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Paper Sons and Daughters

Page 20

by Ufrieda Ho


  sweaty bras, some of them wrapped in lucky strips of animal skin or tightly

  bound by an elastic band and they tumbled into the cardboard beer crate

  that my father used to collect the purses and wallets.

  The cardboard box echoed back the soft clunks of the purses and

  money bags hitting the firm corrugated bottom. At that moment I pleaded

  with ridiculous repetition in my mind for a win for my dad from this

  bank. I hated the disappointment of a loss for my father, because I knew

  for him that even when so much was a gamble in what he did, it was not

  a random, careless act that brought him to these townships.

  My dad would tell me the number he was playing that round and I

  was given the job of opening up zips and seals to save him the task. It was

  really just something for me to do without getting in his way. I always

  went for the pink purses and the yellow ones first, or occasionally there

  would be something unusual like a glossy plastic purse with big flowers

  printed on it or, one of my favourites, a purse made to look like a panda’s

  head with big black-bordered eyes and a flash of fake red leather for a

  happy tongue. It had a click-lock mechanism. I would pull out clammy

  notes that showed up the bodily intimacy people have with money and I

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  would watch as my fingertips turned more and more grey throughout the

  day as the long journey of the exchanged coins from the purses seemed to

  rub off on my fingers.

  As I got older, I was allowed to be helpful with more grown-up tasks.

  My job then was to open up each bag, remove the betting slip carefully

  and then check for the number that was being played. On the printed

  betting slips it was easy to see if someone had a winning bet. But on the

  handwritten notes I would check over and over again to make sure I had

  not missed anything that could lead to a quarrel between the better and

  my father later. When I was sure, I would upturn the purse and throw the

  money into the cardboard crate and put the betting slip aside. At the end

  of each bank’s round, my father would gather together the betting slips,

  roll them up and snap an elastic band around them. On to the column of

  paper he would write the bank’s name and stash it into the money bags

  my mother had made. These would be brought out later in the night and

  entered into my dad’s record books so that he could keep an up-to-date

  record of play for the rest of the week.

  If the number did come up, I had to stack the purse on top of the

  betting slip and wedge them between the dashboard and the windscreen,

  waiting there for my father to count the pay-out once he had finished

  going through all the purses. I would get more and more worried as two

  then three then more purses would find their way up on to the dashboard.

  I started feeling like I had bad luck and that somehow my hands were

  making them win against my father.

  I did not understand the pay-out system that well and I did not really

  comprehend the actual value of money. I only knew that when my father

  had to return money back to a purse it was not good. And my child’s

  calculations measured out winning bets as setbacks for my father. Later,

  I found out that bets were paid out at a one-to-28 ratio and there was a

  one in 36 chance of choosing a winning number. I am not sure how those

  figures came about but they have more or less stuck. A winning 10-cent

  bet earned the better R2.80. The better lost the money on any other bets

  that were made.

  My father had quick hands. He tugged at zips and plucked apart the

  plastic bank-bag seals, and all other carefully sealed purses and bags

  doubling up as pouches for a bet. He scanned betting slips, quickly checked

  that the money corresponded to the bet and as he did the maths in his

  head, his hands were already picking through the coins and notes and

  pushing pay-outs back into purses.

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  When my father beat his betters, wins came in the jingle-jangle of coins

  and some notes emptied into the beer box. But his hand also dipped back

  frequently into the cardboard box stash and some purses were returned

  with a bulge that showed that the one-to-28 pay-out had smiled on the

  better that day.

  When my father was losing, especially on the days when it was his own

  money on the line, the agitation and frustration sometimes commanded

  his body like a possession. His jawbone became pronounced, his tone

  grew sharp and he barked at runners for no reason. He took it out on his

  cigarettes, Dunhills from a maroon box in his breast pocket. He dragged

  on them deeply then tapped the ash out of the car window with his right

  arm that was tanned distinctly darker than his left arm all his life.

  A fahfee man is not your polite local butcher or the plumber who calls

  his clients ‘ma’am’. Sometimes I thought my father was harder than he

  should have been with his betters, but as an adult I realised that even

  the attitude was part of the fahfee man’s life; it was not a business for

  pushovers.

  On most occasions, my father’s anger dissipated even though his

  frustration was not easy to shake because it played out in a tally of losses

  in his head. I am sure I made mistakes, allowing some coins to slip out,

  missing a better’s win and with it causing unnecessary disputes, wasting

  time and giving him more headaches than he needed. But he never shouted

  at me or stopped me from coming out with him those few days each

  holiday.

