Things I Don't Want to Know

Two. Historical Impulse

1 JOHANNESBURG, 1964

It’s snowing in apartheid South Africa. It’s snowing on a zebra and it’s snowing on a snake. It’s snowing on my father’s spectacles and for a moment I can’t see his eyes. I am five years old and have only seen snow in picture books. My father takes my hand and we walk down the steps of the red verandah and into the garden to take a closer look at our peach tree. It is covered in ice crystals. We are going to build a snowman even though we don’t own gloves or warm scarves, but never mind, says Dad, let’s get going, it doesn’t snow every day in Africa.

First we make the body, scooping handfuls of miraculous Johannesburg snow and patting it into a fat dome. Last of all we make the snowman’s head, tracing a wide smile with a stick that had fallen from the peach tree. What shall we do for eyes? I run into the house and come back with two ginger biscuits. We poke out the holes and press the round gingers into the snow head. When it gets dark we make our way back inside our rented bungalow in the suburb of Norwood, up the wax-polished steps that leads to the red doep that leads to a door that opens into the kitchen where a cotton sack of oranges leans against the peeling paint of the pantry wall.

Outside, the snowman stood under the African stars. Tomorrow we would make him even taller and fatter and find him a scarf.

That night while I lay in bed, the special branch of the security police knock on the door of our bungalow. They want my father and tell him to pack a suitcase. Two of the policemen are smoking cigarettes in the garden, watched by the snowman whose eyes are round and hollow. The suitcase my father is packing is very small. Does that mean he will be back soon? The men have their big hands on his shoulders. Dad is trying to smile at me. A smile like the snowman’s that turns up at the corners. And now he is being marched off at a pace by men who I know from conversations overheard between Mom and Dad torture other men and sometimes have swastikas tattooed on their wrists. A car is parked outside the house. The men are saying COM COM COM. The white car pulls away with my father inside it. I wave but he doesn’t wave back.

When I walk into the garden in my pajamas I ask the snowman a question. I speak to him like people speak to God, I talk to him in my head and he answers me.

‘What is going to happen?’

The snowman tells me: ‘Your father will be thrown into a dungeon and tortured and he will scream all night long and you will never see him again.’

I can feel someone stroking my hair. Now the large brown hands of Maria cover my face, her palms pressing in to my cheeks. Maria is a tall Zulu woman who has a secret stash of chewy oblong sweets called Pinkies wrapped in waxy paper hidden in her pocket. Maria is crying too and she is saying, ‘If you don’t believe in apartheid you can go to prison. You have to be brave today and tomorrow and so do lots of children have to be brave because their fathers and mothers have been taken away too.’

Maria lives with us and she is my nanny. She has a daughter my age called Thandiwe but Maria says Thandiwe’s other name is Doreen so the whites can say her name. Maria’s real name is Zama. I can say Zama but she says to call her Maria, which my mother says is a Spanish and Italian name.

‘What is Thandiwe doing now, Maria?’

Every time I ask Maria about her own daughter she makes a clicking noise with her tongue. I think the click means STOP, stop asking me about Thandiwe. When we get back to the kitchen, she tells me to rub Vaseline into her feet. Maria always keeps a pot of Vaseline in her pocket as well as the Pinkies. She takes it out now and I sit on the floor so she can put her right foot on my lap. The skin on the back of her heels is dry and cracked which is why I am instructed to ‘polish’ her feet with the oily jelly until my fingers become hot. At the same time I watch my mother make phone calls to lawyers and friends while my one-year-old brother, Sam, sleeps on her shoulder. When Mom makes a sign with her eyes to Maria, I know she doesn’t want me to hear what she is saying.

‘What is Thandiwe doing now, Maria?’

A week ago Thandiwe had come to the house and Maria put us both in the bath and scrubbed us with a brand new bar of Lux. We stared at each other and took turns to hold the soap. Maria even gave us both a Pinkie so it must have been a special day and then she put some Vaseline on both our lips because we were all ‘cracked up’ from the sun. When Thandiwe had to leave the house she cried like a hose pipe that had been slashed. Tears spurted from her eyes onto the towel wrapped around her belly. She cried while her mother held her in her lap and dressed her in the brand new school shoes she had bought from her wages. Her little girl arms that smelt of Lux were wrapped around her mother’s neck. Thandiwe was not supposed to be in our house because she was black. I had to promise not to tell anyone, no one at all. Sometimes I called Thandiwe Doreen, sometimes I didn’t. Doreen was still crying when Maria left the bungalow to walk her to the ‘Blacks Only’ bus stop where she would return to where she lived in the ‘township’. Maria told her she had to be brave and that her Grandma was waiting to see her new shoes. Watching Thandiwe try to be brave was the worst thing that had happened in my life so far apart from Dad being taken away. I don’t know what happened after I had rubbed Vaseline into Maria’s feet, but later I was in bed and my mother was lying next to me. When our heads touched it was pain and it was also love.

In the morning the snowman had melted. It had disappeared just like Dad.

What is a snowman? He is a round paternal presence built by children to watch over the house. He is weighty, full of substance, but he is also insubstantial, flimsy, spectral. I knew from the moment we gave him ginger biscuits for eyes that he had become a snow ghost.

2

Two years later I was seven years old and Dad was still gone but my mother said he would come back. I stared into my Barbie doll’s painted-on eyes and thought about this. My father was gone. He was gone because he was a member of the African National Congress and the government had banned the ANC because it was fighting for equal human rights. Everyone had to be brave.

I searched Barbie’s blue eyes for any signs of her not being brave. To my relief I found none at all because her eyes had been painted on. She was as calm and pretty as it was possible to be and I wanted to be like that too. I was glad my doll came with four wigs and a hair dryer. Barbie was clearly untouched by anything horrible that happened in the world. I wished I had blue eyes that were painted on with long black eyelashes. I wanted eyes that held no secrets (where’s your father then?) because there were no secrets to hold (he’s in a dungeon being tortured). Barbie was plastic and I wanted to be plastic too.

At school when I tried to speak, it was a big effort to make my words come out loud. The volume of my voice had somehow been turned down and I didn’t know how to turn it up. All day I was asked to repeat what I’d just said and I had a go, but repeating things did not make them louder.

‘Are yoo dumb?’

I told the children that my father was away in England.

‘Where?’

‘Ingerland.’

I wasn’t sure where England was or where exactly my father was but my Afrikaans teacher stared at me as if she knew everything. I was thinking about the phrase ‘out of the blue’. It was so thrilling to think about the blue that things came out of. There was a blue, it was big and mysterious, it was like mist or gas and it was like a planet but it was also a human head which is shaped like a planet. Out of the blue my teacher asked me how I spelt my surname?

L — E–V — Y.

It was obvious to me she knew my father was a political prisoner, but then she said in an excited voice, ‘Ja, you are Jewish,’ as if she had just discovered something incredible, like a Roman coin stuck in the paw of a kitten or a dragonfly concealed in a loaf of bread. And then she blinked her liver-coloured eyelashes and said, ‘I’ve had enough of your nonsense.’

