My friend Freda once told me that he was about the size of a small brown gherkin down there, which did not look too terrible, she said, given that he was — and remains — a shortie. She said it with such matter-of-fact kindness that it sounded less like an insult than a biological footnote.
Freda also told me she had spent the two years of their relationship in and out of the gynaecologist’s rooms, clocking up a small medical debt getting rid of chlamydia and endless thrush.
“Ah,” I said. “Dirty fuck syndrome.”
Then my mouth, being a renegade with no puritanical discipline to speak of, took over. In full Marvel Comics voice I announced, “Thrush-Man strikes again!”
To this day, Sipho and I still call him Thrush-Man in that loudspeaker from the 50's voice.
My husband Sipho, for the record, has never once delivered a smelly yeasty bouquet to my secret forest. Not in the 29 years we've been doing it every which way. With him it has been deep joy all the way up and all the way down. Although, if one were handing out superhero names, G-Spot Clitineer would probably be most appropriate.
Anyway. Back to Freda and Che.
Chortle.
Freda was a pretty little thing from an AWB family. Her mother lay on a hospital bed in the lounge, a catatonic spectre. Bruises sometimes appeared oddly around her face and breasts while the household pretended not to notice. Freda had that same haunted whiteness about her: soft voice, big eyes, damaged circuitry, and a strange vacancy behind the face.
She once told me she thought she was falling into a Mandingo-trap-in-reverse. Che, she said, could only get a properly motivated gherkin if he called her a fucking white bitch and roughed her up a bit. OK, a lot.
“No fucking way,” I said. “Leave that poisonous dwarf immediately.”
She did not.
I asked her whether she felt she deserved to be relationship-raped because colonialism, apartheid and her private yearning to be punished. Was this some kind of private payback for having been an apartheid agent during our university years? I said it as a joke, but only just. She looked at me with that flat little intelligence-operative stare, the one that tells you there is a filing cabinet where the soul should be.
“How did you know?” she asked.
The truth is, I did not know. Not properly. She was'nt even a close friend. She was our production manager on Umgidi. But she was in my house, in my life, and eventually her chaos began leaking into the furniture.
She stayed and took the abuse. She cried on the phone to him daily, sometimes six times a day, while he demeaned her, degraded her, called her a white bitch, and dragged her back into the same rancid little theatre over and over.
“Leave that toxic twit” I said, knowing the answer.
“I can’t,” she whimpered.
Eventually I asked her to leave us instead.
My four-year-old boy was completely in love with her because, to him, she looked like a real-life Powerpuff Girl. And she did too. One day he announced that if Che made Freda cry one more time, he was going to beat him up himself.
“He is just a garden gnome, Dad. I’ll smash him.”
That was enough.
I had no intention of letting my golden little boy go to jail at four years old for killing a Mandingo-in-reverse with a plastic sword and righteous fury.
So Freda left.
Sipho and I looked at each other and shouted out, “Thrush-Man!” as she drove out our driveway for the last time.
We laughed, and through the laughter I'm sure I caught a whiff of Powerpuff yeast agent.
#creativewriting
#yeastinfection #thrush #Lol