Spawn of the Regime. . .

Spawn of the Regime
by Brynn Binnell

It’s South Africa, 1977. The war in Angola is in full swing. Any white boys not in school or University have been drafted into the army to fight Communism for God and the white race in Africa. I’m twelve, so I don’t need to worry.
It’s 1977, Abba’s “SOS” is in the air, it’s in my bones… “SOS” hit me hard as I crossed the dance floor of seedy Uncle Ed’s back street disco in Uitenhage. My mother had finally, after years of bad driving, managed to roll her silver VW Love Bug Beetle. First on the scene had been Uncle Ed, who’d taken us in and told us my stepfather could pick us up at his disco. So, there I was at that tender age crossing a disco floor on my way back from the loo when “SOS” burst out across the speakers and the lighting did its magic, the crystal ball turned hypnotically, bathing me in dazzling beams of light. There, in that crowded room, it hit me, not unlike an orgasm, like something snaking it’s way right through me. Those introductory notes on the keyboard, especially at high volume, the thrill of the chords that follow is electrifying, just before the volume explodes on: “So when you’re near me, darling, can’t you hear me/SOS/The love you gave me, nothing else can save me/SOS.”
It’s 1977 though, and South Africa is reeling after the spectacular Soweto riots planted seeds of doubt in some minds that apartheid might not work out in the longer term. Leaning forward intently and glaring at the nation from behind black-rimmed specs, through Mom’s new black and white TV, Prime Minister Balthazar Johannes “BJ” Vorster had issued yet another warning to the nation. I don’t know what it was that time, but I remember him well, because my dad was a photographer and had taken pictures of him at the Hankie golf course, where he was a regular.
Dad got a shot with me standing next to “BJ”, with his fatherly paw on my shoulder, the other resting on his golf stick. Aside from his ruthless control of the apartheid state, he was known in his younger years for having opposed South Africa’s entry into the Second World War on the side of the Allies, arguing that Hitler’s system was far preferable to the Westminster parliamentary model. For his efforts, which included blowing up Allied military installations, he was interned for the rest of the war, but only to rise to glory in his later years – first as Prime Minister, then as State President.
Like the country of my birth, with its peculiar colour arrangements, my home town is a strange place, somewhere between pan-colour and 60s black-and-white photo-glamour. Technicolor - like in the brilliantly coloured “splash” screens for the big movie companies, yet not too psychedelic. For me, it’s as if everything is coloured with the gentle orange, white and blue tones of the old apartheid flag.
Where I grew up, everyone had big gardens, there were flowers everywhere, and everyone we knew lived in big houses with expansive gardens supported by armies of domestic workers, always in the background, barely perceptible. For me sepia tones don’t work in childhood memories, because everything was so vividly coloured. The accompanying smells were vibrant and fresh, the stars glittered in the sky…. and when I closed my eyes there was a parallel universe going on behind my eyelids. What is it about bougainvillea that makes them permeate one’s memories of the past, and remember the lazy summer childhood times of freedom in the sunshine?  I remember purple and maroon ones…. yes, there were others, but the purple and maroon ones were somewhere near where we lived, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen such bougainvillea since.

My story begins on a lovely summery day. I was doing what I enjoyed doing most at that age: getting tarted-out in my Granny’s evening gowns, Mom’s wigs, and my sister’s shoes. I was lucky that my mom had “dreadful allergies” and claimed that she could only use Kanebo cosmetics. After the Soweto riots the previous year, the currency got shot to hell. But regardless of the expense, she kept the supply coming. As she put it, the ladies in our family have very fine complexions, and the Japanese Kanebo range, specially adapted for fine Oriental skins, was perfectly suited to them. I couldn’t have agreed more. I was also lucky to have had the grandmother I’d had. An incredibly glamorous creature who’d died young and left all her beautiful things to my mother (and indirectly and unknowingly to me!). She had been very slightly built, which was great for matching my size - and had what must have been one of the most spectacular wardrobes in the district.
