Frankie and Stankie (31 page)

‘Would you like to buy that record?' says the shop assistant.

‘Er, no actually,' Maud says. ‘No thanks. Not today.'

‘I thought not,' says the assistant.

Meanwhile, back in
Die Huisgenoot
, some of the full-colour rugby players are sporting double sets of Hitler moustaches as well as the routine sets of multiple eyebrows. Their names are printed, left to right, in rows under the photograph. All of them have Afrikaans nicknames, like ‘Baasie' van Wyk and ‘Tiny' du Preez and ‘Skoppie' van der Westhuizen and ‘Mannetjie' Joubert. They have huge, bulging thighs and the shortest of very short shorts. Dinah and Maud have worked themselves into a state of bliss over the photograph. They giggle until their stomach muscles are aching almost unbearably. They are feigning swoony passion and picking the worst of the bull-necked sports persons to be each other's fantasy husbands. They're in full swing, kissing the newsprint and clutching at their hearts, when they become aware that Mrs Keithley is advancing up the aisle. Then she's standing over them with a kindly conspiratorial air. She bends to undo the centre staples with care.

‘There you are,' she says. ‘You can take the picture home, my girlies. You can take turns to pin it up in your bedroom.'

The girls are halfway dead with the joy of it.

‘It's mine!' Dinah says at once, play-acting to clutch the newsprint to her bosom.

‘It's mine!' Maud says, snatching it from her.

‘Control yourself,' Dinah says. ‘We'll have to take turns. That's what Mrs Keithley said.'

‘Never!' Maud says. ‘It's not fair. I saw it first. Mrs Keithley, tell her I saw it first. Now look what you've gone and done!' She says this because, in the tussle, ‘Baasie' van Wyk has lost a section of his left cabbage ear and ‘Skoppie' van der Westhuizen has parted company with his right thigh.

When Mrs Keithley gets the girls to write letters to the newspaper, it's to practise writing business letters in Afrikaans. They are set to write about the matter of unwrapped bread, because this is one big hygiene issue that keeps on rearing its head. Dinah and Maud write their address and the date on the right-hand side in their exercise books. For the address they have to write ‘Durban Girls' High School', only they write it in Afrikaans. After that, Maud enters into the spirit of her letter, assuming the role of concerned white housewife and mother and waxing indignant about the health hazard to her children.

‘Dirty black hands are crawling all over the crusts that our children love,' she writes.

‘Hey, Dinah. What are crusts in Afrikaans?' she says.

Dinah looks it up for her in the dictionary and passes it over.

‘Right,' Maud says. ‘I've finished.'

Both girls are working at high speed, with slipshod results, in the hope of becoming eligible for another issue of
Die Huisgenoot
. When Mrs Keithley returns the books, she's not best pleased, but it's nothing to do with the letters' contents. Rather, she feels the need to point out a grave mistake to the whole class.

‘High School' in Afrikaans is
‘Hoërskoel
” but Maud has left out the two little dots over the e – an omission which, apparently, has turned ‘High School' into ‘Whore School'. Mrs Keithley is bent upon explanation, but she can't say the word whore out loud, so this is making her struggle increasingly rewarding.

‘The examiners,' she says, ‘are good, upright, clean-living men. They don't want to see such filthy words.'

By now the whole class is feigning persistent incomprehension, but Mrs Keithley has finally hit upon an explanation.

‘My girlies,' she says, and she lowers her voice to a gruff whisper. ‘My girlies, it means – it means – a
street woman
.'

Everyone knows what a street woman is, because the Durban docks are pretty well right there in the town centre and Point Road is full of one-night cheap hotels. But when Maud gets round to scanning the small print of her corrected exercise book she's aware of another mistake.

