The New Girl (Downside) (12 page)

‘Whatever,’ he says, but so drowsily, it sounds like he’s about to fall asleep.

‘Hello,’ Jane says, turning round in her seat to wave at him. ‘How are you today I’m fine thanks kay bye.’ She pauses, stares at Martin for several intense seconds.
‘You’re a forespecial.’

Martin shakes his head and curls up against the window.

‘Where do you live, sweetie?’ Tara asks.

Jane digs in her backpack, pulls out a laminated pink card and hands it to Tara. The childish script on it reads: ‘If lost please restore to 67a Excelsior Avenue, Bedfordview.’
Jesus, Tara thinks, it’s like something you’d tie around a dog’s neck. The address doesn’t sound like a slum area, but as far as she can tell, in this country, names mean
nothing. Tara taps it into her GPS, waits for the gadget to boot up. That’s odd, she thinks, the house is only a couple of kilometres from Crossley College. Tara’s used to
Joburg’s messy and often contradictory layout – shanty towns sitting cheek-by-jowl with Tuscan-style mansions – but as far as she’s aware, the school’s surrounding
area is resolutely upper class, peppered with Virgin Actives and delicatessens.

Tara pulls out into the traffic, follows the GPS’s directions. Jane leans over and fiddles with the radio dials, filling the car with static interspersed with gabbling radio chatter. If
Martin had done this, Tara would have stopped him immediately, but she doesn’t have the heart to spoil Jane’s fun. Poor little mite clearly has a hard enough life as it is.

The GPS woman guides her through a complex warren of side streets, and within minutes Tara turns into Excelsior Avenue, an upmarket street lined with McMansions and gated complexes. She
hadn’t expected this. Perhaps Jane isn’t one of the outreach kids after all.

‘You have reached your destination,’ the GPS voice says as Tara cruises past a property she’s noticed before – well, she could hardly forget it. Scores of statues, most
of which look like they’ve been bought wholesale from a garden centre, are cemented into its towering stucco walls. A triple row of dryads, half-naked nymphs balancing water urns and cherubs
with smiles so poorly rendered that they look like grimaces of pain, jostle for space either side of a rusting gold gate. Stephen had driven her down here a couple of months ago, slowing down so
that they could gawp at the house. ‘Probably some Greek drug lord’s half-completed vanity mansion,’ he’d sneered. ‘More money than taste.’

Assuming that the GPS must have made a mistake, she prepares to accelerate, then spots the gold curls of the number ‘67a’ mosaicked onto the bare breasts of a concrete nymph.

Ensuring there are no cars behind her, she reverses, and swings the Pajero around onto the grass verge.

‘
This
is your house, Jane?’

Jane nods.

What now? She can’t just drop the kid off and run. What if no one’s home? Besides, she should probably have a word with Jane’s parents, tell them that their daughter was
hanging around in the main road – a job she’s not relishing in the slightest. What if Stephen’s right and they are gangsters or drug dealers? But she doesn’t have much of a
choice.

She turns to Martin. ‘I won’t be long. Keep your door locked.’

Martin shrugs and mumbles something she hopes is a ‘yes’.

She helps Jane unclick her belt, and together they approach the gates. Tara searches for an intercom, but Jane steps forward and nudges the vast plate-metal slabs open. So much for security. The
house itself is fronted by packed dirt peppered with weeds and pools of dried concrete – more like an abandoned building site than a front garden. Its partially completed facade, which
appears to have been designed with the Parthenon (or a cheesy casino) in mind, is similarly adorned with statues. In among the generic cherubs and Michelangelo’s Davids, Tara makes out
several likenesses of the Hindu goddess Kali, as well as mythological figures she doesn’t recognise. She recoils at a male figure with the head of what looks to be a squid, a woman with three
breasts and a stump for a hand. Jesus. She’s almost sure that a couple of the cherubs’ heads are fused together like conjoined twins, but before she can look closer, Jane grabs her hand
and tugs her towards the plain wooden front door, which, in comparison to the rest of the place, looks reassuringly benign. Used to entering South African houses by running the gauntlet of security
guards, intercoms and Trellidors, Tara’s shocked when Jane pushes it open – she doesn’t even need to turn the handle.

