re going to come,” he says politely, strangely.

“I can come any time. I was waiting for you.”

“In that case let’s come.”

He stands over me while I lie down and we both masturbate. After a while his eyes roll into their whites and I feel warm drops across my chest and face. He hands me a towel to dry myself.

With a wallet in his hand we go to the kitchen.

“You did good,” he says and hands me a twenty-rand note. Peanuts. I’ve earned fifty bucks from a single trick. But I know not to get greedy. He could become a regular. I get dressed quickly and let myself out. Just before going out the door to the flats another white man looks at me with come-to-bed eyes. A lot younger than the other guy. I decide to follow him. He stays on the first floor.

“Don’t worry about that,” he says as I start to undo my shirt. “You don’t have to take off your clothes. I just want to be sucked off. Don’t worry, I won’t come in your mouth.”

It doesn’t take long before I make him come on his bare chest. He pays me forty bucks and sees me out of the flat.

3

I need a new pair of shoes, I say to myself as I count the money. Joyce is not working, she only works nights. I decide to go to her small flat which she shares with another auntie. At the door she is only too happy to see me.

“Dankie vir die kos, Antie, ek was baie honger. Where’s Aun­tie Bertha?”

“She went home for a few days. You know how she gets homesick. Cape Town can be so lonely,” she says, walking around in her lazy flip-flops.

“Anyway, I’ve got some money and I thought maybe you could put it into my bank.”

Joyce understands banks and how they work. Me, I have forgotten even how to hold a pen, so how can I go to the bank myself? Grown-ups ask many questions there. You must remember when you were born and exactly how old you are. You must have an address and it must be one that doesn’t keep changing. Like you must stay in the same spot for say maybe five years and when you move you must tell the bank. They must know everything about your movements. Like how many homes you have and whom must they call when you want to do something with your money. If you ask me they are a bit like gangsters, they want to know everything so that you cannot run away from them. And you must have an ID and a job that pays you regularly. And every time you put in money they make money for you by lending out your money. They are very clever people who work at banks. That’s what Joyce says. She says she ordered a banking place for me at First National Bank and that all my money is going to be safe there. Every time I make money I give her some and she puts it away for me in the safe. It’s my plan to do something with it one day. I’m not sure what I can do with it or how much I have saved but I have a feeling that it will come in handy one day.

Today I give her twenty bucks and keep the rest. What I like about Joyce is that she never asks me how I make my money. In fact, unlike most grown-ups she doesn’t ask too many questions. She’s only too happy to be sitting at the window sewing or doing something with her hands. Sometimes I just sit there with her and we say nothing to each other for hours. It’s so peaceful.

Sometimes, when she’s not feeling like an auntie, she lets me smoke a cigarette with her but that doesn’t happen often. She never beats me but jeez she can get very angry with me, especially when my clothes are dirty. When I have enough money, because food always comes first, I buy soap and wash my clothes at a public toilet. I wash them one at a time. T-shirt first and when it has dried I wash my socks and when they’ve dried I wash my pants but I wear them wet till they dry in the sun from all the walking I do.

Joyce pours me a cup of tea. I sit on the floor beside her and we listen to her wireless. On the news Pagad is on the loose again. Another policeman was shot dead in his home.

“You know, Zu-zu, these Pagad mense they say they are God’s people but they preach the devil’s work.”

“Yes, Auntie.”

“You must stay away from them, you hear, Zu-zu.”

“Yes, Auntie.”

“And the gangsters. If I ever hear that you are a member of a gang you can forget about Auntie ever giving you food or banking your money. Do you hear me?”

“Me, Auntie, I’m not like them. I’m not a moegoe.”

“You must promise me this, Zu-zu. Say you’ll never be a member,” she says and looks at me with a schoolteacher’s serious eyes.

“I promise, Auntie.”

“No, you mustn’t promise. Say it. I want to hear you say it.”

“I promise not to be a member, Auntie.”

“That’s good, Zu-zu, that’s good.”

We sit in silence for a while and listen to the rest of the news. After a while I tell Auntie that I must be on my way.

I go to Green Point where Allen works as a pimp. I find him standing under a large blue-gum tree talking to one of his white girls. They are arguing about something. I stand back because I know Allen’s temper. He’s killed someone before and I saw the whole thing happen. Knowing him has actually helped me a lot on the streets. I can’t say that we are friends. But if I’m ever in trouble I just have to say that I know Allen and I’m usually left alone.

“Why must I fucking work today?” she yells at him, her pupils like saucers. Stupid woman, she’s high.

“Because I told you so, bitch. Who the fuck do you think you are? Don’t pull this shit on me just because you’ve just had your rock.”

“I don’t see why I have to work today. I haven’t had a day off in two weeks, Allen. What about my pussy?”

“Fuck you,” he punches her and she falls flat on her face in the street. A car drives near her and hoots at Allen. “You and your pussy, fuck you. You’re full of shit.” He goes on and grabs her by the hair.

That’s the problem with the white bitches. I find that they never know when to shut up and here the ouens don’t give them a chance. They are heavy-handed. They just whack. And if that doesn’t do it, they naai and then they fuck them up even more.

