Once I got picked up by this white man, obviously not from Pretoria. After a while you learn to tell which cats aren't from around here. He wore a navy blue suit and he had one of those shiny watches. Said he'd give me two hundred and fifty bucks. How could I refuse? I told him my name was Thandi. White boys seem to like names like that. Or else something American like Candy or Brown Sugar. Hey, the customer's always right. I gave him the full deal and then after I was done he tells me he's not ready to let me go yet.

Hell, all I wanted was my money and I didn't care if he was some senseless murderer or not. The girls had warned me that you get these Afrikaners who wander the streets like predators, acting like they're gonna do business but they're just on a mission to kill kaffers. All the girls were frantic about that, some of them refusing to do business with white men at all. I got many calls during that time with people saying they needed black women because it was like a drought. All the black girls were terrified. Sort of like the Americans were after 9/11. Something happens when someone makes it clear that they're out to get you. Even if you already knew it. Even if it was as clear as apartheid. Sometimes people take it further and something happens.

Here I was in a room on the top floor with an ass who called himself Chris. From the looks of it his real name was Mark or Hugh. Someone inconsequential and dissatisfying. I should know, I had just fucked him and like all Marks and Hughs, he was … er … deficient. But I didn't hold it against him. A job's a job and I did mine and all he had to do was pay.  I hadn't just done all that foul shit for nothing. Sucking on his nothing cock, straddling him, hollering like a bitch in heat. I was angry. We had an agreement, and I wanted my god-damned money! He humored me for a while I went on about trying to pay my way into UCT and how I had to support my two brothers because of my coked out mother. He looked like one of them fools I could spin five hundred dollars out of. With the suit and the nice car and the watch. I figured he had nothing to lose; he would just give me my money because he wanted to do his bit to help the black folk like white cats around here like to do. I was looking at his face and all the time calculating how well my story was working on him. Thought I had sealed the deal. The stupid mother fucker decides to show me his gun. In a mother fucking Protea Hotel, this pampered ass Sandton bitch is going to pull his gun on me! Said he wanted more. He wanted to fuck me all night and he wasn't going to pay for it because I was nothing but a whore on Main Road who should be grateful to be in a Protea Hotel because that's as far in life as I would ever get. The cracker jack made me an offer. Said he'd allow me to come with him to the Protea Hotel whenever I wanted, but he'd be damned if he had to pay to fuck a kaffer bitch. I agreed and I located my handbag. This mother fucker was gonna pay.

The first time I killed, it was honestly a mistake. I didn't mean it. I mean, I wasn't thinking straight. I was alone at home and there was a knock on the door. Now my first instinct was to ignore it, but the trouble in that my thinly curtained window was right by the front door, so I either had to be completely still until the person left or try to hide before they noticed.

I was having a rough day, torturing myself about my weight. I was starving and tired and I should have been studying for my prelims, but I was staring at myself in the mirror agonizing on how fat I was. Stupid! I thought about how much better everything would be if I was slimmer. Not only would I have more customers, but I would be more popular at school. At the time high school was everything to me. I still wanted everybody to like me and I went to extreme measures to try and ensure that. I had to lie of course. I couldn't be honest about my being a prostitute. That would have been social suicide. Amazingly enough I still managed to be in the headlines without it having anything to do with my prostitution. Nobody ever found out.

I was a smart kid. Not clever, but I knew how to think I guess, which the other kids, bless their souls had no idea about. All the teachers thought I was a pleasure and I was even involved in extra curricular activities. But there was this kid named Jonathan Wang in my class and I had a mammoth crush on him. We were close friends he and I all through high school, but he told me many times that I was too chubby for him and that he liked skinny girls.

I starved and starved and starved ...   

The guy at the door – his name was Eppi. At first I found it slightly weird that I was just trying to find out how to kill my appetite when a guy named Eppi knocks on my door. He was a coloured man, in his mid-twenties, chubby and carrying a KFC takeaway. Said he was looking for Agnes. I told him she wasn't in, she was working and he left a message. 'Tell her the Food for Soul meeting is going to be delayed due to a wedding at City Hall'. Get it? He's coloured, so Eppi is actually Appi – short for Appetite, he's fat and he's eating fatty fast food. I had to kill him! I had been yearning for a way to kill my appetite and here was my appetite, right in front of me and I was going to kill it. Scout Street was chilly and bare as always and I invited Eppi in. He had the look of a man who thinks he's about to get pussy. And I gave him the look of a woman about to give her pussy away. I made him tea, we drank it in my room, just in case someone walked in on us. I can't remember thinking about how much was at risk, but I suppose I knew it somewhere because I didn't make any mistakes.  I told Eppi how handsome I thought he was. Told him I'd seen him hanging out with Aggie but never knew his name. He came closer and from then on he was dead to me.

