II Ailsa and Bro and the Big Bust

Ailsa and Bro and the Big Bust

Nobody knows how Bro’s doing these days. Her real name was Dawn and her house in Skinner Street, Pretoria used to attract an eclectic mix of species, including the crème de la crème of the city’s young artistic and literary crowds, members of the city’s equestrian class, eminent connoiseurs of weed and some seedy characters. Bro made life worth living in the early 1980s.

Those were the years of P.W. Botha, the hardline predecessor of F.W. de Klerk who was the man who finally put an end to Apartheid. Botha favoured the generals and society became increasingly militarised. For white males, compulsory service in the defense force was extended from one to two years. South Africa became involved in the Angolan War. Unlike cosmopolitan Johannesburg, Pretoria was a suffocating citadel of bureaucracy surrounded by military camps filled with young conscripts.

In those years Bro was involved with Sharon C, a member of Pretoria’s tiny yet distinguished English aristocracy. The poised and self-confident Ms C dressed like a businesswoman and spoke upper class English spiced with the appropriate business buzzwords of the time. An equestrian, she owned several horses. Nobody but me found her relationship with Bro in any way unusual.

Aristocracy, you see, was utterly alien to Bro’s background or character. For someone of Greek descent, her Afrikaans was pure and her English idiomatic. Bro however, had attended reformatory school and earned her living as a manual labourer. Her intelligence was obvious, though, and her sense of humour charmed even those scandalised by her lifestyle.

Thin and wiry, Bro resembled K. D. Laing. ‘Beatnik’ comes to mind, although Bro had probably never heard of the Beats. Her sexuality evoked images of Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff except that she could be wonderfully warm and amicable. Young artists and writers of both sexes and a clique of ambitious young businesswomen who shared her taste for marijuana made up Bro’s circle of friends.

She shared the house with Ailsa, a tall, slender blonde of Scottish descent that exuded the most supercool hipness. Despite her frequent exasperated exclamation, “these fucking lesbians!”, compassion and empathy suffused her inner being. Ailsa served in the airforce, in the advantageous position of leave clerk in the personnel division. That meant she enjoyed about two months’ leave per year as her leave forms waited in a drawer to be destroyed upon her return.

The house in Skinner Street was a den of dykes and weed. Bro availed herself of various suppliers which included a certain Spikkels (Spots), a tall thin dude that also resembled a beatnik. Reliable suppliers were important due to the household’s high consumption level. Initially the supply was for personal use but Bro soon became a retailer herself. A grave error, in view of the growing customer base and the complex network of interpersonal relations, both within and external to the household.

Ms Sharon C visited every weekend, as did a bevy of girls like the hairdresser Charmaine, little blonde Leigh and her lover Berenice, sundry daughters of members of the Afrikaans aristocracy from the tony suburb Waterkloof, artists like the tiny Patrys, the large bear André and his succession of disturbed lovers and even a national serviceman who stole the painkiller Welconal from the pilots’ emergency medicine kits in the Mirages of the South African airforce.

And of course Ingrid who babbled obsessively, using hooks like “Knorimean?”, “Now bear with me carefully” and “geddit?” to hold the attention of the weary listener. Some of Ingrid’s tales were captivating, like the story of Maxie as documented in the graphic short story Maxie's Revenge: An Illustrated Short Story. In June 2004 this graphic story formed part of an exhibition by the National Library of South Africa titled: Sequential Art – comics and picture stories.