Her comment did not come out of the blue. Not at all. The clue was that for weeks now, she had written angry things in my exercise book.

ALWAYS WRITE ON THE TOP LINE. START HERE.

I had ignored her red biro correction because writing on the top line was impossible. I did not know why but I always started on the third line so there was a gap between the top of the page and the line I started on. She said I was wasting paper and she had filled up the empty spaces between the first and third line on every page with her own writing.

START HERE.

START HERE.

START HERE.

When she shook her finger at my face it went right through my eye like a ghost slipping through a brick wall.

‘Read out loud to me what I’ve written in your book.’

‘Start here.’

‘I can’t hear you!’

‘START HERE.’

‘Yes. Why are you the only child in my class who thinks she can start any where she likes? Take your book and go to the headmaster’s office. He is expecting you.’ That came right out of the blue. I didn’t really want Mister Sinclair to expect me.

As I carried the offending exercise book under my arm, I peered through the window into the other classroom. In class 1J there was boy called Piet who had a purple mark on his forehead like a bullet wound. All the children knew that a teacher had shaved his hair and dabbed iodine onto his forehead with a ball of cotton wool because he swore in class. Now his forehead was stained purple so everyone could see he had done something wrong. I wondered whether the mark would ever go away. When I learned about Jesus Christ and the way nails were hammered through the palms of his poor carpenter’s hands I thought of Piet. Would he walk around for the rest of his life with a hole in his head just like Jesus who came back to life with holes in his hands? I could see Piet through the window, his milky white forehead stained with the purple mark while his finger traced words on the page. Would Lux take off the purple stain or had it gone in too deep?

Piet was Afrikaans and I knew that the COM COM COM men who had taken my father away were Afrikaners too. I had a vague idea that I was supposed to think that Afrikaners were bad people but I felt truly sorry for Piet. And then I remembered I had done something wrong too and I had to walk over the concrete bridge to the headmaster’s office.

The bridge looked over the playground. All the white children were in their classrooms but three black children, two boys and a girl, had climbed over the gate and were turning over the dustbins. The African children were barefoot and the girl was wearing a yellow dress with only one sleeve. Her hair was cut close to her head like Thandiwe’s hair. Sometimes Thandiwe and I washed each other’s hair in the bath with the slab of Lux. When we got soap in our eyes we had to splash our faces with water and try and find a towel with our eyes shut. We bumped in to each other because the stinging soap had blinded us but we were not as blind as we pretended to be. We liked to bump in to each other. From my view on the bridge I could see that the girl had found some bread and one of the boys had found a green sock. He put it in his pocket. And then he looked up and saw me watching him. When he looked up I ducked, then straightened my knees and peered over the bridge again. The children had run away and Mr Sinclair was expecting me.

‘Show me your book.’

The headmaster sat at his desk drinking a cup of coffee.

My hands moved the exercise book towards him, sliding it across the shiny table. He opened the book and stared at the first page. Then he turned the page over and the page after that too. Mr Sinclair was frowning. I could see his finger pointing to the top line. A tuft of black hair sprouted from his knuckle as he tapped the page with START HERE written all over it.

‘Here. Why don’t you start here? Here. Here. Here. You start here. Do you understand?’

When I nodded my two blonde pony tails bounced from side to side.

He stood up and began to roll up the cuffs of his shirt sleeves. A framed photograph of two children stood on his desk. A boy and a girl. The boy’s hair had been shaved like Piet’s and he was wearing a scout’s uniform. The girl wore a blue gingham dress and had a matching blue band in her lovely ginger hair. Suddenly I felt Mr Sinclair’s hands on my legs. It made me jump it was so unexpected. The headmaster was slapping the backs of my legs with his hands.

There was something I was beginning to understand at seven years old. It was to do with not feeling safe with people who were supposed to be safe. The clue was that even though Mr Sinclair was white and a grown-up and had his name written in gold letters on the door of his office, I was definitely less safe with him than I was with the black children I had been spying on in the playground. The second clue was that the white children were secretly scared of the black children. They were scared because they threw stones and did other mean things to the black children. White people were afraid of black people because they had done bad things to them. If you do bad things to people, you do not feel safe. And if you do not feel safe, you do not feel normal. The white people were not normal in South Africa. I had heard all about the Sharpeville Massacre that happened a year after I was born and how the white police shot down the black children and women and men and how it rained afterwards and the rain washed the blood away. By the time Mr Sinclair said, ‘Go back to your class room,’ he was panting and sweating and I could tell he did not feel normal.

Clutching the book that had got me into so much trouble I decided not to return to my class room. I walked straight out of the school gates and made my way to the park where I swung on a rubber tyre tied with rope to a tree. A sign painted in red enamel nailed onto the fence spelt: ‘This play park for European children only. By order town clerk.’ The sun was scorching my bare knees so I moved to the seesaw which was in the shade and stayed there for two hours.

When I got home I took an orange from the sack in the pantry and rolled it under the sole of my bare foot until it was soft. Then I made a hole in it with my thumb and sucked out the juice. I was still thirsty so I drank water from the hose pipe in the yard. It was the hottest time of the day and our tomcat had collapsed under the peach tree that had once, miraculously, been covered in snow. At six o’clock my mother got back from work and said she needed to talk to me. It was obvious the school had rung her to say I hadn’t turned up for the afternoon because she told me I was going to stay for a few months with my Godmother who lived in Durban. After she hugged me for a long time, I walked back in to the garden to tell Maria.

Maria always sat on the steps of the verandah at night and drank condensed milk from a little tin she had pierced with the can opener. She said she was looking out for the parktown prawns. Sam and I had planted ten watermelon seeds in the garden but Maria had told us the parktown prawns might get to eat the young melons before we did. She said the parktown prawn was actually a king cricket and it attacked the rotting peaches that has fallen from our tree. If we touched one it would leap at us and spray a jet black liquid in to our eyes. When I sat next to her on the steps, she put some Vaseline on my lips and asked if everything was alright at school? I shook my head and she sat me on her lap but I knew she was tired and wanted to drink her sweet milk and be alone. She said the stars were so bright she would be able to see if the parktown prawns flew in and if they did she would see them off. Then she gave me a handful of Pinkies from her pocket and said I must tell her about Godmother Dory’s new budgie when I came home. Apparently the budgie was called Billy Boy. I liked the way Maria said, ‘Godmother Dory’. Was that called a phrase? I resolved that when I got to Durban, I wouldn’t say Dory, I would say, Godmother Dory. It didn’t sound quite right when I said it to myself. In fact every time I said Godmother Dory out loud, that combination of words felt uncomfortable — as if I was walking around with three little stones in my plimsolls. For some reason I did not want to take out the stones.

At the end of the week, a smart air hostess with a big diamond on her finger led me up the stairs to the aeroplane and told me to suck my thumb as soon as the plane took off for Durban.