‘Hey, Dinah,' she says. ‘That word you gave me for crusts. Well, look here. Mrs Keithley says it means scabs. I've put, “Dirty black hands are crawling all over the scabs that our children love.” '

Maud's mastery of sports avoidance is good for Dinah's self-esteem. Dinah's always been useless at games, yet she's always felt the need to try. So during her first ever GHS hockey practice – and just when she's giving it all she's got – Dinah hears Miss Chase saying sarcastically, ‘The object is to
advance
upon the ball, Dinah, not to retreat from it. Understood?' Miss Chase also has a low opinion of Dinah's tennis hand. That's ever since the day that Dinah's passed out unconscious on the court. Something about the excessive summer heat and the dazzling sunlight and the uncorrected astigmatism, along with the routine menstrual excess and
the hay-fever suppressants. They've all left Dinah charging uselessly from one side of the court to the other, always too late to scoop the ball, until her brain has sensibly made the decision to take a little holiday. At sixteen, Dinah is possibly the only white South African in the country who can't swim a decent front crawl. Yet she always sits in the stands during swimming galas, lustily cheering for her house, or her school, or her team, just like everyone else.

Now, thanks entirely to Maud, Dinah has learned to wear her sporting incompetence with pride. She's learned that there's an alternative to that perpetual floundering in the shallow end as the butt of Miss Chase's contempt. She's learned to malinger in the school library where the kindly librarian, who has fallen under Maud's spell, will always agree to let them hide. And the librarian confesses, shyly, during one of their occasional conversations, to a parallel career as the author of several hardback historical novels with somewhat lurid dust jackets. Maud writes a series of spoofy, hockey-mad poems as parodies of John Masefield and gets them published in the school magazine. So after that Miss Chase gives up on the pair of them and stops even trying to make them do PT. They're licensed to sit out all the physical jerks on the bench, alongside the usual rotating assortment of shirkers.

‘I've got my periods, Miss Chase,' says Michelle Blumhoff, who is one of the North Beach airhead set, but she's very good at drawing. She says it week in, week out, until Miss Chase finally loses her rag.

‘PERIOD, Michelle. PERIOD!' she screams. ‘Have them ONE AT A TIME, if you please!'

Michelle's dad has once revealed to Beattie Blain that his swirl-patterned kipper tie has a nudie pin-up on the underside.

The only teacher whom Maud and Dinah admire and respect unreservedly, the only one they never send up, the only one in whose classes they never whisper, or giggle, or pass notes, the only teacher whose homework they always do, is the fifty-something Miss Byrd, whose art history classes are their perpetual inspiration. Miss Byrd and her sister are two shy professional spinsters who are rumoured to be living at home with a domineering mother. Yet in the classroom Miss Byrd is a colossus. Miss Byrd is always spellbinding. She takes her girls through a rigorous, high-speed chronology of Western art, along with some concessionary forays into the
arts of India, Africa, Japan and China, so that within two years their files are bulging with hand-sketched details of Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns along with several kinds of architrave plus the façades and ground plans of something like fifty classical buildings.

Then they do Romanesque churches, both in Europe and Asia Minor. After that, they launch into the Gothic. They can sketch the sequence of the Parthenon frieze. They can write essays on the Charioteer of Delphi and on the Praxiteles Hermes. They know the sequence of the bas-reliefs on Trajan's Column. They know the Pantheon, niche by niche. They know barrel vaulting and flying buttresses. They can draw the columns of the Córdoba Mosque and the fan-vaulted ceiling of the Divinity School in Oxford. They can draw, from memory, the various side elevations of Notre Dame and Chartres Cathedral and of Wells Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. They can make drawings of Ghiberti's baptistry doors and of Brunelleschi's dome.

They know, cell by cell, all the paintings in Fra Angelico's monastery and all the Masaccios in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. They can write about the influence of Bellini on Mantegna and about the influence of Duccio on Giotto. They can tell, at a glance, what makes Giovanni da Fabriano different from Benozzo Gozzoli. They can write about the Dutch School and the Flemish School and the paintings of post-Reformation England and the influence of Constable on the French Impressionists. They can sketch each of the figures of Rodin's
Burghers of Calais
.

Because Miss Byrd's teaching has uses beyond its own field, the art girls know about Balzac because of Rodin; they know about Platonism because of Raphael; they know about
commedia dell'arte
because of Watteau. And Dinah knows more about the enclosure movement from looking at Thomas Gainsborough than she's ever learned from listening to Miss Legge. Miss Byrd is never afraid of the present, which means that the girls know Sickert and Stanley Spencer and Francis Bacon and Diego Rivera. They know Rothko and Jacob Epstein.

