Teenagers

Lizards wrestle on hot earth, and chicks wonder through knotholes in stingy fences in search of worms and other delicacies frightened out of wet soils by claps of last night’s thunder.

Stray dogs drag each other by their asses straining genitals at this season of rampant canine orgies, chased by rascals throwing stones and empty tin cans while winding their day with other curious games.

Phekilitye feels a surge of excitement run through him as he glances at a painted sign that denotes his home stretch, trying not to remember just how many dust snorting dogs he saw in peculiar copulative positions.

He however, could not reconcile his disgust at the disconcerting number of tiny poodles hanging from rears of big dogs, paws clawing about in frantic infernal breeding.

He was back to the madness, arriving in time for sunset games and couples’ strolls, and he could not wait to see her after three month.

He hadn’t been in love since his baby’s mother joined the fun brigades led by big spending mine workers four years ago, so the strange tingle in his chest is sweetly crushing his walled in heart, a serenely placid calm seething through his tired body.

After throwing his schoolbag on the single bed in shack he hires in the back yard of Matlokotsi’s RDP house, he slides a rusty steel chair to sit, loosening laces and casting off his muddy boots.

Tomorrow he is turning twenty-three, and all he can imagine as a gift is her presence, her soft gaze that bears hard edges of thoughtful contemplation, a stressed and glum look on a face that forgot its beauty.

She is seventeen, this he recalls as he slips his hand into the satchel he carries to work each day, dragging out a packet of RG’s and box of matches.

Her name escapes his lips as a whisper, smoke rising from his cigarette in a steady stream, filling the entire shack.

And the thought of statutory rape crosses his dozing mind, but is soon cast out my images of her nude body.

Like the rest of the teenagers here, Noverse is quite a self-confessed sex addict, a nymphomaniac well versed in copulative styles and crafty carnal positions.

Phekilitye lays motionless with roasted lungs on his bed in a vain attempt at numbing his erection, contemplating events of the previous night, a nervous twitch coursing through his spine.

Through a plastic covered small window he notices darkness covering the rowdy neighborhood, and he decides to light a candle and prepare some beans and rice for supper, before trotting towards his den of gin and gossip.

A flying cockroach leaps about casting moving shadows on steel walls as the glow of the candle illuminates it, and Phekilitye finds it hard not to find a parable in its feat at conquering light.

The teenagers here, like any annual crop of chance babies reared by grandmothers, like these cockroaches mimicking their personae that respect neither pity nor weakness, rack an absolute sureness that youth is eternal.

They leave neither stone nor wood unmarked with vulgar sex games graffiti and sweet crosses, repressed vixens that have burst their bonds, whose horny urges have exploded into huge tits and pendulous buttocks.

Libidos are released on pavements and back alleys here, and in their sundered child-headed households, yet there is not a trace of anybody's endeavors to find fault with their sensual moves.

Young people are dancing topless and bottomless, and other nuns have thrown off their pious vigil for a heavenly bride, exposed their legs, and danced the ‘kwasakwasa’ up and down church streets as a prank.

With the same inattention to fairly acceptable norms, they walk nights among knives and guns oppressed by a tyranny of false dreams deferred.

At midnight, slogans from taverns roam ghostly streets giving cover to knife wielding loafers looking for entertaining horrors or fantasies.

Pleasures of the flesh are to be played out, discarded and then transcended on bare floors and the frenzy produced dissipating with the mist of soggy cigarettes.

The girls here, spit phlegm like dexterous old pipe smokers with lungs charred by cheap tobacco, and on some evenings they sleep peacefully, their painted claws clasping erect breasts under tattered rags and aging blankets.

Noverse has two children of her own already, a two year old boy and six month old girl all fathered by runaway men.

And that was nothing to scurry away from, Phekilitye tells himself in secret defense of his unfruitful mission of birthing a child before he was thirty.

But he never ceases to remember that steamy night in Tlokotsi’s car, when he felt like a man with his youth restored, her menstrual fountain whose waters rejuvenate the old making him scream like a lawless circus freak.

It was mad sex in a mad township, parched lands reserved for the rebellious - a kind of folk obsessed with all types of euphoric obscenities.

‘I love you’ are three damned words never to be said lightly or rashly, he remembers; but everyone is addicted here and others have something to extol as marvel in these wanton virtues of inebriation and narcotics.

After larding on his vacuum cuisine and feeling belly full of beans and fart, he cannot help but meticulously plan his attire for swag missions on this hump day.

In a town where every day is someone’s payday, white Caterpillar boots, a pair of Bermuda slacks and a baggy Nike t-shirt should make for a perfect wall flower mannequin for drooling gazes of squatter camp sex idols and fashion poachers.

***

He leaves his shack smelling of fruity cologne, stifled by languid stenches of cooling puddles populated with fungi and mosquitoes.

Through menacing streets he waltzes the shadows with a smug attitude of one who knows his bearings in this vile place; he feels protected by the envy others voiced at his in-look.

Perhaps his clothes were not so outrageous by the cool world’s standards, but he felt worth the semblance of affluence whispered to him by trending ghosts of celebrities, and felt certain she would fall for him again.

He soon finds her, in the whirling mess of regulars at Spikiring, her common hideout from her infant’s nagging wails and her grandmother’s incessant prayers welded with spikes of rerun gospel hits.

She always found the nebulous atmosphere of this tavern contagious, leaving one battling with interludes of rage and extreme pleasure.

But the intoxicating flood of resolve that would often bend her knees after a wearied dance, when in reminiscence, she would view her life in fading mirages of forgotten lovers and promises.

And she was with her new lover as anticipated, but Phekilitye was unfazed, feeling glorious under the deflated light from fluorescent bulbs.

Gushing girls with arched lashes were salivating at his rear, and he was winning at a game of jealousy roused by unsatisfied women in insecure men.

Noverse was beginning to notice the funfair around him at the sales booth and dared approach, but her lover had been watching the magnetic pull of money from a distance and opted to intervene by offering her a drink.

Lean men were walking about numbed by booze and smoke, other tilting and wobbling on stacks of crates meant for seats, while gorgeous belly buttons peeked from under tight vests cupping pert nipples of blossoming sex toys.

The night air smelt of stale whisky and menstrual discharges in a stuffy shack sprawling with squalid faces, glum and resigned in the delicious haze of dagga smoke and tobacco.

Scheming ways to make it through to sunrise was always her aim, but tonight, she could feel her eyes sway with heaviness of a haunted woman.

And by some wild chance she finds herself looking into his stare, calm and cunning, and flirting.

He then just stands up from his crate and walks towards her, among hardened eyes of pained youths snatched from mirrors and dreams, among glossy lips smirking.

With lungful of acrid smells of gin and smoke, with a somewhat a rapid prattle of indiscernible words, he screamed into her cold ear: “I LOVE YOU!”