  We went from bank to bank and then we re-did the whole routine again

  as generally there were two trips to a bank each day. These coincided with

  the betters’ lunch breaks and with when they headed home or when they

  were already home from work.

  Sometimes we went to a smallholding and stopped a distance away

  from some beehives. The plot owner farmed bees and sold honey. My

  father bought a few jars that the runner was dispatched to buy for him.

  The yellow-topped lids held back dark viscous sweetness that dad liked to

  dissolve in his tea. There were also jars jammed full of perfectly formed

  hexagons, repeating themselves over and over, forming the honeycombs,

  the raw honey, that my dad also enjoyed and said was a healthier alternative

  to sugar.

  Among the smallholdings in the Eikenhof area south of the city that

  made up some of my dad’s banks, we would make trips to the poultry

  farms. My dad’s order, made via the runner again, was for eggs in bulk,

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  trays stacked neatly on top of each other and carefully deposited into our

  car boot. It was the same with some vegetables and fruit that came straight

  from the farms, not pre-packaged.

  With the shopping done, we would head back out to most of the banks

  we had been to earlier in the day. Now, though, everything was in darkness.

  I remember the dim, gloomy glow of the location lights high above the

  ramshackle township houses. We waited for runners in this orange haze of

  the lights, the Apollos, outside
someone’s small home, or parked inside the

  range of some fluorescent lights outside a spaza shop that had electricity.

  My father switched on the car’s interior lights and we went through the

  routine once again as the township came to life with people who had

  returned home from the city.

  Betters congregated, waiting for my father to arrive – he was their

  hope for something extra for that night’s dinner table, or when they lost,

  it meant going without a new pair of shoes for longer than planned. I

  guess, though, he always represented hope, because gamblers are eternal

  optimists.

  On those days with my dad, I did not have to share him, neither with

  my mom nor my siblings. I saw how money was made in our family and

  I saw dad in this other role, not as husband and father, but navigating

  relationships with people who were not friends or colleagues and not even

  customers really.

  There was a competition and a game that made the fahfee man and the

  betters more like opponents. But they could not be too far apart either.

  They needed each other. Dad needed them to bet; the bigger the pool the

  greater the odds for him to make a profit. The betters needed dad as an

  opportunity, even in the form of a gamble, to add meat to that week’s

  menu. And fahfee needed apartheid, too.

  Fahfee needed two groups on the edges of society, separate but bound

  together, to connect momentarily in the collusion of circumventing the

  ways of the economic mainstream. The end goal for both groups was to

  walk away with a few extra rand in their pockets even if it meant they

  were taking from each other.

  Theirs was a pact forged from their mutual conspiracy against the

  apartheid system. The ma-china and the poor black man of the townships

  were pushed towards the periphery; neither was part of what whirled in

  the tight inner circle: white wealth.

  There was infighting, too, as dad and his betters were drawn into the

  vortex of dispute – it was part of the game. Dad would stand his ground;

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  UFRIEDA HO

  the betters, with their heads leaned into the car window, would disagree

  with gesticulations or shaking their heads, also standing their ground.

  None was ready to back down. And then my father would just drive off,

  incensed and frustrated and maybe also adding a bit of dramatic effect. He

  would return for the evening round to fight again or be ready to give in,

  whichever move he decided to make in the hours he had to cool off and

  to refocus.

  Drama and dispute aside, there had to be a shared respect so both sides

  could take the steps to engage in fahfee’s dance of superstition, suspense

  and survival. It was what they did day in and day out.

  And fahfee also showed up the humanness of connection and the

  ordinariness of transaction, both parties understanding how harsh things

  were when you existed on the edges of opportunity. I remember my father

  occasionally grabbed a few notes from the beer crate and gave them to the

  runner sitting nearby.

  ‘Go buy cooldrinks for everyone,’ he said.

  The runner disappeared with people shouting their orders and

  instructions after him and he turned his back, telling them to shush. We

  would be in the car emptying the purses and wallets when the runner

  arrived back. Dad would wave his hand telling him to keep the change.

  Then Cokes and Fantas in their cold glass bottles were passed around.

  Someone would produce an opener and that was also passed around. We

  all drank in the fizzy, sweet coldness like it was not a day of work after

  all.

  Dad was an outsider here, but he was also tied to this world of hard-

  working men and women. He understood what it took to make a bet,

  to gamble not for fun but for the hope of changing the day’s fortune.

  In the townships, I saw for the first time how the dusty streets turned

  the barefooted children’s feet a chalky grey, how houses were not lit with

  electric bulbs but with gas stoves and candles and that rough hand-painted

  numbers distinguished one house from another. There were no snoozing

  Mexican wall-hangings of the suburbs, no garden gnomes or dogs back

  from the parlour with ribbons in their hair.

