LITMIR.BIZ

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herself down on the bed. Bent her knees so that the sheet looked like a white tent in the dark. ‘We farm children had to go to boarding school from the start.’

      We were quiet for a long time until I asked carefully: ‘What do you think of Ben?’

      ‘He’s all right.’ She turned her face towards me so that the moon shone on her cheek like a searchlight. Her skin looked as white as the sheet. ‘A bit too sweet for my taste.’

      ‘What do you mean … too sweet?’ Yesterday Ben had asked me, stuttering and stammering, to go to Heinrich’s party with him. I would have been at the party over the weekend in any case – but suddenly everything had changed. I didn’t know what to wear, I didn’t know whether I should borrow my mother’s curlers to put up my hair, I didn’t know whether my short hair would look stupid with a bunch of curls, I didn’t even know whether I still wanted to go to the party. ‘Can he dance?’

      ‘Not half bad.’ Her teeth were a white flash in her wide mouth. ‘But if you want to move beyond dancing … he’s terribly shy, you know.’

      ‘That’s OK,’ I said quickly.

      ‘I don’t think he’s ever kissed a girl properly.’

      ‘Oh, that shy?’ I couldn’t hide the disappointment in my voice. ‘Perhaps you can teach him something,’ Dalena comforted. ‘There’s always a first time.’

      A few more moments of silence while I digested the information. ‘When was your first time?’

      ‘French kiss?’ Her body shook as she laughed. ‘In standard six.’

      ‘What’s so funny?’

      ‘I never even asked his name! It was at one of my sisters’ parties. He and I smooched all evening and it was only the next morning that I realised I didn’t know who he was. I was so happy to be given a French kiss at last that I didn’t mind at all who gave it to me!’

      I took a deep breath, mustered all my courage. It was always easier to ask such questions in the dark: ‘And further?’

      ‘Further?’

      ‘What’s the furthest you’ve ever gone?’ My voice was so low that I could barely hear it.

      ‘That time in the shower,’ Dalena whispered. ‘With Miss Lourens’s brother.’

      ‘What did you do?’

      ‘We touched one another … He touched my tits and I touched his … you know … down there …’

      I couldn’t utter a word.

      ‘And he became as stiff as a board.’

      I didn’t dare look at Dalena but I knew she was looking at me. Pulled the sheet up to my chin because the room suddenly felt cold. My body was covered in goose pimples.

      ‘And then?’ I whispered urgently, afraid that she would fall asleep.

      ‘I had the fright of my life!’ She started giggling, her teeth white in the dark again. ‘I knew boys became stiff … but I didn’t know it looked like that.’

      ‘What … does it look like?’ It was the most important question I’d ever asked in my life.

      ‘Have you ever seen a donkey in rut?’

      ‘You mean, his thing hung on the ground?’

      ‘No, man, it doesn’t hang! It stands up straight! It gets longer and longer like … like Pinocchio’s nose!’

      ‘Like Pinocchio’s nose!’ I whispered, amazed, and tried to imagine this odd description. Without success.

      ‘Perhaps it also has something to do with lying,’ Dalena giggled. ‘A boy will say anything when he’s like that: “Don’t worry. I won’t put it in. I know what I’m doing. You can trust me …”’

      ‘Is that what Miss Lourens’s brother said to you?’

      ‘Fortunately my father caught us in time.’ Dalena’s sigh hung in the air for a long time, like a soap bubble before it burst. ‘Otherwise I don’t know …’

      ‘And what does it feel like?’ I kicked off the sheet again. Smelt my own sweat. Almost as strong as the fumes of Peaceful Sleep. ‘I mean, if it … if it looks like Pinocchio’s nose … does it feel like Pinocchio’s nose, too?’

      ‘I don’t know. I’ve never touched Pinocchio’s nose!’

      She started laughing so much she had to push her face into the pillow to calm down. I giggled nervously too, frightened that a prefect or the teacher in the passage would hear us. Frightened that we wouldn’t be able to continue discussing this vitally important subject.

      ‘No, man, I mean … does it feel like wood?’

      ‘Wood? Are you out of your fucking mind?’

      She shook with laughter again. I was getting desperate.

      ‘No, man,’ she eventually whispered, ‘it feels like meat! Like raw sausage. Raw sausage frozen hard. But of course it’s not cold …’

      ‘Like warm frozen sausage?’

      ‘If you can imagine something like that.’

      I couldn’t.

      ‘Where is he now?’ I asked, to get the picture of the strangest sausage in the world out of my mind. ‘Miss Lourens’s brother?’

      ‘You may well ask.’

      ‘Didn’t you see him again?’

      ‘I told you, they all lie when they’re in that condition.’

      ‘All of them?’

      ‘I’ve heard my sisters talk about it.’ Dalena’s two older sisters, both at university, had recently become my most important source of information about this irresistible subject. (Through Dalena, as I had met neither of them.) And perhaps not even a trustworthy source because, according to Dalena, neither of them had gone ‘all the way’.

      ‘They say a man can’t think once his thing is hard. They say it’s your own fault if you let him go too far because then you can’t say no any longer. He goes quite crazy.’

      ‘Crazy?’ I swallowed heavily. I saw the shy, quiet Ben with wildly milling arms, foaming at the mouth. ‘How crazy?’

      ‘They say he’ll rape you just like that.’

      The room was dead quiet.

      ‘But how can you tell … ?’ I took a deep breath like someone preparing to swim under water. ‘How far is too far?’

      The silence continued. All I could hear was Dalena’s regular breathing. This time she had really gone to sleep, I decided.

      ‘I think it’s when you don’t want him to stop,’ she eventually replied, so softly that it sounded as if she were muttering in her sleep.

      ‘You can stay as you are,’ Dalena sang while she mixed coffee liqueur and vodka in three tall glasses. ‘Or you can change …’

      ‘Wrong song!’ Suna laughed on the high bar stool next to me. ‘This isn’t cane, it’s Red Russians!’

      ‘Black Russians,’ I said and watched Dalena pouring Coke into the glasses.

      ‘It’s all the same fucking thing, man,’ Dalena said in Janis Joplin’s world-weary voice.

      Suna was overcome with a fit of giggling. I couldn’t help laughing as well. Nobody could swear like Dalena. Except, perhaps, Janis Joplin.

      I could curse in my thoughts like someone who ate on the sly when no one could see her, but as soon as I said a swear word out loud, I spat it out like milk that had soured. And Suna was like someone on a strict diet who enjoyed watching

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