from their digging and splashing. At Aunty Nora, and her riddles.
And then she recovered her motherly centre, and pointed very slowly to a tiny wader tipping along the shore. Shhhh. See that one? A little stint. Come all the way from overseas.
Halley could hear that the children were meant to be amazed. By migration and endurance. The incredible distances and accumulated knowledge. But they said nothing, only Marnus, who said Oh.
She herself thought little stint big stunt rig splint wrong shunt, wandering off through the bottomless sound of her mother’s words, hieroglyphic as bird prints upon the sand.
Far worse than Kenneth Gardens, even lower down the scale, was Flamingo Court, the cheap flats on Umbilo Road near the beginning of Bayhead, where the flocks of flamingos were long gone.
The Murphys always hurried past Flamingo Court when they walked that way with their mother, though they had once been inside, past the dank inner well and rubbish-strewn stairs, up into the sour stink of the clunking lift. Because their gran had lived in Flamingo Court for a time. Granny Margery.
With Milton, her youngest son, Granny Margery had been staying in a low, quaint block off the Embankment. Small, but a nice place; a breezy balcony curved over the busy street. But then Uncle Milton got married and moved out and the rent was too much for just one.
So Nora got involved. She didn’t know her mother, or not well; but she couldn’t have her on the streets. Understood that anyone had to live with some decency if she were to think of herself as a person.
And the only solution was a bachelor flat in Flamingo Court. Sight unseen, Nora arranged the move with the council and paid for the truck. And once her mother was in, she and the girls walked down from Kenneth Gardens. But just that once. Because they were so stunned that after they’d spent enough time to be polite they turned around and never went back.
Claustrophobic at the smallness of the flat, the stale smell. Shocked at the state of the lift; the incarcerating steepness of the brick tower built around a stagnant central well that was cut across by bowed, dripping wash-lines.
And horrified by the story. Granny could not keep from crying as she told them of the small child who’d been snatched from the stairs where she played while nanny, stripped to her bra and petticoat, washed herself top-and-tail with lye soap at the servants’ coldwater concrete wash trough.
The barbarism, Granny cried, How could you explain it?
But their mother only said in a choking voice that explanations weren’t necessary when savagery was everywhere.
Turned out the girl had been taken by a neighbour, and after a few days, at a time when he was done and sleeping, his girlfriend had unlocked the door and told the little one to run, fast, find someone at the wash-lines.
And they call themselves white people, Marge cried in disgust as her daughter tried to soothe, though not knowing where and how to touch the other woman’s raw distress.
For her mother, Nora saw, this wasn’t a story but a measure of her own helpless despair. Living was so hard! Could it not be lived in some life better than this?
Even before, Granny’s life had been hard, Halley knew, though she didn’t know all the details. Only that her mother’s father, who would have been her grandfather if she’d ever known him, had been a mean, tight-fisted Irishman. Which wasn’t how she’d imagined the Irish at all. Not with all the saints and four-leafed clovers and leprechauns, all that beautiful green.
Story had it that Joseph Alexander Hoare was a dour, miserly government storeman. Each skinflint morning before work, he instructed his wife to furnish him his fill from the food in the kitchen, then he keyed the cupboards against the growing horde of canny, hollow-eyed thieves. They weren’t all his, and that was explanation enough.
Nothing was apportioned children, not even words. Not: No food until dinner. Or: There is not enough.
Just a wordless, methodical slicing, issued to himself, followed by spread, eat, lock, pack and leave, jangling his way to work past the tight clutch of children’s faces.
Every day.
Every day he left his wife with the surd of hunger somehow to appease, though her options were so limited.
And never any privacy for what she had to do either; always the waiting, watching children, their thin-chinned faces shaped like hers and, like hers, begging for some small remit.
So Granny Margery’d had more than a tough time of it, and nothing was about to change with Flamingo Court. She’d just got there, those flats, but she had to get away. A person could not live like that, she cried. Everything about Flamingo Court was wrong. It was depressing.
And much of it was true, for Margery, who was trapped there for a long time, however much she loathed the place.
It was too isolated! Granny hurled the angry accusation at Nora. The dark passages were unsafe. The whole block was a haven for the poor-white criminal element. She’d been accosted in the lift by skollies with knives. The lift was always out of order, her legs couldn’t manage all those steps. Even, it was too far from town.
And didn’t Nora appreciate, she accused indignantly, that a month’s return bus fare into the city cost more than she was saving by living there?
For Nora, her mother’s relentless jeremiad cast her own scorched daughterly love out of the frying pan, and she had to suppress the truth of Flamingo Court in order to think better of herself and her well-intentioned efforts.
And as for Halley and Jen. Their relief at walking away from inside that terrible block was vertiginous: momentarily, they saw themselves as occupying the heights of glowing good fortune, and the brute fact of Flamingo Court became spliced into their sistered silence, part of the splitpole belief that the worst, at least, had not happened to them.
Down below the Ridge
They don’t see many of their relatives, the Murphy girls, which may seem odd since their mother is from a family of thirteen. But they were all split up, so they don’t feel like family, and it’s only Aunty Agnes in Vanderbijl for the holidays sometimes, and Uncle Milton, who’s in Durban but all messed up because his wife ran off with his best friend, and then Granny, that time.
When it comes to the relatives on their father’s side, well, they do see some, mainly Nana, but their mother doesn’t like it. Doesn’t like them. Not his scheming brothers, always on the take, and not even nice Aunty Elda, who’s Nana’s much younger sister.
But Halley is fascinated by how sisters can be so different. Both women are smart and good-looking, so that’s a close match, although Elda has an exotic, sexy rumple. Louche, you could say, as Nora does when speaking of her, compared with the refined appearance and manners of Felicity. Olive-toned Brazil against rosy England. Worlds apart.
Elda isn’t even close to a granny, though of course nor is Felicity, because she’s Nana. Nana does the books in the back rooms for some business in Berea Road near the Tech College, but Elda is a saleslady at the Christian Dior counter in Stuttafords. Ah, non, vendeuse, she corrects, tweezered, pencilled eyebrows raised ironically. So Elda works in the store. For the fragrance house. Which ought to give you some idea of how glam she is. Stand-out stylish.
Elda and Byron (her good-for-nothing husband, quote) have a low house leafed into the bushy folds down back of the Berea ridge, the maze of lanes behind Entabeni Hospital. Always, though she doesn’t have the word, Halley pictures this space using hachures, the contour lines on a map showing the steepness of a hill. The closer together, the more intensely precipitous.
It is here that Halley and Jen’s father sometimes takes his daughters during his visits, since he has to take them somewhere for a couple of hours, and not too far, as there’s always somewhere else he has to be quite soon.
Gotta see a man about a dog, he said to Halley once, and she misunderstood, and got all excited, thinking about her dream puppy.
The girls