Andrew Prior

Andrew Prior was born in Springs, South Africa, and currently lives in Cape Town. He is an investment banker. His interests include global politics, economics, religion and sport. He says of ‘Changing Perceptions’: ‘If I did not write about the urban anxieties of white working-class people in East Rand mining towns during the 1950s, nobody would. So I wrote my short story.’

Changing Perceptions

She was a gaunt, fierce-looking woman with a humourless beaky face, spectacles and the penetrating eyes of a witch. Her face was painted in lipstick, mascara and eye shadow. Someone had told me that people begin to look like the jobs they do. She was about forty, old, and an example of how physically ugly a person’s face becomes when they do certain jobs. Her name was Mrs Havenga. She was not a witch. She was an abortionist with thin red lips.

I recalled hearing the parish priest preaching against abortion one Sunday morning. According to him there was no worse sin.

Mrs Havenga had come into the pharmacy and asked for me. She wanted two bottles of Corvette mixture and gauze. ‘We have no gauze,’ I said. She clicked her tongue. ‘I need it now.’

I was sixteen years old, smooth chinned, ginger haired, freckle faced, little more than a boy but wearing a white coat and a blue tie. Customers coming into the pharmacy did not see an immature adolescent but a confident and competent medical professional. ‘I don’t go to doctors,’ one old man had said to me. ‘You work with pills and potions. Doctors don’t. You know more about medicine than they do, that’s why I come to you.’

I had started in the pharmacy three months earlier, too young to go to university. I had matriculated at fifteen, not because I was more intelligent than any of my contemporaries (although I suppose there must have been something of that) but because I had been put up two years when I first went to school. ‘You spoke all the time, precocious brat you were, you spoke back, and you were too big for your boots. But the teachers knew how to handle boys like you,’ my mother had told me. ‘Put them up a year or two and the older boys would lick you into shape.’

I went to the class of the older boys who were supposed to keep me under control. I don’t know if they did, but given this early start it meant that I had learnt everything that I cared to learn or that the school could teach me by age fifteen and so, after the usual examinations, I was pushed out to find a job.

The local rag, the Brakpan Herald, ran an advertisement that caught my eye. Pharmacist’s Apprentice Wanted, it said. The Herald’s news consisted almost entirely of weddings, funerals, kittens in trees and the occasional ‘native on a bicycle’ knocked down by a car. This job could be for me, I thought. I washed my face, brushed my hair, got on my bicycle and rode to the pharmacy.

Jim Vintner was behind the counter writing something in a ledger. Everybody in the town knew Mr Vintner. He was a forty-year-old war veteran with a sharply trimmed moustache. Not only was he the most well-known pharmacist in town but he was also the mayor and his photograph appeared regularly in the Herald.

‘Mr Vintner?’ I said.

He kept writing. He asked, ‘Yes? What can I do for you?’

I told him my name. ‘I’ve come to be your apprentice.’

He looked up quickly and our eyes met. I held his glance. He nodded his head as if he was thinking something about me. ‘Got matric?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir. Last year.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Sixteen, sir.’

‘Who are your parents?’

I mentioned my mother’s name. ‘My parents are divorced,’ I added.

‘She’s the one who works for the church?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir.’

He nodded. He probably detected in me the precociousness and self-confidence he needed in his pharmacy. ‘Come in on Monday morning,’ he said. ‘The hours are 8.30 to 6.’ He mentioned a sum. ‘It’s the minimum monthly wage,’ he added. ‘If you’re any good you’ll be paid more after two months. If not, you’ll find yourself looking for another job.’ I thanked him and was on my way out of the shop when he said, ‘And buy a tie. We always wear ties here.’

On Monday morning he was there to greet me. He gave me a white coat. ‘Good, you’re wearing a tie,’ he said. ‘From now on you wear this coat as well. You’re now an apprentice pharmacist. Learn everything I know and you’ll never go hungry. You will get rich and may become the mayor of the town.’ I believed him. He must have been like me when he was my age.

