Tandia (10 page)

'Miss Naidoo!' Tandia said in a loud whisper.

'…Miss Naidoo. You see, it made her sick and everything,' Mama Tequila continued.

'I'm sorry the child has not been well, but we do expect common courtesy, Mrs…'

'Mama Tequila!' To Mama Tequila she didn't sound sorry at all.

'Will she be sitting for the end-of-year exams, Mrs Tekella?'

'Yes, I suppose, the doctor says one more week, is that orright?' Mama Tequila was not often intimidated, but she didn't seem to be able to get the hang of this stuck-up individual who was Tandia's headmistress. One thing was for sure, this one wouldn't know how to run a brothel if her bladdy life depended on it. All the clients would leave their trousers behind and run for the hills!

She had thought about adopting her Mae West persona, but as she generally used it only on her clients, she was glad now that she'd kept it straight. An American auntie from the deep South would have seemed an improbable relation for a schoolgirl who was the love child of an Indian and a Bantu.

'We begin exams in a week. Tandia will have missed all her preparation classes.'

'That's orright, Miss, don't worry, she's clever as anything. If you want her Monday she'll be there for sure, I guarantee it!' Mama Tequila was beginning to regain her usual composure and now she adopted what she considered was a snooty voice. 'My chauffeur will drop her off in a Packard personal.'

If Miss Naidoo had felt herself put in her place her voice gave no sign that this was so. 'She will need to bring a doctor's note when she returns. Goodbye, Mrs Tekella!'

Mama Tequila felt the receiver go dead in her ear. She turned to see Tandia with her fist in her mouth in an attempt to stifle her giggles. She had been able to hear the headmistress's shrill voice almost as clearly as if she had the receiver to her ear and, as far as she was concerned, Mama Tequila had come out quits, even ahead if you counted the bit about the car. Nobody in the history of the world had ever done that with Miss Naidoo before.

'Humph! This Miss Naidoo, she needs a man real bad, Tandy. I'm telling you, she one mixed-up lady, that one.

What kind of car she got?'

Tandia looked at her in surprise. 'She hasn't got a car, Mama T.'

Mama Tequila clicked her tongue. 'She hasn't got a car and she hasn't got a man, tell me, has she got lots of pretty dresses and rings and things?'

Tandia laughed. Laughter was happening to her a lot lately. 'I think she's only got four dresses, they all nearly the same, not pretty at all and she never wears any jewellery, only a watch.'

'So tell me, why is she so stuck up, then?'

'Ag, headmistresses are like that, Mama T. She hasn't got time for a man or for riding around in a big car or looking pretty and wearing jewels. A person has got to work very hard and be very clever to have her job.'

'I see, if you very clever and you get a big education and you work very hard, you get this job?'

Tandia nodded. 'Ja, but also, you got to be lucky. There's not so many jobs high up like that for women.'

Mama Tequila put her arm around Tandia's shoulder and drew her into her bosom. 'Okay, skatterbol, if you want you can go back to this school. But I'm telling you something for nothing, this woman can't teach you anything that's going to help you, man, I think maybe it's all a big waste of brains!'

The pink school outfit was Mama Tequila's idea of sticking it right up Miss Naidoo. When she returned, Tandia was going to be the best-dressed, prettiest girl in the whole school.

Every time she thought about the pink gymfrock Tandia nearly died of embarrassment. How was she possibly going to tell Mama T? She'd begged Hester to tell her, but there was a darker side of Mama Tequila's nature and she took it badly when one of her projects was thwarted. Hester wasn't game to incur Mama Tequila's wrath on her behalf. In her world you looked after yourself first. It wasn't unkindness, it was instinct, like breathing, and her instincts had served her well in the past.

Tandia also now understood why Juicey Fruit Mambo had been grinning his head off for the last couple of days. He was happy for the surprise coming her way.

The next day was the Saturday before her return to school on Monday. At six o'clock sharp Mama Tequila reached into her small sequinned evening bag and produced a large brass key to unlock the door to her private salon. She was dressed to the nines; Saturday night was a big night at Bluey Jay, not as posh as a Friday, but bigger and much, much noisier. The bulk of the Saturday night trade were men who came off the whalers and deep-sea fishing trawlers that used Durban as their home port.