She’s expecting to walk into some kind of over-the-top reception area – after the house’s insane exterior, she’s imagining a pink marbled floor, maybe a statue of Venus
– so she’s taken aback when they step straight into an unfurnished, double-height entrance hall that stinks of damp concrete. Work must have been halted mid-renovation, Tara assumes as
she checks out the plastered walls and bare, screeded floor. To her right, a partially tiled staircase sweeps upwards, the top steps disappearing into darkness.

Jane skips towards an arched doorway to the left and leads Tara into a vast kitchen, which, in stunning contrast to the neglected entrance hall, looks like it’s been cut straight out of a
model-home catalogue. It’s bright in here – too bright. Rows of strip lights range the ceiling, and it doesn’t take her long to realise they’re the only source of light in
the room. The windows have been sealed shut with wood panels. Why would they do that? The room reeks of burnt coffee beans, and it’s not difficult to discover why. There’s an extensive
collection of appliances arrayed on the kitchen counters, including three coffee machines burbling with black liquid.

‘Is your mother in, Jane?’

‘Mother’s always in, miss,’ Jane says, for once sounding animated, almost cheerful.

‘Could you fetch her for me?’

‘Yes, miss.’ Jane disappears through a green door at the far side of the kitchen, slamming it behind her.

The minutes tick by, and Tara begins to get antsy. She can’t leave Martin alone in the car for much longer but she’s reluctant to follow Jane through that door. She paces up and down
the room, pausing when she notices a cardboard box, the word ‘Research’ scrawled on its lid in amongst the jumble of appliances. She knows she shouldn’t pry, but she can’t
resist peeking inside it. It’s full of DVD box sets:
Jersey Shore
,
The Real Housewives of Orange County
,
Desperate Housewives Series 3
,
Rock of Love
,
50 Classic Survivor Moments
,
The Wire
, as well as several films –
Independence Day
,
Pretty Woman
,
Lars and the Real Girl
,
Saw 7
,
Love
Actually
and
Bringing Out the Dead
. Eclectic taste, Tara muses. Shoved to the side of the box there’s a battered cookery book. Checking to make sure she’s not about to be
disturbed, Tara hauls it out. It clearly dates from the sixties or seventies; there’s a grainy photograph of a shiny chicken on the cover beneath the words ‘Family Meals for
Four’. She flicks through it, almost drops it as several photographs flutter out from its pages onto the floor.

‘Shit,’ she mutters, bending down to retrieve them. Most seem to be close-ups of plants and vegetables, then she comes across several snaps of a man and a woman posing next to a
station wagon. Jane’s parents? Tara hopes not. The woman is skeletally thin, with brick-red hair and lips that are so puffed with silicone they look ready to split; the man’s skin is
too smooth to be natural, and his nose looks far too small for his face – clearly the result of too much plastic surgery.

‘Good afternoon!’ a woman’s voice calls from behind her. Tara whirls around, sees the woman from the photograph slipping through the arched doorway. Tara tries not to gawp at
her outlandish appearance, which is accentuated in the flesh. Her ballooning lips are smeared in orange lipstick, white scalp patches show through the red curls of her hair and she’s dressed
in the same skin-tight lacy bodysuit she’s wearing in the photograph.

‘Hi,’ Tara manages. ‘Sorry to barge in like this, but—’

The woman takes Tara’s hand in both of hers, flutters a series of air kisses around her head. ‘Welcome to home,’ she says, trying to smile, although those swollen lips make it
near impossible. ‘It’s so pleasant of you to drop here like this.’

Is she foreign? Tara can’t place her accent. It doesn’t have that clipped South Africanness about it, but nor does it sound Russian or European. ‘Um, I volunteer at the library
– you know, at Crossley College. I drove Jane home. She let me in and I—’

‘You
drove
Jane home? That’s pleasant of you. Can I offer you a refreshment? Coffee? We have lots of coffee.’

‘I’m fine, thanks.’ Tara can’t keep her eyes off the woman’s neck, which is several shades darker than the smooth plastic of her face. The remnants of a disastrous
fake tan, perhaps? ‘Look, Ms... I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.’

The woman attempts to smile again. ‘That’s because I haven’t told you what it is.’

