the Greek is long gone now. His butchery is just an empty shop with white paint smeared across the windows and a sign that says: To Let.
That was where I met Aggies the very first time, back in January when I just arrived from Port Alfred. With his placard that just says, Ag Pleeze! Nothing more than that. And with his bare feet like two grey-brown animals.
So, okay. I pushed my way through the crowds of employed people and I went to stand at the taxi stop. I held up my hand, making the sign for Villa Park.
There were some blood smears on my blue tie. What does red stand for in Mrs Mogwera’s culture? In my culture it means anger, I think. Or love. Maybe both?
I took the tie off and slipped it in my pocket.
2
Nick the Greek
After Ma came back from the clinic, around when I was eleven-and-a-few-months, I used to go to Nick the Greek’s butchery often. Ma couldn’t do the shopping. Well, most of the time she couldn’t get out of bed. So I went to buy the food instead. Just about every second day, soon as I’d changed out of my school clothes.
Nick the Greek was a nice man. I don’t think he really was Greek. I don’t even think his name was Nick. That’s just what Ma called him.
Let me tell you, it was a bad day, that day Ma ended up getting taken to the clinic. I was just home from school, taking off my blazer in my bedroom. Then I heard her screaming and the sound of glass smashing.
She was there at her dressing table. It was a very old dressing table that came from Ouma’s farm. Ma always polished it with special oil and I wasn’t allowed to fiddle with the fancy brass drawer handles.
“It’s antique, Dirkie. Real red Rhodesian teak. Your ouma got it for a wedding gift. It’s worth a lot of money, see? We must take special care of it.”
But now there she was, in her yellow dressing gown, smashing at the mirror with her hairbrush. There was already a huge crack down the one side.
“Don’t you come near me,” she screamed. “Voetsek, voetsek! Don’t you dare touch me!” Like she was seeing someone in the mirror. She screamed the K word too. Over and over. That was quite a shock for me. She never used that word, even when she was checking the burglar bars at midnight. Nor my dad. They were always making sure I knew not to say it.
“It’s not a nice word, Dirkie. It makes black people very upset if you say it,” Dad told me. “It’s a kind of swear word. You know, like the F word or the C word. You’ll get into trouble if you use it.”
I knew about the F word, of course. Some grade seven guys said it a lot in the playground. I didn’t know about any C word, but I thought it was better if I didn’t ask. But here was my ma, yelling the K word, and I was so worried she would get into trouble. But I didn’t know how to stop her.
I suppose it was neighbours that called my dad home from work. And then maybe my dad phoned for the ambulance. I don’t remember too well. Except for the two big black men in their white jackets.
They half carried her down the driveway of 5 Groenewald Street, and she was screaming the K word at them, telling them to voetsek. But they just laughed. One of them said, “It’s alright, Mrs Strydom. We’ll take care of you. Don’t worry about a thing.”
Then she started yelling, “A-N-C! A-N-C!” over and over. But in an Afrikaans accent so it sounded like: “Aah. En. See-ya!”
And of course there were neighbours standing on their stoeps and out in their front gardens or even in the road to watch. All the way up and down Groenewald Street.
I mostly remember Jimmy Big-Deal Cameron from number 12. He was two years ahead of me at Villa Park Primary. Rugby captain. Deputy head boy. And there he stood staring, next to his mother, who was dressed up like she was on her way to church or something. Around them were all the fancy flowers she grew, even outside their fence.
I wanted to shout the F word at them. But then maybe the two black men would lift me into the ambulance too. So I just stood quiet beside my dad there at our front gate. Dad had his arm around my shoulder. I could feel how it was shaking. I suppose because even buying Ma a bright-yellow dressing gown hadn’t made her feel better.
*
When Ma came back from the clinic months later, she mostly lay in her bedroom with the curtains closed. And she had to take lots of pills.
That’s why Dad found Dorcas to come and work for us.
Dorcas September.
“You must be polite to her, okay, Dirkie?” my dad said. “We really need her now. She can cook.”
But I hated Dorcas right from the start. Just the way she looked at us and walked around our house like she was laughing at us. I caught her out too. I got back from school and the vacuum cleaner was going in the lounge, making that horrible sound vacuum cleaners make. But when I looked into the room, Dorcas wasn’t cleaning. Hell no!
She was just sitting there on our sofa with the cushions all round her, watching SABC 2 on the TV, knowing Ma wouldn’t get out of bed to come check. And the brush end of the machine was just lying there, howling and sucking in fresh air. Wasting our electricity for nothing!
I told my dad, but he didn’t do anything.
He said, “Don’t upset the maid, Dirkie. Ma needs lots of help right now and I can’t take more time off work to find another maid. So just leave things be, okay, Dirkie?”
Like I was the one causing the problem!
But at least Dad wouldn’t let her move into our maid’s quarters outside the back.
She begged and begged.
“Ag, asseblief, masser, what else must I do? My daughter is alone in my house every day with the school holidays. There are bad men there, masser, all around the streets. I must worry all the time. How can I work properly when I am worrying about my child? Those bad men, they will rape her, murder her, leave her body in the bushes … And your back room is empty. Just some old boxes and newspapers. Ag, asseblief!”
In the end my dad said Dorcas could bring her daughter with her to work every day in the school holidays. I think he even gave her extra taxi money.
So this girl used to sit there, this Janie September. There on the steps of the maid’s quarters, beside her mother’s huge brown bag while her mother worked in our house.
Or pretended to work.
Sometimes I looked out of my bedroom window to see what Janie was up to. Mostly nothing, just sitting there, twirling a lock of her long, curly hair round and round her finger. Staring round our backyard with her eyebrows high on her forehead. Or else reading torn pages from old newspapers and magazines she found in the maid’s room around the pile of boxes. My sister, Fat Sonya, left the boxes when she and her husband, Fatter Koos, moved down to that pineapple farm near Port Alfred. Sonya kept promising that Fatter Koos’s brother would come pick them up. But he never did.
*
This morning at Kagiso Holdings I didn’t recognise Janie September at first. Well, she looked familiar, but I didn’t