After three months at sea chasing the giant sperm whale their wages were burning a hole in their pockets and that wasn't the only thing that was overheated in their trousers. You could always tell the young men off the whalers or the big commercial fishing trawlers; they were scrubbed nearly raw in the attempt to eliminate the smell of fish or whale oil from the pores of their skin. They wore their sports jackets and ties awkwardly and constantly pulled at the collar buttons of their shirts, lifting their chins slightly and moving their heads from side to side.

Saturday night at Bluey Jay was fun for one and all. The pianola in the guest salon ran hot with honky-tonk and
tickcie-draai.
A girl could expect to turn a dozen tricks before the boys, their pockets lighter and with three months of wildly imagined promiscuity tapped and emptied in almost as many minutes, were shooed off the premises into taxis waiting to take them back to their cheap billets in town.

Now, an hour before the first of the Saturday night crowd would begin to appear, Mama Tequila entered her private salon and gazed with deep satisfaction at the magnificent room that never failed to convince her that God was on the side of the honest brothel-keeper. She wore a full-length pink crushed-velvet gown, pink high-heel shoes studded with rhinestones with a pink taffeta turban on her head. To top it all off she carried a large pink ostrich feather fan. She crossed the room as regally as the queen she was and sat on a high-backed Victorian chair of monstrous proportions which was covered in a watered taffeta of deep purple.

Bluey Jay had been the home of an Irish Australian jockey named Bluey J. McCorkindale, who had come out with the New South Wales Light Horse during the Boer War and had stayed on. As a talented young jockey well schooled in the rough and tumble of Sydney's Randwick and Rose Hill race courses he'd ridden a few winners for Barney Barnato, the diamond and gold multi-millionaire, and had soon put together enough to start his own stud farm. Barney Barnato and Solly Joel, Barney's almost equally wealthy partner, had put their blood stock with him. A third share in a stallion named Blue Jay, foaled from the great Irish stallion, Mount Joy, and the American mare, Miss Scarlet, had made McCorkindale wealthy enough. The stallion became the greatest money-earner in the history of the South African turf and Bluey's winnings, invested with advice from his two racing partners, had done the rest and put him into the truly rich class.

The little Australian jockey had then gone over to Sydney to look for a bride to bring back with him. Instead he returned to South Africa with a house. A three-storey Victorian mansion of Sydney sandstone, a triumph of the stonemason's art, with wide verandas running top and bottom around the house, decorated with magnificent traditional ornate wrought-iron railings and posts. With seventeen bedrooms, five bathrooms and with its several reception rooms and two salons it seemed just the house for a sporting man like Bluey J. McCorkindale, who was the fifth son of a drunken Irish strapper and who had been brought up in a three-room worker's cottage in the dockside suburb of Woolloomoolloo and who, at eight years old, had started work as a stable boy.

Bluey J. had ordered the house to be dismantled stone by stone, right down to the last velvet curtain and solid brass curtain ring, packed in trunks and crates and shipped in carefully marked sections to Durban where it had risen again. Bluey J. McCorkindale had made only one concession to his adopted land; he had ordered the floors to be made of African yellowwood.

The salon and the shining yellow floors were Mama Tequila's special joy. She had come upon the mansion when, in a post-war return to Christian values, Durban's police commissioner, Kommandant Vermaak, had decided that the waterside brothels, which had done such a sterling job of rest and recreation for troops and sailors during the war, had to go. Mama Tequila, who owned two of these BBTM ('Biff! Bang! Thank you, ma'am!') sex emporiums, was not displeased with the Kommandant's zeal.

She'd made a fortune during the war but now the quicksex business had fallen on hard times. All her life as a working girl and later as a madam, Mama Tequila had dreamed of owning a brothel like one she had once seen in a movie set in turn-of-the century New Orleans. She wanted a brothel that catered for the carriage trade, people with money and manners and political clout. A house with nice girls who knew their trade and didn't smoke
boom
or drink neat Cape brandy.

