The guttering gaslight glinted yellow off the mess of teeth laid bare by the crone’s ruined grin. Slithering things plopped from the hem of her gown and limped away into the night, as she crooked a finger and gestured with a hiss to the figure that stood in the shadows behind her. ‘Come, my pretty,” she croaked. ‘Come into the light and show yourself to the fine gentleman.”
The girl who stepped forward was 15, an average arrived at by combining the soft, ignorant face of a 12-year-old with the body of a sexually athletic 18-year-old. She wobbled forward on perilous stilettos, thrust out a hip tangentially draped with a shred of thong, collapsed her shoulders so that her small breasts hinted at something more voluminous, and did a little turn before tottering back behind her pimp.
‘Very nice, very clean,” wheezed the crone, stroking the child’s cheek with a claw. ‘All the secret arts of pleasure are known to her. She possesses the mouth of a Greek hetaera, the fingers of a Japanese geisha and the vocabulary of an English footballer. Very cheap. Very lovely.
Very young.”
The man with the clipboard shook his head impatiently. ‘Yes, yes, that’s all implied, but if she’s going to enter Miss Teen South Africa she needs other skills too.”
The beldam grovelled. ‘Well of course, good sir, she enjoys gym and combing her pony’s mane, and obviously wants to start her own marketing company one day, and it goes without saying that she intends to use her platform to highlight the forced relocation of Botswana’s San by … ”
He choked and drew a large cross over the application form. ‘My dear baggage,” he sighed, ‘if she’s not going to highlight the plight of the little children, she’s damaged goods. I simply can’t touch her.” He turned on his heel and headed towards another dark cobbled street he’d noticed earlier. The crone wailed and rushed after him, clutching at his trousers.
‘She can highlight any plight you want! Palestinians! Little Palestinian children! No? Condors, then. Palestinian condors. In wheelchairs. Lesbian Palestinian condors in wheelchairs, who are being denied the right to adopt.”
He stopped and looked back at the girl, who was then just practising her acceptance speech by working her way slowly down a pole, holding on with her thighs.
‘If she can do working-class lesbian Palestinian condors in wheelchairs who can’t adopt, then we might have deal. But they must be poor. Our sponsors can’t appear bourgeois. I mean, they’ve been shipping leg-waxing equipment to the townships for almost three weeks now. That kind of credibility is hard to buy.” He paused and squinted at the entry form. ‘It says on this press release that this year’s entrants ‘invoke the spirit of Ubuntu. Their concerns are for gender equality, social equity and to proudly promote South Africa internationally. They are socially conscious, beautiful, smart and talented women.’ What this means, madam, is that there is a minimum bust size. How big are her tits?”
’34-A, perhaps 35-B in the right lighting and with the necessary medication.”
‘Beat it, Babushka,” he snapped, and walked away. ‘You and your
little dog too.”
Other girls were more fortunate, such as the infant Charlbi Kriel; and while she didn’t win the title, she will one day be able to tell her grand-children (as she helps them glue on their false eyelashes and smears
Vaseline on to their milk teeth) that she was there, on the last day of 16 Days of Activism Against Etcetera Etcetera, a 15-year-old pimped by God knows who to strut about on a stage as the serene embodiment of statutory rape.
Fortunately the Miss Teen pageant was subsumed by the Miss Recently Teen competition, and so the skin-crawling creepiness of the camera lingering over the inner thighs of little girls was relatively short lived. A second blessing was that the interviews were kept short, sparing one from the musings of the philosophically challenged. (‘During my reign I vow to giggle a lot, and to tip my head over to one side in that pose Daddy taught me when I was six, the one that always gets me everything I want.”)
But both boons were undone by the nails-on-blackboard farewell of outgoing Miss SA, Claudia Henkel. As last year’s defender of Ubuntu and gender equality she looked ravishing in a gownless evening strap, but when she spoke, dogs began to howl and presumably the owner of the firm that has given her free elocution lessons for a year hanged himself in his basement. For, despite hundreds of hours of explaining where the rain in Spain falls, she still sounds like the little machine Stephen Hawking uses to communicate, a nightmarish diction in which each word has no emotional, tonal or semantic link to those on either side of it.
As things came to a head co-presenter Sammy Sabiti declared that the women on the stage before him ‘could fill an entire universe with human substance”. Firstly, yuck. But secondly, what a terribly small place the universe has become.