I was in such shock, I wouldn’t have recognised anyone. I opened that door expecting to find the manager of Kagiso Holdings sitting behind a big desk. Expecting that he would tell me to sit down in a nice soft chair so he could ask me questions. But what did I find instead? A whole room filled with other guys, all wanting to earn while they learned.
For a moment it felt like I was back in the classroom at Port Alfred Secondary.
I just stood there in my clean shirt that Mrs Mogwera had ironed for me, with my new blue tie round my neck.
Some guy in the front said, “There’s empty desks at the back, bra.”
But there was only one empty desk, right in the back corner. And I had to walk past all these guys who were staring at me. At last I slid into the desk. And there was this girl right beside me, a Single A. She looked at me once and then turned away, like I was nothing very interesting. But I knew I’d seen her before. Was she maybe from Villa Park Primary?
I looked sideways at her a few times. She had these eyebrows, thin and curved high on her forehead as if she was surprised. But I didn’t have time to think. Mr Nkum-whatever came swaggering into the room with his fancy suit and his loud, arrogant voice, talking about test papers and joking with all the other Double As in the room.
*
Dorcas mainly cooked frikkadels and mashed potatoes. Ma sent me out after school every second day to buy mince. She said she didn’t want the maid handling her money.
“You go to Nick the Greek, Dirkie. I want fresh-cut mince. Not that packaged stuff from the supermarket. And it must be topside mince, you hear me?”
In the half-dark bedroom with the curtains pulled shut, it was hard to see Ma properly. She had her handbag lying there next to her always. By the time she had found the money, she was exhausted again. And before I was out of the room she was lying back against the pillows with her eyes closed.
But I was happy to go. I walked down Groenewald Road, then along Pine Street almost to Northfields Play Park. Then left towards the robots and the Pick n Pay mall.
Nick the Greek was always nice to me. Like I was an important customer.
“Aah, yes. And Mrs Strydom, your mother, she wants I must cut from the topside? She knows what is the good mince. Always she says to me: you must cut from the topside. Only from the topside. I hope she is getting better now. You tell her I send good wishes!”
Nick the Greek spoke on and on while he weighed the meat and then put it through his machine. And wrapped it up in soft white paper. And then the best part came. He took out his special polony and machined off a thin slice for me. So thin you had to hold it carefully so it wouldn’t tear.
“Your bonsela, yes? You come to me again, yes?”
It was the best polony I ever tasted. A soft pink colour, not that ugly bright pink you get at other shops.
I carried the polony in the palm of my hand. I ate it slowly, only one small bite every twenty steps. That way it lasted all the way back to number 5 Groenewald Road.
But even if the mince was cut from the topside, Dorcas’s frikkadels always tasted horrible. Even Dad thought so.
We sat together at the kitchen table in the middle of this lake of green lino. It was the new lino Dad got for the floor while Ma was in the clinic: curling green ferns. He said green was a calming colour.
Sometimes he spoke to me.
“I’m worried, Dirkie. I can’t deny it. They’re talking about redundancies at work. I mean, I’ve been with the firm twenty years now. How can they think about chucking me out? Like I’m a dog! Is that fair? Hell no!”
The frikkadels tasted more like bread than meat. They clogged up on the roof of my mouth like paste.
“But don’t say anything to your ma, okay, Dirkie? We mustn’t upset her, not when she’s doing so well. I’ll have to start looking for another job. It won’t be a problem. I’m only forty-one. Definitely not over the hill yet. Right, son?”
I went to the sink for a glass of water to try wash down Dorcas’s frikkadels. Dad didn’t finish the three on his plate, even though he put on so much chutney. Even though Nick the Greek had cut the mince from the topside.
“Cut from the topside!” Dad said. “Hah! That’s a joke! It’s not just the mince that got cut from the topside, my boy. It’s us as well.”
*
So. Okay. I slipped my bloody tie into my pocket and got into the taxi for a ride to Villa Park Mall so I could sit with Aggies for a while.
It was a good taxi ride, at least. Under Pressure: that was the taxi’s name. But I didn’t feel under pressure. In fact the ride helped me recover a bit from the stuff that happened at Kagiso Holdings.
Sometimes being in a taxi is horrible. The other passengers stare at me like I don’t belong there. Like, what is this lekgoa, this white boy, doing in our transport? They hold themselves stiff so they don’t have to touch me. As if I have a disease or something.
I get angry. This is public transport, right? And I am public just as much as they are. What do they expect? That I must walk everywhere just because I am a Zed? Hell no!
But Under Pressure wasn’t like that. The driver even called me “brother”. That made me feel good. Calmer.
The lady next to me gave me a tissue for my knuckles. I told her it was my birthday. She smiled and made her earrings swing and said, “Happy birthday, then. How old?”
“Eighteen.”
“Only eighteen? You look much older. Like maybe even twenty-two.”
Bethany also thought I was older when I first met her.
“Only seventeen?” she said back in March. We were in her bathroom and she was giving me a clean towel so I could get dry after my hot shower. “Okay, but listen. You tell the other guys that you are, like, twenty-one. I don’t want them thinking I am, like, some cradle snatcher!”
But she still wanted me in her bedroom after the shower. She still expected me to act like a 21-year-old. And when I didn’t, she got quite mean and sarcastic. And asked me if I was gay.
So. Okay. I got out of the taxi at the mall robots. The woman with the earrings called after me. Said I must have a special day.
And there was my friend Aggies. Where he always sits, leaning his back against the third concrete pillar. Exactly opposite the shop that used to be Nick the Greek’s butchery. Exactly where he was the first time I met him back in January.
Aggies smiled up at me so his four teeth showed: two at the bottom right, two at the top left. Those are the only teeth he has. They always make me think of Afrikaans quotation marks, you know for direct speech? We had a teacher in grade six who was always going on about that, like it was the most important fact of the year. It’s the only thing I still remember from grade six. And grade seven for that matter. I wasn’t very good at school. Not like James Big-Deal Cameron, who ended up getting prizes for everything at prize-giving.
But even if Aggies has quotation marks in his mouth, he
