Frankie and Stankie (40 page)

Jed exists in opposition to the Sta-Prest Jehovah's Witness look and he doesn't seem to own a shirt. Oblivious to the sweltering heat, he wears woollen jumpers next to his skin; and corduroy trousers; and sneakers without socks. Dinah has never seen him in shorts. His dress is often missing accessories, such as buttons and functioning zips. Sometimes he ties a crumpled red snuff handkerchief around his throat and he always smokes his own roll-ups. Jed has dimples like slashes when he smiles and these, along with his pointed teeth, his corduroys, his roll-ups – Jed and everything about him – causes Dinah to go weak at the knees.

It's taken a while to get to know Jed, because he's early on walked out of the Song Practice sessions and, after that, he's gone to ground. His whereabouts are a mystery, though he pops up in the odd lecture. Jed walks out when he's called upon to mime the sex act during ‘Roll your leg over' with one of the first-year girls. He gets up and lopes to the front, just as if he's going to oblige. Then he says, ‘Go to hell, you stupid bastards,' and, turning his face towards the glinting bay, he strides out towards Pigeon Valley. The Committee doesn't even try to stop him. He looks too strange and intimidating, too hard for them to fathom. So instead they practise damage-limitation and try to shrug him off.

‘Listen, it's
his
loss,' they say. ‘It's
his
tough, hey? If he's got no community spirit – well, that's
his
tough.'

Later on Jed tells Dinah that he's spent the week sleeping on a beach. Mostly Jed lives in a garage and he looks after himself. He
comes from a British Home Counties family that's gone native in various Outposts of Empire. His dad's gone native in the Caribbean; his mum's gone off to find herself.

‘But he looks just like a native boy!' Maddie says, when Dinah confesses her crush. ‘Ugh! I couldn't
kiss
him. You couldn't seriously kiss him, could you?'

Jed Matthews is majoring in English, so he and Dinah are soon sitting together in most of the lectures and tutorials. The first-year English class is pretty big, so they're broken up into lots of smaller tutor groups. But, just at first, by way of introduction, the class as a whole is set an essay. Dinah and Jed get first and second top marks. They're one per cent apart.

‘God, but you're such a fool!'Jenny says. ‘You'll never get him if you beat him at essays!'

But Jed is already not hers, she can tell. He's been revealing a discouraging tendency to go for fragrant women; twin-set-and-pearls girls from private schools who look and behave like debutantes. They all try him briefly, as a sort of dare, before turning him down for something a whole lot safer. So Jed is her head-friend, her soulmate, her buddy – a kind of giggling companion for whom she struggles to suppress desire.

Her other men friends are Ben and Simon. And then there's Francis Cull. Ben is a precocious maths-bod with a lisp and black frizzy hair. The hair is a little bit Ouma Smuts – but then Ben says that Ouma's related. Ben is a seriously good violinist who looks like a nine-stone weakling. But in fact he's the only person Dinah knows who can lift a good-size prone tree trunk without any help from his friends. Simon is a tiny Catholic male with some sort of growth hormone problem. He's a lovely, gossipy, brainy chap who's funny as hell about the rugger-bugger engineers who've bullied him through Freshers' induction. Simon, oddly, is poised enough to ‘Roll his leg over' for anyone without causing humiliation, either to himself or to his allotted partner. That's as a mime act, anyway. In real life Simon is committed to abstinence and has planned his future as a Benedictine monk in an abbey he's liaising with in Devon. Simon is always funny about the sillier flirtier girls who tart up in the Ladies before the Samuel Johnson lectures – because the classes are being given by a pretty blue-eyed young man. And the young man's tastes, Simon says, most certainly do not run to girls.
Simon always notices every garment that Dinah wears and everything she does to her hair. Simon is the one man who always knows exactly what's in the latest issue of
Vogue
.

Francis Cull is thirty-five and a Church of England priest. He's doing an arts degree along with his job and he's out of tune with the complacent body of the white church. He ministers to a congregation of impoverished Natal Indian Christians in Meerbank, which is damp and mosquito-ridden, so lots of his parishioners have chronic lung disease. He's been a priest in the East End of London and he's full of righteous fury about the obscenities of the local scene. They hang out together – Dinah and her friends – in the flash new students' union building, where, in the canteen, they can dip their chips into a range of condiments that are always on offer for free. And because Dinah still likes mayonnaise best, she always chooses that.

