Frankie and Stankie (46 page)

Lisa is in a rosy mood because she's a girl in love. She's met a young industrial chemist who has bought her an engagement ring with lots of little diamonds around a central stone. They're planning a wedding in the Old Fort Chapel in Durban. The wedding reception is going to be in the Edward Hotel on the beachfront, because Lisa likes things done properly. Dinah's been signed up to be her bridesmaid and she knows what she's going to be wearing. A pale pistachio-green Thai silk suit with high-heeled shoes to match. But now Dinah's turned into a red-eyed heap. She can't see how she'll ever be Lisa's sweet and smiley bridesmaid. She'll be the thirteenth fairy at the feast, casting gloom and noxious mists. She's an unwanted, unhappy jilted woman. Soiled goods. Second-hand merchandise.

And right now she's feeling all at sea. She's spent three years clinging like a limpet to a man who she's known, in her heart, was all wrong. She's gone against her instincts. Yet now that he's
sensibly rejected her and saved her from her own stupid, spineless self, she can't seem to feel that she's been liberated. All she can feel is fear. She's worried that she might have no idea who she is any more, because, for years now, she's been defining herself through her connection with Didi von Schweiten and now that connection's not there. At sunrise she wakes up, aching and shivering, to find that her head is crammed between the bath and the wash-basin pedestal. So she must have fallen asleep. She gets up and creeps back into Lisa's room and gropes for a cardigan. Then, once Lisa has gone off to her lectures, Dinah gets back into Lisa's bed and sleeps until midday. After that she tries phoning Sam, but he's been away from his parents' house since early morning, she's told.

Sam, having called for her at Didi's flat and got no answer, has found himself on the loose in Johannesburg and he's gone off to visit a friend. It's no longer all that easy for him to find friends whom he can visit. More and more they've fled into exile. Or they're in hiding. Or they're in prison. Or else they'll be under surveillance and he's determined to play it safe. So he's gone to visit an architect friend, an architect and man-about-town. The friend is called Arthur Goldreich and, with his wife, he's recently bought a farmhouse in an affluent white suburb on the edge of Johannesburg. The suburb is called Rivonia and the farm is called Lilliesleaf.

‘Come and see us,' Arthur has said the last time Sam ran into him.

At the farm Sam's greeted warmly, but in spite of this, he doesn't stay long. By mid-afternoon he's back and ready to meet up with Dinah after all. Both of them are in sombre mood, though they try a visit to the cinema where Dinah can cry in the dark. He doesn't say anything about his morning's visit. But quite a long time later – once there's really no point in keeping quiet – he talks out the unease he felt that washed over him at the time.

‘Well, I knew there was something going on,' he says. ‘Because Joe Slovo was visiting Arthur as well. But instead of sticking in the living room with us, he spent all his time out the back.'

And by this time the whole nation knows that ‘out the back' is where the secret police have staged their triumphant coup. They've uncovered the entire ANC high command in an outhouse at Lilliesleaf Farm. That's except for Nelson Mandela, who's been arrested several months earlier, while working in disguise as a
chauffeur, for a white actor friend. The police have done their work well. They've infiltrated a young German spy, who is currently courting the daughter of one of the ANC's men. The national mood is triumphalist and the state can't seem to stop crowing. Everyone knows that the captured men will probably get the death sentence. And, for anyone wanting change in South Africa, it's the blackest day they can remember.

But normal life carries on. So, one day Sam is opening a parcel, an unsolicited parcel. It's come addressed to him at the university and a colleague is standing by his elbow alongside the pigeon-holes. The parcel contains inflammatory leaflets of the sort that can get you a five-year prison sentence. They've been sent by a freelance freedom fighter from the safety of a bedsit in Kilburn, or Camden Town, and they've come with an accompanying letter which is asking Sam to pass the leaflets on. He's being asked to hand them over to a high-profile human-rights activist, a person under constant surveillance. Sam reckons the human-rights activist is hardly likely to welcome unsolicited calls from north-west London to embark upon instant revolution. So he proceeds to the gentlemen's toilets where he shreds the leaflets and the letter. Then, with no small difficulty, he flushes the whole lot down the U-bend. Within two weeks, the Special Branch have hauled Sam in for questioning.

‘Did you receive a parcel from England containing leaflets?' they say.

‘Yes,' Sam says, after a moment's hesitation. ‘Yes, I did.'

