Frankie and Stankie (33 page)

When the coal miner is carted off for long-term hospital care in a ward for the dying near to his old mine in northern Natal, Maud
and her mother have to move out of the tied flat. Her mum gets a job looking after the linen in a small residential hotel which comes with a room on the premises that mother and daughter share. Maud's territory is more comfortable to Dinah once the poor raddled invalid is gone, so that Dinah will now stay over in the hotel, just as Maud often stays over with her. In both venues the girls always manage the soundest sleep while sharing a two-foot-six-inch single bed. And tidy long-suffering Lisa now puts up with two muddly little sisters throwing their knickers around in her space.

Dinah enjoys the novelty of the hotel where, in the dining room, there's always a typed menu, even at breakfast time. Tinned grapefruit and stewed prunes; All Bran and oatmeal porridge; eggs, poached, scrambled or fried. At lunch on Saturdays there'll be a starter choice of mulligatawny or cock-a-leekie, followed by macaroni cheese, or the cod mornay option, both served with marrowfat peas. One weekend there's a Sunday dinner of roast pork and Yorkshire pudding, but the typewriter's ‘r' has gone peculiar, so it's ‘Roast ponk and Yonkshire pudding'. Dinah and Maud are delighted. Yonxie-ponxie-pudding-and-pie.

Maud's mum, as well as checking the linen, has to see that the tables in the dining room are properly set because the native servants don't always appreciate the vital importance of nickel-plated fish forks. Sometimes, when Maud and Dinah are helping, she'll tick them off as well.

‘Side plates, Maud,' she says.

‘Dinah's family don't have side plates,' Maud says. ‘Dinah's dad just puts his bread on the tablecloth.'

Maud's mum pauses to polish the diplomacy of her reply. ‘That's because they're foreign, dear,' she says.

Once the coal miner is into the last phase of his dying, Maud's mum is summoned in haste and she leaves her daughter behind in the hotel. But the coal miner's dying extends to a period of four months during which time Maud's extraordinary lack of parental constraint strikes Dinah as the enviable height of sophistication. Maud's unsupervised night life is expanding in adventurous directions and she's going off on mid-week dates with senior students from the architectural school – students who habitually stay awake
all night. Then, in between, there are the short-term liaisons with birds of passage in the hotel.

Maud sometimes arranges dates for Dinah but Dinah finds that these occasions, though they provide an excuse for running up a range of boned and strapless brocade evening dresses, fall wholly outside her range of management skills and leave her feeling all thumbs. It's like being expected to dance in public when no one has taught you the steps. She's aware that a modicum of touching and groping is part of the etiquette of the venture but, because she's unschooled in the know-how of courtship and feels her skills to be roughly equivalent to those she's displayed for Miss Chase on the netball field, she always sits, off-puttingly ramrod straight, giving off unintended ice-maiden messages and throwing her partners into confusion. She sits, waiting for the elegant mating dance of literary-verbal interplay, where her partner's intent will merely be to deposit saliva inside her mouth. Or to get his hand in her bra. The verbal dimension, such as it is, will exist in her partner's crooning Pat Boone lyrics into her ear and there's one particular favourite here that comes up all the time. Pat Boone has crooned it as follows, but it's always being locally amended:

The less you caress them,

The more they like your technique

‘It isn't “the
more
you caress them”,' Dinah says. ‘It's “less”,' but the dates will never believe her.

Dinah and Maud, who talk about nearly everything, but most especially about clothes, will never talk about sexual practices so Dinah has no idea what it is that Maud gets up to when she's not watching. And Dinah's sole snippet of sexual guidance is a one-line utterance offered months earlier by her mother, who then, immediately afterwards, clams up in sudden embarrassment, refusing further elaboration or even a moment's eye contact. Dinah must not allow men to ‘fumble' with her, she says – especially not with dirty fingers. For Dinah this advice, with its maternal emphasis on hygiene, has more the tone of the Home Doctor than any entrée into the secret world of sex, so that by the time one of the dates has accomplished a fumble inside Dinah's swimsuit on one of Durban's more deserted beaches, it's no surprise when the upshot is a vaginal
itch brought on by sand grains up her crotch. And, though she's haunted by the idea that she'll have to take her itch to Dr Schaeffer at the surgery, she manages to cure it herself, with an all-purpose cream that her mother always keeps in the bathroom cabinet. The cream is made by May & Baker whose initials are M and B. These, her mother asserts, stand in for the words Much Better. Dinah's mum has gone on from here to evolve the phrase ‘Much MB'. ‘Tächenherz is much MB,' she'll say, when one of Dinah's dad's three-day migraines has at last begun to abate. ‘
Ach
, today he is much MB. Much,
much
MB.'

