Authors: Fanie Viljoen
Mindf**k (2 page)
There was this man who once drove over a stop street at a helluva speed. Next thing he knew: flashing lights, screaming alarms. A traffic cop had managed to chase him down and stop him. (At that time he had already skipped a few stop streets.)
‘Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing?’ the traffic cop yelled at the guy. ‘You ran a stop street back there! Why the fuck didn’t you stop?’
The guy checked out the traffic cop and said: ‘I don’t believe everything I read.’
Ha, ha, ha:-)
And you shouldn’t either.
Do you really think my dad sat there without his pants? This is not what this story is about. Leave that for the newspapers. (I don’t even know why kids would allow stuff like that to happen to them. They obviously don’t know what sharp knives are for.)
Sorry I lied to you about the pants-thing. I was just kinda looking for an excuse to get out of the living room and I didn’t want you to think that I’m a jackass. My dad has been keeping his pants on for years now. I think he only took them off twice in his life. The first time being when he made Kelly, my sister, and the second time when he made me.
Ha, ha, ha.
If he wanted anything more, he had to keep himself happy – Mom didn’t allow him near her with that thing, if you catch my drift. They slept in separate rooms. Threats of a pending divorce had been poisoning the air for a few months now, but they stuck it
out ‘for the kids’.
Hey, I should tell you about our family. But let’s do it in style – like in the movies. Have you noticed how some of them start? While the credits are rolling, the camera slowly moves across a room (let’s say it’s some little fuck-faced brother’s room). First, you notice a few pics on the dressing table, and then you think: Oh, would you just look at that, they are the perfect family. Colgate smiles, the works. Then the camera glides across the wall and you think: Oh, would you just look at that, he has a wall, man he’s so lucky that he doesn’t have to live in a squatter camp like millions of black South Africans. The camera pans to something hanging off the headboard, let say it’s a girl’s panties, and while you are sitting there in your dirty chair in the darkened cinema you think: Oh, the little fucker is already screwing around. Or he likes wearing women’s underwear.
You get the picture?
Alright, here is mine:
At my door: life-size posters of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. (Did you spot that lie? What?! Haven’t you learnt anything from the stop street story?)
Sorry, let’s try that again (take two).
At my door: posters of the White Stripes and My Chemical Romance.
On my desk (read: alternative,
user-friendly
hoarding zone to stash anything imaginable):
- An empty pizza box
- Empty CD covers
- Loose CDs (mostly pirated copies – have you seen the price of original CDs?)
- Overseas magazines (mostly stolen – have you seen the price of overseas magazines?)
- An empty fish tank (cuz the poor
goldfish died), which then became a snake cage (until the snake died).
Now the camera moves towards my bed. As usual, it looks like a war zone. Underneath my bed you will find the following assorted goodies:
- A flat rugby ball. (There was a time when my dad still had hope for me. The rugby ball is the proof of that, but I decided to hell with this, I will not run around chasing shit.)
- Dirty underwear and sour smelling socks, cuz our maid doesn’t believe in cleaning up underneath anything.
- Oh crap, there’s that biology book which had Amoeba bitching my head off.
And then there are my prized possessions:
- The porno-mags in the drawer next to my bed. (I suspect that the old man
uses them at times to assist with the DIY thing. I once found one of them in a slightly different spot from where I had left it.)
- My computer that I mostly use to play games and surf the porn-sites on the net.
And that’s my room.
As you can see, there are no photos of the family, cuz this isn’t a damn movie. And everyone in this household isn’t happy.
I’ll just have to tell you about them.
Once upon a time there was a mommy Burns, a daddy Burns and little sister Burns. They all lived in a house in Bloemfontein. Langenhoven Park, to be precise. They were very happy. Like the people you see in the shampoo adverts on the TV.
And then I came along. Covered in fat and dripping blood. Kicking and screaming. Perhaps I already knew back then that being born was a big mistake. I should have stayed where I was. (Exactly where that is, I can’t say right now, but I reckon that I’ll have the answer in the afterlife, so ask me again on that day.)
I think my birth fucked up everything. Could be because I wasn’t exactly planned. It fills one with an overwhelming sense of pride to know that you ‘were not planned’. It’s almost like being a gatecrasher long before you could remember.
Kerbs says that the best part of me ran down my dad’s leg. I reckon he might not be way off mark. I think my dad would agree.
I was a naughty shit as a child. At the age of four, I sunk my pearly whites into one of the girls at the nursery school. There was a lot of blood. It streamed over her arm and dyed her pink, icing sugar-like dress red. My teacher, Miss Gilda, couldn’t decide whether she should faint or give me crap. She made these weird noises like I reckon a pig would make if it’s being castrated. I was scared shitless; I thought she was going to die. Stricken with fright I sank my baby teeth into the tender skin just below her knee. I bit down hard. Only then did she shut-up.
Miss Gilda and the icing sugar girl both had to go for tetanus injections. My mom couldn’t believe that I would do something like that. After all, she had always taught me that one should never bite other people. I was asked to leave the school. From then on I stayed with our maid, Anna.
Anna didn’t understand a word of English. At the age of five, I decided to teach her. And I’m proud to say that all my hard work wasn’t in vain – she still swears like a Gautenger stuck in a traffic jam.
My sister is one year older than I am. Nineteen. At first, she was the model child, getting distinctions in all her subjects, until grade 9. Then she decided: what the fuck. And she threw open her legs. Fourteen boyfriends, two shiners and one abortion later, she doesn’t take any shit from my parents either.
