Frankie and Stankie (25 page)

Catherine Cleary's living room has a dark cottage suite with flowered seats and two extra easy chairs covered in moss-green moquette with more green-bobble trim. There's a glass-fronted display cabinet made of Imbuya wood with claw-and-ball feet that has a row of Toby Jugs and a china thimble collection. Catherine's mum has three framed artworks on the wall and some framed family photographs on the occasional table. The artworks are reproductions of Gainsborough's
Blue Boy
and Sir Joshua Reynolds's
Boy with the Rabbit
, along with the new Annigoni portrait of HM Queen Elizabeth II. Catherine's mum's tastes are more traditional than those of Dinah's mum who likes Japanese prints and the French Impressionists, so that when Catherine and Dinah leaf through art books together, it's like a small skirmish in which each girl is nailing her colours to a family aesthetic. Catherine will say ‘Ugh' or ‘Yum', depending on whether the picture is by Cézanne or Lord Leighton and Dinah will do the same, depending on whether it's Raeburn or Renoir. Dinah thinks that Catherine's taste in pictures is chocolate box, because the French Impressionists haven't yet made it big on chocolate boxes.

Catherine's mother is a war widow whose husband died at Tobruk in North Africa, aged twenty-three, when Catherine was two months old. Sometimes, when Mrs Cleary is out, Catherine will lead Dinah down the dark passage into her mother's green candlewick and ruched satin bedroom where, in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe, Mrs Cleary keeps her husband's relics. There are his army uniform and badges wrapped in old brown paper and the letter from the Army saying that he's dead. But what Catherine homes in on is a small drawstring bag containing her father's toenails. These are Donald ‘Bunny' Cleary's only earthly remains. Her father, she explains, used always to take part in the annual
Comrades' Marathon – a fifty-mile run between Durban and Pietermaritzburg. Catherine explains to Dinah that all the running in canvas gym shoes makes a person's toenails turn black and fall off because of the constant pressure. And every year Catherine's dad saved the dead black toenails as trophies. Catherine loves nothing better than to get the toenails out of the bag. She spreads the shrivelled particles all over the floral half-moon rug, but she knows that her mum will have an absolute fit if she ever finds this out.

Catherine's mum is more naggy and whining than anyone Dinah has ever met, but the mercy is that she goes out to work as a dentist's receptionist, so there's an hour after school most days and all of Saturdays before she gets in. The girls rustle up high-speed trays of fudge in Catherine's kitchen and batches of pink-and-white coconut ice. And sometimes they make rock cakes with so much soda that their teeth go all on edge. Then they have a final highspeed scuffle of dishwashing before the Moaning Minnie returns. To Dinah and Lisa, Catherine is quite amazingly disobedient, and Lisa usually bows out of Catherine's schemes because they don't suit her temperament, but Catherine has learnt that she might as well be disobedient because her mum will always find something about her to pick on, no matter what. Mrs Cleary is like a person who's in a chronic state of PMT and she's got a special down-in-the-mouth grumbling voice that she saves for talking to Catherine. If Dinah ever overhears her talking in a friendly voice, then she knows that Mrs Cleary is talking to Tinker the Corgi, or to Dingle the little black chihuahua.

‘He may be as black as the Ace of Spades,' Mrs Cleary quips to Dinah's parents, ‘but there aren't any racialists in
this
house.'

Mrs Cleary is as much of a ‘racialist' as anyone else in Durban, but she says this because she's respectful of Dinah's dad's professorial status and because she knows that Dinah's parents are liberals. In
Dinah's childhood a liberal is a person who doesn't recoil at the thought of a black person drinking out of his teacups
.

Mrs Cleary has frizzed mouse hair and a passion for the Royal Family. She combines being a royalist with being terrifically snobbish. She's the only person Dinah's met who's got a way of winking meaningfully and whispering ‘Top drawer' about certain categories of person. Her constant boast is that she goes out to work so that Catherine can attend a fee-paying school.

‘All of my life, I've scrimped and saved,' she says, ‘so that Catherine can say she's been to Wykeham.'