For the first month I washed bottles, learnt how to read doctors’ prescriptions, how to mix potions and, more importantly, how to listen to customers telling of their aches and pains, and getting some idea how to treat them. I began to shave once a week. With his mayoral duties Jim Vintner was rarely seen at the pharmacy but that didn’t concern him. I was there, I was young, bright, inventive and seemingly capable of solving any problems that came my way. If I didn’t know a solution to a problem I thought one up. For the first time in my life I had met somebody who approved of me being too big for my boots. If I couldn’t think up a solution to a problem I would wait until Jim Vintner reappeared, hear an explanation from him, and so I learnt quickly. The teachers were right, I was too big for my boots.

Jim Vintner dispensed advice and medicines. ‘What you hear and see in the pharmacy stays in the pharmacy. Remember that.’

I was puzzled. ‘Such as what?’

‘Ours is a small town. Strange things happen. Things that you wouldn’t think could happen. But they do. You will find out about them and when you do you keep your mouth shut. Understand?’ I nodded.

I soon discovered that when people spoke about illnesses and I listened sympathetically it was often sufficient to bring about a cure and if I gave them a medicine it would be in a bottle with their name written on the label and the instruction take two teaspoonfuls three times a day. And the content of the medicine? Usually a stomach antacid and a mild laxative. It worked, for the most part. Perhaps it never healed anything but it made them feel better and they often came back for more. After two months Jim Vintner increased my monthly wage.

Women’s ailments were another matter. When worried-looking women came in they drew me to one side and began speaking to me of problems proper to the female sex. I looked and listened, my ignorance concealed by knowing nods. My knowledge of gynaecology was limited. I was brought up by my divorced mother and an aunt, a matron in a hospital. On our bookshelf were books, encyclopaedias mostly, which I had read from cover to cover. One day, when I was thirteen, a thick, hard-covered book had appeared, Gynaecology: A Medical Textbook. I was curious. I read it, trying to make sense of the arcane terminology. I puzzled over the photographs of diseased female genitalia and never having seen a healthy naked woman I suppose my idea of femininity was forever tainted by this gynaecological nightmare of a book. The book, I later discovered, was obtained from my aunt, the hospital matron, and was my mother’s attempt to teach me the facts of life.

‘I can send the gauze to you this afternoon,’ I said.

Mrs Havenga’s mouth turned down and she seemed to be doing calculations in her head. ‘If it doesn’t arrive I will take my business elsewhere. Give me a ring when it comes.’ I wrote down her phone number. Her thin lips became straight lines, ‘Mix the bottles of Corvette. I need them now.’

Taking her business elsewhere was an empty threat. Jim Vintner had told me that she would never get the Corvette mixture anywhere else. No pharmacist in town would dare provide it. Its sale would have to be recorded in the poison register and it couldn’t be sold without a doctor’s prescription. Jim Vintner had no problem with this. He was selective about what he recorded. I suppose it helped being the mayor of the town. He did what other pharmacists and medical practitioners were afraid to do. He probably pulled strings when something went wrong. Corvette was Mr Vintner’s special mixture. Its sale was never recorded.

Mrs Havenga poured scorn on the medical profession. ‘They won’t help women in need. They refuse to solve women’s problems.’ She respected Mr Vintner though. He knew, she said, how women worked and what they wanted.

‘Why Corvette?’ Mr Vintner had asked me on one of those rare days that he appeared in the dispensary. He had been in the navy during the war and liked to come out with nautical terms and insights to test me out.

‘I don’t know.’

‘A battleship is a destroyer. A Corvette is a small battleship. A Corvette is a baby destroyer.’ He then told me the formula and I wrote it in my recipe notebook. It contained something called ergotamine.

‘How does it work?’ I had asked.

‘It causes uterine contractions and starts the process of expelling whatever is in the uterus. Sometimes additional procedures are necessary.’ I wasn’t sure what Mr Vintner was saying but I got the gist. I mixed the potions and gave the bottles to Mrs Havenga. I wondered if I should have a problem doing this after what I had heard from the church pulpit. But something wasn’t clear to me and, so in the meantime, I decided to do what Jim Vintner had instructed. ‘It mustn’t be seen to be coming from this pharmacy,’ he said. The bottles were not labelled, they had no instructions. I supposed Mrs Havenga sorted out the ‘additional procedures’.

