Infamous Cape Town artist Sophie Tugiers has been missing for several years. Her mysterious disappearance caused a brief ripple before dissolving into a distant media memory. Sophie’s controversial art alienated many people: those who didn’t consider her a sell-out thought her last exhibition was sadistic – after all, one of her experimental participants committed suicide.
Sophie Then
“No word on the Regona commercial. No word on the Hey, We’re the Gonads movie. I phoned Rachel last week: ‘Hi, Rachel, it’s Sophie, just checking in to see if there’s any work?’
‘Sophie, Sophie, Sophie …?’
‘Sophie Tugiers. I work assistant in the art department.’
‘Of course, sorry, hon, I have another two Sophies on my books. Nothing right now.’
I now know that’s not true. Denele Madikwe (who’s also with Crew-Up, also with Rachel) just posted on Facebook this morning, ‘Woo-hoo, 1st Art Department Assistant on the Gonads movie.’ She was my assistant last time. Looks like my bubbly personality isn’t doing me any favours. I google ‘How to get ahead at work’, and it’s the same drivel about being pleasant and sucking up to people. Not going to happen. There’s other advice like dressing well, brushing your teeth and brushing your hair. Really? On another site, there’s an internet course which promises to change my life – I’ll be happier, richer, more fulfilled, more confident than ever. It promises I’ll have the Rachels of my world begging me to take jobs, that I’ll reach my ‘full personal potential’. A part of me is tempted – the reviews are astounding: ‘life-changing’ and ‘miraculous’. The other part of me is cynical – how many self-help books have I read? At one stage I was meditating, visualising, keeping a gratitude diary, thinking only positive thoughts (not quite true, a few negatives slipped in; OK, more than a few) and nothing changed. There are even reviews designed to dismiss my concerns: ‘I have read every self-help book, spent years meditating and visualising and nothing worked, until now …’ The course is ‘only $20’. If only I had ‘only $20’, my life would change, but right now, I don’t have much. Indeed, all I have is R35. That’s it.
“How does everyone else have so much money, their plush cars and their holiday houses and biannual overseas trips?”
Fuck it. I’m tired of being broke. OK, I’m not the shacks-in-townships kind of broke; that’s far worse, that’s poverty. I’m a lower-middle-class kind of broke. Sometimes it’s petrol money, sometimes it’s luxury food items – like chocolate and pizza. I seldom buy clothes, and when I have to, I can only afford church bazaars, Mr Price or Chinese stores. I know, I know, I shouldn’t support shops that promote wage slavery, but that’s the loop I’m in: I can’t afford anything else; the system forces me to buy into its evil ways. I haven’t bought new underwear for seven years. The old stuff is so wheezy that I told the last guy I dated that I didn’t believe in underwear, that it was sexier not to wear it.
How does everyone else have so much money, their plush cars and their holiday houses and biannual overseas trips? I think so much about not having any money, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to stop thinking about money. I’m thirty-four and my adult life (pretty much my childhood too) has been consumed with money: never having enough, trying to get more; then, when I can’t make more, trying not to want in a consumerist society. Sure, it’s probably healthy in some socialist, consumerist-capitalism-is-evil way, it gives you a different perspective on the world – the underbelly view of hegemony – but not being able to afford an education, let alone a $20 life-changing course, sucks.
Being broke is exhausting, time consuming. Every time you need something (a kettle breaks, you need a new one), you find yourself in the cheapest places comparing prices, walking from shop to shop to save a few bucks. At every restaurant, the cheapest meal; internal screams when friends – and flush, gluttonous, boozy friends of friends – insist on splitting the bill. Like last night, at a friend’s birthday dinner, dragging a smile across my face: ‘I only had a bowl of soup …’ And no alcohol, because I only have 200 bucks left for the month and instead of paying 45 now (including a tip), you want me to fork out 165, which leaves me with 35 and I’m almost out of petrol. A frat-faced man at the other end of the table (he’d pulled up outside the restaurant, his black convertible Audi spraying out rap lyrics like a stud cat marking his territory – I could only catch ‘cash’ and ‘bitch’), without looking up, his eyes on the bill, annoyed: ‘It’s too difficult to work out who had what. This is easier for everyone.’ Definitive, cocky, assured: cash, bitch.”
Extracted from The Artist Vanishes by Terry Westby-Nunn, out now.
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