Perhaps because her Protestant soul has difficulty in taking it on board, Miss Byrd simply leaves out the artists of the counter-Reformation, so that the baroque, except for Rubens, is one big blank. Seventeenth-century Italy has suddenly gone very quiet
and, though Dinah knows de la Tour and Honthorst, she's never heard of Caravaggio: the man himself, the founding father. Dinah also believes that Spain has ‘three great painters', all of whom were ‘accidents of genius'. Velázquez, El Greco and Goya have no context in Miss Byrd's book. There is no Ribera, no Zurbarán, no Murillo. They emerge, luminous, from a strange and barbarous nothing.

Miss Byrd is, in all sorts of ways, a woman limited by her time and her context, but Maud and Dinah don't see this, because her brilliant extraordinary teaching is somehow coming from the other side of her head. Then, one day, after she's given a lesson on prehistoric cave painting, Miss Byrd lets drop a cheery, unreviewed anecdote about having once seen South African Bushmen on display in a cage at Johannesburg's Rand Easter Show. Maud and Dinah are staring at her, trying not to believe that she's saying this without seeing that it's appalling. They are trying hard themselves not to see the sad, violated rump of South Africa's hunter-gatherers, the straggling survivors of persecution and genocide, in a cage alongside the prize bulls and the innovative tractors and the hot-dog stalls and
boeremusiek
. People as exhibits at an agricultural show. Yet it's clear from Miss Byrd's tinkling laughter in response to their squeamish expressions that she thinks Maud and Dinah are just being silly.

In their perpetual hanging out in the town centre, Maud and Dinah don't always stick to dress shops. Sometimes Maud is having new jodhpurs fitted, which means, for Dinah, hours of waiting in the tailor's shop, among all the bales of cavalry twill. Maud is unbelievably fussy about the jodhpurs and about all her riding gear. Horsemanship is an important part of what she does when Dinah isn't with her, though Dinah knows that she's an instructor at the riding school, as well as one of the school's star performers. So she likes to nit-pick for ever. Sometimes Maud and Dinah hang out near the Cenotaph where they watch the impassioned Bible-thumpers going hammer and tongs at the queues of tired white commuters who are waiting for their buses to carry them home.

One day they have a try at being Bible-thumpers themselves, but their voices just get lost on the air and the hymn they try and sing
peters out on them. Plus the school uniforms, they feel, are undermining their credibility.

‘That was terrible,' Maud says, as they retreat behind the Cenotaph. ‘Nobody was taking any notice of us. Did you see that? They couldn't even tell that we were
preaching
.'

Baptist evangelism is big right now and Billy Graham has recently gone global. So Maud and Dinah are not too surprised when one day, while dawdling alongside the vacant lots behind the beachfront hotels, they see that the Green Tent has risen up in the night, huge as that of Boswell's Circus.

‘Let's go in,' Maud says. ‘Come on. Let's.'

Inside, the tent has a green grass floor and rows of stacking chairs that have been arranged leaving a wide central aisle. There's a long table at the altar end and an invisible Würlitzer is playing religious choruses, sort of quietly, under its breath. The tent is filling up fast as Maud and Dinah take their seats three rows from the front. Some of the women are wearing hats and gloves. Everyone in the tent is white, but maybe there's a parallel tent somewhere for blacks. The Würlitzer gets louder and everyone sings ‘I met Jesus at the Crossroads' and one or two other choruses before the preacher starts his harangue.

Just when they think he's starting to wind down, he runs his eyes menacingly over the assembled worshippers and pauses to stare at particular individuals in the congregation. He's making some very determined eye contact. Dinah is thinking, ‘Please let it not be me.'

‘Whoever will offer his life to the Lord?' he says. ‘Who will be saved on this day? Who will repent him of his sins and be washed as white as snow? Come forward! Yes,
you
, sir! Come forward.
you
, madam! Come forward and give yourself to the Lord!'

People in ones and twos start shuffling timidly towards the front where the preacher lays his hands on them and directs them through a canvas doorway into an invisible place beyond the altar.

‘Come on,' Maud says. ‘Let's go. Let's be saved.'

The girls join the line of people shuffling forward more boldly now, as the Würlitzer is stepping up the volume. Though they're motivated by no more than a desire to see what goes on beyond the canvas doorway, they're feeling little tremors of excitement.