there, which worried me. I’d been on the end of a lot of discipline at my old school in the Transvaal, and none of it had been pleasant. Could things be even worse at the Convent School? Standing on my tippy-toes on the edge of the toilet bowl, I could see the sky full of stars through a blurry, slit-eyed bathroom window that was otherwise too high for anything other than ventilation. I sent silent wishes up to the stars, wishing for a kind teacher, friendly classmates, and, most of all, a friend.
I’d started wishing on the stars when I was eight, wanting my Dad to come home from wherever he’d gone for business trips that seemed to last weeks upon endless weeks. I’d had a spot in our old house, a large window that overlooked the veld from the landing at the top of the stairs. Sitting there, I used to watch the stars break their way through an orange-brown sunset, usually around dinner time. The boys would be downstairs, eager for food, and Mom would be chasing Evelyn along with cries of, ‘The boys are starving, Evelyn! Didn’t I tell you to put dinner on at four? You people, you can’t follow the simplest instructions!’
I’d turned to wishing on the stars for the things I hoped magic could bring my way because reality was something I just couldn’t change—I was too weak, too little, just a girl.
One evening at the old house, engrossed as I was in begging the stars to send Dad home, I made a double mistake: I whispered my wishes out loud. I didn’t hear Simon before he’d bounded up the stairs two at a time. ‘Who’re you talking to, Stinky? Yourself again? God, you’re weird! Mom, Kate’s talking to herself again.’
‘I’m just making a wish, that’s all.’
‘Who’re you wishing to, Stinky? The goddamn veld? You’re mad! Mom, she’s making wishes to the veld, now!’
‘No, I’m not. I’m wishing to the stars. It’s just a wish; I’m not mad.’
‘What stars, idiot? That over there? That’s a streetlamp. Oh, my God, you’re wishing on a street lamp!’
By then Mom had arrived. ‘Didn’t I tell you to wash your hands for dinner? Didn’t I? Then what the hell are you doing, talking to street lamps like a lunatic? What were you wishing for, a brain?’ They were standing so close, pushing me by their presence into the glass of the window, looming over me with sneering looks; if they’d been dogs they would have bitten me.
‘I was just wishing for Daddy,’ I whisper-blurted, with no idea how to defend myself.
‘Wishing for your pathetic father? You seriously think he gives a damn about you?’ Long fingers poked my chest. ‘No-one gives a damn about you! Least of all him. He never wanted you—you’re a useless unwanted little girl, get that through your thick head.’
I was trying to back away from her to escape the confines of glass and bodies. Mom grabbed me by my shoulders. ‘Get away from me! You revolt me; get out of my sight, and you can forget about dinner!’ With that shove I began falling, banging against stairs, crash landing on the tiles below, my head full of stars, like in the cartoons. I could hear Mom shouting at me, ‘Get up, you little actress, stop your attention-seeking and go to your room.’
I guess she and Simon stepped over me to go to dinner. I couldn’t see, felt awfully nauseated, and couldn’t even stand up, let alone walk, so I crawled to my room, grateful to find my bed and rest my head. I lay there, petrified that Mom would come back, petrified by the thudding that knocked against my skull and blind eyes, petrified that I’d vomit in my bed.
Later, Mom woke me, forcing me into my pajamas. For a few days afterward she was calm and smiley, but by then I knew better than to think that Mom had remorse, that she’d done her worst and things could only get better. By then I’d learned to be grateful for a respite from her anger, all the while remaining vigilant against whatever might happen.
I turned from the narrow bathroom window, sighing at the memory. It was stupid to be still calling out to the universe’s magic when it sure hadn’t made any difference to my life so far. Embarrassing hope. Shameful life. Simon’s bathwater lay slumped, murky with soap, shampoo and probably even pee, inert and uninviting. At least it looked deep enough to reach my waistline. I figured it was best to get it over with before my time was up. A quick slide of the bum, balancing myself with one hand and covering my nose with the other, and I was underwater, peaceful, alone, fuzzy curls twirling about my face— ‘Strawberry blonde,’ a nice lady had once said. ‘Mousy,’ Mom had replied. ‘She looks like Annie, from the movie,’ the lady had said. ‘Just a ridiculous number of freckles,’ Mom had countered.
In the bath I closed my eyes and pretended I was dead, daring myself to hold my breath long enough so that I’d faint and never breathe again. I wasn’t brave enough to die, and I was even more afraid of being caught with bathwater higher than my knees—big rule: I was not to have bathwater above my ankles! Mom would inspect at random times, as though she needed reassurance that she was depriving me of something that only the boys deserved. Raising myself from my potential grave, water cascading down my back, gasping for air, I pulled the plug to watch the precious secret water swirl down the drain. Glug! So what if I hadn’t washed? So what If I hadn’t shampooed my hair? Nobody cared, and I’d always be ‘Stinky!’ no matter how much I tried to scrub myself away. Jealousy made my toes curl. Simon was Mom’s favorite child, her angel, Steven her second favorite; she hated me. I felt I hated the boys. Hated them! I hated myself more for not being good enough to love.
Having moved into the new house just before the holidays, I wasn’t familiar with it yet. I didn’t know where the floorboards creaked or whether doors whined. I managed to dash down the hallway to my room without being noticed, blind for the moment it took my eyes to adjust to the murky light of not-quite-dark. Mom was always up on new trends, whether fashion or interior decor— those were the things that mattered most to her, after being thin. My room reflected her taste in modern trends: a black bed; a geometric doona cover; meanwhile, a poster of Barbara Streisand and Robert Redford, two of Mom’s ‘favorites’, had been stuck to the wall above my bed. I’d have preferred David Cassidy, myself. I had a way of passing the time while I tried to hide in silence and invisibility, a way of disappearing into a place where I could do as I pleased, which also mitigated against being busted doing something that might anger Mom. All I needed was a picture. The poster served as well as any other picture from a magazine or book: it became a doorway into another world. I was the one in the red cossie, with the beautiful piled-up hair, whom Robert Redford had just rescued from a freak wave. He was carrying me to my house by the edge of the beach, where he’d build a fire to warm us, and we’d roast marshmallows and think we were the luckiest people in the world! But I couldn’t get into my fantasy; I was on edge. There were too many foreign sounds, no routine yet to judge movements by. Welkom.
Chapter Four
It became fully dark while I sat there, waiting and listening. I could hear Simon in his room—just next door to mine—playing with his Lego, and although his bedroom light spilled out into the hallway and shared itself with mine, his life was a world away from my reality. He mostly avoided me, especially when it was obvious that Mom was mad at me, which was most of the time. I could hear stuff going on in the kitchen, music floating over from Steven’s room. I waited.
Startling light burst over me—Mom was standing in the doorway, finger on the light switch, her favorite way of making an entrance. She loved making me jump with fright or freeze from fear, like an animal caught in headlights of a car. ‘What’s wrong with you, for God’s sake? You’re a freak! Abnormal! What child sits in the dark like a statue?’ She was still wearing a pink tracksuit she’d won in a Fair Lady competition, her car travel outfit, good enough to be seen by total strangers but ‘only low-class women wear tracksuits’ at any other
