The New Girl (Downside) (11 page)

‘Is it like a new slang word? Like rad or lekker or whatever they say here?’

‘S’pose.’

‘Have you told your father about Encounters?’

‘Why should I? He won’t care. He’s always busy.’

Fair enough, Tara thinks. ‘Well, if you are going to go to school, you’d better hustle. I’ll pop these into the washing machine, it’ll be as if it never
happened.’

‘Tara?’ he says as she turns to exit his room.

‘Yeah?’

‘Thanks.’

‘You’re welcome.’ In all the time she’s known him, she’s longed for him to show her the tiniest sign of gratitude or respect, but now that he has, why does she feel
so uneasy?

The morning’s class streams into the library, and Tara’s surprised – and oddly pleased – to see Jane trailing in after the others. Her uniform looks
even grubbier today; her hair greasier. Dark circles ring her eyes as if she hasn’t slept. Tara tries to catch her attention, but Jane heads straight over to the starter-reader shelf and
drops to her knees.

‘Who
is
that?’ Malika says, nodding in Jane’s direction and wrinkling her nose.

Tara feels a stab of irritation. It’s not Jane’s fault that her uniform is tatty. If she is one of the outreach kids, her parents probably can’t afford to wash it every day.
‘She’s new. She was here yesterday. Didn’t you see her?’

‘God. That hair. What was her mother thinking? I’d never let Sienna and Ruby out looking like that.’

‘Maybe she doesn’t
have
a mother, Malika.’

Her harsh tone goes right over Malika’s head. ‘Maybe. You okay to deal with her?’

‘Sure.’

Tara makes her way over to where Jane’s rummaging through the shelves. ‘Hey, Jane. You want to read with me today?’

Jane looks up at her and grins. She’s getting better at it; hillbilly teeth aside, it looks less like a snarl.

‘Which book would you like to start with, sweetie?’ Tara remembers how Jane was holding that book upside down. What if she can’t read? Is that likely? At age ten?

Jane immediately hands Tara one of Duvenhage’s vile self-published picture books. The front cover shows a group of smugly grinning children, their arms around each other. Off to one side,
a small boy with angry slashes for eyes appears to be aiming a vicious glare in their direction. It’s an appalling cover – the children’s heads are way too large for their bodies;
they look like pumpkin heads – and the garbled title,
There’s No Team In Individual
, looks like it’s written in blood.

‘You sure you want this one, sweetie?’

‘Yes, miss,’ Jane says.

Tara scans the first page. It’s all in rhyme, and terrible rhyme at that.

‘Will you read it to me, miss?’

Tara smiles. ‘You’re supposed to read it to
me
, sweetie.’

Jane stares at her expressionlessly.

If Jane can’t read, the last thing Tara wants to do is embarrass her in front of the other kids. ‘How about I start and you can join in?’

Jane nods solemnly.

Jesus, Tara thinks. What the hell was Duvenhage or Clara thinking ordering a dodgy book like this for the library?

‘What are chums, miss?’

‘It’s an old-fashioned word. It means friends, buddies, you know.’

‘Oh.’

She’s about to suggest to Jane that she fetch another book, when the fire siren whoops.

Clara’s office door slams open and she scurries towards Tara. ‘It’s probably just a drill,’ she says, ‘but I should really check what’s going on. Can you
escort the library children outside, Mrs Marais?’ She peers down at Jane, frowns slightly.

‘No problem.’

‘Good,’ Clara says. With a last confused glance at Jane, she heads out into the corridor.

Tara claps her hands. ‘Okay, everyone. Line up by the door.’

The children silently pack their books away and line up. She does a swift head count, then instructs them to hold hands and keep together. Jane is standing apart from the others, that awful book
still clutched tightly in her arms.

Tara beckons her over. ‘Hey, Jane. Why don’t you hold Skye’s hand?’

Jane drops the book onto the floor and limps forward, but Skye steps back, shoves his arms behind his back. ‘I don’t want to, miss,’ he whines.

‘That’s not very nice, is it?’

‘Please don’t make me,’ he whispers, and Tara sees the wobble of tears in his eyes. She understands why he isn’t keen, of course. Jane isn’t exactly the most
approachable of children, but this is an extreme reaction, surely? There’s always one outsider kid in every class – he or she usually ends up being a bully-magnet – but she gets
the impression that Skye’s reluctance runs deeper than being caught being nice to the weird kid.