He has his little mantra. Never tell them what they don't know already; never get caught telling lies.

‘Well, it's good you told us that,' they say, ‘because we already know you did and we've got a warrant to search your property.' The Special Branch man knows that Sam knows that he doesn't any longer need a warrant. ‘And what have you done with the contents?' he says.

‘I flushed it down the lavatory,' Sam says.

‘Now why did you do that?' he says.

‘I wanted nothing to do with it,' Sam says. ‘I wanted to get rid of it.'

‘So was there a letter with the parcel?' he says. ‘I didn't see any letter,' Sam says. ‘I didn't stop to look. I was in too much of a hurry.'

‘Why were you in such a hurry?' says the Special Branch man.

‘I wanted nothing to do with it,' Sam says again. ‘That's why I flushed it away.'

‘So what was the name on that letter?' says the policeman. ‘You must have seen a name?'

The name is flashing inside Sam's brain. ‘Sorry,' he says. ‘I saw no letter.'

‘You might as well tell us, because we know about it already,' the Special Branch man says.

‘Sorry,' Sam says. ‘I saw no letter.'

And so it goes. Round and round. For hours. Finally they believe him.

‘We'll be watching you,' they say.

These days, whenever Sam's doorbell rings at night, he's never sure whether it's the Special Branch, or a person on the run saying hide me. Meanwhile, Dinah, at exactly this moment, is in the middle of writing a final-year essay on Conrad's
Under Western Eyes –
in which Razumov is having his life ruined by a late-night knock at the door. A fellow student is on the run from the Tsar's secret police. Sam's not a sleeper at the best of times, but now he's lying awake at night, waiting for the doorbell to ring. And the doctor's given him some sleeping pills that are having a curious effect. Before he drops off into dreamless sleep, Dinah's noticed that Sam flowers into a stream of verbal fluency, during which he talks out whole nonstop novels of small-town Jewish life. So Dinah knows all about Mr Lubovitz from the men's outfitter's in Krugersdorp, whose wife thinks he's tight-fisted and whose daughter has gone to the bad. She knows about the two Jewish families who jointly own the wet-fish shop that has a deli counter on the side. The families are no longer on speaking terms and rely for all communication on their go-between, their black delivery man, who by now is fluent in Yiddish. Dinah knows about the Mayor of Krugersdorp whom Sam's dad calls Transvaal. This is because he always tells lies that are as big as the Transvaal. She knows that Mr Dupe is the next-door neighbour in Blikkies and that he once threw a rock at Sam's dog Cheeky when Sam was three years old. Mr Dupe was trying to teach Cheeky not to chase after bicycles, but Sam's response was to pick up a rock and throw it at Mr Dupe. Mr Dupe is pleased about this
and he tells Sam that he's plucky. His real name is Mr du Plessis. He was the South African pole-vaulting champion in 1936 and he's been to the Berlin Olympics.

Dinah is witness to Sam's new verbal flow, because she's recently moved in with him. She's had a fall-out with her dad and the cause is Liesl Mainz. Liesl has organised a twenty-first birthday party for her son and Dinah's gone along to it with Sam and Jed. But the party, having been rigorously stage-managed by Peter's mother, is full to capacity with Durban's middle-aged German business community, along with a stalwart but outnumbered smattering of Peter's various friends. Dinah's parents are there as well. Plus Liesl is parading one of her periodic itinerant protégés, a backpacking Freiburg medical student, by name, Karl-Heinz Schultz. And the prétége has brought along a squeezebox. Liesl always likes young people to do recitations in public – or virtuoso sequences of one kind or another – but while Peter's friends have dived for cover in the recesses of the garden, Karl-Heinz Schultz seems more than willing to oblige his hostess in this respect. So Liesl has clapped her hands for silence and has given her protégé the floor.

‘I zing for you now,
ein
zong in zixteen lank-vitches,' the protégé says.

These fatal words are scarcely out before something clicks between Sam, Jed and Dinah. They all three start to vibrate with laughter and they are very soon uncontrollable. The party being mainly al fresco, the three are seated on a grassy bank, half hidden by the merciful darkness. The song is a constant repetition of one line: ‘Everybody loves Saturday night.' The line is sung, four times over, in each of several languages. Plus the audience is being encouraged to sing along with the chorus. So it's very soon like a sort of multilingual Bouncing Ball and the middle-aged German business persons are heartily singing along.

