Shyly she followed the other girls to the sitting room, where they sat down at their study tables to eat breakfast. They were each given a bowl of porridge and there was sliced bread in the centre of the table. Mugs had been set out for coffee.
Vaselinetjie looked straight ahead, but she could hear that The Bold and the Beautiful was on TV. It made her sad. She always used to watch it with her ouma.
“Are you going to eat or are you going to carry on pretending you’re invisible?” Killer interrupted her thoughts.
Even if her throat hadn’t been choked up, Vaselinetjie couldn’t have eaten the blob of porridge in front of her.
“The lumps are gross, but just pretend you’re eating custard and let them slide down,” Albie said. She waited for Vaselinetjie to look her way before scooping the coagulated skin from her porridge and lowering it into her mouth as if she was about to swallow an earthworm.
Vaselinetjie felt the eyes of the others on her. They were waiting for the matron to ask her something so that she would be forced to speak, and then they would laugh at her again.
“Ugh!” Albie almost spat out her porridge. “There isn’t enough sugar in this porridge. Auntie, do you know this white girl speaks just like a coloured?”
“Leave her alone.” The matron slurped her coffee without taking her eyes off the TV screen. “She can’t help it. It’s how they speak where she comes from. Maybe she’s a baster. Now be quiet and finish up.”
“You’ll have to take it as it comes,” Killer tried to console Vaselinetjie. “Sometimes Kitcat and the others add sugar to the porridge and sometimes they don’t, and there’s fuck-all we can do about it.”
After breakfast Kitcat took Vaselinetjie to the kitchen and showed her a long list of duties. Each child in the house had a task. Kitcat had written down only Vaselinetjie’s number, not her name.
“Look,” she explained, “you’re 113. One one three. It’s your laundry number too, got it?”
Vaselinetjie frowned as she looked at the duties. Washing and drying dishes, sweeping, mopping, emptying rubbish bins, and so on.
“Do I have to do it for the rest of the year?” she asked Killer.
“Are you crazy? What do you think my hands would look like if I had to wash dishes for a whole blooming year, hey? We swop every week. Your number moves one place down the list. Except if you’ve made Kitcat or the matron mad, then they’ll put you anywhere they like, for as long as they like. I once emptied dustbins for a whole month, until someone told them I spent the time smoking behind the wall.”
Opposite number 113 Vaselinetjie read “sweeping”. She almost smiled with relief. At least it was something she knew how to do.
“I can mos sweep! Jus’ show me where the brooms is and so,” she told Killer and blushed furiously when the girl gave her a strange look.
When she had finished sweeping, she tried to go out through the back door to escape from the strange voices and the laughing and staring faces, but the security gate was shut.
“It’s always locked, stupid,” someone said in passing.
There was nowhere to be on her own. Nowhere to cry without being seen.
“We have to fall in line to go to school. Then Kitcat inspects our nails and looks through our school bags,” Killer said as she joined Vaselinetjie, who was staring through the bars of the security gate.
But Vaselinetjie wasn’t allowed to join the rest as they left for school.
“The matron is waiting for you in the bathroom. You have to be deloused and dewormed.” Kitcat had found Vaselinetjie at the back door and sent her off while the rest of the girls filed past. Some looked back with spiteful smiles.
“Bug time, sista!” Killer shouted over her shoulder.
Would it be even worse here than at her previous school? Vaselinetjie’s lips began to tremble as she watched the children walk down the hill to town. She saw Killer and some of the other girls stop under some trees and hitch up the skirts of their uniforms to make them shorter.
She had never gone to school with white children before. In her old school she and Avril Farao had the lightest complexions. Avril was very proud of her long straight hair and told the others that Vaselinetjie’s ouma secretly straightened her hair to make it as smooth as her own.
Besides, Avril was always pretending to be English. Missis Farao did the same, and how Ouma Kitta used to laugh when Vaselinetjie pulled her mouth like Avril and her mom’s when they spoke English. Like this, she would say.
Then Ouma always said one should actually feel sorry for them, because you are what the Good Lord made you and you should accept it and live with it. God never makes mistakes.
3
Vaselinetjie spent the rest of the day with a towel wrapped around her head. The matron didn’t seem to hear a word when she told her that she’d never had lice in her life before. She had to rinse her hair three times in vinegar to remove all the oil. Only the next day was she allowed to go to school.
“The town children are a bunch of snobs. They don’t like us, but it’s fine, we don’t smaak them either,” Killer said while the children trooped off to school. The town lay down the hill from the hostel and the morning sun reflected off the tile roofs of the houses.
“Hey, Peppies!” a boy shouted, racing past on his bicycle.
“That’s what they call us and the senior boys at the home,” Killer explained without looking up. “Peppies – for Pep Stores. They say we’re the bastard children of Ham and we wear rejects given to us by Pep Stores.” She kicked an empty Coke tin as she walked.
In front of them Albie snorted and spat a blob of mucus down a manhole. “Sis, man!” Kitcat, overtaking them from behind, smacked her on the head.
In the grade 6 homeroom a teacher whose tie was off-centre and too short called out the children’s names. If the others had not pointed out the new pupil, Vaselinetjie’s presence might have gone unnoticed.
“Name?” the teacher asked without looking up.
“Vaselinetjie.”
There were shrieks of laughter, accompanied by much back-slapping and desk-smacking.
“Silence!” The teacher held up his hand.
Vaselinetjie stood very straight next to her desk. She felt uncomfortable in the faded uniform given to her by the matron the night before. The jersey had been darned in two places and one sleeve was stretched out of shape and way too long. Ouma Kitta would never have allowed her to go to school in such a sorry state, wearing other people’s hand-me-downs.
“What is your full name?”
“Bitty Vaseline … uh … Bosman.”
The teacher chewed on his pen while the boys whistled. A group of coloured girls at the back of the class couldn’t stop giggling and nudging each other.
“Age?”
“Eleven, meneer.”
The teacher looked up. “Were you sent to school early?”
Vaselinetjie nodded. She wasn’t keen to speak again. Fortunately the teacher asked no further questions. Under the desk she saw that one of his shirt buttons had popped open over his belly.
“Stay behind, please?” he asked as the bell announced the end of the first period. “Come a bit closer,” he motioned with the chewed pen. He noticed that she seemed on the verge of making a run for it, and his voice was suddenly gentler. “Relax, child. What do people call you at home?”
Vaselinetjie could hear that the teacher was trying his