Stretched truths and affirmative dating actions

“I really told a shocker this time, hey.”
And she had too. Of all the lies that Anneline had told, in all her years of telling lies, this was the doozie. This one just took the cake.
On the plane back from conference in Cape Town, she’d found herself up front in business class with the two sales executives, Thandeka and Queen. Being newly hired, she’d seen it as an ideal opportunity to impress her superiors.
To her horror, the conversation had taken a swift turn into Xhosa – or perhaps it was Zulu – minutes after take-off. With the town of Darling still visible below them, she found herself marooned on a monolingual island in her window seat.
Dying to make some kind of impact, and with an isiXhosa vocab of about 12 words, she just about flapped her ears off their hinges trying to make sense of the two women’s conversation.
After half an hour of picking up serious stompies, she determined through their brief lapses into English, that they were talking about men.
“Yuh, hayi! They don’t like to admit they are wrong!” Queen exclaimed at one point, and Annelise saw her gap.
“Yes, they’re so stubborn, hey!” she contributed in a tone that matched her neighbours’ amused exasperation.
There was a beat, as Queen and Thandeka turned and looked at her, as if they’d just noticed the woman with the platinum-blonde bob on their left.
Eventually Queen said in a condescending tone, “Ja, well at least white men are a bit less chauvinistic…”
And they went back to talking in Xhosa, or Zulu, or whatever it was. Anneline enjoys being the centre of attention, so she just couldn’t handle being dismissed like that. She said something she shouldn’t have.
“I wouldn’t know. My boyfriend’s black as well.”
There was another beat, and during this one, Thandeka just about choked on her Johnny Walker.
“Black? Your boyfriend’s black? What’s his name?”
And of course, Anneline had replied, “Thando. He’s from Soweto.”
Without missing any further beats, Queen and Thandeka had insisted on meeting Thando. All of a sudden Anneline was the most popular girl in the company.
In the ensuing week, she found herself invited to dinner with the board at The Meat Company at Melrose Arch. They even brought her along to the strategy session at Riverside Spa. Her star had never shone brighter.
One drawback, of course, was that there was no Thando. She had no boyfriend at all – let alone a black one. She’d been to an all-girls high school, the only boy she’d ever been intimate with had been a snow-white, slightly pimply teenager from Stellenbosch. And frankly she was a bit afraid of black men.
But if she was nothing else, Anneline was ambitious, so here she was, cap in hand at the home of her only black friend.
She wanted one thing from Lesego and one thing only: a boyfriend named Thabo.
“Well I do know one Thabo. But he stays in Bryanston. He works at the Absa call centre. I’m not sure he’s single, though.”
“That doesn’t matter. I only need him for one night. We can break up after that. We’ve got the AdMag awards on Wednesday night. I need to show up with a black man named Thabo. It would help if he was stubborn too.”
“He’s not stubborn at all. He’s actually quite nice. I’d be onto him like a shot if I wasn’t already going out with Gift. D’you want me to introduce you?”
“No, I think I’ll just call the call centre.”
And thus it came to pass that Thabo Mnguni had a call patched through to him from a flirtatious white woman who wanted someone to explain how the bank charges on her Absa account were determined.
He gave her the usual breakdown and commiserated with her about the exorbitant rates she was paying. So “considerate” did she find his service, that she hoped he wouldn’t mind if she was so bold as to ask him out.
Thabo didn’t mind. In fact he was flattered. It was encouraging to know that he still had the old charisma. Who said the visually impaired couldn’t be sexy?
“We’re on for Wednesday night,” he said at last, and then by force of habit… “And thank you for banking with Absa.
“Oh no, it’s my pleasure,” said Anneline. “It’s my pleasure.”
And indeed it would be, for Thabo Mnguni was a lover without equal in all of Bryanston. Affirmative dating would never feel so good.