you just going to pee in your pants, or can you actually talk?” Kitcat stepped forward and Vaselinetjie ducked instinctively. Then she saw the roll-on deodorant in Kitcat’s hand. “Is this yours?”
Vaselinetjie nodded. “Uh, ’s mine, ja. Was last in my case mos.” She recognised the deodorant. Rose-scented with a pink cap. Brand-new. Ouma Kitta had bought it for her, together with some Johnson’s Baby Powder and body lotion.
Everyone stopped to look at her. Even Albie stopped screaming and stared.
“If you’re white like me, why do you talk like a coloured?” Kitcat asked, and the others squealed with laughter.
Vaselinetjie felt her face burning. What if the white children beat her up? “I was mos maar born like this, so bleek,” she mumbled.
Would it be the same here as at her old school, where she had always been accused of lying? Nausea rose in her throat. Maybe the matron had not been able to see properly in the dark the night before and put her in the wrong room.
There was a loud crack as Albie keeled over and struck her head on the floor. “Noooooo!” she shrieked, the veins in her neck bulging. “I’m not going to tidy up my cupboard if there’s a houtkop in my room!”
“Oh, shut up, Albie. I’d rather take a hottie any day than a cry-baby and a thief,” the girl on Vaselinetjie’s other side said in a flat tone, as if she was bored. Vaselinetjie recognised last night’s voice in the dark. The girl had a pale complexion and white-blonde hair, tied on top of her head to form a fountain.
“My name is Killer,” she introduced herself above the racket, closing the padlock on her cupboard with a click and kicking the shoes in front of Albie’s bed out of her way. “I set my stepfather’s clothes on fire with a lighter when he was drunk. He had to get a skin graft. Now I’m not allowed to go home, but it’s okay.”
Vaselinetjie couldn’t make out from her tone of voice whether Killer was friendly, hostile or sad. In fact, she seemed quite proud of what she had done.
In an effort to avoid conversation Vaselinetjie began to make her bed. At the same time she was afraid that the others might pick a fight if she tried to keep quiet and did not speak.
“… only two hands and two feet, that’s all I have, but no, the government couldn’t care less. They stuff fifteen children into one house for one matron to look after. Is that fair, I ask you?” Vaselinetjie heard the matron complaining in the passage.
Shyly she followed the other girls to the sitting room, where they sat down at their study tables to eat breakfast. They were each given a bowl of porridge and there was sliced bread in the centre of the table. Mugs had been set out for coffee.
Vaselinetjie looked straight ahead, but she could hear that The Bold and the Beautiful was on TV. It made her sad. She always used to watch it with her ouma.
“Are you going to eat or are you going to carry on pretending you’re invisible?” Killer interrupted her thoughts.
Even if her throat hadn’t been choked up, Vaselinetjie couldn’t have eaten the blob of porridge in front of her.
“The lumps are gross, but just pretend you’re eating custard and let them slide down,” Albie said. She waited for Vaselinetjie to look her way before scooping the coagulated skin from her porridge and lowering it into her mouth as if she was about to swallow an earthworm.
Vaselinetjie felt the eyes of the others on her. They were waiting for the matron to ask her something so that she would be forced to speak, and then they would laugh at her again.
“Ugh!” Albie almost spat out her porridge. “There isn’t enough sugar in this porridge. Auntie, do you know this white girl speaks just like a coloured?”
“Leave her alone.” The matron slurped her coffee without taking her eyes off the TV screen. “She can’t help it. It’s how they speak where she comes from. Maybe she’s a baster. Now be quiet and finish up.”
“You’ll have to take it as it comes,” Killer tried to console Vaselinetjie. “Sometimes Kitcat and the others add sugar to the porridge and sometimes they don’t, and there’s fuck-all we can do about it.”
After breakfast Kitcat took Vaselinetjie to the kitchen and showed her a long list of duties. Each child in the house had a task. Kitcat had written down only Vaselinetjie’s number, not her name.
“Look,” she explained, “you’re 113. One one three. It’s your laundry number too, got it?”
Vaselinetjie frowned as she looked at the duties. Washing and drying dishes, sweeping, mopping, emptying rubbish bins, and so on.
“Do I have to do it for the rest of the year?” she asked Killer.
“Are you crazy? What do you think my hands would look like if I had to wash dishes for a whole blooming year, hey? We swop every week. Your number moves one place down the list. Except if you’ve made Kitcat or the matron mad, then they’ll put you anywhere they like, for as long as they like. I once emptied dustbins for a whole month, until someone told them I spent the time smoking behind the wall.”
Opposite number 113 Vaselinetjie read “sweeping”. She almost smiled with relief. At least it was something she knew how to do.
“I can mos sweep! Jus’ show me where the brooms is and so,” she told Killer and blushed furiously when the girl gave her a strange look.
When she had finished sweeping, she tried to go out through the back door to escape from the strange voices and the laughing and staring faces, but the security gate was shut.
“It’s always locked, stupid,” someone said in passing.
There was nowhere to be on her own. Nowhere to cry without being seen.
“We have to fall in line to go to school. Then Kitcat inspects our nails and looks through our school bags,” Killer said as she joined Vaselinetjie, who was staring through the bars of the security gate.
But Vaselinetjie wasn’t allowed to join the rest as they left for school.
“The matron is waiting for you in the bathroom. You have to be deloused and dewormed.” Kitcat had found Vaselinetjie at the back door and sent her off while the rest of the girls filed past. Some looked back with spiteful smiles.
“Bug time, sista!” Killer shouted over her shoulder.
Would it be even worse here than at her previous school? Vaselinetjie’s lips began to tremble as she watched the children walk down the hill to town. She saw Killer and some of the other girls stop under some trees and hitch up the skirts of their uniforms to make them shorter.
She had never gone to school with white children before. In her old school she and Avril Farao had the lightest complexions. Avril was very proud of her long straight hair and told the others that Vaselinetjie’s ouma secretly straightened her hair to make it as smooth as her own.
Besides, Avril was always pretending to be English. Missis Farao did the same, and how Ouma Kitta used to laugh when Vaselinetjie pulled her mouth like Avril and her mom’s when they spoke English. Like this, she would say.
Then Ouma always said one should actually
