Two

I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD when things began to fall apart.

It started when our beloved cat, Ginger, who I cared for so much, became pregnant. Ginger was my closest friend, a cat who purred (or rather snored) me to sleep each night.

When I came home from school one afternoon, I found out that Donald had put Ginger in a black plastic bag and thrown her away in the Woodstock garden, never to be seen again. After that, I went back to the gardens many times hoping to find her – at first I looked all over, but after a few times I would just sit on a bench hoping to see her again.

If I’d been irritated by Donald before, I hated him after that. I never really spoke to him again, except when I had to.

Just after that Donald told Joyce about my dad’s other sexual exploits. I remember the way she took this news: she was hysterical. She ran outside to the backyard toilet and tried to commit suicide by taking a handful of tablets.

I remember standing next to her, staring at the pills in her hand. I told her how sad I was about Ginger, and I said that I wanted to take a pill as well.

Joyce didn’t take the pills that day, and I sat with her as she calmed down. But she left Roger Street after that, and I never saw her again.

And oh, I was traumatised about Ginger. I cried for days on end. Donald had killed my dear cat, and I didn’t understand why.

So that’s how my sadness began.

One day, shortly thereafter, Oupa David left the house wearing a light-tan suit, and never came home.

No one told me what had happened. I kept asking where Oupa David was, and nobody told me.

On the day of his funeral, I was told to come with, and I still had no idea what was happening or why. I hid in Oupa’s bedroom, among his clothes, and I didn’t come out. I really thought he would come back. Eventually, Donald said they should leave without me. And they did. It was only years later that I found out that a car accident had ended his life.

After that, Ouma Florie went very still, like a ghost. She became tired and depressed. I don’t think she ever recovered from the shock of his death. There was no cooking, and for the first time that I could remember, the house was quiet.

A few months after Oupa David died, Ouma Florie passed away. She had a heart attack, I was told.

And then my dad got really depressed. He’d lost his grandparents who had always loved and supported him, and he’d lost Joyce. My dad got more drunk, more often, and he started leaving the house even more.

And then another rock hit.

My dad learnt that we had to leave the Roger Street house because the buildings in the area were scheduled for demolition. The government planned to construct new flats, which we were told to apply for. My dad didn’t bother though: he didn’t have a job, and thought he wouldn’t qualify for housing. He couldn’t have paid any rent anyway. He was too lost by then to even attend the community meeting at St Philip’s Church.

Things were going from bad to worse.

My sadness was growing. I was confused about having to leave home, but I thought that when we moved, I would stay with my dad. Because we belonged together.

But in those last few weeks at home in Roger Street, I didn’t know where he was most of the time, and I missed him.

And it was around then that he told me he couldn’t take care of me any more. I was so hurt. I was sure he was lying; that he just didn’t want to take responsibility for me.

I remember him taking me to look for my mother at the docks nearby, thinking she was still living there. He’d heard she was living with a new husband in an abandoned boat in the shipyard.

Several times we went there together. Several times he left me sitting for hours on a bollard that the boats were tied to, and I would swing my legs, eating my fish and chips carefully wrapped in paper, waiting for my mother to pick me up, like he’d said she would, or for my dad to return …

Nobody came.

Just the seagulls circling to steal my chips.

Each time, late in the day, one of the fishermen who’d stayed at our house would recognise me and bring me home to Roger Street where all around us the demolitions were starting.

This was my dad’s way of dumping me, though I didn’t know it at the time. There was weeks of this, and eventually the demolitions forced us out of our home in Roger Street. I don’t know where my auntie or Donald went.

After we left Roger Street, my dad found a shelter for us to stay in near the docks. We spent the next two nights there, the two of us. But I think he just tried to find somewhere safe to leave me. Because one day when I was at the shelter, he left for the day and never came back.

At eight years old, I had been abandoned.

I only knew one route to walk. I knew the way from the Roger Street house to the docks, and from there to the shelter. I walked that route, looking for my dad. I kept going back home, kept going back to Roger Street, although there was no one there any more. And every time I went back, the house was more broken down.

The shelter, the street and my broken home, the street, the shelter – that was the circle I would walk. Trying to find home. Trying to put the pieces back together again.