This time, instead of parading around in front of the mirror, before the servants, or my sister and her friends, I decided it was time to get out and try something different. I’d hatched a plan and after hours of preening and fussing, I knew that I’d never looked this good in my life!
I crossed Sutherland Road to get to the Simms’s house.
Knock, knock, knock, and in a flash, Auntie Joyce was there. Ever vigilant, and as she told everyone who would listen afterwards, she’d seen the “lady” coming. Not the brightest button on the uniform, but always good-natured and good-humoured with us kids, she could be counted on for a laugh. This time was no laughing matter, though. From when she opened the door, I could see that I had her. She hadn’t recognised me. This was fuel to my fire.
But first, a bit more about the Simms’s.
Aside from television being new in Uitenhage in 1977, some people still didn’t have telephones – and the Simms family had been among them. They’d announced their acquisition of one to the neighbourhood with a series of unwelcome phone calls, including pranks in the dead of night – Uncle Andy after a few drinks. The Simms’s were always the last to get anything in our street. Now that they had a telephone, they still had a TV and car to go, but whether or not they would ever get there was not up for consideration at that stage. So their phone was their pride and joy, and all of us kids in the neighbourhood were given demos and allowed to make a quick call here and there to “see how it worked” – as if we didn’t already know, but it was fun anyway, so we went along with it.
One of the few things the Simms’s had that most of us didn’t was a lava lamp. Theirs was in a faux gold container, the wax inside glowed brown in a sinister yellow treacle. We loved that lamp – and would be made to sit carefully and still in the forbidden guest lounge at the front of the house, hands washed, before it could be switched on, under strict adult supervision.
“Mrs Simms?” I asked coldly, from behind Granny’s horn-rimmed, diamond-studded glasses, and holding a feather-boa-draped arm vaguely in her direction, bearing papers. 
“Yes,” she replied, very cautiously.
Even she could see immediately that the lady before her on her doorstep was no ordinary customer. Something’s up, she’s thinking to herself. Something funny’s going on here. It’s not just the canary yellow feather boa – there’s something else. But what?
”Mrs Simms, I am here about your telephone.”
Her face lit up. “My telephone?” She gushed breathlessly. “Is something wrong?” She probed. “You want to use it?” She stepped out, wanting to see and hear more.
“I’ve been sent by the Postmaster.” I announce, magisterially. “There’s a problem with your phone.”
“A problem?” she squeaks. “With my telephone! With my telephone! What sort of a problem?” She backs away, ever so slightly.
“Mrs Simms. I need to come inside… I’m from the Government.” I said this conspiratorially, glancing ever so slightly over my shoulder. “I’ll need to come in.”
“Yes, of course, yes! Please! Come in!”
Pregnant with questions, she ushers me straight through to the forbidden formal lounge. I know exactly what chair I want: it’s the big one that Uncle Andy doesn’t allow anyone else to sit on. And it’s right next to the lava lamp.
I do my best to sound blasé, but, “Oh, Mrs Simms,” I gush. “What an unusual ornament.”
“Yes,” she agrees proudly. “We got it at Bradlows.”
Feigning ignorance, I ask her if it actually works, and get instant gratification as she switches it on. She sits down opposite me, expectantly. I can’t mess it up now; I’ve had her fooled so far. She doesn’t know it’s me, and the telephone story seems to be working. I remember to close my legs, then open my handbag and retrieve the document I’d been waving around on my way in.
“We have some rather unpleasant business to discuss, I’m afraid. The Postmaster is not happy with you at all.” I glare at her, then I put the document down (it’s actually one of my mother’s accounts) and fish around in my handbag for my cigarettes and lighter. Out they come: gold cigarette box with mother-of-pearl inlay, dad’s gold Dupont lighter. There’s a bit of fumbling, then a flash, a puff of smoke, and I’m off.
