Street Kid (25 page)

Everything had fallen out of my carrier bag in the struggle, and so I felt around on the ground to retrieve as much as I could. Then, somehow, I managed to stagger from the yard, down the alley, and out into the street. I don’t know how I got to the railway station but I managed
it somehow. It was the only place I could think of that would be open all night. If it hadn’t been for the fear coursing through my body, I don’t think I could have walked at all. But I didn’t feel the half of my injuries that night. All I knew was that I couldn’t go back to the yard. Not ever.

When I got to the station, I went straight to the ladies’ room and locked myself in one of the cubicles. I didn’t know if I wanted to retch, pee, or faint, but all three feelings were intense. I was palpitating with fear and sat, collapsed on the toilet, with my head on my knees. I don’t know how long I stayed there, but it was a long time.

Later, as I was standing at the basin trying to wash the blood off myself, I caught sight of my face in the mirror. It didn’t look like my own. It scared me to see it.

Chapter Twenty-one

A
fter the attack, I ceased caring what was to become of me. I no longer thought up ways to find food, or bothered to keep myself clean. My head wasn’t able to make any plans at all. If I’d been thinking clearly, I would probably have thrown myself under the first bus I saw. Instead, I just moved from hour to hour by some basic instinct. All I knew was that I had to get out of Hillbrow, to somewhere far away from the yard where I’d been raped.

Two days after the attack, I got on a train, without knowing or caring where it was going. My body was moving creakily, like an old woman’s, and even managing the step onto the train was agony. I got off at a place called Lenasia and dragged myself along the platform looking for a place to rest. And there I saw, in a deserted railway siding, an old yellow train carriage, rusty and dilapidated.

I climbed aboard, through a door hanging precariously by one hinge, and lay on the metal floor. I didn’t go anywhere or move from that position for many hours. Night blended into day and I was aware of nothing except the dark and cold of night-time, followed by the warmth of the sun in the middle of the day. As there were no windows in the carriage, it was like being inside a bean can. All the
seats had been ripped from it, leaving metal bars along the floor which I tried to squeeze myself between. But the ridges of the hard steel bore their imprint into my back and legs whilst the cold froze my bones stiff like dead twigs. I’d thrown my school case into an old water butt so I had no school cardigan now to keep me warm or to cushion my head.

Eventually, I had to get up and look for water. I made my way slowly out of the station and onto the dusty road. It was a few hundred yards to the nearest houses, and when I reached them I saw that I was in a place quite different from anything I’d seen before in Johannesburg. They were all painted different colours: yellows, pinks, and blues, a cheery note amidst the wretched poverty of the place. From some of the houses came the sound of a strange jangly music accompanying a high-pitched wobbling kind of singing.

Lenasia, I discovered, was an Asian community, and a world away from Hillbrow. Here there weren’t any shops or restaurants, just a smoky warren of dirt roads and tiny bungalows with corrugated iron roofs. It wasn’t as stark as Soweto, a township I’d seen from the bus, which was a grey wasteland of tin and mud shacks with no trees or plants, decoration or colour. Here the houses – although basic – were brightly painted, which gave the place a cheerier feel. But I could see it was still very poor and, as I passed by a derelict petrol station, I realized that I hadn’t seen a single car on the streets.

With the lack of any food to be had, I nearly perished in Lenasia. I did manage to find water, which, to my shame, I had to drink from the shared toilet at the end of the street nearest to my railway carriage. As I squatted in the little tin shack, which grew to be as hot as an oven by
midday, I spotted a little pot with a spout tucked in the corner. When I looked into it I found that it was full of water. Years later, I discovered that keeping clean was an important part of the religion of this community and that the water I drank from the pot’s spout, heated to almost boiling point in this cauldron of a tin shack, was used to wash a person’s private parts after going to the toilet. My drinking all the water must have caused an agony of irritation for those who lived in that street who found the pot empty every day.

If I hadn’t had such easy access to a toilet and drinking water, I wouldn’t have stayed in Lenasia at all, and that might have been better for me. As it was, I slowly sank into a listlessness brought on by starvation. I no longer cared what became of me.

