“It’s terrible, terrible,” Soldier agrees.
“So how much will it cost me?”
He pretends to misunderstand her. “It’s volunteer stuff. But we need uniforms, so the skollies can see when we are around, and they know not to commit crime and what-what. So we have a presence. And we need computers and phones. It’s all unpaid.”
“How much will it cost me?”
“We don’t work for reward, Mama, but you know, businesses need protection. Women like you, they are vulnerable, working on their own. And sometimes those businesses make a contribution. A donation. You don’t want to be robbed. You don’t want to lose all your hard earnings and you know what skollies are like now, no respect. You don’t want to go through that.”
Thozama thinks about the things she has been through. Her husband working in Germiston as a petrol attendant, both of them bringing in money, building their home, a family from two different cities over a thousand kilometers apart, when he died in the fighting between the Zulus and the ANC in 1993. She thinks about her twenty-six-year-old daughter who drinks up her government grant, drinks to drown the anger and the shame of her diagnosis, and forgets to give her baby, Thozama’s grandson, his anti-retroviral medicine.
She thinks about her best wishes: to live with her kids (all grown up, the customs done, her son has already been to the bush), for her business to grow and her kids to take over, so she can relax, stop riding the train to the butcher, stop shaving the heads, boiling the heads, selling the heads.
And she thinks about this man, this Soldier, this lion, and she stoops, as if she has dropped something, as if she is an old woman who needs to take a break. And she picks up a broken half-brick from the ground.
“What is it, Mama?” he says. “Don’t worry, it’s not much money. We all have to make a living.”
And she hits him on the side of the head.
It is a clean blow. Her arm is strong from her work. It is much easier, in fact, than chopping a sheep’s skull in half. Although the sound it makes is almost the same.
He drops to the ground, collapsing from the knees like one of those cheap Chinese toy figurines with the button at the bottom, the bags slipping from his hand, dropping with him.
A smiley rolls out, comes up grinning at him, the tongue thick and pink between its teeth. But he can’t see it, because his eyes are closed. Blood smears the side of his head. It will draw flies. It will leave a scar.
There is a chance he might find her. There is a chance he might retaliate.
But he has made one big mistake.
“I am not a sheep,” she says to the man sprawled on the ground behind the station.
She picks up her bag, restores the prodigal brother to his place among the smiling-sneering heads, and walks away into the crowds at the market towards Chinatown.
It should come as no surprise that the princess found her pea, not beneath the teetering pile of mattresses, quilted and cotton-rich, with pocket coils and high-density foam, but nestled among the wiry coils between her legs.
You might wonder how she’d missed it in the first place. How could she have overlooked the marvel that would turn her blood to treacle and pin her like a butterfly on the fulcrum of her desire? The princess wondered at this herself.
But the unfortunate truth is that, like many princesses—and princes besides—she had always been too preoccupied with her princess-y duties, which included making the cover of Heat and People and Us Weekly, dabbling in music or fashion or reality TV, looking hot at all times, dancing on tables and, most importantly, Being Seen.
Delighted with her discovery, feeling like an explorer who has unexpectedly stumbled upon a lost temple in humid tangles of jungle, the princess rose from her tower of mattresses, calling impatiently for her infinitely patient handmaid.
Now, this handmaid was a loyal servant and true. An economic refugee from Ecuador, she had seen many things and weathered many tempests with the princess, including that video scandal—all the more sordid for its tediousness—where the princess lolled limp and bored while the prince, who turned out to be a pornographer, grunted and heaved away. But that was before the princess found her pea. And the handmaid was willing to bet her immigrant work visa that everything was about to change.
She set about helping the princess prepare, which was not technically in her job description. But in this matter—being that of the flesh and the delights thereof—the handmaid was far more experienced and had much wise knowledge to impart.
But before you cry foul over class exploitation, consider that the handmaid had a secret—a secret that had allowed her to stick by the princess throughout her wastrel shenanigans and wasted affairs. For the handmaid deeply loved the princess in a manner not entirely appropriate or approved, despite what you may have seen on those Spring Break reality TV specials.
So, at the princess’s insistence, the handmaid plucked and shaved and waxed the plump, velvety casing, all the better to show off the sultry treasure within. Then she teased back the folds and burnished the princess’s pea to a glistening jewel. And the princess shivered and shuddered and gasped and finally cried, which the handmaid thought was a tad melodramatic, but then she hadn’t been let down all her life by fumble-fingered and feckless princes.
She dabbed the princess’s tears (and other damp bits) with an indulgent three-ply tissue. Then she brushed out her hair, pinning it up in a style that only seemed effortless, and rifled her wardrobe for an outfit to match. After much deliberation, the handmaid picked out a pale starry sheath of a dress by a designer whose name you would recognize.
It was the kind of dress that clung in all the right places, the kind that might easily ride up as a princess swung open the door of a limousine, or attach itself with static attraction to a silver pole that a princess might be slithering against in a nightclub, or simply be hoisted up at the right moment of intoxication at the right prompting from a man with a camera.
