B O N U S C H A P T E R

☆☆☆

NTOMBI KHAYA

Content Warning: Rape & Suicide.

☆☆☆

I was twenty years old when I had the first real taste of life. It was not the scientific and biologic explanation for existence, where one inhales and exhales in order to receive oxygen to keep all bodily systems going, but the breathtaking, heart-racing, fire-burning burst of life, youth and love that flowed through my veins. The day Robert and I had our first kiss, it felt as if my entire world had been knocked off of its axis.

I remember what his lips tasted like and the warmth of his large, calloused pale hands holding onto me as if I was the totality of all of his worldly possession. His eyes were bluer than the sky above us and they seemed to sparkle as he looked down at me and smiled so tenderly at me that I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry because of the awe and the fear he incited within me and how at that moment, it was the first time I'd felt something either than the perpetual and blinding rage and fear that had followed me for as long as I can remember.

Before Robert Hearth and the Nandos in Pretoria CBD; before South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994, there was 1991 - the year of Nelson Mandela's release. It was the year I turned thirteen years old and the year the darkness made home within me and never quite left.

February 1991, Soweto, South Africa.

I remember the walk home from school with my sister, Portia who was two years my junior. We took the kilometre-long trek in the sweltering summer sun, with our pitch black dungarees and our pitch black socks making our pitch black skins burn even faster. She was telling me about the geography lesson she'd had and some new gossip about a teacher in the same way she did every day. This was our routine. We would then get home, change out of our uniforms and help Mama around the house.

We lived a simple existence, though it was hard in a place like that. Mama tried her hardest to keep us away from the places where it was easy to get into trouble. Things were better then than in '76 and the State of Emergency, but not by much. I knew this. Portia was a little too young to fully grasp it then, she was only eleven years old in body and much younger in mind. Mama liked it that way and so did I.

I remember the celebration that awaited us when we reached our street. Children were yelling "Viva, Mandela, Viva!" while women sang praises to God and men were sitting in compounds drinking their beers in their kilos.

At home, Mama gave us note money to go and buy many bottles of cold, Cocoa-Cola and two kilograms of beef and some biscuits and she'd warned us to hurry back as she suspected the local spaza would be busy with excited youth and energised policemen.

Everyone content when we finally sat down for our evening meal that night long after our neighbours left - Mama, Portia, Uncle Thabo and myself. I'd helped Mama cook the pap and she'd made beef stew. It was hot and tender and the special blend of salt and spice slid down my throat in a tantalising dance. It had been a while since we'd seen meat on our plates.

Times were very trying and Mama had to make do with the little she made from working as an at-home seamstress. The money Baba sent at the end of the month was the edge that kept us floating above but it did nothing more.

Even so, as Mama and her brother talked about what Nelson's freedom meant to them, I listened to the hope that tinged their voices and the excitement for better things. Uncle Thabo had been a part of the student protests of '76. He'd left school that year and hadn't returned since. He lived in the back room in the yard and had been for the past year.

He worked as a bricklayer for a house Mr Kunene, our pastor had built for his growing family. He liked to spend his money at the tavern. In Mama's eyes, he was an unsung hero, a man who'd fought for the liberation of Blacks and was just as important as Albert Luthuli, Oliver Tambo and Hector Peterson, maybe even a little more because he was her big brother. I had no opinion on the matter or on the man himself.

My life revolved around school, doing chores for Mama and anticipating Baba's return. He worked in the mines in Egoli and sometimes many weeks would pass until he was able to come home to us. I loved his visits because he always came home with smiles and nice things.

The last time he'd been home, he'd bought me a pair of beautiful white pantyhose for my church dress and had left Mama with enough money to buy a lot of meat and even some beer for her brother. I hoped that with the good news of Nelson, his work would let him come home to celebrate for a little while.

Out of everyone, he loved me the most. I was his little girl and he was my beloved Baba and I could never fathom the idea of loving another man the way that I loved him.

That weekend, Mama and Portia were going to a prayer evening and I was staying behind. Mama thought I was old enough to be left alone for the night and I'd felt so giddy at the prospect. Mama was really starting to see me as big girl.