I came to Lenasia in late March and stayed there for over two months. At first, I’d forage for scraps every day, choosing to comb a couple of the nearer streets during the quiet interval after people had left for work and the kids had gone to school. I didn’t feel strong enough to venture further afield. Sometimes I found a bag containing scraps of food that were completely foreign to me. But most days I had to go without. Any rubbish parcels I did find, I had to fight over with a pack of stray dogs, desperate, thin animals with sharp hackles and ribs that almost poked through their skin. I had to make sure I got to the parcels first before they’d been ripped apart.

Can a human being sink any lower than this?
I wondered.
I’m worse off than the stray dogs I find myself fighting with for chicken bones. At least they belong to a pack … I’m alone here and if I die no one will know. Maybe the dogs will fight over my bones too.

With these macabre thoughts came the most horrible nightmares – strange hallucinations brought on by my
starved state – in which monsters chased me and vile slimy creatures with my father’s eyes came out of the walls and loomed over my prone body. At some point I’d ceased bothering to go out to look for food at all. Lying there in my steel box, I didn’t even register whether it was night or day. And because of the hallucinations I was having, I hardly knew either if I was asleep or awake.

I must have had my thirteenth birthday in Lenasia, but I wasn’t aware of its passing. I’d got to a point now when I no longer felt hungry. It was as if I was floating somewhere under the water in a place of half-light, possessed by a deep lethargy, the rhythm of which only varied when the ghoulish waking dreams held me in their grip.

I don’t know what made me finally get up. It wasn’t as though I really cared what happened to me. I’m not even sure I understood how close to death I was. Now that hunger pangs no longer racked my body, it wasn’t something I was aware of any more.

I raised myself slowly, leaning on my elbows, and got to my knees.
Got to go back to the city. Got to wash … Got to get a job. Got to eat.
Stray thoughts floated around my head. I tried to get them into some kind of order, but it was like trying to catch flies in a box.

Without a mirror I couldn’t see what sort of state I was in, but I knew I must look a sight. There was blood on my shirt and on my face. I only guessed that it was from a nosebleed from the taste of it in my mouth when I sniffed. I tried running my fingers through my filthy hair, but it was too matted and came out in clumps when I tried. The skin on my hands, feet, and elbows was raw and peeling, and inside my mouth I could feel sore, ulcerous patches with my tongue.

I made my way out of the carriage and onto the street. It took a superhuman effort to put one foot in front of the
other, but I made progress nonetheless. It was as if I was on some sort of autopilot. Outside the station was a bus stop and a group of waiting people. When the bus came, I got on with them; when they got off, I got off too. My head was spinning and I managed to walk halfway along a street before realizing that I couldn’t see at all. I blinked my eyes for a moment, trying to focus, then my whole body buckled and I collapsed against a shop door and slumped to the ground.

The next thing I knew I was gazing up into a woman’s face. She looked concerned and was asking me something in Afrikaans. I couldn’t answer her and then she really seemed worried. She went to fetch the shop assistant and together they helped me inside and onto a rest bed in the back room. After I’d drunk a little water, the shop assistant spoke to me:

‘Is there anyone we can telephone? Have you got a parent we can contact?’

‘We don’t have a telephone.’

‘Well, if you give me your address we’ll go and find your mother.’

I didn’t know what to say then. I only had the Newlyn Mansions address, so I gave her that.
They’re going to find out now that I’m all alone, that there’s nobody living there.

And then, an hour later, my father arrived.

I remember nothing of the next few weeks: who nursed me or how they did it. I can’t imagine Freda or my father feeding me soup from a spoon, or helping me to the bathroom. I think I might have been at Cherie’s for a while, before being taken to Freda’s flat in Hopkins Street, as I dimly recollect hearing a woman’s voice saying ‘Let’s soak a cloth in vinegar. It might bring the fever down.’

When my fevered head finally cleared of its swarm of muddled sounds and dreams, I found myself lying on a sofa in an unfamiliar room. I was on my own. I dimly remembered being collected by my dad and taken somewhere in a taxi so I guessed that this was where he was living. I was too limp to feel nervous or even curious. It must have been early afternoon as I could hear the noise of children coming home from school. I drifted off to sleep and when I next woke it was early evening. I knew immediately I wasn’t alone in the room.

‘Oh, you’re awake.’ Freda’s cold tones made me tense up inside as instantly and involuntarily as a mollusc reacts to an unpleasant invader.

