kagablog

Today I actually remember being in school. So many days have been a blur lately, but this afternoon stood out. We were learning about the body in biology. When the teacher asked about the kidneys and their function, I actually put up my hand. Finally something I knew.

I said that they’re bean shaped organs the size of my fist. There are two of them, that they’re reddish brown and they’re located in my upper abdomen. Their function is to filter waste, fluids and extra salt out of my blood. My teacher was impressed with me, for once.
Then she asked me, and the class, what happens when kidney’s fail.
I stared at her blankly, like I didn’t know, except that I guess I did.
You die, she said, harshly, then moved on to the pancreas.
I guess it’s hearing it from someone completely objective, someone who’s just stating the facts.
Someone who doesn’t know it’s you.
It was like a reminder, a loud alarm clock that my organs are rotting. My kidneys are failing.
It feels like I’m being kicked hard and fast by someone wearing soccer cleats.
It makes me feel like I’m not in control of my own body. I have to watch as it ejects food and swells up like a balloon. My eyes get puffy and I feel my body temperature drop by like a million degrees. Everyone I know is worried about me which just makes me feel guilty. They keep telling me I’m going to dehydrate, which would be crazy because it’s the middle of winter.
It’s been raining a lot, and sometimes I wish I could lie down outside, on the pavement, with my mouth open, drinking it all. I wish getting better were that easy.
The doctors have made it clear to my mom that I need more dialysis. I’ve had this condition since I was eight but it got a lot more serious this year. The thing I know for sure is, we can’t afford it, even as my mom denies it. She shouldn’t, I’m too old, I know the truth. I got no more ubuqwebe, my mother yelled at no one in particular this morning. She had no more jewelry left to hawk. We’re officially skepselas, the poor folk.
Not that we were ever exactly fat cats, but we managed, before. My mom made more money, she had a boyfriend who lived with us who helped out. My half brother, who’s older, helped. Now it’s just the two of us. Now we have to do embarrassing things, like show up at the hospital and beg . Half the hospitals around here won’t even look at you if you don’t have a gun shot wound, if you’re not dying on the spot. “You should jola one of the doctors, mom”, I joke as we sit in the taxi on our way to the hospital. You’re still good looking, you could make it happen. Uyabeda, she spat at me, disgusted. You’re talking garbage. What, you think I’m a magosha now? It’s the first time I’ve seen her look really angry in months. It kind of felt good, almost normal.
It’s raining as we get out of the two Rand taxi, a Zola Budd, as they say around here, a Toyota, which is missing its windows and its license plate.
It was a four -four, where you sit with 4 people next to you on each side, and the kid sitting next to me, who was probably five with sticky hands kept grabbing at my hair. I had to control the urge to bite her. It’s 9:30 at night, 45 minutes after my mom got off work, at the nearest one fifteen minutes from our flat. It’s Hillbrow Hospital, the H Hosi, as they call it around here. We walk past a park and a school, plus a bunch of day care centers. I guess all the teenage mothers and gang members have to put their kids somewhere. My mom thinks this side of Hillbrow is a lot safer than where we live but I’m not so sure. I was kicking one of those small coke cans as we were walked in and I nearly stepped on a syringe. It could’ve gone right through my shoe so I kept my mouth shut. She’s got enough shit to worry about as it is.
We live in Highpoint, which actually is a physically high point, on a hill, right in the middle. If the Tsotsis that hang out outside our building smoking all the time are right, our area is the number one place for drug deals in the country. They call it Heroin Heights, but what I’ve seen a lot of is crack and coke.
The streets are lined with one star hotels, street meat vendors and real magoshas getting ready to hlahla any guy stupid enough to pay them. Our apartment is on Claim st, near Kotze, across the road from the infamous Protea Hotel. It’s legendary for the amount of jijis, underage girls, that are there all the time. I can see them without squinting from my window. Sometimes there are moms, like in their forties even. I can see it in the lines in their faces, that dead look in their eyes. They wish they were dead, I can tell. They stand outside, smoking dagga, staring vacantly into the street. At night they’re way younger. Some of them look my age. They all wear the same gold or purple eye shadow, red lipstick and black fishnets, or torn tights. When their legs are bare you can see bruises and sometimes scratches. When they bend over, you can see everything. No underwear, nothing. Every night when I go to bed my room is bathed in orange and green neon from the hotel sign. One of my mom’s friends once offered to make me some curtains, my mom keeps saying I should put up some towels, but I always say no. Orange and green are my favorite colors.
