Frankie and Stankie (3 page)

Dinah, unlike Lisa, becomes obsessed with her dolls. They begin to exist in real time. And from the time she starts school herself, all the dolls have school as well. They are in their classrooms every day and Dinah makes them all miniature school books and school uniforms. Each chair in the living room is a different classroom, depending on the dolls' ages, and their home time has to be staggered. So for the dolls in the younger classes, Dinah's mum has to fetch them home. Home is on Dinah's bed. The neighbourhood boys who spy on her doll games manage to pick up that Rosema is an abuse victim, so they promptly start knocking her about. Everything about poor Rosema's body language is screaming at them to abuse her. They barge in and kick her round the garden like a football. They toss her high into the tallest trees so that she hangs for a moment in the branches by her hair before falling on to the red earth in a heap, like a broken spider. Then, one day, a boy called Donald Carter gets into a frenzy. Dinah watches as he shakes Rosema violently between his teeth, tossing his head from side to side. Then he throws her into the air and catches her in
his mouth. He growls at her like a tiger and suddenly he's ripped off the end of her nose. Dinah's eyes are opened. In a fit of guilt she takes Rosema to her heart and swears to love her best for ever. Having rejected her child, she now adores her with an extreme devotion. She sews up Rosema's nose with a needle and some of the flesh-coloured thread that her mother uses to cobble together holes in silk stockings.

‘Rosema is my favourite,' she says. ‘Rosema is my best doll.'

She and Rosema become inseparable.

The reason Dinah can sew from an early age is that her mother can't. Sewing follows the law of alternating generations, so that if your mum can't sew then you can. Dinah's mum's idea of sock-darning is to work a tacking thread round the hole and pull it tight into a ruched lump. This is one reason why Dinah and Lisa have blisters on their heels. The other is that their shoes are much too clumpy. Their dad, who is independent-minded and holds strong opinions on most things, has grown up in a household without sisters. He thinks girls' stuff is silly and inferior and he's got no time for it. He buys his daughters boys' toys and boys' shoes, so they have a red-and-green Meccano set and Bayco building blocks and a Hornby and several gyroscopes, and sturdy laced shoes called Knockabouts. But when Dinah is six, precisely because she's so skinny and weedy, a shoe-shop attendant measures her as AA width, and says that her feet will be ruined unless her parents put her in ultra-narrow, girly Startrites which just happen to come with a T-bar and a buckle and petal patterns cut out on the insteps. This is the happiest day of Dinah's life and poor Lisa is terribly jealous.

Dinah is a cry-baby and she has a bleeding heart. So one day she won't stop crying because she's accidentally washed a small spider down the plug-hole. Her mum, who has a Gothic streak, tells her that much more terrible things are happening every day. There and then she tells Dinah about a court case in that day's newspaper. It's all about a mother who's been tying up her children and making them eat their own sick. Because Dinah's mum is anxiety-prone, she likes to off-load gruesome stories. This is why she tells Lisa and Dinah about the multiple rapist in Cape Town for whom she mistook the Australian soldier. He could get through any locks and keys, she says. So the rapist would get into a house or a flat while the woman who lived there was out, and then he'd hide, so
that when the woman came home, she'd lock the door safely behind her and, just then, the rapist would step out of a cupboard.

This anecdote makes Dinah start checking all cupboards on entering a house, including small flat wall cupboards. And she always looks under beds, chests and dressers in case of very small rapists – sometimes even two-dimensional rapists. Only then will she think of locking a front door. Dinah's mum calls the rapist a murderer, so that she doesn't have to explain what rape is, because Dinah and Lisa don't yet know anything about sex, not until they are nearly ten and eleven. This is when Dorothy who lives in Manning Road takes them into a cupboard and whispers to them one by one what their mum and dad do together in bed.

When their dad gets a proper tenured lectureship in the maths department at the university in Durban, he has to go on ahead for the first day of term, so it's just the three of them that take the train together the day after the girls' mum has finally finished the packing. Dinah's mum has found a home for the family's cat, but not for the last two of her kittens, so, on the night before they leave, she sneaks out after dark without telling the girls and she pushes the kittens through the fence of the nearby Cecil Rhodes Estate. She's always liked the gardens there and she hopes that the kittens will dig in and manage to have nice lives.