‘Diamonds are a girl’s best friend,’ the hostess winked. ‘One day when you get married your fiancé will give you a rock too.’ When her eye flickered, the diamond on her finger flickered too. ‘If the plane crashes I’ll blow my whistle okay?’ Sitting alone sucking my thumb, I waited for her to blow the whistle but she was too busy walking up and down the aisle showing passengers her engagement ring.

Later she said, ‘Look, that’s Maputaland, can you see the lakes and marshes? That’s Rocktail Bay where my lover boy proposed to me. It’s got a coral reef. Nearly in Durban. You must ask your daddy to drive you to the game reserve and show you the lions and elephants okay?’

I nodded.

‘Hey, don’t you speak?’

I shook my head.

‘Left your tongue in Jo’burg?’

I nodded.

‘Is that the pilot calling me? It is isn’t it? Hope the wing hasn’t fallen off!’

She winked and made her way towards the cockpit where the pilot was smoking a cigar. It was his birthday and the crew were singing a rugby song:

She had no clothes on at all

at all at all at all

she had no clothes on at all

3

Godmother Dory presided like a gaoler over Billy Boy’s existence.

He couldn’t get back to his bird world because he was locked up in his cage. When he played on his ladder and swing he lifted his wings while he whizzed in the air but it wasn’t the same as flying.

‘Shut that window otherwise Billy Boy will fly away. You can hold him in your hands. Do you want to?’

I nodded.

‘He makes more noise than you do.’

When I cupped Billy Boy in my hands and buried my nose in his soft feathers, the pilot’s rugby song came in to my head.

He had no feathers on at all

at all at all at all

he had no feathers on at all

Poor Billy Boy. He was so sad under his feathers. His small organs and little bones. Godmother Dory told me to count his toes every month. Apparently if a budgie had some of its toes missing this was because of mites. And I had to listen to him breathe. If there was a ‘click’ when he took a breath that meant he had air sac mites. Godmother Dory knew everything there was to know about budgies. She told me that it was very important not to take pity on a sick budgie for sale in a pet shop.

‘Pity will not bring a sick budgie back to life. It will die of respiratory problems whatever you do.’

I tried to slap down the pity I felt for Billy Boy in case it killed him but it kept coming back. I stared at the sawdust at the bottom of his cage and told myself he was happy and well but I didn’t believe myself. As far as I was concerned all the crops had failed to grow in Billy Boy’s life and any hope he possessed had been eaten by ants and his parents had been crushed by a train.

I had forgotten how huge my Godmother was. When she hugged me, I disappeared in to the folds of her stomach. Everything went dark and muffled and I could hear the water dripping inside her pipes. A rumbling noise that was like the sea which was five miles away from the house. The Indian ocean. A sea full of sharks. The life guards on the Golden Mile, which was what the beach was called, had to check the shark nets every morning and make announcements on tannoys when it was not safe to swim. I’d already had to run out of the water and wait on the sand until the shark had been caught. While they were catching the shark I read the signs on the beach:

CITY OF DURBAN

THIS BATHING AREA IS RESERVED FOR THE SOLE USE

OF MEMBERS OF THE WHITE RACE

The only black people allowed onto the beach were the ice cream sellers who walked barefoot across the hot sand, ringing a bell, shouting, ‘Eskimo pie, choc-ice, eskimo pie.’ Sometimes the white boys who went surfing had a leg chewed off if they went too far out on their boards and my Godmother would show me their picture in the newspaper the next day. She said she was more scared of tapeworms than sharks. When the ginger cat was sick on the carpet she flung up her arms and screamed because she said there might be a tapeworm in the vomit. The maid called Caroline cleaned it up while Madam shut her eyes and squealed, her soft white hand clamped over her lips. It seemed then that a tapeworm could swallow a shark; fear did not have a logical size and what’s more, fear was a hermaphrodite. My Godmother told me that tapeworms have both male and female organs in their long long bodies: ‘They have ovaries and testes all mixed in together,’ they are ‘hermaphrodites’, and if that wasn’t terrifying enough, ‘Any human being who likes to eat raw meat should know that a tapeworm would like to eat them.’

Outside the house in Durban, wired onto the gate, was a big sign:

ARMED RESPONSE

When I asked what it meant my Godmother who knew everything was happy to explain: ‘If The Blacks break into the house and rob us, my husband, the venerable Edward Charles William, will shoot them, but don’t tell your mother. So while you stay with us you needn’t worry about a thing!’ So far I’d been introduced to sharks, tapeworms and guns. And hermaphrodites. And orchids. ‘Come and look at the flowers in my garden. My orchids have small blooms but smell stronger than the bigger ones.’

It was in Godmother Dory’s garden in subtropical Durban that a miracle lay in wait for me, a hallucination, a mirage, a sort of cartoon. Leaning against the palm tree under Natal’s blue sky, smacking flies off her long tanned legs, was a living Barbie doll. Something was shining in the sunshine. It was a gold letter in the shape of an M and the M was attached to a gold chain she wore around her neck. I was dazzled. Somehow, Godmother Dory had managed to produce a slim, blonde daughter who looked like plastic.

‘Hello. I’m Melissa. I’ve just got back from a shorthand course in Pretoria. Aren’t you going to say hello to me? You’re not in church, you can speak loud you know.’

Just as tiny Barbie was losing her aura and becoming a mere toy with nylon hair, a living Barbie wearing a pastel blue mini-skirt had appeared on the scene.

‘C’mon baby. Sit in my bedroom and talk to me.’

Melissa was seventeen, wore her hair in a beehive and painted her eyelashes with a little brush which she dipped in a pot of black mascara.

‘Hey don’t you speak? Aaaah. You don’t have to. But listen I’m doing my secretarial exams. I got to do shorthand, so if you talk fast I can practise writing what you say. It’s a code called Pitman’s.’ Melissa took out a pen and wrote some squiggles on the back of my hand. ‘It says, Welcome to Durbs my little chum.’

It was an honour to be allowed to sit on Melissa’s bed and witness the way she teased her hair with a plastic comb until it stood on end all over her head. A special crystal ashtray lay under the bed. I could just see it under the white pom-poms that shivered on the edge of the pink satin eiderdown. Melissa was a secret smoker and kept the ashtray under her bed to hide the butts from her mother. The best moment was when I got to spray the slim can of gold lacquer all over her beehive while she peeped through her half-closed eyes, lashes stiff with mascara. The sweet chemical vapour from the lacquer was like a painkiller. I watched Melissa make herself up in awed, humble silence. The idea that plastic people were the most interesting people was born first of all in Barbie’s painted-on blue eyes, then in Maria’s painted on brown eyes every time I asked about Thandiwe, and finally in Melissa’s teenage laboratory. Melissa was quite literally making herself up. The fact that lipstick and mascara and eye shadow were called ‘Make Up’ thrilled me. Everywhere in the world there were made up people and most of them were women.

‘Hey dumb girl, let me do your hair for you. Sit on my lap and I’ll make you a lekker style.’

With Melissa’s help my sad, sensible pony tail soon changed into an exotic coil of golden plaits pinned on top of my head. Melissa said I looked like a movie star and all I needed were some diamonds and rubies to put in my ears and drape round my neck and weave round my wrists. Emeralds would suit me best because of my green eyes. When I had daughters of my own, I would give them my emeralds because they would have ‘served their purpose’. What was their purpose?