Malika is already leading the line through the door.

Tara sighs. ‘Go on, then, Skye. But you are being very rude.’

‘Thank you, miss,’ he whispers, fleeing after the others.

‘Well, it looks like you’ve got me,’ Tara says over-brightly to Jane. She takes the child’s hand in hers. ‘Don’t worry about what Skye said.’

‘Oh, I’m not worried, miss,’ Jane says. ‘He’s just a brown.’

Tara blinks. A brown? Is that some sort of racist statement? Unlikely, as Skye is as white as she is. ‘You shouldn’t use words like that, Jane.’

‘Like what, miss?’

‘Brown. If you... um... use it in the wrong way, people might think you’re being racist.’

‘What’s racist?’

‘Where people discriminate – I mean judge or treat badly – other people because of the colour of their skin.’

Jane looks up at her through those grey, unreadable eyes. ‘And not because they’re depreciating? Mother says that the problem with browns is that they depreciate too
quickly.’

‘Depreciate? What do you mean by that, Jane?’ The child shrugs. What kind of parents has this child got? It sounds like she’s being fed a steady diet of ignorance and casual
racism. ‘Are you finding it okay in the school, Jane? The other children... Has anyone been mean to you or anything like that?’

‘Mean, miss?’

‘Cruel. You know...’ God, she thinks, she’s really making a pig’s ear of this. She must be getting rusty. ‘Teasing? Bullying? You can always speak to me about
anything that’s worrying you, you know that, right?’

‘Are you my chum, miss? Like in the book?’

‘Yes. I suppose I am.’

‘Do you have a baby in your tum?’

‘What? What made you ask that?’

‘One of the halfpints told me. Is it factual, miss? He said they come out of here.’ Jane pulls up her shirt, and points to her belly button. Tara gasps. The girl’s stomach is
sliced with scar-tissue.

Jesus, Tara thinks. A car accident? ‘What happened to you, Jane?’

‘Happened, miss?’

‘Your stomach. The scars.’ Come to think of it, aren’t they more like burn scars? Tara’s not really sure. And there’s that limp. Tara can’t see any sign of a
leg-brace, but perhaps that’s also an injury from some sort of accident.

‘Oh. Mother says I shouldn’t talk about my carcass. She says that browns won’t embrace that. Do you like television, miss?’

Tara’s struggling to follow Jane’s train of thought. ‘Yes. I suppose I do. Don’t get to see much of it, though.’

‘I love television, miss. You sound like television.’ She drops her voice, puts on an American accent. ‘Motherfucka, I’m a gonna shoot a cap in ya ass.’ And then
she laughs – it’s a shrill sound, but it makes Tara smile all the same.

‘That’s another word you shouldn’t really use, Jane.’

‘Which word, miss?’

‘That cuss word.’

‘Cuss?’

‘That... um... word beginning with “m”.’ She isn’t getting anywhere. ‘Come on. We’d better get going.’

By the time she and Jane make it outside into the playground, the other children are already lined up in perfect, silent rows, Duvenhage pacing up and down in front of them like a sergeant
major. She ushers Jane over to Ms du Preez’s line at the far side of the yard.

Tara feels the weight of eyes on her back. She turns, sees the swarthy maintenance man next to the grounds staff and cleaners a few metres away, looking in their direction. She lifts her hand in
acknowledgment, but he doesn’t respond. She’s about to dismiss this as more of that rude behaviour she encountered outside Sybil Fontein’s office, when it hits her that it’s
not
her
he’s staring at, after all, it’s Jane. While Clara briskly does the head count, an exercise that takes several minutes, he doesn’t once lift his eyes from her; he
doesn’t seem to notice Tara’s increasingly pointed glare. His intense expression is making her feel uneasy. It’s almost... hungry.

She’s relieved when the children are dismissed and Jane follows her classmates safely back into the school. Tara thinks about confronting the maintenance man, asking him what the hell he
thought he was doing staring at a child like that, but he’s already making his way to the groundskeepers’ shed and she’s not in the mood to make a scene. Besides, it’s
almost break time, and Baby Tommy is waiting.

