Moxyland - Lauren Beukes [47]
Zama likes to play the family historian. She's a font of all these great stories about our parents, but the Eskom orphanage – let's not cop to the PC term of 'trade school', even if they are cultivating proprietary workforces – has always been more vivid in my head than my idea of home, which is a patchwork of broadcast images. Green hills and sky and a threadbare chicken with long scrawny legs scratching through dust that would never yield a juicy maggot, let alone mielies. It's all cliché, a communal sepia-toned memory that all us Aidsbabies have in common.
I was only seven at the time. The baby of the family after Zama and Siphokazi, and Tebogo, who succumbed even before our parents. I just have to accept whatever Zama says, the stories polished and brittle from so much repetition.
I think I remember a clinic with walls painted a sickly avocado green, and playing Darth Vader in the sterilmask until I got a smack. In my memory it's Zama who hit me, but I suppose it could just as easily have been a nurse.
She says we used to walk miles along the railway tracks, picking some raggy weed, cosmos I think, to give to our mother. Predictably, the nurses confiscated it all when we got there for fear that we might contaminate our parents. We weren't even allowed to touch them.
I remember rows of beds crammed together and sour metal smells and a man, limbs as spindly and sharp as a locust, who terrified me. It's going to sound harsh, but I'm glad I never had to go back there, never had to deal with the reality of Thomokazi and Sam Mazwai, which is all I have of them, their names on my birth certificate. And the legacy of two sisters, one turned hippievegan-Buddhist-dropout, the other fermenting in her dead-end job at Eskom, never having graduated beyond our first parent company.
It may be partially my fault Zamajobe never made it out of Eskom. I probably had some kind of familial obligation to tell them when I realised that only the brightest and most productive get out – to better companies that pay a premium for the privilege. But they were older. They should have been guiding me. And besides, I didn't need the competition.
Within a year, I'd been handpicked to go over to Pfizer SA Primary in Cape Town, and suddenly the story sums in class were focused on medication doses rather than wattage, and the school didn't have the same level of desperation. There weren't girls selling themselves at the side of the road to truck drivers for tuck money.
At fourteen, I had my pick of bursaries at secondary institutions run by Telkom, Cisco, Wesizwe and New Mutua. I knew I wanted to get into media, and by then I knew how to negotiate, how to play the system. No more fucking around in squalid dorms with the hordes. When I took up New Mutua's scholarship, I demanded a private room, and it was great for two years.
Communique got me through a Pluslife chat room. In those days it was music sharing and flirting, before the record labels started imposing criminal sentences and meshing their crippleware with defusers. I met my first handful of boyfriends through the chats. But then one of my online friends made me a proposition of a different nature.
By the end of the day, New Mutua knew all about it and I was being forcibly evicted, marched out by security guards with Aitos, not even allowed to go back for my phone. Looking back, it's obvious that my new friend ratted me out to make sure I didn't change my mind. I never learned his real name. Headhunters are only as effective as their anonymity.
Technically, I still had another four years of training to go before officially entering the workforce, but Communique was willing to let me skip two, provided I waive the gap year that all skills institute grads are legally entitled to. But I've been here six years, almost seven, and that's starting to feel like a very, very long time.
When I get off the phone, with a whole halfhour's worth of filler for the spyware boys, I find a