Extract I was lecturing a group of fresh-faced young girls, recent arrivals in the double-digit age category, on why they needed to follow the news. It felt a bit hypocritical, really, telling this giggly gang they should concentrate more on what was happening in the country than on their face. Hypocritical because I too would rather talk face-framing eyebrows than spew my disgruntled bile over the parlous pre-election state of affairs in our country — and the precipice-edge tension in the world at the moment.
The girls were up on The Brow Thing (pronounced thang, or did I mishear?) The Brow is the new, or fairly new, face fashion obsession. There’s a thing/thang called microblading in which a handheld tool made up of many tiny needles adds pigment to the skin giving you “natural” eyebrows.
It doesn’t last forever, the girls informed me. You need regular top ups.
Like dipping into reputable news sites on your phone to “top up” on information about your surroundings, I said lamely. The girls sniggered, threw looks at each other and rolled their eyes.
Teenage girls. Tough broads. Cruel. Hard audience.
We moved on from The Brow to falsies.
Now in my teenage day falsies meant stuffing everything from toilet paper to an old T-shirt to pieces of pillow foam into your bra to make your boobs look bigger.
Trying to get both sides equally proportioned was the tricky part, and while the ample bosomed me didn’t have to try quite as hard as my girlfriends, the challenge was still daunting enough for us to carry around a ruler to measure the distance from shoulder to nipple to ensure both sides lined up.
These days, falsies are something entirely different. In eye makeup fashion, falsies are false eyelashes individually glued onto too willing eyelids to make natural lashes look fuller and darker.
Both are expensive, uncomfortable — even painful — procedures, yet infinitely preferable teenage conversation topics, it would seem, to the painful reality of what is happening in our world.
So, have you heard about the services company Bosasa who bribed government officials to win lucrative contracts, I asked the girls. It’s been on thnews.
Blank stares. Angelo Agrizzi? The former Bosasa COO who is spilling the beans at the Zondo commission into state capture?
Vacant eyes.
Then one of the girls threw back her weave (yes, her R2,000 weave; yes @ 13) and said: “Oh, you mean Fat Cat. And I don’t mean Phat,” she said to the girls behind her fanned hand. Giggles.
Mr Piggy, another said. Squinting. “His eyes are too close together, like my stepfather. Don’t trust Mr Piggy,” she wagged a finger and the girls tittered, guardedly. There was hurt in that wagging finger.
Click. The girls were on a roll. The light foundation-covering-acne faces came to life. Revulsion puckered mouths into sneers. Disapproval on unlined faces as they described this sweaty man; who heaved his bulk out of a chair with difficulty; who breathed heavily; whose top lip quivered under a forest of small damp bubbles.
How can you trust a man who is so out of control, who’s so fat? Teen girl 1 asked.
Fat haters. It’s a real teenage girl thing, a schoolteacher friend at a private school told me. It’s not a new subject, the battle that girls have with body image. This column is not about that.
What surprised me was the venom levelled at Mr Agrizzi.
These days it’s called “throwing shade”. In my day, it was called showing contempt; sneering, humiliating.
Every generation has its slang, words that are fashionable for a limited period.
Similarly, every family has a unique lexicon, one that is contextually contained within that tightknit circle.
When I was 19, and read John Irving’s 1978 novel The World According to Garp, I came to understand the delicious way in which this special family vocabulary develops.
One of the young characters mishears a warning about the undertow at the beach as the “under toad”, and so the “under toad” becomes the family word for anxiety, for the constant ubiquitous threat of disaster.
When the Naidoo family went on holiday, my dad left our home in the charge of a neighbour, Ali Shah.
Ali Shah was always at the gate when we got home. He’d greet my mother (always my mother) with the words: “I was alert Madame”.
So whenever we needed to compliment someone for their efficiency or effectiveness, we said they were as alert as Ali Shah.
I did not admonish the girls for finding Mr Lardy Agrizzi distasteful, though I did point out that his bulk was not his weak point.
His lack of character was. I, too, find him unfit, unappealing and unfresh because he’s a crook who’s ratting out other crooks.
Am I glad he’s spilling the beans? Absolutely. As a senior executive in the know at Bosasa, he’s whipped the lid off the boiling pot of corruption when giving evidence at the Zondo commission.
He’s named names: money counting, bribers at Bosasa, top dog politicians and government officials … he’s implicated them all in the bribery scandal.
But I don’t think that we should, for one minute, let him off the hook for his part in it all. He is as guilty as the worst of them. He’s not a saint, he’s not doing a noble thing.
Watching him is stomach churning. The whiff of criminality coming off him reeks of expediency.
I don’t know if he’s made a deal that protects him from prosecution. I hope not. I hope he gets to answer for, to pay for his transgressions.
He’s done the right thing, for the wrong reasons. Let’s remember that.
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