Frankie and Stankie (43 page)

‘You kept my mother awake all night,' Didi explains reproachfully. ‘With all that sneezing and coughing and your constant visits to the bathroom. Can't you try and be just a little bit more considerate?'

‘Sorry,' Dinah says.

Her eyes are little pink slits. The skin around the wings of her nose is shiny red and cracked.

‘Don't say sorry to
me
,' he says. ‘Try saying sorry to my mother.'

When Didi deserts her in February to go off hunting somewhere, Dinah designs and executes for him twelve different Valentine cards, each with its own neat rhyming couplet written out in Chinese ink, and she posts these to his family home. She remembers this act of excessive devotion, because it's with these Hallmark
greeting-card skills that she finally draws from
Mutti
her one and only sort-of compliment. Dinah is ‘
so künstleriscth
', she says, that she ought to be finding herself a boyfriend whose talent matches her own.

And then, once Didi has accomplished his degree in business studies, he goes off to Johannesburg and gets himself a job. And Dinah, who is suddenly being courted by three far more suitable young men, is telling them all, one by one, that though she likes them, she can't possibly take them on because she's going to marry Didi. One is a journalist and a talented batsman who plays cricket in the national team. He's one of that generation of Springbok sportsmen whose careers get aborted by the boycott. Another is an up-coming Rhodes Scholar, an ambitious academic brainbox who gives her lifts on his clapped-out red Lambretta. He weaves it perilously all over the road and crashes it so frequently that Dinah develops a theory of inverse correlation between road skills and high intelligence quotient.

The third, unbelievably, is Jed. Jed who has suddenly decided that she's the girl for him after all. He's given up on his line of twin-set girls and he's opened his heart to Dinah. And Dinah – weeping inwardly as she hears herself utter the words – tells him no, that, though she
really
likes him – as a friend, of course, not as a boyfriend – she's going to marry Didi. Jed, unlike the other two, doesn't hang about. He doesn't linger on her mother's living-room sofa, hoping to find favour with her by outstaying his rivals. He tells her she's a fool. Then he leaves at once. And, from then on, he addresses not a word to her for almost half a year.

Jed is into something political, Dinah is fairly certain, but then there are all sorts of people about whom it's become better not to ask. There'll be the person with whom you're having dinner who, all unbeknown to you, is keeping a store of dynamite underneath the divan. And nobody with half a brain will ever talk politics on the phone. Or in a public place. Or even in the garden where a neighbour might overhear. Bombs have been going off at regular intervals, mostly in government buildings, because, since its banning, the ANC has pulled off over two hundred successful acts of sabotage. There's been the unmasked ‘Blonde Spy' at Wits, who has hit the Sunday papers – and spies are everywhere. Some of Dinah's small inner circle will whisper that the librarian's a spy
and, to be sure, he likes to draw one aside and offer one, in confidence, his cupboard full of banned books. So any time you're after reading
The Communist Manifesto
, well, that will be no problem. You just come along to him.

John Vorster, as Minister of Justice, is looming over the security apparatus in a formidable double act with his friend Hendrick van den Bergh – his own appointee as head of the Special Branch; his wartime fellow conspirator from their
Ossewabrandwag
days. There's the Sabotage Act and the Ninety Day Act, by which the police can arrest any person and hold them, on suspicion, with no warrant and no access to a lawyer. That's for ninety days. Then it's a hundred and eighty days. And the police can always re-arrest you, the moment you've been released. Plus people in custody are suddenly beginning to manage fatal accidents – in the showers, on the stairs, taking tumbles from upstairs windows.

Things are not as bad as they'll get, but they're certainly getting worse. Dinah's response, in Didi's absence, is to join the madrigal group. Because Alfred Deller, the English counter-tenor, has caused a sudden revival of interest in early English music.

When Lisa graduates, she decides to become a librarian, mainly because she's so certain that she doesn't want to be a teacher. Both girls are completely certain that they don't want to become teachers. Because who'd want to end up like Miss Legge? Plus Dinah's still convinced that nearly all teachers are mad. Teacher, librarian, secretary, nurse. These are the careers that appear to be on offer. That's if you're a girl. Lisa's got herself a place on the librarians' course in Johannesburg because Durban doesn't have one. So Lisa and her mum are up in Johannesburg, looking for the cheapest digs they can find. They're looking for a nice boarding house, preferably one that doesn't reek of boiled cabbage and Sanilav, because Lisa, like her mum, is fastidious. Both of them don't like common.

