Frankie and Stankie (23 page)

In the Transvaal, buses for blacks are right now political dynamite, because the companies who run them have tried to put up the fares. Black commuters have been boycotting the buses and walking, en masse, thirty kilometres a day, in and out of work. They picket the buses and sometimes burn them and stone them and even throw themselves in front of them. Then the bus companies hire the poorest township migrant workers to beat up the protesters. The Liberal Party has tried organising a lift system of volunteers with private cars, but all this does is give the police a chance to nail more agitators and Communists, since all they have to do is stand about taking down the numbers on the white drivers' licence plates. What's happened is that the sight of all those blacks walking in their thousands into white town centres singing protest songs has been enough to make the municipality hammer out a compromise.

Most of the white schoolkids with whom Lisa and Dinah take the
bus don't know about the bus boycotts. For them the Green Mambas are a fun way to tease their friends. Because, whenever there's a Green Mamba coming, you can pretend it's the bus your friend is waiting for.

‘Here comes your bus, Denise,' you say and everyone will fall about laughing. Denise will pretend to be very indignant. Then she'll take a turn.

‘Look, it's yours,' she'll say. ‘Stop, stop, Green Mamba! Here's a passenger for you.'

Angela gets on the bus two-thirds of the way along the route to high school, so Dinah always tries to save her a seat. She catches it in Nicholson Road outside a small semi-detached house that has Snow White and all Seven Dwarfs cast in concrete in the front garden. Plus there are several concrete toadstools and concrete butterflies. The figures are all about eighteen inches high, except for Snow White who is much bigger, and all of them are brightly painted.

Then the bus journey comes to an end for Lisa and Dinah because they vacate the Butcher Estate to make way for its new tenant, the South African Police. Dinah's mum cries when the pergola is cut down and coils of barbed wire are erected on top of the tall green hedges all the way from Ridge Road above to Vause Road below. Soon the Butcher Estate has ‘Keep Out' signs in two languages, with pictures of salivating Alsatians. Dinah never enters it again, though she passes it all the time. She remembers it as a magic place, big enough to get lost in, with its giant bamboo clumps and vervet monkeys and the carpets of jacaranda flowers outside the back door. With its passing she appears to lose all interest in the outdoors. The bullying, triumphalist tone of the police force means that to look at the Butcher Estate from the perimeter fence is like looking in at an enemy occupation.

The campus families have been leaving gradually. Dinah's family are the last to go and Wendy Jones's the first. Wendy goes without saying goodbye, because there's a distance that's developed between the children. Wendy Jones, Lisa's fellow gingernut, has long ago stopped coming round to play and has closed ranks against the whole child commune. This has happened, shortly after the girls' impromptu tea party, with the arrival of the family's third child. Pregnant Mrs Jones, who sat on the grass all those years
before, has given birth to baby Roddy whose head is much too big for him and who never learns to speak or to leave his pushchair. Instead his pushchair keeps on getting bigger.

Wendy has never said anything to the other children about Roddy being not quite right. The fact of his evident and serious disability isn't admitted or aired. But Wendy stops playing and becomes Roddy's obsessive second mother. She always walks alongside her mum and her little brother Owen eyeing the other children with suspicion. They are the wild, running, shrieking child-people from whom Roddy needs protection. Wendy smothers Roddy with out-loud baby talk as she passes the girls' bungalow. Meanwhile Roddy lolls lifeless in his pushchair, his sad giant head topped with orange curls, like a sad Hallowe'en pumpkin thinking sad pumpkin thoughts.

Somewhere in Roddy's yearning moon face is an echo of his pleasant, orange-haired dad; plump freckly Dr Vernon Jones from Wales with his little damp hands, who lectures in history and always wears his sandals with socks. Meanwhile Mrs Jones has doubled in size with Roddy's birth and has become a person to be scared of. When the rift becomes a feud, Lisa and Dinah know in their hearts that it's all really their fault, because, home alone for an hour one day, they spy little Owen Jones from the window and he's playing with Lisa's ball. They know that it's Lisa's because of the pattern on the rubber. From the house, the sisters swoop on Owen, two against one, like bullies. They grab the ball and dash indoors, slamming the door behind them. Victory! Then they watch Owen run whimpering home to tell his mother.

