my birthday. My mother bakes a cake, it is a chocolate locomotive, I can’t believe my eyes, how did Mother make this whole thing? Grandfather and Grandmother come from Wellington. It is one of the best days ever. Friends appear. Who invited them? (A little grey escapes from my bag.) Mother puts down the cake and everyone sings. I want to eat the chimney. I break it off, it is an empty toilet roll with icing. (More grey.) I decide to eat the cab. It is an empty tissue box. (Lots of grey!) Eventually there is something to eat, the chocolate roll in the middle, but I don’t feel like it any more. My father gives me my present, it’s a rugby ball, brand new and light brown, leather or plastic, I close my eyes and make a wish, I open my eyes, it isn’t an Easter egg, still a ball. I put it aside. Grandmother gives me her present. It is wrapped in Christmas paper. (The grey becomes less.) I open it. It is a paper doll, a girl with sheets and sheets of clothes you can cut out, short strips wrap around her body and make the clothes stick. She can be a princess, a teacher, a policewoman, a lady with her own shop.
One thing about Grandmother – she could shop like no one else. She often dragged big brown paper bags into her kitchen and began to unpack. Twenty boxes of canary seed. Thirty boxes of cough mixture. Forty packages of orange hair dye.
Grandfather: What are you doing with the seed? Who has budgies?
Grandmother: It was on sale, it would be stupid to leave such a bargain behind.
Grandfather: And the cough mixture? Who is coughing?
Grandmother: You! Soon!
Grandfather: No, heavens, Grandmother, and the hair dye?
Grandmother: Ben, that pharmacy is closing, the things are marked down, if the wrong woman gets hold of it she’ll make a fool of herself, I had to take it.
Grandmother had definitely been in a shop somewhere, maybe stood with a small truck or a set of blocks in her hand and then saw the paper dolls were much cheaper. That’s all. But it shifts my reality as quickly as someone taking a pair of scissors from a drawer. My princess changes her appearance within minutes, she moves between worlds. My friends disappear, Grandmother and Grandfather go home, Mother does the dishes, Father gives my brother a bath, I am in my room, the door is closed, the grey is gone, I am cutting out a blouse. I do not dream of a braid down my back or a dress on my body, I do not want to be a girl, but I have a job to do. I dress my princess and I listen to her speak, she says the strangest thing: One day you can change your clothes just as quickly.
When? I ask.
My father opens the door. I do not look up. He opens the cupboard and puts the rugby ball next to my shoes. He says nothing, he merely closes the door behind him. And he would do it again, every time I broke his heart.
A Table for Prentjie
Somewhere near the church, the main road’s tar disappeared and there, where gravel became ground, they sat in a row: church, school, tennis courts, dormitory. In this dormitory my mother worked a few times a week, she had to supervise until the sun began to set. On these days I had to stay there after school; I have no idea where my baby brother was.
A few years ago I visited the town for the first time since I left there at the age of nine. I was invited to do a show at the church hall; this hall had been a gigantic building where all of the town’s plans began or ended, but when I went back I was shocked to see how small and cramped the hall actually was. This has happened a few times: childhood buildings that had shrunk so much over the years that on a return visit they were invariably unrecognisable and always bitterly disappointing. This would also be the case with the dormitory, but for the purposes of this story I have kept it in its original form, long, pale and damning.
The occupants were farm children – the descendants of both wealthy and struggling farmers – who all went back home on Friday afternoons, city children who’d been sent there to keep out of trouble, and a few town children from families too miserable to have any future prospects. A few had to stay there over weekends and even holidays. And when my mother was on duty, I wandered about, one afternoon after another.
The youngest children played outside, the rest had to do their homework in the dining hall. I was too young for real homework and so I wandered. The front door opened onto a small entrance hall and then you could turn left or right down a long corridor with pale, polished floors and on both sides a multitude of doors. There was a forgotten lounge, an office, bedrooms for staff, single rooms and dorm rooms for pupils (I don’t know how it was decided who would sleep in a dorm room and who in a single room), bathrooms and the dining hall. At the end of the corridor, on either side there were sharp turns to even more rooms and the long wing at the back that consisted of laundry rooms, storerooms and the kitchen; from above thus a perfect 8.
Here there was no pleasure – perhaps for others, but I couldn’t find anything, not a single pretty thing, no mysterious corners or dancing shadows, only empty walls, rooms and children. And The Smell. There was an inescapable smell that would not budge for even a moment – not the smell of the cleaning products that are still so popular in shiny corridors, nor that of chicken pie baking in big ovens, nor that of coffee escaping from a staffroom; it was a dead smell, a grim grey smell. Mother was terribly upset when I once began sniffing a slice of bread in front of the other children, I couldn’t help it, I was certain The Smell hid in the thick slices of death’s bread that were slapped down each day in front of everyone. No butter or jam could disguise those dreary sponges.
Maybe it was the recipes of those years, or the fact that not every town had someone like my grandmother, but only tiredness and drabness ever came out of that big kitchen. I wanted to scream, Where are the rusks, where are the scones, where are our biscuits, we are little children! That was where I first had The Horrors, when trays with plastic containers filled with quicksand and funeral sludge were carried into the dining hall. I would wait until my mother looked away and then disappear down the corridor.
It was during one of these furious I-have-the-horrors-and-I-am-hungry strolls that I saw the door to a boy’s room was wide open. He was sitting on his bed and paging through a book. His feet were off the ground. I never knew his name, in my thoughts I called him Prentjie. He was the oldest child in the dormitory, but also the smallest; he was quiet and very beautiful, it looked as though he’d been drawn, his clothes were never dirty or wrinkled, not a single blond hair was ever out of place, he never looked for trouble and only spoke when someone asked him a question. All the children in the world should be like him. I liked him a lot.
I stood and looked at Prentjie in his barren room, not for so long that he would notice, but long enough to see there was nothing beautiful, not a rug, not a chair, only a bed and a wardrobe with a suitcase on top; the walls were empty, the only picture was Prentjie. Why wasn’t he with the others in the dining hall? Was he also escaping from The Smell? And where would he go? He only had his ugly room, I felt so sorry for him, for days I wondered what I would do if I had to live in a room without any of my things.
It was a weekday afternoon, warm, a few children played listlessly next to the dormitory, the rest sat staring at their books in the dining hall. I was in the corridor. Prentjie’s bedroom door was open. I walked closer to see. He and his book were not on the bed. But the Yellow Juffrou was on her knees next to the bed. She was one of the teachers who lived in the dormitory, youngish with short, light-yellow hair and an unusually broad face, with a dimple in each cheek that made her look like she was constantly smiling. She was the Standard Two teacher and wore a yellow cardigan every day.
In her hand was a pencil. She drew a thin horizontal line on the wall, then another one directly below the first, and connected the two at both ends. Then she drew two thin lines from the left-hand corner to the floor, and the same on the right-hand side: a table!
My mother
