IRON HORSE
On days like this Tumiso had always felt the urge to stand up on top of his table and rise above the office cubicles and shout “ I want to get really drunk on cheap Whisky and sleep with my boss tonight !” but as usual he resisted this strong urge and opted to tap his pencil to the tune of Sonny Rollins“ Round Midnight”, on his table he always wished to be made of skin and bra**, but he knew such erratic behaviour would strip him of a promotion and a Friday would no longer be a Friday anymore, it would become the last day of employment before two days of over indulgence where money would be spent like a 8 year old boy in an Adult gift shop for the first time after losing his first tooth. Another 45minutes of plaid shirts and khaki chino’s, and then there’d be a transition into the high strung chords of dementia at the Blues Room where Gerry Mulligan was to be playing with a local quartet from Mannenberg, but for now the humming ba** of the row of Xerox copy machines reminded Tumiso of that last task he had to complete before stabs and crescendo’s of ale and his labour’s unfulfilled merriment were to commence.
“Tumiso, are those faxes’ for the Skype office packages ready yet? The packages need to be extradited by the end of the today and that wont happen unless the faxes with the sales conditions get to the offices…so get on it” said Frank Beyers, a man with very stale features who like me knows nothing about Information Technology solutions but has learnt to memorize the necessary terms to get by each day without exposing the rupture in his own social fabric, indeed he wore cheap shirts as well, the type where one came free with the other at thrift shops along main road in Woodstock. Tumiso did not want to sleep with Frank Beyers; he would have loved to beat him to death with a coffee mug though, but nothing involving any lubricants and bodily fluids. Tumiso wanted to sleep with Rita Foster, the woman in charge of Even Space IT Solutions, she was hardly ever in the office tough, (or the city for that matter) except for her picture which was hung crooked above Ayanda the receptionist’s head, the frame was cheap and it made her look thirty years younger but her picture reminded Tumiso of his High school nurse, Mrs. Southey, she was a humanitarian, she once looked after a whole ward of sickly students when a sudden “flu” spread loose. Many were cured miraculously after having their temperature taken, and it had something to do about the way she would lean over your face whilst placing her hand on your forehead and your eyes would wonder to mountain peaks that gave off a wonderful scent that modern medicine still to this day can not duplicate let alone conjure.
-“Rita is coming around with some people from Switzerland to do an audit next week, so things have to be right on point” added frank, before heading off to talk about cricket and the best Spur Ranch he’d ever been to with some of the web developer guys who were treading on the verge of pa**ing for computer geniuses with down syndrome.
-“okay, I’m on it, its only a few photo copies” said Tumiso , he was about to say something else like “get off my dick” but he saw Leandre walk over to the photo copy machines to probably get on with the faxes that so many people at the office had to get on with every last Friday of the month. Leandre was in a grey area, not in her own, but the one that Tumiso had created for her, because the office and the world alike for Tumiso were black and white, the good and the bad, the going out for lunches and the lunchboxes, the Parkers and the Bics. Leandre only spoke when she was spoken to like the other lunchboxes, but she was different, she wasn’t the type to moan and plot murder about being called a lazy mongoloid the whole day while sneaking off for extra cigarette breaks. She took things calmly, too calmly, some people (mostly the fat one’s) even suspected her of using heroin at work. Maybe I should ask her out for drinks later, Tumiso thought to himself, but this idea fell away like it had for the past three years, it was simple, she was a devout Muslim and he loved pork ribs and the occasional drug on the numerous birthday’s he had in one year.
Leandre’s Family would never allow it; Tumiso had once seen her brother pick her up from work before, he was one big intimidating son of a bitch who had no reason to check if the food he ate was Halaal or not because all he ate was steroids, protein supplements and the occasional daaltjie.
Leandre was still nice to talk to though, she had an astounding knowledge of music and wanted read more books by Ralph Ellison if any existed after Invisible Man. Tumiso stood up and let Frank Beyers do his talking about nothing thing to the other slaves nearby, he picked up his faxes and walked towards the photo copy machines as he thought of interesting conversation to unleash on Leandre, politics maybe? No, that’s way too dry for a Friday, politics are always too risky.
- Lee! What’s going on? Tumiso said as if he didn’t see what she was doing, although she did have one too many faxes to copy and send and most people had only six or so to do.
- Just getting these faxes copied and sent so I can get the hell out of here, I’m so hungry, oh! what I’d do for a chicken burger right now.
- Yeah me too, the faxes that is, I’m down for some Eisbein! Said Tumiso with a slight grin on his face.
-What’s Eisbein? Leandre said
- A big piece of a pig that Germans like to eat with sour cabbage and jugs of beer!
- German’s huh? Not for me thanks, my favourite thing out of Germany is Walter Carlos, ever heard of him?
- The guy that plays the synthesizers? Tumiso said as his voice rose in excitement at the splendor of her knowledge in music.
- Yeah! Yesterday I bought his album on Vinyl, it has Beethoven’s ninth symphony, 2nd movement played on a Robert Moog synthesizer, now that’s much better than pork and rotten cabbage!
- What! I’d like to hear that, I’ ve got a song where he plays the William Tell Overture, I don’t know on what synthesizer though, but it sooths my stomach just the same.
- you should come by and listen to it some time, shit…let me finish up these photo copies, Frank’s doing his rounds”. Leandre said this as if she had just awoken from a dream, her file folder fell to the floor as she hastened to finish her faxes and amongst her outgoing faxes to companies such as Selwyn’s Secretarial Services was a little flyer that said something about COSATU and the unions of something, Tumiso hardly gave it a look, there we so many people handing flyers out these days that he also just took a couple now and then to make them feel good about doing their job“Yeah, I should get on it too” Tumiso said once his dream had ended.