Last year, Kelly finished Matric. She said there was nothing to it. You basically have to be a moron to flunk your Matric these days. The Department of Education tries
really hard not to disappoint the learners. And just in case things didn’t go according to plan, she informed the principal that her great-grandmother was black. This meant Kelly was historically disadvantaged and they had to try harder to pass her at the end of the year. And they did.
Kelly now works at a pizza place and she mostly smells of dough and melted cheese.
My mom and dad are like a see-saw. When one is at the bottom, the other is on top. And when one is on top, the other one is at the bottom. I’m not talking about sex here; I’m talking about their jobs.
My dad was an estate agent. Things went well for him; he even ranked as top seller a few times at Aïda. The pay was good, but not enough. Then he decided to start his own estate agency. People probably didn’t find it amusing buying a house from a place called ‘Burns Housing’. Needless to say, the place folded like a fortune cookie.
Then he gave the corporate thing a shot and went to work at the bank. Saambou. A few years later, all the personnel from Saambou were sacked. Everyone heard the rumours, but nobody wanted to believe it. Finding a job after that was a bitch. Affirmative action and the pale-
male-syndrome
closed all the doors.
And then came the back breaker.
My mom, who worked as a personal assistant at an investment firm, had in the mean time gradually started climbing the corporate ladder. In the evenings she studied so hard you could almost see the Unisa books flying. And during the day she attended every imaginable conference and sucked up to all the bosses. And before we knew it, her pay check was bigger than my dad’s.
It was a recipe for disaster. Their marriage went down the drain. No man’s self esteem can handle things like that with grace.
He grabbed at straws and tried selling funeral policies to keep his dignity. She just kept on earning more and more in bonuses each month. She bought a BMW. He had to downgrade to a second-hand Mazda.
But they stayed together under one roof, in separate rooms. Kelly and I could see the way they looked at each other. And we knew: the shit had hit the fan.
Saturday morning.
SMS to Kerbs:
my mom just gave a helluva scream. i think she saw her car:-(
It was the first time in months that Kelly was home on a Saturday morning. Did her boyfriend dump her? Well, good for him! Normally she dumped the boyfriends long before their sell-by date. It made her believe she had the power to end it all. It gave her a false sense of security. And it thankfully
stopped those tear-filled sessions that could last for days afterwards.
I checked her out as she walked from the kitchen cupboard to the fridge. Tried to see if anything was wrong. Waiting for that you-men-are-all-lower-than-swine-shit outburst. Maybe a tear.
She kept a straight face. Then perhaps everything was still a-okay between her and the boyfriend. (What’s his name again? Something like Cutlet, Cunter, Gutter? Gunter? Never mind.)
‘They broke into mom’s car last night,’ Kelly said when she noticed me watching her.
‘Oh?’
What was I supposed to say? Ask her about the car? Who cares, I was there, wasn’t I?
Kelly emptied some Rice Krispies in a bowl, then cold milk and three spoons of
sugar. I shuddered at the thought of the cold milk. And the food. I don’t know how people can have breakfast. I’d rather have a cigarette.
I watched her taking the first mouthful of cereal, heard the snap-crackle-pop. A stream of milk ran down her chin. She wiped it off with her hand and took a second bite, this time smaller. I imagined hearing the sugar crunching underneath her teeth, how it glided down her throat only to appear days later as a cellulite dimple on her white butt-cheek. And I could see the three cartoon-characters on the cereal box laughing at her.
‘What are you looking at?’ she asked after a while.
I just grinned, wondering if I should tell her: I’m watching you fattening yourself up. But I just left it. That was a war for another day.
I heard someone at the front door. A while later my dad stepped into the kitchen.
‘The car’s window was smashed. The radio is stolen,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘Oh, you do?’ he asked.
Same tone as last night. That
well-buddy
-I-know-too-tone of voice. But did he really know, or was it my imagination?
‘Kelly told me.’
‘Ah.’ He scratched his stubbly beard and sat down next to Kelly.
‘I’m going to check it out,’ I said, to get out from under my dad’s eyes. I knew he watched me disappearing into the hallway.
I stepped outside barefoot, only dressed in jeans. No shirt.
My mom was sitting in her car. The look on her face like someone mourning a loved one.
‘Fuck, Mom, I heard they –’
‘Please stop cursing,’ she snapped, not even looking my way. Her hands were clamped around the steering wheel, her eyes staring intently through the windscreen.
‘Mom, didn’t you park the car inside?’
‘Does it look like I did?’
I walked around to the passenger’s side. The leather was still wet after the rain. The carpet too. Pieces of glass everywhere. My eye caught the screwdriver on the carpet. Shit, it was the one that Kerbs used to lift out the CD player. I picked it up quickly. Mom’s eyes flashed towards me.
‘Don’t touch it!’
‘Sorry.’ I shrugged my shoulders, but I didn’t drop the thing. ‘The police won’t go through too much trouble anyway. Fingerprinting and the like, I mean.’ I’m hoping, actually. ‘They’ll want to know if you have insurance, you answer ‘yes’, case
closed. They’ve got bigger worries than stolen radios.’
‘My sunglasses are missing too.’
‘They’ve got bigger worries than stolen radios and sunglasses.’
My mom looked so sad sitting there. Her blond hair was still messed up from the sleep. Her eyes looked tired. She still looked a bit befuddled. Maybe it was from the two sleeping pills. Or maybe it was just the sadness for the car. I think she loved it more than she loved my dad. She probably got better service from the car.
‘I should go back in,’ she said. ‘I have to phone PG Glass. Find out when they’re opening.’
As soon as she left, I wiped the screwdriver clean. Just in case.
Then I stepped back into the house.
I heard my mom looking for her cell phone.