She said I was a ‘beauty’ and one day, if I remembered to scrub my fingernails clean, a dashing man would take my hand and he would kiss it with his lips for a long time. Then he would kneel at my feet while I looked down at his hair parting and he would beg me to be his wife. I hoped that I would be like Melissa when I grew up. I too would smoke cigarettes and be able to make squiggles on paper in Pitman’s code and drive barefoot in fast cars with my stilettos chucked on the back seat for later.

‘Never wear shoes when you drive my little chum, that’s the best way.’

But first of all I had to tiptoe past her one-eyed father and make myself invisible to him. Edward Charles William had one glass eye and one real eye. Melissa told me that when he was a boy someone poked out his left eye in a rugby game and now his eyes did not match. The glass eye had purple flames in it. It was practically a fire burning in his socket. I made up a rule: only look at his glass eye. Never ever catch sight of his real eye. A glass eye was an unseeing eye and I did not want him to see that I was frightened of him. Edward Charles William was like a king. When he sat at the head of the table with his wife and only daughter, I could see us all reflected in his glass eye, I could even see the grey dog called Rory wagging his tail and panting in Edward Charles William’s eye.

‘ROOOREEEEE! Sit! Sit!’

‘Pa-aa. Uch Pa you’re frightening the wits out of my new little chum! Just ignore him dumb girl, he’s a pussy cat.’ Melissa shook her pink frosted finger nail at her father, winking at him while she filled his glass with scotch and sent me into the kitchen to get his ice.

While I was in the kitchen I stared out of the window while the ice cubes melted in my hands. The ice reminded me of building the snowman with my father. I was going to be eight years old soon and he still hadn’t come home. When I returned to the table and Edward Charles William looked furious at the sight of the tiny slivers of ice that were dripping in my hot hand. Melissa covered up for me.

‘Pa, ugh, Pa, why is it so hard to find ice that doesn’t melt in three seconds? What’s the science, Pa?’

If I had anything to ask my own father I would have to ask him in my head. When Melissa said, ‘Will you take me fishing?’ and her father said ‘Yes,’ I asked my father if he would take me fishing too? His ghostly answer was always, ‘Fishing is treacherous. You might get the hook stuck in your finger!’ Or I would say, ‘Dad, today I climbed to the very top of the tree,’ and he would say, ‘Climbing trees is treacherous. Don’t climb all the way up. Climb halfway and never look down!’

I guessed that Edward Charles William did not want me to be living with them in Durban but Godmother Dory told me that it was necessary for me to have ‘a stable home’ and that it was ‘the least she could do’ because she and my ‘poor poor’ mother had gone to boarding school together and they had taken it in turns to keep watch when they read books at midnight under the sheets with a torch.

I began to listen to how Edward Charles William spoke English, which was the language we all spoke. When he wanted his socks, he yelled at a servant to get them for him. When he wanted a towel for his evening shower he yelled again. He didn’t say the words socks or towel he just yelled the name of the servant. The name of his servant meant get me my socks, get me a towel.

When his shoes needed polishing, the man who did the garden polished them for him. Edward Charles William called him ‘boy’ even though he had four children and nine grandchildren and had silver hair. His name was Joseph and he called Edward Charles William, ‘Master’. The language Edward Charles William spoke to Joseph was the English language but his tone was like a whole separate language. For a start (and I never knew where to start) I could hear that Edward Charles William’s tone was enjoying something too much. I could hear that Edward Charles William needed to be less happy. This thought made me laugh, and every time I laughed I felt a bit happier, which was confusing my new idea about happiness not always being a good thing but there was nothing I could do about it.

One Sunday, Joseph gave me half his pie with gravy and we sat on the grass in the shade because ‘Madam and Master’ always went for a drive on Sundays. That was the first time I noticed he had two fingers missing from his left hand. When I asked him what happened to his fingers, he said he caught them in a door. He taught me to count to two in Zulu. One was Ukunye, two was Isibili. Or something sing-song like that. The idea that there was a door somewhere in South Africa with Joseph’s two fingers stuck in it began to torment me. Later, when I told him that my father was a political prisoner, he told me that an Alsatian dog had bitten off his two fingers when the police raided his brother’s house in Jo’burg. They were looking for Nelson Mandela. When I told him my mother and father knew Winnie and Nelson Mandela (who was in prison FOR LIFE on Robben Island) he instructed me not to ever tell this to Madam and Master — or even Billy Boy. And any way, he said, mopping up his pie and gravy with his thumb and two remaining fingers, what was the point of keeping a bird if it didn’t lay eggs? Amaqanda. That was Zulu for eggs. If Madam’s blue bird laid a blue egg, that would be a little meal.

Every night a grey blanket was placed over Billy Boy’s cage. I knew my father slept with a grey blanket over him too because he had told my mother in a letter.

‘Come here my little chum, you’re freaking me out the way you’re always staring at Ma’s budgie.’ Melissa clasped her arms around my waist and lifted me off the carpet.

‘Now say after me, I CAN SPEAK LOUD.’

‘I can speak loud.’

‘SAY IT LOUDER.’

‘I can speak loud.’

‘THAT’S NOT LOUD. I’m not putting you down till you scream.’

I experimented with a tiny scream. It sounded quite real and she put me down.

‘Lisss-ten, when you smile I know you don’t mean it. Smile for me with all your teeth. Ah that’s lekker. Let’s take the spaceship into town.’

The spaceship was Godmother Dory’s brand new car. She had grown so large she could no longer fit into the old one. I sometimes saw her in the kitchen at night lifting fistfuls of minced meat and potatoes into her little cupid lips. The spaceship was silver and shiny and had spotless cream leather seats. What if the tyres of the new car exploded and Godmother Dory crashed and no one was able to lift her up to take her to hospital?

‘Why is your Ma so fat?’

Melissa lunged towards me and stamped hard on my toe. And then she punched my shoulder.

‘Don’t be so rude, dumb girl. Ma’s a prisoner in her own flesh. She can’t get out of there.’

‘Why not?’

‘She’s dead but she came back as a zombie.’

‘No!’

‘You know Jesus is a zombie too? He died and came back to life.’

Melissa waved the car keys in my face.

‘Say sorry and I’ll buy you a bunny chow.’

‘What’s a bunny chow?’

‘It’s lekkkkker. But you don’t tell anyone where I’m taking you. Especially Pa. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘You said that nice and loud. Girls have to speak up cuz no one listens to them anyway.’

If Melissa had a secret life, I expected nothing less of a plastic person. Plastic people had things to hide and what Melissa was hiding was that she knew places to eat downtown where her Indian boyfriend lived. This place turned out to be a cafe in a side street full of garbage and flies. Old meat bones lay heaped in the gutter underneath a pile of potato peel and rotting carrots. When we walked into the cafe an Indian man reading a newspaper at the till looked up and shouted, ‘Hey Lissa! Is it bunny time?’ He was chewing something that had stained his teeth orange. When the man shouted, ‘Hey Lissa!’ the Indian families devouring plates of curry with their fingers all looked up and then looked down. I guessed they looked down because we were white and not supposed to be there.

