Tandia (20 page)
It was the sort of laughter they all needed. And Tandia knew that she too was expected to laugh. Sarah had, after all, done it for her. Tandia was not unaware of the unspoken disapproval of the working girls, and Sarah's poem had been a gift of generosity. The Geldenhuis incident had been with them all. Now, at last, it was out, brought to the surface by a silly, childish little poem which had somehow made it all warm and safe again.
Mama Tequila knew that she couldn't have asked for anything better, and she now realised how much strain she herself had been under. It was good to laugh and she let it all roll out of her. At last she was sufficiently in possession of herself to talk, but she was afraid that if she spoke in her natural voice her emotion might show, so she slipped into client vernacular. 'Sarah, honey, you the best, you hear? You da poet lorrikeet!' She started to chuckle softly. 'Say it again, Sarah, do it one more time, baby!'
Sarah held the poem out and started to read again, but before she had completed the first line Mama Tequila was off again. The poem was a trigger all right! She raised her arms above her head to clap her hands together and suddenly her red velvet gown split from under the armpit down to her thighs. This caused fresh gales of laughter. 'Hoâ¦hoâ¦hoâ¦heeâ¦hee-hee, I think I going to wet my pants! Sarah, Mr Dine-o-mite, he ain't going to get no pussy for this dress, you hear?'
Frog Friday, despite the anxiety they had felt leading up to it, was showing all the signs of being an all-time success.
Hester and Marie, each taking an arm, led Mama Tequila across the room towards the door. As they reached the entrance to the salon Juicey Fruit Mambo appeared. 'It is all ready, madam,' he said.
Mama Tequila turned back into the room and addressed the girls. 'Go now into the other salon, everyone! In there is my big going-away surprise!' Turning to Hester and Marie she said, 'You too, darlings! Juicey Fruit Mambo will help me to my room. Go on, go now, enjoy your party. Hurry, jong. If you get there fast you can take first pick!'
Hester's scream of delight as she entered the client salon made all the other girls come running. Standing around the room were eight of the best built hunks of super manhood she'd ever laid her eyes on. Their arms bulged and their pectoral muscles smashed aside the buttons on their shirts to reveal chests and stomach muscles a girl could die for. Hester, with four or five of Madam Veuve Clicquot's special thigh-warming tonics under her belt, was willing to commit suicide on the spot. She grabbed at the biggest, horniest man she could see. Doreen did, the same and soon every man in the room had a girl draped on his arm. This was Mama Tequila's special treat: beautiful, taut, young coloured men who looked like Adonis to make up for all the wheezing and burping, the pot bellies and the limp little willies they'd had to coax to life during the year. Or, as Hester had once said, 'Some, they an insult to a one-eyed snake, man! They just blind worms with a swollen head!'
Tandia, for whom no man had been allocated, walked over to the pianola and, sitting down, started to pedal it. Most of the tunes were well-known
boere musiek
numbers, old favourites that caused the feet to tap and the blood to rise. In about five minutes flat the place was jumping.
Juicey Fruit Mambo dispensed beer from bottles buried in tin tubs of crushed ice, and the two coloured women from Durban appeared from the kitchen carrying pies and sausage rolls and an assortment of good things men like to eat: sausages and chops and big, juicy steaks. The girls were swung and danced and picked up and fussed over until the shirts of the men clung to their massive chests. Sarah removed the shirt of her partner and the other girls soon followed suit. It was a sweating, laughing, dancing, hugging, swinging, lifting party and Marie told Hettie she thought she'd passed away and woken up in heaven.
And then Johanna got the gramophone going and the lights dimmed and the night softened to Nat King Cole's 'Mona Lisa' and the couples drew closer, chest and breast and breathing heavier, as Frank Sinatra stroked them with 'Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered' and 'The Lady is a Tramp'. One by one, they danced off the floor and up the blackwood stairway, each girl with -a man in 'tow and a lot of loving mischief on her mind. The beautiful young man carrying Jasmine up the stairs stopped halfway and said, 'Man, if I die now, I'll kill myself!'
As parties go, there have been bigger parties, louder and more colourful ones with live music and more spectacular entertainment, certainly more drunken parties or parties for more important people, but Frog Friday 1954 was, in its own small way, one of which the human race had a right to be proud. No one threw up or grew violent or felt left out or unrequited. At two a.m., Juicey Fruit Mambo knocked on the various doors to tell the boys their taxis were waiting. They appeared soon afterwards and each wore a smile and a stunned look in his eyes.
