Frankie and Stankie (8 page)

‘You'd better keep him,' they say.

So they hug him goodbye and hurry inside.

The girls are celebrating. Punch is theirs. He loves them best in all the world. He's proved it. He's chosen them. He has singled them out from the multitude. For years Punch is the girls' best friend. They take him everywhere, though he's a demon for dog fights and can't leave anything in canine form alone. He aborts every picnic outing by needing stitches as a result of canine spats along the way – incidents always initiated by himself. And at the vet he lets it be known that he doesn't approve of residential care, by frequently escaping from the surgery to return home trailing bloodied bandages. Lisa and Dinah's mum always tries to stop the girls from taking Punch for walks, but they whine and plead so much that she relents.

‘Don't let go of his lead,' she says, but, faced with Punch's invariable assaults on other dogs twice his size, this is what they always do. They drop the lead and run screaming home in panic.

‘Ma-aa! Punch is
fighting
!'

Punch has no idea of his own limitations and one day he attacks a bull mastiff. The dog tries at first to retain his dignity by ignoring the little upstart, but, finally, when Punch's taunts, growls, nips and exhortations become too irritating, the bull mastiff simply leans down and takes Punch's left ear in his great jaws. And there Punch has to stay, with his head twisted sideways, trying all the while to balance on his stumpy little hind legs. He is whimpering pathetically, but the mastiff's jaws have locked and he can't or won't let go. Passers-by all have helpful suggestions.

‘Twist his tail,' says one.

‘Light a match under his nose,' says another.

Finally, a helpful householder comes out with a zinc bucket full of cold water, which he throws over the head of the bull mastiff. It works. The dog is so surprised that his jaws unlock and he lets go.

Punch is a sociable and greedy little dog, so the Butcher Estate suits him well. He joins in all the children's games and, in the evening, when a range of supper-time smells issues from all the stable-type kitchen doors that open on to the green, he lifts his nose in the air and makes his choice about which family to visit. Liver is a big favourite with Punch and, since this is a carnivorous era – an era of brisket and offal and innards; of tripe and trotters and stuffed
hearts; an era before Anglo-Saxons have thought to fill red peppers with couscous, or to throw white wine over arborio rice – Punch is often in luck. Dinah even forgives him when a budgie goes missing and Punch is to be observed with blue feathers around his mouth. She writes a poem about the episode, with a mournful repeating refrain:

Sing woe for Joey

Eaten by a dog.

Dinah can't bring herself to name the dog in question.

At school, Sally is Dinah's best friend. This is because Sally says so. Sally is much bigger than Dinah and her dad is the butcher at the Overport shops. She has short hair because her mum won't let her grow it. Sally says that, because Dinah is her best friend, she can't play with anybody else. Class One spends most of its playtime rustling up numbers for games that never happen because the bell goes before they've had a chance to begin, but it's the preparation for the games that always looks the most fun. It begins with two girls linking arms and skipping through the playground.

‘Who wants to play
Nau-augh-ty Babies?
' they chant.

Anyone wanting to play joins the line and the skipping chant continues. The line gets longer and longer, and the chorus gets louder and louder. Often the line gets so long that an intermediate game develops which involves sweeping into all the other smaller games and swallowing them up. Sometimes the chorus line stops in front of Dinah and someone will ask her directly to come and play, but Sally always puts out a hand across Dinah's chest.

‘She's not playing with YOU,' she says, ‘because she's MY friend.'

Dinah looks longingly at the chorus line because the skipping and the chanting look so jolly. And being Sally's friend means letting Sally undo her plaits every day and then do them up again. Dinah knows that Sally's efforts make her look silly because she always gets too much hair in one plait and not enough in the other. Plus she makes a zigzag parting all down the back. Sometimes one plait is a lot higher than the other. One will sprout from above her right ear while the other will be coming from the left side of her
nape. And Sally tweaks while she's about it. Dinah tries to protest but Sally is always too forceful for her.

‘I don't want you to do them,' Dinah whinges, ‘because last time you did them all funny.'

‘That's because I was small,' Sally says. ‘I'm bigger now, so I know how to do them prop'ly.'

‘You did them yesterday,' Dinah says, but Sally is already pulling out the regulation grass-green ribbons that match Dinah's regulation grass-green pinafore dress.

At lunch-break Sally does swapping.

