Frankie and Stankie (4 page)

‘Ma!' she yells. ‘Quick! Lisa's stuck!'

This becomes a very frequent refrain.

About the monkeys, there's a big divide on the Butcher Estate and it's usually immigrants versus native-born South Africans. The foreigners think the monkeys are exciting but the locals, including most of the students, think they're a pest and talk about them as if they were rats to be got rid of. Plans for monkey pogroms are hatched from time to time so that the Butcher Estate can be purged of them and stories are swapped about monkeys attacking women and children.

There are several folk remedies proposed for getting rid of the monkeys. One is to nail a dead monkey to a tree, which will drive all the others into exile. Another is to dip a live monkey in a bucket of whitewash and then let it go. The whitewashed monkey will then frighten off all the other monkeys, who will run away and set up house somewhere else. Dinah thinks the second idea is even more horrible than the first because she feels so sorry for the whitewashed monkey who will be left all alone after the others have gone, just
like the lame boy on crutches in ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin' who got left out of the magic hill.

Angel-face starts school just one year ahead of Tiny-mite. It's the year in which she turns seven. The school is called Berea Road Government School for Girls. She wears a grass-green sleeveless pinafore dress over a white blouse, and grass-green bouffant knickers to match, with a pocket on the knickers for her hanky. Every morning all the girls have to lay an ironed hanky on their desk before assembly and put their hands on the hanky to display clean fingernails. The dress and the knickers are made of regulation fabric called Tobralco, and Lisa has to wear white ankle socks with her black Knockabouts. She also has to have a leather satchel with two shoulder straps and a panama hat with a badge.

Angel-face isn't lucky with her reception-class teacher. On her first day she is herded into the assembly hall with seventy-five other new girls, all dressed in grass-green, and they are made to wait and wait. Eventually a pretty, smiley young teacher with auburn hair like Maureen O'Hara and a bias-cut skirt and cork-heeled sling-backs comes in and calls out lots of names. The lucky little girls line up one by one in front of her and are borne away to a classroom, while Lisa's half wait and wait some more. Lisa is caught short and piddles discreetly on to the lino, standing up. Some of it runs down her legs and into her socks, but most of it makes a puddle on the floor, from which she walks away. Eventually an old battleaxe comes in, with pale, watery eyes and with her hair done in sausages under one of those hair-nets made of human hair. She's called Miss MacLean. She gets the children to line up two by two, before tapping at Lisa's puddle with a billiard cue.

‘And who is responsible for this?' she says, but Lisa doesn't own up.

Miss MacLean is a witch, and she victimises Lisa, who writes with her left hand and smudges a lot. When they graduate to dipping pens with G nibs, bad girls fill the inkwells with blotting paper so that, when you dip your pen in the inkwell, you get a midnight-blue jellyfish on the end of it. The jellyfish are used for ink fights.

One day a girl called Tilly Boston lobs a jellyfish which splatters on the wall, but Miss MacLean blames Lisa and demands that she
ask Mother for a picture in a frame to cover the blots. This is timed with the arrival of a batch of lithographs sent to Dinah's mum by her one-time boyfriend at the Berlin art school where she herself was a student a long time ago. But the girls' mother is determined that Miss MacLean is not getting one of those. So she cuts out a photograph of Swiss mountains from
Life
magazine and puts it in a frame. Miss MacLean is pleased with the picture and hangs it over the jellyfish mark on the classroom wall.

The only other picture is of King George VI, because Durban is terribly royalist. Everybody knows that the English are best and Lisa learns to sing ‘Rose of England thou shalt fade not here' and ‘There'll always be an England down every country lane'. She also learns a hymn about not letting her sword sleep in her hand until she's built Jerusalem on England's green and pleasant land. Dinah is already longing to be English, although she hasn't even started school yet. Tilly Boston is huge and scary because she's much older than everyone else in the class. She's been kept down two years running because she can't pass the Class One end-of-year exams.

Lisa, having learnt to write her letters, writes lots of letters at home. Then she teaches Dinah, and every afternoon they busy themselves writing letters to their mother. The letters are always the same, because Lisa has misunderstood the purpose of letters. She says that, after you've written the address and the date at the top right-hand corner, in a neat slope, and after you've written the salutation, what you do is you copy out sentences from the Beacon Readers. When you've copied out as much as you want to, you write, ‘From your loving friend' and you put your name at the bottom. Then you draw pictures in the margins. After that, you make an envelope out of a sheet of paper which you stick with Gloy and you draw a stamp in the corner with a smiley king face on it.