As for the girls? The widow Clicquot could not have done a better job. Everything the French sailor had told Mama Tequila about her champagne proved to be true. Mama Tequila's eight working girls had been transil-meddle-tated right into heaven.
But all this happened long after Tandia had been replaced at the piano pedal by one of the coloured ladies from Durban. Halfway through the evening, after the men had all eaten, Juicey Fruit Mambo handed over the task of serving drinks to the other one and left the party. Some twenty minutes later he returned to tell Tandia she was required in Mama Tequila's salon. 'What is it, Juicey Fruit Mambo?'
He grinned, his gold incisors gleaming. 'I think you be very, very happy, Missy Tandy, big
indaba
for you!' he giggled, but would say no more.
Tandia stopped in the girls' waiting room and patted her face with a towel and added a touch of lipstick. She couldn't imagine what Mama Tequila might want. Frog Friday had been the biggest day of her life, the day she matriculated with honours and, in her mind, started her life properly and truly. From now on she was beautiful and brand new, no longer the daughter of Natkin Patel, known in the best white circus, but Tandia Patel, a black
slimmetjie
who was her very own person. And for just a moment, as she opened the door to Mama Tequila's salon, she wasn't scared at all. She was surprised and delighted to see Dr Louis and Sonny Vindoo. Her surprise was even greater when she recognized the round, squat shape of Old Coetzee with his puffy eyes and whisky nose, his untidy suit jacket open as usual, showing his waistcoat with his gold watch chain looped across his big belly. With him stood a very tall, thin man in a dark suit with perfectly round glasses which sat halfway down his long, sharp nose. His steel-grey hair, plastered down with hair oil, was parted down the centre just the way Patel had worn his. His narrow face had a disappearing chin and it looked as though he didn't laugh a lot. In his dark grey serge suit and white shirt he needed only to stand on one leg and he would have been Icabod Crane.
Sonny Vindoo rushed to welcome her. 'My dear, dear, Tandia, how very beautiful you are looking!' He giggled, 'I must be having the name of your dressmaker at once, my goodness, yes!'
Old Coetzee pulled himself up to his full height which wasn't much bigger than five foot six inches.
'Magtig!
You are a pretty girl, man!' he said, to Mama Tequila's surprise. He was an important, upstanding Afrikaner and she couldn't remember ever hearing a Boer paying a compliment such as this to a coloured person. What a waste, Mama Tequila sighed; she would be worth a king's ransom if she worked on her back.
'Please, everybody sit!' Mama Tequila indicated the comfortable high-backed Victorian armchairs which had been drawn into a semicircle round a low coffee table with ball-and-claw legs. 'Juicey Fruit Mambo will bring drinks.'
'You must come and meet Professor Ryder, the head of the Law School at Natal University,' Sonny Vindoo said. 'And, of course already you are knowing Magistrate Coetzee.'
'Howzit, Tandia,' Dr Louis called, using the casual slang expression to ease her nerves.
'Good evening, Magistrate Coetzee, good evening, Dr Louis.' Tandia said politely, trying hard not to sound nervous. Her heart was thumping. The thin man, who looked like one of the marabou storks Juicey fruit Mambo had once identified for her on a walk along the river, was from the university.
In her pink gymslip behind the bar it was easy to know the role she was required to play. She was Miss Tandy with the beautiful smile who kept the drinks coming, the shy, ingenuous part of a double act with Mama Tequila. But what was she here? What was expected of her? She knew instinctively that she was required to impress Professor Ryder, who didn't look like the sort of man who was going to be a pushover charmwise. There could only be one reason why Sonny Vindoo and Dr Louis were here, though how Old Coetzee fitted in she couldn't imagine. He'd paid her a compliment, which was a very strange thing for a man like him to do.
In her mind she saw him standing to rigid attention, the top part of him fully dressed right down to his watch chain, but with his trousers around his ankles. Across his left shoulder was the old Boer Mauser that usually hung on the wall directly above the blackwood stairs. Sarah knelt on the floor in front of him.
Sarah had accidentally come upon the solution to Old Coetzee's erectile problem when he'd taken down the old rifle and, with tears in his brandy-bright eyes, stroked it lovingly. 'Miss Sarah, this is a Mauser 8mm carbine, it's what nearly beat the
verdoemde rooinekke
in the Boer War! This is the rifle that defended the
republiek!