Mama Tequila had been raised in the slums of Cape Town's District Six and she'd learned, very early in life, that a man's snake wasn't like everybody said, colourblind. The white snakes liked to creep into black holes and the black ones into white. She'd also learned that coloured girls were the perfect compromise; they could pass, in most instances, for white with black snakes and for black with white ones. For it was the minds of the snakes that got a vicarious pleasure out of colour; the snakes themselves with their single blind eye, seldom stopped to compare skin tones.

When she found Bluey Jay on thirty acres of rolling green hills within half an hour's drive of Durban she'd known at once that there was a God in heaven. For the outside of the house, somewhat in need of repair, was almost a direct replica of the one in the movie. Inside nothing had been touched since the time of Bluey Jay himself. Whilst the drapes were faded and worn and the upholstery on the Edwardian couches and formal chairs and the Persian carpets were almost threadbare and some of the furniture was badly in need of french polishing and restoration, it was all there. Mama Tequila could hardly believe her eyes.

All it needed was money to restore it and Mama Tequila had plenty of that. She had found a Mr Leonard Polkinghorne, a highbrow Englishman who wore detachable starched collars and who had once worked as an assistant curator at the Victoria and Albert in London, and was now head curator of the Pietermaritzburg museum. Leonard Polkinghorne was an expert on Victorian and Edwardian decor and she assigned him the task of returning the formal rooms in Bluey Jay to their former glory.

'Nothing changed, you understand, Mr Lennie, just exactly the same as before, only everything pink.' Mama Tequila couldn't bring herself to pronounce his surname, which seemed to her amazingly apt for the restoration of a house intended as a brothel and was yet another sign from God that she was doing the right thing.

'Mr Lennie, do you know what kind of place is this?' Mama Tequila asked when she took him out to show him the property. Leonard Polkinghorne looked at the scaffolded Bluey Jay and then back at Mama Tequila who sighed and said carefully, 'Mr Lennie, this is going to be a place where you come when you are tired of your wife.'

'Ah, I see, a rest home! That's perfectlay splendid, I'm perfectlay happy to be associated with a rest home.' Leonard Polkinghorne was very big on the word 'perfectly' which he pronounced in this funny way.

Mama Tequila sighed again; this was one dumb person orright. 'Ja, but more like an
excitement
than a rest, Mr Lennie.'

A slow grin spread over Leonard Polkinghorne's face and his eyes grew wide. 'I say! You don't mean?' Mama Tequila nodded her head. 'Yes you do! By jove, a brothel! How perfectlay marvellous!'

The one-eyed snake strikes again! Mama Tequila thought happily. 'The best, Mr Lennie, the best whorehouse in the world and also, when you and I finish with it, the prettiest.'

The restoration of Bluey Jay outside and inside, and including electricity and new plumbing, had taken a sizeable bite out of Mama Tequila's wartime fortune, but Mr Lennie's fee wasn't one of her expenses. He elected to take his retainer in what he referred to as 'dalliance time.' Mama Tequila, happy to oblige, carefully worked out the total amount owed to him in hours. It was an agreement which Mr Lennie said suited him 'absolutely perfectlay', and which eventually took a great deal of the starch out of his collar. At Bluey Jay he was known to the girls as 'Mr Perfect Lay'. All the girls had been told to appear at a quarter past six in the salon and they now stood around Mama Tequila's chair 'oohing' and 'aahing' her dress.

'Jesus, Mary, Mother of God! Have mercy on a poor working girl, Mama T! How much time am I going to have to give to Mr Dine-o-mite for this beautiful creation!' Sarah cupped her hands over her face and groaned in mock agony. 'Talking of Mr Dine-o-mite, he gonna be here soon,' Mama Tequila chuckled, 'but he just come to make a delivery.'

Juicey Fruit Mambo, dressed in a white tuxedo jacket, black stovepipe trousers, white shirt and pink bow tie, walked into the salon carrying a small scolloped silver tray on which rested nine tiny glasses of sherry and one of green chartreuse. There were eight working girls at Bluey Jay, not counting Tandia, and Juicey Fruit now dispensed a glass to each of them as well as to Mama Tequila. Finally he placed the glass of green chartreuse on an occasional table to await the arrival of Sonny Vindoo. He returned moments later with a glass of lemonade, which he handed to Tandia.