ask,’ Dalena warned. ‘Unless you want to spend the rest of the evening hearing all about this fabulous guy you’ve never met. The brownest eyes, the broadest shoulders, the best-looking legs, the most unbelievable personality, the biggest …’
‘You’re lying, I never carried on like that, Dalena!’ The vodka probably also had something to do with the heat in my cheeks.
‘Have you ever listened to yourself, Mart?’
‘The biggest what?’ Suna wanted to know.
Now it was Dalena’s turn to giggle. Suna’s eyes widened. My cheeks got hotter and hotter.
There were certain words even Dalena wouldn’t use. When it came to sexual parts, male or female, she couldn’t even mention the biological terms. Even though they sounded so chaste in our pretty biology teacher’s mouth.
‘Penis!’ she’d whispered for the first time the other evening in our hostel room. ‘It sounds like a new kind of headache pill!’
‘And what about vagina?’ I asked, as always braver in the dark. ‘Doesn’t it sound like the name of an old maid? There was an old maid named Vagina, whose looks became finer and finer …’
Dalena had to put her hand in front of her mouth to stop laughing.
‘And testicles!’ I’d giggled. ‘Like something belonging to an octopus! He swings his dangerous testicles about to keep the enemy at bay!’
‘And vulva could’ve been a car. He climbed into his new Vulva and drove away.’
‘And uterus?’ We were both amazed by our daring. ‘Isn’t there a city in Holland called Uterus?’
‘Uterus and Clitoris,’ Dalena had announced in a dramatic whisper. ‘A Tale of Two Cities!’
‘Dalena exaggerates.’ I took a few quick swallows from the glass in front of me even though I knew it wasn’t a cold drink. ‘It was only a holiday romance.’
‘That’s what she tells you now!’ Dalena’s voice was louder than usual, even more like a boy’s. ‘After stuttering old Ben has won her heart.’
‘He doesn’t stutter, he …’ I fell into every trap she set for me. ‘He’s only shy.’
‘Ha!’ She gathered our glasses to mix another three Black Russians, confident as a cocktail barman behind her father’s counter. She was wearing a man’s maroon dressing gown in a silky material. She constantly said she couldn’t stand her father but she evidently couldn’t resist the temptation of wearing his clothes. ‘Let’s drink while we can. Don’t think we’ll get anything more than Coke and Fanta tomorrow evening. Perhaps a couple of sneaky beers for the boys, but definitely nothing for the girls! After all, nice girls don’t drink!’
‘Let’s drink a toast to Mart and Ben!’ Unlike Dalena, Suna’s voice had become higher and thinner. She sounded like a six-year-old girl. It could also have been the alcohol affecting my hearing. ‘To whatever may happen tomorrow night!’
‘As I know old Ben, bugger all will happen,’ said Dalena.
My body felt too light for the bar stool, my feet too far off the floor. I studied the walls around me hung with dozens of framed rugby photographs. Team photos, mostly, from Springbok teams to farm-school teams with no differentiation between famous and obscure players.
‘What are you going to wear?’ Suna wanted to know.
‘Sheesh, I don’t know.’ I could hardly admit that I’d struggled with this problem for over a week. ‘Jeans, probably. What about you?’
‘It probably doesn’t matter,’ Suna sighed. ‘I don’t have a date.’
Suna wasn’t ugly. She had long blonde hair and a great body and all; but she also had acne. Not badly, but as a result she suffered from a serious lack of self-confidence. The moment a boy looked at her she dropped her head and swallowed her tongue.
‘Oh, come on, Suna!’ Dalena bellowed. ‘I told you I’d make you look great with my sisters’ make-up. You’re going to look like Cinderella at the prince’s party.’
‘Cinderella had a fairy godmother.’ Absently Suna rubbed her pitted skin. ‘You can’t cast magic spells, Dalena.’
‘There’s nothing that foundation and blusher can’t fix. There’s absolutely nothing …’
And with this prediction my roommate fell off her high bar stool with an ear-splitting crash.
I sat on the balcony in front of Dalena’s bedroom and looked out over her father’s farm. It wasn’t a toy farm like my father’s. Chris van Vuuren was a real farmer, not an attorney wanting to play at being a farmer.
Over the weekend I’d realised for the first time that Dalena’s father was filthy rich. You would never have guessed it if you saw her in the hostel. She wasn’t one for fantastic clothes or shiny bangles or anything that showed that her people had money. I knew what my mother would say: if you were used to money you didn’t have to flaunt it.
My people weren’t exactly poverty-stricken, but my father’s bank statement was always as unpredictable as his next scheme to make money quickly. Or to lose it quickly, which happened more often. At the moment things were going rather well with a farm and a swimming pool, but the Van Vuurens’ farm and swimming pool made ours seem like a suburban plot with a fishpond. The Van Vuurens not only had a swimming pool big enough to hold a school gala, they also had a jacuzzi and a sauna.
‘Jacuzzi,’ I said aloud to hear what this exotic word sounded like in my mouth. Almost as pretty as French. ‘Je t’aime, mon amour.’
‘What?’ Dalena asked behind me and I was so startled that the writing pad fell off my lap.
She stood at the French doors which opened out of her bedroom on to the balcony, yawned lazily and stretched her arms high above her head. She was wearing only the loose T-shirt in which she’d slept. Love is … I read on her breast, above a picture of two little dolls hugging one another on her stomach, with the rest of the sentence on her hips … being nice to her even if she’s grumpy.
‘I thought you and Suna were still asleep.’
‘So you sat talking to yourself.’ She blinked her eyes in the sharp morning light. ‘Anyone would think you were in love.’
‘Did you enjoy the party?’
‘Oh, it was OK.’ She dropped into the deckchair next to me, yawned again, stretched her bare legs. ‘You obviously enjoyed it.’
‘Where’s Suna?’
‘Probably still dreaming about how popular she was.’
She turned her head towards me, the grey-green eyes wide awake now, and smiled that impossibly wide smile. ‘She was a hit, wasn’t she?’
Thanks to Dalena’s sisters’ make-up and the low red lighting in the rondavel, Suna completely forgot about her skin problem. And once the boys saw how she could wriggle her body on the dance floor, she didn’t have any breathing space for
