time or another. Gracie and Beth fight because one has more space than the other, or one of them got the shady side of the car. Luckily, I’m out of those fights. But then my mother decides it’s tea time, which means it’s my turn to fight – with the flask. I hate this so much. Grown-ups are always wanting tea, and I just can’t understand it. I’ve only been doing it for a short while now, because Mom says I’m only just big enough to work with boiling water. She says I’m so clever, and I’m so good with my hands, and that’s why I get to do this special thing to help her. But I don’t like it one bit. You have to get the mug out – it’s a red enamel one – and then put the tea bag in. Then you have to wrap the mug in a tea towel and hold it between your legs, and fish the flask out of the basket. It’s heavy, and the top takes forever to screw off. Then you pour very, very carefully, and hope the road doesn’t get bumpy. Then it’s the three sugars. And the milk, which is kept in a cooldrink bottle.
Mom is always very worried we’ll get hungry, so she packs stacks of sandwiches in an old Dairymaid ice-cream tub. She makes cheese and tomato, peanut butter and syrup, or apricot jam and coconut sarmies.
It’s a lucky thing Beth has started eating different kinds of food again, otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to have any of this. For a while, she ate only red food. It was all red apples, red jelly babies, tomatoes, toast with strawberry jam, spaghetti with All Gold tomato sauce. In the end she was really jittery, and she could never sit still. The grown-ups were worried about her, and kept trying to make her eat peas and carrots and meat. My mom cried a lot, and then one day she took Beth to the Juicy Lucy in town while I was at school. Mom could only take one of us, because we don’t have money, and the one person had to be Beth because she was sick. So they went to the Juicy Lucy, and in the end Beth couldn’t say no to a waffle with ice cream, bananas and syrup. That’s how she became normal again.
It’s not just the tea. I’m in charge of the sandwiches too. It’s a good thing we have them, because we’re all hungry by the time we pass Somerset West. Especially me, because the sandwich tub sits under my feet. The sarmies are always the first thing we check for when we’re ready to leave. We can’t go off without our padkos.
Mom is always quite nervous when we’re on our way to Gran. She combs her hair too much, paints her nails a pale colour and wears pink lipstick that she never wears at home. She tries on lots of different clothes while she’s packing, so that in the end her room’s a big mess. She struggles with zips and buttons popping off. With the first zip trouble she’ll say, “Oh bugger,” but then later on she screams, “Fuck!” and thumps the floorboards, thinking we can’t hear her. If you peep into the room, you’ll see her sitting on the floor with a red face. And then she packs lots of loose jerseys and things like ponchos. I think it’s because my gran doesn’t like fat people.
But you mustn’t be too thin either.
“Look at this little stick insect!” she always says when she sees Beth, and, staring at me, “Hmm. It’s easy to see that she leaves you to eat every single thing you can find.” Then she gives my mom a dirty look.
“Come with Gran, angel,” she says to Beth, and leads her by the hand to the kitchen where she gets fed leftover roly-poly pudding and farm milk.
Gran doesn’t give me this stuff, because I’m normal, and Gracie’s just a baby. Me and Mom, we need to wait for a meal time to have pudding.
When Gran takes Beth off like this, I go to look at the treasure. It’s not really a treasure, that’s just my name for Gran’s special display cabinet. She’s got lots of beautiful things in there. Things that make my eyes burn from not blinking, things so lovely they make my mouth water. Gran’s favourite is a little statue of a girl with a swan and some flowers. She tells us her mother, our great-grandmother, brought it all the way from England on a ship. We stay away from the cabinet, and never touch, because we’ll get a big, big smack if anything happens. It will be Trouble. But I like to just look.
I think Mom is scared of going to the farm because of Gran, but for me and Beth there’s only really one scary thing about the place, and that’s Uncle André.
* * *
The Consol bottle goes plink-plink-plink as the butterfly tries to escape. Beth has put the bottle up on the dressing table. Because of the mirror, you can see the butterfly from two sides. It’s a black-and-yellow one. After a while she just sits in one spot, opening and closing her wings. Gran wants Beth to let it go, but she won’t listen.
“You’re making the Butterfly Queen very angry,” Gran says in the dark that night. The door is open a crack, and there’s a wedge of yellow light behind her, but Gran is just a voice coming out of a big, black statue. We say nothing.
“Beth, listen, you need to let this creature go.”
Beth sighs. “But why, Gran?”
“I told you. The Butterfly Queen. She’s seen that you’ve hurt one of her little ones. Did you see that she’s lost one of her legs?”
We are both dead quiet.
“Beth, I’m warning you, if you don’t let that butterfly go, the Queen will come in the night, and pull off one of your legs, like you did to this innocent butterfly. It’s your decision, so live with the consequences.”
The door creaks shut.
Beth whispers to me, “Lily, do you think it will really happen?”
“I don’t know. But what are we going to do if you only have one leg?”
We lie and think about it. After a while, Beth throws off her covers, grabs the bottle, and tiptoes past Uncle André’s room. I don’t hear her coming back, but the next morning she wakes up in a wet bed, for the first time we can remember. We know Gran will be cross, so we take the sheets to Gesiena and beg her not to say anything.
Chapter 6
1988
Chapter 6
Jane’s house is more fun than mine. Jane is my friend, and we’ve been in the same class always. Her mom always brings us tea and biscuits. Also, she has three Barbies and four My Little Ponies.
Since I stopped playing with Faye from down the road, Jane is my best friend. When Faye still lived close by, I often played at her house after school. But the problem with her was that she was a champion sulker. If she couldn’t be the princess, or we were playing the wrong game, or I wouldn’t share my money with her, she’d stop talking to me and stare into a corner with her arms folded. Or, sometimes, she’d start crying. That was the worst, and it was very boring to play her games or give her my stuff all the time.
In the winter holiday last year, when we were in sub A, Faye went away to visit people, and that’s when Jane and I started playing together. Jane’s house is a train ride and a short drive away from mine, or else just a longish drive. There’s another school close to where she lives, but her mom used to be a teacher at Kalk Bay, so that’s how come she goes to school there with me.
The house is big, with high ceilings. Jane says it’s a Victorian. There aren’t that many Victorian houses in Plumstead, Jane says, but her house is actually in Timour Hall, which is almost Plumstead, but much better. It’s painted beige with white icing. The ceilings are so far above your head it feels like you could breathe clouds into them. But the floorboards creak like mad, so there’s no such thing as sneaking around at Jane’s house. The garden is big with good hiding places behind plants, and a Wendy house at
