LITMIR.BIZ

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Jan Ellis pudding and Ouma Kitta’s home-made bread with thick slices of goat’s milk cheese and fig jam!

      Her tummy growled when she thought of the food. Here at the home she never felt really full. The food simply stuck in her throat. Either because she was convinced that the other children were staring at her, or because she was too homesick to eat. And when she did manage to eat, the helpings were so small that she was still hungry when she got up from the table.

      At night she sometimes dreamed of food, and in the morning Killer would tell her that she’d made weird chewing noises in her sleep. At school she saw the children from the home ask the town children for food, or stealing or simply taking their food.

      Once she discovered someone’s sandwich on the hand basin in the toilets. Only one bite had been taken from it and she wanted it so badly that she waited until the last girl had come out of the cubicles before hiding it under her jersey. But in the end she was too ashamed to eat something that another person had chucked away. It made her feel like trash herself.

      Sometimes she stood behind the tuck shop during break just to breathe in the warm smell of hotdogs and pies. At other times, when her hunger was almost unbearable, she avoided the tuck shop. What if she couldn’t control herself and ended up stealing something too?

      Auntie Whiskers’ breath smelled like old cheese. Luckily her eyes were nearly always glued to the TV screen when she spoke to Vaselinetjie.Every matron had a diary in which she wrote down everything for which the head, the other matrons or the children might report her to the ANC.

      Pictures of Steve Hofmeyr adorned Whiskers’ diary and all her files. She told the girls she would like to have his babies and made them listen to his CDs. Then Killer would make a face at Vaselinetjie and Albie behind her hand and pretend to get a violent stomach cramp and throw up. It was their private joke.

      “Vaselinetjie, have you seen your social worker yet?” Whiskers asked now.

      “No, auntie,” she answered, panic setting in.

      “She means, yes, matron. Mr Kedibone has called her in. She just doesn’t know he’s her social worker.” Killer poked Vaselinetjie in the ribs.

      Vaselinetjie remembered the black man with the scar on his forehead. All through the interview she had done her best to ignore it. The boys said someone had attacked him with an iron bar, and then he had killed the man and buried him in his back yard and built a chicken coop over the grave so that the police dogs would smell nothing but chicken shit.

      “Why do I need a social worker?” Vaselinetjie whispered.

      “Vaselinetjie, are you really such a fool? Wake up, girlfriend! And get with it!” Killer declared impatiently and stalked off.

      After this Vaselinetjie became even more withdrawn. She spent most of the time lying on her bed and at school she sat in a toilet cubicle during breaks with her feet against the door to keep it closed. If Killer thought she was too stupid to be her friend, why would the other children want to be friends with her?

      Nazrene and her group kept pestering her. “Hey, girl, don’t you owe me something?” Nazrene called over the wall while balancing on the cistern of the cubicle next door.

      “Voertsek!” She was no longer afraid of the Diergaardt girl who refused to leave her alone. Her sorrow was far greater than her fear.

      “Are you upset because you’re an orphan?”

      “What do you mean, orphan?”

      “Orphans are unwanted children who belong to Madiba and live in his orphanage so they won’t sniff glue and whore on street corners and upset the foreign investors who come here from overseas. And you’re one of them, you and all the other welfare cases from the home, so pay up, nè?”

      Vaselinetjie had never heard the home being described in those terms. The welfare lady who had brought her there had mentioned that it was not an ordinary school hostel, but the word “orphanage” had never been used.

      “YOU’RE A LIAR, NAZRENE!” she yelled and jumped up, but a small, nagging voice was speaking inside her.

      Could it be true?

      She had wondered why this hostel was so different and why the children didn’t go home for weekends like the boarders in Upington. Now she had to find out – from Nazrene of all people – that she and the other children in the home were nothing but discarded trash!

      “I said voertsek!” she shouted and kicked the door with all her might. Nazrene and her friends laughed and left, shouting in-

      sults.

      No wonder everyone had lost patience with her for not knowing what was what! Everything she had heard was suddenly falling into place.

      Vaselinetjie began to sob bitterly. So it had never just been a case of being sent to a school with boarding facilities. She had been sent away to an orphanage and her grandparents must have known all along! She doubled over on the toilet and held her stomach as if she wanted to squeeze the pain from her insides, but the ache grew steadily worse.

      She understood now that the government looked after them and paid the matrons to check them over for lice and open sores. And if a child had weeping sores that wouldn’t heal, and coughed and kept everyone awake at night, the matrons had to wear rubber gloves. Then the head asked the president for extra money to look after the sick child. Those children had the whispered disease. They carried the ghost on their backs.

      The bell announced the end of second break but Vaselinetjie continued to cry in her cubicle. “No, Oumie,” she sobbed, “noooo, I don’t want to stay here!”

      For the first time she understood why every child had a social worker. It was their voices she heard on the intercom in the afternoons, summoning the children to their offices on the ground floor.

      The social workers filled in forms that said what you were like, whether you were rotten to the core or whether there was still hope for you. They also recorded whether you’d been swearing and whether you were sorry about the language you’d used and who was going to pay for the windows you smashed when you kicked them in a fit of rage.

      “It’s all about rands and cents,” the matrons kept telling the children, because that was what the head told them.

      And if you’d been doing you-know-what and you had a bun in the oven, the social worker arranged for you to pop it out somewhere else. Then you missed a lot of school and usually failed your grade.

      Everything she had learned during the past months was whirling through her mind.

      “Don’t be surprised if the social workers cancel their appointments with you. They can’t keep up with the new arrivals. They spend their days on the phone, trying to persuade people to donate soup ingredients and nappies. Or even worse, begging them to take a child or two off our hands for the holidays,” Whiskers had warned them only the week before.

      Vaselinetjie’s social worker had sent for her. The only black men that Vaselinetjie had ever come across were the ones that used to sit on the stoep of the off-sales at Keimoes on a Saturday morning. Tswanas. They were seasonal workers, Oupa had told her. Don’t go near them, he’d warned. They don’t speak our language and if you can’t understand someone’s language, you don’t know what he’s thinking.

      Vaselinetjie knew Mr Kedibone drove a bright yellow car. The kids liked to look at the picture in the rear window. It was of galloping wild horses and it was very pretty.

      “Sit,” motioned the social worker from behind his desk. “Do you remember me? I’m the one who collected your forms from your matron on your first day and took you to meet the head.”

      “You’re Mr Verybony.”

      The man shook with laughter. He pushed back his chair and rested his head on his knees. He seemed too big for the chair.

      “Well, you’ve certainly given me a nice name, but actually it’s Ke-di-bo-ne. Do you know what it means?”

      Vaselinetjie

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