could play the daughter, thought Pia, the poor little girl hoping against hope for a Christmas present. She would take the plum role of the troll father herself. His emotions would be anguish at not being able to afford a present, then inspiration as he touched the piece of wood, followed by industry and smaller bursts of inspiration as each problem posed by the project found its solution. Hair? Sheep’s wool!
“Shall I make us some lunch now?” Curtis’s voice seemed far away.
“Maybe I should wait for my mom to come back.”
“She’s probably treating Granny to something in Simon’s Town.”
Pia sat beside Curtis at the kitchen table and watched him make sandwiches. He wore jeans and sandals and his sleeves were rolled. She didn’t tell her school friends that her mother’s boyfriend was sixty years old because for them sixty was, like, dead. Curtis looked forty-nine, so why should she correct that impression?
He did not cut the crusts off as her mother did. He did not ask, “What would you like on your sandwich?” He made one cheese-and-tomato sandwich and one avocado sandwich and gave her one half of each. He did not treat the kitchen sloppily, as Mr Morland did. He cut the bread and grated the cheese on a wooden board. When the sandwiches were safely on their plates, he scraped the crumbs off into the bin and everything was tidy again, quick as a conjurer. She could not imagine him making a mistake, which is why his crooked middle finger with its missing nail fascinated her.
“Tell me again what your dad said after you stopped to help the puff adder out of the road.”
Curtis swelled his chest as he got into character: “Damn fool boy – don’t you have the sense you were born with? What damn fool plays Good Samaritan to a venomous damn snake?”
“But then he drove you very fast to hospital.”
“He had to or I would’ve lost my hand.”
There were men who fixed things, who made sandwiches, who helped puff adders and drove trucks very fast to hospitals. Then there was her dad.
“Your father phoned earlier,” said Curtis. “He’s coming around at three to take you riding in Hout Bay. Is that okay?”
She looked out of the kitchen door. Starlings were fighting on the tin rooftops of the outbuildings, their claws scratchy as scuttling rats, and their voices squawking with warnings to their enemies. She wished her mom were there to bang on the roof with the broom and make them go away.
Everything felt unstable when she was with her dad. Why did they always have to go somewhere, when she would have preferred to stay somewhere known? She hated meeting new adults – and even more, new children. They visited people who shrieked with delight to see her dad. She’d be sent off to a curtain-darkened TV room strewn with other children’s toys she felt too shy to touch, even though they called to her. It was agony to leave the staring eyes on the floor when she could have given them histories, homes, accents and above all, hope. Some of the children in the room belonged to the house, which only made them more hostile towards newcomers like her. The adults would stand there for a while, talking about them all as if they were animals in a zoo. Then there was the heart-stopping moment when their parents left them alone together, strangers, with instructions to “play”. She never knew when she would be taken home. At these times, she thought intensely about her mother. Perhaps her mother would come to find her, she’d thought when she was much younger. The adults drank and laughed and only started making lunch at three or four in the afternoon. Once she’d been offered stinky cheese to eat. That was bad enough. But then her dad also wore odd clothes. She dreaded summer for his sleeveless vests. Worse still, he wore a Speedo to swim in when everyone knew that grown-up men should wear baggies. Sometimes one of the strange children would be bold enough to ask, “Why does your dad dress like that? He looks weird.” To survive in the mean streets of childhood you needed a pretty mother and a normal father. She only had the one.
But the riding lessons were okay. Not at first, when Leroy had tried to learn how to ride too. Her wild, jokey father on horseback, joining a class full of twelve- or thirteen-year-olds – she’d felt utterly humiliated. Luckily he’d grown out of that phase, and during the lesson sat on a bench watching her and answering his cellphone. He said riding hurt his balls, “But then maybe that’s because I don’t wear underpants.” She’d looked around to make sure no one heard that. She liked to see him sitting on a shady bench looking ordinary in a long-sleeved shirt. He didn’t always wear a funny hat. In winter he could pass for normal. And the horses themselves – she loved them. When you were on a horse, you shared the horse’s strength and the horse’s stature. There was one called Campari, with a slightly tipsy walk.
“Can you tell my dad that I have to be back for supper?” she asked.
“Your mother should really make that call,” Curtis replied. “But if she’s not around, I’ll try to do it diplomatically.” They all treated Leroy’s temper like an unexploded bomb.
Pia felt reassured. If Curtis would police her father then everything would be fine. If one of the other girls didn’t get there first, she could ride Campari and be back in time for supper. Pia was studying a large butternut in the vegetable bowl. It looked fleshy and bald, like a lot of babies she’d seen.
“Could I borrow the butternut?”
If she wrapped the butternut in her old baby blanket – that might work.
Curtis picked up the butternut and turned it round in his hands. “I could draw a waking, crying face on this side, and a sleeping face on the other side,” he guessed.
Pia brought him the ballpoint pen from the shopping list. She liked the way he read her mind. When he had drawn the faces, she wrapped the vegetable in a dishcloth to show him how good it was.
“Just think: it cost less than ten rand and we can peel it and eat it afterwards,” said Curtis.
“No one’s going to peel this here child of mine!” said Pia with a passable American twang.
Don’t give in to your child’s wheedling for new “stuff”. Children hanker after new toys in garish packaging. Esther remembers Percy’s despondency one Christmas when it seemed that all the young boys of the Southern Peninsula had been given battery-operated tin and plastic boats. As we walked on the beach after Christmas lunch, we passed one and then another and another little boy gleefully holding his motorboat. A high tide had left a shallow lagoon on the Clovelly end of the beach, ideal for sailing. Esther and I collected bits of flotsam and put together a marvellous boat from a small plank lashed to bamboo stalks, with a cuttlefish for a life raft. Soon Percy was running along the water’s edge, shouting “Check this!” Children who are given realistic toys fail in one of life’s most important lessons: how to imagine the real.
Alerted by Bella’s bark, Curtis went out to help Zoe. Margot’s mother looked bleached with exhaustion. Her legs were weak, but there was strength in the hands that grasped the railing on one side and her walking stick on the other. Once inside, he helped her onto the chaise longue and brought her a light blanket.
“I feel like death,” said Zoe. “Could I have one of my not-minding pills?”
“You have that in the evening, Ma,” said Margot. “But perhaps we can give you something homeopathic now.”
Pia brought the Rescue Remedy. She sat in the chair beside her grandmother, nursing her new baby butternut. “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word,” she sang. Zoe accepted the pill and closed her eyes.
“Are
