Tandia by Bryce Courtenay Read Free Book Online Page B

up. The sour smell of stomach-fermented kaffir beer filled the cell. The woman was sick three more times, the noise of her spitting and hawking filling the small cell. Finally she turned from the bucket and straightened up. She was panting from the effort of throwing up and her carnivorous lipstick was now smeared across her face. Steadying herself by placing her hand on the wall, she wiped her eyes with her free hand and looked about her. It was then that she saw a frightened Tandia hunched in the darkest corner of the cell.
    'Shit! Who you?' She wasn't really asking a question and her flat gaze was not in the least curious. She withdrew her hand from the wall which caused her to lurch slightly forward. 'Don't fuck with me, you hear!' Her words seemed to upset her balance and she fell two steps backwards until her shoulders bumped into the wall, whereupon she gave a soft groan and slid slowly to the floor beside the bucket, one fat arm coming to rest inside it. In moments she began to snore. The tight skirt had ridden up her thighs and Tandia now saw that she wore nothing underneath.
    Tandia didn't know what to do. She sat in the dark corner, one arm drawing her legs up against her chest, the fist of her free hand in her mouth in an attempt to hold back the panic she felt rising within her. After a while her breathing calmed a little. What should she do? If she took the woman's arm out of the shit bucket she was fearful that she might wake and beat her up. Her sense of survival told her to leave things as they were and her sensibilities, already deeply offended, told her that she could not do so, that the mess in the bucket was in part her doing.
    Tandia waited until she was sure the woman was not likely to wake from her drunken sleep and crept over to the bucket. The woman's hand rested on the bottom, covered in shit and vomit. Gagging as she lifted the arm out of the mess, she rested it on the floor beside her and carefully removed the doek the woman wore tied around her head. Using the head cloth she wiped the foul-smelling hand and film dean. Tandia's heart leapt with fear as the woman gave il sudden groan, sighed deeply and, lifting her arm, dropped it back in the bucket. Tandia pulled back in horror, the stench was overpowering. She began to cry softly.
    After a while she dried her tears. She was crying too much. Crying was an indulgence she would have to learn to do without. She now realised that the woman had passed out and was unlikely to be roused, so she moved over to her again. Once again she removed the woman's hand from the slop bucket and wiped it as clean as she was able, using the now soiled doek. Then she dragged the unconscious woman dear so that she lay on her side with her lipstick-smeared cheek against the cement floor. This seemed to stop her snoring.
    Several hours seemed to pass in the stinking cell and Tandia, when she felt she could bear it no longer, would concentrate on the tiny window until she could make out the pinprick of stars in the tiny square of darkness. She imagined how fresh and dean it was out there with the stars, how some of the air from the space surrounding them was finding its way into her miserable cell. She was not sleepy and her body ached in even more places when she lay down. Besides, the idea that the woman might wake while she was asleep made her fearful of closing her eyes even as she sat. She conjugated the verb 'lacrimare', 'to cry', in imperfect, future, future perfect and past perfect. Patel had always stressed that she must be good at Latin; he dreamed that she would go on to become a lawyer. She went on to irregular verbs with funny endings and then recited her personal and relative pronouns. 'Qui, quae, quo, quod,' she whispered to herself. It was strangely comforting to be using her mind and she challenged herself to remember Book Four of Virgil's Aeneid, especially the part where Aeneas enters the underworld and finds himself in the Elysian Fields. That was her