on the wall while I fought the temptation to suck up the last of my milkshake as Niel had done. Love Story, I saw, and remembered how I had cried when Ali McGraw died so beautifully and giggled every time she said bullshit. Opposite me my twelve-year-old sister stared open-mouthed at Niel, which encouraged him to suck even harder.
‘Wow!’ she said with an American accent.
‘Shaddup,’ I hissed and tried to hide behind my mother as one of the matric boys at a table in the corner turned to look at us.
‘Children,’ my mother tried saying in my father’s voice. But it never worked.
‘Ma, he’s wearing his school uniform and he’s behaving like an elephant in a zoo!’
‘Tcha, old Mart is just scared one of her boyfriends at the table there at the back will think her brother doesn’t have any manners.’
‘Well, he doesn’t.’ I grabbed the glass away from him so fast that the straw hung in his mouth like a long, soggy cigarette.
‘Sheesh, where’d ya learn to grab so fast?’ he asked with something like admiration in his voice.
‘At table in the hostel. If you don’t grab you go hungry.’
I enjoyed the slightly shocked expression on my mother’s face. She touched her bottle-blonde hair, stiff and sticky with spray as usual, and looked over my head at the posters. Niel burped, looking me straight in the eye. Lovey giggled behind her hand and my mother looked more martyred than ever.
‘You should’ve kept him back a year, Ma,’ I said. ‘Any idiot can see he shouldn’t be in high school yet.’
He looked at me as if I’d slapped him. I almost felt sorry for him. He was the smallest in his standard six class and his biggest fear was that he wouldn’t grow much taller.
‘Never mind,’ Ma comforted as usual. ‘Simon only started growing when he’d almost finished school.’
Hearing Simon’s name made me feel depressed all over again. My elder brother had started his National Service a month ago. Now I was the eldest in the house with this poison dwarf of a baby brother, and a sister who believed that life was a movie in which she played all the leading roles.
The Portuguese café owner was leaning forward behind the counter, resting on his elbows, between the cash register and a fan which swung to and fro like a human head. Every three seconds a breeze blew through his dark hair. There were two similar fans in the far corners of the café, high above the tables, but they seemed to make no difference. My grey school uniform clung to my thighs and there were damp circles of perspiration under my arms.
Behind the owner’s head hung the only poster which didn’t advertise a movie. It was the kind you saw in travel agents’ windows: a big colour picture of a deserted beach with palm trees. Like somewhere overseas, I thought longingly. Lourenço Marques, it said in heavy black letters across the blue sky. That was where LM Radio broadcast from.
The man had sad eyes. He reminded me of the café owner in a book I’d read during the holidays, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The name caught my attention in the bookcase at the beach house between all the other books that had stood there for years, fading in the sun. I had wanted to tell Dalena the plot but she lost interest when she heard that it didn’t have a happy ending.
‘Gone with the Wind,’ Ma sighed again, her eyes on an old poster.
‘They don’t make movies like that any more,’ Niel and Lovey said quickly before Ma could say it.
Ma didn’t even seem to hear.
‘Have you heard from him again, Ma?’
‘Simon?’ My mother ferreted in a crocheted bag with wooden handles and took out her pack of Cameos. ‘Two letters in one week! He must be terribly homesick.’
‘I miss him.’
‘So do I, Mart.’
Ma swallowed the last of her tea and lit a cigarette. Equality? asked the woman in the Cameo advertisement, peering at the camera through thick false eyelashes. Onlymen are born equal. We’re different. Like our cigarettes. She was beginning to look a little bored. Ma, not the girl in the ad.
Actually, all four of us were a bit bored. It was Friday but because the school was holding a sports meeting on the following day, the hostel children weren’t allowed to go home on the Friday afternoon. Ma felt sorry for us and had come to see us. But when she and Lovey drove to the farm later on, Niel and I would have to remain behind.
‘A Friday in the hostel!’ We will not give up the fight against terrorism and Communism, I read in the newspaper lying in front of my mother. We will fight and go forward with faith until we have achieved a just peace. The Minister of Police had spoken at the funeral of an adjutant who had been killed with three other policemen on the Rhodesian border. ‘It’s terrible!’
‘It’s going to be fun!’ Niel smiled with Ma’s dark eyes, adult eyes in a pointed little-boy’s face which made him look even more like a poison dwarf.
‘I wish I was a year older,’ Lovey sighed. ‘Then I would’ve been in the hostel too!’
‘I wish I was two years older, Lovey, then I need never see a hostel again!’
‘My name is not Lovey,’ she said as usual.
‘Sorry, Lovey,’ I said as usual.
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, I read on a poster in the corner where the matric boys were sitting. Now that was a smart movie. Bob Dylan’s music.
‘If you want to go to Stellenbosch, Mart,’ Ma said and drew an ashtray set in a miniature tyre towards her, ‘you’ll have to stay in a hostel.’
‘No ways, Ma! I’d rather go to an English university. Then I can do as I like even if I have to stay in residence.’
‘You’ll break your father’s heart if you don’t go to Stellenbosch.’
‘He broke mine,’ I replied, ‘the day he dropped me in front of the hostel.’
‘Don’t always exaggerate, Mart. It’s not that bad.’
‘How do you know how bad it is, Ma? You’ve never been in a hostel!’
It sounded sharper than I’d meant it to but Ma didn’t react, simply tapped her ash neatly into the little car tyre. Goodyear was written on the rubber. A good year for whom?
‘Well, I listen to you talking … about your roommate, the way you …’
‘If it wasn’t for Dalena I’d have committed suicide by now!’
This time she reacted.
‘Don’t say things like that, Mart.’ A forefinger tap-tapped the cigarette. This was a sure sign that you had to watch your step. She didn’t lose her temper easily, my father was the quick-tempered one, but the day she did lose her cool … Don’t push me, she always said. Don’t push me.
‘If it wasn’t for Dalena I’d probably have run
