tramp the washing in the bath with grated Sunlight while Nora bends and rubs with the green bar of soap uppppp and downnnn the ridged washboard for the tough stains. Then they do one rinse in clean cold water and after that it’s let’s go do the twist with the sheets, Halley holding one end of the wet, twisted rope and Jen the other until most of the water’s been squeezed out.
If there’s really a lot of heavy washing, Nora pays Mrs Volans next door one rand and they borrow her freestanding mangle, which gets the wringing job done more quickly but you have to be careful about crunching the buttons, and anyway Halley gets queasy when the washing comes out stiff and flattened, the people completely wrung out of the clothes.
At Kenneth Gardens, some of the women pretend Nora doesn’t exist. Others make their bodies very flash when she’s nearby, hoping to provoke. Some look at Nora skeef, only their faces goading.
Bladdy Nora Murphy, who walks around with a ruler up her backside and her nose in the air. Mrs High and Mighty. Lady Muck. The hoity-toity walking dictionary! Who the hell is she to talk? A backvelder from Bloemfontein who dirties her gundies just like everyone else. There’s her washing there by everyone else.
A number of the men have made overtures to this remote, attractive divorcée, but she’s spurned them, every one, so she’s obviously a frigid bitch.
Though that hasn’t stopped them from trying. They agree that Nora Murphy must be getting it somewhere, hey, a woman who looks like that. Lucky bastard playing hide the sausage. Two small kids must be a bit of a handful though, don’t you think? When would she get the time? But she must, surely; no way such a hottie could do without.
Nora’s good friends with Aunty Beulah upstairs, and the woman next door. They admire her, what with Mark, who’s done his damndest to drag her down. Maybe she’s hardly got two brass farthings to rub together, like everyone, but Nora’s got good manners, self-reliance, determination. And she’s so good with children, her own and all the others who hang around at 4 Ixia on weekends because there’s sure to be plenty on the go. To top it all, she’s chic. And my, doesn’t she dress her little ones beautifully?
So in this place where people live hard to make up for hardly living, Nora does everything she can to look after her children like a good mother. She loves them. People say she adores them.
But look, if she wants them to be good, she also wishes for them to be happy. Which means between this and that and here and there, all the do’s and don’ts, they make some friends. Which is what they need, being children. And it comes in handy for their working mother too, because she can’t always be watching over them.
Going places. All of them together, their mother and lots of kids. Sheila, Deon, Marnus, Wendy . . . all the way down Francois and far along through to Bayhead, where they spent the day at the mangroves. At low water, the tidal flats emerged in wind-pecked pockets and patches, sand suddenly more extensive than water. A mass of forested shoots fingering up from a glutinous, tarry silt.
The children’s bare, panicked legs were sucked in and stockinged black. Crab colonies, each crab with a carapace daubed a different shade of blue – turquoise, indigo, jacaranda purple – and many wielding one enormous red pincer, either horrible handicap or helpful come-hither. As the children approached, the crabs were pulled in unison into the thousands of puckered holes. And then, after some immobilised minutes in the dappled mangrove shade, they peeked up one two tens hundreds, and the skittish messaging began again.
So many birds. Spoonbills delicately dibbling and dabbling. A peck of mohawked pelicans chuntering down towards the water.
Halley watched her mother’s patient happiness, and thought of her as a grey heron, poised, but with a yarn of hidden gut tangling its toes. She seemed a woman held by a wary caution come too late, yet still spiked with the longing to gulp things whole.
Once, they even spotted an actual flamingo. Just the one, so extraordinarily solitary, although Nora spent long minutes staring into the sky and scanning the scrubby shore.
Ask your father about them, she said sadly to Halley, All the flamingos in the bay when he was small. This is nothing compared to what they were. You didn’t need to know a hawk from a handsaw to realise that.
Which made the other children glance up momentarily from their digging and splashing. At Aunty Nora, and her riddles.
And then she recovered her motherly centre, and pointed very slowly to a tiny wader tipping along the shore. Shhhh. See that one? A little stint. Come all the way from overseas.
Halley could hear that the children were meant to be amazed. By migration and endurance. The incredible distances and accumulated knowledge. But they said nothing, only Marnus, who said Oh.
She herself thought little stint big stunt rig splint wrong shunt, wandering off through the bottomless sound of her mother’s words, hieroglyphic as bird prints upon the sand.
Far worse than Kenneth Gardens, even lower down the scale, was Flamingo Court, the cheap flats on Umbilo Road near the beginning of Bayhead, where the flocks of flamingos were long gone.
The Murphys always hurried past Flamingo Court when they walked that way with their mother, though they had once been inside, past the dank inner well and rubbish-strewn stairs, up into the sour stink of the clunking lift. Because their gran had lived in Flamingo Court for a time. Granny Margery.
With Milton, her youngest son, Granny Margery had been staying in a low, quaint block off the Embankment. Small, but a nice place; a breezy balcony curved over the busy street. But then Uncle Milton got married and moved out and the rent was too much for just one.
So Nora got involved. She didn’t know her mother, or not well; but she couldn’t have her on the streets. Understood that anyone had to live with some decency if she were to think of herself as a person.
And the only solution was a bachelor flat in Flamingo Court. Sight unseen, Nora arranged the move with the council and paid for the truck. And once her mother was in, she and the girls walked down from Kenneth Gardens. But just that once. Because they were so stunned that after they’d spent enough time to be polite they turned around and never went back.
Claustrophobic at the smallness of the flat, the stale smell. Shocked at the state of the lift; the incarcerating steepness of the brick tower built around a stagnant central well that was cut across by bowed, dripping wash-lines.
And horrified by the story. Granny could not keep from crying as she told them of the small child who’d been snatched from the stairs where she played while nanny, stripped to her bra and petticoat, washed herself top-and-tail with lye soap at the servants’ coldwater concrete wash trough.
The barbarism, Granny cried, How could you explain it?
But their mother only said in a choking voice that explanations weren’t necessary when savagery was everywhere.
Turned out the girl had been taken by a neighbour, and after a few days, at a time when he was done and sleeping, his girlfriend had unlocked the door and told the little one to run, fast, find someone at the wash-lines.
And they call themselves white people, Marge cried in disgust as her daughter tried to soothe, though not knowing where and how to touch the other woman’s raw distress.
For her mother, Nora saw, this wasn’t a story but a measure of her own helpless despair. Living was so hard! Could it not be lived in some life better than this?
Even before, Granny’s life had