Because Maud is such a glamorous figure for Dinah, it doesn't dawn on her that life at fifteen alone in a hotel isn't altogether satisfactory. But it's more or less from this time on that Maud becomes devoted to Dinah's parents. And Dinah's parents love her back, allowing her all sorts of liberties that they wouldn't allow Lisa and Dinah. There's no disapproval, for example, when Maud, rising at midday in nylon shorty pyjamas, sidles mock-sexily on to Dinah's dad's knee and puts on her Marlene Dietrich voice. She does this as a way of helping him to eject a party of Jehovah's Witnesses who have managed to effect an entry.

‘Vhy don't ve show ze gentlemen out
und
have some vine, my darlink, huh?' she says and she runs her fingers through his hair.

Then – just as she's got the Jehovahs on retreat at the front door, and Dinah's dad is pulling out his wallet to pay them off with a compensating purchase of
The Watchtower
magazine – Maud embarrasses him deliberately by changing tack. Transforming herself into an infant spoilt brat, she grabs his wallet and hugs it to her person. She's stamping her foot and yelling loudly.

‘DON'T give them our ice-cream money, Daddy! I SAID, don't you DARE give them our ice-cream money!'

It's fun to watch Dinah's dad's ears going pink as the Jehovahs are making a hurried getaway. And Dinah, who never really minds about it, is perfectly aware of the relish with which her dad always likes to point out that Maud's drawing homework is so much better than her own. Maud's drawing is that much faster and more deft, so that while Dinah is still laboriously cross-hatching their assigned arrangement of watering can, pot plant and trowel, Maud will have already accomplished hers and is adding spoofy speech
bubbles for the amusement of Dinah's dad. ‘I am a watering can,' the speech bubbles say. ‘I am a trowel.'

Thanks to Maud's increasingly hectic night life, she's now as close to falling asleep in class as Dinah is from the hay-fever pills. For this reason it makes a lot of sense for the girls to spend more of their school-time socialising from inside the medical room. The problem here is that, while Dinah's chronic allergies mean that the teachers will always believe her, Maud's professions of illness often fall on sceptical ears. The girls have already devised a system whereby they stagger their requests for sick leave, in order to ensure that Maud will always plead incapacity, either in Miss Bardsey's or Mrs Keithley's lessons. Then Dinah will follow her in the next, by gaining permission from a different teacher. But even then it isn't always easy.

‘You look very well to me, my girlie,' Mrs Keithley says one day. ‘You must go right back to your place and get on with your work.'

Maud is filled with such righteous indignation at having her word placed in doubt that she's at once bent on proving Mrs Keithley wrong. If she takes a swig from the ink well, she says, it will make her lips turn blue and that will prove her case.

The effect of drinking the school ink is, unfortunately, rather more dramatic. One small swig and Maud's teeth have begun to chatter. Within minutes she's turned a ghastly white.

‘M-my eyeb-balls f-feel like b-b-b-boiled eggs,' she whispers. ‘D-d-d-dinah, I'm n-n-not j-joking.'

Both of them are transfixed. When the bell goes for break, they eventually manage to stagger outside, both convinced that Maud is fading out. Yet neither will dream of summoning a teacher. They sit in the shade of a jacaranda tree, half paralysed with fear. Then, thank goodness, after several swigs of water, the fit begins to pass. And by halfway through the next lesson Maud is still sufficiently pale and shaky, not only to earn herself an open-ended place in the medical room for the day, but also to have company, because Dinah is allowed to go along with her to check that she's all right.