So, for the first time ever, Dinah's alone with her dad. And, because she's suddenly filling the space that her big sister's vacated, she's being trusted to take the odd turn with preparing the evening meal – and she's just accomplished her first roast chicken with roast potatoes. Then the phone rings and she's being asked out on a date by a person she only knows by sight, a person who is new on campus. The date's got tickets for a mime show, he says, and it's starting within the hour. There's a touring French mime artist in town, but Dinah's in a quandary, because her roast chicken is ready to serve.

‘I'll just have to ask my dad,' she says.

This is a remark which the date later tells her he's found a bit of a turn-off. But he comes to fetch her in his VW beetle which is reeking strongly of cat pee. This is because, three days before, the date has acquired two feral cats from the animal rescue, who have spat and
pissed their way home. They're not cuddly cats to look at, he says. In fact they're not cuddly at all. They're like those electrified cats that you get in children's cartoon films. They're fierce and scrawny and, when they take fright, they re-assemble themselves with zigzag outlines. So they're not like Dinah's farm cat then, the comfy and rotund Muschka, who saves all his energy for purring and smiling and for blinking his flecked yellow eyes. The date has named his cats Wyatt Earp and Jesse James. Dinah notes that the back seat of the beetle is awash with crumpled airmail editions of the
New Statesman
and with Pogo comics from the Okeyfenokey Swamp.

The mime artist is Marcel Marceau and, because Dinah hasn't thought to bring her Gregory Peck men's horn-rims, his performance is lost on her. Thanks to his black hat and trousers, however, she can tell that there's a figure on the stage and that the figure is moving about. But in the interval, because everyone else is raving about the mime artist, Dinah feels the need to fake it and she has a little rave as well. She and the date are in the bar with two of Dinah's lecturers – two newly appointed young post-grad persons who've swiftly got it together. The male young person has made his mark on Dinah's final-year tutorial group – mainly through his misreading of a line in T.S. Eliot's ‘Fire Sermon'. He's come to grief over Eliot's description of a young woman's life in London bedsit land.

First he's read the line in his wide-boy Germiston accent that goes so well with his weathered black lumber jacket: ‘ “Her drying combinations,” he reads, “touched by the sun's last rays”.

‘OK,' he says. ‘OK. So she's got these drying combination things on her head. Sort of like this.'

He gestures, making a beehive shape in the air above his head to indicate one of those stand-up dryers found in women's hairdressing salons before the advent of the blow-dry. Then he looks quite threatened when all the students start to laugh. For Dinah and Jed it's the first time in months that they've made eye contact, so things are looking up.

‘What's so funny?' says the young male party. ‘Have I got egg on my face?'

‘Combinations,' Jed says eventually, ‘are a kind of winter underwear. They're “drying” because she's hung them up. She's laundered them, you see.'

‘Oh shucks,' says the young male party.
‘Underwear?
So I have got egg on my face.'

The young female party has been a lot less fun and she's got a streak of Miss Whiplash. Her first move is to give everyone really no-good essay marks and this is true for Dinah's essay on the novels of E.M. Forster.

‘You didn't seem to notice,' she says, ‘that Forster is a
minor
novelist.'

But, as Dinah now snipes in private to the date, once they're safely back in their seats, ‘I thought it was an
essay
I was writing. I didn't think it was a league table.'

The young female party is under the sway of Dr F.R. Leavis, who has isolated the Big Five in the history of the English novel. He's cut and slashed, until only the lucky five are left. Only five are in the Great Tradition. Dinah thinks that the list has to be crap, because it doesn't include Charles Dickens.

‘I mean,' she says to the date, ‘I mean – if you had to make a choice – which would you be saving from the burning fiery furnace?
Sons and Lovers
, or
Bleak House? The Shadow Line
, or
David Copperfield?
Which would you rather burn your hands for?
Washington Square
or
Little Dorrit?
'

Then she feels a terrible drip for having mentioned her essays on a date. But it's all right, because the date has got an essay story as well. He tells her that, as a student activist, he's been probed by the Wits Blonde Spy, the spy whose taped information to the police has now been splashed all over the papers.

