Frankie and Stankie (32 page)

Once through the doorway, all they can see is more tent, though this time it's been subdivided into lots of little canvas cubicles. Each
cubicle has got a row of three stacking chairs, along with one on its own for the saving monitor. All the saving monitors are wearing green tabards with enamelled badges that say ‘Jesus Saves'. Maud and Dinah's monitor is a young woman, probably no older than seventeen. And she's so sincere in her desire to see them saved that the girls right away start to feel like heels. They sit side-by-side on the stacking chairs and stare fixedly at the tent's grassy floor, not daring to glance at each other. Yet soon the inevitable vibrations, the portents of giggles about to burst forth, are beginning to give them away.

‘You just came in for a laugh,' says the monitor. ‘Didn't you?'

They nod in silent shame.

‘Well, that's not very nice, is it?' she says.

They shake their heads, no, but the giggles keep rising to the surface.

‘It's not very clever either,' she says. ‘I think you'd better go, don't you?'

They nod. They still can't stop giggling. Then they retreat, ignominiously, back up the aisle in haste, pushing through the crush of people still lining up to be saved. They make their way out into the sunlight.

‘Phew,' Dinah says. ‘I feel terrible.'

‘Me too,' says Maud. ‘But I wish we could have got the badges. What shall we do now?'

Just occasionally, Maud has money. Lots of money. Like once every six months. Maud calls this money her divvy.

‘My divvy's come,' she'll say. ‘Let's go and spend it.'

This is when she buys new riding boots and when they both buy clothes in Truworth's with her money. Maud buys them each a thing called a waist cincher which is a stiff elastic item like a twelve-inch deep belt that goes around your waist, underneath your clothes. It has whalebone struts at four-inch intervals and it looks like the middle bit of a merry widow, with no boob sections and no suspenders. It makes their twenty-inch waists go one and a half inches narrower, which they find very satisfactory.

Then they go and get their hair expensively dyed. Maud has found a tall Swedish hairdresser who proceeds along radical lines with startling effect. She starts by bleaching all the colour out of the
hair so that their tresses look as white as those of Miss Legge. They sit side-by-side staring into the mirrors, two sixteen-year-olds, each with a white-string floor mop fixed to her head. After that, the Swede paints on a kind of mink blond paste, section by section, laboriously wrapping each strand in a little square of tin foil until their heads are nothing but overlapping silver scales. When they emerge from the foil they look fabulous. Their hair is an identical, exquisite mix of silver and palest sand. All their natural yellow is gone. They are the glamour twins of GHS. The only annoyance is the regulation black Alice band, which must be worn at all times ‘to keep the hair off the brow'. But Dinah and Maud don't want their hair to be kept off the brow. They want it tousled and hanging in their eyes, just as the Swede has left it.

Maud's divvy is lots of fun, though for a long time Dinah has no idea what it is or where it comes from. Then one day – but only after ages – Maud takes her home. It's a big surprise for Dinah, because Maud's family is working class. Maud's is the only white working-class family that Dinah's ever met.

Maud's mother is shipped out from Aberdeen to the coal mining regions of northern Natal, as a mail-order bride for a Scottish migrant coal miner. She's seventeen and he's twice her age. For her family this makes one less mouth to feed at a time when the workhouse is looming, because Maud's maternal grandfather – another long-distance Scottish migrant worker – has recently stopped writing letters home and his postal orders have dried up. The biggest coal towns in Natal are called Newcastle and Dundee, but Maud's mother and her stranger husband live in a one-horse town called Danhauser where their daughter Lilian is born. But then, five years on, something happens. It happens because Maud's mother and a woman friend are treating themselves to a winter holiday in Durban and they decide to go to the races.

The Durban July Handicap is the social occasion of the year. It's terrifically dressy and some of the more extrovert women wear hats with whole nests of blackbirds on the crown, or entire banana plantations, in order to get their pictures on the social pages of the South African
Sunday Times
. Maud's mother doesn't have the wherewithal to dress up and she isn't wearing a hat, but all the same she catches the eye of a racehorse owner who leaps social boundaries to become her long-term lover and he longs to be her husband. The lover is a man of means. He belongs to one of the landed families of the Natal sugar plantation elite, a group who are locally known as the Sugar Barons. And then, when podgy little dark-haired Lilian is eleven, the lover gets Maud's mother pregnant.