‘Thanks Victor. And a bunny for my little chum too. She’s from Jo’burg.’

Melissa steered me to one of the tables and said, ‘Sit.’ I was furious when she told me to sit, as if I was a disobedient dog. She had some of her father’s tone in her, that was for sure. Melissa had caught ‘Master’s’ tone, she needed to take an aspirin and sweat it out of her. I started to sneeze. Victor carried over a can of Fanta and opened it for me while I was still sneezing.

‘So you’re from Jo’burg?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is Ajay in today?’ Melissa interrupted us in her new tone.

Victor pointed at someone with his finger which was also stained orange. A young Indian man had just walked into the cafe. He wore a shiny grey suit and snakeskin shoes and he smiled when he saw Melissa.

‘I’ll get your bunnies.’ Victor made his way across the sawdust on the floor, kicking an empty cigarette packet under a table.

A bunny chow turned out to be meat curry spooned inside the crust of half a white loaf of bread. I ate it with a soup spoon and watched Melissa flirt with Victor’s son. Ajay was shrugging, saying something about ‘next Tuesday’ while Melissa rolled her painted-on eyes up to the ceiling. Ajay lit her cigarette and then he lit his cigarette and they both made O’s of smoke in the air. Their O’s were the most beautiful thing in the world. Sometimes they floated towards each other and just as they were about to touch they melted in to the air. The air smelt of rice. And spices. The O’s and the rice and the spices and the space between Melissa and Ajay whose shoes were made from snake and Melissa whose eyelashes were sooty with mascara and the way her little finger was touching the cuff of Ajay’s shirt seemed to me how life could be when it was going well.

When Victor walked back to our table and sat down he ruined it all because he started to talk about politics. Melissa told him how my father was in gaol because of apartheid. Victor told me that his grandfather had come from India to work in the sugar cane fields in Natal. He said every time I sprinkled a teaspoon of sugar on my grapefruit and made my teeth rrrrrotten as a result, I must remember it was his granddad who planted South Africa’s white gold — and I must tell my Dad there was always a bunny chow waiting for him in his ‘establishment’. I nodded and pretended to be interested but I was really looking at Melissa who was holding Ajay’s hand under the table. If this was love, it was forbidden love. Even I knew that. Everyone in the café knew that. Politics had found its way in to grapefruits and into holding hands. I was fed up with politics and looked forward to the day I could smoke and make O’s in the rice-scented air and run my little finger under a handsome man’s shirt cuff.

When we got to the car park, Melissa took off her sandals and asked me to hold them for her while she searched for the car keys. She never drove in shoes, this was her ‘specialty’; her boyfriends always clasped her shoes tightly to their chests while she pressed her bare feet on the gas and sang ‘golden hits’ by The Shangri-Las.

‘Oh maaaan — I think I’ve left them in Victor’s Bunny House!’ While she searched frantically in her bag, I gazed at the car parked next to the spaceship. A girl my age was sitting on the back seat holding something on her lap. Her lips were moving, as if she was speaking to someone but no one was there.

‘Look she’s talking to herself.’

Melissa walked across the oily concrete in her bare feet and peered into the Bentley.

‘You know what?’

‘What?’

‘She’s talking to a rabbit!’

‘A bunny chow?’

‘No. A REAL rabbit.’

It was true. The girl had a white rabbit on her lap. I could just see its ears poking up, tickling the girl’s chin. At the same time a man and a woman walked towards the car, the man flicking his keys against his hip. As soon as he unlocked the door, the girl’s lips stopped moving. The woman saw us and laughed but she didn’t mean it.

‘We just took her rabbit to the vet. He’s got a sticky eye.’

Her husband made a high pitched voice, like his wife, and repeated what she had just said.

‘HE’S GOT A STICKY EYE! HE’S GOT A STICKY EYE.’

When his wife’s cheeks reddened, he said it all over again.

He didn’t sound like her at all. I wondered who he thought he was imitating? The high voice inside him did not sound like my mother or Maria or me or Melissa or even the woman it was supposed to be. Here was the clue. He sounded like himself.

‘HERE THEY ARE!’ Melissa’s car keys had somehow slipped inside the Pitman’s code book she always carried around with her.

‘HOPE YOUR LITTLE BUNNY’S BETTER,’ she yelled at the girl. She put her bare foot down on the gas and eased the spaceship out of the car park.

‘What do you think she was saying to her rabbit?’

‘Ja. Well. That’s her secret.’

‘Why’s it a secret?’

Melissa shrugged, her painted-on eyes fixed on the road as she turned right onto a concrete flyover. It began to thunder.

Naked African children were begging at the traffic lights, hands stretched out, palms turned up.

‘What secret was she saying to her rabbit?’

Warm rain started to lash the car windows.

‘She said, “Why don’t Ma and Pa love each other?”’

4

I knew that smiling was like the magic charms that some girls wore on bracelets. Little silver pixies and hearts jiggling on their suntanned wrists to bring them luck and ward off the evil eye. Smiling was a way of keeping people out of your head even though you’d opened your head when you parted your lips. This is how I smiled when Godmother Dory told me she was going to send me to the local convent school. While she was saying this she held a little pair of scissors in her hand to trim Billy Boy’s wings.

‘The feathers should be shiny and full.’ Her plump finger prodded Billy Boy’s chest. ‘This is the keel bone. It’s sticking out a little bit more than it should. I think Billy Boy is underweight. I’m going to give him more seed than usual tonight.’

‘What’s a convent school?’

‘It’s a school where the teachers are nuns.’

‘What’s a nun?’

‘A nun is a woman who has married Jesus Christ.’

‘Oh. The hostess on the plane to Durbs was getting married. She showed me her ring.’

‘But she didn’t marry Jesus Christ. She probably married a man called Henk van de Plais or something like that. It’s quite quite different.’

Her face was pale like a zombie.

‘An alert and playful budgie is a sign of a healthy budgie. Billy Boy is not as chirpy as usual.’

When she had finished tidying up Billy Boy’s feathers she locked him up again in his cage. I watched how she wiggled the little lever to shut him in so that I could wiggle it to get him out.

‘The convent is called Saint Anne’s and the nuns are very good teachers. Please take the cat and his tapeworm away from Billy Boy’s cage.’

I picked up the cat and warmed my hands in its ginger fur. I knew he didn’t have a tapeworm. Maybe Godmother Dory had a tapeworm inside her? The clue was that she was hungry all the time, so something was eating her up. The cat had taken to sleeping in my bedroom. Melissa threatened to cut Ginger’s ear off if he didn’t return to her pink satin eiderdown, but he had obviously decided to risk it. Ginger Was Mine. When Melissa had been a pupil at the convent she hated it. Now that she was doing a secretarial course and drank Rock Shandy’s and met her girl friend from Pietermaritzburg at the Three Monkeys or the Wimpy Burger Bar, she had stopped praying.

