Everything that matters to me is in this box. I have a shelf in Uncle’s cupboard that keeps some old stuff I hardly ever use any more like my school uniform and some ragged shoes that I have not worn in years, but in the box lie my life’s treasures. My magazines, all of them, from the first Glossy I read when I was thirteen, to this month’s issue of Girlfriend, are in the box. Beside them is my contact lens case, holding within the most expensive things I own, worth many months spent scrubbing grease and sweeping storerooms after hours. The dainty little emerald-green coloured lenses that float gracefully in the sapphire blue contact-lens solution are a reminder of how far I have come, from the naive orphan child living in a one-bedroom house with her incompetent Uncle in another family’s backyard in yet another decrepit township to the charming young waitress with pretty green eyes and soft, blowin-the-wind, caramel-blond hair (pinned in perfectly to make it look real), working at the classiest coffee shop this side of the equator. My Lemon Light skin-lightener cream, my sunscreen, my eyeliner, mascara, eye-shadow, blush, eyelash-straightener and the pieces of caramel-blond hair extension which were bought for me as a child to braid my hair with but never used because Uncle misplaced the money he was supposed to pay the braiding lady with, are all little testimonies to the progress I have made despite the odds. They are hard evidence of how much closer I am to Project Infinity.
I take out the green gems, my eyelash-straightener, my foundation, my Berry Liscious lipstick and my clothes from the box and take them into the kitchen where I will bathe and dress. We do not have a bath or an inside toilet like the Tshabalalas do or like some of the more advanced homes in Mphe Batho Township, so I have to collect water from the taps outside, boil it and clean myself in a bucket in the kitchen. Perhaps if Uncle spent less time crying and more time finding ways to capitalise on his new position as fake black economic empowerment partner, then maybe we could afford to instal a toilet or even a bath in our home. But perhaps it is for the better that the conditions in this dump never improve. They can serve as a constant reminder to me of what I do not want to be: black, dirty and poor. This bucket can be a daily motivator for me to keep me working towards where I will someday be: white, rich and happy. You see, that’s the difference between Uncle and me and in fact between me and most of the hopeless, shortsighted people in Mphe Batho. I know what I want in life and am prepared to do anything in my power to get it.
Am I going crazy? Am I already crazy? No. Maybe. Maybe crazy is what you need to be to get somewhere in life. Like those inventors or whatever who created aeroplanes and things; didn’t everyone think they were crazy when they said they wanted to fly? And now look, everyone’s flying. If crazy is what I need to be to get out of here and into Project Infinity, then crazy is what I am going to be.
I proudly set my Silver Spoon uniform – the black tight-fitting jeans and the black T-shirt with a silver spoon running down its back – out on the red-and-white-checkered plastic kitchen table that Gogo bought for Uncle when he first moved into this place many years ago, before I was even born. The T-shirts were given to us by the coffee shop, but the jeans we had to purchase ourselves. At the time, it being my first job, and having recently dropped out of high school on a whim with no money and no means of making any, I did not know how I was going to get my hands on a pair of black jeans and nearly lost the job for showing up at work twice ‘incorrectly attired’. But I soon pulled myself together and made a plan. There was no way a single pair of silly jeans was going to stand in the way of me and Project Infinity. Sometimes in life you have to push the boundaries, be creative, stretch your resources and take the road less travelled to get what you want.
“Fiks, dear, we love you, you know that.”
“Yes, Miss Becky.” Had she said she loved me? Miss Becky loved me? They loved me?
“Dahling, you are gorgeous. So well spoken, so bright, just to die for.”
“Yes, Miss Becky.” It had only been two weeks at this new job and they loved me. I could not believe it.
I mean, I knew I was brilliant at anything I set my mind on doing, but it’s so different when you hear it in somebody else’s words.
“But you see, dahling, I am going to be very blunt with you now. Silver Spoon is an upmarket establishment. Top notch. Right up there on the food chain. We have a reputation, sweetheart, a loyal clientele. Dahling, do you see the people who walk through our doors? Do you actually see the people we serve? Well, do you?”
“Yes, Miss Becky.” Her tone had changed and I was getting a little frightened.
“The people who come here, sweetheart, are respectable people. Dignified and accomplished people. Do you understand that, dahling?”
“Yes, Miss Becky.”
“The people we have here, dear, are great politicians, businessmen and judges, Fiks. They are the people who make this country. Without them, well, you and I wouldn’t even be having this conversation, would we?”
“Yes, Miss Becky.”
That last comment made her laugh, a strange and awkward laugh. I did not laugh with her, although I probably should have. I was too busy frantically trying to figure out where this conversation was going and what the most appropriate response would be.
“Well dahling, what I am getting at is that the very least we can do is to give these hard-working people the class that they deserve, the class that they pay for when they come here, the class that Silver Spoon Coffee Shop promises to always deliver. And with you incorrectly attired, dressed like that, dahling, wearing our Silver Spoon T-shirt over those murky brown trousers, well, I don’t see how the two could possibly ever work.”