  One time, as we left the township, we saw a man with no legs trying

  to push his awkward, broken body across a road. His clothes were

  dirty and torn. The slow-motion scene played out in front of us as the

  man lugged his body across the ocean of tar. My father rolled down the

  window and handed the man a few of the large R1 coins with their leaping

  springboks.

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  Dad shook his head and a soft ‘Shame, shame’ dropped from his mouth

  as the man writhed determinedly to complete his task. We drove off.

  I never asked my father why black people lived in townships and why

  there were no white people there, or Chinese people for that matter. Why

  was life so hard for some people? My father never offered any context of

  the world created by the hand of apartheid, the world that we lived in and

  the world we slipped in and out of as the ju fah goung and his daughter. All

  I could feel was the same useless pity of a few coins tossed to someone in

  need and knowing that tomorrow my father would be back, and the man

  with the broken body would still be dragging himself across the road.

  The world of the townships seemed so far away from my other world

  of textbooks with punctuated sentences, learning about capital cities or

  how to do long division – the things my dad and mom felt were what we

  should be concerned with. The world was full of nuance, full of all these

  other lives and different ways to make a life. In my child’s mind, everything

  fitted in as I was told it should, but I also saw that people slipped in and

  out of where they were not supposed to be under apartheid’s dictates.

  One holiday shift, Kelvin, dad and I drove past a young woman standing

  at the side of the road with her hand extended, waving down a lift. It was

  not unusual to see young women in this position, it happened often, but

  this time we stopped. Something was different – she was white. I did not

  understand why we had stopped for this woman when there were so many

  others we passed on a daily basis.

  Years later it became clear to me. Dad knew better than we did who

  fitted in where and when, and a young white woman on the outskirts of a

  township at dusk was the wrong fit.

  To Kelvin and me it seemed simply a friendly gesture to stop. Kelvin

  got out of the front seat to join me in the back. We assumed all adults got

  the front seat by default. I could not remember ever having a white person

  in our car, and certainly not a pretty girl with long blonde hair. Kelvin,

  who had kicked off his shoes in the course of the day, used his toes to

  push forward the seatbelt clip, trying to be discreet. But the young woman

  noticed and when she smiled at him we both giggled into the back seat of

  the car.

  We knew the fahfee day ended when the dusty road and orange gloom

  of the Apollos le
d back to the tarred roads. Here, working traffic lights

  commanded order, houses were hemmed by neat lawns and house numbers

  on walls were not hand-painted scrawls but shiny and polished brass cut-

  outs or glazed ceramic plaques.

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  UFRIEDA HO

  We arrived home and as the car idled in front of our gate we jumped

  out to undo with a noisy clank the metal chain-link we kept on our garage

  gate. Pulling each side open, we waited for the car to pull in; the brake

  light illuminated our legs as we re-wound the chain and anticipated the

  sure clip of the padlock my mother kept hooked on the diamond mesh

  fence she had erected to coax creeping flowers to bloom.

  ‘Have you locked the gate?’ my dad asked, as he almost always did.

  He probably checked it again before we went to bed, but for now our yes

  was enough.

  We carried the bags of money that were also stuffed with the fahfee

  record books and the fahfee slips from the day’s play. As we walked

  through the door we dragged our feet a bit, exaggerating our movements.

  We had been out to work after all, and we wanted to mimic our dad a

  little; we wanted to feel like the man who had put in a hard day’s work

  with tiredness as the badge to prove it.

  Whatever real tiredness we felt was a truncated version of what dad

  went through every day, and this was a holiday shift for him. Mom shooed

  us off to wash up quickly as she put the final touches to the evening meal.

  One of my siblings brought my father a cup of tea and he sat back to relax

  a little bit before dinner.

  Holiday time brought the unusual pattern of eating our evening meal

  together as a family. With dad home, we would swop and shuffle to fit all

  six of us around the rectangle of our blue Formica kitchen table. Dad sat

  at the head of the table – and invariably it was now him, not my mom,

  telling us to lock the dogs out of the kitchen so we could eat or mumbling

  something about us holding our chopsticks properly. Once the meal was

  done, we settled down to TV. But the day’s fahfee takings had to be counted

  and the players’ betting trends recorded and made ready for the next day’s

  rounds.

  A newspaper was spread down its broadsheet centre. The homemade

  fabric bags, heavy with coins, were emptied out like a roar of thunder to

  count the money. Once the notes were scooped up, it was down to the

 

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