Chapter 5 - pChapter 36 -LThe Queen Who Never Left the Stage

Her real name was Grace Gumede, born 1959 in Sophiatown before the bulldozers came.By sixteen she was already six-foot-one in stockings, cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass, voice like warm mielie-meal sliding down your spine. They called her "The Zulu Marlene Dietrich" in the clubs along Rockey Street, and she wore the nickname like a diamond choker.She danced at the Pelican, the Skyline, the Blue Moon (anywhere the white owners paid in cash and pretended not to notice she was Black). She wore ostrich feathers dyed blood-red, sequins sewn on by blind aunts in Orlando West, and a smile that promised every sin you were too afraid to confess. Men killed for a night with her. Women killed to be her. She let them all believe they had a chance, then left them bleeding money and pride in the alley behind the club.In 1978 she fell pregnant by a married Cabinet minister who liked to be whipped with his own belt while she called him "my little Boer boy."He promised her a house in Houghton, papers, everything.Instead he paid a doctor in Hillbrow to "fix the problem."The doctor botched it. Gigi bled for three days in a Yeoville flat while Miriam Makeba records spun and spun. She survived, but the child did not.She never danced the same again; something inside her had burned out and left only cold, perfect stage light.She moved into the House of Drennin in 1983 because the rent was R120 a month and the landlord (some distant Drennin cousin) was too afraid of her to ask questions.She took the entire ground floor, painted the walls midnight blue, hung velvet curtains the colour of old bruises, and turned the parlour into a private salon. Every night she held court: jazz musicians on the run from the Security Branch, models who needed a place to shoot heroin without their agencies knowing, white boys from Wits who wanted to feel radical for one semester.She kept a silver cigarette holder that had once belonged to Dolly Rathebe and a pearl-handled .22 she swore she'd used only once (on a talent agent who tried to pimp her to German tourists).She aged like statues do: slowly, magnificently, cruelly. By 2010 she was seventy-one but could still stop traffic in West Street with one raised eyebrow. The new generation of queens called her "Mama Gigi" and paid tribute in bottles of Veuve and stolen Chanel.The House loved her from the first day.It gave her the warmest radiators, the only burst pipes in other apartments, let her cigarettes light themselves when she snapped her fingers. In return she told it stories (every scandal, every heartbreak, every name whispered in the dark). The walls drank them like brandy.When Nicole and Rene arrived in 2024, Gigi recognised the smell of old damage on them immediately.She kissed both girls on the mouth the way she had kissed every beautiful broken thing for forty years, tasted the demons already nesting under their tongues, and smiled with something that might have been pity.The demons used her memories like piano keys.They shattered her antique mirrors one by one, each crack spelling out the minister's name, the Hillbrow doctor's name, the name she had chosen for the child who never drew breath.They nailed every love letter she had ever burned to the ceiling above her four-poster bed so she woke each morning to decades of lies fluttering like dying birds.On the night she died, Gigi filled the clawfoot tub with boiling water and Moët, slit her wrists with the same pearl-handled .22 (the blade she kept taped under the vanity for emergencies), and arranged herself like Dietrich in Morocco: one arm draped over the edge, cigarette still burning between bloodless fingers, eyes wide open and unafraid.She died smiling because she finally understood the last trick:the House had never been her protector.She had been its longest-running act, and the curtain had simply fallen.Now she walks the corridors in the same silk robe, ash falling endlessly from a cigarette that never shortens.She greets new tenants with the old kiss on the mouth, whispers the same line she used in 1983:"Welcome, darling. The house likes pretty things with damage."Only now her lipstick leaves bruises that never fade,and when she laughs you can hear the unborn child laughing with her,a sound like broken glass wrapped in velvet.She is still the queen.She just rules from inside the walls now,and the show (darling) never ends.