hand slips and she paints her skin.
“Damn,” says Beth.
“Get out of here!” shouts Mom, so we do.
Laetitia goes to Annabelle’s house after work sometimes. We see her taking off her doek and uniform, and she laughs with Annabelle and dances to the jazz. I’ve never seen anything like it. She calls Annabelle by her name and drinks coffee out of proper mugs, not an enamel one that gets kept under the sink. We see this as we peep through the window, but it’s our secret. Not even Beth will tell Gran, because then our chances of seeing the crystal ball will be ruined forever.
* * *
I love my room, with its little round window. On the other side is a big window, from where I can see a tree, with birds hopping around in the branches. The little window is my secret friend. I feel like it lets me see things that other people can’t, because it looks like a peephole, and it’s high up, where no other window would be. I have to push a chair up against the wall to look out of it properly, but sometimes at night I lie in bed and look at the stars until I fall asleep.
On Gran’s farm, the stars are much brighter. The sky doesn’t look foggy at night, like it does at home. We visit Gran and Grampa at Easter time, and sometimes over school holidays.
Grampa is very old, but still likes to farm. He cuts his beard short, and it makes him look like he’s always smiling. He walks around with that smiley look, but the way he pushes his hips forward makes his skinny bottom look even flatter. His bony shoulders look bonier because he pulls them up, with his neck sunk into his body.
Sometimes soup lands in his beard, and then Gran says, “Hendrik!” and Grampa smiles and pretends he can’t find his serviette until Gran says, “For heaven’s sakes!” and sticks her head under the table. But, once, Gran told Gesiena to crawl under the table to find it, and that was the last time Grampa lost his serviette. Now he feeds scraps of food to Pietertjie the sausage dog and sometimes slips up when he says grace.
He’s always doing funny things like that. One time in church they were saying a thing called the Creed, and instead of saying that Jesus sits at the right hand of God, he said by mistake that Jesus was sitting at the right hand of Pontius Pilate. This made him laugh for the rest of the service, only he had to pretend that he wasn’t laughing, because of all the people, and because of Gran, who fed him a Halls to calm him down.
“Ooh, the old madam gave me a fishy eye,” he says, and winks at me. Gran isn’t allowed to know that he calls her the madam.
Grampa snores very loudly. Gran even has to wear earplugs to bed.
“Nothing will wake that man,” she complains. “He snores like a tractor, yet gets a peaceful night’s rest, night after night.” She shakes her head. “And the way he eats!”
Once she’s started with her list of Things, you know you’re going to be listening for a while.
“Seconds for him, every night, and the pudding!”
Gran doesn’t approve of Grampa, because she doesn’t really like anyone to enjoy themselves too much.
The other problem with Grampa is his language. He uses some terrible words, and Gran doesn’t like that one bit. She doesn’t say anything when he does it, but then afterwards she talks about it. So when he swears, we watch Gran, and she looks at us with big eyes and a tight mouth, and she closes her fists in a “You see what I’m talking about!” kind of way. There’s one dreadful word that Grampa uses, that Gran never even notices. He says it a lot, and Mom has told us it’s such a terrible word, we must never ever say it. It’s the k-word. Beth wanted to know from Mom if it’s worse than fuck, and Mom said, yes, definitely, but never say that either.
* * *
Today Grampa is wearing wellies because it’s raining, but usually he farms in funny-looking shoes he calls brogues. He polishes them with brown Nugget every day. He also has newer ones for town and church. The neighbours laugh at Grampa’s shoes. They say it’s an English affectation of his wife’s, but Gran really doesn’t care what Grampa has on his feet, as long as they can be wiped clean on a doormat.
At bedtime, Grampa gives us a hug. His beard has a soft scratch to it, like dry leaves. It smells like coffee and chocolate. Some people say his beard makes him look like the Duke of Kent, but he says no, the Duke looks like a Scottish terrier, so he doesn’t think so.
Sometimes Grampa sneaks up on us, but it’s always a joke. “Oh-ho-ho, you’re your mother’s child,” he says to me when he finds me with my hand in the biscuit tin. And then he pours me a glass of milk to go with my biscuit. It’s thick and creamy, straight from the cow. We sit down together, me with my biscuit and milk, him with his black, sludgy coffee that looks like tar and tastes as bitter as aloes, and he tells me stories about the farm and its people. Sometimes Beth finds us in the kitchen, and then Grampa offers her a chair, a snack and a drink, and then we both listen.
Grampa loves this land of round hills and small dams. He says his roots are stuck in it, same as the blue gum tree’s roots. And the blue gum didn’t start off here, either.
Grampa tells us why his father moved here almost a hundred years ago. “The sheep, they vrekked one after the other,” he explains. “It’s a difficult life when you can’t feed your animals. Because then you can’t feed your family either.” He sucks on his pipe.
“In our family, we know about starvation,” he says. “When your greatuncle Abie got back from the war” – and here we pull faces, because we know what’s coming, but pretend we’ve never heard it before – “he was so hungry from starving all over North Africa and Italy that the first thing he did when he got home, was eat.”
That doesn’t sound too bad, but wait –
“Your great-granny prepared a feast of boerekos. Roast lamb, potatoes, sweet pumpkin and rice. And old Abie put away most of the roast in one sitting, and died three days later because his body couldn’t handle food any more.”
“Least of all, Great-grandmother’s food!” we finish the story.
“But shhh, don’t tell. The rest of the district thinks he’s a war hero, died in a POW camp,” and with this comes the wink, and of course Beth and I love this. Because secrets are fun.
This isn’t the only secret in our family. There’s also the story of Grampa’s other brother, Uncle Klaas. But this is not a story we hear from Grampa. This is a story that comes from picking up stompies. The problem with Uncle Klaas, they say, is that his voël was so itchy. Then, one day, they found him behind a stone wall, consorting with a man called Skaap, which was like breaking two of God’s laws in one, and then Uncle Klaas had to go away. He went to Australia, because everyone knows that’s where heathens go. I don’t know what a voël is, but obviously it causes lots of problems, and I can only hope I don’t have one of my own.
* * *
It’s mainly because of Grampa that I like going to the farm. But getting there isn’t so much fun. In summer it gets so hot in my mom’s Beetle that the seats stink, and my legs sweat against them. Beth has a weak stomach, so sometimes the smell and the twisty road make her want to throw up. This usually happens on Sir Lowry’s Pass, where you can’t really stop, and then my mom shouts at me to open Beth’s window, which is hard to do because I’m strapped in at the front seat, and Beth is in the back. I have to hang all the way over my seat like a jolly monkey, and usually I have to unclip my