My mom is taking control of the situation now. My legs feel like they’re going to buckle at any second. She’s got this hard look in her eyes, this street look I’ve seen her use with the guy who drives the banana- kaar through our street. He comes by once a week, exchanging our used bottles for bags of popcorn and chips. We spend hours scrounging for stuff, swiping liquor bottles from our neighbors garbage. Then he tries to stiff us, tries to give us half or less of the amount he owes us. Then my mom goes from being friendly and polite, a mam’gobozi, who gossips with them, to
their worst enemy. There’s this moment of disbelief, this palpable look of shock on their faces, before they just give up and give her what she wants. My ouledi is badass.
My eyes begin to well up and I wonder if she notices. A while ago I learned how to cry in public without anyone noticing. I don’t change my facial expression and I let the tears fall individually. I think being quiet is the best way to get away with anything. A couple years ago, at school, I got bullied by some other kids. I once got pushed in front of a door and everyone laughed as it slammed in my face. My lip was swollen and the skin above my nose and under my eyes bulged into hard red bumps. I sat crouching behind it, bleary eyed and blubbering in pain. No one came near me. Guys walked right past me, and this girl that I thought was cool and wanted to be friends with saw me, laughed and kept walking. No one said a word to me. I haven’t
been able to cry in public since.
My mom knows me better than anyone. I cry in front of her all the time. She’s knows I’m about to break down, she can tell, so she steers past the front desk in the emergency room. She finds a single empty chair and I sink into it. It’s made of worn blue leather, and has stuffing coming out of its right arm. There’s a table full of dog eared magazines beside me. I leaf through an old issue of Time, feel disgusted, put it down. They never write about us. They never talk about the people who really struggle, the people in the townships. She leans up against the side of my chair. There’s nowhere for her to sit.
My mom works harder than anyone I know. The best word for it is phithezela-hectic. She cleans houses six days a week. When I get up in the morning she’s already gone, and when I get home she’s still not back yet. She’s hardly ever around, so she can’t take of me when I’m sick. She strokes my hair now. I used to wear it in tight thin braids to make it feel like I had extensions. I felt so weird about having hair that was red and soft to the touch that grows at such a tremendous rate. I thought about cutting it all off at one point and wearing hats and berets like my mom. She never had extensions. I guess I’ve gotten used to it now.
I don’t want her to feel bad about anything. I understand that she needs to work. It could be a lot worse, I say. We could be out on the street. She shakes her head and looks away. Aiiii, she mutters shaking her head. We nearly there, hey. We haven’t had any electricity for three days now. It’s fine during the day, but at night I have to use a torch just to get to the bathroom. I can’t see to do my homework or read, I can’t listen to music and I have a boyfriend and he can’t even call me. She starts filling out the hospital forms for me. She writes out my date of birth and then my age. I’m going to be seventeen next week. It’ll be at least a couple of hours before anyone can see us. I close my eyes. I wish I had something to knock me out. I open my eyes and find my mom filling out her section. Occupation: housekeeper. Nanny. Professional taker of other people’s shit. She gets down on her hands and knees and scrubs their floors for less than a thousand Rand a month. She makes them huge meals with fancy food, and we’re subsisting on fruit loops with milk that’s past its expiry date. Their food would probably make me sick, but the whole thing makes me sick to be honest. They treat her like a sbotho, like a worthless person that they can replace at any time. Which I guess they can. My mom has a grade five education. When I graduate from high school, it’ll be a big deal to her. When I look around me sometimes, at the neighborhood, when I think about my chances, my chances of making anything of my life, I get incredibly depressed. I don’t know what I want to be, or what I want to do except make a lot of money. Enough to buy us a house. Enough to get my mom some nice new things.
Enough for decent food, no more of this township crap. I keep telling my mom that if I eat any more achaar, which is township salad, oily, made of mangoes, that I’ll be sika for the rest of my life. I keep telling her my kidney problems come from eating too much achaar, or chicken dust which is meat, any meat, it could be pigeon for all we know, sold to us by street vendors. Sometimes she laughs, but usually she snaps and tells me I’m being a chizzboy, a spoiled brat.
I like to fantasize about dropping out of school and being a singer or a rapper.
I love kwaito, township hip hop, and African singers. My mom has all the albums, from Miriam Makeba to Brenda Fassie to Bongo Maffin and Mandoza. Kwaito adds color when everything is grey and white- the buildings, the crap burger joints, the wet laundry that hangs out of people’s windows, showing off our underwear, reminding the world that we’re working class, the gun shots at night. It’s too bad that my father was white. I’m a Dushi, a mixed race kid. I’d never be accepted if I wanted to make music like that. As it is, the kids I know from around here call me Coconut- a person who’s brown, kind of black on the outside but totally white on the inside. They hate that I don’t go with them to one of the shit schools in town. I go to an almost all white school in Edenvale that takes me forever to get to. My name is real name is Colleen, which they call me at school, but in Hillbrow everybody calls me Coco. It’s ok. It doesn’t bother me anymore.
