Читать книгу Sister-Sister - Rachel Zadok - Страница 11

Shame-Shame, All the Same

All eyes slide from Sindi to the woman. Everyone’s waiting to see who’ll be the first to give. Sindi takes a step backwards and some small child, nerves wired, giggles. A murmur runs through the watchers. Booysen and Marlboro spring to their feet and scurry towards us, flashing spite at each other as they pick their way over mattresses and people.

Marlboro reaches us first. He takes Sindi by the elbow and, with a smug grin, drags her into the centre of the room. “Ma, this the sista I told you about.”

I look at Booysen. He sucks his lips, says nothing. The oros woman folds her arms across her chest. Strong arms, solid slabs of hard fat, like Mama’s. “Well, girlie, you got a name?” she says, voice full of sugar.

Sindi sways.

“My name’s Wilhelmina, but you call me Ma Wilma like the rest of them. What you want us to call you?”

Sindi studies the toes that poke from under Ma Wilma’s skirt.

“Don’t she talk?”

Marlboro shrugs. “She talk, Ma, but not so much. I think maybe she’s tired. She been inside that heap of ou transis all night till I pulled her out.”

“Sho, bra, you lie.”

Ma Wilma snaps around. Her thick steel-coloured braids whip across her face and settle on her shoulders like spiteful Siamese cats. “Shut it, Booysen. This isn’t a competition,” she snarls, caramel tones burnt bitter. “For all I care a ’copter airlifted her here. You boys aren’t heroes. Yesterday you were all for boasting how you knew where to find little ones, now you want a kiss for bringing me this. You better hope she’s clean, otherwise the mess is going to be yours. Now both of you fok off and mind yourselves ’fore I give you a klap.”

Both boys slink into the shadows.

“And you, girlie, you a bit of a vuil pop. You need a wash.” She grabs Sindi by the arm and leads her away, shouting over her shoulder for Rissik and Bree to bring a bath. They disappear into the tunnel she emerged from a few minutes earlier.

As soon as she’s out of sight, the watchers start laughing and making kissie-kissie noises and I realise: they’re all children. And all girls, as far as I can tell, except for Booysen and Marlboro and two other boys around their age. They look like street kids, with their matted hair and dirty faces, but their clothes are clean enough and though they’re not fat, they’re not starving either. I do a quick headcount: about thirty girls. The smallest looks five or six; the oldest, a blonde girl, is maybe twelve. It’s hard to tell the ages of street kids exactly – they’re small from being hungry and sucking glue. Sometimes you meet a boy that looks ten and he tells you he’s sixteen. Maybe true, maybe not: it’s like that. The streets are full of lies and invisible kids nobody wants.

I find Sindi in a pipe lit by a single bulb. A double mattress, with a sinkhole in the centre that tells me it’s Ma Wilma’s bed, sits at the edge of the cold blue circle cast by the bulb. Next to the bed is a cardboard box containing a few dog-eared magazines. Beyond the lick of light, a white dress hangs like a lonely ghost on a clothing rail. I wander over and rub one of the lacy cuffs between my finger and thumb. Crispy, like crumbs of burnt toast.

I turn from the dress and look at my sister. She sits shivering on the mattress. Ma Wilma stands in front of her, holding her coat. Without it, Sindi looks small-small. I can’t remember the last time she took off the coat, but her jeans, belted with string, remember the width her waist used to be. Her jersey is faded and full of holes, the New Tiyang Primary colours stolen by sun and dirt. The sleeves are too short and sit halfway between her wrist and elbow: Sindi’s getting longer and thinner. Two girls come in carrying a washtub between them. Water slops over the sides as they set it down.

“Watch it,” Ma Wilma snaps. “Next time you waste water like that, I’ll bleed you to replace it. Take this and get rid of it.” Ma Wilma holds out Sindi’s coat. Neither girl moves. “Problem?” she asks, arching her brow. I see she doesn’t have any eyebrows or lashes. They shake their heads like their ears are glued together. “You girlies aren’t princesses either. Remember where I found you? I can put you back there.”