‘Quick!' Lisa says. ‘Quick! Lock the back door. Shut all the windows. Draw the curtains. Quick! Hide! Hide! Mrs Jones is coming!'

Within minutes, Mrs Jones is thundering on the front door. ‘I know you're in there,' she says. ‘Come out!' Then she raps on the windows. Then she goes round the back. ‘Come out!' she cries. ‘Come out! Give that ball back to Owen at once!'

The girls don't respond. They hardly dare to breathe. They crouch, scared but excited, under Lisa's iron bed.

‘You've not heard the end of this!' Mrs Jones says.

Eventually, she stomps off. Yet she doesn't follow through. Dinah's mum never finds out. And then, three weeks later, Lisa
discovers her own ball. It's lying at the bottom of the
Klappkasten
. Dinah and Lisa look at each other. Lisa is biting her lip. They look at both balls side by side. The balls are identical twins. After that, they have no option but to make their victim into their enemy. They can't not hate Owen now, just as they hate his sister. It's no speaks with either of them until the Joneses leave the Estate.

Dinah's family moves for six months into some temporary campus housing alongside the university, while their own house is being built. The temporary house is a brick cottage, one of six, built into the indigenous woodland of Pigeon Valley, and so close to the high school that the girls are always in danger of being late for assembly. Their dad, for the first time ever, starts switching on Springbok Radio, because that way they can pace themselves by the commercials. They know that they have to be out of the house before the last line of the Zoomo Cough Sweet commercial. First they hear the forced, fake coughing fit and then the voice that says, ‘Stop that cough with ZOOMO!' The word ZOOMO! must reach their ears just as they hit the main road.

The new house is being built with money left to Dinah's mum by the Misses Connie and Louisa. It's a thousand pounds and it's completely unexpected. Dinah's mum likes houses, so with thoughts of the legacy dancing in her head, she sets out to prowl the older residential areas of Durban, looking for her ideal home. She walks all the gracious, shaded streets between the Overport shops and Mitchell Park. One place is called the Elephant House, because the last elephant in Durban was seen right there, in the garden. Sub-tropical vegetation has grown up around these older houses, lush and dense, making a green shade around colonial verandahs, white-plastered walls, and wide French windows. She loves the way the climate encourages a blurring of inside and outside, and one house she looks at has a tree growing right up through the roof. The gardens end in small, scrubby orchards of pawpaw trees and banana palms. Front gardens are full of azaleas and aloes and red-hot pokers. The houses have fixtures dating from a time when ships docked in Durban Harbour carrying stained-glass door panels from England, fan lights, balustrades, whole pressed ceilings complete with borders of acanthus leaves, scalloped brick-roof copings and porcelain sanitary ware bearing the names of Messrs Shanks and Twyford.

But then there's Ta, who refuses to engage with any of her housing schemes and, having grown up in small rented flats, has no experience of gambling money on property. Having left the Old World behind him, he now dislikes anything that reminds him of Old World domestic interiors. Brass door handles, mantelshelves, wallpaper, washboards, ornamental cast iron, chandeliers and sash windows – all these bring back to him the things that he'd rather forget. He dislikes mouldings and panelled doors. He knows without having to look that old houses are about decrepitude and that any house not built to 1950s local authority planning-office specifications will mean rust, damp, termites, rot, cockroaches, subsidence and probably flood. Plus it will smell of mothballs and old ladies' fur coats.

So the nest egg is used to buy a plot of red earth on a hill behind the university where bushland is fast becoming new urban sprawl and the balance becomes a down payment on one of the municipality's approved range of bungalows. The choice is between plans A, B and C. A building contractor is employed but now there's a hitch, because the house is taking for ever. The builder, being a recent immigrant from Europe, has gone heady on the opportunities available for white-skinned entrepreneurs in the new apartheid South Africa. He has quickly realised that all he needs is an underpaid black craftsperson with no labour rights and no electoral voice who will do all the work for him. So, Dinah's parents' builder is a full-time absentee. He's keen to develop his angling skills while the house is built, start to finish, by a single Zulu labourer who has three words of English in answer to Dinah's dad's questions, whenever he visits the site. ‘Boss gone fishing.'