A month ago, she'd used a very significant portion of her wages and we'd gone to town to buy me my first real bra and the matching panties that came with it. She believed I needed those things for Sundays, so I could be beautiful and proper for the Lord.

I cared far less about looking proper and more about the way my breasts, so tender and budding and round would look in the cups. And that's what I'd spent the night doing, under the dim candlelight I stood in front of the mirror in the bra and panties and ran my fingers over all the new curves that had come in and took note of every arch and dip that hadn't been there before.

After a long time, I finally took all of those items off and slipped into my old white nightie with little red roses on it and fell into a peaceful, deep slumber.

The next time I woke, it was because I could feel a heat in my nether regions. It felt as if I was having cramps from my menses but the pain was accentuated a thousandfold. I felt something warm rush down my legs and let out a cry of agony.

I was still too groggy to make sense of what was happening. My monthly bleeding had occurred just last week, could I be getting it again so soon? I felt a hot, unfamiliar heavy breath billow against the skin of my collarbone and it was with a start I realised that the bed was creaking and there was someone - Uncle Thabo - on top of me and inside me and he was tearing my body into two. I tried to scream and was met with a swift smack to my face and a laboured "be quiet or I kill you."

It felt as if hours had passed while he was on top of me and by the time he decided he was done, the pain was too great to bear. I couldn't cry, or groan or move.

My mother found me in a pool of my own blood the next morning and it was she who roused me out of unconsciousness. She woke me up with a hard shake of my shoulders and told me to wake up, wash and clean my sheets because Baba would be home in a few hours and he couldn't see me in that way. Portia was in the kitchen crying for me.

I heard the resounding slap against her face through the walls when Mama told her to shut up and stop making a scene.

Baba returned with a multitude of presents for everyone. There were reading books, new school shoes and summer dresses for my sister and I, and a new leather handbag and smart shoes for my mother. Nelson's release had made him generous.

We sat for Sunday lunch, all five of us - Baba, Mama, Uncle Thabo, Portia and I. Thabo sat directly across me at the table and every time he'd catch my eye, he'd wink as if to let me know that he'd ultimately won.

Baba eventually found out because things of that nature don't stay hidden from the patriarch of the house. My father was very angry. He and Uncle Thabo got into an altercation which left my uncle with a bruised face and a bleeding wound from his head. Baba left to go drink at the tavern and Mama spent all night in the kitchen crying and praying.

Portia cried too, but I'd taken her into our shared room and told her it'd be best if she quietened down and slept and so she did. And I sat in a numb silence all night - until the next morning. Baba told me in a cryptic voice in our family meeting after breakfast that what had happened in this house was to stay with us. He didn't want people from outside in our business.

Rape was a very messy thing to have smeared on our family name and he was already working so hard in those awful mines to make sure that we were respectable folk. Besides, he'd made Thabo pay for his sins and I had to do my best to make peace with what happened. Mama told me to pray to the Lord to restore my purity and to forgive me for losing my chastity in the way that I had.

×

Baba went back to work in the mines and Uncle Thabo stayed in his back room and life was the way it had always been, except for me, because I'd changed. I felt as if the night I'd bled my life out on my childhood bed was the night my spirit wandered off and was never to be found.

I felt dead inside as if someone had ripped out all the organs inside of my body and left the shell. My sleep was plagued with bad dreams and my hands would shake in the daytime, even on the hottest days. I began to perform badly in school and I no longer took heed to my mother's instruction.

One day, she slapped me hard across the face for not doing any of my chores and I'd realised with full clarity that I hated that woman and everything about her. I hated her brother, I hated her husband and I hated her God.

I'd slapped her back and she'd watched me with horror filled eyes. She screamed for Portia to come and finish with all of the chores and never touched me ever again.

When Baba came home the next time, I refused any of his gifts. Mama said it was because I was demon-possessed. Baba called me an ungrateful whore. He stopped loving me then.

Thabo got married in 1992 to a fat, ugly woman named Gladys and he moved into her family home with her. I was forced to attend the wedding in the summer dress my father had bought me year before.