The little blonde fairy girl is duly registered as the coal miner's daughter but her arrival has made the lover all the more determined
to become Maud's mother's husband. The problem is that the coal miner's lungs are already showing signs of trouble and Maud's mother will not desert him, because two wrongs don't make a right. Plus there's her crosspatch displaced daughter to consider, who's on the edge of adolescence: Daddy's girl Lilian, whose loathing for the new baby never abates. The Sugar Baron nonetheless pursues a policy of biding his time. He begins by making over a sum of money for his daughter which Maud's mother invests, deciding to spend the bulk of it on sending the child, as soon as it's possible, as a boarder to the Maris Stella Convent School in Durban. She's full of secret pride at how bright the little girl is proving, though she dares not let her pleasure show in front of the coal miner or her elder daughter – given that the little brainbox is already no big favourite with either of the above.

At the convent five-year-old Maud soon learns to cry without making a single sound while the nuns comb the knots out of her long blonde hair and smack her on the head with the back of a hairbrush. Most of the nuns are Irish immigrant and killjoy. They have a grim northern mindset which is distinctly pre-Vatican II. And being acquainted with the circumstances of the little fairy girl's origins, they are more than ever anxious not to be sparing with the rod. Meanwhile, Maud, who is missing her mum like mad, is certain that she must keep on striving to do her very best and then she'll earn a reconciliation and be allowed to go back home. So the little fairy girl comes top in all her subjects and waits in hope for her mum to come and reclaim her. She isn't remotely ready to understand that the more she shines at everything the more her big sister will resent her, or that it's her own very presence in the house that is stoking all the anger and sense of grievance.

By the time Maud has been at the convent for five years, the coal miner's lungs are sufficiently wrecked for him to be invalided out of the mine service on a small occupational pension – an ill wind which doesn't blow everyone ill, since it provides the Sugar Baron with a chance to gain greater access. He buys Maud's mother and her family a pretty little town house in Durban on the landward side of South Ridge, so the little fairy girl can now become a day girl at the convent and have riding lessons and a pedigree cocker spaniel puppy with wavy ginger ears. He visits the little house almost every day, especially now that poor old grumpy Lilian has
seized the first opportunity to escape into a teenage marriage and establish a place of her own.

So these are good times for Maud and her mother, but the idyll doesn't last, because, within two years of the purchase of the house, Lilian's marriage has fallen apart and she's back under her mother's roof feeling ever more short-changed. And she's filling up all available space, given that she's already managed to produce two children. So now there's little Darren and Debbie. The pretty little house is now dominated by the forceful if lowering presence of Lilian – an overweight, embittered young battleaxe who hates her pampered sister and longs to murder the dog. She hates Maud's brains and her private-school accent and all the rosettes in Maud's bedroom pertaining to successes at sundry gymkhanas. She hates the accident of Maud's Botticelli face with the wide blue eyes and blonde braids.

So this is the toxic atmosphere into which Dinah walks one Friday afternoon when she finally goes home after school with her best bosom friend. Lilian is playing the role of Mrs Joe Gargery, bullying and biffing to left and right. She's abusing the cocker spaniel in a querulous parrot voice and staring daggers at her half-sister's friend.

‘And look what the cat dragged in,' she says. ‘Who's
she
?' – but nobody dares to risk a reply.

The poor old coal miner, with his toast-rack chest and ravelled lungs, is sitting in the corner, his knees under a green plaid rug. He's flicking through back numbers of the
Daily Mirror
– the first English tabloid newspapers Dinah's ever seen.

Maud's slip of a mouse-quiet mother doesn't look like a person to make a conquest at the races. She looks like everybody's favourite dinner lady; the one who'll always sneak you an extra helping of treacle tart and never make you finish up your greens. She makes tea and sandwiches for everyone, puffing end-to-end on ciggies and talking in a voice that's almost a whisper. Her job is to practise appeasement within her household's warring walls. Her mouth is fixed into a sweet, conciliatory smile that gives her face a pleasant, somewhat pussy-cat appearance.