“Ja, Ma,” they say with one voice.

“Now get, and send Loveday with some clean clothes.”

The girls skitter out with the coat and Ma Wilma turns her attention back to Sindi. “You sick, girlie?” she asks, tilting Sindi’s head back. She pulls my sisi’s lower eyelids down. Sindi’s eyes roll, but she doesn’t pull away. “You got the sickness or what?” Sindi shakes her head. Ma Wilma looks hard at her face. “How old are you?”

“Thirteen,” I say.

“I asked you a question,” she says, shaking Sindi.

“I’m fift_teen.”

“Liar, liar pants on fire!” I shout.

“You ever been with a man? You got a boyfriend?”

Sindi shakes her head. Ma Wilma grunts and shuffles over to the cardboard box. She takes out a sewing needle and a white plastic stick about the length of a pen. The black swirls towards me when she stabs the needle into my sisi’s finger.

“Okay, okay,” Ma Wilma soothes. She twists Sindi’s finger so the drop of blood beading on the end of it drips into a small window in the plastic stick, then drops the stick into her pocket. “What happened to your hand?”

“A dog bit m_m_me.”

“Ah, a whole sentence. Good, I was beginning to think you were simple. Loveday will get that cleaned up, then we’ll get you something to eat and find you a bed.”

As if summoned by her name, a lanky girl with a shock of hair as blonde as Marlboro’s enters, carrying a bundle of clothes. Ma Wilma and the girl speak in low voices. I hover around my sisi. She’s shivering, hugging herself to try still the shakes. Ma Wilma leaves the pipe, her skirt hissing like a snake. When she’s gone, Loveday tosses the bundle of clothes onto the bed.

“Ma Wilma says for you to wash. She want me to do it, make sure you get properly clean but no way. You wash yourself, neh. I’m happy to look out for the laaities, make sure they gets cleaned up once a week, but you not a laaitie. You got years on me fo sho. And you stink worse than the ouledi’s blumas.” She flops down onto the mattress, takes a magazine from the box and flicks through it. Sindi doesn’t move. Loveday shoves her with a foot. “Look, sista, don’t mess around. Ma Wilma’s going to come back now-now. She’s got other uses for that knobkerrie, she’s not as old as she looks.”

When she still doesn’t move, Loveday stops paging and gives her a hard look.

“Jissis, moegoe. Move it.” Loveday drops the magazine, grabs Sindi by the arms and pulls her to her feet. The girl looks like a stick of the pampas grass that grows in the barren stretches of veld along the Ring Road, all white fluff on top of a thin reed, but she handles Sindi towards the washtub as if she’s a paper doll.

Sindi’s head jerks back from the shock of cold water splashed in her face. The glaze lifts and she looks at Loveday like she’s only just seen her. “I can wash m_m_myself.” She strips and uses her T-shirt as a washcloth. Loveday drops onto the bed and begins paging through the magazine again.

When Sindi’s done, she wrings out her T-shirt, then turns her jeans inside out and gives them a good shake. A few coins and the collected dregs of our life on the road fall from her pockets.

“Don’t do that, sista, you’ll spread fleas and lice,” Lovedays says, eyeing Sindi’s stuff. “Los your kak and get dressed, or we gonna miss last dish. I’ll sweep it up later.”

Loveday watches Sindi dress with a sly face. “You know Ma hates Believers.” She pauses like she’s waiting for this fact to sink in. “Ma hates them. Give her a box of etchies and a bottle of b-diesel and she’d burn the whole church to the ground with every Believer in it. If one of them come in here,” she swipes her fingers across her throat.

There’s spite in her voice. I put my face close to hers. She’s pretty but her lips are thin and lines have already formed around her mouth, like an old lady’s mouth, like Gogo Nkosi’s mouth. I know, looking at those bitter creases, that Loveday is brewing trouble.

“Why does she call you Loveday?”

Loveday frowns over the top of the magazine. “It’s my name, neh, everyone got a name, even you.”

Sindi wrings water from her shirt. “There’s a ss_astreet called Loveday.”