By the time the protégé has done it in French, Spanish and Italian, the trio are whooping and snorting out loud and they're having to use their shirt-tails and skirts to wipe away tears of joy. By the time he's doing it in Afrikaans and Zulu, they have all three rolled down the grassy bank, balled up like hedgehogs. And each has a fist stuffed into his mouth. Then Sam is nudging the other two.

‘Let's go,' he's hissing frantically. ‘Let's disappear, for God's sake.'

So they creep around the side of the house and out through the gate into the road where the beetle is waiting for them. The strains of the protégé launching into Swahili are filling their ears as they depart. Then, gradually, their seizures die away and their stomachs cease to ache. Sam knows about a late-night café, run by the Indian comrades. It's a sort of mixed-race greasy spoon, where they'll do you some cheap curry and rice. So it's while they're eating their plates of curry that a tortoiseshell cat with lactating nipples lures them out into the yard where she's got a litter of kittens. In a cardboard box – awaiting adoption or drowning – are four kitsch greeting-card puffballs. Two are palest creamy orange and two have panda patches.

‘You like to have some cats?' says the comrade.

So Sam and Dinah take the two orange ones and, by the time they've reached Sam's place, the kittens have both got names. They are called Mattie and Bart. Then Sam drives Dinah home where, having preceded her parents to the house, she goes straight to bed and sleeps.

Next morning, at breakfast, her dad is incandescent. He hauls her into his study and starts tearing a strip off her. Liesl Mainz has been on the phone and she's very hurt, he says. Dinah's offended old family friends who don't deserve to be the object of her displays of sneery contempt. And who, pray, does she think she is? Little Miss Too-Clever-By-Half? She and her duo of swaggering friends who think themselves a cut above? Liesl Mainz is a decent sort who deserves better than to have her party ruined by a silly snobby adolescent who isn't yet fit to understand that the middle class is the salt of the earth. Dinah even sort of knows that some of what he says is true. But she also knows that the song was a scream and to laugh at it was bliss. Besides, she has no techniques for meeting her dad halfway. So she opts for defiance instead.

‘I thought it was supposed to be Peter's party,' she says. ‘Wasn't that the whole point?'

She refuses point blank to phone and apologise, or to write a letter. Instead she flounces out in tears and runs off down the road in her little white shorts and sandals. She runs past the Cleggs' tearoom and general store; past the bus stop and past the old Manor House where Jenny's parents live. She runs past the convent hospital and all the way to Sam's doorstep. Sam knows that it's just
before her final exams and he's nice about taking her in, even though it's a bit embarrassing for him, given that she's still one of the students and fraternising isn't quite done. So Dinah sleeps on a spare divan in the glassed-in sub-section of Sam's upstairs verandah, from which vantage point she watches the two orange puff-balls tap dancing on the old wooden floorboards. And every night she's lulled to sleep by the complex scrabble of the pigeons' feet, who've taken up residence in Sam's steeply pitched Edwardian roof space.

Dinah loves Sam's flat. It's the whole top floor of a detached colonial house with an upstairs wooden verandah and huge, low sash windows. There's nothing much in the flat to speak of, except for Sam's clothes and papers and books which he keeps all over the floor. He got one auction-sale chaise-longue with the horsehair falling out the bottom and one capacious wing armchair with a baggy grass-green loose cover that she thinks might be made of Astro-turf. In the kitchen there's a double-fronted Queen Anne cooking stove that comes in mottled blue enamel. It's got mottled enamel cabriole legs and it gives off mild electric shocks unless you approach it sideways. The fridge makes the kind of rackety din that speaks to Dinah of goblin people hammering to get out. Then there's Sam's large unmade bed.

The bed is unmade because Sam can't make beds. He can't seem to fit a pillowcase with the corners to fit the corners, so the side seams run across the face of the pillow with the corners jutting like prick ears. He has a problem with distinguishing longways from crossways when it comes to a fitted sheet. So there's plenty of tuck-in room at each side, but the length can be missing two feet. Sam fits plugs to electrical appliances with a fine disregard for the cord grips, so the flexes work themselves loose. She's noticed that bills and necessary papers don't stay on their spikes for Sam. They like to abscond into oblivion. Inanimate objects are menacing to Sam. They always like to play lost. So one day, when Dinah comes to call for him in his room at the university, she finds him shifting his tottering piles of books in a major excavation project. The books have mostly come to him courtesy of Blackwell's overseas mailing department.