Trying to find my dad.

But with the house gone, it was like he had disappeared.

You had to pay to sleep in the shelter in those days. My dad had paid for just a few nights for me, and then my time was up. At the shelter, I met some kids, kids who knew the streets, who knew about life at the docks. Many of them lived under the bridge near the Gallows Hill Traffic Department in Green Point, and that is how I came to live under the bridge too – my home, on and off, for the next few years.

I wasn’t in school any more – how could I be? I spent a lot of time moving, roaming, searching. I met Donald again that way, since he was now living at the docks. We bumped into each other. He was still a drag queen, mostly always drunk and trying to survive in his own way, but the one thing about Donald was that he knew where the family was. He knew how to get information from the dock workers.

So it was Donald who found out where my mother was, where she lived with her own family. He told me to go look for her in Site C, Khayelitsha.

I didn’t know where to go, nor did I speak any isiXhosa. There was no one I could ask. I took the train to Khayelitsha, but I was too scared to get off there, so I returned to Roger Street to sit and hope, and then back to the bridge.

I made that aborted journey again and again.

Eventually I found my mom.

I was nine when I joined her, her husband, Richard, and their two sons, Brendan and Owen, in Khayelitsha.

I hardly knew my mom, but my expectation was that she would be happy to see me, that she would be nice to me and take care of me. She would see that I needed someone to take care of me. I was just a little child. But when I met her again, she was like a stranger.

It all turned around.

My mother had been happy without me. She was now respectably married, with her own life and family. She worked as a sales lady in a Muslim-owned furniture store in Kwa Trek, a shopping mall in nearby Mandalay.

There was shame I put on her from the first moment I arrived. She didn’t want to ‘look bad’ because she had a fatherless child, so she really didn’t want me there. She kept asking me if I’d found my dad, and she beat me when I said no.

She told her husband I was her brother’s child.

I had no friends in my mom’s house. My two half-brothers didn’t care about this Afrikaans-speaking ‘relative’. They considered me a bit of a reject and made life difficult for me. They were only a few years younger than me.

I looked at them and thought they had a great life. Their father, Richard, was a truck driver, and he came back from a trip just after I arrived, bringing them new clothes and sweets.

Richard wasn’t happy about me being around either. He never tried anything with me, but when she was at work, I could feel his eyes following me.

And the sandy, windy township was so strange compared to the suburb of Woodstock with its proper roads and shops, churches and schools and old brick houses. When I moved to Khayelitsha, shacks were being built and people were painting them to try and make them look good.

You’d hear koof-koof-koof in the middle of the night: people arriving from the Eastern Cape, building their shacks. Dogs barking, sand being moved. The more houses that went up, the more sand was dumped in the road, which had to be shovelled.

The language of the community was isiXhosa, and it sounded strange to me. I soon realised that the culture here was very different to what I was used to. When I settled into my mom’s Khayelitsha home, people would ask me where my mother was because my mother continued to tell people in the community that I was not her daughter. As a child, I didn’t know what to say. In my head, I would say, ‘My mother is here.’ But I knew my mother had told the community something else, so I just shut up.

The young girls who lived around us were also curious to know who I was – I didn’t speak isiXhosa, yet I looked like them. I had a massive Afro because my granny had always allowed it to grow – she used to plait my hair. My mother didn’t like my hair. This was not my home.

I remained in the back, outcast.

I had imagined that once I was with my mom, I would go straight back to school. But my mother seemed to take her time putting me into school. Instead, she got me to do labour around the house. And she would get angry when she thought I wasn’t cleaning the house well enough.

My mother had always been industrious, always a survivor, and so, on Saturdays, besides selling alcohol, she held a ‘Chinese cinema’ at the house, using a cloth and projector. She charged 50 cents per person, and a lot of kids came because they didn’t have television in their houses.

And when I arrived, the family gained a cleaner. Every day I had to walk and collect water from a communal tap far away and do chores in the house. The only benefit of my water-fetching was that I got to go outside. I met people and began recognising people and making friends. Gradually, over those first few days, I started to understand isiXhosa.

