was so low that I could barely hear it.
‘That time in the shower,’ Dalena whispered. ‘With Miss Lourens’s brother.’
‘What did you do?’
‘We touched one another … He touched my tits and I touched his … you know … down there …’
I couldn’t utter a word.
‘And he became as stiff as a board.’
I didn’t dare look at Dalena but I knew she was looking at me. Pulled the sheet up to my chin because the room suddenly felt cold. My body was covered in goose pimples.
‘And then?’ I whispered urgently, afraid that she would fall asleep.
‘I had the fright of my life!’ She started giggling, her teeth white in the dark again. ‘I knew boys became stiff … but I didn’t know it looked like that.’
‘What … does it look like?’ It was the most important question I’d ever asked in my life.
‘Have you ever seen a donkey in rut?’
‘You mean, his thing hung on the ground?’
‘No, man, it doesn’t hang! It stands up straight! It gets longer and longer like … like Pinocchio’s nose!’
‘Like Pinocchio’s nose!’ I whispered, amazed, and tried to imagine this odd description. Without success.
‘Perhaps it also has something to do with lying,’ Dalena giggled. ‘A boy will say anything when he’s like that: “Don’t worry. I won’t put it in. I know what I’m doing. You can trust me …”’
‘Is that what Miss Lourens’s brother said to you?’
‘Fortunately my father caught us in time.’ Dalena’s sigh hung in the air for a long time, like a soap bubble before it burst. ‘Otherwise I don’t know …’
‘And what does it feel like?’ I kicked off the sheet again. Smelt my own sweat. Almost as strong as the fumes of Peaceful Sleep. ‘I mean, if it … if it looks like Pinocchio’s nose … does it feel like Pinocchio’s nose, too?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never touched Pinocchio’s nose!’
She started laughing so much she had to push her face into the pillow to calm down. I giggled nervously too, frightened that a prefect or the teacher in the passage would hear us. Frightened that we wouldn’t be able to continue discussing this vitally important subject.
‘No, man, I mean … does it feel like wood?’
‘Wood? Are you out of your fucking mind?’
She shook with laughter again. I was getting desperate.
‘No, man,’ she eventually whispered, ‘it feels like meat! Like raw sausage. Raw sausage frozen hard. But of course it’s not cold …’
‘Like warm frozen sausage?’
‘If you can imagine something like that.’
I couldn’t.
‘Where is he now?’ I asked, to get the picture of the strangest sausage in the world out of my mind. ‘Miss Lourens’s brother?’
‘You may well ask.’
‘Didn’t you see him again?’
‘I told you, they all lie when they’re in that condition.’
‘All of them?’
‘I’ve heard my sisters talk about it.’ Dalena’s two older sisters, both at university, had recently become my most important source of information about this irresistible subject. (Through Dalena, as I had met neither of them.) And perhaps not even a trustworthy source because, according to Dalena, neither of them had gone ‘all the way’.
‘They say a man can’t think once his thing is hard. They say it’s your own fault if you let him go too far because then you can’t say no any longer. He goes quite crazy.’
‘Crazy?’ I swallowed heavily. I saw the shy, quiet Ben with wildly milling arms, foaming at the mouth. ‘How crazy?’
‘They say he’ll rape you just like that.’
The room was dead quiet.
‘But how can you tell … ?’ I took a deep breath like someone preparing to swim under water. ‘How far is too far?’
The silence continued. All I could hear was Dalena’s regular breathing. This time she had really gone to sleep, I decided.
‘I think it’s when you don’t want him to stop,’ she eventually replied, so softly that it sounded as if she were muttering in her sleep.
‘You can stay as you are,’ Dalena sang while she mixed coffee liqueur and vodka in three tall glasses. ‘Or you can change …’
‘Wrong song!’ Suna laughed on the high bar stool next to me. ‘This isn’t cane, it’s Red Russians!’
‘Black Russians,’ I said and watched Dalena pouring Coke into the glasses.
‘It’s all the same fucking thing, man,’ Dalena said in Janis Joplin’s world-weary voice.
Suna was overcome with a fit of giggling. I couldn’t help laughing as well. Nobody could swear like Dalena. Except, perhaps, Janis Joplin.
I could curse in my thoughts like someone who ate on the sly when no one could see her, but as soon as I said a swear word out loud, I spat it out like milk that had soured. And Suna was like someone on a strict diet who enjoyed watching other people eat. I had never heard her swear but she started laughing uncontrollably every time Dalena used a rude word. And Dalena cursed like a gourmet. She rolled the words around her tongue the way my father did with good wine.
‘Cheers, Mart.’ She handed me a glass after adding a handful of ice to it. ‘Let’s drink to Heinrich’s party.’
My stomach felt hollow every time I thought about the party but I knew it was too late to back out now. Suna and I were spending the weekend with Dalena because the party was being held on a neighbouring farm the following evening. Naturally, we weren’t supposed to be sitting in her father’s bar, but her mother had to spend a few days in hospital with some nervous complaint or other and her father was at a Broederbond affair, according to Dalena.
My father didn’t think much of this I’ll-scratch-your-back-if-you’ll-scratch-mine Broederbond. My mother said it was only be-cause they had never asked him to become a member. I thought it was just something else he could blame her for. Her father, my Grandpa Fishpond, had supposedly been a member of the more liberal United Party. And they probably thought she was English because she dyed her hair and smoked Cameos.
‘Hmmm.’ Suna licked her lips. ‘Where did you learn to drink this stuff?’
‘Mart told me about it,’