I told Mrs Havenga the price, ten pounds. She snorted, ‘Daylight robbery!’ She paid. A lot of money I knew, over half of what I earned in a full month but Mr Vintner was a slick businessman. ‘Nothing for nothing,’ is what he always said.

Some days later I saw two women hesitating at the front door of the shop. They made as if they were checking out items in the window. I examined them. They were Mrs McSwiney and her daughter Petal. For a while they hovered there, glancing from time to time into the shop, while I was handing over medicines to a customer. They came in and I heard Mrs McSwiney ask for Mr Vintner. ‘He’s at a Council meeting,’ she was told. She signalled with her head, ‘Then I want to talk to him.’ I rang up the customer’s bill, gave him the change and Mrs McSwiney pushed her reluctant daughter from behind and the two of them stood in front of me. I knew the McSwineys from the local church. ‘God blessed them with a large family,’ the parish priest used to say. ‘Irish,’ said my mother with a sniff, clearly disapproving of their prolific reproduction.

I never knew the exact number of Mrs McSwiney’s children but I thought it was about seven or eight. It kept changing. Additions had arrived regularly. She had a large face, unkempt hair, and she wore a cotton dress that clung to the soft folds of her ample figure; on her feet were flat tennis shoes although I am sure she had never held a tennis racquet in her life. She had the beaten-down look of a woman who had long since given up trying to look attractive. She was married to Arthur McSwiney a heavy, fierce-faced, boilermaker who did night-shift work at the smelters. Arthur was a wife beater. And, I am sure, his children also got their fair share. He wore goggles and rode a Harley Davidson motorbike with a sidecar in which were often to be seen Mrs McSwiney and two or three of their children. Looking at Mrs McSwiney I wondered how Arthur McSwiney found the enthusiasm to do what was needed to make so many children. Then the new arrivals stopped. Arthur McSwiney had either lost interest or found entertainment elsewhere.

He hadn’t changed his behaviour. On Friday nights, pay nights, he would join his mates in the bar at the Station Hotel then arrive home having spent most of his week’s earnings and there beat his wife and terrorise his children. I knew about this because one evening Petal had called around at our house with a black eye and in a state to say that her mother had told her to ask my mother for a loan. My mother was indignant. Her father had been a Scot. She had spent her own life scrimping and saving. ‘I would rather starve than belittle myself to ask for a loan,’ she had said. If she could do it, why couldn’t others? ‘Besides,’ she had added, ‘Why don’t people with large families think about this before they breed like rabbits?’

Anyone who dared ask my mother for a loan was sent away with a flea in her ear. And that is what had happened to Petal that night. Harsh on Petal, I thought. It was hardly her fault.

They, mother and daughter, now stood in front of me. I looked at Petal. She was sullen and silent. Perhaps she was recalling the treatment she had got from my mother. She was fourteen, pretty, and had clearly done her best to make herself look attractive but apart from her clear complexion and dark hair she hadn’t succeeded. Her tattered skirt and blouse had seen too many washings and an odour of poverty seemed to cling to her and her mother.

‘How are you, Mrs McSwiney?’ I asked. I nodded at Petal.

‘Not good,’ Mrs McSwiney said crossly. I supposed she was Irish like her husband but she spoke with the flat accent of any other Brakpanite. ‘I want to tell you something.’ She signalled with her head to the end of the counter away from the customers. We made our way there.

‘How may I help you?’ I asked.

Not convinced she was out of hearing she placed her hands on the glass counter top and leaned over. ‘We have a problem. It’s this Petal here.’ She lowered her voice to a whisper and I caught a whiff of halitotic breath. ‘She’s fourteen and started her periods a year ago. Now she tells me she hasn’t had a period for two months.’ She looked at me as if testing my knowledge of female menstruation. I looked blankly back at her. I had discovered that when people want to communicate confidential information to you it paid not to say too much. Besides I knew that there was a connection between menstruation and other female conditions but what that was, was unclear to me. I stayed silent.

