have gotten me into?
But Dad says what you do is illegal, so why do you do it?
I am not the addict – your father is the addict.
At this, Protector & Soul and I screech, wail, despise Old Lass openly.
He is not an addict!
We love going to his house!
He doesn’t do bad things any more!
YiaYia is there too!
We were helping you by giving him the green tobacco cigarette!
We have been trained so well. We believe every word My Father has said.
He clings to the warped notion that he should get full custody of us with such fervour that he recruits us as his soldiers in a war against our mother. He wants us all to himself and the more he fights to keep us, the more Old Lass feigns tightening the reins on us. Not enough to stop us from going to him every second weekend, but enough to buy us our first ever cellphones so we can contact her if we need to while we’re away.
We return home to Old Lass after one such weekend, and our cellphones do not return with us. She questions us, shouting in sadness, desperate for us to actually tell the truth for once, and my head swims. My knees are weak. I am so confused and broken.
A few days earlier, I stand in front of My Father, head swimming, knees weak, confused and sobbing, as he demands I give him my new Nokia. He goes out alone that night. Our cellphones take our places on his visit to Hillbrow. He smokes them when he gets home.
Things deteriorate with furious speed in the home we now creep through in Parkhurst. The house that clearly belongs to Second Husband. Here, Old Lass learns how to ignore hearing things and how to unhear them altogether. Second Husband moves hatefully through the halls and over the floors. One summer’s day, Protector & Soul is reading Harry Potter on a distressed, white-wicker couch that has found a home on the veranda among its wooden comrades. Second Husband arrives home in his white bakkie, and before even having manoeuvred his body out of the car, he yells at her for not greeting him in his own home, for being disrespectful, for existing.
Old Lass says nothing. Protector & Soul gets up and joins me in our bedroom where she casually continues to read.
‘I just never read books outside again,’ she tells me now.
Second Husband makes an incredibly easy target of himself. Between the stink of his cologne trailing behind him through the house, leaving us wrinkling our noses and pretending – with much exaggeration – to dry-heave, to the way he speaks to Old Lass as though she is undeserving of any semblance of love.
He speaks in the way that I now recognise as an adult, a way that keeps certain women going back to awful men. Like shoes that we insist on wearing only because they feel so good once they’ve been taken off. So Old Lass stays, wilting at a rare kind word that slips from a nasty mouth every few days.
His grip over the house and its three inhabitants tightens. Protector & Soul and I aren’t allowed to eat his food or drink his drinks or breathe in his oxygen or cough within his earshot. Hating him is as easy as loving our mother.
And so we forget My Father’s indiscretions with a graceful ease as we thrill him with the stories of Second Husband’s instead. Soon, we became spies instead of nuisances in the Parkhurst home. Upon hearing about Second Husband’s plan to take Old Lass and us away to Mozambique on a school holiday, My Father instructs Protector & Soul to steal his passport. Now, at 26 years of age, my sister’s mind draws welcome and infuriating blanks.
‘I remember being told by Dad to steal it. I remember waiting until Second Husband left the house and going through his cupboards. I remember finding the passport. I don’t remember taking it or giving it to Dad. But I must have, because a few days later it was discovered missing.’
One day not long after our Mozambican trip is cancelled due to the curious case of the missing passport, Old Lass is standing over the stove boiling pasta and melting butter. Her two friends Eugene and Nathan sit at the long, narrow wooden table that runs down the centre of the kitchen, tossing back drinks with Second Husband and waiting for the pasta to be placed in front of them and fatten them up. The three men discuss relationships and marriage, not children.
Second Husband glances in my mother’s direction and says to her back, ‘So … should we do this thing?’
‘What thing?’ she asks, pouring the strained penne into the scorching butter that has singed a nutty brown.
‘Get married.’
‘Yes.’
To say my sister and I are devastated is an understatement. On this occasion of protest, as with those that have preceded it, Old Lass reminds us how lucky we are to have Second Husband. Because of him, we have food in our belly and a roof over our heads. We are children. No one has explained to us that the Splodge Shop is barely making any money, flower soaps and textured pillows failing to bring home the big bucks. We are children. No one has explained to us that sometimes you have to bite your tongue and walk on eggshells and betray your children and climb into bed with horrendous men because you need a roof over your head and food in your belly, to ‘protect’ the very kids who now resent you because of it.
The wedding day arrives and Protector & Soul and I argue with Old Lass. We insist on wearing jeans. I insist on wearing jeans. We are determined to don the least celebratory outfits we can find. Jeans don’t say, Good job, Old Lass; jeans say, Go fuck yourself, Soon-to-be-stepdad. Old Lass is gentle. Even at her hardest she is one of the gentlest souls. After tiresome negotiations, I trade in my jeans for a grey skirt with denim trim and try to be furious with her, but on this day she is more breathtaking than ever. I stare at her and devour the sight of her fingers, the fat knuckles we’ve all inherited, and her ankles, tanned and slender, and her eyes, the black beads brought to attention by her black hair, as though the universe has gifted them to me. I count my blessings, knowing even at such a young age to look at my grown-up mother as a crystal ball, a gateway to the features, wrinkles, figure and hairline that await me. In this, I am smug, often revelling for hours in how exquisite my mother is compared to some of the ugly moms my friends have been stuck with. Old Lass pulls a cream-coloured lace leotard over her midnight hair, which falls freely, the tips just grazing the top of her tiny boobs. She snaps shut the three metal buttons of the bodysuit between her thighs, does the same to the three buttons that secure the leotard at her caramel neck, before stepping into a floor-length skirt that on any other woman would look like a repurposed gold bedspread embroidered with flowers rather than a boutique dream. On my mother it looks magnificent.
After Old Lass and Second Husband say their vows under the oak tree in front of the forty-or-so family members and friends serving as tipsy witnesses, the photographer asks for photos of the newly married couple and their children. Old Lass sits on a bench next to her sickly sweet husband. Protector & Soul and I sit on either end of them, and Second Husband’s two daughters – who until this point I’ve been ferociously pretending don’t exist – squeeze themselves into the shot.
This is the first time Second Husband has ever embraced me in any way, I note as he slings his arm over my shoulder for the photo. Without meaning to, I feel a joy boiling up inside of me. I consider how happy my beautiful mother looks. Her smile is so big its claws are tugging at the corners of her eyes. Her energy is so light, limitlessly loving. Maybe the wedding will change everything, I think under the foreign but welcomed weight of Second Husband’s arm. I begin to burst with hope and feelings of guilt, as though I am abandoning my sister on an island of resentment, pushing myself from our shared shore on a raft of forgetfulness, to the horizon of forgiveness, leaving her rubbing sticks together, all the better to burn that whole fucking place down, alone, behind me.
Click. The photographer turns his back to go and take pictures of the other guests. The instant Second Husband realises the lens is no longer on us, he rips his arm from behind me and stalks off to get a drink. My face falls, skinny chicken arms ache as I turn my raft around and paddle with everything I have to join