Ishmael Toffee (2 page)

Florence grabs one end of the sheet and pulls it loose, stripping the bed. As the sheet floats from the mattress a tiny pair of pale-pink panties fall to the carpet. The child’s. Florence bends down and picks them up, seeing the blood smeared on the front of the cotton panties, seeing dried spots of something else. Men’s stuff.

Florence knows what she is looking at. Has known for a long time. Known before Lucy Goddard found out and cut her wrists. Florence shuts her mind to it.  This is no business of hers.

She bundles the panties up with the bedding, ready to take it all to the laundry room, then she stops and stares out the window up at the dark rock of Table Mountain, not seeing it, back in the dining room that morning bringing breakfast in to Mr. Goddard who stood by the open patio doors, busy on his cell phone.

“We’re talking a full partnership, right? Okay. Okay. Well you know I’ve always loved Sydney, and this bloody country is getting more screwed up by the day.”

Mr. Goddard saw her and stepped out onto the patio, his voice trailing away, but she heard him saying something about a new start for him and Cindy.

Florence knows only too well what’ll happen. They’ll pack up and go to Australia. And what of her? She’s not getting any younger. Got no family. Got no pension. All that stands between her ending up back on the Cape Flats is this job, and she knows he’ll toss her out like trash, Mr. Goddard. That’s how they are, these white people. Had it happen to her often enough before. But now she’s too old to start again.

So, with no real plan in mind—not yet—Florence takes the child’s panties into the kitchen and puts them in a plastic bag. She locks the kitchen door and walks across to her room, hidden away behind the washing lines and the trash cans.

She unlocks her room—neatly made single bed, big old TV, hotplate by the sink—looking out the little window at the man working in the garden as she hides the panties in the closet beneath her small stack of folded sweaters.

Not sure how she’ll use them, but there’s no way she’s going to be thrown back into the world of that thing out there, shirt off as he chops down a shrub, crude prison tattoos crawling like eels over his wasted body

3

Ishmael sweats as he pulls out weeds. The garden of this house spreads across what must be two acres of land. But it hasn’t been looked after lately. Ugly things coming up between the flowers. It’s okay, he knows what to do.

“Hey! Hey you! Lunch.”

He looks up and sees the battle axe waving at him from the kitchen door. He washes his hands under a faucet—water warm from the sun—and pulls on his shirt, walking up to the house. The woman has left him lunch on a chipped plate lying on the gravel next to a dog’s water bowl. Hasn’t seen no dog. Doesn’t like dogs.

As he takes the food Ishmael spots the blonde kid peeping at him from one of the upstairs windows. She ducks away when he catches her eye.
They went out in the fancy car, the girly and her daddy, then came back maybe an hour ago, the white man watching as the kid walked into the house before driving away again.

Ishmael sits under a tree and eats with the spoon the woman left for him. Bent old spoon—discolored. Like him. Doesn’t matter. Lunch is chicken and brown bread and butter. The gravy is nice and he finishes all his food. Catches the kid checking him out from the house, ducking away again when he looks up.

He rinses the plate and spoon and leaves them by the back door. Strips off his shirt and goes back to work.

“What are those drawings on you?”

Ishmael turns and sees the girl standing watching him, way kids do. Not scared to stare.

“They like comics, missy.”

“My names not missy. My names Cindy.”

He says nothing to that, pulling out a handful of weeds. Looks back and she is gone. Suits him. Little blonde girlies and men look like him aren’t part of the same world.

But she comes back later, with a small pile of picture books, him taking a break, drinking some water. She sits next to him like a little madam. Opens one of the picture books. Drawings of people and animals and cars. Nice white people and little blonde kids like her.

“What’s your name?”

“Ishmael, missy.”

“I told you my name is Cindy.” She points to the words coming out the people’s mouths. “Read this to me.”

“Can’t you read?”

“Of course I can, but this word,”—tapping at the page—“I don’t know it.” Looking up at him. “Read it to me.”

“Ask the lady by the house.”

“She’s too busy. She chased me away.”

Staring at him with those eyes the color of the water in the big shiny swimming pool.

