Frankie and Stankie (39 page)

‘Stand up all those Freshettes,' he says, ‘who haven't yet been asked to Freshers' Dinner.'

The whole increasingly ghoulish ritual is bizarrely reminiscent of the Union Jack fiasco at Berea Road Government School for Girls. Plus Dinah just knows that none of the Fresh Persons is ever going to ask her to Freshers' Dinner. And neither, thank the Lord, are any of the bully boys on the Committee. It's already perfectly clear to her that she's a freak in weirdo stockings with weirdo silver hair; a freak who thinks she's above it all; a freak who doesn't know how to simper; a freak who always walks, ramrod straight, eyes to the floor, in weirdo, snooty-girl clothes. Plus she's a freak whose dad is head of maths, so any messing with her undergarments is probably no-go. So Dinah knows that the weirdo silver-haired offspring of Prof du Bondt is not going to be snapped up with alacrity as a favoured dinner companion. And she's damned if she's going to be one of that ever-dwindling band of girls – the girls with pebble specs and overactive grease glands, the girls with callipers and funny teeth – who is going to get made to stand up, day after day, until she's forced into the arms of some reluctant male Fresh Person with unpleasant body odour.

So now, when she isn't in lectures, or hazardously crossing the campus trying to avoid the Freshers' Reception Committee, she's
hiding in her tiny room, filling up on cream crackers and not daring to eat in the dining hall. She's running the gauntlet between the residence and the lecture halls, trying not to get intercepted, because the whole purpose of the bows and the discs is to announce one's status as a first-year female student and, as such, one is required to make oneself available to the entire male student body. That's the Committee's much emphasised rule. Any senior male student can bawl ‘Freshette, come here!' and the rule is that you've got to stop and present yourself for inspection.

‘These two will do,' says a male senior to his companion one day. He and his friend have intercepted Dinah and Jenny. And they've contrived to block the path.

‘OK. We think you'll do,' he says.

Jenny's response is to look suitably withering. ‘Well, sorry, guys,' she says. ‘But we don't. We don't think you'll do at all.'

She grabs Dinah's arm and they skirt deftly around the two senior males. They're on their way home to Jenny's house for lunch. Jenny has just gone on two exciting dates with a handsome Rhodes Scholar architect who has recently returned from England where he's been dating the Deb-of-the-Year, as featured in
Country Life
. Both factors – the Rhodes Scholarship and the Deb-of-the-Year connection – are considered high achievements for a Jewish colonial boy.

‘Jen,' Dinah is hissing urgently. ‘Hey, Jen. Did you notice that one of those guys has got a
withered arm?
'

‘Oh crumbs,' Jenny says. ‘Oh blast. Oh well. So what?
C'est la vie
.'

Then they both start to giggle. They giggle about it all the way home to Jenny's maisonette where Pansy Kaufmann is on the patio, wearing two cucumber slices, one over each eye.

Jenny, who has a way with grown-ups, has already been getting invitations to parties by younger members of staff. The major conduit for these engagements is a glamorous older undergrad who buys her clothes in Paris and drives a silver Carmen Gia. She's currently married to a man of means to whom she refers as ‘my Jewish draper', but she's showing all the signs of being about to trade him in. And it's at the salon of the glamorous older undergrad that Jenny has managed to get introduced to the Rhodes Scholar
architect. Jenny, because she's still living at home, doesn't have to worry about being waylaid at the entrance to the women's hall of residence, where the all-female House Committee is, if anything, more besotted by rules than the Girls' High School prefects.

‘Freshette, your bow's not right,' some senior female person will pronounce, looming the while over Dinah's carefully flattened bow – flattened to make it look as much as possible like one of Mrs Horlicks's smart little head-hugging hats – and she'll plump it into an idiotic parody of a small girl's party ribbon, or until it looks like an aircraft propeller, about to go off into spin. So, once inside, Dinah lurks in her room, working hard on her Chaucer essays, until Maddie Holmes, or Lindsay Greig, or – just occasionally – Lavinia Steadman, will come and knock on her door.

