would have been her grandfather if she’d ever known him, had been a mean, tight-fisted Irishman. Which wasn’t how she’d imagined the Irish at all. Not with all the saints and four-leafed clovers and leprechauns, all that beautiful green.
Story had it that Joseph Alexander Hoare was a dour, miserly government storeman. Each skinflint morning before work, he instructed his wife to furnish him his fill from the food in the kitchen, then he keyed the cupboards against the growing horde of canny, hollow-eyed thieves. They weren’t all his, and that was explanation enough.
Nothing was apportioned children, not even words. Not: No food until dinner. Or: There is not enough.
Just a wordless, methodical slicing, issued to himself, followed by spread, eat, lock, pack and leave, jangling his way to work past the tight clutch of children’s faces.
Every day.
Every day he left his wife with the surd of hunger somehow to appease, though her options were so limited.
And never any privacy for what she had to do either; always the waiting, watching children, their thin-chinned faces shaped like hers and, like hers, begging for some small remit.
So Granny Margery’d had more than a tough time of it, and nothing was about to change with Flamingo Court. She’d just got there, those flats, but she had to get away. A person could not live like that, she cried. Everything about Flamingo Court was wrong. It was depressing.
And much of it was true, for Margery, who was trapped there for a long time, however much she loathed the place.
It was too isolated! Granny hurled the angry accusation at Nora. The dark passages were unsafe. The whole block was a haven for the poor-white criminal element. She’d been accosted in the lift by skollies with knives. The lift was always out of order, her legs couldn’t manage all those steps. Even, it was too far from town.
And didn’t Nora appreciate, she accused indignantly, that a month’s return bus fare into the city cost more than she was saving by living there?
For Nora, her mother’s relentless jeremiad cast her own scorched daughterly love out of the frying pan, and she had to suppress the truth of Flamingo Court in order to think better of herself and her well-intentioned efforts.
And as for Halley and Jen. Their relief at walking away from inside that terrible block was vertiginous: momentarily, they saw themselves as occupying the heights of glowing good fortune, and the brute fact of Flamingo Court became spliced into their sistered silence, part of the splitpole belief that the worst, at least, had not happened to them.
Down below the Ridge
They don’t see many of their relatives, the Murphy girls, which may seem odd since their mother is from a family of thirteen. But they were all split up, so they don’t feel like family, and it’s only Aunty Agnes in Vanderbijl for the holidays sometimes, and Uncle Milton, who’s in Durban but all messed up because his wife ran off with his best friend, and then Granny, that time.
When it comes to the relatives on their father’s side, well, they do see some, mainly Nana, but their mother doesn’t like it. Doesn’t like them. Not his scheming brothers, always on the take, and not even nice Aunty Elda, who’s Nana’s much younger sister.
But Halley is fascinated by how sisters can be so different. Both women are smart and good-looking, so that’s a close match, although Elda has an exotic, sexy rumple. Louche, you could say, as Nora does when speaking of her, compared with the refined appearance and manners of Felicity. Olive-toned Brazil against rosy England. Worlds apart.
Elda isn’t even close to a granny, though of course nor is Felicity, because she’s Nana. Nana does the books in the back rooms for some business in Berea Road near the Tech College, but Elda is a saleslady at the Christian Dior counter in Stuttafords. Ah, non, vendeuse, she corrects, tweezered, pencilled eyebrows raised ironically. So Elda works in the store. For the fragrance house. Which ought to give you some idea of how glam she is. Stand-out stylish.
Elda and Byron (her good-for-nothing husband, quote) have a low house leafed into the bushy folds down back of the Berea ridge, the maze of lanes behind Entabeni Hospital. Always, though she doesn’t have the word, Halley pictures this space using hachures, the contour lines on a map showing the steepness of a hill. The closer together, the more intensely precipitous.
It is here that Halley and Jen’s father sometimes takes his daughters during his visits, since he has to take them somewhere for a couple of hours, and not too far, as there’s always somewhere else he has to be quite soon.
Gotta see a man about a dog, he said to Halley once, and she misunderstood, and got all excited, thinking about her dream puppy.
The girls love it off the Ridge, the kaleidoscope of house and garden and casual cousins, though Nora’s worried, and always asks dryly after Aunty Elda’s talons. Still so long, I presume? And what shade of scarlet this time? A tone of brutal amusement.
Nora knows about these people, make no mistake; she’s been trying to disentangle her life from theirs since the day, more fool her, that she agreed against her better judgement to go through with the marriage to Felicity’s middle son. Even now, unhitched, she’s battling with the ties that bind.
Halley is still too young, too in love with her father, to share her mother’s prejudice. But she is also unable to reconcile Nana’s elegance with the rougher, more working-class qualities of her sons. You never see a crumb on Nana’s tailored dresses, never mind a crease. Nana, everyone has to agree, has class.
About her husband, though, Halley didn’t know, since Grandpa Murphy was long dead.
What she’s picked up, little scavenged pieces, is that he had a wild temper and a liking for drink. Was a philanderer involved in whaling. Which seems far too little to make a person real.
Why does she remember some snippet about Grandfather Murphy sozzled and trying to row back to the whaling boat when it had left port without him? Never a clock-watcher at the best of times, he’d been particularly unmindful of the time that day, being otherwise engaged at an establishment in Point Road called Smugglers’ Inn. Which Halley thought would be an exciting Famous Five adventure at Pirate’s Cove, but really it was only a smelly men’s bar.
She knows places like that, because they’ve walked past on their way to the beachfront. A bar always had swing doors, split into two stiff, varnished wooden wings like a cockroach exoskeleton. Behind, you sensed a sharp clinking, softened by a darkened hum. If a man came out as you were passing, it was always the same white man, his face doughy, nose large and red. Then Nora pushed the children ahead on the pavement, hurrying along. But she couldn’t hide the smell, or the sign. It said Kroeg. Which was crook and spoeg, so you knew exactly what kind of man it was.
Her unknown grandfather Halley tries to imagine as a man in a hurry launching a rowing boat out of his sloshing headache into the open sea. She can’t think from where, since every point along the wavering sand and stumbling, rocky shore seems as improbable as the next. She’s sure he tried hard, her grandfather, made a sterling effort as men were supposed to, but tugging at the awkward oars she sees him so poegaai he’s unable to scull, so he’s soon swamped and topsy-turvy under he goes to his watery grave.
Halley, her mother says, sick to death of questions she cannot answer, Give it up! Forget about him. He was nothing. Certainly nothing to you, my girl. Though she thought how Mark’s father was a sponge and an old soak.
Your