What the hell, he wasn’t going to bullshit. “I can’t read, missy.”

“You lie. Everybody can read.”

He shakes his head. “Not me, I can’t.”

Her eyes unblinking on him. “Didn’t your mommy and daddy teach you?”

“I never had no mommy and daddy.”

She stares at him. “Have they gone to heaven?”

He has to laugh. “Ja, someplace like that.”

Something crosses her face like a shadow and she nods. “My mommy has gone to heaven, too.” He can find no words to offer, then she looks bossy again. “And why didn’t you learn at school?”

“I never gone to no school.”

“Hey! Hey!” The battle axe again, standing like a teapot in the kitchen doorway. “You don’t get paid to sit on your backside. And Cindy, you come in now, hear? Come!”

The child closes the books and walks away with them, looking back at him a couple of times, like he’s a freak.
Ja, well he is what he fucken is.

Later the white man drives up again in his quiet car, walks across to Ishmael and gives him a hundred rand note. Tells him to come back tomorrow and every day the rest of the week. Ishmael nods, folds the note up into his pocket. Good money this, for doing your passion.

He washes at the faucet and pulls on his shirt, goes to where his backpack lies under the tree. A book—proper book with a stiff cover—leans up against the pack. It has smiling kids on the cover. He dries his hands on his jeans and opens the book. Sees a picture of an apple with some writing next to it. Then a picture of a ball, more writing. This is a learning book, he knows. A learning book on how to read.

He looks around for the kid, but can’t see it. He is scared to take this book. Next thing they tell him he’s stealing and they throw him back in Pollsmoor. But something about that kid—he doesn’t want to make her feel like shit by turning down this book.

 
Jesus.

What the fuck, he puts the book in his backpack and he walks down the long driveway to get him a taxi back to Tin Town.

4

Cindy is dreaming of Mommy when Daddy opens the bedroom door and wakes her. Dreaming of those mornings Daddy went to gym and she crawled into the big bed with Mommy, pressing her little body close to Mommy’s, feeling her warmth nice and toasty.

Daddy comes in and stands in the doorway and the light from the corridor spills all white into her room like milk, trickling over her Barbies on the shelf and lapping up against her bed. She plays that she’s sleeping, but that won’t fool Daddy.

Last week she stood on the little plastic chair with the butterflies on it and made herself tall enough to reach the key in the lock. A big key in her small hand, like the picture of Alice in the book Mommy used to read to her.

She turned the key and crawled deep into her bed, pulled the sheets and blankets over her head like a tent. Daddy came and banged and banged and banged and called her name, telling her to open the door.

She blocked her ears and hummed like a bee, but she could still hear Daddy. Heard him sitting down outside the door, crying. Next day when she unlocked the door to go make a pee he took the key away and she never saw it again.

Daddy comes over to her bed now and she hears his big shoes making whispers on the carpet.

He leans over her and says, “Cindy. Cindy.”

She smells something on him like horrible medicine, the way he always
smells
at night. He lifts her from the bed and carries her down the corridor, long like a choo-choo train, and takes her to the room where him and Mommy used to sleep. Where Cindy used to crawl into bed with Mommy and sometimes Mommy would tell her stories, even though it was morning and the sun was peeping up over the mountain. Stories about animals and jungles and little girls and little boys who were always happy and laughing and playing.

Daddy puts Cindy on the stool of Mommy’s vanity table, the one with pretty curly pink legs and little gold handles like flowers. Mommy’s make-up is still there, even though Mommy has gone to heaven. Cindy looks up and sees three Cindy’s and three Daddies in the mirror that’s got flaps like a bird.

Daddy opens a round tin of powder and Cindy smells Mommy and wants to cry. He dips the soft, puffy thing into the powder—the thing Cindy always called a marshmallow when she stood next to Mommy, watching her get made up before she went out with Daddy, as beautiful as a fairy queen. He rubs the marshmallow against Cindy’s face and the powder gets up her nose and she wants to sneeze.

Daddy twists a lipstick until it pops out all red and horrible and he brings it to her lips. She turns away and shakes her head, hiding her chin in her pj top.