Loveday sighs. “Ja, there’s a street. Ma Wilma names all her girls after streets, sometimes the street where she pick them up, sometimes just sommer. Depends.”

Sindi stands in the washtub. Light from the naked bulb snags on every bump on her body, casting purple shadows. It makes dark hollows of her cheeks and the sunken spaces between her collarbone and neck, runs a line of light along her ribs and cheekbones. She looks like a negative, an X-ray, a shivering-shaking X-ray.

Loveday leans back. “They find you by the old golf course, huh? Maybe Ma’ll call you Reading.”

“M_m_my nn_name’s sss_asSindi.”

“Ja well, it’s not like you can say your name so maybe now it’s Reading. Ma don’t like anyone to be called by their real name. If nobody knows your real name, nobody can find you. No one come looking anyway. ’Cept one time this ou mlungu come looking to recruit us to his church. Fokken Believers. Ma went spare, she moered him stukkend, snapped his leg like a twig. Booysen and Oxford drag him out and leave him on the street. That was at the warehouse. Nobody ever find us here, but we can’t stay here in summer, just in case it rains. It don’t, but the Long Dry got to break some time. Better safe, neh.”

“Where are we?”

“This?” Loveday looks around like she’s not sure. “Ma says this a ou storm-water reservoir, part of the waterworks. We safe enough down here, the city got no use for this reservoir long as the dry hold.”

Dora Xplora blue and bloating.

“Out there, the big round room, that was where they stored the water before treating it, but we call it the dorm. Makes Ma jumpy to think of all the water that filled it once.”

Dora Xplora face-down in the vlei

Barefoot, no socks, her shoes got washed away

Her satchel strap still wrapped around her throat

Daai ding kon nie swim but vetkoek floats.

Loveday hands Sindi a long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of jeans that are wide at the waist and too short, but they’re clean and Sindi looks grateful. I glance at my dusty New Tiyang Primary uniform and wish she’d give me something new too. When Sindi is dressed, Loveday bandages her hand, pulling the strips of rags tight. Then she collects Sindi’s old clothes and leads her back to the dorm. The air stinks of boiled cabbage and burnt pap.

“Just in time for last dish,” she says. She points out a mattress and leaves my sisi standing next to it, staring at the crowd gathered at the mouth of a lit-up pipe, holding plates.

By the time Loveday returns with food, Sindi’s curled up on the mattress, asleep.

“Wake up, girlie, you can’t sleep all day.”

I lift my head and look over the mound of my sisi’s shoulder at ankles, thick as diseased tree trunks, and driftwood feet with chipped yellow nails. I don’t need to see her face to know who they belong to.

On the road, you learn that it’s better to play dead than to give in to panic and bolt. Sindi’s quickening heartbeat tells me she’s awake, probably squinting at Ma Wilma’s feet through slit-eyes while sifting through her memories, trying to place us in time and space. But remembering’s hard. The world’s an ugly place and memories aren’t something to unwrap like birthday presents.

I can feel Sindi’s exhaustion in the heaviness of her limbs. After a few minutes of playing dead, she falls back into sleep. Ma Wilma clicks her tongue but she leaves us alone. I press my face into the back of Sindi’s neck. We curl together like two spoons in a drawer, but Ma Wilma’s visit has made me restless. I leave my sisi sleeping and climb the ladder strung with lights. I perch on a rung halfway to freedom and pretend to be an angel, watching.

Ma Wilma is the first of Sindi’s visitors, but she isn’t the last. Others come. Loveday leaves a plate of food. Later, she returns and takes it away, uneaten. Booysen stands over her, looking worried. He shakes his head, but I’m not fool enough to think he worries for her. Young girls come, giggling-giggling, and drip water into her mouth and ears.

Their tricks make me mad. I wrap my arms in wire and spark until everyone is asleep. Then I’m the only one awake and I feel cold and alone.

