four or five minutes passed. The black lady stood inert in front of the ATM. Her card was still in the slot and I could hear a beeping sound as she looked around her.
‘Oh boy! What is she still doing there?’ said the blonde behind me to herself.
Making sure that nobody is watching her, or else blaming herself for putting her money in the bank instead of under her mattress, I answered her silently.
The black lady at the ATM looked around again. The blonde curled her lip. She started cursing impatiently each time the black lady inserted her card into the slot to redo her transaction. Agitated, she ruffled her thatch of long blonde hair with her manicured fingers and began tapping her right foot on the pavement.
I looked her up and down; her red dress stashed away her beautiful slender body from shoulder to hip, leaving her sunburnt legs naked. Stylish sunglasses were pushed up into her blonde hair.
At long last the cursing blonde exploded. ‘Excuse me. Do you mind helping her? She seems to be struggling,’ she pleaded, pointing at the lady at the ATM.
What she didn’t realise is that I had a lot on my mind. I was not in a good mood at all. My meeting with Dr Winterburn had taken its toll, and on top of that I had just received the grade for my first Political Studies essay and I had failed it.
With a sudden flash I turned and looked at the blonde. Anger was building up inside me. Why pick me when there are three people in front of me? I asked myself angrily. She could have even offered to help the lady herself if she was really serious about it. Why me? Is it because she is used to blacks running her errands every day?
‘Is it because I’m black?’ I asked.
With a shade of disbelief creeping into her voice the blonde responded, ‘Jeez! I was only sayi . . .’
Her face turned pale from my insinuation. Her long blonde hair wagged about as if she was looking for a hole in the ground to swallow her up immediately.
I could tell that my words had had a strong impact. Yes, it is true that I was implying that she was a racist. It was the season of change when everyone was trying hard to disown apartheid, but to me the colour white was synonymous with the word and I didn’t regret what I had said to the blonde.
Anyway, I had been told that playing the race card is a good strategy for silencing those whites who still think they are more intelligent than black people. Even in parliament it was often used. When the white political parties questioned the black parties they would be reminded of their past atrocities even if their questions were legitimate. Then the white political parties would have to divert from their original questions and apologize for their past deeds.
The blonde looked around her to see if anybody had overheard our nasty little conversation. People remained unaware of what had passed between us. I stood with a scowl on my face, anticipating her response. She finally summoned up enough courage to speak and stammering said:
‘My gosh! Why on earth do you think I’m racist? I was just . . .’
‘Because you are white,’ I answered.
‘So that qualifies . . .’
‘Yes. I know the likes of you and I’m sick and tired of pretending. When you see a black man like me I know you don’t see a man, but a black boy.’
‘I’m sorry if you feel that way. I was merely saying that maybe she would be more comfortable being assisted by you.’
I clicked my tongue. ‘Ag! Voetsek maan! What made you think she would be comfortable being helped by me and not you or anybody else in this queue, including the security officer over there?’
‘Oh jeez, I mean . . .’
‘Yeah. It’s because I’m black just like her, isn’t it? And you think you are different from us,’ I snapped.
The blonde made some attempt to absolve herself but I turned to face the ATM. The security officer had helped the black lady and I was now second in the queue.
When my turn came to use the ATM I found I had three hundred and thirty rand in my bank account. I withdrew three hundred rand and headed to the nearby Moosa Supermarket to buy some groceries. As I walked away I could feel the blonde’s eyes on my back.
Themba, one of my township friends, had finally got a job as a cashier at the Moosa Supermarket. From the shelves I took as many goodies as I wanted without even bothering to check their prices. At the till Themba would either pass my goodies through without ringing them up, or he would ring up a lesser price. As he was doing this he would say, ‘The rand is weak my friend, we must save money when we have a chance’.
The total that flashed up on the cash register was forty-seven rand and eighty-one cents. The groceries that I had filched were worth more than one hundred and eighty rand.
In order to hoodwink the shop manager, who was sitting at the other till, I tendered eighty rand in tens and twenties. Themba then gave me more than thirty rand in coins. At the door was a black security officer, I folded a ten rand note and handed it to him underneath my receipt; he smiled at me and ticked the receipt.
Along the way back to the Y and not very far from the Moosa Supermarket was a bottlestore. The change that Themba had given me at the supermarket was jangling in the back pocket of my jeans. I walked inside with my grocery bags and within a few seconds I had increased my load by twelve cold beers.
At the corner of De Korte and a small street that I didn’t know the name of, I started feeling the weight of the heavy plastic bags that I was carrying. My fingers began to twitch as if I had cut off the blood supply.
I stopped by the robots opposite Damelin College to see if there was a car coming. There was nothing on the road, so I crossed before the green man appeared on the robot and sat down on a big stone under a giant tree next to the College building. I looked inside one of my bags and saw some appetising biltong curling up at me like a snake.
I put my hand inside the plastic bag to pull out the biltong. But instead I touched the ice-cold Black Label dumpies. My mouth started to water. I tried to swallow the saliva, but my throat was too dry. I spat out the saliva and watched the blob fall noisily on the tarmac while my hand groped inside the bag again. With a mind of its own, my hand bypassed the biltong and came out with an ice-cold lager. I laughed at myself, but I didn’t put the beer back in the bag. After all, the Y is still far away and I am tired of walking. Who’s going to see that I’m drinking a beer under this tree?
As I twisted the top off my dumpie my mind landed comfortably on the very first glass of beer that my father gave me. That was way back in the late 1970s.
My father was a good musician. Unfortunately none of his children took after him, but in drinking I think I outclass my old man. My mother used to complain a lot about my father’s drinking and his late homecomings; sometimes she would even accuse him of having an affair. But later I found out that my father was just enjoying playing his music and drinking beer at the bottlestore, where he could find good drunken backing vocalists to accompany him when he played his Xizambi.
This traditional Shangaan instrument was made out of a thin cane which was bent into the shape of a bow. A melodious string would be fastened from one bent end of the wood to another. A short carved stick would then be struck against the cane, providing percussion and melody at the same time.
My