“Come on, Cindy, don’t make Daddy cross,” he says. “Daddy needs you to be a big girl for him.” Cindy lifts her chin. “Make a kissy mouth.”

She does what he says, and feels her top lip tickle her nose. But it doesn’t make her want to laugh. Daddy puts the red lipstick on her, all smeary like a wax crayon. His hand is shaky and he goes over the edges and onto her face skin and when she looks at herself in the mirror she looks so horrible it makes her scared.

She closes her eyes and thinks of the little man in the garden. Hardly coming up to Daddy’s shoulder, small like a child.
Don’t trust people
, her mommy who has gone to heaven told her.
Be careful
. And the teachers at the kindergarten say,
watch out for strangers.

She doesn’t know why, but, as Daddy lifts her and carries her to the bed, she decides she is going to trust the little man with the pictures on him.

Daddy pulls down her pjs and she can hear his breath like a kettle and feel his scratchy face and she makes herself very tiny and goes far, far, away.

●

Ishmael Toffee feels the slime and the sludge suck at his feet, like it wants to pull him under and drown him. By Christ, he hates this landfill. Not the smell—spend half your life in prison cells crammed with dozens of men you don’t smell much no more. No, he hates the way it draws the human trash of Tin Town to it like a magnet—whole families up there during the day, foraging in the rotting waste—has them on their knees in the leavings of faraway white Cape Town, closest they will ever get to a decent life.

A light tower throws an orange glare across the vast wasteland of filth, turning it the color of tripe and guts. Bright enough for Ishmael to find what he needs: a jagged piece of rusted tin the size of a soup plate. Perfect for him to cover the hole in his shack and keep the fucken world out.

He grabs the metal and slides down the side of the dump, short legs scrambling to keep him upright. When he hits bottom he hears the screaming. First a baby, howling loud as a burned cat. Then a woman, going apeshit, like a TV preacher talking in tongues.

Coming round the corner he sees her—young still, maybe twenty—banging with her fists and kicking at the door of the shack across from his. Wailing and weeping something terrible. Ishmael wants no part of this, so he scuttles to his shanty, metal sheet under one arm, free hand already reaching into his trousers for the key to the padlock.

But she sees him and she’s coming on, all snot and waterworks, spitting on him as she shouts, “Please, uncle! Please help me!”

Even in this light Ishmael can see her face is swollen with more than cheap booze and backyard drugs. Somebody has smacked her, good and proper.

Light as a dancer, he ducks past her, but she gets a hand on his shirt and takes hold with the devil’s own grip. “Please, uncle, please.”

Ishmael swings, using an elbow to knock her hand away and lifts the jagged metal, ready to add to her wounds. “Get you away from me, you cunt!”

She’s down on one knee now, lifting her hands to him in prayer. “I’m begging, I’m begging. He’s got my baby in there. Listen. Listen to it!”

And she’s off again, sobbing, shouting. But she can’t drown the screaming of the child, cutting into Ishmael’s head like a bone saw, and all he wants is to put an end to that noise.

Ishmael runs at the shack door and kicks it, the wood splintering under his boot, breaking free of the lock and flying open. Inside a rubbish sits on a mattress smoking a meth pipe, a little baby lying on the floor crying for its mama, kicking its fat little legs.

The rubbish looks up at Ishmael, “The fuck you want?” Smoke coming out of him like his face is on fire.

Ishmael kicks him in that face, hears something snap, and says, “Move your rotten ass out here before I stick you dead.”

No knife to stick him with if this fucker pulls a gun, but the little chicken sees Ishmael’s eyes and those tattoos and he’s gone, nothing left but stinking smoke hanging in the candle light.

“Thank you, uncle,” the girl says, picking up the baby, but Ishmael is already out the door, getting his tin and going into his shack, locking up after him.

Using a rock he hammers the metal in place, covering the hole. When he’s done
he sits on the sand floor and watches the candle flicker and dance from the wind that finds its way through the holes in the sheet metal like a pickpocket.

He opens his bag and takes out the book the little white girly give him. Wipes his hands nice and clean on his jeans before he opens it.