“Oooh! Sorry!” She blusters. “I forgot to offer you a drink! I am so terribly sorry. Tea? Coffee?”
I smile graciously. “Why, yes. Thank you. I’ll have a glass of wine.”
Auntie Joyce does a double-take. In the seventies, a house-caller might well light up a cigarette, particularly as there were ashtrays all around the room. But I can see that I’ve really got her thinking now. Maybe the wine was pushing it – but I’d thought initially that it would impress upon her the fact that I’m an adult – grown up: smoking, drinking… I glared back at her and blew a thin trail of smoke in her direction, as if to ask: “What the hell are you waiting for?” She thought better of whatever it was that she’d been contemplating and left the room. In a flash, she was back, and set a glass of white wine alongside me. Immediately, I took a sip and had to fight back facial contortions. Fortunately, the Simms’s liked their wine very sweet.
Suddenly: “Richie!” She squeaked. “I know it’s you, man! I’m gonna tell your mother what you doing with her things. And smoking and drinking. Is it you?”
“Mrs Simms? What are you talking about? This isn’t a joke, you know. You don’t seem to realise the seriousness of your situation,” I warned her – the words straight out of my schoolteachers’ mouths.
“No,” she intoned slowly, with doubt and disbelief. “I don’t believe it…”
I interrupt. “Mrs Simms I have to take your phone back because you haven’t paid this month.” By now I’m being so convincing that I’m quite taken in myself.
Another squeak: “What? But my husband paid! I sent him to the Post Office last Saturday! Wait, I’ll show you.” In a flash she was off down the passage. I could hear drawers being opened and closed, and much fumbling with papers.
The cigarettes and wine were starting to take effect. I looked out languidly, across the yard, through the lace-curtained window, puckered my lips and took a puff of my cigarette as I gazed at the boys in the Brandwag Boys School cadet squad. They were parading out in the street between our houses, yet again. They seemed to favour our street – possibly because of all the trees and shade they brought. The boys were mostly my age, but from a different world entirely. I went to a private English school in the countryside; this was Brandwag, a state-run Afrikaans school.
Then I spotted Koosie, a lovely Aryan beauty, fourteen years old and made of pure muscle. Some time ago he’d approached me at the Children’s Bioscope hosted by Uitenhage’s Protea Theatre. It will always be a place of fond memories for me. I’d seen Star Wars there, and Saturday Night Fever. But I remember the time when I was standing near the fire exit, munching on sweets and he came over and said hello. I was immediately on guard; he was not only a “bigger boy”, but also a very virile one, too, albeit with a baby face. I avoided “toughies” wherever I could. Being a pale, wispy boy I got teased or bullied – especially with my long hair and girly looks. Worst of all, he was Afrikaans – and my parents didn’t want me, a good English boy, getting too friendly with the locals.
He asked if I minded him talking with me, and offered me some brightly coloured sweets, quite irresistible to a boy like me who could barely afford the popcorn on my limited pocket money. As I munched on the sticky, sweet toffee, he asked me to come outside with him. I stopped chewing for a second. Uh oh! I thought. This can only be trouble. Only the bigger boys – especially the rough ones – go out there with their girlfriends, usually to kiss and smoke. None of us younger boys ever dared go out there. But he was insistent. He told me that he wanted to ask me something. Taking me by the hand, he led me out into the bright sunshine.
He squeezed my hand, moved closer to me, and said softly, “I want to ask you something?” I shrunk. Why was he holding my hand? I was tingling all over. I’d been blushing from the second he approached me. Boys don’t hold hands. I giggled, then immediately grew serious as the possibility that this was some ghastly trap entered my head – they wanted to catch me out for being a naff. Was that it? No, I didn’t think so. He was moving closer. Now he put a hand around my waist.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.
Boys can’t have boyfriends! Confused, all I could do was giggle and smile, and say, “No!”
“Do you want one?” he persisted.
