the Mercedes, her bare, sweaty butt cheeks squealing on the leather, an ache radiated outward from her cunt (which felt like a recently tenderized chunk of raw meat) into the rest of her body, and the T-shirt rubbed painfully across her nipples that itched and burned from beard rash.
The muscles and tendons of her legs and back throbbed from the unaccustomed positions the randy golf pro had ragdolled her into on the rear seat of the car, and she saw his jowly face made silver by moonlight as he had her straddle and ride him to some invisible finish line, which he’d reached with loud grunts and oaths—and even something that could have been a snatch of a drinking song.
As she searched for her jeans and panties Tanya caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview: her black hair (worn long in those days) was the nest of a mad bird and lipstick and rouge were smeared across her face, lending her the appearance of a depraved mime.
She found her jeans and her other sandal but her panties were gone. As she cracked the car door a child’s action figure tumbled out onto the red earth of the road and lay looking up at her accusingly.
Tanya almost sobbed with relief when she saw the roof of the shiny little white Volkswagen her parents had bought her three months ago for her eighteenth birthday gleaming across the cane.
The short walk to her car had her sweating in the February heat and heavy humidity and her mouth was dry and bitter.
She slid in behind the wheel of the Volkswagen and cranked the engine. Hot air blew out of the vents and the plastic bottle of water she found on the floor beneath yesterday’s Mercury (the front page trumpeting the imminent release of Nelson Mandela) was as warm as piss.
She drank it, anyway, as she rattled down the gravel track and found the coast highway that wound through the blinding green landscape until she swung off onto another unpaved farm road that led her to the house she’d grown up in, a white double story that looked as if it had become unmoored from English Home Counties suburbia only to run aground in this sea of sugarcane on the tip of Africa.
She parked between her father’s Land Rover and her mother’s sensible Toyota and let herself into the silent house, the grandfather clock in the hallway bonging once at the bottom of the hour: seven thirty.
It was Sunday, the only day of the week when the uniformed houseboys and girls (Zulu men and women in their forties and fifties) were permitted to stay late in their cramped quarters—hidden from the house by a froth of purple bougainvillea—and were expected in the kitchen only at nine a.m. to prepare the brunch that her parents took on the patio, her mother gabbling inanely, her father, hidden behind the Sunday Tribune , grunting with the perfect timing of the long-married man.
Feeling edgy and hungover Tanya went through to the kitchen and found a can of Coke in the refrigerator. She washed down a couple of aspirins with the treacly soda, splashed her face at the sink and dried herself on a kitchen towel.
She had no desire to climb the stairs to the bedroom of her childhood and early pubescence—still frozen in time from when she’d gone to boarding school in Durban at thirteen—in case she encountered one of her parents and was subjected to the inevitable interrogation about why she hadn’t come home last night, so she went into the living room.
Crossing to the window seat—a favorite haunt of hers as a child—she saw the 1960s Anne Sexton anthology, Live or Die , lying on the cushions. It was dog-eared and a couple of pages had come adrift of the spine through the years of mother immersing herself in these tormented, confessional poems.
She found the silence of the house oppressive and went to the stereo perched beneath shelves of long playing records—her father scorning cassettes and CDs. A recording of the Ray Conniff Singers lay on the turntable, visible through its closed plastic lid.
As a child she’d been
The muscles and tendons of her legs and back throbbed from the unaccustomed positions the randy golf pro had ragdolled her into on the rear seat of the car, and she saw his jowly face made silver by moonlight as he had her straddle and ride him to some invisible finish line, which he’d reached with loud grunts and oaths—and even something that could have been a snatch of a drinking song.
As she searched for her jeans and panties Tanya caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview: her black hair (worn long in those days) was the nest of a mad bird and lipstick and rouge were smeared across her face, lending her the appearance of a depraved mime.
She found her jeans and her other sandal but her panties were gone. As she cracked the car door a child’s action figure tumbled out onto the red earth of the road and lay looking up at her accusingly.
Tanya almost sobbed with relief when she saw the roof of the shiny little white Volkswagen her parents had bought her three months ago for her eighteenth birthday gleaming across the cane.
The short walk to her car had her sweating in the February heat and heavy humidity and her mouth was dry and bitter.
She slid in behind the wheel of the Volkswagen and cranked the engine. Hot air blew out of the vents and the plastic bottle of water she found on the floor beneath yesterday’s Mercury (the front page trumpeting the imminent release of Nelson Mandela) was as warm as piss.
She drank it, anyway, as she rattled down the gravel track and found the coast highway that wound through the blinding green landscape until she swung off onto another unpaved farm road that led her to the house she’d grown up in, a white double story that looked as if it had become unmoored from English Home Counties suburbia only to run aground in this sea of sugarcane on the tip of Africa.
She parked between her father’s Land Rover and her mother’s sensible Toyota and let herself into the silent house, the grandfather clock in the hallway bonging once at the bottom of the hour: seven thirty.
It was Sunday, the only day of the week when the uniformed houseboys and girls (Zulu men and women in their forties and fifties) were permitted to stay late in their cramped quarters—hidden from the house by a froth of purple bougainvillea—and were expected in the kitchen only at nine a.m. to prepare the brunch that her parents took on the patio, her mother gabbling inanely, her father, hidden behind the Sunday Tribune , grunting with the perfect timing of the long-married man.
Feeling edgy and hungover Tanya went through to the kitchen and found a can of Coke in the refrigerator. She washed down a couple of aspirins with the treacly soda, splashed her face at the sink and dried herself on a kitchen towel.
She had no desire to climb the stairs to the bedroom of her childhood and early pubescence—still frozen in time from when she’d gone to boarding school in Durban at thirteen—in case she encountered one of her parents and was subjected to the inevitable interrogation about why she hadn’t come home last night, so she went into the living room.
Crossing to the window seat—a favorite haunt of hers as a child—she saw the 1960s Anne Sexton anthology, Live or Die , lying on the cushions. It was dog-eared and a couple of pages had come adrift of the spine through the years of mother immersing herself in these tormented, confessional poems.
She found the silence of the house oppressive and went to the stereo perched beneath shelves of long playing records—her father scorning cassettes and CDs. A recording of the Ray Conniff Singers lay on the turntable, visible through its closed plastic lid.
As a child she’d been
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