She isn’t late to collect Martin this afternoon from Encounters, but it’s a close-run thing. It had been a real effort to drag herself away from Baby Tommy.
She’s finding the work so... fulfilling somehow. And it’s not just the money. The feeling of bringing him to life is far more intense than when she Reborned her first baby, Baby Pooki;
even stronger than when she created Baby Paul.

She waves at Malika, who’s lounging against her black BMW convertible, waiting for her older daughter, Sienna, to slouch her way to the car. Tara isn’t a fan of Sienna, a
twelve-year-old mini-Malika with highlighted hair and painted acrylic nails. Tara remembers meeting her at Martin’s birthday party last year. She seemed older than her years, spent most of
the party huddled in a corner with a couple of mini-skirted pre-teens, and Tara had overheard them making bitchy comments about their classmates. She has a vague recollection that Sienna and her
sidekicks were accused of picking on one of the outreach kids – something about creating a Facebook hate group.

Martin picks up his bag and slinks into the car.

‘How are you feeling, Martin?’

‘Fine, thanks,’ he says, his polite tone surprising her.

But he doesn’t look fine, Tara thinks. He looks exhausted, his face muscles slack, his shoulders drooping. ‘How was Encounters?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘The meeting?’

‘Fine, thanks.’

‘Have fun?’

‘Yes.’

She follows Malika’s car up the driveway, is about to accelerate into the main road, when she spots a small, familiar figure standing among a cluster of commuters waiting for their taxi
home. She’d recognise Jane’s odd-coloured hair anywhere. What is she doing here? She should have been home ages ago. Has she also been to Encounters?

‘You know that kid, Martin?’

‘Huh?’

Tara gestures in Jane’s direction. ‘That girl. She in your Encounters group?’

‘No.’

She makes a decision, shoots out into the traffic, switches on her hazard lights, brakes sharply and pulls over next to her.

‘What are you doing here, Jane?’ she calls out of the window, ignoring the furious blare of horns from the cars forced to stream around her.

‘I’m waiting, miss.’

‘You shouldn’t be out on the road, sweetie. It’s dangerous.’ It’s worse than dangerous, Tara thinks, remembering the predatory way that maintenance man stared at
her. ‘How do you normally get home?’ She can’t walk, surely. That would be asking for trouble.

‘Danish.’

‘
Danish?
’

‘Danish takes me home.’

‘Who’s that? Your brother?’

‘No.’

Maybe it’s her mother’s deadbeat boyfriend. Tara pictures a tattooed thug, breath stinking of booze, screeching up to the school gates in a muscle car with blacked-out windows. Her
imagination is really running away with itself. ‘Isn’t he coming to fetch you today?’

‘No. I told him not to.’

‘Why not?’

‘I wanted to exit with you. You’re my chum, miss.’

‘Oh, sweetheart,’ Tara says. Is the poor kid so lonely that she’s waited all this time on the off chance that she’ll turn up? Thinking about it, how
did
Jane
know Tara would be back to fetch Martin? And if she didn’t go to Encounters, what has she been doing in the hours since school let out? ‘It’s not safe for you to be out here by
yourself.’

There’s another flurry of beeping horns, followed by, ‘
Move, bitch!
’ She’d better get going.

‘Get in, Jane. I’ll give you a lift.’

Tara waits for Martin to protest, is surprised when all she hears is a muttered ‘Aw what?’

The girl smiles and jumps into the front seat. Martin always sits in the back as if Tara’s his taxi driver; it’s pleasant to have a passenger next to her for once.

‘Put your seat belt on, sweetie.’

‘Belt?’

Hasn’t the poor kid ever been in a car before? Maybe she only travels by minibus taxis – coffins on wheels, as Stephen calls them. Come to think of it, maybe those horrendous scars
are the result of a car accident after all. Tara leans over her, pulls the belt across the child’s skinny body.

‘Can I have a hug?’ Jane asks, in the same gruff American accent she used before.

Before Tara can answer, Jane throws her arms around her neck and Tara finds herself hugging her back. Jane’s frame is fragile, feels almost like it could snap under her embrace. She smells
of dried leaves and strawberry essence.

Tara feels her chest tighten. Shame, poor kid must be starved for affection. She gently disentangles the girl’s arms from around her neck, indicates and pulls the car up onto the pavement
so that she isn’t blocking the traffic.

‘Martin, say hello to Jane.’