Lynn and Pepsi

I was just sitting there, in the corner of the Brass Bell pub, minding my own beer and staring through the open window at the one guy in the waves, trying to get some sort of ride with his body board from the choppy sea. I had just dropped off my daughter for a sleep-over date at a friend’s house in Fish Hoek. I had this beautiful Saturday evening to myself and I had no plans. After sending a text message to Graham to see if he would like to meet me for pool in Obz, I relaxed into the corner to enjoy the view and the cold draught.

The elderly couple that came up the stairs and through the entrance door into the pub, headed straight to my table. Oh no, I thought, trying to avoid eye contact by looking through the window at the surfer, they are going to spoil my day by talking nonsense, all in order to try and talk me into buying them drinks. Their clothes looked worse for wear and they were carrying a plastic packet each. She also had an old, faded towel bundled up.
The woman boldly came and sat right next to me, while the man sat at a distance at the opposite end of the table. My interest was now tickled by this bold woman and I took a closer look. I did not pick up any smell of methylated spirits or bushfires as I expected to. They might be in their early sixties, I thought. He was small and wiry and had the unshaven look of a Greek fisherman. His eyes looked sleepy; from drinking sweet wine in the sun, I thought. He looked good-natured though, judging by the wrinkles around his eyes.
She had a wild bunch of curly hair that refused to be kept in place by a faded baseball cap. She wore modern, square-rimmed spectacles with a pink plastic frame. It drooped slightly on the one side. Her beautiful features and her eyes, alive with interest and curiosity, looked like that of a girl much younger that has not yet experienced the rough side of life.

‘Ooh I’m so cold’, she said, her tongue struggling a bit. I tried to ignore it and hoped that they could not notice through my opaque sunglasses that I was looking at them out of the corner of my eyes. She repeated the sentence, this time shaking a bit with a mock shiver. ‘Well, go warm yourself in the sun’, I replied, hoping in vain that they would both go do that, or at least get the hint, and I would be left in peace.

I opened the gap and she wasted no time in getting a foot in the door: ‘We had a nice picnic on the beach and now I’m so cold.’ Well, I thought, here we go; instead of telling them to get lost you are being too nice again.

Someone from across the room greeted the man and he waved back a bit drunkenly, mumbling something. She was obviously accustomed to him communicating like this and she asked who he was talking to. He mumbled a bit more and she understood that too. She asked him to go and buy two Sherries, turning to inform me that they only came in for a sundowner after their picnic.

I relaxed back into my corner, thinking this won’t be so bad after all; at least they were buying their own drinks and will not be pestering me just yet. It was when the women struggled to light a cigarette that I noticed her hand: her left hand was missing fingers, several fingers! She noticed me staring and, thinking it was due to her smoking, apologised, exaggeratingly waving around her head as if there was a big cloud of thick smoke that she was trying to steer away from me.

‘I have to stop, I know, but I only smoke when I need to relax’, she said. ‘And after…’ the man said with a glint in his eye. ‘No splitting, hey!’ she interrupted him and laughed, looking at him lovingly. ‘You are not allowed to split, you hear!’ she repeated. ‘No, a gentleman does not tell’, I added and she laughed and slapped the table.

‘What happened to your fingers’, I asked, thinking that she probably cut them off when cleaning fish at the Kalkbay harbour, while under the influence. I mean, I have seen how fast and skillful those ladies work, and it is known that alcohol abuse is a problem in these parts. ‘You know, I like the way you just ask straight out’, she replied, moving closer and holding the hand under my nose unsteadily. ‘I was born like this.’ Right, I thought, here comes the story. I looked over at the man on the other end of the table. Surprisingly, he had not bought a drink for himself. And it was not Sherrie that he bought for her either; rather some hard-tack liquor like brandy, judging by viscosity and colour of the liquid sloshing around the ice cubes in her glass. He looked like he had seen this movie before and was resigning himself to see it again.

‘What’s your name’, she asked. I said my name and, as usual, had to repeat it a few times and spell it before she got it. The normal joke about which brother, Cain or Abel, was the naughty one, followed. She introduced herself as Lynette, Lynn for short, and said her husband was Ernie or Ernest. ‘Ask him about his nickname’, she prompted me, winking. I looked over at him to see if he wanted to be part of the conversation. She gestured to Ernie to come and sit next to her. ‘I don’t bite’, I said, ‘come tell me about your nickname’. ‘It’s Pepsi’, volunteered Lynn. I misheard her in the din. ‘What – Pipsi?’ I asked, thinking that I am about to hear some distasteful story about a boy wetting his bed in hostel bedrooms. ‘No, Pepsi!’ said Ernie, laughing shyly. ‘Like Pepsi Cola. Do you see?’

Ernie went on to explain that the year he was born was the same year that Pepsi Cola made its first appearance in Cape Town. The delivery trucks used to drive up Voortrekker Road in Parow as his mother would push his pram on the pavement. ‘There goes Pepsi’, his sisters would yell as the trucks go past, and somehow the name then became his. ‘It’s a nice name, don’t you think?’ he said proudly.
‘So where does Elsies come into it?’ asked Lynn. ‘No, I grew up in Elsiesriver, but I was born in Parow’, replied Pepsi, a bit perplexed that she did not know this. ‘Thirty-nine years I have been married to this man; next year it will be forty’, said Lynn. ‘Oh I love him so. You know he took me and did not care about my hand. We all liked the boys, you know, but nobody thought that I would get a man because of my hand. But he wasn’t bothered about it at all. In those days it was a skande, you know what I mean? Parents felt that they had to hide you if you had a gebrek – I even had to get married with a very artificial looking glove over my hand!’