I didn’t answer. This guy was making me feel like I was on fire. Could he be serious?
“Can I ask you something?” He was relentless. His tones steady, measured, respectful – even reverent, so I got the feeling that he was okay, and that nothing bad was about to happen.
“Okay,” I agreed.
“Can I have a kiss?” Now he was blushing, too. I nearly collapsed in a spasm of giggles. But there was no avoiding him as he held my hips and started to move closer to me, eyes locked into mine, pinning me gently against the wall.
Our lips touched. My heart was beating so fast it felt like I was about to take off, or just float away in a flutter. He opened his eyes and moved back slightly, his blue eyes shining into mine. Then he moved back again as he realised I was spellbound, utterly entranced. This had never happened to me before, and it was way beyond my imaginings. There were other boy-girl couples scattered around, and down the untidy fire escape area. Many of them were doing the same. Kissing, giggling, smoking.
His tongue started to flicker at my lips. I could taste bubble gum. His lips were stained red from a sweet he’d been eating – mine were more black from some black candy I’d been sucking earlier. As I started to relax and let go I closed my eyes and let him do what he wanted with me.
A boy who made me swoon had given me sweets, asked me to be his boyfriend, and kissed me! There we were, two boys kissing right out in the open and nobody was saying or doing anything about it. There I was, being kissed by a boy, and finding myself liking it! Finding myself spellbound, swooning!
At some point, I was snapped out of my dream world as my younger cousin, Jamie, came bounding up with another boy his age. He was looking at me strangely, while his companion and my Koosie were rattling off in Afrikaans, which neither of us cousins understood at that age.
Koosie turned to me. “Is he your cousin?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Why does he say that you are a boy?”
I giggle, rather more nervously than before. “I am a boy!” I exclaim, thinking he was joking. There was more babbling in Afrikaans.
“I’m so sorry!” he pleaded. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were a boy!”
I was horrified. He’d thought I was a girl. I had often been mistaken for one, but the situation had never gone as far as this. I felt ashamed and embarrassed. But he was begging me for forgiveness. Blaming himself. I kept telling him it was okay. Secretly hoping that somehow we could carry on doing what we had been doing. That he would be my boyfriend. Buy me sweets and kiss me. But there was to be none of that. After profuse apologies and some more sweets, he was off. We never spoke again, and I avoided him in case there’d be trouble, particularly as I got older.

All of these memories flashed through my mind as I sat at Auntie Joyce’s, watching him in the cadet band in the street, puffing away on my fag and sipping wine through a belipsticked mouth. If he could only see me now. Beneath Granny’s gold dress, in my Star Trek undies, I felt a cool tingle. That funny “swoon” feeling passed through me again, snake-like. I fancied Koosie, but in a peculiar way that didn’t fit the categories of understanding I had at my disposal at the age of twelve. This was alien territory for me. A secret, enchanted Kingdom where nothing could be named because, strictly speaking, nothing existed even in its own world. This Kingdom owed its existence to its non-existence. Everything in the Kingdom was always something other than itself. Like my strange feelings for Koosie.
Like my compulsion to wear Granny’s beautiful clothes. And my even bigger compulsion to wear Mom’s make-up. How many times had she caught me out now? How many times had I been threatened or punished? Initially, she could always tell when I’d been “playing” with her make-up because of the clumsy finger marks and evidence of digging in her beauty products. Now that I was getting older and smarter I left fewer tracks. But then, she’d spot the traces of mascara around my eyes. Or lip liner. There was always something. The threats, the insults – she’d called me a naff in nearly all the possible permutations. But all to no effect, as I felt irresistibly drawn to make up, jewellery, gowns, hand bags… the antithesis of what a twelve-year-old boy should be interested in. What drew me even deeper in my fascination for “dressing up” was the fact that I was so damn good at it. This was no clumsy clown-lips game. Oh, no. I spent hours before the mirrors. Preening, trying different colours, endlessly fascinated. Each time learning a bit more. And the clothes and jewellery my grandmother had left us were stunning! 
