corpse and ungrateful asshole, into a bush in the garden. Thus solidifying my lifelong hatred for the little creatures.
Repurposing the beetle coffin, we make sure Old Lass and Second Husband are nowhere to be found before heading into the garden, our eyes glued to the ground.
Within minutes of our dark eyes adjusting to the sun absorbing and reflecting the grey gravel, we find the little end of a joint. The stompie thing. The rolled cardboard tip still securely held in place by determined saliva, we pop our evidence into my little box and run into our bedroom. Little hiding places everywhere. A box within a jewellery box within a music box on which a plastic ballerina dances. Filled with dread and a sense of accomplishment, we wait and wait for the next weekend we’ll spend with My Father.
At this point, my sister has already been forced to flourish into a warrior. As though her interior resilience is leaking through her pores, each year she requests combat boots, action man figurines and remote-controlled cars for her birthday. I, a living, breathing floral pattern wrapped in a bow, serve as her confidante, shadow and contrast. Father’s Friday arrives before we know it. Again, our weekend bags sit in our classrooms stuffed with pyjamas, clothes to play in, remote controls struggling against zips, and a little box in which the remnants of one of our mother’s joints lies, still, holding its breath. Our entire lives packed into bags, between two homes, neither of which we want to exist in.
We hand the little plastic box, which we have wrapped in toilet paper, to My Father.
This stuff smells so bad, sissie.
He tells us what a good job we’ve done.
Days at My Father’s house consist of watching TV, asking our YiaYia to make us waffles and playing with our cousins. On rare occasions, My Father comes into the garden and sits with crossed legs in the middle of the lawn. Protector & Soul and I sprint past, close enough for him to grab our ankles. This is the entire game. Trying to run fast enough to avoid being caught, being caught and dragged to the ground and being tickled. When the evenings come, My Father puts on a movie in his small, childhood bedroom, which is now his tiny, adulthood bedroom, and Protector & Soul and I fight over who gets to lie next to him on his single bed – the alternative being a small mattress placed on the floor. He lies on the bed with one of us in his arms, wearing his thin cotton sleep shorts and nothing else. When it is my turn, I lie on his chest and twirl my finger through the hairs, breathing in his smell. But just as I get comfortable, I immediately regret fighting for this prize, resenting this thing resembling comfort in the very instant I receive it.
Everything is sour. The single bed, his smell, his chest hair. As we grow, my sister and I fight over who gets to lie on the mattress on the floor. Eventually, we unite and come up with explanations as to why we should both lie together on the mattress on the floor, leaving My Father with more room to himself on the bed. When My Father is elsewhere in the house, Protector & Soul and I are both drawn to and repelled by the decorations and odds and ends lying openly on the white shelf that runs alongside the bed.
Porn magazines turned inwards on themselves reveal plump tits, all either too hard or too soft. Furry pussies form the top of the pyramids that have been turned on their heads. Condom wrappers, some with tenants, some without, poke out from between books while others brazenly bask in the glow of the bedroom’s exposed light bulb. Call Girl catalogues line up behind ashtrays and worry beads from Greece.
One night when my explanations have failed to convince him that I should keep my distance, I lie next to him on the bed. I am six years old. He touches his index finger down on the raised mole that sits directly in the centre of my chest between my 10-cent nipples.
‘One day when you have boobs, men will love kissing you right here on this mole, Mouse,’ he tells me as he taps his finger on it a few more times.
Perhaps storytelling runs in our blood, because when we go off to our own bedroom at My Father’s house, my sister and I beg him to tell us stories of his childhood before we crash into sleep. Maybe we are just looking for some semblance of normality, a fantasy. I am desperate to picture him as a young boy, as someone I can relate to fully. As someone who is other than My Father. We screech for retell requests of stories he’s run out of long ago. Tell us again, Dad. This time make it even better. He tells us about how he and his best friend, who’d lived next door to each other since birth, would attach a long piece of string to cans and whisper along it from window to window late at night. He tells us about the mischief and retaliation he’d get up to at school when the pesky Jews who made up the majority of the Parktown Boys’ population would tease him, chanting ‘Chili willy’ unimaginatively. He tells us about peeking through windows that exposed the neighbourhood girls, about running carelessly through quiet streets, about bunking school. Endless tales of being a child, being a child, being a child.
One day, when he and I are alone, My Father tells me about when a grown-up touched his penis when he was a kid.
‘I was six years old, just like you are now. I told your YiaYia and your Pappou. No one believed me.’
No one believed me.
No one believed me.
No one believed me.
No one believed me.
It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes My Father remembers a story he hasn’t told before. When they reveal themselves to him, he tells them immediately. I am six or eight or fourteen and I am told everything by him.
When I used to go to Hillbrow, I’d meet a lot of people you should never meet. Women who trade their bodies as currency. Men who encourage it. One night, a prostitute I knew followed me back home to Rosebank. She used to be beautiful. I was already in the house when she arrived, and she kept ringing the doorbell. I was high, and she wouldn’t stop ringing it and ringing it. I got one of my guns from the safe in my bedroom and sat down on the carpeted floor. She sat down on the floor of the patio opposite me on the other side of the door. You know the warped glass in the doors in my house? Yes, so I could see her through that. She sat there crying and begging me for crack. She said I could have her if I’d share. I sat there staring at her with a gun in my lap, hoping your YiaYia wouldn’t wake up. I don’t know how long we both sat there. But I just stared at her. And I started to laugh so much. She was so desperate. I just sat there with my gun, laughing while she begged.
A few weeks after delivering proof of my mom’s vice to My Father, a woman from Social Services arrives at the Parkhurst house to check up on me and my sister. Old Lass is hysterical.
Why are you here?
What has that fucker done now?
Whatever he’s said isn’t true.
He’s the addict … I am not the addict.
My daughters are okay.
Where did you get that?
That’s not mine.
It’s their father you should be worrying about.
I am too young to be included in any of these conversations. Protector & Soul is taken into our bedroom alone with the Social Services lady and I am told to wait outside with my mess of a mother.
My sister blocks this interaction from her mind within the time it takes for the woman in the grey pantsuit to climb back into her car and drive away. She can’t tell my mom what was discussed, staring blankly at Old Lass as she begs for details. Now, all these years later, Protector & Soul tells me that she can’t fill me in on what was said, not because she doesn’t want to, but because her cells won’t even allow her to remember.
‘Christy, I don’t even know if it was a man or a woman who came and if it wasn’t for you and Mom reminding me of this altogether, I never would have thought of it again.’
In the greater scheme of things, nothing ever comes of this visit. Nevertheless Old Lass is furious with My Father. She is especially furious with us after we inform her, screaming, that we’d only done what My Father told us to do by collecting her stompie.