PW Botha awoke with a start, lost. Memory returned, and his breathing slowed. He groped for his glasses, staring blindly into the darkness of the ward. The hospital was very quiet. Something was wrong. A pressure deep inside his face. A throb; a stifling fullness under his eyes. Another throb. And then an almost imperceptible wriggle.
”Vingertjie?” he whispered, relieved. ”Vingertjie, is that you?”
”Hello, Pieter,” came the tiny, familiar voice, muffled by nostril.
”What are you doing up my nose?”
”Ag,” sighed the finger, slipping into view and standing on the end of the old man’s chin. ”I can’t sleep. I need dagga.”
Botha flinched and stuffed the digit under his pillow. It screamed sullenly, and thrashed briefly before surrendering to the weight of the feathers. Vingertjie’s social toking was fast degenerating into a full-blown dependency, and Botha blamed himself.
He’d been inconsistent with the finger, he realised now. He’d played hot and cold, pandering and punishing too arbitrarily. One week a gift of bubble-wrap, the next a deliberate paper-cut. And now he was losing Vingertjie for good. He remembered how it had once been, before the hangnails and the stupid juvenile infatuation with wearing a baggy Elastoplast halfway down the first joint. They’d been a team once.
He smiled sadly in the darkness.
”Remember when you’d call me Papa,” he whispered. The finger worked itself free and dangled itself pensively over the edge of the bed. ”Why can’t it be like in the old days? Papa and Vingertjie versus the terries and the Cubans.”
”I can smell meths,” said Vingertjie. ”Just dip me in it for five minutes. Seriously. I’m hurting, Pieter. The nights are hard.” It paused, and then sidled up to the old man’s cheek. It stroked it tenderly. ”Come on, Papa. For old times’ sake. You and me. Let’s go find some dagga.”
”Vingertjie!”
”But I love you, Papa! Your Vingertjie loves you and he needs you really badly!”
”One more word,” hissed Botha, ”and I’ll get the rubber thimble.”
”But Papa!”
”The rubber thimble. Your choice.”
The finger curled and uncurled spasmodically, twisting this way and that, and at last flung itself at the nightstand, knocking over a pill dispenser. It lay still, whimpering softly. ”I hate you so much,” it sobbed softly. ”I swear to God one day I’m going to get into your mouth and make you vomit on a beauty queen.”
The threat was not idle. Vingertjie had always shown a penchant for spitefulness when denied its whims, a fact made doubly dangerous by its keen eye for a big occasion. A 1985 ultimatum, for instance, which demanded that he amputate his nine other fingers — ”to prevent a coup” — or face a diplomatic backlash had almost ended in grief as Vingertjie began flicking meatballs across a banquet table at an appalled baby-faced Bantu Holomisa.
And of course there had been the Dakar incident, with young Mbeki blissfully unaware of how close he’d come to being ravaged by the total onslaught of a vengeful and unskilled amateur proctologist, and all because Vingertjie had wanted a short recess to enjoy an Eskimo Pie, and the ANC delegation had refused.
But with experience had come guile and patience, and now, in the twilight of both their lives, Botha had learned to understand what the finger needed when it was posturing; and soon Vingertjie was affable and restrained once again, as they discussed in whispers the relative merits of an isolationist tribal homeland system versus an old-school integrated gulag network; and presently the finger’s responses became shorter and quieter; and at last it was silent altogether, curled up on his chest, dreaming happy dreams of days of pomp and might, wagging at bleachers packed with pretty floral hats, with ribbons of orange and white and blue …
Good night, my old friend, he thought, and gave the finger a little stroke. It curled tighter, and muttered something about Casspirs and silk panties. A good finger to have. Perhaps he was being too draconian. Perhaps he would give it some dagga tomorrow. And some bubble-wrap. Yes. Papa would provide, as he always had. A zol and bubble-wrap for his last true friend.