I worship this rifle! With five thousand more Boers on horseback and this carbine, I'm telling you man, Queen Victoria would be crying tears in her English teapot and
Oom Paul
would still be president of the
republiek!'
Sarah couldn't be sure about Queen Victoria but she knew for sure Oom Paul, the first president of the Transvaal Republic, had been dead for more than fifty years. 'That's very nice, Magistrate Coetzee, if you want you can bring it with you.' Sarah suggested, in an attempt to coax the old bugger into the pink room so that she could begin the arduous task of bringing him to gratification. Old Coetzee lumbered after Sarah, following her into the room like an excited schoolboy.
Thinking only to amuse him Sarah had commanded, 'General Coetzee, Commander of the Boer Republican Army, friend of President Oom Paul Kruger himself, stand to attention!' To Sarah's surprise Coetzee had immediately shouldered the old German rifle and stood to rigid attention beside the bed. Sarah was not one to miss an opportunity and she'd quickly slipped her hands under his waistcoat and undone his belt and trousers, pulling them down to his ankles. 'Watch careful as anything, you hear? The British are everywhere, jong!' she commanded him. Old Coetzee's eyes darted around the room as Sarah went to work on him. Occasionally, he'd remove the Mauser from his shoulder and fire an imaginary shot. 'Got him, got the
verdoemde rooinek
right between the eyes!' he shouted quickly, working the bolt action of the old rifle to eject the imaginary cartridge case before placing it back over his shoulder. In a surprisingly short time, Old Coetzee had risen to the occasion and before you could say, 'God save the Boer Republic!', she'd finished him off with French.
As Mama Tequila and the other three men sat down, Tandia extended her hand to Professor Ryder. 'How do you do, sir.' It was a brave thing to do; coloured girls don't shake hands with important white people who might think they were cheeky or trying to be the same as a white or something. Immediately he'd released her hand she began to worry.
But Professor Ryder didn't seem to mind. He sat down and crossed his long legs and looked at Tandia over the top of his glasses, which appeared to have slipped halfway down his long nose. 'Or Rabin tells me you know your Latin, Tandia. Certainly a high distinction in your matriculation exam is very commendable.' He cleared his throat, reached up and brought his glasses back to rest on the bridge of his nose. 'We'll begin with something simple, okay? I want you to conjugate a few curly irregular verbs.
The future perfect tense of the verb "to use", if you please?'
Ah!, thought Tandia, he's like Or Louis, always a puzzle, trying to trick me with a deponent verb, passive in form but active in meaning. She had learned from Mama Tequila the value of a little drama, and now she gave the lanky professor a dazzling smile where he might have expected a serious schoolgirl demeanour.
'Usus ero, usus eris, usus erit. Usi erimus, usi eritis, usi erunt,'
she said, to Dr Louis's obvious relief.
'Very good Tandia.' The professor appeared to be thinking. 'What about the perfect tense in the subjunctive?'
Tandia completed this request as effortlessly as the first.
'Usus sim, usus
sis,
usus sit. Usi simus,
Usi
sitis, usi sint.'
Professor Ryder grinned. 'That's the easy bit over. Now let's try you on Virgil's
Aeneid,
the fourth part.'
Tandia could feel the blood rising into her face and her mouth was suddenly dry. She regretted her previous aplomb. Virgil's Aeneid IV was Dr Louis's territory and, to please him, she'd studied the Latin poet more diligently than she was required to do at school, even after a while getting to quite like him. But she wasn't sure what the professor would expect from her.
'Dulces exuviae, dum fata deusque sinebant, accipite hanc animam, meque his exsolvite curis;
"sweet relics, sweet so long as God and Destiny allowed, now receive my soul and free me from this suffering",' Professor Ryder recited, making each word sound as though it was delivered from a lectern. The relief Tandia felt was palpable. She knew this passage was part of the Queen of Carthage's death soliloquy. She knew the two lines that followed, and quoted them in a quiet but firm voice which belied the terror she felt.
'Vixi, et, quem dederat cursum fortuna, peregi; et nunc magna mei sub terras ibit imago.
"I have lived the life and finished the course Fortune has allotted me. Now my wraith shall pass in state to the world below.'"