But life in my mom’s house soon became like hell. My mother kept a half-jack bottle of Smirnoff vodka in her purse when she went to work, and there was a lot of drinking in the house. When Richard returned from his driving trip, he got angry and beat her up. When he left for his next trip, she took out her frustration on me.

I saw a lot of violence in that household.

Every day when my mother went to work, she would leave me with my duties for the day. She would tell me to go buy meat in Kwa Trek, and then come home and cook umngqusho (samp and beans). The first time, since I didn’t know isiXhosa, I had to find somebody who could tell me how to get there.

In that house, cooking and cleaning had become my enslavement. I didn’t mind the cleaning so much, but I minded the way my mother was treating me. She chastised me for not knowing how to keep sand out of the house. Sand became my curse. I had come from living in town, where there were roads, concrete and brick buildings and gardens. Now, the cursed sands of the township forced me into sweeping the same area sometime three times an hour, just to keep my mother quiet.

Sometimes, she’d tell me to ‘spring clean’ before her husband came home from a driving trip. And when he did, without warning, I’d be woken up in the middle of the night to make tea, amagwinya, steam bread, anything.

There seemed no possibility of going to school, but I had learnt to write in my Chapel Street Primary School in Woodstock. My unhappiness pushed me to start writing a diary about my little life, which I kept in the bag that I travelled around with. My mother didn’t like me writing in my diary; it made her angry that I was wasting time when I could have been cleaning.

One day, when she sent me to Kwa Trek to buy chicken feet, she told me to find a barber and get my hair cut while I was there. This was a very sad moment for me. I had always loved my hair – I felt that I was myself because of my Afro. The other isiXhosa girls around seemed to like it, and I felt happy when they asked me if it was my real hair. It made me feel proud and important for a little while.

I cried while the guy cut my hair.

I asked myself why my mother was so vicious. Was it just that she was jealous of my big, fluffy Afro? I was being forced to be a Xhosa girl, as much as I didn’t want to be.

It was on that same afternoon that I went to buy the chicken feet in Kwa Trek that I realised how much my mother was using me. Walking from my mom’s house to the barber I could see the school. When I left the barber, feeling so hollow at the loss of my hair, I had to walk past the school again to get to Kwa Trek.

When was I going to go to this school like the other kids? I wondered. I felt like I was being treated differently and I didn’t know what I had done to deserve it.

When I got to the furniture store, my mother didn’t bother to introduce me to the boss. She just told to me how to prepare the chicken feet when I got home: how to boil the water, remove the dirt, skin and hair on the feet, and add beef stock. She instructed me to have the chicken-feet stew ready to eat by the time she got home from work – oh, and to make pap to go with it.

I was being kicked around and treated like a worthless being. I was waking up every day at 4am to make coffee and porridge for my mother and her husband, two people who didn’t care a thing about me.

I’d been told I was worthless twenty-four/seven, ever since I had arrived. I realised then that all my mother could offer me was a place to stay sometimes – this was not a family I could be part of. I stayed only for about two weeks. I went back to living under the bridge with the other street kids.

After a while, I thought I should go back to my mom’s house, to see if anything had changed. I remember arriving at her home; she was sitting inside the house on this big comfortable chair. She sat with an air of authority but she didn’t act surprised when I showed up. It was more like she was waiting for an explanation. I had hidden my diary in the suitcase with my half-brother’s clothes, and she’d found it and read it.

‘You’re back in my house,’ she said to me, ‘but you wrote all this stuff about me. So what do you want?’

She threw my diary in the fire. I watched it burn.

Then my half-brother Brendan and her husband Richard came out with a sjambok. I took the beating because I knew I wouldn’t be able to run and catch the next train to town. After she beat me, I didn’t even cry. After ten minutes, she commanded me to come help cook and clean up the kitchen.

All the time I was thinking about tomorrow: I would wake up, steal the R50 note I had seen inside, take a Coke, eat all the meat, and leave.

I was so tired of this woman. I was so angry with my mom. And so I became movable like the sand I was forced to sweep – leaving my mom, going back to Roger Street, back to the bridge, back to my mom. And every time I came back to Site C, she would beat me up.

Over and over again.

Like the sand, my sadness just kept coming back.