still new, yes, the nausea is completely natural, you will get used to it, you are drifting now, like you’re on a ship, the ship is swaying on the sea, on the ship is a swimming pool, it is also swaying and you are in that water. You are swaying along with the sway of the sway. You are not dying, you are just not touching the ground. You hear everything your teacher says and you do what you must, she is one of The Merciful, she sees you, she sees you are drifting, but she cannot stop it, she must do her job.
I liked Miss Van Wyk a lot, she was friendly, not friendly enough to say school is over now, but she did have compassion. (Those were Grandmother’s words, if someone showed you compassion, you were safe.) In a photo in my album I am sitting next to her, you can’t see at all that I’m drifting, I am smiling broadly. On my chest is a paper face with my name.
What I like a lot, despite the ship and its swaying and the block around my neck and my parents who are missing, is the smell in the classroom. Powder paint, starch paint, watercolours, plasticine, crayons, glue, wooden blocks, wooden beads, paper of every thickness and texture, together all of this creates a smell that I will recognise for the rest of my life in studios and workshops, the places where craftsmen slave away to give shape to something unrecognisable or unreachable.
From somewhere comes a voice I don’t know, a man’s voice, he is talking to me, softly and calmly: It’s not so bad, see? It’s not that bad at all.
Outside someone rings a bell. Miss Van Wyk makes us stand in a row.
Are we going home now? I ask. But the block presses against my throat and makes my voice hoarse, nobody hears me.
It’s break time, says Miss. We are all going to walk together to the trees, there you can play and eat your sandwiches. If someone wants to go to the bathroom, just tell me and I will walk with you.
So I learn a term that holds more fear and cruelty than any ghost story Grandfather could ever think up. Break time. My block is heavy, I struggle to breathe, I just follow the child in front of me. I don’t look up, I only see shoes, there must be more than a million, all the shoes look like mine, I look up slightly, everyone’s clothes also look like mine, why? So we can disappear like those pieces of my puzzle with the big sky? My mother and father will never come to look for me, they are at home with my baby brother. Why do they want me gone? And these children! Why are they yelling so? And jumping like goats? Don’t they know we’ve been thrown to the wolves? (Also Grandmother’s words.)
Here I learn another thing, suspense. I drift, now among the million identical children, nobody hurts me, nobody says anything funny, nobody grabs my sandwich, but I’m waiting for it, there is no one who can help me here, Miss can’t watch everybody, why is there a break? Why must you leave your desk and your case? Surely you can play at home!
I look up. No, look down! There are bigger children at the building with the toilets. They are watching us. I chew my sandwich. I like eating, but here I taste nothing.
The day lasts another thousand hours. I don’t know how I got home. I have a star on my forehead and a drawing in my hand.
Oh, that’s pretty, says my mother. What is it?
It’s a ship, I say.
I only see blue, says my mother.
It sank, I say.
My mother puts down the drawing.
How was Day One? she asks.
What is Day One? I ask.
Your first day at school! Tomorrow is Day Two!
Do I have to go again?
My mother laughs.
Oh, she says, You’re such a comic!
The World Screen Headquarters
My first school case was a little rectangular brown chest, inside was a lunchbox, a bottle for cooldrink, a pencil case with coloured pencils and now and then examples of the monstrous art produced by children in Sub A. There was also a thin book with light-blue lines. In this little book Miss Van Wyk pasted notices or wrote short messages to parents. One day after school when my mother and I were in the lounge, I took the book from my school case and gave it to her. Inside was a message: if any new pupils were interested in taking piano lessons, parents should please contact the school office.
Did I read it myself, or did my mother? I have no idea, but let me first tell you about the lounge: my school years took place in the period when this planet’s interior decorating reached a low point, when brown and old gold were regarded as beautiful, when thick, sand-coloured carpets and thick brown pottery plates were a middle-class household’s pride and joy. This plague hit our homes within two years of the piano message appearing in my school case, but on that day we were still safe, the windows were hung with long white curtains on which a forest of thin black bamboo had been painted, quick brushstrokes like Japanese calligraphy. The furniture had dark-grey seats with light-grey backs, upholstered in a woven fabric with a knobbly texture, underneath were skinny, round, splayed feet made of a light wood. Our lounge looked like a room in which James Bond could listen to a long-playing record and girls with long necks would hold wine glasses, it was sunny, modern and dramatic and I spent as much time there as possible. With our move to the next house this furniture and these curtains vanished; it took me forty years to track down bamboo-patterned fabric again. (Which is now often used as a tablecloth when I entertain with my pitch-black dinner service.)
No discussion of piano lessons was necessary: even when I was little I would swallow hard if I found myself near a thing with keys. In every church, church hall, school hall, dining hall, living room, any place my parents’ religion or social circles took us, there would be a musical instrument, battered, out of tune, shabby or beloved. Even the horrible electric home organs that were high fashion in those years tempted me as though they were edible. In Wellington I often went along when Grandfather dropped in on Mr Byleveld, there in the centre of town was the workshop where pianos were rebuilt or repaired, in rows and rows they stood like guards before the vault of melodies; already I’d decided that heaven would one day be filled with pianos, not the harps my mother had read to me about.
An hour after the message had been delivered, my mother crossed the street: three houses down was The World Screen Headquarters. Here lived Mrs Joubert. She was the town organist, the creator of that vast sound that Sunday after Sunday made my young soul jump for joy, higher and further than any sermon could. In her gloomy dining room an upright piano stood against the wall, crowded with decorative cloths, family members in small frames, glass bowls, porcelain figurines and a few fans from faraway countries. To the left of the piano was a sliding door to the lounge and still further left the arch that led to the big kitchen. The whole house was full of odds and ends, mementos, gifts, cookbooks, reading books, phone books, writing pads, packets of envelopes, pen holders, little bowls with paper clips, postcards, serving platters, glass jars, hard biscuits, fruit, paintings, lamps, crochet work and lace curtains. And screens. Except for the screen door on Uncle Attie and Aunt Miems’s back porch, this place surely housed every other screen on earth – there was a screen in front of every window and a screen in front of every door. Screens that could push up, shift, slide out, screens that couldn’t move, rolled-up screens that lay underneath the kitchen table and waited for an opening. Here something had to be kept in or out.
Like Mrs Joubert, her piano and all her possessions, The World Screen Headquarters didn’t attract me or repel me, it didn’t welcome me or make me want to flee, it was darker than day and lighter than night, and for some reason I spent a lot of time here, was given food, played outside and explored everything. (Was I by myself?
