cheap wooden table, grey with age, under the window. Wire mesh against mosquitoes in front of the window. And bars behind the mesh, even though the room was on the second floor.
Slowly I’d sat down on my bed and stared at my knees under my new grey school uniform as if they belonged to someone else. Golden brown legs after a holiday at the sea.
My mother suppressed a sigh and sat down on the other bed in the room. I hadn’t wanted to look at her, afraid that I would start crying. Or even worse, that she would cry.
‘Only three days,’ she’d said in a thin, unfamiliar voice, ‘then it’s the weekend.’
I looked away, through the mesh in front of the window, to where orange flames burned in a tree. I didn’t know what kind of tree it was. Where I came from, trees behaved in a dignified manner, green in summer, bare in winter. Oak trees, weeping willows, fig trees. Not gaudy pink and purple and orange like the frangipani and the jacaranda and the tree-with-flames in this hot, feverish country.
But now we had come to live in the Lowveld because my father had made a mint with one of his schemes and for the first time had been able to afford a small farm. Because he wanted to play at being a farmer even though he was an attorney. Because he’d seen too many cowboy movies, as my mother had mumbled when she’d heard of this plan. Because he saw himself as a pioneer in the Wild West.
The idea was that my mother would run the small banana farm while my father and a few partners developed a kind of health farm in the vicinity. A place where wealthy people could stay when they wanted to stop smoking or drinking or to lose weight or simply to rid themselves of aches and pains. Stupid, I thought, like all my father’s schemes. To expect adults to pay large sums of money to stay in a glamorous concentration camp! To get a bowl of lettuce for lunch and do PT three times a day!
And it was as a result of this fantastic idea that I, at almost sixteen, was sitting in a hostel room for the first time in my life. A few years before, when I was still reading the Afrikaans version of Angela Brazil’s books, I wouldn’t have minded. There was a time, not too long ago, when stealthy midnight feasts and silly pillow-fights sounded more fun than the wildest party in the darkest of garages. There was a time when I could eat tins of boiled condensed milk down to the last lick without worrying about whether my jeans would still fit me.
Now I felt too old.
‘Well, I suppose I have to go.’ My mother’s face was shiny with perspiration. This was her first acquaintance as well with the greyness of a hostel room. She looked at me as if she would never see me again. ‘Your father’s waiting in the car and it’s hot.’
He was the one who wanted to come and live here, I thought.
‘Will you manage the unpacking?’
She looked at the new nylon suitcase on the floor. Grey – as though we’d had a premonition when we’d bought it the previous week – with its handle and binding as extravagantly orange-red as the flowers on the unfamiliar tree.
‘Yes, of course, Ma. Please go.’
She got up and hugged me briefly, frightened of an emotional outburst. She smelt as she usually did, of baby powder and cigarette smoke and the sickly sweet hairspray (‘For Firm Hold’) that made her hair stick to your fingers. But her smell mingled with the strange odours in the room – stale food, disinfectant, Peaceful Sleep mosquito repellent – and I drew away because I felt sick. She thought it was because I didn’t want to kiss her.
It was only when she left the room that I cried.
Years later she told me that she had cried too, all the way home. While my father tried to convince her that I would learn team spirit and obedience and good table manners in the hostel – plus all the other decent attributes which, according to him, his four children seriously lacked.
‘This is what happens when you try to rear children in the modern manner,’ he had accused her, and not for the first time. ‘From Dr Stock’s books.’
‘Spock,’ Ma had sighed.
‘You know perfectly well what I mean. If I’ve told you once, Marlene, I’ve told you a dozen times that you mustn’t come crying to me if they turn out to be dropouts or drug addicts.’
My holiday at the sea felt like something in the distant past. I couldn’t even remember the colour of Nic’s eyes.
Brown, of course, I thought in a wave of panic, but what kind of brown? Brown like bitter chocolate or brown like milky coffee or brown like gingerbread or …? I realised that I was hungry and wondered whether hostel food was as awful as everyone said it was.
The bed opposite me was empty, the sheets and pillowcase a dirty white with the faded initials of the Transvaal Education Department in both languages – T.O.D. T.E.D. T.O.D. T.E.D. T.O.D. – in their serried ranks as the only decoration. ‘We always keep a couple of beds open,’ the matron had explained. ‘Newcomers are often a day or two late.’ Her voice sliced through my marrow like a butcher’s saw. I hoped that the newcomer on her way here had been involved in a car accident. I didn’t want to fall asleep next to a girl I didn’t know from a bar of soap.
The bell rang so shrilly that I was startled, and ran to the door. Outside, in the passage and above the door, hung something that looked like a giant’s bicycle bell – a stainless-steel serving dish which made an indescribable noise. Of all the rooms in the long passage, I had been given the one directly below the bell. I shut the door and burst into tears.
That was the supper bell, the first of many bells I would learn to distinguish in my new life as a boarder.
The dining hall was even more hideous than the bedroom. There were eight girls at each long table, seated on hard wooden chairs with high backs. While Matron said grace some stared at a bowl of brown bread in the middle of the table, faces as strained as a sprinter’s in the blocks. The moment the saw-like voice said ‘Amen’, everyone made a grab for the bowl.
There were twelve slices of bread in the bowl, I realised later, which meant that only the four fastest eaters could have a second slice.
It was even worse than I had imagined, I thought, while the girl next to me swallowed her bread in great, greedy bites and shot out her hand for the second slice. It was like something from Charles Dickens!
At the head of each table sat a matric girl who was allowed to serve herself first. Then the stainless steel dishes were passed back and forth until they eventually reached the end of the table where the losers sat. The unpopular ones, the ugly ones, the stupid ones, the newcomers, like me. By the time I’d served myself the last of the food, the matric girl’s plate was virtually empty.
The evening meal was mealie porridge and sausage with a sauce of baked tomatoes. Where I came from we had mealie porridge for breakfast, with milk and sugar and a lump of butter. And even for breakfast I wasn’t mad for it.
The matric girl at the head of the table had the face of a young child: a button nose, her hair bunched in ponytails above her ears; but her breasts were two majestic mountain peaks which overshadowed everything in their vicinity. I stared at them unashamedly.
Perhaps this area was so fertile that it wasn’t only the vegetation that grew faster than in other places? Maybe the people too were affected. I looked at my seven table companions. Naturally they didn’t all have big breasts, but the one next to me, the one who had grabbed the bread, had hands almost as big as my father’s.