‘Swap your sandwiches for mine,' she says.

Sally guzzles all Dinah's blue cheese and celery on nobbly health bread and all her roast beef and piccalilli, even though piccalilli is one of the few things Dinah likes to eat, and she likes the bits of cauliflower best of all. Then Dinah goes home with her lunch-box full of Sally's sweating plum-jam sandwiches. The jam is always oozing through the bread in the humid heat, dyeing it purple. The sight of Sally's sandwiches drives Dinah's dad to distraction, because he thinks the brand-new health bread is such a delicious innovation and he buys it all the time. But it's not really meant for him. The health bread has recently been devised as a way of injecting some nutrients into the terrible carbohydrate diet of the black urban poor. But the black urban poor are refusing to buy it – they, who were once such successful pastoralists with a varied agriculture. The poor are now committed to a debased industrial diet of maize meal, white bread and Coke. That's along with the occasional lump of gristly flyblown meat. ‘Boys' Meat Two Shillings. Dogs' Meat Two and Sixpence.' Dinah wishes that she could dump Sally's sandwiches in the litter bin. But, after school, Sally always walks her home. Then Dinah walks Sally home. Then Sally walks Dinah home and then it's time for supper.

Dinah can't remember ever actually entering Sally's house, but she knows Sally has a much older sister, because Sally tells horrid stories about her sister's monthly periods. She says it makes her sister go smelly and that at dinner time her dad will sniff the air and then he'll say, ‘What's that nasty smell? It smells like bad meat in here.' Sally has a wild tale about how once the doctor had to come and chop her sister out of her sanitary pad because she'd got stuck to it. Dinah hasn't much of a clue what Sally is talking about,
because her own mum is always so discreet about what she calls her visit –
‘Mein Besuch
' as she says – though daffy blue-baby Bev, who goes to the open-air school, has a live-in auntie who launders her re-usable sanitary towels and pegs them up on the washing line complete with blood-brown stains. Dinah has always vaguely imagined that the stains are Bev's auntie's poo.

Bev's dad has a hobby which is to keep on building more and more stone walls in the garden and her big brother Barney's hobby is to smash milk bottles in the road and to knock out streetlights with stones. Bev's family has a dog that's fixed to a chain which runs along an iron bar that's riveted to one of the stone terraces, so that the dog spends all day running the length of the bar and barking itself into a frenzy. The chain makes Dinah feel crawly inside, but it's not as bad as the house she has to pass on her way home from school where there's a monkey in a collar fixed to a tree stump by a three-foot chain. All the monkey can do is jump from the ground on to the tree stump and back again. It's in the garden of one of those blue-collar white households where to border your flowerbeds with arched sections of rubber motor-car tyre counts as a style statement and to flick a bull-whip in the yard counts as a hobby. A bull-whip is called a sjambok and you can buy them from the vendors on the beachfront.

At the end of Dinah's first school year, Miss McNeil has a Christmas party for her class, and she gives them each a balloon out of a big multicoloured cellophane bag. Every balloon blows up to about ten inches in diameter and comes red, green, yellow, blue or orange – that's except for Dinah's. Her balloon is the only silver one in the bag, and it blows up to double the size. It doesn't occur to Dinah that this blessing may have been random. She knows that it's because Miss McNeil loves her best. She treasures the balloon. She becomes anthropomorphic about it. While some of the girls play wild games with their balloons and have popped them before the end of the afternoon, Dinah takes hers home and ties it to her bedpost and keeps it for months and months. Gradually it gets to look like a shrivelled grey kidney on a string. Then it loses its remaining air altogether. Dinah stashes the damp grey rag in a drawer with her knickers and vests. She loves Miss McNeil and she knows that Miss McNeil loves her. The end of Miss McNeil is the beginning of hell.

Mrs Vaughan-Jones takes Class Two. You have to watch out every second, because she's like one of those malicious firecrackers that keeps on jumping about all over the place. You never know where she's going to land or when the bang is going to come. Mrs Vaughan-Jones is like a drunkard because she's both belligerent and unpredictable. Her teacher's table is on a little platform and she stands on the platform making speeches in her own praise.

‘I may be strict but I'm kind,' she says.