With Lilian's return to the little house, the Sugar Baron has finally, and very decisively, cut his losses. He's backed off and quickly made a marriage to somebody else. Then, almost at once,
he's produced two daughters, legitimate daughters, Maud's younger half-sisters, but there's a stipulation that the girls should never meet. All contact with the Sugar Baron must cease. All patronage is understood to be at an end. It's as if he never was. Maud's the coal miner's daughter and that's that. From the time she enters Dinah's class at GHS, Maud is never in her father's company again, though she can't help coming upon his picture from time to time, because he's often in the newspapers initiating worthy civic projects. Nor can she stop herself from speculating about the two half-sisters who – kitted out in their bottle-green uniforms and regulation Quality Street straw bonnets – will be pupils by now at Durban's prestigious girls' private school. The College on Marriott Road. All that's left is Maud's half-yearly divvy which her mother allows her to spend.

None of the girls at GHS knows anything about Maud's family life. Only Dinah. Because Maud confides in her that same afternoon as they escape the house and walk down the hill till they reach the corner by the Marist Brothers' Roman Catholic Boys' School.

‘He's not my real father,' she says. ‘And I don't mind. I'm glad.'

She's been embarrassed by the coal miner's racism in front of Dinah, whose family's wider, more sophisticated take on ethnic matters has had an instant conversion effect upon Maud's own racial preconceptions. She resorts there and then to a mode of reference for the coal miner which sees her through in their conversations from then on. ‘Me mam's ‘usband,' she says.

‘Me mam's ‘usband was once had up in court,' Maud says. ‘He rammed a black man into a brick wall, because the black man was trying to have a pee.' The black man was permanently maimed, Maud says, but the coal miner got off with a smallish fine. ‘A man like
that
,' Maud says.

She's shredding grass blades between her fingers as she speaks, picking them one by one from the Marist Brothers' verge.

There aren't any public conveniences for blacks. Not in the white urban areas. Public toilets are always labelled ‘Europeans Only/
Slegs Blankes
'.

Two months after Dinah's visit and Maud, her mother and the coal miner have given up on the little house. They've ceded it to Lilian,
along with the cocker spaniel. They've moved into a tied flat on the top floor of a factory in Umbilo Road because the coal miner has got himself a little part-time job as the factory's night-time caretaker. Maud misses her dog and she hates her new address in the smoky industrial end of town. She embarks on a charade of always getting off the bus two stops early and walking up the hill first before doubling back. Dinah colludes with her in this, but Catherine Cleary, nose to the ground as always, has managed to root it out. And Catherine sees it as her duty to spread the fact as widely as possible.

‘It's a sin to be ashamed of your family,' she tells Dinah. ‘Maud needs to be taught a lesson.'

Dinah finds this position repellent as well as incomprehensible, because she takes it as normal by now for people to be ashamed of their families. Isn't that why everyone would rather die than have their mum or their dad turn up at school? Wrong hair; wrong shoes; wrong bag; wrong accent; wrong body language; wrong laugh. Wouldn't all the girls in her class rather starve all day than have their mum appear at the classroom door, eagerly waving their packed lunch?

And Dinah knows that she isn't unique in having discovered adolescence as a time when you can hardly bear being in the same room as your parents for more than five short seconds. For herself she has to look away these days, rather than watch the angle of her mother's hand as she lifts a cup of tea. She must block her ears rather than bear witness to her mother's every little sigh or sniff – a cruel but necessary revulsion if one is ever to sever from one's parents and learn to live on one's own – especially, that is, if one's mum has been as close as Dinah's has been to her.

‘It's for her own good,' Catherine is saying, who is these days wearing a small gold crucifix on a neck chain and alternating her routine smut with a range of pious convent homilies derived from her mentor, Sister Catherine. But her outing of Maud is a parting shot, a final arrow from the bow, because Catherine, who has screwed up on her Matric, has now left school and is about to head out for England and a nurse's training in Hove. As Mrs Cleary has put it, Catherine is to have a spell ‘at home'.