In the medical room you have to write in the record book what's the matter with you that day, so Dinah always writes ‘hay fever'. Maud usually writes ‘sinus trouble', but now she writes ‘chattering teeth'. Quite often in the medical room they'll meet Carmen
Shapiro who is older than they are and wilder. Carmen is very beautiful: a dark, glossy beauty who lives up to her name. She intermittently intersects with the North Beach airhead set but in truth she's far too eccentric and far too original for the herd. Carmen always writes whatever she likes in the medical-record book. She writes ‘hypochondrial diffusions' and ‘period pains'. She writes ‘septicaemia' and ‘gangrene' and ‘scurvy'. One day she writes ‘sweaty feet' and another day she writes ‘labour pains'. Thanks to Carmen it becomes perfectly obvious to Maud and Dinah that the staff never consult the medical-record book and that you don't really need to fill it in at all. Carmen is brilliantly gymnastical and she does handstands, or she turns cartwheels round and round the medical room. She and her friends are expert truants and she has funny stories about their various close escapes. They hide in the lavatories during assemblies and during lesson cross-over times.

‘Always stand on the lavatory seat,' Carmen advises the younger girls. ‘Then the prefects can't see your feet under the door.'

Carmen is in Lisa's class and Lisa has now become a prefect. Once Carmen's caught red-handed in the medical room while Maud and Dinah are watching from neighbouring beds. She's doing a headstand against the opposite wall when the head of maths pays an unexpected visit.

‘I'm anaemic, Miss Unwin,' Carmen says, having hastily turned the right way up. ‘My doctor's told me it's vital to get blood to the brain every hour.'

It's a mystery to Maud and Dinah why Carmen hasn't been expelled, especially as they've repeatedly teetered on the brink of it themselves for several much more innocuous and minor transgressions. Most recently it's been because of what they've done while sitting out the swimming lesson on the tiered stands one morning. Maud believes that she and Dinah can rescue the class from an impending follow-on maths test. They can do this, she says, by prolonging the class's changing time at the end.

‘We'll muddle up all the bras,' she says. ‘That'll take for ever to sort out.'

So the two girls leave the sunny stands while Miss Chase is busy in the pool. They spend a few brief, happy minutes in the changing room, transferring Fern Levy's size 36D to the cubicle of Pat
Mayer's 32AA. They switch Adele's 34C with Lynette's 34A and Bet's 34B with Marjorie's 36C. Then they return unnoticed to the stands and wait for the shrieks and confusion. The scheme is highly successful since the class takes for ever to sort out its undies and the maths test is well and truly missed.

And Miss Maidment, subtle creature that she is, then takes three days to summon them to her office. Plus, because she does this one by one, both girls are caught off guard. Maud is summoned first and Dinah has no idea that she's to follow. They don't even know what it's about.

‘Godalmighty, but look at me,' Maud says. She casts an eye over her routinely desecrated uniform. ‘Swap me your blazer, Dee,' she says. ‘Swap me your tie. Swap me your shoes.'

With the uncanny knack of best friends the two girls not only share a shoe size but they can fit into all of each other's clothes. Maud has spent her mother's school shoe money on lots of Helena Rubenstein and on a pair of pink party pumps. Her current school shoes, a clapped-out pair of Grey Street cheapos from the Indian bazaar, are dusty with age and gaping at the toes. Her tie is twisted and very un-ironed. Her Alice band is nowhere. Her blazer is shouting its origins from Yael's fish-moth trunk. So Dinah hands over all her clothes in a lightning swap before Maud proceeds to the Head. Then, ten minutes later, when Dinah is summoned as well, it's hard not to catch Maud's eye and explode with giggles as Miss Maidment is lecturing her on the state of her derelict blazer and tie, on her gaping, dusty shoes and missing Alice band. Dinah does what she always does at such times. She stares fixedly at Miss Maidment's floor, trying in vain, this way and that, to make her size six feet fit exactly into the chevron wood blocks which are always half an inch too short.

Then, when Maud's mum and Dinah's dad are summoned from the ante-room, the girls know that things are getting serious. They watch in silence as Maud's mum expresses genuine wide-eyed surprise in her little whispery voice, because she cannot possibly believe that the little fairy girl is capable of transgression.

‘Och, but she's always such a gud wee gerril,' she says. ‘There's surely been a mistake?'

Meanwhile Dinah's dad keeps on looking at his watch and tapping his feet impatiently on the floor.

‘Chuck her out,' he says. ‘She's a waste of your time. Search me why you've kept her all this time.'