All of them are older than Dinah but, between them, they make up the sum total of the people in the hall of residence to whom she can relate. Maddie, who is still collecting first-year credits, has been in the place three years. She's one of the uni's repeats. Maddie makes no pretence of intellect and she raps her knuckles against her skull to suggest that the contents are made of wood. University is her finishing school. It's been a chance for her to meet boys and have fun, because Maddie is all extrovert. Maddie's got quite a brassy look without her having to contrive it, since her entirely natural yellow hair comes the colour of bottle blonde. Plus it's even got natural split ends. She's got a big untidy mouth and she walks, unselfconsciously, with a slightly knock-kneed gait. This, together with her hint of hollow thighs, has given Maddie a sexy, fucked-out look which, oddly enough, she manages to combine with the manner of the girl-next-door. Maddie is always kind and motherly. And it's Dinah's impression that she's probably the most sought-after girl on campus – all of which means nothing to Maddie, now that she's fixed on boring Bernie – her steady, her husband-to-be, the man for whom she's currently wearing her twinkly engagement ring.

Maddie clacks about the campus on backless stack-heel shoes. She's got a slim, trim, fabulous body and she always looks unfussed. She has easy-to-wear, pull-on stretch jersey dresses and broad elastic belts. There's no artifice in her appearance because she's too comfortable in her own skin – and Dinah can't help liking her for being the opposite of herself. Plus Maddie never behaves like
one of the prefects and she couldn't give a bugger about Dinah's green bow and disc. So it's not long before Dinah's helping Maddie to put together her essays. And Maddie is offering Dinah all her worldly wisdom about condoms and oral sex and How Far a Girl Should Go.

Maddie's noticed that there's a senior male student who's begun to eye up Dinah – and she thinks that he'd be a disaster. He's been sitting on the wall across the road from the hall of residence and he's been calling out, ‘Freshette, come here.' So far Dinah's been doing what she always does. She's walked straight past without stopping. But she's begun to notice that he speaks with a guttural ‘r'. Plus he speaks as if he were doing the offensive routine just slightly tongue-in-cheek. Like her, he's pale as curd cheese. He has nice Slavic cheekbones that make him look like a boy in a Pasternak painting and his eyes are a startling ice-blue.

‘Oh God. I wish it wasn't
him
,' Maddie says. ‘You'll have to watch your step with him.' But then all she'll say is, ‘He's foreign. He's a smoothie. Well, you know what Continentals can be like. Anyway, he's much too old for you. He's twenty-five, you know.'

‘So what's his name?' Dinah says.

‘Dieter,' Maddie says. ‘But everyone calls him Didi.'

‘Well, they can't do that,' Dinah says. ‘Because Didi is what people call me.'

‘Tough,' Maddie says. ‘Because that's his name. Didi von Schweiten.'

‘Von Schweiten?' Dinah says.

It's a name that rings a bell because she's recently read it on the sleeve notes of one of her dad's new records. Baron von Schweiten, patron of several German baroque musicians, including Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, subject of the record sleeve in question.

Lavinia Steadman is a graduate student in social anthropology. She's a beautiful olive-skinned brunette who is fascinating to Dinah, because she spends all her daylight hours indoors in the hall of residence wearing a dressing gown and slippers and with her hair twiddled up in enormous rollers. Then, at nightfall, she puts on her Chinesy-looking sheath dress and her gold backless high-heels. She takes out the rollers and paints her half-inch-long eyelashes. Then, with her hair all ravishingly bouffant, she goes out with a young heart-throb maths tutor in Dinah's dad's department.
Because she doesn't have lectures any more, it's possible for Lavinia to stay in the rollers all day. Lavinia's a big favourite with the anthropology professor, the same wiry female in laced shoes and ankle socks whose lav paper Lisa and Dinah once tore askew in childhood. The anthropologist has done early pioneering work among the Venda peoples and is known on campus as the Rain Queen in recognition of this work.

Dinah's third and favourite residence-girl companion is an orphaned wild girl who gives the impression of having brought herself up. She's a final-year social-work student and she's definitely not one of the prefects. Lindsay Greig is fairly manic. She lives on Multivites and on Super Plenamin tablets. Plus she chews on caffeine pills, so that she can stay awake all night. Lindsay is right then relishing her sojourn in the women's hall of residence, because its intake is offering satirical possibilities which she finds hard to resist. The residence – Dinah's residence – is brand new. It's a supplement to the older one and it's been built on a prediction of increasing student numbers. Right now, however, it's only half full with undergraduate girls, so the authorities have decided to offer the extra bedrooms to a group of up-country Afrikaner girls who are students at Durban's newly established Afrikaans-language teacher-training college. And – given that this is the year of Dr Verwoerd's Republican Referendum – the resulting English-Afrikaner mix is predictably explosive.