My head beginning to spin from the wine, I continued to gaze out into the street, past Auntie Joyce’s lava lamp, past the bougainvillea along the wall, the Barberton daisies, the ecstatic zinnias that smiled back at me cheerily from beside the garden path. Beyond the cadets lay my mother’s garden. I could see her prized sweet peas, along with the sunflowers, the ranunculus and moonflowers. The boys had completed the exercises they’d been busy with out in the street and were now preparing to march on. The band struck up a tune, the flag and colours were raised, and they marched away. The music faded away as my thoughts returned to the present. I felt relieved that they’d finally moved on, making it possible for me to get back home across the road without being spotted or caught. 

Auntie Joyce returned excitedly with a sheath of papers – accounts, from what I could gather. One in particular became the object of her discourses as she tried to convince me the account had been paid in good time. Not impressed, I snatched the document away with a nasty air and thrust it into my sequinned handbag.
“Missus Simms,” I pronounced, magisterially. “The Post Office never makes mistakes. If we say you didn’t pay, then that’s the end of the story – you didn’t pay. Now we are taking your phone back.”
Sipping my wine, I told her coldly, cruelly and in no uncertain terms that they would only be able to get it back once the Superintendent had issued an order.
Throwing back the last of the golden liquid in the glass, I made a move toward the source of all the controversy. Her brand new telephone: grey, black circular dial, with a very large maroon handle – one with a mouthpiece that would extend way below my jaw when the earpiece was pressed to my ear.
“No!” she shrieked. “You can’t take the phone!”
“Oh, yes, I can,” I told her, heading for the instrument.
“But we did pay it. My husband pays all his accounts every month!”
“I am terribly sorry Mrs Simms. He will have to come and see me and the Postmaster in Mosel. In future you must pay your accounts on time - if he gives you the phone back after this.”
I yanked the telephone cable out of the wall and picked the instrument up, tucked it under my arm, and headed for the door, to a cacophony of protests and pleas from Auntie Joyce.
A deft yank of the door and I was out on the porch. I was having a real battle, not only tipsy and high on nicotine, but struggling to focus through Granny’s bifocal lenses. I’d got out there so quickly that Auntie Joyce hadn’t quite registered in time to stop me. But as she started to gather her senses and saw the funny Post Office lady sway down the garden path with her new phone, she finally overcame her fear of authority and came out in hot pursuit.
“Hey! You must give me a receipt! You can’t just take our phone!”
But I was off. As I approached the end of the garden path, it all caught up with me. The wine, the cigarettes, the feather boa, Auntie Joyce falling for it, Koosie, the madness of it all. And at that moment, trying to stifle the hysterical laughter that had been building up ever since I’d arrived, my foot wedged on a section of broken paving and my sister’s high heel shoe twisted beneath me. It was all over: In a second I’d lost my balance and found myself lying in the zinnias, screaming with laughter, wrapped in a canary yellow feather boa with the telephone cable twisted around me.
“Richie! I bloody-well knew it was you, man! Now, gimme back my phone! You’re bloody naughty, man! Dammit!”
As I tried to scramble away, she was onto me.
“I’m going to bloody hit you, you bugger. You think you can fool me.” She wrestled her phone back and it was all over. “I’m gonna tell Uncle Andy so he can give you a damn good hiding when he comes home from work tonight. Does your mother know you wear her things?”
I was half-way across the road, still wracked with hysteria. I knew I’d had her fooled - enough to have gotten out of her front door with the precious telephone.
Back home, “SOS” playing in the background, I looked at myself in the mirror. I was beautiful, and I knew it. If only I was a girl. That funny swoon feeling snaked its way through me again. I puckered my lips and blew myself a kiss. If I’d been able to fool Auntie Joyce, what about Koosie?

                                                *******
Brynn Binnell
London,
Summer 2006