She added, ‘I’ve had my fair share of children. So I know what this is all about.’ It was Mrs McSwiney’s turn to be silent. I didn’t know what it was all about but she seemed to assume that I did. ‘If you don’t know the answer to a question, always ask another question,’ had been one of Jim Vintner’s first instructions.

I asked, ‘Oh? What?’

Petal had stepped back and stood some distance from us as if she wanted no part in this conversation. Mrs McSwiney hissed, ‘She’s got herself into the family way.’ She paused and glared at me as if I was the one responsible. ‘And after all I’ve done for her. Even sent her to the convent. What will the nuns say?’

I knew this wasn’t quite as she said. My mother was in on the gossip circle of the town. I knew about Petal and her sisters because my mother had told me. They did go to the convent. The nuns accepted girls from Catholic families who couldn’t afford the fees and treated them as charity cases. The McSwineys were in this charity category.

Once at the convent my mother was again appalled. This time because the McSwiney girls didn’t have the proper school uniforms, ‘That Arthur McSwiney drinks away the money he should be using to clothe his children!’

So she organised a jumble sale in aid of the convent and she handed the money over to the Mother Superior. ‘Buy the McSwiney girls school uniforms,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell anybody where it came from.’ But I knew. My mother had no problem talking about these things at the dinner table.

As I pondered what Mrs McSwiney had said I knew that this wasn’t a case I could handle. For once I felt out of my depth. I said, ‘Mr Vintner is not in. He deals with these problems.’

She fixed angry eyes on me. ‘We can’t wait for Mr Vintner. My husband will kill her if he finds out.’ Knowing Arthur McSwiney, I knew this was no empty threat. He was capable of doing just that. And to the boy responsible.

She leaned further across the counter and I caught another blast of her breath. I had difficulty standing my ground. She hissed, ‘You’ve got to sort it out.’

I said, ‘I’ll give her something.’

‘Well don’t just stand there. Will you be after hurrying up, now!’ The way she said that surprised me. We didn’t talk like that in our town. I looked at Petal who was still standing away from us, she caught my eye. I turned and went into the dispensary. When I came out I had a bottle of corked, unlabelled, Corvette mixture. Mrs McSwiney looked at it suspiciously. ‘Will it work?’

I had no idea. But Mrs Havenga had bought it. I said, ‘It’s Mr Vintner’s mixture.’

‘I’ll take it then.’

‘Anything else you’d like?’ I asked. Mr Vintner insisted that we always ask that question. He said if each one of us behind the counter sold one extra item to each customer it would do the pharmacy the world of good. ‘No, hurry up and wrap it. Arthur will be home soon and he doesn’t like to wait for his dinner.’ I wrapped the bottle in brown paper and handed it over.

‘She must take two tablespoons when you get home. And then two more every two hours.’ I added, ‘That’ll be five pounds, please.’

Mrs McSwiney pulled back. She looked as if someone had punched her in the face. ‘Five pounds!’

Suddenly she had forgotten about our quiet conversation in the corner and was making it a public affair. ‘I don’t have that sort of money,’ she said clasping the wrapped bottle close to her sagging bosom as if she had no intention of handing it back. She said, ‘This girl here is not saying who did it. But he’ll pay up when I get to know. Otherwise my Arthur will get after him. Arthur will sort him out.’

I wanted her out of the shop. I said hurriedly, ‘I’ll put it on the book.’ The book was the place where the purchases of those without money were recorded. Each purchaser was allowed only one entry. It had to be cleared before any further purchases were made. It worked.

What Mrs McSwiney had said had made me curious. This was a small town and already my brain was searching for the male perpetrator. I knew of a number of possible candidates among my friends. I wanted to be around when he came in to settle the McSwiney account. I added, ‘Tell him to ask for me when he comes in to pay.’

Mrs McSwiney turned to her daughter, ‘And you come with me, my girl. You haven’t heard the last of this.’ She swept out of the shop, her daughter two paces behind her. Petal glanced over her shoulder, caught my eye and she communicated a message to me which I could not decipher. I heard the nagging continue even after they had left the shop.

