A wing and a prayer

"Maak gou, maak gou, kawuleza!"* It was a deer in headlights sort of thing, I looked up from texting and into the gaaitjie's very insistent and impatient face. The woman standing next to me was similarly startled. "Ok, ya, sure." I mumbled as I squeezed into the taxi. The gaaitjie was finding space for the ma, but she was big and wasn't going to fit into any old dark hoekie*. So the gaaitjie, like directing some orchestral masterpiece, or playing one of those puzzle games where there's one tile free and you have to move all the little pieces around to create a picture, waved the guy in the jeans up, moved the guy in the bright blue tracksuit to the right, pulled the other ma's cooler bag forward, and then my view was obscured by the girl he pushed in next to me and I was stuck, facing forward, unable to move. But clearly he reached some kind of crescendo, all the while shouting at our commuting community to "come move quicker, it's no time for sleeping, sister come wake up", and there was room for the ma to nestle in. He had hardly shouted "Forward!" before we were on our way.

My arms were pinned against me, T-Rex style, so I just dropped my coins in the hand of the woman sitting next to me and smiled hopefully. She paid the gaaitjie and asked me, "do you know what time it is?" I could feel my phone in my jeans pocket, but there was no way I had leverage space to get it out. "Uhmm, I think it's around 6pm." She was wearing a headscarf so I gave it a bit more thought. "Yes, I was on the pavement at 3 minutes to," I told her. I remember because I was temporarily late and was checking the time on my phone continuously. She nodded in thanks, clasped her hands together, and went silent. Half a minute later she broke her fast.

The gaaitjie tapped loudly on the side of the van, called "Forest Hill!" and flung the door open. We came to a sudden stop. If I wasn't held in place by my neighbours' bodies, I would've whip-lashed forward. "Come, come, come!" he shouted, "skywe jou lywe!"* I giggled a little. As we sped away again I shouted "MacDonalds!" and twisted my head as much as I could to see that the gaaitjie heard me. "MacDonalds!" he shouted forward to the driver. As I was leaving the van I bumped my head on the door-frame, and the gaaitjie took a second to say, "careful sister" before swinging back into the now moving van and slamming the door.


* Hurry up!
* Small corner
* "Move your bodies", but funny, because in Afrikaans it rhymes.