denied until I serviced her car and saw her driver’s licence. I had thought she was younger.
“Sipho, I can see you are still worried about last week. Don’t. You understood what I was telling you, so relax. I told you I understood, and it was just the liquor talking anyway.”
To her list of attributes I must add tact, for what happened “last week” was me crossing a boundary. It had been five days after I’d dropped the “school bomb” on my parents. The smoke from that explosion still lingered in my house, but I had woken up to a good day. I’d fitted brake pads to eighteen taxis at R50 per car. Bulging pockets drove sleep away that night. I felt ten feet tall, and bought a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black from Mama Mkhize.
It was a slow night, when even the twenty-four-hour taverns closed. Mama Mkhize clutched a bundle of keys as I poured my first triple. Courteous, she invited me into the house, and I was surprised by what transpired.
“Johnnie is my favourite too. Mind if I join? I’ll give you a taste of my hand. I have Appletiser, soda water, tonic water and just water. What do you use?”
My choice of dash for the whisky triple did not matter. The taste of her hand – light. Lots of soda water, a film of Appletiser. Easy on the senses.
“I could drink all night if I dashed like you. Light, but it goes down well,” I said.
We drank and laughed. There was a cosy touch to the way we chilled. She made chicken livers as a snack. With each shot, her eyes slanted. She allowed me to get close. I was about to plant a kiss.
“Please leave,” she said in a tone strong enough to knock sense into me. Yet I swear her eyes giggled through the whole thing. The following day, I was at her door with an apology that she accepted with no lecture attached. Since then, I had only stolen glances at her; eye-to-eye contact made me blush.
“Yes, the agents are expensive, but they have professionals and machines that measure the tiniest of details.”
My attempt at bringing a natural, quick end to our conversation failed dismally.
“Nonsense, Sipho. He should have given the car to you. You know when you rev them, the windows of this house tremble.”
Mama Mkhize was a natural exaggerator. Maybe she had to be. She dealt with drunks all day and sometimes all night. I took my beers, smokes and change. My eyes bowed to her direct stare. Her straight face with giggling eyes.
“Maybe next time he’ll come to me. I will charge less than half of what he paid.”
I headed home. I preferred solitude by the blue wall to solitude among drunks.
Musa’s car was parked by the blue wall, doors ajar, when I got home. The colours – white on blue – had my mind retrieving a snapshot of summer skies over my granny’s house at Amanzimtoti. The engine of the BMW 325is was humming. Beer in one hand, Musa was urinating into the concrete channel that drains 2524 Close.
* * *
I knew Musa from the shantytown that occupied my back-yard view. When I was seven years old, the shacks pasted on the hill mushroomed to form a functional neighbourhood. A stream separated our M Section from them. When we were kids, our parents warned us about the shacks and the crooks who roamed there. I nodded my head but did not keep away because there was a shop there that had the sweetest, cheapest sherbets. They loved me at that tuck shop. The granny who owned it always pinched my cheeks and called me her son-in-law.
For every suburb there is a township, so for each section in the township a shantytown – add a ghetto to a ghetto. Fully functional, with such things as committees and such. The shantytown even had a name, Power, after the electricity plant that buzzed day and night at the top of the slope.
It was impossible not to mix with the children of Power because we shared a dusty patch by the stream that we used as a soccer pitch. I was eight years old when I first saw Musa, and I cheered in unison with the crowd for this boy who – though only ten years old – ran circles around the older boys. Musa was the king of football tricks. In twenty-cent games, he always put on a show. In my mind, when I think of our childhood soccer-playing days, I can’t keep out this vision of a stick-man running, the ball glued to his feet, dancing over tackles in a cloud of dust.
We also shared a school with the children from Power. In grade four I shared a desk with Musa, which is when he became my friend. I made the school’s soccer team because of him.
On a football pitch, Musa passed the ball to death. What I lacked in showmanship, I compensated for with speed, blessed with pace and strong lungs. Everywhere on the pitch Musa’s passes found me, through the eye of the needle, across a sea of legs. I would point to the spot and Musa would put it there.
In high school we were in separate classes, so we only hung together after school. When friends change, they get bored of chilling with you. Musa started to hang with the shoplifters – birds of the same feather, I reckoned. On days when he forced himself to pass by my house, our talk was no longer the same. I’d yap about engines and soccer while he rapped about the spoils of shoplifting – things to sell and money to collect.
Musa hung with the shoplifters, who in turn hung with the car thieves, all dressed up swank and bragging about which of the two cliques made cash quicker. Although the signs had been there for a long time, it still came as a surprise when Musa dropped out of school in grade nine. He left for the City of Gold with only the clothes on his back. His return from Joburg – dressed fresh in Versace, in a car considered the holy grail of BMWs in the township – was drenched in a glorious “I have made it” glow.
* * *
“You are a magician, Sipho. My car flies now. When I press it, it goes. I mean really goes. I hope you are ready because we are drinking tonight, birthday boy.”
Musa’s hands were in flight. He wore a brightly coloured, shiny shirt.
His car really only needed a major service. He would have known this had he not just dropped the car and left. But Musa was never interested in that aspect of cars. He was present for almost all of my apprenticeship as a mechanic in our back yard, yet not once did he touch a spanner or change a brake pad. He just sat on a piece of newspaper on our greasy bench and cracked up my father with his shoplifting tales.
“The secrets of these things are in the airflow meters. I played with it a little. Don’t press it too hard or we’ll have to rescue you from a bush somewhere. It is you who is the magician, Musa. Where did you get such a fresh 325is? It is beautiful, my brother,” I said.
Musa rolled in a 325is that glided on seventeen-inch chromed BBS rims. Bar the rims, the car was original in all aspects, with all the electrical switches in proper working order. His 325is had the glassy shine of a Joburg car – as if there was a protective film over the paintwork. Even my father, a die-hard V8 disciple, was a fan of the 325is. A powerful engine on a light, balanced body. Graceful in the brutality of the drift. In the townships, the BMW 325is was – and still is – loved with the same passion by doctors and crooks alike. The sound in idle was a daring rumble.
“Put those in the back seat. There is a party waiting for us in Lamontville.”
I threw my Amstels into the cooler box. A few sparks and then a flame revealed a devilish smile as Musa lit a cigarette.
“You drive, Sipho, I drank too much during the day. Start at Z Section – two girls we have to pick up there,” he said.
