Viva McVee arrived that day at the tail end of a dust storm, and as the empty Simba chip packets settled back in the branches of the leafless hedge at the school gate, out of the grey dust appeared a woman. I sat on the lid of the dustbin outside of the airless staff room smoking a cigarette and as she emerged I felt my heart jump and knew, from the look of her, that we were in for something.

“I’m looking for the headmaster,” she said in her odd way, holding each word a fraction of a second too long in her mouth, caressing it with her tongue before letting it loose into the air to be gobbled up by my waiting ears. My eyes rested on her lips- full and red, her eyes- almond and swirlingly deep and luscious, her body- thin waist, broad come-hither hips; I was lost in her physical aura and just as I drifted away into Viva McVee fantasyland, a place I was to spend an inordinate amount of time during the coming weeks, I was pulled back into reality by the cigarette burning my fingers. Throwing it to the ground, I said, “He’s inside. Should I take you?”

The words she spoke that day were rare gems but I didn’t know that just yet. Viva McVee, we were to come to realise, was not big on conversation. It wasn’t that she was a snob, she just had no interest in speaking to anyone or hearing anything anyone had to say to her. Viva McVee seemed perfectly happy in her own mind. Her presence, though, caused a lot of noise as the huge, fat opaque block of lust-filled dreams of a school full of male teachers and puberty entrapped boys needed space, and it squeezed into the dust covered little patch of matchbox teachers’ houses causing loud squeaks and groans and complaints of “move over”, bending things, that in the end I realised, should never have been bent.

Viva McVee hardly spoke, that is, until she met Eddie Fisher. Of all of the men she could have chosen, why Eddie Fisher, no one could figure out. Garamond stood up in the staff room full of indignation when it was realised he would not be the one, “Look at me for God’s sake.” Heads bobbed in agreement, without a doubt he was the best looking among us, we all knew it. Viva McVee seemed to have overlooked that fact.

“And at least I have money,” Lubamba lamented from the corner, the only one at the school with a working car.

But she chose Eddie Fisher. Eddie Fisher with the blue checked shirts for Monday, Wednesday and Friday and the red for Tuesday and Thursday. Eddie Fisher who was as tall as most form one boys and so thin most of the same could lift him over their heads if they were forced to. We all had to admit that he did have two perfectly sculpted ears and a lovely little smile, though few had seen much of it before Viva McVee showed up. Smiling had not been a big part of Eddie Fisher’s life up until then and that was primarily because of Thelma.

The unseen Thelma was little more than a voice echoing nightly through the nooks and crannies of the teachers’ quarters, sending shivers down people’s backs and planting seeds for horrific nightmares. “What you doin’ now Eddie Fisher?” It would question in a tone set aside for ghouls and goblins.

“I’ve seen her,” Lubamba would tell people. “She’s as wide and as tall as the door frame. Her massive breasts nearly touch the floor. That day I saw her, she pulled Eddie Fisher, gasping for air, out from under one of ‘em.”

Though the men in the staff room listened with all seriousness, they knew Lubamba’s story couldn’t be trusted, nobody’s Thelma stories could. And there were many stories at that school at the edge of the desert. Rumour had it that a whole day was set aside out at the lonely boys’ hostels just to tally up the latest story about Eddie Fisher’s wife. Sometimes she was tiny with her flesh like biltong holding tightly to her cranky bones or round and short with angry eyebrows sharp as knives. Sometimes she was a sex starved nymphomaniac that had been known to snatch up a boy who’d let his mind and steps wander and drifted too close to the house’s front door. Other times she was a cold fish who tossed poor Eddie Fisher to the ground if he spied her out of the corner of his lust filled eye. Though the stories moved up and down and left and right, without sense or reason, based on little fact and a whole lot of speculation, everybody agreed on one thing- Thelma was scary and Eddie Fisher had a seriously hard-luck life. At least until Viva McVee arrived.