Finally, the little house is built – a tribute to the Zulu labourer's industry and skill. Lisa and Dinah share one of the three small bedrooms so that their dad can have a study, but there's nowhere for Dinah's mum to set up a weaving loom or mess about with paints. The house has a front door that leads straight into an L-shaped sitting room with the dining table and Dinah's mum's piano fitted into the smaller part of the L. It has galvanised-steel windows equipped with basic-range burglar bars.

All the same, it's exciting to have a house and Ta is delighted with it. He's especially delighted with the plywood flush doors that smell of new glue and with the flecked Emelux finish which has
been sprayed on to the walls of the kitchen, bathroom and WC in place of the more expensive ceramic-tile option. He's delighted with the corrugated asbestos roof and the asbestos drain-pipes which will never rust or crack. He is full of enthusiasm for the septic tank, an ecologically laudable sewage-disposal system which dictates that the family would be ill advised to use soft-tissue toilet roll, and ought to stick with the interleaved sheets of scratchy Jeyes. There's even a special holder for the scratchy Jeyes that's been thoughtfully recessed into the wall of the Emelux.

The house has only one lavatory since there isn't one in the bathroom and this is a source of daily concern for Dinah's mum who suffers with temperamental bowels. Dinah's mum needs the loo each morning within five minutes of her first sip of breakfast coffee, or else the day is lost, but this is almost always the time when Dinah's dad is in there working on the crossword puzzle. Dinah's mum keeps remedies called Chocolax, Brook-lax, Liquid Paraffin and California Syrup of Figs. She keeps these in her knicker drawers along with the Lux flakes and Nescafé and Swiss chocolate. She also keeps an enamel enema jug with a length of nasty rubber hose in a canvas drawstring bag. This is a thing Dinah uncovers one day while snooping but she has no idea what it's for and, naturally, she cannot ask. Dinah's dad always emerges from the lavatory looking pleased.

‘The clue's “Half-moon”,' he'll say. ‘Look. Two letters. The answer's “Mo”. How about that?'

What Dinah's parents haven't taken into account is how expensive the new house will be. Because nobody has lived in it before them, nobody has supplemented the gaps in its basic structure. So Dinah's house has no garden path, no paved terrace for afternoon tea, no pulley rigged up for a washing line, no lawn, no letter box at the gate, no gate, no fence, no coat hook behind the bathroom door, no bookshelves, no curtain rails. There are no plants in the garden and there's precious little topsoil. Dinah's mum's new garden has three steep terraces of red Durban earth, which erode into mudslides with the first heavy rains. So with no money to call her own and the weekly account book to confront, Dinah's mum sets out for the botanical gardens to teach herself about plants. And it's while she's leaning over the various specimens and taking down their names
that she meets one of the people who becomes a part of the family's life. Francis-the-Gardener is an Indian employee of the parks and gardens department.

‘I'm Francis-the-Gardener,' he says into her ear. ‘I'll get you some of these. Cheap, madam. Very cheap. You come back later. Five o'clock. You come back.'

And from that day on, Francis-the-Gardener supplements his meagre council wages by selling Dinah's mum, lovingly wrapped in damp newspaper, all the odd corms, buds, cuttings and bedding plants that he's garnered during his days in the flowerbeds. Francis-the-Gardener's knowledge is extensive, although he's unable to read. He's stick thin and suffers from bronchial complaints, which gives them a common bond. For a while he tells her what to do with all the cuttings and the corms, but soon he's working in the garden with her in every spare minute he has. Francis is always in need of money and soon they are talking trees.

Dinah's house, as it turns out, is not far from where the gardener lives in a hovel made of corrugated iron, with his wife and his five children. This is because the Cato Manor location starts just below the road that bounds the bottom of Dinah's family's garden. Several of the poorest Indian families are living there in makeshift shacks, having been burnt out of their homes during the anti-Indian riots of 1949. Most Durban Indians like Francis-the-Gardener are the sons and daughters of indentured Hindu labourers, the indigent of the subcontinent, who were shipped in to work in the sugar-cane fields of Natal, since the Natal cane fields, unlike those of the Caribbean or Mauritius, post-date the abolition of slavery and local Zulu labour isn't all that keen. Cutting cane is very hard work and, as Dinah's junior-school history teacher has already explained, ‘A Zulu's idea of hard work is to lie in the sun with his hat over his eyes.'