7

DRINKWATER TRADING

IT WENT SOMETHING LIKE THIS WHEN Eddie Drinkwater walked into a bar.

‘Hey, Ed! You on H₂O today, or something a bit stronger?’

‘Let’s take a bet. I go for stronger.’

‘It won’t be mineral water, that’s for sure.’

‘Sparkling or still?’

‘Dis-stilled, man. Glug-glug, down the hatch.’

Eddie kept his head down so he wouldn’t see their faces. He’d been the butt of jokes about his name since his first day in school and they got worse when he discovered brandy. Marriage hadn’t helped either. One rainy night his foot slipped on the brake and the car went into a spin and crashed into a bridge, smashing his face on the steering wheel. His young wife was killed when she hit the windscreen, having loosened her seat belt to comfort the baby in the carrycot wedged in behind the back seat. By the time rescuers dragged him out, blood and petrol fumes veiled his brandy breath, and the screaming child was the focus of attention, so he was not prosecuted.

Except by himself. There were days when he locked the door of his bedroom and drank himself to oblivion. Then Philomena Moloi, the housekeeper and nanny, would distract the child with games and songs and hours of baking that filled all the biscuit tins in the kitchen.

‘Come, Jo-Jo, we leave Daddy to sleep, eh? We go and play nice games.’

‘But Daddy’s always sleeping. I want to play with him.’

‘He’s too tired now, lovey. Come with Ma Philo.’

As she grew older, Joanna Drinkwater learnt to associate the smell of baking with a dazed look on her father’s scarred face and the spirituous blast of his breath. Now she was a fourth-year medical student in Gauteng and came home as seldom as possible. Her absence released Philomena to sell offal in the afternoons, and gave Eddie even more reason to upend his brandy bottles.

Khanya Tibane, his assistant, was very worried about the state of the trading-store accounts. Eddie had taken him into the household as a seven-year-old at Philomena’s request; the boy was an orphan who would be company for Jo. The two of them had played and squabbled and eaten together and thrown mud at each other then made up again, normal stuff for friends. Eddie was too distracted, and often too drunk, to hear what the older villagers muttered about black boys getting too familiar with white girls. When Jo went away to boarding school and university, Khanya began to help behind the counter in the afternoons and every weekend.

He enjoyed the work, saved up to study for a correspondence matric and dreamed of having his own shop one day. His mistake was telling the boss when he passed accounting. Eddie was delighted, saying, ‘Well done, son, now you can take over.’ Within minutes Khanya had been handed the accounts ledger, the bank deposit book, the chequebook and a yellowing stack of unpaid bills addressed to Drinkwater Trading, and Eddie had headed for the Outspan bar.

After a weekend spent poring over the ledger and the unpaid bills, Khanya confronted him on Monday in a state of shock. ‘Mr Eddie, you owe three times more than was coming in last month.’

‘So what’s new?’ Eddie had kick-started the day with the usual splish in his breakfast tea. His false front teeth were bared in the mirthless grin of a hyena straining to be polite. He had worn his shirt and trousers for three days and they were splotched with sweat and vomit stains.

‘But nothing balances. It cannot balance! This is big trouble.’

Eddie gave an airy wave. ‘Don’t worry, son. Debt collectors have to be bloody desperate before they’ll come to Crocodile Flats.’

‘What about Jo’s university fees?’

‘She’s a clever lass. They’ll give her a bursary.’

‘The newspaper says that the universities are getting tough now,’ Khanya warned. ‘Students cannot get an exam pass unless the fees are paid.’

‘Oh, stop moaning and get on with it. Pay a few bills. Post-date the cheques. Send ’em to the wrong addresses. Cook the books.’ He turned to go.

‘You are asking me too much, Mr Eddie.’

‘Rubbish. Just part-pay the essentials – electricity, phone, etcetera – and put the bad buggers at the bottom. I’ll be back later.’ He shuffled towards the double screen doors leaning off their hinges on to the veranda where Vigilance bent all day over his jigging treadle machine, and was gone.

Khanya stood watching him weave along the road towards the Outspan.

‘The boss starts earlier and earlier.’ Vigilance squinted up at him over the last rites he was giving an already over-patched boot.