Dawn filters through the manholes and Ma Wilma’s kids begin to stir. The dorm fills with breakfast chatter that soon drops away as kids disappear up the ladders and into the pipes. By mid-morning, only Ma Wilma and a few little ones are left. I stay on my perch and watch the dull fade of the afternoon slide over Sindi. By the time twilight comes and the older kids pour back into their hole, I’m lumed up like a light bulb, but Sindi still sleeps.

That night, I slip into her mind and dream her dreams. I see myself, Thuli, strange and disconnected and the wrong way round, like I’m stuck in a mirror. We walk across the patch of veld to Saviour’s Pit Stop, our arms crooked at the elbows and linked together. The sky is silver-blue and the propeller on the Legend winks as it turns slow in the breeze, fanning our cheeks. The colour of her dreaming is sharp, as if our lives then were so much brighter, but rapid guilt oozes over the dream. Emptiness eats at happiness and the black blots us out.

Sunshine spotlights the floor. It’s the kind of sun that traps you in a lazy daze, unable to do anything but stare at dust motes. Everyone is drowsy, as if the sleeping sickness that has taken hold of my sisi is contagious. I almost expect them to drop, one by one, onto mattresses and curl into their dreams. The air is thick with unsatisfied expectations, a gift we brought. Someone new, and everyone waiting for the small changes in their lives that new things bring. But Sindi sleeps on, dragging them all into our limbo.

Ma Wilma shuffles across the floor, the tap of her knobkerrie soft, as if she doesn’t want to disturb anyone. She steps into a sun spot, blinking at the brightness, and stops. “Marlboro,” she calls, rapping her knobkerrie to make him hurry. They exchange a few words; then he crosses the floor to where Sindi sleeps and drags her mattress from its shadowed recess into the light.

Ma Wilma is like a moth with no wings, pacing up and down in the harsh glow of the bulb. Three days have passed since we last saw her, since she stooped over Sindi’s sleeping body, nudging her with the knobkerrie while sunlight played over my sisi’s face and brought her back to life. In those three days only Loveday came near us. She brought porridge and bread and, once, a tub of hot soapy water and clean rags for Sindi’s hand. She refused to speak to Sindi, keeping her eyes down as she unwound the dirty bandage. The stink from the wound brought a sour kiss to her lips. That was the only time her stony mask slipped.

Then Ma Wilma sent for us. Now we stand, hands behind our backs, waiting for her attention. Her pacing makes me think of Miss Booley, our grade five teacher, even though Miss Booley was ruler-thin. Miss Booley once made us stand in front of the class, hands behind our backs, eyes reading the floor while she paced, up and down, up and down, up and down . . . until, without sign or warning, she snapped around to face the class with their blank eyes and their straight necks.

“Look,” she hissed, her finger pointing at us while her spiky features faced the others. “They’re not clean children, not clean the way children in my class should be.” And they looked at us, at our uniforms that weren’t clean enough. Our second-hand uniforms, too short and not clean.

“No, ma’am, not clean.”

They looked at our baby-dolls, our scuffed and worn baby-dolls, and they laughed and pulled their lips thin over their white teeth; and inside me, hate grew. Hate bubbled and boiled until the rage clenched my hands into fists. I wanted to bash Miss Booley’s face. I wanted to take her head and smash it into the wall, into the whiteboard and the desk, to wipe that face away until there was nothing left but blood and mess and no face. No, ma’am. No face. No clean face. Just fat bloody lips and broken teeth.

Tears brimming, I cut a look at Sindi to see if she was ready to smash Miss Booley. But Sindi’s eyes were dancing, her nostrils trembling as she swallowed the giggles. She was laughing. Laughing at Miss Booley. And as I looked at her I-don’t-care face, my fingers went soft and my anger dissolved and the laughing caught and it snorted out my nose, a pig grunt laugh and then Sindi couldn’t swallow any more and we were both laughing-laughing, laughing-laughing, and Miss Booley was raging-raging and we were “OOUUUT!”

But we didn’t care. No ma’am, we didn’t, because second-hand dresses and worn-out shoes don’t matter. Teachers and classmates don’t matter. Sisters matter. Only sisters. Sister-sister, sister-twin, twin-sister.

