Alive Again. Andre Eva Bosch
loved my mother with all my heart and it hurt me to see her suffer. But I took that hurt and I did something good with it. This is what I did:
One day I read in a magazine that we can use our biggest hurts and turn them into our biggest strengths. I wondered how I could do that. I thought about it a lot. And then, out of the blue, I knew what to do. I would use that hurt to remind me never to give up on my dream of studying law.
I made a promise to myself that I would let nothing stand in the way of me getting the best grades I possibly could. I said, “Nandile Dube, I promise that I will never let you down. And I will do my best to make good choices.” I closed my eyes and wrote these promises in an imaginary place deep inside my heart, which I called my Place of Promises. It was a secret place where only I could go.
“Make good choices, Nandi, and life will reward you.” How often did my mother say that to me!
“Are you boys listening?” she would ask my brothers.
With serious faces they would always nod. Like me, they had heard these words a hundred times. Like me, they would never dare to ignore my mother when she spoke these words.
My mother could be soft as the fluffy, fleecy blankets she bought us with her Christmas bonus one year, but when she had her thunderstorm face on, we did what we were told.
Even so, we were never afraid of our mother. Sure, we didn’t like it when she punished us with jobs like weeding the vegetable patch when we had been cheeky. And we complained when we had to keep our rooms clean and tidy or do the dishes at the very moment a friend arrived to play. My mother was strict, as strict as the strictest teacher at school, yet we never feared her.
It was our father we feared. Especially when he was drunk.
2
For as long as I can remember, my father had got drunk over weekends. Friday and Saturday nights were the worst. He would get home late after hanging out in the shebeen. His loud voice would wake me as he drunkenly called my mother from her bed, demanding food. On really bad nights I would hear his shouting go on and on while I lay shivering in bed.
“You’re a useless woman!” I would hear him shout on so many nights. “All you care about are your children and what they do at school. I will go to my other woman. She gives me what I want!”
Then the sound of a kitchen chair flung against the wall and the muffled sound of my mother’s pain. On those nights I wished my father would go and live with his other woman. I wished he would drink himself to death and leave us in peace. I wanted to run down the corridor and grab my father and push him out the kitchen door into the dark night. I wanted to lock the door so that he could never, ever come into our house again. Lying there, my fists in two hard balls, I wanted to run to the kitchen to help my mother.
But I had done it once, and it had made matters worse. My father had looked at me with his bloodshot eyes, smiled his crooked smile and said, “You think you are better than your father? You think you are going to be a lawyer one day? Girls are made to please their men. I, your father, will make sure you get married long before matric.”
And then my father had struck out, hitting me across my head so that I fell against the kitchen table. My mother forbade me to ever run to her rescue again.
So I would listen helplessly to my father’s cursing and shouting on those terrible nights and then, as soon as the house was quiet again and I was sure he had passed out on the couch, I would creep into my mother’s bed and lie down beside her.
“Is there blood, Ma?” I would whisper. If she said no, there was just a swollen patch of skin on her cheek where he had hit her, I would be relieved. No sign of blood was good news to us in those days.
“I’m scared. Scared of the Bad Boys,” I would whisper in the dark.
My mother would stroke my head. “Always be careful,” she would say, her voice thick with fear. “And always remember never ever to walk alone, especially after dark. Bad Boys like pretty girls. But you, Nandi, are my African princess. You will have a man one day who will respect you. And who will respect your dreams.”
* * *
I knew I was pretty. I could see myself in the mirror, after all. I had big, brown eyes with long eyelashes. My hair was thick and braided. I had high cheekbones. My skin was smooth and shiny. I had full lips. I was tall and slim. A shop assistant once said to me that I was one of the lucky few: “You can wear any old baggy shirt and you would still look like a model,” she had said.
I didn’t wear old baggy shirts. I didn’t have a lot of clothes, like some rich girls, but I loved wearing fashionable clothes. Who doesn’t? But whenever a Bad Boy watched me, I wished my skirt wasn’t so short. I wished I wasn’t wearing a tight-fitting top. When Bad Boys swaggered towards me in the street, whistling, calling, jeering, my palms sweated. I lowered my eyes. Struggled for breath. A brick hit me in the stomach. I made sure I got away, fast.
Who were the Bad Boys? They were boys, my mother told me, who disrespected girls. Who forced themselves onto girls. Boys who regarded girls as objects, as things. Cheap things. Things that could be thrown away. Thrown around. They were boys who used girls to satisfy their need to feel like big, powerful men. And every generation of KaNyamazane women had stories of the Bad Boys of their time.
Because my father had been a Bad Boy, my mother warned me against the Bad Boys of KaNyamazane from a very early age. I knew that a Bad Boy could shatter my dreams in the blink of an eye, just as my father had shattered my mother’s dream.
And so, another promise which I kept in my heart, in my Place of Promises, was that I would never, ever be with a Bad Boy.
My best friend at school, Maryke Malan, knew how I felt about boys. Maryke and I were exact opposites in every way. I was black, she was white. I had brown eyes, hers were green. My hair was frizzy and black and short, her hair was sleek and blond and long. I was tall and slim and never put on weight. She was short and always on a diet. I was serious; she was outgoing and a real party girl. I studied every day and my essays were always finished on time, even before time. Maryke often begged me at the last minute to help her get her work done.
But one thing we had in common was that Maryke and I both wanted to find a Special Boy. A Special Boy was the exact opposite of a Bad Boy. We even made a list of all the things a Special Boy was, and wasn’t. I showed Maryke my list: he was good looking, kind, funny, cute, clever, friendly to my friends, exciting, and he smelt clean and fresh. He wasn’t a flirt, a bully or a boy who drank or smoked, did drugs or dagga. He wasn’t the jealous kind, and he wasn’t the type who got nasty when a girl got better maths marks than he did. He wasn’t the kind who told his girlfriend what to wear or which friends to hang out with. And he definitely was not a player who cheated and lied.
“Your list is just the same as mine!” said Maryke. But she did have one thing I did not have on my list: he must be a good kisser.
“You have to put it on your list, Nandi,” she teased. “It’s high time you kissed a boy.”
I knew Maryke had kissed boys before. But I was funny that way. I believed in real love. I couldn’t understand how girls could kiss any old boy just because everyone else did it. I would keep my first kiss for a boy who was everything I dreamt of. Nothing less would do.
But although Maryke was a kisser, she and I knew enough about HIV to know that we were not ready for anything more than kissing. Going all the way was not for us, not after all we had heard about HIV and AIDS at school.
Maryke’s father was a doctor and he often came to school to talk to us about sexually transmitted diseases, HIV and AIDS. I liked Dr Malan. He was kind, and when my brothers or I were sick my mother always took us to see him when he consulted at the KaNyamazane Clinic on Wednesday afternoons. Between my mother and Dr Malan there was no chance I would sleep with a boy. My mother’s favourite line was, “You can become a lawyer or another HIV statistic, Nandi. It’s your choice.” Dr Malan always said, “Saying no to sex is the best AIDS cure I have ever heard of. The best way to ensure