Dr Verwoerd, under the shadow of Sharpeville, has just been howled down in London at the recent Commonwealth Conference. This has been the response to his wish to have South Africa remain within the Commonwealth once it's declared itself a republic. He's failed in this and been booted out – yet he comes back declaring ‘victory not defeat'. He says that we're celebrating our freedom and he refers to our ‘new dawn'. This in the year when the State of Emergency has swept like the Black Death through the home of anyone – black, white, Coloured or Indian – who is, or ever was, a little bit active in protest politics. The sun, Dr Verwoerd has announced, is ‘breaking through the morning mist'. This is because the Boer Republic is about to come again.

So naturally, the little Afrikaner Nationalist girlies are busily pinning up their patriotic posters for the coming republican referendum, because, in the referendum, all white eighteen-year-olds
will be able to cast their vote. The posters carry the ‘new dawn' imagery and they're done in the style of Soviet Realism. Or, more accurately, it's Prairie Realism. They depict a Boer on horseback, beard and leather breeks in place, and complete with his fetching General de Wet hat which he's waving in the air like Andrew Jackson. The Boer is riding triumphantly into a large art deco sunrise.

‘
Opsaal
!' says the poster.
‘Die Republiek Kom
!'

‘Saddle up!' it's telling the voters. ‘The Republic is Coming!'

Lindsay likes to wind up the girlies by pasting over these posters a home-made version of her own. She dashes these off at lightning speed and they all show a fat-arsed and very small Boer, drawn cartoon-wise from behind and seated on a clapped-out donkey. He's trotting, a-hobbledy-hoy, into what looks like a kindergarten sun face with a grumpy down-turned mouth and straggly spider's-leg rays.
‘Opsaal
!' says her caption.
‘Die Republiek Kom
!' Her caption is emanating, in a saucy, scalloped speech bubble, from the region of the donkey's rump. Lindsay's posters are constantly to be found, ripped, crumpled and dashed to the ground. But she just keeps on pinning up more.

Lindsay isn't perceived by the campus males as girlfriend material, but she's one of a tiny handful of girls who is rumoured to have slept with blacks. On one occasion she enters Dinah's room with the news that she's just been all round the residence, interviewing the Verwoerd contingent with the help of a bogus questionnaire. She's told the leader's loyalists that the questionnaire is to do with her social-work finals and that it's essential for her degree work. As a result, she's got the girlies to describe to her their first sexual experience. Lindsay's delighted because one of her poster girls – an upcountry innocent with two flaxen pigtails and tiny pimples for breasts – has offered her a whispered confession to write down anonymously in her files.

‘One day,' the girl has told her, ‘I put two oranges down my blouse to make myself false bosoms.'

Dinah is just a bit squeamish about this, but Lindsay is rolling about with laughter on her floor and Lindsay's laughter is always infectious. She's the life and soul of any female gaggle, but she terrifies all the campus men. Lindsay has a raucous laugh and one of those two-fingered whistles that can carry for miles across valleys.

As to the campus at large for Dinah – well, it's easy enough to make friends, in a way, because there isn't really much choice. What happens is that she's drawn together with four aberrant first-year males – drawn into a satisfying closeness because of the uncongenial racist context which creates their togetherness. So Dinah's new friends are four weirdo men. Weirdo by campus standards. Jed Matthews is a hunk, over six foot six, a sort of beatnik before his time. That's in South Africa, anyway. He's sufficiently dark of skin colour to have the average white-girl student taking suspicious peeks at his fingernails in search of absent half-moons. But Jed has beautiful, ‘u'-shaped fingernails with all his half-moons in place. He's got glinty green eyes and a craggy, villainous look, like the bad guy in a Western movie. Plus he's got two enchantingly ziggy-zaggy chipped upper incisors.