“I thought the sickness was on you, girlie, even though you tested clear. The way you slept, like the dying sleep. Coma, I said to the boys, that one’s got the coma of the dead on her. We’ve seen it before. Many times we bring girls in, older girls that have been on the street for years and they roll over and die. Stink the place up like dogs. Then my boys have to move the body, dump it somewhere. It’s looking for trouble, shifting corpses. So no more older girls, I says to them, no more. Bring me little ones and we can look after them until they’re old enough, but only if they haven’t been fiddled. Not easy to find little girls nobody’s fiddled with these days, everybody thinks a little girl’s going to save them.”

Dora asked a skollie for a sugar sweet.

Ma Wilma leans on her knobkerrie. “But then my boys told me you was a beauty. Bit skinny, but a beauty. They said you’d clean up good. They told me how they’d watched you crawl into the cars and not come out. They’re good boys, but they can make trouble. I couldn’t have it on my conscience, such a beauty trapped in the cars.” She spits on the ground at our feet. “Now it looks like I’ve rescued one of them.”

Dora flashed pink blumas in the street.

She pulls something from the folds of the clothes and holds it out. Her hand wrapped so tight around it her knuckles show white through her skin.

Dora kissed Jack-rola an’ now she’s dead.

A spiteful smile twists Loveday’s lips and she pushes Sindi so she’s within punching distance of Ma Wilma’s fist. Sindi flinches, but Ma Wilma just opens her hand. Something falls to the floor.

Dora’s not in heaven cos her vetkoek bled.

Loon Man’s cross lies there in a tangle of string. I look at it and I know, bad things have come.

The boys strip her of her new clothes and she cowers in front of them while they stand around talking about her titties and her bum. She tries to hide behind her arms, but they pull them down and hold her wrists. They say she’s too skinny, but she has a pretty face and in a few weeks they can make her fat. They look at her. She looks at the floor.

“Think about something else,” I whisper, because I know how it is.

I know because of the day we went to the sea. When we caught a taxi to the swimming beach, Sindi and me and him, while Mama went shopping for a tombstone. I think about the waves and how we clung to him, holding on to his thin arms to keep from being swept under. Then he showed us a place they used to call the Golden Mile before the water rose up and flooded the fancy hotels.

Shame-shame, Thuli’s shame, all the same, shame-shame.

They paint her lips the colour of blood and smear the same waxy stick onto her cheeks to cherry them up. I’ve never seen her with make-up before, it makes her look like a clown, just like Mama used to say it would. It makes her look like she’s been punched in the mouth. They say the colour suits her.

They make her wear the white dress. The lace crackles when they zip it up. The camera flash flares against the fabric, against the shiny sweetheart cups that stand out proud while her titties try to hide. The dress is so bright, her skin so dark it seems the dress is a person and she its shadow.

Shame-shame, Sindi’s shame, all the same, shame-shame.

I stood on the lid of the toilet seat, staring at the lock. The echoing drip from the cistern kept time steady while his breath came hot and fast-fast. On the other side of the door, I heard Sindi singing quiet to herself. I thought it was strange, Sindi didn’t sing. Then I realised it wasn’t her singing. It was me.

“You’re a good girl, Thuli,” he whispered in my ear.

After, we stood in the damp shadows of the ladies’ toilet and changing room, peeling our wet vests away from our bumpy skin. The pads of my fingers were wrinkled, as if the sea had made me old. They felt numb and strange, like somebody else’s fingers. The changing room smelt of pee, wet concrete, splintered wood and the thick-bleach salt smell of him. We turned away from each other then, no longer the same. I watched her dress in the mirror, but her face was a closed door and she wouldn’t look at me.

Shame-shame, Thuli’s shame, all the same, shame-shame.

“Smile, sista,” they say and poke her in the ribs, tickling her like this is a joke and everyone’s friends. They take picture after picture, crowding around her image on the tiny screen after each flash.

“There are some good ones,” they say. Ma Wilma smiles and says to tell the Commissioner to sell her cheap.