‘You don’t want the Convent girls to think you’re a freak do you?’

‘No.’

‘Then you must speak loud. Hey I’ll tell you one thing: you’ll be the only girl with a Jewish surname on the register. If you get lost in the cloisters just follow your nose.’ Melissa laughed until her painted-on eyes ran all over her face and I joined in because I was her little chum.

Saint Anne’s was a provincial school for well-heeled, white-skinned Catholic girls. Between the cloisters stood a small bowed statue of the Madonna and child, the sad mother with her baby in her arms. On the streets of Durban most African mothers carried their babies strapped to their backs but if they were looking after the white babies they pushed them in a pram. Did the Madonna have a servant to hold her baby for her? I wondered if my own mother was missing me? I hoped so. Perhaps I was a saintly orphan who had been sent by God to be cared for by the nuns? I leaned against a stone pillar and gazed at a plaster statue of Jesus Christ with slashed hands. It made me think all over again about Piet in my Johannesburg school. Had his iodine stigmata faded away yet?

The nuns seemed to have devoted their lives to helping me learn how to read and write. Every day they knelt by my side in the class room, gently rolling plasticine A’s and B’s and C’s in their soft white hands. When they asked me to name the letters, I lowered my head like an orphan saint should do, and whispered ‘Ay, bee, sea,’ while they nodded encouragingly. I thought it might be rude to tell them I had learned to read and write two years ago. In fact I understood all the signs on the golden mile without the help of plasticine.

THIS BATHING AREA IS RESERVED FOR THE SOLE USE

OF MEMBERS OF THE WHITE RACE

Sister Joan told me her rosary was threaded in sections of ten beads and the ten beads were called decades. A decade was ten years. What if my father was away for a decade? What if I was swimming in the bathing area reserved for members of the white race for decades but never saw my father again? I would be alone with the white race who were not normal. I would be totally alone with them and at their mercy like the surfers were at the mercy of the Great White Sharks who managed to get through the gill nets in the subtropical sea.

The oldest nun passed me an M.

‘M for Melissa’, I whispered dutifully.

‘Yes, How is Melissa?’ Sister Joan was now rolling out an N which I knew came after M. I had known this since I was about four.

‘She’s at secretarial college.’

‘And is she doing well at the tech?’

‘She’s learning Pitman’s code.’

I did not tell Sister Joan that Melissa (two S’s in Melissa but we were only on N at the moment) had been banned from driving for a month. This was because she hijacked the spaceship and drove Ajay to see his uncle. Last night when Edward Charles William saw the car was missing at 1.15am he made Godmother Dory wake me up. She dragged me in to the living room and Edward Charles William squeezed his face so close to mine that he squashed my nose.

‘Do you know where fat face is?’

I shook my head and stared into his glass eye.

‘Is she seeing a boy?’

‘No.’

‘An Indian boy? ‘

‘No.’

‘I’VE GOT A BLARRY KAFFIR LOVER FOR A DAUGHTER! YOU’VE COME TO STAY AT THE RIGHT HOUSE, HEY?’

‘Get away from her,’ Godmother Dory squealed in a begging sort of way, ‘Leave the child alone. What am I to say to her poor mother?’ Meanwhile Ginger cat lay asleep on the sofa with its soft paws crossed over each other.

When Edward Charles William put his hand over his glass eye I was terrified it was going to fall out. A sentence formed in my mind. It resembled the sign on the beach:

THIS GLASS EYE IS RESERVED FOR THE SOLE USE

OF MEMBERS OF THE WHITE RACE

Edward Charles William told me he was going to call the police to find Melissa. The police? The same men who had taken my father away? When the spaceship swerved in to the driveway, Melissa beeped the hooter at the police car that had arrived at the same time as she did, rolled down the window and waved like she was on holiday.

‘Hey guys! I didn’t steal my ma’s spaceship honest. I was abducted.’ The policemen laughed but Melissa went crazy after they left. She called her father ‘a fucking Nazi’ and told me that now she couldn’t drive it was hard to find a place she could meet with Ajay. South Africa was shit, Ginger was shit, Rory was shit and I was a dumb freak.

‘Do you still want to be a dolly like your horrible little Barbie?’

‘Yes.’

‘How can you be a dolly and a saint? You know there was a saint called Lucy who plucked out her eyes? But she could still see things because you never stop seeing things until you die. I want to die if I can’t see Ajay.’

Sister Joan was now smiling at sister Elizabeth who didn’t notice because she was busy making a plasticine O. I nodded piously and copied her smile, which was half a smile, as if she had decided a whole one was going too far. She passed me the O. It reminded me of Melissa and Ajay’s smoke rings of love but I said quite loudly, ‘O is for orange. There is one O in God and one O in mother.’

‘Yes. Well done. And are you happy staying with your godmother?’

Happy? I gazed at my ugly black regulation school shoes. Happy? There were two P’s in happy. I could already see Sister Elizabeth rolling out the plasticine P. Perhaps it made the nuns happy to play with plasticine? Perhaps they should roll out plasticine all day long while I read a book? Did they know I actually read books, lots of them, all the way through? Did they think I was dumb like Melissa thought I was dumb? Was I happy? Was I supposed to be happy?

After a while Sister Joan took my hand in her own holy hand and asked me if I believed in God.

The picture of God I held in my mind was connected to the snowman I had built with my father. The snowman was God. He was cold and dead but I thought about him all the time. By way of answering, I opened my satchel and showed her a letter my father had sent to Durban. It occurred to me that I should read it out loud to her so we could stop making plasticine letters.

My darling,

I’m glad the nuns are so nice. Be sure to say your thoughts out loud and not just in your head.

Kisses to the sky.

With all my love from your Daddy.

Sister Joan squeezed my hand.

‘When your father says say your thoughts out loud, he means for you to speak louder.’

‘Speak louder to God?’

I waited for her to say, yes, but she was silent. That was the first time I understood the phrase, ‘Read between the lines.’

5

I had been told to say my thoughts out loud and not just in my head but I decided to write them down. It was five in the morning and I could hear Rory barking at the reed frogs in the pond. I found a biro and had a go at writing down my thoughts. What came out of the biro and onto the page was more or less everything I did not want to know.

Dad disappeared.

Thandiwe cried in the bath.

Piet’s got a hole in his head.

Joseph’s fingers got bitten off

Mr Sinclair hit my legs.

The watermelons grew and I wasn’t there.

Maria and Mom are far away.

Sister Joan might not believe in God.

Billy Boy behind bars.

Billy Boy was my main thought. I put the biro down and then I opened my bedroom door. I would have to be quiet otherwise Edward Charles William might think I was a burglar and do what was written on the sign outside the house:

ARMED RESPONSE

If I was going to do what was ‘between the lines’ of what I had written down, which was to free Billy Boy, then so might Edward Charles William do what was ‘between the lines’ of the words ARMED RESPONSE. Were words just threats or were they serious? Was it true that sticks and stones were more dangerous than words? What was the point of just writing things down, any way? What was the point of writing, BUY MORE PINKIES, but not buying them because writing it down had replaced the desire to actually buy them?

