I WAS ALWAYS SO ANGRY and upset. And I moved back and forth between Siviwe and Ons Plek.
Every time I was moved to Siviwe, Lea stayed at Ons Plek. She was committed to staying safe. She hardly every left the shelter. The times I came back to see her she always seemed like she was doing better. I loved her; she was like a little sister. Our relationship faded when I moved to Siviwe, but I always remembered that she was there at Ons Plek, trying to stay safe.
While I was at Siviwe, I tried to stay clean, but sometimes it just got too much for me, and I would go back to the streets. Occasionally I would go back to my mother in Khayelitsha. After a while, my circle of moving also landed me back at my dad’s house.
Even after everything that had happened, I still felt good about seeing him – I would come and go maybe once a month. He’d let me know when Beverly wasn’t there and I’d rock up. I just wanted a relationship, and it was important for me to spend time with him.
When she was around, he wasn’t happy to see me, but I’d have fun with him when Beverly wasn’t there. We’d eat soft white bread with lots of Rama margarine, Simba Mexican chilli chips and Oros orange squash. He was a fun person, quite cool. But my dad drank a lot after he was kicked out of Woodstock.
We also played a game, snakes and ladders – throw the dice and move your stone up or down. It was fun. Every time we ate together, we’d play that.
We didn’t discuss problems. I didn’t tell him that my mother didn’t want me – he couldn’t have known it would turn out the way it did. I never asked him for anything because we’d both lost a home and a family we loved.
Sometimes he would let me sleep overnight on the floor, but the next morning I would have to jump on the train back to town.
Sometimes I couldn’t sleep over, and would have to leave at night. I took many train rides at night, travelling back to Ons Plek, or to under the bridge. Train rides at night meant I faced being molested by guys who would drag me to the toilets and do things to me.
One time as I was on the train from Gugs, on my way with some other girls from Ons Plek to town for a Brenda Fassie show. I somehow didn’t feel fear when we were approached on the train by some aggressive men.
That night the train didn’t stop at all the stations so we couldn’t jump off. But it wasn’t me who was raped that time.
And I just kept moving, on the streets, sometimes in the shelter, back and forth to my dad’s house to flop on the floor for the night, then back to the streets. Always moving.
Because I was in and out of school all my childhood, I never attained enough education to move smoothly from one grade to the next; rather, I was always put in a special learner class for kids from the streets, like myself.
Eventually I ended up back in Siviwe, and after that I went to Batavia Secondary School, which was for special needs kids, because my reading levels and learning were low compared to other kids of my age. I settled down again, and tried to keep things steady.
Back in Gugs, my dad’s shebeen business didn’t do well, so Beverly went off to Joburg to deliver drugs. She got caught and was locked up, and that’s the last I ever heard about her.
With no income, my dad couldn’t pay his rent, so he went onto the streets to deal drugs. I don’t know where his son, Storm, was taken.
After that, I saw my dad sometimes on the streets in Salt River, near Siviwe. He didn’t always recognise me, but I still hung out with him before the Siviwe gates closed. Sometimes he would give me a R100 note, and I would brag about him to the other kids.
Every week the shelter gave us money to do our shopping at Shoprite, and we would sometimes see my dad on the streets begging. The other kids began to make fun of him, and this made me very angry.
The shelter had lots of girls who shared their beds: it was quite common among the shelter girls in order to secure a place in that society.
By now I had learnt only one way of dealing with my deep-seated feelings of hurt, batrayal and rejection: sex. I became this butch girl, and I took out my frustration on one of the girls at the shelter, a childhood friend. I found myself abusing her in the same way that I had been abused. She never seemed to complain about the way I treated her – she would get annoyed at me if I went quiet, if I didn’t touch her and seemed to not care. Then she’d become confused and jealous. It seemed to satisfy my anger.