‘I’m afraid so, bhuti.’

‘You’ll be in the shit if he goes down.’ The old man’s vigorous hair and eyebrows and ear tufts were tipped with frostbite, his fingers as rough as nutmeg graters from years of needle pricks.

‘Up to my neck. What will I do without him?’

‘We can’t depend on the whites forever. You have your community,’ Vigilance reproved.

‘This community is very poor. And Mr Eddie’s always been good to me.’

‘That’s not goodness. He’s using you to do his work.’

‘But I enjoy it. Also, he and Jo and Ma Philo are my family.’

‘He’s just using you,’ the old man insisted. ‘Whites are always bleating, “She’s part of our family!” when they mean some poor woman who slaves for them and gets paid next to nothing. Keep your eyes open, umfana.’

Vigilance hunched over his machine and Khanya went back inside to try to straighten out the mess. The ledger was as haphazard as a hamerkop’s nest, scribbled with hieroglyphics in odd amounts that might be income or expenditure or telephone numbers, it was hard to tell. While Khanya could reconcile the balance on his side of the trading store to the last cent every day, Eddie would stuff notes and coins as often in his pockets as in the till, emptying them on the counter at the end of the day in a jumble of cash that became Khanya’s despair.

When he told Philomena about it, she said, ‘He’s drinking like it’s water from the tap. I don’t know where this thing is going to end up.’

‘We’re going to lose our jobs. Mrs Ming will buy the store and bring in relatives, and there’ll be no room for us.’

‘She’s a good woman who wouldn’t put us out on the street. And Mr Eddie will see us right,’ Philomena insisted.

‘Don’t fool yourself, Ma Philo. He’s got no money and he doesn’t care any more. He’s too far gone. Bhuti says he’s using me.’

‘Shame, that man. I’m so worried for him.’

‘What about shame, us?’ Khanya demanded. ‘I still have to finish my matric. If I lose this job and my room, I don’t know where I’ll go. You have two kids and an old mother to feed. Jo’s fees are not paid. We must do something.’

After a painful discussion they agreed that Khanya should write to Jo in the distant city, but there was no reply. Meanwhile he puzzled over the accounts, told people that the boss was suffering from bad headaches, ordered supplies, fended off demands for payment, locked up at the end of the day, then went round to his room by the rain tank in the back yard to study until midnight.

Philomena cooked lunch for him and Eddie before hurrying to the butchery to buy her offal. With her large plastic bucket filled, she folded an old sack to make a head pad, hoisted the bucket up with its slopping, sliding contents and walked in the stately manner of women carrying well-balanced burdens to her pitch at the bus and taxi terminus.

In the early afternoon, heat radiated off the network of tracks and paths meandering between shacks packed like rusting sardine cans, making people feel sluggish and irritable. The leaves on the few remaining thorn trees closed together in pairs and drooped. Even the barbed-wire fences hung in loops from post to post with remnants of plastic bags snagged on the spikes.

All the way to the terminus, she concentrated on a single thought: Please to God, I’ll sell most of it. Though the rent tin was always topped up on pay days, the food tin would be rattling by the end of the month.

On the day her daughter claimed to have seen Ma-Jesu, so few people bought offal that Philomena had to concede defeat before the bucket was half empty. The sun was long gone by the time she lifted it back onto her head and walked home through Drinkwater Trading’s neglected sisal plantation, one of Eddie’s abortive schemes for making money. The path wound between the remaining plants and the shacks that had sprung up around them, a snaking peopleway of trodden red earth that served at least two hundred families.

The weight on her tired head was nowhere near as heavy as her worry about Eddie’s slackening grip on reality. Khanya had warned her that the business was sliding into critical debt. If her main source of income dried up, how would she support her family? For months, ever since the letter from the West Rand gold mine informing her that her husband Esau had been badly hurt in a mining accident, she had neither heard nor received a cent from him. He’d left details of the compound where he lived, but her letters to him went unanswered and the telephone number gave only a long engaged signal.

She was bitterly afraid that he had a town wife who was wheedling his injury benefits while he lay suffering with no family to comfort him. Or bury him with due respect if the time came.