All those bloody radio commercials. Betrayed by her soft-sell voice. “You’re going places, living your best life! Don’t you want an insurance policy that goes with you and grows with you?”
“It’s not your fault, my baby,” her mom says. But she knows it is. Nobody else brought this down on them. Chantal can’t go back to school. Instead, she sits on her bed and plays mindless cell phone games putting things in order, or watches Netflix on the couch, with the dog, hugging his neck. She smashed her phone screen with a hammer from the kitchen drawer. Smashed it again and again until it was splinters of plastic and busted motherboard.
Someone has graffitied the words “MEATPUPPET WORE” above their garage in giant red letters. They misspelled “whore” or maybe it was an unfinished work. Meatpuppet wore what? Her voice. Her face now, as well. And Chantal’s. It’s all going in the wank bank, as one of her admirers said to her aunt.
It’s the worst thing that has ever happened to her.
Worse than the time she admitted to her parents she didn’t have a scholarship or state funding, that she was paying her own way through university by whoring herself out. Her dad cried. Her mom nodded and nodded and nodded, her jaw tight, lips compressed so tight they disappeared. “All right,” she said. “All right, then you must be safe.” She helped her set up an ad, made her check in, insisted she get a male roommate.
Or standing shivering in the Mowbray police station, with her cheek swollen, the cut above her eye, something cold and broken in her. And the policewoman sneered. “But it says here you have been arrested for sex work before. What did you expect?”
“It was her fucking boyfriend!” Mel yelled at her. “It’s domestic violence. What does her job have to do with anything?”
“Leave it. I don’t care,” Nats said.
“You’ve got to report him. What if he does this to someone else?”
“Karma will get him.”
It didn’t, as far as she could see.
It’s a whim, sitting at home on the couch while her mom and Chantal are out buying groceries, braving the world. She takes all the medicine she can find in the bathroom, drinks the dog’s flea shampoo and the cleaning liquids, lies down on the bed, and waits to die.
She wakes up in Vincent Pallotti Hospital with tubes down her throat. Her mother sits in the corner, wan and stricken, knitting her fingers, together, apart, together, apart.
“What the fuck were you thinking?” Zukiswa hits the bouquet of cosmos against the hospital bed in frustration, almost unintelligible through her tears. “You can’t let them get to you, you can’t. Those fuckers. Those shits.”