The next morning I was in the dispensary when Jim Vintner walked in. Everyone knew when he arrived. He came in a flood of loud greetings and questions about how the shop was doing. The mood changed. We became busier, fluttering around doing what we had left for later. He strode into the dispensary to check up on me. The dispensary was, after all, the most important part of the shop. I showed him the prescription register, which recorded the dispensing of the previous day. He examined it. ‘Looks shipshape. Anything else you sold?’

‘Yes, two bottles of Corvette to Mrs Havenga.’

‘What price?’

‘Ten pounds. She paid.’

He nodded with approval. ‘I knew you would do well here,’ he said. ‘Anything else?’

I wondered if I should tell him about the bottle I had sold to Mrs McSwiney. Perhaps Petal’s message to me was that I shouldn’t tell anybody about this. Or was there something that I had missed? I said, ‘Another bottle to Mrs McSwiney. No label on it.’

Jim Vintner’s eyes widened. ‘What’s happened to her? Had enough breeding and seen the light?’

‘For her daughter,’ I said. ‘The oldest one.’

‘Oh? How do you know?’

‘She twice missed her periods.’

‘Have you learnt the facts of life or did Mrs McSwiney tell you that?’

‘She told me.’

‘So you’ve learnt something. The Corvette may or may not work. Nobody knows. Sometimes these things just sort themselves out. Did she pay?’

‘I put it on the book.’

Jim Vintner scowled. ‘We can kiss that money goodbye.’

He was proved wrong.

The next afternoon, Friday, I heard the roar of a motorbike outside the shop, the motor was cut and I looked through the opening from the dispensary. A massive figure strode bowlegged into the shop, his metal-tipped boots clanking on the wooden floorboards, his ample body swaying from side to side. On his way home from the smelters, I thought. His face was smeared with soot, his goggles were pulled up over his head, and he was wearing grease-stained overalls and a thick woollen overcoat. A lighted cigarette dangled from his lips. I wondered why he was here. He said something to one of the women assistants. She put her head around the corner of the dispensary. ‘He’s asked for you.’ I was puzzled. I knew why he was here but I had narrowed down the list of prospective payees. This man hadn’t been one of them.

‘Good afternoon,’ I said.

‘Here’s the five pounds.’ From his back pocket he extracted a wad of notes, peeled off one and handed it to me. I took it, opened the loan book, and next to the McSwiney entry I wrote ‘Paid’, and signed my name. ‘It worked,’ he said. He screwed his eyelids as the cigarette smoke drifted upwards. He added, ‘And you’ll keep your mouth shut.’

I looked more closely into his face. His presence was an admission. His appearance confirmed it. I could smell his body, a sharp underground odour that mixed with the reek of dirt and something I could not identify. Knowledge rose within me like the water level in a mine dam after a summer Highveld thunderstorm. Behind the grime and soot I saw hanging jowls, huge neck, small piggy eyes, and the lascivious look of the child molester. He turned on his heel and stamped wide-legged out of the shop. I moved to where I could see out the front door and I watched while he adjusted his goggles, heaved a massive leg over the Harley Davidson, sat down with a thump, gave the bike a kick start, engaged the gears and bike and sidecar roared off.

It couldn’t be like that, I said to myself. I had expected one of the boys of the town, almost certainly someone I knew to walk in, ask for me and hand me the five pound note. I would have given him a knowing wink. But it hadn’t turned out like that. Something had shattered my perception of the world. The world doesn’t work this way, I kept repeating. Or perhaps it did. I thought of Petal. The way she had turned her eyes to me, signalling something. It came to me. I now knew what it was. This was one of those events that Jim Vintner told me I would learn about but would have to keep to myself.

‘May I disturb your daydreaming?’

I turned and looked into the face of a woman. It took me some time to adjust to her. I knew her. She came regularly into the shop. But she had changed. She was now like any other woman from the town who bought from the shop, neatly dressed, carefully made up, the sort of woman you would find helping my mother at the charity sales in the parish hall. She looked at me narrowly and then her smile brightened. She had a friendly face. She seemed different but perhaps she had been like this all the time. I had her phone number if any of my women customers needed her. I began to doubt what the parish priest had said about sin and abortion.

‘Mrs Havenga,’ I said, ‘How may I help you?’