I crept into the dining room. On the polished table were four bowls, four silver spoons, four cups, an empty toast rack and four china plates. Would Goldilocks have broken in to the bears’ cottage if she’d seen a sign on the gate that said ARMED RESPONSE?

I ran past the table and pushed open the door that led to the living room where Billy Boy lived in his cage. First of all I opened the window that looked out over the garden. Then I lifted the grey blanket off the cage. Billy Boy opened his little brown eyes. They were the same colour as my father’s eyes. I counted his toes. Yes he had all ten of them so he didn’t have mites. Then I listened to him breathe to make sure I didn’t hear a click. Last of all I peered at his beak, checking to see the holes weren’t clogged up. I wiggled the latch and opened the cage door.

Billy Boy lifted up his wings. And then he closed them tight against his little blue body. He lifted one foot in the air, paused, and put it down on his perch. Birds everywhere were singing. It seemed to me that all over Natal, birds trilled into the first light of day, encouraging the blue bird to break free and join them.

If I had poured all my childhood anxieties in to Billy Boy’s tiny carcass, he had a lot to carry. He was very heavy. I had given him a soul, but he didn’t seem to care. I had imagined all kinds of things for Billy Boy, breathed in to him all my secret wishes. I had given him another life to live, but he did not want to be free. He was supposed to be a bird, a flying machine, but he seemed to like his cage more than he liked his liberty. Everything I had imagined for Billy Boy was dead. I didn’t know what to do. Betrayed and desolate, I began to walk away from the bird who wanted to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Something happened. A flutter of wings. The silver cup falling from the mantel shelf. A small dot of blue. A circle of blue. The sweet pea smell coming from the garden. Billy Boy flew out of the window just as the ginger cat padded into the living room, its tail held high in the air.

I pretended everything was normal at breakfast when I sat at the table with my new family. I had been pretending that everything was ‘normal’ for quite a few years now and had become quite good at it. Edward Charles William crunched his toast and English marmalade while Godmother Dory poured tea from a teapot that was smaller than her bosoms. Today was the day Melissa sat her secretarial exams and she had styled her beehive three inches higher than usual for luck. She was reading her Pitman’s textbook while she sipped from a glass of cream soda, which she said would give her energy for the exam. Billy Boy was probably sleeping on a leaf high up in a tree in the morning sunshine.

He was free. Billy Boy was free.

It was only when I was buckling my school regulation shoes that I heard Godmother Dory screaming. I spent more time than usual on the third hole of the buckle, testing it a few times before deciding the second hole was probably a better fit and starting all over again. By the time I made my way towards Godmother Dory, her little hands were flung up in the air and she was calling BILLY BOY over and over again. There were things she wanted to know. How come the cage door was wide open? How can a budgie open its own cage? Melissa who was late for her exam ran to get her mother tissues while trying to put on her white cardigan.

‘Don’t shout at her.’

‘But my little budgie’s not going to survive. He’s probably dead.’

‘You gotta understand Ma,’ Melissa was looking for her pad with all the shorthand notes written on it.

‘What do I have to understand?’

‘She thinks the budgie is her Pa.’

‘How can Billy Boy be anything but a budgie?’

If that question was something human beings had been grappling with ever since they started painting animals with mineral pigments on the walls of caves, Melissa’s mother had not yet caught up. When Melissa saw me listening outside the living room door she lunged at my school tie and pulled me towards her made up face.

‘FUCK YOU. Why did you go and let Ma’s bird out?’

Before I could answer she ran off and I heard the engine of the spaceship revving up and the tyres squealing on the drive. Edward Charles William had obviously let Melissa fly the spaceship again because of her exam. After a while I walked into the garden. Joseph was coughing inside his shed. He ate his breakfast there every morning, a thick porridge called mealy meal which the maid called Caroline, who had another name, Nkosiphendule, prepared for him in a tin bowl. I still hadn’t managed to buckle my shoe. It was slipping off so I bent down to try again. It was so hard to thread the little silver thing through the hole. After a while, Joseph opened the door of his shed and told me to come in. My shoe was still half on and half off so I had to slide rather than walk. The shed smelt of mould and paraffin. Joseph slept on a mattress on the floor. Two green blankets lay neatly folded on a chair. His jacket hung on a hook in the corner.

‘Madam told me you’ve lost her budgie.’

Madam was Godmother Dory. Master was Edward Charles William. Sometimes Joseph called him Baas as well as Master. Master and Baas and Madam were the white race and they ate kippers and marmalade for breakfast like the King and Queen of Ingerland.

‘Look.’ Joseph pointed to a wooden crate that he had turned upside down to make a table. On the box was his tin bowl. Billy Boy was hopping up and down on the rim of the bowl, pecking at the porridge inside it.

‘I found him on the roof and gave him lodgings.’ Joseph started to laugh. ‘But he hasn’t laid a blue egg yet so we won’t be sharing a little meal. I’m going to put a lid on the bowl and you are going to take him back to Madam.’

When I brought Billy Boy back into the house, Madam was lying on the sofa reading a book called Love Is A Word You Whisper. The maid who pretended she was Caroline so Madam could say her name carried in a tray with a pot of tea and two strawberry jam biscuits arranged on a saucer. Madam’s pudgy fingers moved across the tray and grasped one of the biscuits. I heard her bite in to it and then crunch it with her porcelain teeth. At that moment Billy Boy chirped. Madam sat up and wailed. She had jam all over her little lips and I could see the biscuit crumbs on her tongue. After she had put Billy Boy back into the cage and slammed it shut she walked past me towards the telephone without saying a word. I could hear her asking in a loud royal voice to be put through to South African Airlines.

That afternoon, while I sat on a bench under the cloisters watching the nuns hit the hands of the girls who were being punished for various crimes, I knew that something in my life was about to change. Meanwhile, I observed the choreography of sin and punishment that was happening in front of me because whatever was going to change was going to take me somewhere else. The sinful girl was holding her palm facing upwards, towards heaven. Then the nun took a metre ruler and swiped it across her palm, two whacks, no, three whacks. Sister Joan was busy smelting the hand of an extra sinful girl called Laverne when I saw Godmother Dory waddling through the cloisters. Yesterday, Laverne had shown me a red mark on her neck where her boyfriend had left a love bite. Yes, he had actually bitten her out of love. Sister Joan was talking to my Godmother and she was beckoning to me. Now that she knew all about me letting Billy Boy out of his cage, she was going to purify my hand by beating it.

‘Come here.’

To my astonishment, instead of punishing me, Sister Joan bent down and buckled my shoe. She had been teaching me French, the most distinguished thing that had happened in my life so far. She had told me all about the visions of Jeanne d’Arc, and she had taught me the word for shoe. So now she asked me how to say shoe in French. When I said, ‘Une chaussure’, she stood up and placed her cool clean palm on my forehead.

‘Your Godmother says you’re homesick so she’s sending you back to your mother. This will be your last day at school.’