The Rhodes Estate is called Groote Schuur which means Big Barn. It's got a small pride of lions that Lisa and Dina can sometimes hear roaring at night. Cecil Rhodes was once the Prime Minister of the Cape, but now he's forty years dead. There's a bronze statue of him in The Gardens in Cape Town, pointing heroically towards the north. This is because, as well as owning twenty-nine Cape wine farms and most of the Transvaal goldfields, he also owns lots of Rhodesia in the north, because Queen Victoria has given him rights to rule all the territory there – that's any territory where his mining ventures are venturing. Cecil Rhodes is famous for the Glen Grey Act which is designed to create extra land shortage among blacks, because having land has always made black people far too idle to go and work for whites. And, until now it's been only white farmers who've wanted cheap black labour. Now Rhodes and his friends are needing far more of it, because mining has become the big thing. Cecil Rhodes is a man of vision. He believes in making money for Empire and in white boys having
adventures. He's got his own sort of personal boy-scout pack, but it's made up of boys who are grown-ups. Dinah knows that Cecil Rhodes is famous because he wanted to build a railway line all the way from Cape to Cairo. Everyone knows that this is a very inspiring idea, because it's not only ambitious, but it's alliterative as well.

The train journey to Durban takes days and days, so the girls settle in happily to seventy-two hours of cutting out paper dolls with breaks for eating ham-and-pea soup from thick china plates in the dining car. Outside, the telegraph poles dip and rise in the wide landscape. The waiters enchant Dinah by their virtuoso method of dispensing tea and coffee. Holding nickel-plated coffee pot and milk jug, one in each hand, they pour two streams from a great height, swaying with the train's motion as they do so. It's a wonder to her how they always get the coffee and the milk to reach the top of the cup at exactly the same time. Their mum merely comments that the coffee is
Dreck
. She shakes her head and grimaces.
‘Schrecklich
' she says.
‘Schrecklich
.' All the waiters are white Afrikaners and all the bedding ‘boys' are Cape Coloured.

The original pale-brown people of the Cape had called themselves the Khoi, but the Dutch settlers called them Hottentots. The early Dutch had made so bold as to land, because the Portuguese had recently proved to them that the seas around the Cape didn't boil. So the Khoi lost all their territory to the Dutch and were turned into landless labourers. They also lost their language. That's except for those peculiar clicks that got taken over by the Xhosa. Finally the Khoi stopped being the Khoi and became the Cape Coloured people. They'd got mixed up with the whites and their slaves – slaves who had come from everywhere – from Guinea, Angola and Madagascar; from India, Java and China. But the top-notch slaves were always the Malays and they built the old Dorp Street Mosque. So if a Cape Coloured person says to you that his daughter looks like a Muslim, what he means is that she's got straight hair, which is a top-notch thing to have. Plus his daughter's probably also got those beautiful green eyes.

Durban is all sweaty heat and banana palms and huge succulent plants. The girls step out into the Victorian Gothic of the railway station to be met by their dad, who steers them through the
surrounding bustle of Indian fruit vendors and Zulu rickshaw men to settle them in a taxi. Both girls are in new kilts for the occasion: Lisa's is plaid, Dinah's is pink. Lisa and Dinah have neither of them ever seen a rickshaw man before and so they can't stop staring at first, even though these are just the plain-Jane rickshaw men in grubby, colourless head rags whose job is to pull sacks of maize. They haven't yet seen the fancier rickshaw men on the beachfront who wear ten-ton ornamental head-dresses with lots of horns and beads. The headgear fans out, two foot both ways, in a parody of an Aztec priest, and the rickshaw man's job is to pull around white tourists in their swimwear so that they can have their pictures taken. Holiday Snaps. Everybody Dinah knows calls a photograph a snap, except for her dad who is a serious amateur photographer – which is why he always spends half an hour taking your picture. Dinah's dad says that the rickshaw men are usually dead by the time they're forty, because you shouldn't be pulling four tourists in a cart with a ten-ton thing on your head.

