Tandia (13 page)
Mama Tequila chuckled, 'Then, Sarah, if old Coetzee is not the most
upstanding
citizen you ever seen, then you better call the ambulance, you hear? Because for damn sure, he's dead!'
The girls all laughed and clapped. 'That was a good one, Mama T,' Sarah said, and they all nodded agreement. Mama Tequila was the best teacher; they all felt warm and needed and very superior. They were whores with a future.
Mama Tequila turned to see what Tandia was doing with the coffee. She was nowhere to be seen and Sarah jumped up and ran towards the big AGA stove. Tandia was pressed up against her corner of the alcove biting her hand, the tears running down the cheeks, her shoulders heaving with the effort to contain her emotion. Blood ran from the corner of her mouth where she had bitten into her hand.
'Oh my God!' Sarah stretched out her arms and bent down to embrace Tandia. She took the little girl in her arms and started to rock her. 'Shhh! Don't cry, Tandy. It's only pretend, don't cry, skatterbol, no one can hurt you, you hear? You safe here.'
The girls had all risen from the table and crowded around the cooking alcove. 'Let her go!' It was Mama Tequila's voice. Confused, Sarah looked up first at Mama Tequila and then back to Tandia. 'Leave her, you hear!' She turned to the girls. 'Out! Go to your rooms! You too Sarah, go now, jong, before I lose my temper.'
Sarah released Tandia, propping her up against the split logs stacked against the rear wall of the alcove.
'Maak gou,'
Mama Tequila said in Afrikaans, a language she rarely spoke and only when she was upset. Sarah rose quickly and left the room, following the other girls out.
Mama Tequila remained standing for perhaps fifteen minutes until Tandia began to calm down. 'Go to the table, Miss Tandy!' she ordered, turning slowly and moving across the room to the big club chair.
Tandia rose and, sniffing, sat at the table. Mama Tequila held a cork-tip in her hand which she now fed slowly into her mouth and lit with the Zippo. She withdrew the cigarette and pushed the smoke out lazily. 'Why you crying, Miss Tandy?'
'You, you know why, Mâ¦mama T,' Tandia sobbed.
When Mama Tequila spoke again her voice was sharp. 'Now you listen to me, you little shit!' She lowered her voice as Tandia looked up at her in tearful alarm. 'You listen good, you hear? You can leave today, take your basin and pack your things.' She reached for her bag on the small table and started to rummage through it until she found her purse. She opened the clip and removed five crumpled onepound notes which she flung down onto the floor in front of her. 'Take it, it's the five pounds we took out of your pants when you came here. Before tonight you out, gone from this place, you understand!'
Tandia's world collapsed about her. She'd only heard half of Mama Tequila's titillation talk to the girls when she found herself back in the cemetery talking to the dead Patel and then it all happened again, the handcuffs and the marble cross and the big, hard white man inside her! 'Please Mama T, let me stay! Please! I will do anything. Anything you want, jus' let me stay here, I beg you Mama T!'
Mama Tequila looked at Tandia and began to talk softly. 'You not special, Miss Tandy, you dirt. You nothing. You know why? Because you a coloured person who is sorry for herself. Inside you like a white person, inside you rotten white meat, you got a white heart. You think something bad happened to you?
Wragtig,
I'm telling you, you don't know what bad is! Rape! Rape is nothing, you hear? When Sarah was six her daddy raped her, when she was eleven he threw her out the house because he was putting his
slang
into her baby sister. At thirteen she a whore already, already working on the streets. But she's not sorry for herself, all the others is the same, some of my girls are worse even than that!'
'Please forgive me, Mama T, I swear on my mother's grave, it will never happen again. Please, I won't feel sorry for myself ever again, just let me stay!'
'Miss Tandy, this a whorehouse! The business we got here is to fuck men.' She pointed at Herman the Hottentot. 'Around here that is the boss. Hester and Sarah and Jasmine and Colleen and Hettie, Doreen, Johanna an' Marie, they all got one job, to make him happy. But they my whores, you hear? What happened before is over, finish and klaar, a white person can cry about yesterday, they got that luxury; for a coloured person there is no yesterday, you got to use all your courage and your strength to stay alive for today. You waste it on yesterday, you a dead kaffir. You understan' what I'm saying, girl?'