… and starved and starved.

My bed was soaked in blood. There was blood on my carpet even. I had to move quickly and I knew just who to call.
'Peter, is that you?'
'My Zulu Queen, what can I do for you?'
'I've got a problem.'
'Tell Peter all about it baby.'

So I told him and he wanted to know the details and I had no details for him. I had the feeling that he thought I wasn't telling him all I knew, but the truth was just that I had nothing to tell. All I knew was I'd killed a man and I wasn't going to jail and he said, 'Baby girl sometimes you got to face the fuzz and see what happens. Hell they won't put away a pretty little thing like you. You'll probably get a dirty record is all. I know you've been through worse.'

And I said, 'Trust me … there's no other way.'

The police never came after me. To tell the truth, I was never worried they would. The South African police – dismal. If they came after me for all the murders I've committed since, I'd pay them a hundred bucks and be off the hook.

When I went back I was a woman. I wasn't whimpering beneath him any more. He wasn't all I knew. I knew more. More than he wanted me to know. And I guess more than he ever dreamed I would ever know. I looked him in the eyes and I felt his apprehension. I felt his somnolent heart not knowing whether to stop or run faster. Of course, he's an old man, more set in his ways than I am, I know. But my going back wasn't an attempt to make him change or make him apologize. I went back for myself. I had to. There are no rules in such a relationship like my father and I have. Everything is allowed. And I know he knows that. And that's why I went back.

He asked me about my life and warned me against the things I was involved in. He knew, he said. He'd watched me. He'd sent people to keep a watchful eye. His heart broke. Why did I insist on hurting him so. I smiled not because I thought it was funny but because I wanted to hurt him. I don't know why. I just felt the need. I felt there was no other way.

'You're talking too much, old man', I said, lighting a cigarette. I saw his hand move reflexively, as if to stop me, but nothing came out of his mouth. Just, on his face, misery and disappointment and a little desperation.

Good. That's what I want.

We had little to say to each other, almost nothing at all. After seven years, he looked at me and I looked at him and we had nothing to say. Naturally, he preached. I had been expecting it. Flipping through the pages of the Revelations like I would flip through the latest one small seed, looking for the good bits. He quoted Revelations two verse sixteen and then chapter seventeen verse eight and nine. Then with a shrewd and yet dense expression he says, 'And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with him an hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father's name written in their foreheads. Revelations fourteen, verse one.' Like I didn't know.

I fucked him that night. I rode my father's dick like it was a mechanical bull. He resisted, but minimally, disappointingly. Part of me was hoping he would refuse me. That the pastor in him would grow some balls and refuse to put his penis into his daughter's vagina. God, I still can't get used to it. After so long … it still makes my stomach turn. How long has it been? I thought for sure he would have thought about it more and he would object to it more. Then, I thought, I can rape him. Avenge myself, you know? Like in the movies. Like in the bible 'You reap what you sow' and what not.

But I deduce that there could be some precision to what he said about me being overwhelming. He says I do something to him that he's dreadfully vulnerable to. I suppose after having sex with him since I can remember, it's easy to bring him to his knees. After all, he's my father and I'm daddy's little girl. He says it so often, it almost doesn't count. 'Are you daddy's little girl?' he asks with that tainted gaze on his face. Or when he's coming: 'D-D-Dadd-y's l-ittle girrrl, aaaaaah'. It comes into my ear and stops somewhere, never reaching its objective.

Daddy's Little Girl.

I suppose he deserves credit for giving me the idea of how to be a successful whore. When I was younger I used the phrase to please pedophiles in Pretoria, Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town. I was well known all over for being the best and most professional under age prostitute everywhere. For a while I was proud of it. But now, I've graduated from high school and I've saved up enough money to go to University for at least two years and I've never been caught or implicated in any way for the five murders that I committed in the past four years. But I could use the money to support my self while I find another, more legitimate job. Or I could go home to my dad's parish, become a Christian – repent. Maybe I could use it to send my mother to rehab. After all, she blames me for her addiction. Says I stole her man. Imagine that! – as a little girl, I stole my father from my mother. And now I could make it up to her.

I'm completely free. And yet …

And I see five special paths before me. I can stay here and be a whore for the rest of my life, or leave and study art or literature, or turn myself in for all the men I've killed, or go back to one of my parents, or I could end it all now – hang myself or slit my wrist. Five paths, leaving from this very spot that will never correspond. And yet each way, in all its exclusivity still binds me industriously to my wretched father, Richard Starr. … having his Father's name written in their foreheads, God damn it! Is there no other way?