Tara waits for her to give it, but the woman simply stares at her as if she’s waiting for her to continue the conversation. After several awkward seconds, Tara says, ‘I’m
afraid Jane got it into her head that I would take her home.’ The woman still doesn’t respond. Is she drunk? Could this be the source of the neglect? ‘She was waiting outside on
the main road. She said that someone called Danish usually fetches her.’

‘Oh that karking
Danish
!’ The woman laughs as if Tara’s just said something hilarious. She looks at the photographs Tara’s left littered on the counter top.

‘I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have been prying. Really, there’s no excuse—’

‘Do you like this?’ the woman asks, gesturing to a close-up of the man.

‘Um... very nice.’

‘Isn’t he scenic? He could be a mascot, couldn’t he?’

What the hell does that mean? A mascot like in a baseball game? Like the Mets’ Mr Met or something? God, Tara thinks. Poor Jane. With a mother like this, no wonder she has trouble fitting
in. She reaches for something to say. ‘Um. Your house, it’s very... interesting.’

‘Is it?’

‘Unusual.’

‘Tara?’

She looks over her shoulder, sees Martin hovering nervously at the doorway that leads into the entrance hall. ‘I’m coming,’ she says to him. ‘Go back to the
car.’

Martin stares at the woman for several seconds, then does as he’s told.

She’s reluctant to leave Jane in the hands of this woman, but what else can she do? Looking like a freak isn’t a crime, is it? And to be honest, she’s desperate to get out of
here. She turns back to the woman. ‘I really should go now, but—’

She jumps as the muffled sound of a scream penetrates the room.

‘
Tara!
’

It’s Martin.

Penter finds Jane sitting in front of the television, watching one of her favourite upside movies,
Revenge of the Driller Killer III
. The violence isn’t to
Penter’s taste. She’s not delicate – she was a recycling apprentice before her redeployment to Upside Relations – but she prefers the movies that end with weddings and
parties and laughter, even though she knows this partiality for upside fancy verges on disregard. In the normal world, movies are only for the eyes of Shoppers, but up here she’s allowed to
indulge in these non-factual story-documents as part of her research.

The more she watches, the more non-facts she finds in upside documents. They seem so concerned with vague abstractions like worshipfulness, symbolic currency, concepts like
values
and
national pride
. How can browns spend so much time and energy on perpetuating this nonsense when there are beans to grow? When they could just go out and look at the sky?

Father says that the most accurate reflection of brown life is found in the product advertisements, and he keeps encouraging her to spend more time watching these. But he must be mistaken. If
the advertisements are a true reflection of society in the node, female browns always eat
yogurt
together. She tried the glutinous substance once; it made her projectile. The women also
talk about detergents and cook while singing. If this is true, then she understands them less every day.

Before she makes dinner she needs to file a report about the brown educator’s unexpected arrival in the kitchen, but she’s unsure what to say. She’s sure she interacted with
the educator according to protocol, but its offspring behaved in a grossly disregardful fashion. She doesn’t know whether she caused offence in some way, or whether she should take offence.
Despite this, she imagines wearing lightweight apparel, talking about yogurt and detergent with the educator, or maybe discoursing about
love.

This ‘love’ is the most interesting upside abstraction, and it is the subject of several movies. In the name of research, she used the computer in the television room to investigate
the concept. She has memorised the definition she found: ‘Love is both an action and a feeling. The action of love generates a blissful feeling called by the same name. When the action stops,
the blissful feeling is replaced with pain. Every person is capable of great love (and its opposite, fear, which generates all painful emotions such as hate, greed and jealousy).’

Penter wonders if she is capable of blissful love, or even fear. She supposes that it is possible now that she has gone several days without a penetration renewal. But how will she know if she
does
feel it? She doesn’t think it can be like regard – which she has felt many times, of course. Regard is what makes the world function. According to her research, the
greatest love is supposed to be between a Mother and an offspring, although Penter cannot understand how this could be. In many documents, like the ones entitled
Love Actually
and
Pretty Woman
(a disconcerting title as the female protagonist in it is unsightly even by brown standards), love is nothing to do with offspring and everything to do with violent debate,
naked parasitism, speeding around in upside machines and festivities that make Shoppers’ cocktail sales look like halfpints’ vat-leaving parties.