One day, towards the end of her first year, Lisa has learnt to do invitations as well, so they write out lots and lots of invitations for people to come to tea the next afternoon, and post them through all the neighbours' doors. It takes them all day to make the invitations and the envelopes. They draw flowers on all the envelopes. Everybody comes to tea. There's Paul and Alice Carter from Manchester with their three boys, and the Notcutts and their sons, Simon and Martin, and John and Dornacilla Peck from Canada who have a
DIY built-in wonder-kitchen in their bungalow because John is a handyman and Dornacilla can make Baked Alaska. There's Dr Garjinsky from Poland and Dr Leberman from Germany, and Ken and Jean Hill, and Peter Bullen in his stripy blazer, and Professor Raymond Sands from Nottingham via Sweden, and Wendy Jones with her pregnant Welsh mum and her little brother Owen in baggy rompers. And there's Mrs Taylor the Estate housekeeper who says she's Swiss when she's really German, because that way people don't refuse to give her a job – and Mrs Taylor needs a job because nobody has ever clapped eyes on Mr Taylor.

The girls' mother has nothing in the house to feed anyone, except for half a packet of plain biscuits and a pound of Five Roses tea, but all the visitors sit on the grass and chat while the girls' mum tries to hide her embarrassment and sends Lisa flying out to the Overport grocer's shop. Lisa comes back with milk and Romany Creams and two big chocolate Swiss rolls.

At the Overport shops there are two grocers, but their mum always makes them go to the same one because she once saw a cockroach in the other one. On the way to the shops you nearly always pass Ralph who lives in one of the big houses along Ridge Road. Ralph used to go to the daffy school. Now he's got too big, but he's still a member of the local Scout Cubs, so that when they have processions Ralph marches along at the back in full regalia, swinging his long arms, even though he's two heads taller than all the other Cubs in the pack, who, year by year, move upward and onward to become proper Scouts.

By the time Dinah starts school she is weedier and more asthmatic than ever, and so is her mum. It's Dinah's infant asthma that first triggered her mother's asthma because she was trying so hard to carry her tiny baby's burden instead. Now she finds the humid Durban climate doesn't suit her. She's lost some of her bloom and she's got as thin as a stick. Her pretty blonde hair has gone a bit matt from ill-health and also from all the obligatory post-war perms. These are hit-and-miss affairs and sometimes Dinah's mum comes back from the hairdresser in tears, with the ends of her hair all burnt and yellow. Sometimes she tries to perm her own hair with a kit called a Toni, that has two bottles of stinky ammonia solution and a re-usable bag of little plastic shapes like cartoon
dog bones. Dinah is very frail and catches everything. Then, whatever it is, it always turns to bronchitis. Ill-health makes a bond between them. For her mother, Dinah is always Poor Little Dee, an endearment which is accompanied by anxious looks and the wringing of hands.

‘I am so worried about you,' she says.

Dinah learns to love all her mum's smothering concern and special treatment. She hates the feeling of waking up in the night not able to breathe, but she reaches out for the pills on her bedside table: one tiny Ephedrine tablet and half a Luminal. The Ephedrine dilates her bronchial tubes but leaves her heart banging violently against her ribs. The Luminal is a tranquilliser to stop the palpitations. What she likes is to be tucked up in bed with her mum on days when she can't go to school – that's once they've both stopped struggling for breath. Sometimes they have bronchitis at the same time and they spend days and days together in bed. It's the beds that are helping to give them asthma, of course, because the undiscovered housedust mite is rampant in Dinah's mum's ancient German pillows and feather beds. Microscopic creepy-crawlies are having parties in the Kaiser's bedlinen – because Dinah's maternal grandmother was in at the bidding when Kaiser Wilhelm's household items were auctioned off at the beginning of the Weimar Republic. For some reason that has never been explained to Dinah her mum's family – though they brought precious little out of Germany except for money that got impounded and jewellery that got stolen – still had the Kaiser's bedlinen when they sailed into Table Bay, the Kaiser's bedlinen and the two ornately carved Gieseke thrones.

