I’m still thinking about the better men thing after our morning lecture session, as I take my sandwich and water bottle to the small room where we had our disaster of a guys and girls meeting.
Celi is there, pouring coffee into a mug from her flask, and grabbing one of the old cookery magazines Chef Baloyi leaves lying out for us.
“Hi Aviwe.” Her smile does things to me.
“So you got home okay last night?” I say, and cringe. Such a lame-ass thing to say. She wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t.
“Slept over at Baleka’s. Safer.”
“Yes, safer,” I repeat. And then – I can’t help myself – I say, “We were talking earlier, me and Taptap and the others, about how to be better men. For you girls. Shouldn’t that include, like, protecting you? But you-all say you don’t want that.”
“I can hear how frustrated you sound,” Celi says. “But it’s difficult for us too. We wish we didn’t need protection, so we say ‘don’t protect us, just stop being a danger to us’ … But that would only happen 100% in some ideal world that doesn’t exist.”
“So what must we do?”
Celi isn’t smiling now, and I see she has tears shimmering in her eyes.
“The man who raped Madira offered to walk with her to the taxi rank – so she’d be safe, he said. Even though she knew him, she said no, but he insisted and insisted, said the streets weren’t safe and he’d protect her … So she gave in.”
“Oh God.” I don’t know what to say.
“So offer us your help and protection, but don’t force it on us,” Celi finishes up in a shaky little voice.
“Got it.” I mean to smile at her, but find myself sighing instead. “So much to learn. This ‘better men’ project isn’t as simple as I thought it would be.”
At least that makes her laugh.
“Don’t be discouraged. I think you’re already a sensitive man, Aviwe.”
“Someone like Felleng would say sensitive equals pathetic, feeble – all those things.”
A glint appears in Celi’s eyes. “Do you care?”
I don’t need to think about it for longer than a second. “No.”
“And us girls, we value sensitivity.” She’s smiling again. “You showed you had it when you picked up how nervous that woman in the lift was, when she thought she was going to be alone in there with a strange man.”
“That sort of thing.” I shake my head. “I guess I don’t know what it’s like.”
“The most uncomfortable I’ve ever been was when my mother sent me to her work with a message and I went to the wrong room, a sort of meeting room, full of men. The way they all stopped talking and just stared at me. Their eyes! It was like they were measuring me. I was 16.”
She shudders. I want to find that roomful of men I’ll never meet, and tell them what I think of them.
A movement at the door. Felleng is standing there looking at us. I can’t read what’s in his eyes, but I don’t think it’s anything good.
***
Tell us: Is Aviwe right about Felleng having bad intentions?