rolled my eyes. “They are the same, Mum. The twins are the same too – six, spoilt, and stupid naughty. All still carrying on in Camps Bay.”
“Okay, fine. Tell me, how is your practice going? Any new clients? When are you coming to do me? I was thinking it must be time for my next Botox?” I saw her frown; it clearly was time. “How is the wedding going? And Owen? Have you met any more of his family? Any of the men taller than him? Is he the shortest in his family? I mean, I can hope, can’t I?” I hadn’t told her much about Riccardo. Just that he was very charming and looked like a more tanned version of Owen. Nothing about him being an asshole.
We lobbed answers and questions at each other and made my drink last another forty-five minutes before I left, promising to do her Botox the next time I saw her.
Dad next – he would help me fix everything.
9
Parking my car outside their block on Victoria Road in Clifton, I saw their Porsches – matching black ones – in the cordoned-off parking area at the top of their apartment block. Level with the road, I leaned over the parking area railings to see if anyone was outside their apartment down below. Theirs was the whole of the ground and first and second floors, and opened up onto grass, only the glass balustrades separating them from Clifton’s Second Beach. I could see a little bit of the corner of the pool but no one was outside. I’d pointed it out to Kari once, and she’d said she couldn’t imagine that the people who lived there would ever have a day of worries. They poo just like you, I told her, even if their parking bays alone do cost a million rand a pop.
I waited at the glass-cased entrance in the parking area. Dad always comes up to meet me; we talk a little before we go inside and the twins demand attention.
“Lily, this is a nice surprise.” He hugged me, then pulled back but kept holding me at the shoulders. “Are you all right? Everything okay at home? Can’t remember when last you’ve come on your own on a Sunday,” he said, looking into my eyes. I reached over to kiss him, once on each cheek the way he likes.
“Yeah, some unexpected things at home.”
His cheeks were grizzly. That was odd. He says it’s easy to look good on a Sunday – everyone else makes no effort and they look like crap. All he had to do was shave to look like a million bucks. A little effort at the right time, my girl, and you are on your way.
“Owen? Better to know before the wedding, love. It’s not too late to change your mind, cancellation fees are nothing. You can do better, you know.” Oh my God. I must have sounded just like him when I talked to Owen about our honeymoon.
“I’m not changing my mind!” I did immediately change my mind about telling him my Courtney and Chiara woes. Something wasn’t right about him and, besides, I didn’t need to fan the flame of his anti-Owen feelings. Mum would find out from Lucio, but she and Dad never talked, so he wouldn’t have to know what was happening at home. “Just some pre-wedding arrangements I’m sorting out.”
“Hmm, all right. Have you signed the antenuptial already?” A little disappointment in his eyes, brown behind clear plastic spectacle frames I remember seeing at Oculus at the Waterfront. Little too young for him – must’ve been Violet’s choice.
“Yes, all done. We not going down to the apartment?” I asked when he walked towards the pavement, dodging a woman with a pram and a French bulldog. I love their apartment, and Violet always says I have a room there whenever I want to stay over – but, beautiful as it is, I’m not properly comfortable when I’m there. A bit like how it feels now that Courtney and Chiara are at home.
“Later. Let’s go for a coffee, at La Belle? Wasn’t sure if you wanted to walk so I ordered an Uber when you messaged to say you were here,” he said, eyes scanning the road crammed with Sunday traffic. “That’s him,” he pointed at a silver BMW slowing down at the kerb, hazards flashing.
I was surprised. Dad is a creature of habit. He always goes to Caprice in Camps Bay. He and Violet sit at the tables outside on the pavement, with her obviously being one of the beautiful ones who fit right in there. Dad is never one to hide his riches. La Belle had all the views of the Camps Bay strip, but its spot upstairs in the Promenade Building across from the tidal pool hovered over the bustle, gave a little bit of cover the further inside you sat.
“No Violet?” I asked after we were settled in the Uber, after the driver checked three times that we were actually driving the kilometre and a half to the café. We could definitely walk back, I told Dad. Silent-but-Violent Violet. I wasn’t disappointed to have him all to myself, but I had to be sure. That beautiful step-momster of mine can appear silently from nowhere. Often it is just as I am getting into a conversation with Dad when she pops out. Talkus interruptus. Seeing her always makes me want to go, What the hell? Who invited you?
I first thought of her being Silent-but-Violent like a super-stinky fart when I met her. Me twenty-five and her thirty-one, but her body better than mine would ever be. Dad loved her as instantly as I hated her. She was into Christian Dior’s Poison in those days – believed in ‘layering’, using the bath gel, body lotion, deodorant, and parfum until every honey-blonde bronzed-and-toned (nothing was ever untoned) bit of her was smothered. I could smell her coming.
She’s moved on from Poison, mixing it up these days so I can’t smell her coming any more. Now she just bursts into the room in a puff of whatever the fragrance of the day is. Still gives me that sick in my throat. I know I should be used to her by now; it’s been thirteen years. But a fart is a fart. And in my books, she will always be Silent-but-Violent Violet, my very own stinky step-momster.
I can’t breathe when she is around.
“And the twins?” I checked, half-expecting one of them to creep out from somewhere in the car. Thing One and Thing Two. Charlotte and Sebastian. They look like Violet, except for the darker hair, and they like to sit as close to Dad as they can, sometimes on his feet under the table when we go out. Ridiculous. They turned six a month ago; you would’ve thought they would have grown out of it already. I can tell them apart now that Sebastian has a boy’s cut and they are choosing their own clothes. They used to have matching shoulder-length hair (“Chestnut, can’t even mix that up,” Lucio said when I showed him Violet’s profile pic of the four of them) and wore the Petite Maman range that is all navy stripes and tan and leather trim. They never speak to me, always to Dad or Violet. They call me ‘Her’. I haven’t seen them since Christmas when Dad got Charlotte two snow machines that spurt foamy snow so she and her friends can pretend to be in the Frozen movie whenever they want. Sebastian got a tree house. Have you ever seen a tree in the ground-floor gardens of Clifton beach apartments? A crane put it in.
“No, I first wanted to talk to you privately about some things,” he said. Here was the further source of my troubles. I am a Daddy’s girl more than I have Mummy’s thighs. Strip away the great haircut, obsessively good skin care, fantastically expensive clothes, and murderously beautiful shoes, and you would be left with a reasonably soft-edged nearly midget-sized human (all right, perhaps I exaggerate, but whichever way you skin it, one metre sixty-five is not tall). We are both a fortnight of bad eating and no gymming away from fat and spotty. But as he is a man – people mind less. And at sixty-four, with a sexy forty-four-year-old wife, a three-storey apartment in Clifton and enough money that no one genetically or romantically linked to him ever has to work, well, I’ve found that people definitely mind less. At least he earned it all; I don’t deserve what I have. That realisation had been the start of my depression. Poor me, I mocked myself through years of therapy, what a problem to have.
“Violet said she might bring the kids later when we’re done.”