I hadn’t seen Freda for about ten months. When we were sharing living space at the Allendene I’d hardened myself against those knee-jerk feelings of trauma which always threatened to throw me around like a puppet. I hadn’t exactly grown inured to her malice but had found a way of blocking it out. It hadn’t been so hard as she’d hardly been around and, when she was, she mostly ignored me. Now though, unprepared as I was, I couldn’t protect my soft underbelly quickly enough. Just seeing Freda’s pinched, hateful face was like being thrown across the room by a sharp cut to the solar plexus. I felt violently sick.

When my father came home, much later that evening, I had retreated to a state of weakness, caring about nothing, so seeing him didn’t have much effect on me. Like Freda, he barely looked at me. At one point she had brought me a cup of soup and a slice of bread but beyond that gesture, it was as if I wasn’t there.

For the next three months, from June to September, I lay on Freda’s sofa recuperating. I had no choice but to help myself to eggs and bread from the kitchen and borrow
Freda’s soap when I bathed, though I was always nervous about doing so. Sometimes I dipped my finger in her bottle of shampoo or jar of face cream, but I was always careful to wipe any drips or stickiness from the rim afterwards.

I didn’t know why Freda had taken Dad back, or why she put up with me in her flat. It wasn’t as though my father was any nicer to her. He was still spending the daytime with Cherie and would talk to her on the telephone in the hall every evening after he’d come in. Presumably, for form’s sake, Cherie hadn’t wanted him to move into Newlyn Mansions with her, so Dad had tracked down Freda to provide him with a bed.

In spite of everything, Freda still felt some attraction to my father and wanted to see if she could win him back. I watched her vain attempts to try and look attractive and fashionable, but nothing ever looked right on her. She’d changed the way she did her hair, from the tight curls and Kirby grips, which women had worn in our Manchester neighbourhood, to an even less becoming backcombed style. She’d tried to go blonde but the dye had made her dark hair turn a nasty mustard colour, and the hair was so thin that you could see her scalp through the puffed-up beehive on top. Worse still was how badly the style suited her sharp, sulky face. I didn’t wonder that my dad barely looked at her when he came in.

‘How was your day?’ she’d say.

‘So-so,’ was the only response she got.

My dad was particularly jumpy in the flat at Hopkins Street. It can’t have just been that he was penned in with Freda and me. There was definitely something else bothering him. I wondered if the school board had been on his tail again, otherwise he wouldn’t have asked Freda to put me up. But I sensed that he had other, bigger worries.

He paced up and down the apartment, and would check the post nervously. He peered through the glass doors in the lounge at the street below any time he heard a noise outside. Whenever I could, I escaped to the balcony and let Freda and him have the room to themselves.

Little by little, from muttered phone conversations and the odd thing he let slip to Freda, I picked up what Dad was up to. It was more than a year since the closure of the Triangle Band Healing Sanctuary, after which he’d been hissed off the platform at one of his Spiritualist events. Realizing that they had been supporting a con man with a tendency to seduce the more vulnerable members of the congregation, the Spiritualist church in Johannesburg had banned him from preaching. Never one to feel shame or sit licking his wounds for long, Dad was soon cooking up new business schemes with Cherie.

One of these was a ‘spiritual postal service’, which involved placing advertisements in the local papers. There was no shortage of lonely old ladies, lovelorn spinsters, or bereaved people who’d willingly send postal orders to my father. In return, he’d send them a taped message from a departed loved one, or a personal horoscope. I hated to see my father prey on these sad, vulnerable people.

It was the beginning of summer by the time I was well enough to leave the flat. It had been a difficult few months. I felt so powerless and weak, and at the mercy of Freda and my father’s moods. Neither of them ever hit me now – maybe they thought I was too big at thirteen for that – but it was hard sharing a living space with two people who never so much as looked at me. They hadn’t once asked where I’d been living for the nine months I’d been sleeping rough. I think each presumed I’d been living with the other. Anyone else would have shown some curiosity, however
unfeeling; but Dad and Freda almost enjoyed demonstrating that they had absolutely no interest in me. It made me horribly on edge; and although there was some respite when they both left for work, I soon felt my stomach tensing again, waiting for their return each evening.