It was 16:45, already way too late to still be at work, Tumiso was tired of the blinding white light of the office and the drone of constant redundancy, he tidied up his desk and packed up his laptop into his grey back pack which also held a sport bottle of red wine he planned to drink on the train ride back home, the iron horse awaits and it takes some sort of intoxicating agent to tolerate fat civil servants and bank employees smelling like musk and complaining about being ha**led for ” ID books and loans from button smokers and wet backs.” It was a 10 min walk to Cape Town station, and normally Tumiso would take a slow stroll and go past St George’s mall and green market square through the flea market and look at sculptures of colonial coons along with Che Guevara t-shirts and instruments for smoking marijuana, it was indeed a strange cluster of tourist attractions that had the Germans and Americans acting like acid fiends staring at a bowl of fruit and somehow dissecting the intricacies of African life through the arrangement of bananas and grapes. St George’s mall was horribly deserted that day, and Tumiso felt a slight tremor of uneasiness similar to when Mrs. Southey caught him looking at her breasts when he had glandular fever, he walked over to Adderly street and saw that the entire street had been turned into a rubble of urban decay as piles of trash laid scatologicaly from corner to corner and shop windows lay broken aghast the faces of the owners who were laying their grievances to the policemen on horse back who added to the imagery of riots in the 60’s or an urban plantation during the slave era. A robbery maybe? That’s too many shops to be a robbery, Tumiso though, but whatever it was Tumiso did not plan on staying around any longer and play Inspector Cleasau on a pro bono basis.
Tumiso’s first reaction was to make a quick turn and cut into a back alley to avoid the devil’s henchmen who he suspected had already tried to link him to the cause of the whole disaster he had just stepped into. The rotten beasts always need to make an arrest for the shop owners and most importantly for their own ill fated reputations sake, police profiling in Cape Town always seems to run along the lines of anyone who isn’t white. Tumiso paced his steps and tried his best not to run and make himself look guilty of running to catch a train, the station was in sight, and to Tumiso’s delight, there was a big group of security guards who were boarding the train to Simons Town, they all seemed to be in a rather jovial mood, singing and dancing and what not, “probably the Friday Spirit” Tumiso thought to himself, “and at least I don’t have to worry about being robbed on the way home! Safe!”
Tumsio rushed on board along with the rest of the working cla**, primary school students, hustlers, preachers, snack vendors and a horde of Security guards who had changed from singing old songs of freedom to shouting profanities through the train windows. Tumiso couldn’t find an open seat so he positioned himself along the railings on the sides of the train where those standing were to keep themselves from falling when the train came to a screeching halt. The atmosphere in the train was alive and rampant that day, it was even livelier than the early mornings where a crazed preacher and his congregation would sing and stomp until the train actually felt like an Evangelical amusement ride heading into the pits of hell. The security guards presence and communal spirit was truly felt on that particular day and some people who were probably clerks or licensing department officials took off their ties and waved them high in the air and began to join the fraternity of the people the woman sitting next to Tumiso called “ eager weekenders”,
“Ja, I guess we all are in a way, they’re just a bit bold about it I guess” replied Tumiso whilst contemplating whether or not to move to another carriage at the next station so he could drink his wine alone.
“Christ!” the woman next Tumiso exclaimed, a few paces away from her two security guards had just forced the door of the train open whilst moving, and the rest of the pa**engers were breaking train windows or crouching beneath the seats and praying to their respective Gods. Tumiso thought they were going to train surf, he’d seen some school kids try the ghastly sport on the Langa line. The little f***ers would climb out of moving trains and get on top of the carriages like the robbers did in old cowboy movies, or worse, they even let their feet levitate a few inches from the grounds surface where the train tracks anxiously waited for fat lumps child meat to drop off so it could be taken to the Department of Public Transport Christmas braai at the end of the year.
Screams erupted all around the four corners of moving metal, Tumiso saw a middle aged man of about 35yrs or so being hurled out the train by two navy blue clad security men through a broken window which caught the sides of the man on his way out, leaving a generous splatter of blood and what appeared to be an appendix across the uniforms of the security men. The poor man was thrown out somewhere over Salt River, “they’re going to rob his corpse” said a school kid who was standing beside me, “I hope decent people find my body”. Tumiso’s thoughts paced into a torrent of possibilities which all ended with a picture of himself split open across the back like a Chinese fortune cookie across the roof of some one’s house whilst they watched Backstage. There was no escape, and the train did not stop at any of the various stations that it usually did, maybe they had killed the driver as well. A boy of about 18 came running from the other side of the carriage where most of the ruckus was taking place and quickly headed towards the side of those who had given up on praying and patiently waited to be tossed out of a window into someone’s back yard. The boy fainted before us before he could say anything at all, say what though? It was all over. Maybe he’s the lucky one. Tumiso sat quietly on the floor with his head on his knees, he thought of his sister in London who was doing random minimum wage jobs that required desperate South African teenage labour. He wished her a good life and hoped that she would quit the nonsense and come back home where the beer is cheaper and the sun stays around for a while longer, his eyes fell to the floor and he saw a flyer that read COSATU, Workers Union General Strike 18 May 2006, WORKERS UNITED AGAINST LOW WAGES. Tumiso smiled and felt a swarm of hands grasp his collar and lift him to his feet, he closed his eyes. Leandre was about to dig into her chicken burger.
A week later Tumiso was buried in Queens Town in the Eastern Cape where he was originally born. Rita Foster never attended the funeral.