And then it's Rag Week. On the wide, pristine steps of the new students' union building, one of the students, in the night, has spray-painted a message. Dinah blinks at the bold red letters as she proceeds down the steps with Jed. ‘KEEP KAFFIRS OUT OF OUR RAG.' Dinah's quite surprised by this, because she hasn't considered that there'd be any black students clamouring to take part in Rag Week. Dr Verwoerd wants all black students off campus by 1961 and – since Durban has the part-time degree students hived off in a place called City Buildings which sits in town near the central bus station – most black undergraduates have never been a presence on campus. But Jed tells Dinah that he's been to a meeting where one of their first-year English classmates, among others, has felt very strongly about keeping the Rag Week white.

‘Why should we give
them
our Rag on a plate?' Jed is cruelly mimicking. ‘Why can't
they
have their own Rag?'

‘ “They”, “them”,' Jed says. ‘And I expect you've noticed who the authorities have hauled in to scrub the bloody thing off?'

‘A kaffir,' Dinah says. ‘Who else?'

She's referring to the crouching black skivvy in house-boy get-up who is right then on his hands and knees, going at the graffiti with scouring powder.

It's Dinah's impression that Rag Week is running on seamlessly from Freshers' induction and that it's the same quorum of white racist males who are in charge of both events. Rag is offering a preliminary night of drunken float-building and rah-rah student
bonding which includes an all-night, all-white sexual orgy, strongly intimated to take place underneath the hired lorries. Then, next morning, there's the election of one pretty, hung-over Rag Queen and two pretty, hung-over Rag Princesses. There's also the sale of a Rag magazine so mind-boggling in the mediocrity of its smut that Dinah's amazed the Rag Committee doesn't fall on its own sword. Trouble with Rag Week is, although it's for charity, it's been so rigorously highjacked by racist philistines that anyone halfway literate, anyone who could rustle up a decent Rag Mag, wouldn't want to touch it with a barge pole.

And then, once Rag Week is over, Dinah loses Jenny. Jenny who has just been dumped by the Rhodes Scholar architect. He has brought out from England his peaches-and-cream fiancée: his Oxford fellow student, his Cotswold sweetie-pie in her little green ballet pumps. She's a class act with whom Jenny – being Jenny – right away makes Best Friends. And it's because Jenny is feeling a bit low that Dinah and Jed take her along with them when they go to visit Peter Mainz. Dinah and Jed have discovered that they've got Peter in common. Jed has been friends at school with Peter, the pampered singleton of Dinah's mum's friend Frau Liesl Mainz, with the unreformed, lopsided face, the civic-minded matron who once entertained the Tyrolean yodellers in the Maypole Tearoom by the Cenotaph where the Special Branch now hang out. Jed and Peter have written plays together in the sixth form of Durban Boys' High School. The plays are written in the shadow of Samuel Beckett and require a modest cast of two – that's always Jed and Peter. They also require some predictably modest props, like stepladders and empty dustbins. Dinah finds out about the schoolboy connection because Jed, for purposes of satire and self-mockery, pulls out of his pocket one morning a copy of the Boys' High School magazine.

‘But I know that boy,' Dinah says.

So Dinah and Jed, along with Jenny, set out to visit Peter. It's one weekend when he's home from his art school in Pietermaritz-burg. Dinah observes that Jed has a curious relationship with Peter. It's a relationship of genuine friendship crossed with the kind of disdain that a person who shifts for himself in a garage will have for a person who revels in the role of mother's darling. So Jed is piss-taking over the fondue that Frau Liesl Mainz has placed before them – the four Nice Young People, all twirling their bread in a
copper pot of oozy cheese. But, more than Jed, Dinah can't help noticing that something is happening to Jenny. Because Jenny has taken one look at pampered Peter and the glance has changed her life. Jenny has given away her heart and this time it's for ever. And Peter is obviously charmed by her and fancies himself in love. Frau Liesl is right away over the moon, because Jenny is her idea of dreamgirl. Jenny will be the daughter-in-law; the
liebling
female companion; the comfort of her old age. So it's happily ever after as far as everyone's concerned.

