takkies. She turns to stir the Maltabella, making it thick like mud. When it’s ready, she’ll add milk and brown sugar. It looks better than Jungle Oats, which is like cat sick. Still, I close my eyes as I eat it.
Lucy sucks on her cigarette and breathes out a long sigh of smoke. “She took my fountain pen again. This time she filled it with lemon juice. She’s going to ruin it. Seriously, Mima, I’m going to talk to Daddy about her if she doesn’t stop her nonsense.”
Toughees! My father has already eaten breakfast and gone to his consulting rooms near the Johannesburg General Hospital. He likes an early start. This means Gemima starts early too. Before my father gets up in the morning, she’s already put a pot of water on the stove for porridge.
As soon as she hears the sound of his feet on the floorboards and the bath water running, she comes upstairs and gets me out of bed and dresses me for school. While my father eats his oats she cooks him his two eggs and bacon, which she serves with a slice of white toast. Gemima’s mummy used to make him exactly the same breakfast when he was a boy on the farm in Natal.
Lucy stubs out her cigarette, squashing it into the ashtray with sharp jabs. She clips on her earrings and goes outside to wait for Roger the Dodger. He’s been Lucy’s boyfriend for the past six months. Roger drives a clapped-out Morris Minor which doesn’t have indicators or windscreen wipers. My father calls it the red devil.
Roger is studying to be a lawyer. When he graduates he’ll have to cut his hair, stop shouting his mouth off about the natives, and learn to toe the line, my mother says.
Lucy is nine years older than me. When she’s in a good mood she allows me to sit on her bed and watch her get ready for her dates with Roger. Sometimes she practises the cha-cha-cha on me and lets me paint her toenails. Lately she’s been telling me I’m a big pain in the neck and I must buzz off.
Lucy is studying for a Bachelor of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand but she spends most of her time not studying and raising hell with Roger. My mother says it doesn’t matter if Lucy fails her degree because after university she’ll probably just get married and won’t have to work. Lucy says my mother is stuck in the Dark Ages.
Roger’s car backfires as it drives off, and Gemima peers under the table with a smile. “Oh, there you are.” She makes me stand still as she sponges the grubby marks off my gymslip. She squints at the shine on the serge. “You can’t go to school like that.”
She gets her Special Book out of the kitchen drawer and pages through it. I look over her shoulder. “What does Ann say?” Ann Wise’s advice in the Sunday Times is the only part of the newspaper Gemima reads. When my father is done with the paper, Gemima cuts out Ann Wise’s tips and sticks them in my old school exercise book.
Ann knows a stack about lots of things: how to cure warts, remove perspiration marks and any stain under the sun. She’s brilliant when it comes to making a can of pilchards stretch to a satisfying family meal. One of Gemima’s proudest moments was when Ann published Gemima’s “housewives economise” tip on what to do with old bits of soap.
“Scrubb’s Ammonia,” Gemima says, and unlocks the cupboard door. She chooses a bottle from her collection of household cleaning supplies. Bottles of Ann Wise potions fill her cupboard. She rations my JIK, and it’s never enough to clear the inkblots in my exercise books.
During the day she keeps the cupboard key on a string around her neck and at night she hides it in a secret place. I’ve searched everywhere but I’ve never found it. My father says the contents of Gemima’s cupboard could blow a hole twice the size of Kimberley’s in our back garden.
After sponging my uniform, Gemima spoons dollops of Maltabella into a bowl and grabs Anne of Green Gables. “You’ll mess your nice book.” She puts it back on the shelf and watches me eat. “Just one more mouthful.” I open my eyes and make hamster cheeks at her. Porridge spurts out of the sides of my mouth and she clicks her tongue and says, “Wena!” (That means “You!” in Zulu.)
I speak the language like a real African because Gemima talked Zulu to me from the time I was a baby. We sometimes chat in Zulu, but Sister Columbanus says I mustn’t speak native at school.
“Don’t backchat me, young lady. I do not want to hear, ‘My father also speaks Zulu, so there.’ No, don’t dare say that, miss. You are very bold.” Sister Columbanus grips the rosary at her belt, like she’s seeking support from a higher being.
Breakfast finished, I go upstairs to my parents’ bedroom while Gemima makes my school sandwiches. My mother’s bed is farthest from the window and the curtains are closed.
“Good morning, Mummy, how are you feeling today?” I speak in whispers. If I talk in my normal voice she tells me not to shout, it hurts her head. Bottles of pills are lined up on my mother’s dressing table next to a photograph of her and my father on their wedding day. My mother has a huge grin on her face in the photo. It was a time before the disappointments, when she still knew how to smile.
She raises herself from the bed and presents her face for a kiss. “Don’t smother me, Margaret.” Her skin is sticky and I can taste the Pond’s night cream on my lips.
“I think I may get up today.” There’s a frog in her throat. My mother often thinks about getting out of bed to sew. But then she pulls the covers up under her chin and sleeps away the day until supper time.
My mother has nerves. She didn’t always have them. They came a few years after Lucy was born, when my mother suffered her disappointments and had to spend lots of time recovering. There were four disappointments until I came along. I don’t think I made up for them because my mother still spends a lot of time trying to recover.
Gemima laces her walking shoes and takes me to school. I plonk my hat on my head. St Virgilius says it’s a mortal sin to be seen in public without a hat. In winter, it’s the black felt hat, in summer, the white straw boater. Both are crosses I must bear.
Gemima huffs and puffs like the big bad wolf on the way to school. Every few steps she stops and coughs because she says her cold has gone to her chest.
I take a squizz at her head and wonder how much of her brain the tokoloshe has managed to eat these past few nights. The skin on her neck above the collar of her uniform glistens with Vicks VapoRub. Gemima says the Vicks, along with the Stearns Pine-tar and Honey cough mixture should do the trick. But I don’t think so. After tonight, there’ll be nothing left of her brain.
Gemima won’t let me run ahead, and she coughs and snorts when she hands me my suitcase at the school gate where Benny is waiting for me.
“Slow coach, slow coach, slow coach,” he yells.
I grab his wrist and twist, giving him a Chinese bangle to make him stop.
Benny and I are at the same school because the boys’ school down the road burnt down last year and they’ve got nowhere else close by until it’s rebuilt. My school is bearing this annoying cross by seating the boys on the left-hand side of the classrooms and trying to ignore them.
The girls sit on the right-hand side, away from the windows, so we boil in summer. It isn’t any better in winter because St Virgilius doesn’t believe in heaters or spoiling children.
My desk mate is Louise Daincroft. I sit at the front of the class because the teachers say they like to keep an eye on me. Louise sits in the front because she wants to be teacher’s pet. She also can’t see the blackboard and has to wear glasses that are held on with