I'd felt something ugly crawl up my spine as I watched him and his grotesque wife drinking, kissing and being merry. I didn't understand why he was allowed to move on with his life and was blessed with a new wife while I felt as though I was a rotting corpse, festering and clawing in the darkness.

I began to wander off on my own and I'd leave the house at odd hours and return in the dead of night. My mother accused me of sleeping around with older men and I let her have it, but the truth was that I spent all of my time drunk and thinking about how fucked my life was. I was befriended by a boy named Solly who was a loner himself.

He wasn't involved in the gangs but he was respected enough that no one ever messed with him and he took me under his wing. We'd spent evenings roaming the streets and he'd buy me bottles of Black Label and I'd drink them like a fish until I was blackout drunk and unable to feel any pain.

I failed grade 10 at the end of 1994 and I knew without a doubt that I would not be returning to school. Solly was leaving for Pretoria and I decided to go with him. It was with relief that my parents let me go as they believed I was beyond redemption and beyond any of their love which they now showered upon Portia - who was now the model child.

We'd long since lost our connection but I still caught her looking at me with these eyes full of pity sometimes and it made me want to slap her. She stayed out of my way though, and that was how I preferred it. I was sixteen years old and unqualified when I reached Pretoria and yet I knew I had to do everything in my power to thrive in that new place because I had left Soweto behind and could not go back.

It took me a week to get the job at Nandos. I'd been fortunate. A girl had quit her post and I'd happened to wander into that store, CV-less but with a desperate looking face, eager to work as anything and for any wage. Our manager, Van Niekerk, had somehow taken pity on me and had given me the job on the spot. I'd been living with Solly in a grimy, cockroach-infested apartment in CBD with five other men. He and I shared a mattress on the floor and we were both hunting for jobs together.

Solly had never shown a romantic or sexual interest in me before but he'd taken to touching me when he thought I was asleep and I let him have his way with me - lest he became angry with me and did exactly what Thabo had done to me years before. I knew I had to leave him behind soon because his friends were drug dealers and he showing interest in their trade.

I was relieved when one of my colleagues told me about Mam' Ruth and the one-room she was renting out in Mamelodi West and I was relieved to discover that the rent was reasonable and didn't deplete all of my wages.

The next four years passed by in a blur of early mornings and late nights. All I did was work and work. I had no interest in going out, or seeing men or keeping friends.

The initial plan was to use my wages to enrol myself into a class of sorts so I could get an education, but with all of the hours I worked and the little time I had to myself, I was always so tired... too tired to learn. Pretoria was an unforgiving city but I managed to survive and that was all that mattered. And then one day, an arrogant man named Robert Hearth blundered into my life and everything changed.

October 1998, Pretoria, South Africa

There were many kisses that followed that first one and with each moment I spent with this giant, gentle creature it felt as if my river banks were filling where they'd once been ravaged by drought. He filled me up with so much love that it wore me down and permeated to my very bones. I never told him what I'd been through, but I knew he could sense that it had been something ugly and dark.

We made love for the first time on a Sunday afternoon, in my drab and small rented room. We'd gone out to breakfast hours before and when the time came for me to return to my place, he'd parked his car and I'd led him inside instead. We were alone and the sun lit up everything inside. There was a moment we both came to complete halt and surveyed each other's bodies.

It was the first time in my life that I'd actually seen a fully naked man and my cheeks burned. I thought that he was beautiful yet so completely foreign, so completely different to me. For a moment, I was tempted to call everything to a stop, because thoughts of Thabo tainted me and I feared I'd feel the same blinding pain. I couldn't bear to disappoint the man I loved in that way.

Robert had showered every single part of my body with wet kisses and I'd writhed when that mouth had dipped down below. I hadn't known that it was possible to do the sort of things with a tongue and I was even more astonished at how much I liked it and how it filled my entire body with electricity.

There was a moment of searing pain when he entered me and felt as though my entire body was protesting at the intrusion. I prayed to every god that existed that I wouldn't cry and that he wouldn't sense my distress. But to my surprise, the pain dissolved slowly and with each move of his hips, a pleasurable sensation began to blossom within me and my knees felt weak.