And it’s not that this didn’t make the handmaid sad. But she had long ago given up judging the princess, who was quite the worst combination of headstrong and insecure. For in this matter, too, the handmaid was also wise and experienced, having been motivated by that selfsame troublesome formula to abandon wool-gathering on the alpaca farm where her family worked, and to sneak across dusty borders in cramped and stinking trucks, to have many adventures both wild and frightful.
Then the princess kissed the handmaid goodbye and clattered across the entrance hall of her luxury apartment toward the limo that awaited her, just like every other night, weekday or weekend, on a princess’s rather busy social calendar.
But this was not like every other night. This was different. Because the princess was different.
The doorman noticed it as he held open the door with a sharp snap of his heels. And the limo driver noticed as the princess slipped onto the back seat among her so-called friends. And even those bespangled and twittering girls noticed, despite their notable lack of observational skills, which were generally limited to spotting a fake designer label or a cheap haircut at fifty paces.
The princess was more sparkly than usual, more sparky, more radiant. The scent of confidence came off her like she’d been doused in a bottle of the stuff. And, more than that, she was smugly sated.
Her friends interrogated the princess with barbed banalities like “What’s up with you?” But the princess, still simmering in the heat and thrall of afterglow, could not be roused by their bile. Behind their perfectly whitened smiles, her friends rumbled and muttered with venomous envy.
At the nightclub, all swished past the velvet rope and the huddled plebs clamoring after them for acknowledgement or autographs. Her friends dismissed them, but the princess found herself for once moved by their plaintive and probably unhealthy adoration—and did something she never did: she stopped to chat.
Horrified, her friends seized her arm and hustled her inside the building before she could exchange more than a sentence with the ecstatic couple
at the front of the queue, leaving the large but hapless bouncer to deal with the fandom hysteria spreading fast as the pox or a viral video.
Inside the club, it was hot and pulsating with people, like the flush and the rush through a heart’s central chambers. Before they made it to the VIP bar, the princess found herself ensnared by the music, the deep house-beat insistent and sweet as the throb between her legs. She started to dance, not for show, as she usually did, atop a table above the masses, but for pleasure, in the thick, sweaty press of the crowd. Her friends on the sidelines rustled and murmured with gleeful scorn, disguised as concern.
Seeing his opening, a predatory prince prowled over to grind and gyrate in what passed for foreplay. But his mistake was in assuming that she was well fucked, rather than fucked well, and she shrugged him off to dance on her own, lost in the flow of the rhythms resonating inside her and out.
Gradually, the whole room began to take note of the difference in the princess. The crowd parted and swirled and started to orbit her, like electrons—or sharks. The envious friends and the prowling prince found their way to the center, circuiting closer and closer. Then one touched her hair and another her elbow, one plucked at her strap and another at her skirt, hands reaching and grasping as if she were a religious relic, a crying statue, a totem, a vodoun doll.
The princess tried to bat them away, laughing, as if it were a game—but these courtiers played rough. They kept pawing and groping her, the circle getting tighter and closer, until she had no route to escape.
It was a day for new feelings, it seemed, for now the princess experienced another emotion she’d never had before. It was not dissimilar to the feelings induced by the handmaid’s deft fingers, the fluttering in her chest and the thrill down her vertebrae. But whereas before these were soporific and dreamy, this sensation left her cold and bright as the hard, glittering eyes of her one-time friends.
“What is it with you?” and “Who do you think you are?” they heckled and sneered, snagging manicured nails on that silver shimmer of dress, their movements savage and jerky in the hiccuping strobe.
They ripped and they tore, shredding and stripping the flimsy fabric as easily as you might a reputation. In vain, the bewildered princess struggled and wept. Her cohorts didn’t stop until her dress lay in strips at her feet—and her secret lay bared to all.
The predatory prince was not the only one to recoil in shock, crying that he’d never seen the like when the truth was, he’d never thought to look. The rest of the assembly gasped in wonder and fright as the princess tried to shelter that lustrous pearl, that giddying pea that she had fully intended to show off that night—but, not like this, not to these hyenas in designer clothing, who jostled and jeered, buoyed by outrage and superstition and fear.
The princess moaned and curled over herself, trying to shield her nakedness, trying to deflect the blows that came not from fists but from pretty mouths lined with lip-gloss or ringed by designer stubble. She collapsed to the ground, writhing from hurt and humiliation. And then, a voice blasted the crowd.
The source of the command to “Back off, bloodsuckers!”, was so unlikely that, at first, it caused tittering ripples. Standing defiantly in the doorway was a girl with dark hair, wearing supermarket jeans and, worst of all, practical shoes. It was the handmaid. And when it was clear that the contemptuous mob had no intention of obeying, she drew herself up and waded right in.
The empty-eyed courtiers tried to resist, to fight back, but they were no match for a girl who had wrestled alpacas and the bureaucracies of borders—not to mention the princess’s vanity. They were so one-dimensional, their personalities so paper-thin, that they proved no trouble at all. One push, one shove, one shoulder and they wafted up and away like helium balloons. They floated to the ceiling, where they bumped against the rafters and tangled in the light fittings.
The handmaid hefted the princess to her feet, wrapped her up in her anorak and escorted her out from that awful place, between the drifts of celebrity, bobbing in the cross-currents of the air-conditioners.