“But…”
“No ‘buts’, dear.”
I wanted to explain that I understood the uniform requirements perfectly and I was working on buying a pair of black jeans. I had even gone up the yard to the Tshabalalas, whom I deplored because they thought they were better than us, to try see if Ous Joy, who was the only Tshabalala I could stand, might have a pair of black jeans I could borrow for the meantime. I had spoken to Uncle about lending me some money to buy a pair and had assured him that I would pay him back with my wages as soon as I had them. But Uncle had no money and said that I needed to wait until month end. Of course that wouldn’t work because month end was a long way away. But I was working on a plan D and just needed a little bit of time.
“Yes, Miss Becky.”
“You have until tomorrow, sweetie. Make a plan. Gosh, it’s a fucking pair of jeans, not a pair of Jimmy
Choo shoes. And that hair, dear, do something about it, anything, just don’t come to work looking like that again.”
“Yes, Miss Becky.”
I walked out of Silver Spoon that afternoon straight into The Meisies Store across the way. My heart was thumping against my rib cage, each breath hurtling out of my flared nostrils in short, forced bits. I could hear the blood rushing past my ears. I refused to lose this job. And so when I got onto the escalator and headed down, first past the lingerie section and then the fragrances, I knew what I had to do. I calmly removed from the shelf the first size 32 black jeans I saw, folded them into my bag and went back up the escalator, past the fragrances and then the lingerie section and walked out of the store.
I fill my bathing bucket with boiling water and switch on the kitchen radio. Radios, radios everywhere, on every shelf, in every corner, packed up in boxes and stacked in piles. All of them gifts from Lentso Communications, thank-yours for all the perjury and forgery Uncle does for them. Uncle is an idiot and they know it. All he’d have to do is ask them for money and they’d give it to him, they know how much power he has with the information he holds and how he could annihilate them if he told someone about the actual terms of his employment. But do you think Uncle would ever work up the balls to ask for enough for even just his taxi-fare back home? No. Why? Because Uncle is a first-grade dimwit. He sincerely believes that they hired him for his intellect. Ha! Intellect? They hired Uncle because he’s got Yes-Man written all over his
face.
I remember how as a child I would page through the photo albums of Uncle growing up at the Kinsleys. I would stare for what must have been hours at each individual photo and then close my eyes and try to picture myself in them. Me, instead of Uncle. There was one photo I particularly liked. It was of Uncle’s ninth birthday party and at the time I was nine years old, too. I had never had a birthday party in my life. I didn’t even know of anyone who had had a birthday party. Uncle sat in the centre of a large table of crisps and Fizzers and Cheese Curls and Smarties and little round colourful chewing gums and paper cups filled with Coke and Fanta and purple juice and a large multicoloured cake with nine blue and white candles. There was a red and yellow jumping castle in the background and children everywhere. White children everywhere. Some of them were jumping, some running around, some playing in the pool and others sitting with Uncle at the table, smiling for the camera. Smiling for Uncle. White children smiling for Uncle! I remember being filled with such wild envy and rage that I was unable to understand why that couldn’t be me in the photo, why the Kinsleys hadn’t thrown such a party for me, why nobody had ever thrown any kind of party for me. I got my blunt-nose scissors out of my school bag and cut that photo into a gazillion tiny pieces, put them in my mouth and chewed them all up. Uncle didn’t deserve any of that.
Uncle could have had it all and he screwed it up. The Kinsleys did so much for Uncle even though they didn’t have to. I mean, he was only their domestic worker’s son and yet they treated him like he was one of their own. Those poor, poor Kinsleys. If only they had known that all that money they were investing in tuition, school uniforms, piano lessons and expensive encyclopaedias would one day go to waste. If only they had invested that money in me instead of Uncle. I knew I was clever, more clever than Uncle would ever be and more grateful. I knew that if I was given half the chance Uncle had been given, I would never have turned out to be a disappointment. No, unlike Uncle I would have been grateful for an opportunity at a better life.
Sometimes Gogo got into the mood of telling stories about ‘those filthy homes of those rich white people’ which she spent most of her days cleaning and when she did I would sit still and listen carefully, waiting for the part where she would get to talking about the Kinsleys. She didn’t have very much to say about them because they weren’t as cruel and cold-blooded as the others. My grandmother hated speaking about the good white people, so she would often only say a word or two about the Kinsley family and their home. Gogo would grumble a little about how she didn’t understand why the Kinsleys had chosen to only pay for Uncle’s schooling when Charmin (my mother) was just as smart. Then she’d grouch a bit more about how white people enjoyed breaking up black families.
One day I gently asked Gogo if she still remembered where the Kinsleys lived and what their address was.