Their house is a small prefab bungalow, one among many erected hastily for ex-servicemen in the grounds of a vast, exotically landscaped estate. It's called the Butcher Estate and it's owned by one of the local sugar plantation aristocracy, but now it's on loan to the university as a place to house academic staff and students. A jacaranda tree sheds mauve, bell-like flowers just outside their kitchen door.

There's an island of giant bamboo inhabited by a colony of grey vervet monkeys with black faces and black doll-sized human hands and feet. They leap and chatter and munch bananas, holding their babies upside-down on their bellies as they fly through the air, and sometimes they swing from their own tails just for fun. From the living-room window, just beyond the undergraduates' cricket pitch, you can walk through a shady green pergola covered with passion-fruit vines and bougainvillea, because in Durban bougainvillea grows over everything. Most of the trees are umbrella-shaped and have varieties of big red flower. Sometimes they have seed pods as big as dagger sheaths that crack open on the ground, spilling out fat speckled beans. There's a flower in the garden called chinker-ing-chee and lots of bushes called yesterday-today-and-tomorrow because they have flowers in three colours all on the one bush. Yesterday's flower is violet, today's is blue and tomorrow's is white.

The war is over and there's been a mass of emigration from Europe, so lots of the academics are from somewhere else. Most have been busy breeding, so that clusters of children peek out from the other bungalows and young university wives with babies in bouncy carriage prams are visible on the communal green. There's always somebody to play with and somebody's baby to mind and somebody to gang up against in the child community of the Butcher Estate. Dinah's favourite person is Harry Stent and very soon everyone is teasing her about him.

‘He's your boyfriend,' the children say.

Harry is a skinny boy with tight blond curls, but his small sister Margaret is plump and olive-skinned with big black eyes, because she takes after their mother who is Spanish. Margaret is too small to talk properly, but she always stretches out her little dimpled right hand and says, ‘More,' in the presence of biscuits. All the other children laugh at her and tell her she can't have more when she hasn't had any yet, but she just says it again. ‘More.'

Sometimes, when all ideas for games dry up, the child pack will go and sit on the wall in a long row and watch the undergraduates practising cricket, because it's fun to giggle and point if a batsman is wearing his groin guard on the outside of his trousers and to shout out ‘Hard cheese' and ‘Hard luck' in groany voices when someone's been given out. It makes the batsmen get really narky.

‘You kids clear off!' they say. ‘Go on. Scram!
Voetsek
!'

Then Dinah's family furniture comes. There isn't all that much of it and, in the kitchen, they just have wooden orange boxes for cupboards with cheap cretonne curtains strung across the fronts, but there are the two ornate, throne-like chairs – Grandfather Gieseke's chairs – which are definitely not bungalow chairs. They were carved by Dinah's mum's grandad for whom woodcarving was a hobby and they date from the 1870s, but their style is sort of Jacobean-baronial and they look as though they could be used for the banqueting scene in
Macbeth
. They are large and square, with heavy arms and stretchers, and they're made of dark, heavily carved oak. Their arms and legs and tall backs are transformed into a mass of vine leaves, barley-sugar twists and Gothic inscriptions from the Lutheran Bible. And then there are three new consumer items that cause excitement. There's a fridge called Frigidaire, and a small brand-new upright piano for their mum.
And there's a radiogram like a cupboard for their dad whose growing collection of classical-music records is stored in big flat boxes with file-reference numbers. But the best thing about the new radiogram is that it comes with a rogue demo record that's completely unlike the rest of their dad's collection and Dinah and Lisa love it to bits. This is because all of one side is taken up with a song called ‘Little Piggy'. So they ask for it over and over, and they always sing along:

Every little Piggy has a curly tail
And nobody knows the reason why.

Dinah loves having all the trees to climb on the Butcher Estate. Some of them grow so close to the bungalow roofs that she can picnic on a variety of staff rooftops. She rigs up a pulley system with a large fire bucket to haul up her dolls. She and some of the boys even haul up Lisa, who doesn't like to climb but wants to join in. Then, when the monkeys come on raids to steal their bananas, all the children retreat in haste, leaving poor Lisa wailing on the roof that she's stuck. Dinah always has to run home on these occasions and call their mum.