But outside the front door, worse was waiting. There were snapping shutters and flashes and the terrible scrutiny of zoom lenses. Unfortunately, the baying paparazzi were made of sturdier stuff and used to the worst kinds of abuse. They didn’t give, they didn’t crumble in the face of the handmaid’s wrath. Their shutters whirred and clicked, snapping relentless shot after shot after shot.
The handmaid faltered, blinded by flashbulbs. She felt her confidence draining from her, as if those ancient legends about photographs stealing a piece of your soul might be true. She batted at the air, as if she could swat away the popping flashes, but it was too much. She was exhausted. She was done. With a moan and a whimper, the handmaid fell to her knees on the curb, scuffing her jeans.
And that’s when the princess stepped forward, out from under the handmaid’s protective arm. She took center stage, where she’d always been most comfortable, although never this exposed. When she had the paparazzi’s full attention, meeting those cold lenses with uncharacteristic calm, the princess shrugged her shoulders and let the anorak drop.
The cameras all automatically dipped as if weighted, down past the slope of her diminutive breasts and her taut gym-toned belly to the undercurve of her body and her pink velvet box and the still glistening treasure nested within.
For a full minute, the hungry cameras feasted. And then something happened. A paparazzo lowered his camera, then looked away, ashamed. Then another, and a third and a fourth. The fifth nudged the sixth, who ripped the seventh’s camera from his hands, and a clatter of memory chips fell to the pavement, to be scrunched beneath stamping boots.
The princess stood naked before them, still and collected and candidly open, so that none of them could stand up to her, or stand to look, as she showed off their shame, her pride, her voluptuous pea.
And so it was that the princess found not only her pea and her pleasure, but also her heart.
The princess and the handmaid fled the bright and terrible city. They bought a farm in the mountains of Ecuador and launched a trendy fashion label of hypoallergenic alpaca wool products in couture cuts.
The handmaid still struggled with the princess from time to time; people aren’t readily cured of a lifetime of bad habits, not even by fairy-tale miracles. She found the alpacas to be generally sweeter of temperament, although when riled, they would spit a sour green slobber of saliva and stomach acid and half-dissolved grass. And at least, in her experience, the princess had never done that.
It starts with Kafka.
—But you should love me anyway, I tell Joe.—If I turned into a giant cockroach, I’d still be me.
—Ja, except you’d be crunchy and gross and you wouldn’t have these, he says, lifting my breasts. I squirm away, slapping at his hand.
—Oh, so now you just love me for my body. I see. And here I thought it was who I am that did it for you.
—Lien. Your body is part of who you are. You can’t just divorce your mind. Although if you do, I get custody of the pussy.
—Do I have to pay you alimony?
—I’m sorry. I just would not be attracted to you if you had six legs and insect skin.
—Carapace, I correct.
—Exactly. Trust me, not attractive.
—But what if I was horribly disfigured in a terrible accident? What if I got burned and my skin melted like plastic?
—That wouldn’t be the same as you being a giant cockroach.
—But what if I was? What if I fell through a window and cut my face to shreds?
He sighs and rolls over to look out the window framing Signal Hill.
—Okay, okay. What if I was a man? Would you still love me?
—You are not a man, his voice says from under the pillow he’s pulled over his face.
—What if I was. Before. Before you met me? I straddle him, leaning on my elbows on his chest. What if I had a sex change in Thailand and my old name is Michael. Would you s
till love me?
Joe lifts the pillow and looks up at me.
—Are you trying to tell me something, Lien?
—Um. Maybe.
—You’re just wrong. You know that? He shakes his head, then rears up to kiss me on my forehead.—You need to stop reading that book. And stop watching so much daytime TV. And shave your toes.
—What’s wrong with my toes? I’m indignant. Mortified.
—Nothing. Except if you shaved them, maybe I wouldn’t almost believe you when you say you used to be a guy. He waits a beat.—Michael.
I whack him with a pillow and he wrestles it away from me and we make love again, breathless, laughing.
Only the next day, Thursday, I wake up feeling slippery. Not like a giant cockroach exactly, but something is out of sync with my body, more even than recent changes. I ease out of bed, careful not to wake Joe, pull on my tracksuit and my sneakers and click the door shut behind me. Outside, the sky is pale like water. A minibus taxi roars past, the guy in the back singing out Keptown-Keptown! I drop my leg from stork position and push my toe against a wall to stretch my calves. The wind battering against the flagpoles of the hotel across the road has chipped the sea into dark and angry little caps.
The Afrikaans poet Ingrid Jonker killed herself here. Just walked into the sea one day. When they found her body, there were tiny sea shells in the curves of her ears. When I mention this to Joe when we are out walking, eating Flake 99s, he tells me to stop being such a melodrama queen, only he says it like this: mellow drama queen.
I start a slow warm-up jog to the promenade, speeding up as I reach the rails that fence off the Atlantic. There is a homeless guy on the beach, shuffling among the gulls and pigeons that lift and resettle behind him, a screeching, fluttering wake. My legs are starting to burn and an arrowhead grazes my lung every time I breathe. It feels good though, like I’m on cruise control.
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