Nobody knows about housedust mite when Dinah is a little girl. So asthmatics are thought to wheeze at night because that's dream time, Freudian time, unconscious time. If you're asthmatic, it's because you're daffy. It's all in your head. Dinah's dad doesn't get asthma. He's a physically superior specimen – that's except for his terrible three-day-long migraine headaches which leave him groaning feebly in a darkened room. Otherwise, he'll always take flights of stairs three treads at a time and he goes for vigorous daylong hikes in the Natal countryside at weekends, stamping in his sturdy boots to discourage the green mambas. But he still likes to contemplate the possibility of terminal illness. He does this with
spirit at mealtimes while tucking into great quantities of bread and cheese, though he always keeps his slim, boyish physique.

‘It's a shame to leave such a little scrap on the dish,' he'll say, about a quarter-pound of mortadella, or a wedge of Danish Blue. Then he'll proceed to his burial arrangements. ‘No fuss; no bother,' he says. ‘Just throw me on to the compost heap.'

‘
Ach nein
, Tächenherz,' Dinah's mother says, because she gets easily upset.
‘Ach nein. Nein, nein
.'

To correspond with her daffy, mouth-breathing image, Dinah develops a range of facial tics. She screws up her left eye and then her right. She does it alternately, twisting up her face in a grimace. This is partly because she's edgy, but mainly because she has one eye that's a lot more short-sighted than the other eye. She does close work with her left eye and distance with her right. Her dad doesn't believe in giving her glasses. He thinks they'll only make her eyes worse. Plus he can't help thinking that, compared with his own eyes, her eye deficiencies are chicken feed. Dinah's dad lived all his pre-school life in a beautiful cloud of unknowing, a swirl of light and dark tinged with pink and gold, until he went to school. Then, just as the teachers were about to write him off as subnormal, the school nurse came round and tested his eyes and gave him glasses.

Along with the housedust-mite feather beds are Dinah's mum's tasteful handwoven dust-impregnated bedspreads. She likes these because she is artistic. So is Dinah. She draws all the time and she draws quite well.

‘Dinah is artistic,' her mum says, ‘like me.'

Lisa is labelled practical. She is not artistic. She is tidier than Dinah and she likes to bake cakes. Plus she always keeps her eyes open. These respective characteristics are blown up into long-term personality traits. Lisa, says their mum, should be a reporter. She is always first with news. This is true. She knows that Mrs Spinks has had her baby. She knows the moment that Babs has broken her leg.

When they draw pictures together of houses and trees, Lisa's pictures are not as good as Dinah's. Their mum always likes Dinah's best. Lisa says that this is because Dinah is her favourite.

‘Let's swap pictures,' she says. They take in the finished products to show their mother. ‘Which one do you like best?' Lisa says.

She always makes their mum choose. Their mother points to Dinah's picture, which is currently in Lisa's hands. Lisa is furious. She throws down the picture and stamps off.

‘You're the pet,' she says. ‘She likes you best. That's because I'm adopted. I know I'm adopted.'

Sometimes Lisa, who is a good organiser, rallies the neighbourhood children into a gang. They stomp round and round the bungalow, banging on saucepans, while Dinah and her mum are having their lovey-dovey wheezy little rests together in bed.

‘Dinah's the pet of the fam-er-ly,' they chant, over and over.

Being the pet disadvantages you with the other children. Dinah is aware of this, but it's a role she clings to, a role she can't give up. And it's true that they are both artistic, even though her mum is limited to expressing her talents in exclusively domestic contexts, so that Dinah remembers a birthday party when her mum made every child a ballerina table decoration with a filmy layered skirt made out of pastel tissue-paper. She remembers a farmyard birthday cake with a pen of marzipan pigs and a little coop of marzipan chickens.

Dinah's father is as fed up with all the sickbed bonding as Lisa is. He bangs about and swears in Dutch, especially at mealtimes when Dinah's mum gives her the special Poor Little Dee treatment. He and Lisa are both first-borns. They are both strong, forceful and assertive personalities. They identify with each other. Dinah and her mum are shrinking violets. Dinah is still a non-eater, and her mum strains her freshly squeezed orange juice through a fine sieve because Dinah whinges if it has ‘bits' in it. Her dad thumps the table and makes everything jump.