This is her favourite utterance and she always says it just before she moves off down the aisles to start hitting out to left and right with her metal-edged ruler. She goes raging up and down the aisles, cutting and slashing with the metal edge. But there's a teacher's pet in the class who never gets hit with the ruler. Then another thing she likes to do is make jeering remarks about some of the girls she's especially taken against, because that way she gets the rest of the class to copy her and pick on them as well.

Mrs Vaughan-Jones frequently hints at an out-of-hours connection with the teacher's pet's family.

‘And how's Auntie May?' she'll say. ‘Please give her my love, when you next see her, won't you, dear?' Or she'll say,
‘Do
thank your mother for her hospitality, dear,' just as if she and the teacher's pet's mother are always meeting up over the weekends.

The teacher's pet has come up from Miss MacLean's Class One and Dinah tries to feel sorry for her because, like Lisa, she's had a year of Miss MacLean which is now being followed by a year of Mrs Vaughan-Jones. Yet it's hard to feel sorry for the teacher's pet, because she looks as if she's smirking all the time. Or it may be just
that her face doesn't help because it's so much like a pudding. She always looks smug when she gets chosen to go outside and clap the chalk out of the blackboard dusters – which is all the time. Or when she's allowed to take messages round the school to the other teachers. And, even when everyone else in the class has got their hand up to answer a question, Mrs Vaughan-Jones always chooses her.

‘Yes, dear.
You
, dear,' she says to the teacher's pet.

Then she says it's because the teacher's pet is sitting up the straightest. Or she'll say it's because the teacher's pet's hand isn't waving about in the air like everyone else's. Sometimes Mrs Vaughan-Jones will even change the answer to a question so that the teacher's pet can always be right.

Then suddenly one day the teacher's pet has left Dinah's school, halfway through the year. She's gone off to a new school that's been built nearer to where she lives and Mrs Vaughan-Jones is bereft. Now there's no one to be teacher's pet until Yolande Berry joins the class from Manchester. For months Mrs Vaughan-Jones tries to say Yolande is best at everything, just because she comes from England.

‘Stop. Look, everybody,' she'll say. ‘Look at Yolande.'

This always happens during eurhythmics and PT because Yolande's classwork is so bad that Mrs Vaughan-Jones doesn't want to draw attention to it.

The girls do eurhythmics in the hall. They wear short Greek tunics and pretend to be butterflies, or trees, or goblins when the music plays. Dinah's tunic is black, because it's Lisa's hand-on, but, from the beginning of that year, the school rule has changed about eurhythmies tunics, so they don't have to be black any more. If you get a new one it can be any shade of pastel so long as it's made of a material called Moygashel. Lisa's new tunic is lemon-yellow, but some girls have baby-pink, or hyacinth, or sky-blue. Yolande's tunic is crumpled jade with a beige, unwashed edge, because she keeps it in her gym-shoe bag and never takes it home.

Mrs Vaughan-Jones is always so cringey about her that it takes the rest of the class nearly four months to work out that Yolande is really just a slob. She always has greasy hair and her teeth have a greenish film. Plus she chews with her mouth open and she doesn't change her socks all that often. Enid Palmer sits next to her and one
day she says right out that Yolande smells. She tells a joke that she's got off her dad who was demobbed in England after the war.

‘Where's the best place to hide a ten-shilling note in England?' she says and the answer is, ‘Under a bar of soap.'

This is because Enid's dad says the English only have a bath once a week. The girls giggle about this, but no one really believes it, because it's so hot and humid in Durban that you've got to have a bath every day. Sometimes twice. And people are always saying to each other, ‘It's not the heat, it's the humidity.'

Mrs Vaughan-Jones calls Dinah the Cow's Tail instead of by her proper name so that very soon the whole class is doing it as well. She does this because Dinah is always last getting changed for PT. Sometimes, for variety, Mrs Vaughan-Jones calls Dinah the Snake because Dinah is so scared whenever she speaks to her that all Mrs Vaughan-Jones can hear are the voiceless sibilants at the ends of Dinah's words. Then she'll push her big scary moon face right into Dinah's face, so that Dinah can see her bluey wrinkled skin all speckled with liver spots. She'll go ‘Hisssss!' so that she spatters Dinah's face with flecks of foamy spittle. Dinah dares not wipe it off until Mrs Vaughan-Jones isn't looking, but somehow she's always looking. It's as if she has those compound eyes, like flies have, that can see in all directions at once. Her eyes are a darting, washed-out blue with a sort of egg-yolk film over the outer corners.