When Happiness Tshabalala burst into the ministry of transport with a basket of flowers on her arm and began hurling handfuls of rose petals over cubicle walls, her colleagues knew better than to ask. The fervour with which she celebrated national days of awareness was matched only by her inability to understand their general thrust, and her co-workers had long ago learned that the best course of action was to be noncommittal and to smile a lot until her error had been gently explained to her.
Indeed, the National Animal Day incident was still as fresh in everyone’s minds as the bloodstains on the carpet. Having decided that the day required her to rent and bring to work a specimen of the National Animal, Happiness had tried to acquire a springbok, her enquiries eventually leading her to a man named Boskak who promised her the finest springbok R25 could buy. But when it was delivered, on the end of a rope leash and with a bow around its neck, the animal was a disappointment. She tried to remain enthusiastic, but when it ate her tablecloth and began eyeing her laundry basket, she had to concede that it was in fact a goat with fibreglass horns glued to its scalp. The wrangler and his faux antelope were banished from the Tshabalala home, and she spent the rest of the evening feverishly developing a backup plan.
Which was why she arrived at the ministry the next morning not with the National Animal but rather with the National Bird, a blue crane stalking suspiciously along behind her on a length of string. The rest was bloody history: the creature had pecked someone in the buttocks not an hour later, and by lunchtime had killed Minister Jeff Radebe’s pet iguana, Tony Leon.
Since then the ministerial staff had been somewhat gun-shy, and this morning, as the petals rained down, they opted to keep their theories to themselves. Fourie in Traffic mooted the possibility that Happiness was celeÂÂÂbrating Take A Flower-Child To Work Day; but when she began to sing How do you solve a problem like Maria, the riddle was solved as it became clear that Happiness had misread the memo for the second year running.
”It’s Car Free Day,” said her section manager sternly, ”not Carefree Day. There’s no E.”
”Nonsense!” warbled Happiness, giving him a kiss on his forehead. ”There’s always E if you know where to look for it! I feel so close to you!” She stuck a daisy between his teeth, and skipped away into the photocopy room to make an early start on her ”Love U Stax” flyers.
”She is gentle, she is wild,” mused Fourie. ”She’s a riddle, she’s a child.” ”She’s a headache,” sighed the section manager. ”She’s an angel,” protested Ignatia, the receptionist. ”She’s a girl!” boomed Radebe from his office, where he was playing with a radio-controlled Hummer, making it scramble over piles of yellowing tenders from bus companies. He frowned, irritated. They could be so petty sometimes. Happiness was a dependable worker, with an inexhaustible supply of ideas on revolutionising public transport. He backed the little truck into his shredder, which fell over, spilling the lacerated remains of her last four proposals. Well, at least she was a dependable worker. Admittedly, the idea of a network of emissions-free trams, pulled by tea-fuelled illegal immigrants, had been a little eccentric, and at some stage he would have to point out to her the flaws in her scheme to link Johannesburg and Pretoria by bobsled, but this constant sniggering about her foibles would have to stop.
Besides, the confusion was entirely understandable. Gauteng’s Carefree — dammit! — Car Free Day had happened almost a month after the official international date, and even then Cape Town’s effort had reportedly passed without a ripple in the diesel smog.
At least not politically: the spectacle, on the other hand, had been splendid. Capetonians had donned their best boaters and bonnets to watch Helen Zille cycle to work on a municipal penny farthing, and twice they’d seen her mayoral chain catch the spokes, causing ferocious whiplash. Mahouts had clapped doilies over the rolling eyes of their elephants, the beasts trumpeting in terror at the sheer modernity of it all, and young lovers punting down the Liesbeek, trailing fingers through a soup of used condoms, had gasped as her petticoats flashed past.
Nothing exciting like that ever happened to him, thought Radebe. Bobsleds. He sighed, and phoned Happiness.