Tandia nodded, then sniffed and wiped her nostrils with the back of her hand. There was blood on her hand where she'd bitten herself and now the blood smeared over her face. She was just like the woman, the black shebeen whore at the police station. 'Yes, I will try, Mama T.'
'Try is not enough, Miss Tandy. If you going to be a whore, you going to be a whore with a future. If you going to be a lawyer they going to try to kill you. And they not going to rest until they got you on the slab, the mortuary, a dead kaffir lawyer! You got to make yourself so when they stick the knife into your heart the blade break. When they get another one, it break also! And another and another. Then maybe you can have a future too!'
Tandia's voice was hardly a whisper. 'Please Mama T let me stay?'
'Miss Tandy, this the first and last time, you hear?'
Tandia rose from her chair and rushed over to Mama Tequila and hugged her. 'Thank you, Mama T, I will not let you down.'
Mama Tequila patted Tandia on the back and then pushed her away, but she did so gently and Tandia knew she'd been saved. 'Go now, you can tell everyone they can come out of their rooms.'
Tandia was walking towards the kitchen door to leave when Mama Tequila called her back. 'No more what you doing with Sarah. No more, you hear?'
'Yes, Mama T,' Tandia whispered.
The hot coastal summer passed for Tandia as she entered her final year at high school. Except for Sundays, when she and Juicey Fruit Mambo would head for the high mountains, her time was taken up with work at Bluey Jay or school work.
Tandia had been brought down to solid ground with a terrible thump after the Herman the Hottentot incident. She was smart enough to realise that she would be required to adapt absolutely to the environment of Bluey Jay, that Mama Tequila would tolerate nothing less. Her quiet, shy ways would have to go. At sixteen Tandia had spent the larger part of her waking hours by herself, if not always physically, certainly in her head. The habit of going for long periods without talking was inappropriate at Bluey Jay, which was a rowdy, aggressive place, loud with vulgar laughter- and sudden melodramatic tears.
To Tandia's astonishment the girls all seemed to cry for the wrong reasons. Never for the past which had been steeped with misery, but over such dumb things as a quarrel about whose turn it was to do something in the kitchen or simply because two of them were wearing the same colour gown or stayed too long in the bathroom, silly stuff which Tandia couldn't imagine even getting upset about.
Mama Tequila worked her hard but Tandia didn't mind; she'd always worked hard and now she learned to do with less sleep. She'd never been a big sleeper; her early childhood terror as she lay alone in the shed at the house in Booth Road had conditioned her. She began to find ways to be indispensable at Bluey Jay, not simply as a room maid but in a number of other chores as well. At first she had to practise laughing when one of the girls said something funny, but after a while she found that buried all these years inside her was lots of bubbling laughter. Driven at first, by the circumstances surrounding her, to seem gregarious and happy rather than naturally quiet and timid, Tandia now found that she was posing less and that laughter and involvement was coming naturally to her. At sixteen her body had suddenly shaped into its female lines. Curves which had been threatening to arrive seemed to wait almost precisely for her sixteenth birthday. Then they shaped her torso and rounded her hips into a tight lithe woman's shape. Her legs, always unusually long, now seemed to fit her body naturally. Each day she seemed to grow more beautiful. The girls at Bluey Jay had all been picked by Mama Tequila because of their looks. But they all understood that Tandia wasn't of the same clay. With her green eyes and perfect skin, she was destined to be a beautiful woman. They cherished this thought among themselves; Tandia was going to be too beautiful to ignore, even in South Africa.
For her part, Tandia carried her beauty with a naturalness and lack of affectation that endeared her to them all. She simply saw it as a contribution to the atmosphere at Bluey Jay, an abstracted thing which she could use to full effect in her new environment.