I came with a gasp of his name - completely overwhelmed with what my body had done and how good it felt. He merely chuckled and kissed my cheek before he pushed against me as he was still as erect as when we started. The pleasure came threefold after that and I'd clung to him as my life depended on it while moans escaped my lips and he breathed hotly into my ear.

I'd fallen asleep right after, bundled in his arms and with my head tucked into his chest and the morning sun growing stronger and warmer through the thin curtains.

×

It was in December of that year when I found out that I'd fallen pregnant. Robert and I were ecstatic. He'd moved me to his apartment in Waterkloof and I stopped working. I felt like a princess in a glass castle, waiting for her prince to return every evening with a sweet kiss to my lips.

We were in love but things weren't perfect. He began to complain that he didn't know anything about my past and I wouldn't let him meet my family - while his family absolutely detested me and thought me to be a fraud.

The pregnancy was very difficult and I had a rap sheet of ills that plagued me from each trimester: from aching limbs, swollen feet, and an irregular heartbeat. The shaking began again and it was accompanied by a heavy sensation in my head as if I'd been knocked over by a club.

Sometimes, I'd spend hours on the floor while Robert was away at work, dizzy and with tears streaming down my face afraid that I would lose that child and Robert's love along with it.

Giving birth was an equally traumatising experience and they'd come close to losing me and the baby but after a harrowing sixteen-hour delivery, I had my baby girl in my arms.

To this day, I have never felt a love that was as vast nor as deep nor as instantaneous as when I first laid eyes on my child. She was mine and Robert's and she was so wonderful and perfect and the first thing that I could be proud of in my godforsaken life.

The first few months were blissful, in an odd way. I still had the shakes and sometimes when I held Paiten, I was afraid that I'd drop and hurt her but I nonetheless loved her and I loved her father and our new house and our new life. All I had to do was stifle the voice inside that told me to leave this all behind and never look back.

Paiten caught the flu at seven months that had messed with her respiratory functions - she needed to be rushed to ER early in the evening and I'd cried all night while Robert comforted me. That was the straw that broke the camel's back and I knew then that I would never be the mother that Paiten needed me to be, or the kind of wife Robert deserved.

The day I left, I'd waited until the shakes left my hands before leaving my child with a neighbour and ultimately disappeared into an abyss.

1999 - 2016, KZN, South Africa.

I don't have much to account for the next seventeen years, most of it is a blur of an alcohol addiction that spanned for a decade - coupled with an unsuccessful suicide attempt. I worked as many things over those years - a waitress, a cleaner, a domestic worker, a nanny and barely scraped by. It was my last employer who found me floating in his bathtub after he'd returned a day early from his vacation that brought the turnaround in my life. He was a bachelor whose family resided in France.

I came to clean in his apartment three times a week and I'd tried to drown myself while he was away. He was a generous and understanding man who sent me to a psychiatric hospital instead.

After being rehabilitated, I found a job in a hotel, went to school for business and hotel management and I soon found myself managing the hotel that Robert later found me at.

×

Robert knows all of the important things - where I've been, what I've been through and where I want to go. There are some things I will never be able to tell him, because they're so grotesque that they've buried themselves in memories that I fear to recall.

And he still loves me and I believe he forgives me. Paiten loves me and forgives me. I have yet to forgive myself but I wake up every day that I'd been given a second chance to redo everything and that I'm still so loved and treasured.

Robert and Paiten were the people who gave me the first taste of life and it is with them that I will feel the last.

×

A U T H O R N O T E

first of all, THANK YOU SO FUCKING MUCH FOR 75K READS. YOU PEOPLE ARE INSANE!!! i hope everyone has been well for the first six months of this new year.

it feels a little weird to update a chapter after so long ngl, i'd almost fallen out of the swing of things. but, here's bonus chapter one, i hope i told Ntombi's story well. as promised, there are still two bonus chapters on the way. until then, take care of yourselves loves!

-dzangie 💛