‘Oh him,' the Blonde Spy has said about the date. ‘Oh him. He never tells me anything. He just talks and talks about his history essays.'

The date's also got a story about someone he knows who, as a cocky graduate student, was once rude to E.M. Forster. Dinah has never thought of E.M. Forster as someone she could be rude to. She thinks of famous writers as being names on the spines of books.

Dinah enjoys her night out. She likes the date's curly black hair. And she likes it that he's got himself two cats. Plus she thinks he's very amusing. But still she stiffens as he parks the beetle outside her parents' house.

‘I'd like to kiss you, but I won't,' he says, taking the wind out of
her sails. ‘I had two molars out this afternoon and the inside of my mouth is still feeling like lumps of chopped liver.'

The date's teeth are a disaster area because he's spent his years at university letting the students in the Wits dental school attend to his mouth for free. So now he's got lots of unnecessary crowns and experimental bridge work. He's got fly-overs and cantilevers all threatening to come down.

Dinah seizes the opportunity to make her little speech. ‘I really like you as a friend,' she says, ‘but my boyfriend's in Johannesburg and I'm going to marry him.'

‘Well, that's no problem for me,' says the date, ‘because I don't want to marry you. Anyway, he's in Johannesburg. And I'm right here.'

The date teaches history in the African studies department. He's recently come from Cape Town University where, like Dinah's dad several decades before, he's had a job as a junior lecturer. Now he's got a proper job in Durban, but he comes from the Transvaal. He comes from Krugersdorp, which is a West Rand mining town about twenty miles from Johannesburg. It's famous for the Sterkfontein Caves, he says, where a young Scottish doctor uncovered a very significant missing link.
Plesianthropus Transvaalensis
, otherwise known as Mrs Ples. He found a female skeleton that finally offered hard evidence of an adult humanoid that stood up and walked, using its hands like people. Krugersdorp, being thick with gold mines, has had a concentration of white English miners, often immigrant Cornish tin miners. But it's also one of the spiritual heartlands of Afrikaner Nationalism. Krugersdorp is where President Kruger's forces impounded the ramshackle English conspirators of the pre-Boer War Jameson Raid. Plus it's got the Paardekraal Monument, where people in voortrekker costumes like to gather for heritage occasions. In addition, Krugersdorp, like most Rand mining towns, has communities of Asian and Jewish small traders, of which the date's family is one.

The date has spent his only-child boyhood playing near the Sterkfontein Caves with his mongrel best-friend dog called Cheeky. Or squatting on the riverbank with his father's black assistant, a man who models hump-backed oxen for him out of river clay. This is before he has to go to school. After that, from the time he's about nine, he always gets beaten up en route, by brawny Afrikaner highschool
boys, because he's Jewish and English-speaking and the year is 1942. So the date's mum arranges boxing lessons, but he still goes on getting beaten up, until one day five years later. This is when his chief tormentor appears with two little pipsqueaks. The plan is that the pipsqueaks will beat up the date, while the big boy stands by to watch. But let the date lay a finger on the pipsqueaks, and the big boy will wade in. Feeling his honour to be at stake, the date brushes aside the pipsqueaks in one swift movement and goes straight for the big boy, where, by sheer good luck, he breaks a blood vessel in the boy's nose. So blood pours over both their school shirts and wrecks their respective school ties. That's the day when the bullying stops and reputations are made and lost.

The date's mum is sent out from London to South Africa in 1928. She's sent out from the Mile End Road to go and work for one of her ten brothers with whom she's already spent a pinched and squabbly childhood in varying degrees of watchful resentment. Plus, because she's the only girl in the family, she's always been made to polish her brothers' shoes. All eleven siblings are seriously brainy, but the family can't afford school uniforms so, aged fourteen, they all go out to work, which for most of them means shipping out to the Rand, where they set about earning the passage out for the next sibling down. That's except for the youngest one who – always top of his junior-school class – is discovered by the school nurse to have an irregular heartbeat. So he's carted off, kicking and screaming, to the residential special school where, after two years of weaving baskets, he gives up the spirit and dies.