“You weren’t complaining yesterday when that client paid you a three hundred rand tip. Don’t think I don’t know about that, bitch. I know about it. You can’t hide anything from me, meisietjie. Daai glad hare, it does nothing for me. This isn’t Joburg,” he continues slapping her. “I’m going to moer you for your mouth, you must learn when to shut up.”

By this time she has a serious cut under her left eye and bruises all over her face. Her clothes are also torn. He grabs her by the scruff and bundles her to his flat which is on the same road. People walk by.

“What the fuck do you want?” he says as he walks past me.

I show him forty bucks. That’s the only thing Allen understands best – money. He doesn’t answer. He just calls me with his head. The white girl is bleeding but she doesn’t cry.

“I should naai you for all the shit you cause, you stupid bitch,” he says and throws her on the couch that looks flea-ridden. The cats scurry away. She doesn’t say anything.

“Go clean up before I fuck you up again,” he yells, the devil in his eyes. He kicks her hard in the ass as she gets up. She falls on her face and starts crying.

“Get up, you cunt! Poes! Fokken naai!”

She gets up slowly and goes to the bathroom.

“Now what the fuck do you want? And who said you could sit down? Fuck off your naai, get up,” he turns to me.

“Allen, I need shoes,” I say looking at his feet.

“Fuck off, why didn’t you come yesterday?”

I wait for him to slap me but he doesn’t.

“Hey, what’s your fucking problem? Look at me when I’m talking to you.” He straightens my head by the chin.

I look at him, hiding the terror in my eyes.

Unexpectedly, he smiles and shows off his mouth of mostly gold fillings.

“You’re my my laaitie, you know that? Where’s your money?”

I give him the moistened notes.

“Wait here,” he says. “Don’t sit. I’ll have a look in the bedroom.”

On the floor around me there are boxes of stolen items, things that Allen or whoever it was got from house breaking. A pair of Reebok tackies that look like my size stare at me from the corner. Allen returns with ten-rand flip-flops. He throws them at me and says I must return in three days’ time to get proper shoes. What he means is that I must return in three days’ time with more money. And when I do I must not say anything about today, otherwise he will beat the living shit out of me. He’s like that, Allen; you must never remind him of anything. He knows everything. I take off my shoes with holes at the bottom and put on the thin strops. Give me those ones, he orders me. I nearly hesitate but give him. What is he going to do with them? I walk out his flat and try not to think of my money as wasted but as protection money.

I can walk a little safer knowing that Allen has my money. Money is his language. It’s the only thing he remembers, everything else is unimportant. I wouldn’t be surprised tomorrow if he asked that girl who beat her up. Of course she would be forced to say that someone else beat her up in fear of upsetting him again. And then another stupid argument would start and more blood and tears. He’s totally messed up, Allen. I don’t know if he’s crazy or just likes playing games.

I feel tense and walk towards the bridge hoping that Liesel will be there.

I’ve learned something from Allen and that is money is everything. It’s everything because you can get a house and call the shots. When you’re dressed properly grown-ups give you a bit of respect. But as long as I’m me and have no home and wear tattered clothes Allen will never give me proper clothes because that would mean that I can look like him. And no one who knows Allen looks like him. He makes sure of that. Even if it means he strips you himself. He always has to outdress you, outsmart you. It’s his way. It’s the grown-up way. He only wears Nike shoes and expensive jeans and tops. He always gives me clothes that are just about to fall apart, so that I’m always dependent on him. So that I will always go back to him for more and spend my money on him. But I understand. I have to do it. It’s the only way I can be safe on the streets. There are too many monsters out there.

4

I get to the bridge and find that Liesel is not there. So I hang around Ma Zakes’ spaza shop with Sealy. He buys me mageu and rolls a joint.

“Keep an eye out for the pigs,” he says.

“Sure.”

“Where were you last night?”

“Why?”

“Gerald fucked up this one guy with a goni because he called him driver as he got into his cab.”

“Who was that stupid naai?”

“Liesel’s outie. You checked him. He thinks he’s hard because he’s in Hard Livings.”

“Ja, I know him. He’s a real poes.”

“I checked you like Liesel.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t give me that shit. You only buy your stop from her.”

“Ja, because she doesn’t make me wait like you ouens.”

“Ag voetsek, you just want to naai her.”

“It’s not like that.”

“Ay but you’re full of kak. You never know what’s going inside your head.”

He lights up the joint and takes a long drag. TKZee belt out “Shibobo” from Ma Zakes’. I take a sip of mageu and let it settle at the back of my throat. Sealy bobs his head in rhythm. He’s a bastard on the dance floor. He can outdance anyone and he’s got style. That’s why Gerald likes him. Gerald comes in with his white Ford Grenada. He makes a lot of noise before he parks it outside his shack not far from where we are sitting.

“Away, Sealy,” he shouts as he gets out of the car.

“Away, Gerald,” Sealy says and gets up to dance. I watch him from the bench, his feet shuffling pantsula-style, a cool sleepy look on his face. Just before he goes to Gerald he gives me his joint and another stop.

“Swaai us another pilletjie, ek sê.”