now.”
5
Tanya surfaced into a pungent fog of stale perfume, alcoholic sweat and briny genital secretions. When she tried to open her eyes and couldn’t part the lids she thought she’d been struck blind for her sins, until she realized that the mascara she’d inexpertly applied the night before at her mother’s urging was gluing them closed.
Fuck.
Taking her eyelids between her fingertips she pulled them apart and sat blinking out the car windshield at the gaudy deities clotting the tower of the Tamil temple rising into the hot dawn from the sugarcane that stretched like a thick green carpet down to where the torpid Indian Ocean slapped at a deserted stretch of yellow beach.
The temple—built a hundred years ago by the South Indian laborers who’d been shipped over in their droves to hand harvest cane here north of Durban—the sugar plantations and the greasy ocean were all too familiar, but the big car (a starburst of sun flaring on the three-pointed star on its the hood) wasn’t. A miniature golf ball dangling from the rearview mirror just above Tanya’s head—she was sprawled in the partly-reclined passenger seat, naked but for her Robert Mugabe T-shirt (those were more innocent times, before Bob had morphed into a syphilitic tyrant) and the single hippie sandal that remained attached to her left foot—provided a clue to the Mercedes-Benz’s owner.
A wet snore had her looking over her shoulder at the rear seat, into the sweaty, florid face of the beefy man who’d picked her up in the bar of the Salt Rock hotel the night before after she’d ditched a group of her ex-schoolmates (barely two months into her first year at Durban University Tanya found them unbearably dull and provincial) at a local disco and headed for the cocktail lounge filled with rowdy men her father’s age.
She couldn’t remember the man’s name but she did remember that he was the pro at the local golf course and—once he’d berated her for wearing a T-shirt glorifying a “communist coon”—had plied her with gin and bragged that he’d helped her father overcome his slice, whatever that meant, and (with sudden, almost forensic clarity) she remembered sliding unsteadily off her bar stool and following him through a swinging door after he’d told her he needed to use the “loo.”
Following him into a gloomy corridor, tart pine disinfectant not quite masking the stink of stale urine and human dung, the big man’s cloying aftershave and meaty body odor adding further noxious layers to the fetid air of the corridor as he’d closed in on her.
She’d ducked his kiss—beer and tobacco and poor dental hygiene—kneeled and unbuckled his belt, his paunch sagging as she unzipped him and pulled his khaki shorts to his knees, revealing a pair of white underpants that were ludicrously boyish.
Feeling laughter bubbling in her throat she’d reached into his skivvies and freed his cock, a blunt, fleshy thing that rose from a thicket of blondish pubes and taken it into her mouth, using it to cork her hilarity.
He’d gasped and flailed at her hair, his prick hardening against her palate.
For a moment she’d fancied that if she bit into this veiny plug of skin and gristle he would deflate like a punctured blimp, disappearing with a flatulent hiss.
The door had creaked and, as she’d tongued and slurped, she’d looked up and seen another man standing in the doorway watching, quite motionless.
The golf pro had seen him too and the stranger’s appearance, coupled with her ministrations, had brought forth a groaning, glottal climax, jism filling her mouth like watery dollops of albumen from a botched poached egg.
She’d spat out the man’s twitching dick and with it his semen—gobs landing on his pants and dappling the tiled floor—and stood, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand.
Her memory dimmed again and she had no recollection of leaving the bar, but as she moved in the seat of
5
Tanya surfaced into a pungent fog of stale perfume, alcoholic sweat and briny genital secretions. When she tried to open her eyes and couldn’t part the lids she thought she’d been struck blind for her sins, until she realized that the mascara she’d inexpertly applied the night before at her mother’s urging was gluing them closed.
Fuck.
Taking her eyelids between her fingertips she pulled them apart and sat blinking out the car windshield at the gaudy deities clotting the tower of the Tamil temple rising into the hot dawn from the sugarcane that stretched like a thick green carpet down to where the torpid Indian Ocean slapped at a deserted stretch of yellow beach.
The temple—built a hundred years ago by the South Indian laborers who’d been shipped over in their droves to hand harvest cane here north of Durban—the sugar plantations and the greasy ocean were all too familiar, but the big car (a starburst of sun flaring on the three-pointed star on its the hood) wasn’t. A miniature golf ball dangling from the rearview mirror just above Tanya’s head—she was sprawled in the partly-reclined passenger seat, naked but for her Robert Mugabe T-shirt (those were more innocent times, before Bob had morphed into a syphilitic tyrant) and the single hippie sandal that remained attached to her left foot—provided a clue to the Mercedes-Benz’s owner.
A wet snore had her looking over her shoulder at the rear seat, into the sweaty, florid face of the beefy man who’d picked her up in the bar of the Salt Rock hotel the night before after she’d ditched a group of her ex-schoolmates (barely two months into her first year at Durban University Tanya found them unbearably dull and provincial) at a local disco and headed for the cocktail lounge filled with rowdy men her father’s age.
She couldn’t remember the man’s name but she did remember that he was the pro at the local golf course and—once he’d berated her for wearing a T-shirt glorifying a “communist coon”—had plied her with gin and bragged that he’d helped her father overcome his slice, whatever that meant, and (with sudden, almost forensic clarity) she remembered sliding unsteadily off her bar stool and following him through a swinging door after he’d told her he needed to use the “loo.”
Following him into a gloomy corridor, tart pine disinfectant not quite masking the stink of stale urine and human dung, the big man’s cloying aftershave and meaty body odor adding further noxious layers to the fetid air of the corridor as he’d closed in on her.
She’d ducked his kiss—beer and tobacco and poor dental hygiene—kneeled and unbuckled his belt, his paunch sagging as she unzipped him and pulled his khaki shorts to his knees, revealing a pair of white underpants that were ludicrously boyish.
Feeling laughter bubbling in her throat she’d reached into his skivvies and freed his cock, a blunt, fleshy thing that rose from a thicket of blondish pubes and taken it into her mouth, using it to cork her hilarity.
He’d gasped and flailed at her hair, his prick hardening against her palate.
For a moment she’d fancied that if she bit into this veiny plug of skin and gristle he would deflate like a punctured blimp, disappearing with a flatulent hiss.
The door had creaked and, as she’d tongued and slurped, she’d looked up and seen another man standing in the doorway watching, quite motionless.
The golf pro had seen him too and the stranger’s appearance, coupled with her ministrations, had brought forth a groaning, glottal climax, jism filling her mouth like watery dollops of albumen from a botched poached egg.
She’d spat out the man’s twitching dick and with it his semen—gobs landing on his pants and dappling the tiled floor—and stood, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand.
Her memory dimmed again and she had no recollection of leaving the bar, but as she moved in the seat of
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