Wykeham is the most upper crust of South Africa's girls' boarding schools and it sets its girls apart by requiring them to wear unbelievably large black hats, huge, conical witches' hats like the ones in Ronald Searle drawings. Catherine is no longer at Wykeham, but, nonetheless, her time there means Mrs Cleary can now make reference to her daughter's close acquaintance with the granddaughters of Senator Heaton-Nicholls. This doesn't hold much cop for Lisa and Dinah, who wouldn't know who the Senator was, were he not right then at the top of their dad's morning rant list. The Senator is a dyed-in-the-wool segregationist and the UP's native expert. He's been urging Parliament to vote for Mr Strijdom's abolition of the Cape's Coloured franchise. For the Cape to have a Coloured franchise, he says, is ‘holding back the natives' progress'.

These days Catherine is a day girl at a local convent school, although her mother, along with the royalism and the racism, is passionately anti-Catholic. Dinah has never come across anti-Catholicism before. There's always been her dad's dimissiveness about religions in general – though he does have a jokey little rhyme that suggests an unexpected preference:

Of all religions I profess
I much prefer the Methodess.

But she's never encountered the kind of sectarian paranoia that Catherine and her mother exhibit. When it comes to Catholics, mother and daughter are united, both in sentiment and in syntax.

‘The priests in Ireland are living off the fat of the land,' they say. ‘Meanwhile the peasants are scratching about for potatoes.'

They'll say this while their own illiterate, under-age Zulu house-boy is polishing their front steps for a full-time monthly salary of three pounds ten shillings and sixpence plus two bags of maize meal. Catholics worship idols and gabble prayers like sheep. Catholics go to Mass, only because they're terrified of the priests. The priests are always standing behind them with pitchforks, prodding them into church. The Pope is the Scarlet Whore of Rome. The Pope is Jezebel and de Valera is Beelzebub.

Dinah is completely baffled by this. She can't relate to the imagery, because she's never heard of Jezebel, or Beelzebub, and she's never seen a pitchfork in real life – only in her ancient kiddies' board book version of ‘Old Macdonald'. The source for this curious, grafted-on bigotry is Mrs Cleary's long-dead husband, Donald ‘Bunny' Cleary, who – though he never in his short life set foot in Northern Ireland – had his small-town childhood in Mafeking illuminated by the passionate sectarian hatreds of his Ulster Protestant parents. Then, in the few happy months he had with Catherine's mother, he was able to hand on the baton of his Loyalist inheritance.

Mrs Cleary met her husband at one of Mafeking's Saturday-night dances and she fell for him at once. This was her one brief happy time, dancing with the daredevil young Irishman, the wild one in the pack, the joker, the wag. Just occasionally, she will regale Catherine and Dinah with references to these occasions.

‘Just a bit of Pond's Vanishing Cream and a touch of Johnson's Baby Powder on the nose,' she'll say.

She says it with an unaccustomed glint, and sometimes a little pointedly, as she watches Catherine and Dinah begin to dolly-up and experiment with Maybelline blue mascara and Max Factor Pan-Stick. Mrs Cleary likes to emphasise a woman's modesty and decorum, so she tells the story of the Bold Young Woman at one of the Mafeking dances. The Bold Young Woman was wearing a backless evening dress and one of the young men, before he planted his hand on her back in order to dance the quickstep, pointedly unfolded his handkerchief and placed it over the patch of bare flesh. Naturally, the Bold Young Woman was mortified and blushed scarlet with embarrassment.

Sometimes Mrs Cleary will joke about having to dance with one of the local Afrikaner farmers. They always danced ‘the pot handle', as she says. She means that the farmers danced, hillbilly hick, with their right arm held straight out, pumping vigorously in time to the music.

Catherine has a fine skin and a small delicate nose but she has almost no eyebrows or eyelashes, and she has small recessed blue eyes. Her bum is flat and wide and she runs easily to fat. Dinah has more visible eyes and eyebrows and proper curvy buttocks, but she hates her nose and starts to steam her coarsening skin over a
pudding basin of boiling water with a bath towel over her head. The coarsening skin has to do with biological maturity, which has come to her as a complete shock one recent Saturday morning.

I'm dying, she thinks. I'm bleeding to death. It can't be that nobody's told her about menstruation. She's surely been told and she's suppressed it. But because she knows that she's dying, rather than that she's afflicted with a routine female condition, she doesn't whisper it secretly to her mum. She announces it out loud in front of both her parents, so there's a general family to-do over it, with her mum running for sanitary towels and her dad saying, ‘Well, I suppose she ought to pay full fare on the buses from now on.' Until then, Dinah has always got by on the under-twelve rate.