From Juicey Fruit Mambo she learned to run the bar and from Mama Tequila she learned how to hustle customers. A shilling glass of Scotch was five shillings at Bluey Jay and Tandia could convert it into a double and look abject at her mistake, making such a beautiful mess of trying to pour the extra Scotch back into the bottle that a customer would beg her to stop and be happy to pay ten shillings for his drink. She could water drinks perfectly for drunks and, if they were sufficiently drunk, get them onto cold tea without them knowing the difference. While the kaffir with the gold teeth had to be watched like a hawk, no customer ever thought of Tandia cheating them. At first Tandia was simply the late afternoon barmaid relief for Juicey Fruit Mambo, but after just a few weeks Mama Tequila announced at a chew the fat chat that Tandia had achieved solo status in the saloon bar.
It happened one Sunday morning when Tandia, like all the other girls, had appeared in her chenille dressing-gown in the kitchen. It was unusual for Tandia to be dressed this way, but Mama Tequila hadn't remarked on it. Tandia was usually up hours before the rest of them, dressed and doing her homework and already in the kitchen to help when she appeared to cook breakfast. Mama Tequila made a mental note to take her temperature after the session. Tandia up this late and still not dressed was obviously not well and she knew, since the day of the Herman the Hottentot affair, Tandia would rather die than complain of not being well.
Her announcement that Tandia was to be allowed the third billet in the bar was a singular honour. The girls showed their delight by getting up from their chairs and crowding around her.
Tandia flushed with pleasure. She loved the important feeling working behind the bar counter gave her, and to be put on an even footing with Juicey Fruit Mambo and Mama Tequila as custodian of the saloon bar was an unexpected honour. She'd been up and about since dawn, and now she stood up. Closing her eyes briefly and taking a deep breath to contain her terror she allowed the dressing-gown to slip from her shoulders. She stood before them in her pink gymslip and stockings, standing on her toes to simulate the effect high heels would give her. She had taken eight inches off the skirt of her gymslip and the tops of her stockings could just be seen held with the pink ribbons of her suspenders. Her blouse was unbuttoned to show the curve of her breasts and she held herself in a provocative pose, her body slightly turned with her hands on her hips and her left shoulder thrust forward. Six months previously she might have looked like a young girl playing at being a femme fatale, but now she was provocatively sexy. Mama Tequila who seldom showed surprise at anything drew back and then burst into applause. Unthinking, she slipped into her American vernacular, 'Baby, you just the sexiest thing I ever did see!' she said, with obvious admiration. The girls all clapped and laughed and Marie ran from the room and appeared a few minutes later with a new pair of white highheeled shoes which she made Tandia put on. It was the biggest move Tandia had ever made on her own and it felt good.
Mama Tequila made Tandia practise walking in the pumps. She was stiff for days afterwards but Tandia knew the effect was worth it and she could hardly wait to return from school the next day and to appear in her new guise in the saloon bar.
Tandia had such a natural sweet innocence about her that the effect she had on customers was doubled. She was totally desirable and totally unattainable at the same time. The combination made her a formidable attraction behind the bar. For Mama Tequila made it known that, under no circumstances, was Tandia for sale. If anything this increased her desirability to the Bluey Jay regulars.
With Tandia at the bar, customers not only increased but stayed longer and spent more. Just in case a customer lost the urge to use the upstairs services of the house or was drinking too slowly, Mama Tequila would give Tandia a signal by placing her hand over her glass. Tandia would wait until the customer was ready to order again. 'Same again, Miss Tandy.'
Tandia would pretend not to understand the request and her eyes would grow big. She'd put her hands on her waist and lean back slightly with her left shoulder thrown forward, the way Mama Tequila had taught her. 'Oh, sir, not the same again! Last week was good, Jasmine says you were so very good and very nice to her also. But you can't have the same again!' Tandia would take a deep breath and giggle, 'So! This week we have a special treat for you! Doreen is going to take you today and she has some lovely, lovely surprises for you.'
Tandia was never explicit nor did she talk dirty. She was becoming an actress who worked with body language and with her eyes. Words could only have cheapened the merchandise she had for sale at Bluey Jay. Tandia understood when Mama Tequila said that a whorehouse was a theatre of the mind, and she intended to be the perfect understudy to the leading lady.