As my tears dripped on to Sister Joan’s holy veil, I thought about how she had shaved off her hair which she called her weeds of ignorance. She had told me to say my thoughts out loud but I had tried writing them down instead. Sometimes I showed her what I had written and she always made time to read everything. She said I should have told her I could read and write. Why hadn’t I told her? I said I didn’t know, and she said I shouldn’t be scared of something ‘transcendental’ like reading and writing. She was on to something because there was a part of me that was scared of the power of writing. Transcendental meant ‘beyond’, and if I could write ‘beyond’, whatever that meant, I could escape to somewhere better than where I was now. I was bitten with love for Sister Joan. She had told me that faith was not a rock. God was there one day and gone the next. If that was true, I felt truly sorry for her on the days that she lost God. I searched for the French words for goodbye and when I found them, ‘Au revoir Sœur Jeanne,’ I realised she had the same name as Joan of Arc. For some reason this made me cry even more. My bemused Godmother who hadn’t a clue what was going on snapped open her handbag and took out a scrap of paper.

‘Melissa said to give you this.’

It was a note scribbled in Pitman’s code.

‘Goodbye my crackers little chum.’

6

Two days to go! Dad’s coming home!’

I was now nine years old and Sam five. Sam had last seen his father when he was one. At breakfast we ate toast sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar and practised out loud the sort of things we would say to our father when he walked through the front door.

‘Hello. Do you want me to show you the way to the bathroom?’

‘Hello! I’ve drawn you a rocket.’

‘Hello! My feet are size three now.’

Meanwhile Mom was out at the shops buying clothes for my father to wear when he came home. My chest went tight when she carefully laid the clothes out on the floor and summoned us to come and have a look. There on the kilim rug were a pair of men’s trousers, smart new shoes, socks, two shirts and three brightly coloured ties. Sam and I stroked the cotton of the shirts, pressed our thumbs in to the toes of the leather shoes, adjusted the position of the socks. Yes, these were the sort of things fathers wore. We talked at length about what kind of food we should give our father for his first lunch and Mom said we must try not to be too shy and just be ourselves. We nodded gravely and went off to practise being ourselves.

When Sam went to the park he collected a handful of stompies, cigarette butts that had been ground out on the grass. He saved them in his pockets until he got home and then put them in a little glass jar. Sam was convinced that all dads liked stompies. Maria put on her best dress, the dress she wore when she went home to her house where her real children lived. But before she put on her shoes, she sat down and instructed me to rub Vaseline into the dry skin on her heels.

‘Do you know what they found in the Zoo Lake?’

‘What?’

‘A human head. Put some Vaseline on this leg too.’

‘A child’s head?’

‘No. A man’s head.’

‘Is it Dad?’

‘No. Your father is on his way home.’

I knew my father would be arriving with Mom in a car from Pretoria Central Prison. But I was not sure what he looked like now. To be certain of recognizing him, I held in my lap the black and white photograph my mother had propped up by the telephone in the dark hallway. The photograph that for nearly five years had represented the father who sent his love to me in letters and messages. Kisses and hugs, XXXXX OOOOO written in biro on prison note paper. Sam and I climbed up the two stone gate posts outside their house and I held the photo in my lap, glancing at it every now and again just to make sure. The gateposts were six foot high and looked straight out over the road. Every time a car went past the house we waved. Our hands had been scrubbed clean with a brand new bar of Lux.

For some reason, I thought my father was going to return home in a white car. The same car he was taken away in. So every white car made my heart thump under the white daisies stitched on my dress. The panic of my father not turning up made everything very slow. Clouds moved across the sky slowly. People walked on the pavements slowly. Dogs barked slowly.

A small red car turned left at the golf course and swerved into their road. I stiffened my toes inside my patent shiny shoes and waited. The door opened and a man jumped out and ran towards us. He did not even wait for the car to stop. We knew who it was and I did not bother to look at the photo lying in my lap. It took us a while to get down from the very high gate posts. Dad was waiting for us but we couldn’t get down. Now we were all legs and arms and trying to slide down and the man who was our father grabbed our legs and then lifted us in to his arms. He was wearing the shirt we had admired when Mom laid them out in the living room.

Dad hugged us and we didn’t know what to say. And then he hugged us again and put us down on the pavement where moss grew in the cracks. We walked through the gate and into the kitchen. When Maria saw him she embraced him and I heard him say the word ‘Thandiwe’. Mom poured three glasses of wine, one for Dad, one for Maria and one for her. They raised their glasses and we all looked at Dad. He took a tiny sip, paused and put the glass down again.

‘I haven’t seen a glass for five years.’

My father was thin and his face was pale. He sat down at the table and sipped his wine again. And then he picked up a plate and ran his finger over it. ‘I have forgotten the feel of porcelain. I’ll have to learn how to handle a cup again and to manipulate a fork.’

Dad put down the white china plate he has been examining for the last five minutes and stood up.

‘Where is the garden?’ He cocked his head to one side and smiled at me. ‘I want to see the snowman.’

There was no snowman in the garden. Sam wrapped the ends of the new white linen tablecloth around his small wrist and looked down at the floor. Mom tried to remove a fly from the window with the back of an envelope.

‘Take your father into the garden.’ Maria waved her hands at me.

My father is standing in the garden. His face is pale grey like dirty snow. Only his eyes move. His arms hang stiffly by his sides. Dad is back, so very still and silent, standing in the garden. He looks like he has been hurt in some way. Very deep inside him.

‘Daddy, the cat died while you were away.’

He squeezes my hand with his cold fingers.

‘It’s lovely to be called Daddy again.’

Two months later we left South Africa for the United Kingdom. When the ship pulled away from Port Elizabeth docks in the Eastern Cape province, the passengers were given rolls of toilet paper to unravel from the height of the deck. The other end was held by friends and family standing on dry land waving goodbye. As the ship edged out to sea, Melissa who had come to see me off held the other end of my toilet roll. The ship’s hooter wailed into the blue sky. I could see her jumping and shouting but I couldn’t hear her. Her words got scrambled in the wind, drowned by the roaring of the tug boats as they pushed the ship out towards England. Melissa was the first person in my life who had encouraged me to speak up. With her blue painted-on eyes and blonde beehive that was nearly as tall as I was, she was spirited and brave and she was making the best of her lot. I couldn’t hear her but I knew her words were to do with saying things out loud, owning up to the things I wished for, being in the world and not defeated by it.

I would like to forget the image of the ship’s crane at Southampton docks when it lifted into the sky, the three wooden trunks which held all that my family owned. There is only one memory I want to preserve. It is Maria, who is also Zama, sipping condensed milk on the steps of the doep at night. The African nights were warm. The stars were bright. I loved Maria but I’m not sure she loved me back. Politics and poverty had separated her from her own children and she was exhausted by the white children in her care, by everyone and everything in her care. At the end of the day, away from the people who stole her life’s energy and made her tired, she had found a place to rest, momentarily, from myths about her character and her purpose in life.

I don’t want to know about my other memories of South Africa. When I arrived in the UK, what I wanted were new memories.