‘Anyhow, where was I? Oh yes, I was telling you that I was born with it like this. But you know, I can play the piano!’ She demonstrated by banging away at the table. ‘I teach music too. I am a music teacher, yes I am. Not the teenagers, please; I like teaching the little ones. They are not shy to ask about my hand either, just like you, sommer straight to the point. They say “What’s wrong with your hand” and then I tell them and then they accept it and we get on.’ She held the hand up for me to see again. ‘When I was a girl some doctors from overseas were here; as if overseas is somehow better’, she snorted. ‘They looked at my hand, they prodded it and pinched it and they said that they could extend my fingers by using bone and flesh from elsewhere in my body.’ She pinched her thigh. ‘But they said that once they do that I would not be able to move it and use it the way I was used to. That meant not playing music anymore.’ Her face contorted. ‘You know I even do concerts? I play at fund-raising events at schools and churches. Fifteen thousand rand at the one church, I’m telling you!’ She took another swig from her glass. Pepsi meanwhile had produced a little bag of raisins from somewhere and she grabbed a handful from him. ‘But when I was young the piano or organ always had to be set at an angle so that people won’t see my hand, you see. So that people would not be offended by it. My father was a minister and I played at lots of churches, but always the piano had to be set so as to hide my hand.
It was a hard decision, that of the operation – the hardest a sixteen year old have to do, and that on my own. You know I went up that mountain’, she pointed through the window up the mountain past Boyes Drive. ‘My father was a minister and they were always away in Jo’burg or Kimberley or somewhere; and I was in boarding school. I sat alone up that mountain for a long time and thought about never being able to play music again. For what, so that I can have pink fingers? Long, useless fingers – you could put a ring on yes, but no other use! But you know, I was always a bit of a rebel?’ ‘I bet you probably still are’, I replied. She laughed heartily and a wet raisin landed on my sleeve.

‘Pepsi, why are you so quiet?’ I asked. ‘Does Lynn do enough talking for the both of you?’ He laughed and replied softly that that’s always been the case.

‘So do you have any children?’ I asked. ‘We have a boy and three girls. None of them are married – they all just shacked up with someone’, her face sagged a little, but then lit up again. ‘And we have nine grandchildren.’ Pepsi’s eyes smiled.
‘And you, do you have children?’ she asked. I replied that I have a daughter of nine years old. She asked about my wife. I told her that I am a single father. Then followed the normal, careful, but probing questions about my single status.

‘But you have a girlfriend?’ Lynn asked. ‘No, I’ve been dumped’, I replied. Another raisin went flying across the table. ‘What is the problem then’, she asked, laughing. ‘I don’t know; I guess it must be me.’

‘No’, said Lynn, rubbing her fingers together. ‘I know what it is - it’s money. I’m telling you, that’s all that women are interested in. They make me sick, my species, all they want is money. But not me, look at me and my Ernie, we don’t have much, but we have each other. Forty years almost now!’

‘What can it buy you? It can’t buy you happiness, and if you don’t have that you have sweet blou all. Oe, laat ek nou my draad kry!’

‘Look at my brother, for instance: he’s an anesthesiologist in L.A. – not an anesthetist – an anesthesiologist, he oversees them. He has all this money. You know he has a farm and he breeds racehorses, and all that stuff. For five years he and his wife struggled to have a child. Him, with all his geleerdheid, and they couldn’t conceive.’ I saw the irony: ‘Yes, and you two had four children and lots of grandchildren!’ She laughed. ‘Yes, a whole nageslag, I’m telling you.’
‘You know when finally their baby was born, the girl suffered from epilepsy. They took her to all the best specialists in California and they operated her brain and tried to remove the epilepsy and she became a kool! My brother’s marriage eventually ended in divorce and I think it was this thing with his daughter that drove them apart. You know, he still comes to visit and once or twice he brought her with. He told me, you know that he told me that he would trade everything he has and owns to get his daughter’s health? No, money can’t buy you happiness.’ She shook her head a few times to accentuate the point.

Pepsi had meanwhile made an exit from the pub, taking his plastic bag with him. Lynn looked as if she was just starting to enjoy herself. ‘Nou waar’s my mannetjie nou?’ she noted his absence with surprise. ‘Jy weet, ek het hom so baie lief.’

‘Listen you tell your daughter; how old is she again?’ I replied with her name and age. She held a crooked finger in front of my face. ‘Well, you tell your Anja that she must find herself. She must get her education, and not just matric, that is worth nothing. She must get her education and she must develop herself. Has she decided what she wants to do yet?’ I told her about Anja’s interest in the arts, her ballet and violin lessons. Her face lit up and got a dreamy quality of a young girl seeing herself on stage. She waved her arms about, almost knocking another patron glass over. ‘Oh, the arts! I love the arts. I mos told you I am a musician. Well, you must tell her, tell her what this aunty said, she must rely on her self. You know her daddy and her family and grandparents and uncles and aunts – that’s all nice to have. But in the end you just have yourself; you must know yourself and make and trust your own choices. You must determine your own direction.’

With that, she gathered up her plastic bag and her bundled up towel. She turned her cheek to me and leaned over for a kiss. I gave her a hug and a kiss. It is not every day you get so much advice for the price of a hug and a kiss.

I watched her make her way through the pub and out the wrong door, the one leading to the restaurant. Then I made a quick exit.