By the next day Jenny has made up her mind, because Jenny is always decisive. She'll abandon her degree in modern languages. She'll give up on the volumes of Montaigne that she's been carrying about in her summer basket, up and down the steps of the library tower. And, there and then, without Matric art, she'll talk her way into the fine art BA in Pietermaritzburg. Plus she'll talk her way into the women's hall of residence alongside the male equivalent in which Peter Mainz lays his sacred head.

But Peter, within the month of Jenny's arrival, has fallen for somebody else. A chunky, dark Afrikaner girl from a farming family way up north. Solid as a figure by Juan Botero, Sandra is a country girl. She has raven hair and thick unplucked black eyebrows and thick unshaven underarm hair. Sandra has the broadest feet that Dinah's ever seen. She's a cute soap-and-water girl. So Liesl Mainz goes into mourning and cries over Dinah's mum. And Jenny does what Jenny does. She becomes Peter's girlfriend's Best Friend. Jenny is now a student of fine art, fifty miles away. And – being Jenny – she's soon being courted by one of the academic staff, a young physicist who, Dinah thinks, has much more going for him in looks, charm and courtesy than pampered Peter Mainz. But then, it isn't Dinah's life.

And, decades later, while staring out of her window on to her street off the Boulevard St Germain, Jenny – pretty, immaculate Jenny, middle-aged, childless, depilated Jenny, as always, trimly in-shape Jenny – sighs and says to her one-time schoolfriend, ‘Oh Didi, if only Peter had
loved
me, my life would have been different. It would have been better.'

It's on the last day of Freshers' Induction that the head honcho of the Freshers' Reception Committee finally catches up with Dinah.
He's standing there, on his tree-trunk legs, filling the path to the women's hall of residence like Apollyon on the Bridge.

‘Hey, Freshette,' he says. ‘We've noticed that you haven't been coming to Song Practice.'

Dinah is stopped in her tracks. She's hoping to God that she hasn't got those instant giveaway red blotches that, in stressful circumstances, will jump forcefully into evidence all over her neck, blotches to indicate terror. There are two of the Committee standing before her, but one of them is doing all the talking. The second is the square-shouldered female person, the harridan with outsize boobs. The boobs are a disconcerting in-your-face presence, because Dinah can see that they are rising and falling with the harridan's emphatic breathing. She's evidently in a state of elation through the pleasure she's being afforded by this eleventh-hour fair cop. The show is, after all, nearly ended and the
grande finale
of Freshers' Dinner is due to take place that night.

‘We'd like to know why,' the head honcho says. ‘Why haven't you been showing up?'

Dinah finds that her mouth has gone dry. She longs right then to have Jenny beside her to blurt out something cocky, something to break the ice. Because it's boring, Jenny would say. Because we've got better things to do.

‘I'm speaking to you,' he says.

‘I –' Dinah says.

‘And I suppose you think you can just
waltz
along to Freshers' Dinner?' he says, saving her the need to make reply. ‘I –' Dinah says.

‘Because if you
don't
come to Song Practice –' he says. His volume is increasing and he's turning puce with indignation. ‘If you
don't
come to Song Practice –
If you don't come to Song Practice –
then you – you
CAN'T COME TO FRESHERS' DINNER
!'

Dinah is staring at him in astonishment. Because it's just beginning to dawn on her that he has no ultimate sanction. Absolutely no power at all. Except to ban her from Freshers' Dinner. And she doesn't want to go. The realisation leaves her so elated that she almost laughs out loud. She's suddenly feeling great.

‘Well, frankly, so what?' she says.

‘I told you she'd be like this,' says the harridan, getting in her sixpence worth. She's edgily tapping the painted red claws of her
right hand against the painted red claws of her left. It's making a sound like a thrush cracking a snail against rockery stones. ‘And who's your partner for Freshers' Dinner, Freshette?' she says. The technique is never to use a Fresh Person's name. It's always Fresher and Freshette.

Dinah doesn't answer. Instead, slowly and deliberately, she slides the bow out of her hair. Then, equally slowly, she pulls the disc off over her head. The disc, the badge of ignominy. Dinah du Bondt. Female. Eighteen Years. BA English.