names. I caught some, missed others but I was sure that by the end of the party we would be bosom friends, brothers and sisters, even if we had never seen one another before and would most likely never do so again.
I looked around for a place to sit amongst these thoughtful people.
Chapter 8
Some time later, the door we had come through burst open and a half-naked girl came leaping in, pursued by the bald man in the red bathrobe, which was billowing behind him – a bald, flabby superhero in a comic-book cape and a tantrum of cheated lust.
We all gaped at the pair. The girl skittered and swerved behind Tolo, who raised her right palm like a traffic officer. The man stopped as if he had been suddenly seized by paralysis. I admired Tolo’s authority.
The girl peeked out from behind her, reigniting the man, and the spell was broken. He opened his mouth wide, releasing a lashing red tongue that struggled to form words as he howled such a stream of obscenities as have never been heard this side of hell.
How could all this have happened so quickly? I almost laughed, most inappropriately, of course. But there was that girl with her blonde wig all askew like a demented circus clown. Her friends were in a high fever as they crowded at the door.
“Uncle Rich, ke eng – what’s this?”
I think it was Tolo who asked, but everyone was now talking and shouting, and one much older woman was moaning in a far corner near the open and undraped window.
Uncle Rich spluttered to a halt, looked around at the shocked faces watching him and then made the whole thing worse by beginning to cry. It was a soundless, hopeless weeping, with thick blobs of tears running down his fat cheeks. It silenced the whole room, including the excited faces at the door.
The girl emerged from behind Tolo and went over to the bald man, embraced him and led him out through a different door. “I’ll take him upstairs,” she said sweetly in a cooing schoolgirl voice. He went sheepishly, with one hand clutching his collapsed superhero’s cape. In an indefinable way we were all humiliated.
Jacky-Jack took the reins and was determined to whip us out of our momentary gloom. He did a sensible thing by herding all the young girls and their partners out of the crying room and back into the room without chairs, where he put on some loud, lively tune to silence the joyless doubters and their wandering thoughts. He shut the door on us.
I took a seat next to Uncle Muzi and Tolo sat on the other side of him. This was Tolo’s arrangement, which I did not approve of: I mean, this Uncle Muzi was the glummest party guest I had ever met. And the unlikeliest person I would have chosen as an ally.
We got ourselves glasses and I took a deep gulp of the imported whisky. Tolo stayed with mineral water. Uncle Muzi was drinking a suspect concoction made up from different bottles and also from a silver flask he kept in his inside left jacket pocket.
“What was that?” I asked no one in particular.
The woman who had been moaning in the corner answered. She was a thin sixty-something woman with a craggy face that had defied all attempts to keep it young. She should have kept all that cosmetic rubbish off her face and she would have been just fine, but what do I know about trendy older citizens? She had a sharp, determined chin and bright eyes, though. In fact, everything about her suggested sharpness and determination: from her steady legs planted firmly on the floor through her gaudy clothes to her prominent forehead. It made one wonder what her moaning had been all about. Probably a false shocked-maiden-aunt performance – but for whose benefit? She apparently had a lot of tricks in her bag besides the cosmetics.
“He is a sad, troubled man!” she exclaimed in a high voice, shaking her head.
Aren’t you all?
“We are all sad, troubled men,” Uncle Muzi confirmed my thoughts in a decided tone. “We are all walking in the dark. There is a verse in the Bible about it.”
“He’s worse than that – and him too,” the woman objected and pointed at Uncle Muzi.
Tolo came in at this point. “It’s because he lost a lot of money in some investment and now his creditors, the banks and the lawyers are all crowding him.”
“He should have been more careful,” I said heartlessly and took a long pull from my glass. I tapped my foot to the banging music coming from the next room through the closed door.
“Careful?” the bedaubed woman screeched, coming out of the corner in a flurry of vivid, clashing colours. “Careful! Who are you to talk about careful? The whole fraud was planned right from the very beginning.”
“What thing is this?” I asked in all innocence.
“It’s a verse in the Bible,” Uncle Muzi informed me as he put a trembling hand inside his jacket. We all stared at him, but on receiving nothing further on this intriguing point we abandoned him to roam alone in the biblical thickets.
“It’s about that mall between Katlehong and Thokoza,” the woman, who had appointed herself spokeswoman, declared. I had not given her my credentials but I was a fresh audience to listen to her overflowing grievances, and that was enough for her. No one tried to dissuade her, and I was interested in hearing all about it; I might need angry allies later on.
“A verse in the Bible,” Uncle Muzi said softly as he carefully poured the contents of the flask into his glass. “My mfundisi liked preaching about it. I did not understand him then.”
“What did it say?” Tolo asked him, probably with the intention of getting this Bible story out of the way.
“Wait . . . wait . . . It said . . . ” he drifted off into a puzzled fog.
“Leave him alone,” a tallish, powerfully built man with sharp, angry eyes, who had previously not spoken a word, barked from where he sat stiffly upright on the corner of the sofa.
“We are small township business people and now with these big shopping malls moving in and driving us out life has been tough,” the woman said evenly.
“Right then, I see it, all of it,” I said brightly. It was about time I showed slight signs of interest and intelligence. “You consulted lawyers to protect your rights. They charged a large fee to fight a case they knew they could not win and now they want you to pay up. You have had to borrow –”
“No!” a bald, thin man sitting next to the tall, angry man interrupted me. “Tell him what happened, Lulu.”
Lulu, the thin lady, told me . . .
This was not going to be like other malls in other townships where big white business had moved in and the local black businesses had not been accommodated, where rental fees were murderous and they just could not compete. This one was going to be different. They were going to get support from some kind overseas investors. The government was also going to help with cash guarantees. All they had to do was set up a common fund and individually put up a certain amount of money. Some of the local, foreign and government money did appear – but the mall was never finished. Now the people in the surrounding area were stripping it piecemeal, stealing everything – bricks, steel, doors, windows. Everything.
“And . . . and . . . the money . . . Now . . . now . . . here we are, bowed down with our heads in our hands.”
That
