my ponytail over my bruised top lip.
Some of these boys and their skinny ankles are still deeply etched into my mind. There was Calvin-Sexy-Legs, whose big sister had died. I remember being moved that he and his family would still visit her favourite restaurant every year on her birthday. I giggle and choke now on the guilt at having sexualised a seven-year-old boy by referring to him as ‘sexy legs’. There was David T. A tiny boy whose white skin would boil into red patches on summer days, causing a mottled appearance that would melt away and then angrily rise again after a fingertip would press down on it, before turning blue at the arrival of winter. There was Shane, who had secured the role of Peter Rabbit in the end-of-year play we were putting on (I wailed, Old Lass holding me, over the injustice that the mainstream kids had been allocated Cinderella for their own play while we were stuck with fucking Peter Rabbit). Shane had landed the lead role on a Friday morning, and I’d spent the rest of the day fuming – with myself mostly, for not having been brave enough to audition in the first place. By the time the final bell rung and little chairs were lifted onto little desks, I felt a fiery certainty that if I didn’t act now, I’d forever regret it. As Mrs Carty began to bid us weirdoes goodbye, I shot up my hand and bellowed, ‘Mrs Carty, I would like to audition for the role of Peter Rabbit.’ Shane was peeved, man. He was especially peeved when Mrs Carty’s mouth twitched into a knowing smile before telling me to go right ahead.
Right there next to my desk, with the seat of my chair level with my nervous head, I stood as tall as I could, breaking my back with a pride and posture it had never before experienced, plastering the most surprised expression I could muster onto my face, before flinging my skinny arm around to point at my ass, and saying, ‘What’s that? Whatever is it for?’ Indeed, Peter Rabbit had just discovered his tail for the first time.
Mrs Carty clapped her hands together, just once, declaring, ‘And Christy will play the role of Peter Rabbit.’
If you’re feeling sorry for Shane, don’t. He went on to spy and see me naked on a Grade 7 tour through a crack in the curtains, so … fuck Shane.
And then there was Lualan. That little asshole and I were the frontrunners in the comprehension activities that dear, cloudy Mrs Carty would have us do every day. The comprehensions were divided into categories based on difficulty, each category colour coded. Purple to some might represent ‘sexual frustration’, but to me, when I see purple, specifically dark purple, all I see is victory at having beaten Lualan to the finish line.
My elation was sorely short-lived, however, when December arrived and news broke that my days in the Pilot Class were coming to an end. Most of us, myself and Shirley included, had passed the year and were now allowed to fraternise with the enemy in the mainstream classes going into the next year, while others, namely Lualan, were held back to repeat Grade 3. Instead of being disappointed that my comprehension companion would no longer be around to challenge me, I quickly felt my dark purple pride dissipate. Who cares if I beat Lualan at comprehensions if he’s so stupid they held him back a year?
CHAPTER 6
Mustard, Mustard and Heineken
Around this time, Old Lass meets the man that will become Second Husband. He’s a tall, lanky antiques dealer whose body possesses not one Mediterranean bone. Protector & Soul and I immediately dislike him. We aren’t used to such pale skin. We aren’t used to men who actually do things, like go fishing, and who drag us along to do so. We aren’t used to men who don’t smoke crack and who instead drink beer, greedily, so that it dribbles from their lips. We aren’t used to men who braai. We aren’t used to having a loud, fishing, beer-drinking man in our house telling us what to do. And we definitely aren’t used to having to share our mother. In our young and expert opinions, Second Husband wears far too much cologne, is far too literal in the colour coding of his outfits (sometimes arriving head to toe in coordinating shades of brown and mustard) and is simply not right for Old Lass. But none of this matters. Within a year of meeting him, Old Lass has packed up our Wendywood lives and moved us to a new home.
The house is pretty and big and not at all like our Wendywood flat. Plonked in the middle of a Parkhurst road lined by trees, the path beyond the heavy wooden gate leads through the garden and up three steps to the veranda. The house is painted white. A fresh, deep, chalky white that fails absolutely in concealing the elderly cracks recently painted over. Arranged starkly on the white veranda are two of Second Husband’s antique chairs. They are brown and wooden – as is all the furniture in this house. The back garden homes the most gloriously big oak tree, under which Old Lass will later get married, as well as a pergola happily drowning under grapevines, the only Greek whisper in our new home. Protector & Soul and I hate the place.
Nonetheless, we set about making our new, shared bedroom as ‘us’ as we possibly can. Our wooden bunk beds, painted a light lavender, are placed against a wall, leaving us more room than we knew what to do with. The parquet floors are streaked with fresh damage as we push the other furniture around from one spot to the next. We know from the second we move in that we will be confined to our bedroom most of the time. Second Husband, when he isn’t in his dark and gloomy antique shop a few roads away, lies on the old daybed that serves as a couch in the lounge. No matter the time of day or the state of the weather, whenever he is at home he draws closed the heavy green-and-red velvet curtains, blocking the outside world from dancing across the screen on which the History Channel flickers. Old Lass brings him beers. Old Lass makes him bacon pasta. Second Husband stinks and stains the velvet curtains and daybed cushions and air with plumes of blue Peter Stuyvesant smoke. Old Lass rolls joints for the two of them to smoke in the garden. Second Husband returns to the couch, is brought another beer and resents Old Lass for having children who follow her from home to house. Instead of asking us how we are, Old Lass tells my sister and me to ‘keep it down’.
One day, a huge bakkie arrives and dumps piles of gravel in the front garden. Men begin raking it over the soft grass and bare earth. I am horrified by the knowledge of an impending torture on my always-bare soles. Other than my shared bedroom, the garden is my only playroom. Gravel on the outside, eggshells on the inside. My nightmarish preoccupation with stones in shoes being fully realised and leaned into.
So it is that Protector & Soul and I begin retreating further and further from Old Lass. It comes easily to us.
Second weekends insist on continuing, and off Protector & Soul and I go to My Father’s house. When we arrive, he asks about Second Husband. We tell him we don’t like him. He asks us why. We tell him, ‘We just don’t.’ We are children and we don’t know how to say, ‘It’s actually just quite crap having to share our mother, who is our favourite person.’ Or perhaps, ‘We can feel it in our bones that he doesn’t want us around and that he’s angry Mom has us.’ We are children and we don’t even know that this is our reasoning. My Father asks us about Old Lass.
Is she still going into the garden to smoke?
Yes.
What is she smoking?
We don’t know.
Are they normal cigarettes from the blue box with the camel on it that she usually smokes, or is it a cigarette that she has rolled and filled with dried green grass?
Both. None. We don’t know.
My Father then instructs us to search through the garden in Second Husband’s house when we return after school on Monday.
Collect the little ends of the cigarettes, you know, the stompies. Hide them away somewhere in your room and bring them to me the next time you come here.
And so we do.
When we return home to the Parkhurst house at the end of the weekend, Protector & Soul and I start sorting through the tiny, ornate boxes strewn around our bedroom that until now have had no function. Too tiny to put anything other than Christmas beetles into, which I had done a few weeks before with the intention of acquiring new pets. When I open the lid to take out my new companions hours after capturing them the first day, one has died and the other falls into my mushy palm and begins scratching away at my chubby flesh