“I hadn’t,” she said quietly. “When everyone just stood there … It was horrible.”
Why would you care? I wanted to shout. It’s not like you’ve ever had to experience that! I felt like Dr Dolittle’s Pushmi-pullyu, the two-headed unicorn-gazelle freak from the children’s book Mom had read me as a child: I was torn in two directions at once, both angry with June for being so perfect, and grudgingly grateful. No one else cared how I felt.
“Thanks,” I muttered.
June scrunched up her sandwich paper and put it back into her lunchbox. I never even had wax paper around my sandwiches. It was like hers were more delicate, more aristocratic than normal people’s sandwiches and had to be protected against bruising, like in the story of the princess and the pea.
“We kept chickens once,” she said, as we turned into her street. It wasn’t particularly fancy or smart, but I noticed there was no litter on the pavement, and the gutters were clear. “There was one that was a little different from the others. The rest were all brown and well fed. This one was softer, redder and smaller. It never got to the feeding trough in time, so I used to take it extra grain. One day, when I was at school, it injured itself and was bleeding. The others …”
“What happened?” I asked, although I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know.
“They pecked and pecked at it.” It sounded like there were tears in June’s voice. “When I came home, it was just lying there.”
“Dead?” I asked, feeling sick.
“Nearly. I managed to revive it, but it was never the same again. I blamed myself for weeks for not protecting it better. It carried a huge, ugly scar for the rest of its life, where the feathers wouldn’t grow.”
“That was a bit like how I felt today,” I said quietly. I couldn’t believe I was admitting it to her: I never wanted to tell Mom or Dad stuff like this, especially when they came home so late with drawn, tired faces, and I’d be scared to share it with someone else at school, in case they used it against me.
June linked arms with me, like a real friend. I imagined I was a Pushmi-pullyu again, with two heads on either side of my body, one absurdly comforted that someone should care, and the other one straining in the opposite direction because, after all, she could never really understand. No matter how hard she tried, she would never be a Pushmi-pullyu, right?
*
Three
I HAD BEEN PLANNING to practise some of my scales, but Hank was already hogging the piano, wrestling with his pieces for the competition. Typical. He always seemed to get there first. Always practising, practising, practising.
“Nerd,” I muttered under my breath, kicking my battered satchel aside, wishing it was Hank.
I tugged my hair out of its ponytail and got changed, chucking my school uniform into the corner with my schoolbag. Most of my clothes were scrunched up under my bed or on the floor or shoved into whichever peeling cupboard or drawer they would fit, but I always folded my Calvin Klein T-shirt along the seams and placed it neatly in my top drawer.
It had been my favourite shirt ever since I wore it to school on civvies day last term, and everyone noticed and admired me. Even Kean looked envious. Actually, it was just an ordinary white Mr Price shirt, but I carefully stencilled over the CK logo in a Seventeen magazine, then had it imprinted on the shirt for R40, and nobody knew the difference.
When I wore it, my freckles seemed to fade, and I imagined that it magically transformed my arms and legs so that they were no longer matchsticks but curvaceous, like those of Marilyn Monroe in the poster above my bed. I dreamt that one day I’d look like her. She’d started out as a redhead too.
I had another picture on the back of my door, the famous one of her standing in a billowing dress over an air vent, but my favourite was the one above my bed, with her gingery hair frizzing in the wind and the sea in the background. She looked really happy.
“My family would often go down to the beach in Humewood, and I would stretch myself out on the sand and close my eyes, pretending to be Marilyn. We don’t go to the beach any more now.”
“Perhaps I’ll look like you one day,” I told Marilyn. The poster was crinkled just over the corner of one of her eyes, and as it reflected the light, I imagined she was winking at me.
In the background, I could still hear Hank playing. He was practising a Debussy piece, a nocturne, starting like the lightest wave of a wand as his hands floated several octaves up the keyboard in broken chords, and then letting the real magic emerge: an intoxicating, mournfully beautiful melody that made Mom want to cry on days when she was too tired even to say hello.
“It makes me want to puke,” I said to myself, but actually, I felt more like crying too.
Dad had been working late, so he only picked Mom up well after 7de Laan had finished, and I’d already switched off the TV and started getting things ready for supper. Not that I wanted to, but after a day as long as hers, she’d probably snap if I didn’t. I hauled out a tin of spaghetti, rinsed and chopped the tomato and onion, and then put it in the fridge with the defrosted mince.
“Thanks, Helen love,” she said, kissing me briefly as she walked in later and headed straight for the fridge, automatically pulling out the tomatoes and the mince and switching on the stove with her free hand.
Already, I was about five centimetres taller than her, and on long, hard days like these she seemed to shrink, rather than me growing. Her hair, always straight, lay lank and flat against her head, a dull grey broken by faded reddish streaks, and I noticed that her work shirt seemed to hang more loosely than normal on her pale arms as she plodded tiredly around the kitchen. She stood for a moment, with the fridge door open, as Hank played the final notes of his Debussy, and sighed a little, as though for a second she’d forgotten she was a cashier.
Then my brother came in.
“Sounds good, Hank,” Mom commented, half to him and half to my dad, who was banging the layers of dust from his shoes at the door.
Dad rubbed his bald head so that a thin sprinkling of grey brick powder fell onto his overalls and nodded to Hank. “You’re doing well, son,” he said, placing his hand on my head in greeting as he sank into his chair. Mom had covered it in plastic because no matter how hard Dad tried, he still left a trail of dust on it which slipped into the cracks in the leather. I would hate to sit in that chair every day and not be able to feel its coolness against my skin, but he didn’t even seem to notice. He took out the free paper that was delivered every week and pretended to read it, his head nodding.
“There are the dishcloths,” I said, pointing to the neatly folded pile on the work surface.
Mom smiled for a second, her faded face momentarily beautiful, the same smile that had been directed at Hank when he walked in. It made her look like a young Mia Farrow, exotic and enchanting.
I was going to tell her where I got the dishcloths, but she’d already turned her back and was rummaging in the cupboard for the frying pan.
I gingerly shared my dad’s chair with him for a few minutes, reading with him until I couldn’t bear the artificial smoothness of the plastic any longer, and I slipped
