The Camp Whore by Francois Smith

Author:Francois Smith [Francois Smith]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Chapter 20

Tiisetso walks ahead and I follow, slipping and sliding behind him. He has a long stick in one hand, slim and delicate as the feeler of a cricket, and a bright blue blanket around his shoulders. I have to keep lifting up my black dress so that it doesn’t drag on the ground, but it’s easier now that I have shoes, even though they’re a bit too big for me. It is still pitch-dark; it must be very early, as I hardly slept for more than an hour.

Last night Tiisetso arrived at the fire wearing different clothes, if one could call them clothes. He wore a sort of overcoat made of dassie and lynx hide – with the tails as tassels. He was wearing all his bracelets, and he had his knobkerrie and lesiba with him, but he also had a string of beads around his head, with feathers dangling over an ear. I got quite a fright when I saw him.

Mamello just kept stoking the fire, and then she stood up and I heard her walk down to wherever it was that they lived. I had never seen their house. Tiisetso played the lesiba, and after a while Mamello came back, also wearing different clothes. At least her skirt was made from fabric, but above that she only wore strings of beads that hung from her shoulders over her chest. Nothing else. She had two pillowslips with her, one in each hand. There was a live creature in the one, I saw it move and it also made noises.

Mamello put the pillowslips on the ground, the one with the thing inside was tied with a knot.

She began to sing and Tiisetso played and Mamello danced and jerked her shoulders forward, turning her head from side to side and clapping her hands. They sang and sang and sang, and then I stood up, because I had already done that a lot. I knew it so well that I could sing along, and I also started shaking my shoulders like Mamello – and by now I could do it without any pain. When I first did this it used to hurt, and I also laughed a lot, so much so that Mamello also started laughing.

We sang of horses walking clipitty-swish through water and cattle growing fat in the long grass and children calling their mothers and we sang and sang until the stars sank down and joined us in the cave and we became part of the night. They danced close to me, right next to me. We danced in a circle around the fire, our feet shuffled over the stones, sh-sh-sh, and many things came into my head and then flew out again. Ma and Neels were also in my head, and I was quite surprised by that, as if they were people I’d seen for the very first time. We were in the tent, I was with Ma, and the tent was drawn closed and baked warm by

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