A nurse comes to call into another waiting area. She and mom chat. She asks my mom if I have Magama Amathathu, if I have AIDS. She says it because I’m thin, because I haven’t been keeping anything down. I’m about to snap, I’m about to say no lady, not AIDS, just HIV.
It’s the kind of joke my mom wouldn’t find funny. She doesn’t want a phalafala, she tells me, sharply poking me in the leg. It’s true, I know. The last thing we need is a fiasco.
Sometimes when I think about being sika, I think about how many years I’ve had these health problems, I think about how little we have money wise, how my mom has to phanda, to make ends meet, I get so angry. I understand why people deal drugs, why people rob houses, why stupid people get shot. Everyone just wants to get out. Everyone is desperate to get out of this place as soon as they can. And there are so many of us.
My boyfriend is from Zimbabwe. His name is Munya. He’s one of the refugees who hopped the fence, walked and crawled and climbed and possibly killed to get into this country.
He’s eight years older than me. He’s six feet tall, and thin. I can feel his hip bones and his rib bones when I touch him. He’s gentle all the time, at least with me. He’s different than most of the guys I’ve ever met.
If my mom thinks anything bad about him, she doesn’t say it. She knows he’s older, but she thinks he’s twenty five, not twenty eight. She was happy when he got a job in computers, and when he got fired last month, I didn’t tell her. She doesn’t need more to worry about; when he takes me out, she doesn’t need to know where he gets his money. It’s hard to meet a guy around here who doesn’t deal drugs. Munya doesn’t gufa- he doesn’t smoke crack or do coke.
He just deals it, because it moves a lot faster than weed and he makes so much money that if he gets caught he’ll be able to pay his bail. It’s not so bad when you think about it. He doesn’t see Magoshas or have phamakote, which is what they also call AIDS. We have sex, and most of the time we use condoms. It’s hard to remember all the time. When passion grabs you, it grabs you, it’s something intangible, a force that you can’t control. It’s a feeling I’ve always wanted to feel, so if it seizes me I try not to say no. Sometimes when I remember it’s too late. We’re nowhere near a place where we can get some. It would kill the moment, the feeling, the urgency. Sex helps the world goes black, it makes me forget that I’m sick, that I could die, that we have no money, that I might make nothing of my life. There’s a gnawing fear in me that I’m not as good as my classmates; that I can try and struggle and still not end up like them; with two parents, in a nice house, with a nice husband and family, with money, with security.
I can’t tell my mom that I’m having sex. She’ll think that I malunde- that I sleep around. She’ll be scared of me getting pregnant, even though we’re careful most of the time. Most of all, she’ll be scared I’ll never be a makoti, a bride. She’s scared I’ll end up tainted, used and thrown away like her. My mom has never been married. She wants everything to be better for me that it was for her. Sometimes it feels like too much to promise her. Sometimes it feels like too much pressure.
When we get called to the doctor’s rooms, finally, we’re told that we have to pay. The doctor explains to my mom that we have to, that not treating it can be fatal. We panic and talk, pace the passageway, and think. I suggest calling Munya for the money and my mom relents.
She still thinks he’s a stand up guy with a real job, instead of a lova, an unemployed guy who deals drugs and knows all the lyrics on Brenda Fassie’s Memeza album.
Sometimes when Munya is high, and bored, he sculpts things. He sculpts faces from pieces of wood, whole bodies from sticks that are lying around. He has an artist’s soul. Maybe that’s why my mom doesn’t fear him.
She sees his good side too.
It’s his drug money that pays for the dialysis. When he doesn’t have enough he and his friends break into houses. They say they never hurt anyone, just scare them until the job is done.
There’s something exciting about it, about taking life into your own hands, but there’s something scary about it too. When I think about my mom, going to work in a five year old uniform missing its middle button, with a rag tied around her head, stealing sugar from their pantry because she’s afraid to ask for some for tea, going without a lunch so I can eat one- I feel so sad and angry and guilty, guilty for not doing more.
Tomorrow night when he asks me to go with him and his friends to housebreak I think I’ll go with. I want to see what it’s like.
Sometimes it doesn’t seem like I have a choice, or much of a chance anyway of doing anything else. I mean, there’s the future that everyone’s always talking about for me, and then there’s the truth, the one I see everyday. The buildings, the drugs, the pocket knife I wear in the sock of my school shoes. I might do my best and never get out of here, or get away from it anyway.
I have to see what it’s like. I have to try it once, just to know.
I have to figure out if something, anything, makes me feel less angry.

.