/ 9 June 2017

Ghosts of the past linger between the walls of 18 Norman Street

18 Norman Street
18 Norman Street

Eighteen Norman Street no longer has a front door; only four wooden side panels with glass fogged by the stain of smoke still intact. The wooden floors in the entrance and lounge have been ripped out and three pieces of paper remain pinned up on its walls; the cover of a drum magazine, a love letter and drawing that appeared to have been done by a child – all of them faded by the smoke that engulfed the rooms when the house was torched.

“Yeah she is one of my crazy [girls], but she is a simple, talkative, funny little girl I’ve ever been around/ Hey it’s just a metter of time, till she realize how much I love you,” the poem reads. It’s signed “Lolo loves Kim” and dated January 25 2017.

A green overall jacket lays between the concrete rubble and charred wooden panels that held up the ceiling. Next to it, evidence that the room is still being used to either smoke drugs or as a shelter is evident. As a brothel, the lounge acted as the reception area to the Johns. The wooden chairs that were torched with mattresses the day when residents attempted to shut down the brothel would have seated its customers and a table outside kept the drugs for the night.

The cupboards in the hallway, too, are torched and ripped out. An apparently recently placed empty two liter plastic bottle stands upright on one of the remaining shelves.

To the right is the master bedroom, it’s wooden flooring also ripped out, its carpets still folded into a corner and the windows broken out, frames and all. The beds in this room were carried out along with the other furniture by protesting residents.

In the corner, between broken up pieces of concrete lays a green worn out ID of a 24 year old woman. In her picture, the woman appears smiling with a bright pink shirt. In the back of the book, hidden between the pages, a brown piece of cardboard is found with her name and another date; August 24 2016.

The meaning of the identity book or its place in the brothel and drug den, will remain a nearly unsolvable mystery. What is known, is that the master bedroom played host to a revolving client base in the brothel, and the throne to the head pimp.

The two other bedrooms are smaller and appear to to have been home to children. Their floors are missing and there is little evidence that they have been used after the house was torched and its roof collapsed, but these are the rooms that the majority of the women who serviced clients called home. A number of residents described seeing more than five women living there at a time.

The electrical wiring that connected the stove and plug points in the kitchen have all been stripped, this is the only room in the house where the concrete floors are still covered in tiles. On top of a half broken cupboard is a R2 250 BetXchange lotto ticket dated May 30 2017. On the back of the ticket are combinations of numbers.

Inside and out, the pipes and wiring have also been torn from the walls. Mounds of broken glass and black soot serve as a replacement for the house’s burned flooring in the kitchen.

From being a home for a family then a spaza shop frequented by neighbours, then an inconspicuous brothel to becoming a popular drug den, 18 Norman street has ghosts of the past lingering between its walls. But soon, it could be reduced to nothing at all, if the fate of completely destroyed brothels in Rosettenville is a sign of things to come.