I was certain that if I could go there just once – let them see me just once – then they’d immediately recognise that I was much more clever than Uncle and a much more worthwhile investment. I knew that if I was given the chance to meet the Kinsleys, then all my problems would be solved, for they would surely ask me to move into their home right then and there and change my name to something cute like Sarah Kinsley. Gogo had looked at me over her glasses for a long time with a frown on her face. I think maybe she thought that I wanted to go over there and steal from them or something crazy, which was really ridiculous because I was only nine or ten at the time, but Gogo always worried that my mother’s blood had cursed me and it was only a matter of time until I ended up in jail or dead. So Gogo ignored my question and moved on to the Samuelses and how they used to give her Mrs Samuels’s old underwear as a Christmas present.
I’d known Uncle was an idiot even before Gogo told me his story. Like I said, I was a gifted child, and could see right through his fancy English and mounds of books. Gogo’s version of Uncle’s fall simply confirmed the suspicions I had held since the age of five or something. My own personal interpretation of what really happened is that Uncle had allowed living with the Kinsleys to get to his head. The Sunday lunches on their patio, Mrs Kinsley with a large straw hat on and the boys helping Mr Kinsley at the braai, the bicycle with blue training wheels and the birthday parties every year. All those white children smiling for Uncle, singing for Uncle, dancing and playing for Uncle, messed with his head and loosened a few screws.
If it had been me, I would have kept my cool. I would have taken it in my stride. I would have taken it a day at a time. But Uncle gobbled it all up at once. The cake, the Fizzers, the Cheese Curls, the purple juice, the bedroom with blue walls and Spiderman sheets, the holidays at the dam and all those smiling white faces he swallowed at once, without chewing.
Nobody really knows what exactly went awry in his head because as the story goes Uncle just came home after his first semester at the University of Cape Town with a letter of exclusion from the medical school in his bookbag. He was fat and crying into the pillow he took with him to Cape Town when the entire family waved him goodbye at the bus station at the beginning of that year. He lay in bed for weeks sobbing and eating whatever Gogo put at his door and that was the end of it, the end of Uncle the smart one, the one who spoke the white man’s language, the one who would save us.
Gogo told me that some blamed it on the Kinsleys, that they had seen a capable young black boy and thought it their right to remove him from his home and his people in the township where he belonged and whisk him off to their thatch-roofed house in the suburbs where they confused him with their white this or that and then dropped him when he crumbled in the real world. Nonsense, I thought. I knew better than to give my opinion, and sat quietly and listened on. Others believed that Uncle had simply grown too big for his boots. He’d outgrown not only his boots, they had said, but his black skin.
Uncle had grown proud. He had forgotten who he was and where he came from and as a result had been punished by the gods. Of course he could be forgiven, they said, if only he performed the correct rituals, but everybody knew that Uncle no longer believed in them. Others secretly suggested that it was Gogo’s fault for not performing the necessary thanksgiving ceremonies when he was sent off, or for allowing him to stay with the Kinsleys in the first place, or for allowing him to go to university and not encouraging him to work like other men.
There were many theories but I thought all of them were a huge heap of crap. Uncle failed dismally and was excluded from the medical school at the University of Cape Town because he was an idiot. Simple. Uncle was an idiot and got what idiots got. He probably didn’t study for any of the tests because he idiotically thought he was too smart to study. Absolute idiot. Gogo was upset because the Kinsleys didn’t even try to do anything about it, it was as if they had never known him, raised him, pushed him to study further and be a doctor. They didn’t call or write or anything, just went on with their lives and weekends away fishing at the dam and a few years later emigrated to Australia.
But what should the poor people have done? They had paid for him all the way through the second part of primary school and high school and then were even prepared to pay for his way through medical school. What more, really, could the poor people do? It wasn’t their fault that Uncle was an idiot. Trust black people to complain when white people don’t do anything to help them and then complain when they do and then complain when they don’t help them again after they’ve screwed it up. If I were the Kinsleys I would have made Uncle pay me back for all the money I invested in his empty head, with interest.
“You are listening to the twilight zone with me DJ Tinky on this beautiful Sunday morning. A brand new day! New beginnings! Another shot! What are you crazy people doing up so early! Call us and tell us why you aren’t in bed, Joburg!”
I eat a slice of bread with coffee and make porridge for Uncle. I don’t know why I do it. He is a grown man and should be able to make his own breakfast. But I will do it today because I have time. Whether I do it tomorrow will depend on how I feel. The idiot
does not deserve it.
As I leave the house DJ Tinky plays Fast Car by Tracy Chapman. Weird woman, sounds like a man. It makes me feel funny, sort of scared and excited at the same time. I haven’t heard the song in years. ‘New beginnings’ huh, DJ Tinky? ‘Another shot?’ Well, let’s hope you are right.
You’d be surprised how full the train station can get on a Sunday. I avoid the groups of noisy people and sit on the edge of a bench next to a little girl too young to try to strike up conversation with me and pull out my Girlfriend magazine from my handbag. I do not know why people here have taken upon themselves the duty of making attempts at speaking to me. I work hard to keep the ‘don’t speak to me’ look on my face and yet it seems they read it as ‘please speak to me’. It is especially bad on a Sunday because the trains are unreliable and come round every hour if they do at all, so people seem to think striking random conversations with strangers is a good way of killing time.
Coconut Page 10