And given the public nature of its onset, it's pretty weird that nobody seems to notice what Dinah's going through, that what's happening to her every month isn't exactly normal, that for twelve days out of thirty she's soaking through a packet of Kotex pads in a day, and often wearing two of them at once, that every time she stands up there'll be a rush of accumulated blood, just like turning on a tap – a gush that always contains dark, jellified clots. Since the Girls' High School summer uniform is a revealing pale-cream cotton, Dinah longs for the navy serge of winter, even though Durban doesn't have a winter, just hot and very hot. That way the kindly senior girls aren't forever coming up to her and whispering that she's ‘come on' – just as if she doesn't know that she's got huge stains on the back of her dress.

Every month Dinah chafes two weeping raw patches at the tops of her inside thighs from all the friction caused by the hardened, dry edges of the Kotex pads. She puts Vaseline and Elastoplast over the raw patches and tries not to wince with every step as she walks from the bus stop home from school. This routine agony goes on until, at seventeen, with the collusion of a clued-up new girl, Dinah discovers the unbelievable, the paradisal joys of Tampax and wonders why the Nobel Prize for Science hasn't been awarded to the inventor.

Catherine Cleary is Dinah's conduit to the fine detail of boy-girl street mores. Catherine knows that if a man wants to buy what she calls a rubber johnny, then he'll go into a chemist shop and spin half a crown on the counter without saying a word and the assistant will know what he wants. She knows that if a boy writes ‘Father
Uncle Cousin King' on a note that he passes to you on the school bus, then it means that he wants to F-U-C-K you, though for the moment Dinah doesn't know what fuck means, either. That's until Catherine explains it to her. Catherine knows that when a boy writes ‘SWANK' on the back of a letter it means ‘Sealed with a naughty kiss', which is a way of saying he wants to snog you. She knows about bulges in boys' school trousers and she knows that boys pant when they're sexually aroused. Catherine giggles at the sight of Dinah's mum's sewing machine shuttle flying up and down and she likes to pull the caps off tubes of lipstick and shunt the waxy red sticks up and down in their holders.

‘What does this remind you of?' she says, but Dinah is either too ignorant or too repressed to be reminded of anything. All she knows is that Catherine is being rude.

Catherine explains the Virgin Birth to Dinah by telling her how the Holy Ghost ‘came upon' the Mother of God.

‘The Holy Ghost did this to her,' Catherine says, and she makes a fist of her right hand with the thumb jutting saucily between her index and middle fingers. Then she waggles the fist in Dinah's face. It is not a gesture Dinah's seen before but she begins to get the point. The Virgin Mary has become pregnant by the Holy Ghost, as a result of receiving a schoolboy's note while sitting on the bus. Father Uncle Cousin King.

All through junior school Dinah and her friends have kept autograph books – little hard-covered books with pastel-coloured pages on which classmates, teachers and best friends signed their names. Or sometimes people would write verses or draw a picture with a snappy caption. If somebody wrote something witty or clever, then one could save it and use it oneself to write in someone else's autograph book:

When God gave out legs
I thought he said kegs.
I asked for two fat ones.
When God gave out noses
I thought he said roses.
I asked for a big red one.

This is what Enid once wrote in Dinah's book, except Enid's rhyming couplets went on and on. Another classmate's rhyme is lost on Dinah, because she's never heard the expression ‘fellow feeling':

Fellow feeling is wondrous kind
But I wonder just how a fellow would feel
If he felt a fellow feeling
In his pocket behind.

Best of all is Angela's page that shows a pot-bellied Marmite jar with its label at the top – ‘MARMITE'. Underneath the jar, Angela has written, ‘But Pa won't.'

Autograph books have pretty well disappeared with high school, but Catherine still has one and she asks Dinah to sign it, so Dinah borrows Angela's Marmite pun and sketches it into Catherine's book. Underneath she writes, ‘With love from Dinah'. Then one day soon afterwards, Catherine's all fired up with excitement.

‘I got into such trouble from my mum,' Catherine says. ‘She read my autograph book, you see, and she's seen what you wrote. God, she had
three fits
'