Frankie and Stankie (5 page)

‘You're not straining that child's orange juice AGAIN!' he says. ‘She'll come to a sticky end, you mark my words.'

But Dinah carries on whingeing. ‘I'm not hungry for potatoes. I'm only hungry for gravy.'

At breakfast she eats one-sixth of a dry Weetabix biscuit, but only if she's allowed to glue each separated crumbly flake to a small slab of cold butter. Sometimes she'll eat nine raisins after having arranged them in a pattern on the cloth. One day, her dad is so incensed by it that he rips off the tablecloth. It makes the jugs and bowls crash to the floor along with Dinah's raisins.

‘She'll end up on the gallows, that girl!' he says.

Mealtimes are often high drama.

But, in the street, when Lisa and Dinah are out together, they are united in sisterhood against adult busybodies who go in for personal remarks.

‘All her strength is going into her hair,' they say.

They tend not to flatter Dinah by addressing her direct. They maintain a third-person mode, as if they were simply stage-whispering among themselves. But they make free contact with her skimpy blonde plaits, which tail off somewhere near her shoulder blades.

‘She should get all her hair cut off,' they say.

The busybodies have just as much fun with Lisa, who was born with a malformed right arm. She has only one proper hand because the umbilical cord wound itself round the limb early on in the uterus and starved the hand of blood. The girls' mum attributes this misfortune to a big wave that knocked her over when she went swimming once while she was expecting. So Lisa's funny arm is all her fault. Lisa was born on mid-winter's day and handed to her mother at feed-times so effectively swaddled that she didn't discover the funny arm until the nurses told her about it two days later. But it helped that by then everyone in the hospital had been so charmed by Angel-face, who weighed eight pounds at birth and had a cloud of soft orange hair and a smooth creamy complexion.

‘What happened to your arm, little girl?' say the busybodies. Something about Lisa's greater forcefulness makes them talk to her direct. ‘Did a shark attack your arm?'

This is a favourite suggestion for a few months after killer sharks have made a sudden, unexpected appearance on one of Durban's beaches and they've ripped the arm off a child called Julia Painting. Then the shark nets are laid with a great fanfare and everyone feels safe again, except that you still have to watch out for the jellyfish and the currents. You always have to swim between the lollypop signs and the lifesavers are there all day, watching from their latticework tower, or practising manoeuvres with a rope. The lifesavers are all men, but they wear girls' bathers that come up over their chests and girls' bathing caps with the strap dangling. After the lifesavers have gone home, the evangelicals come and do clappie stuff on the beach.

I met Jesus at the crossroads

Where the two roads meet.

Satan too was standing there

And he said, ‘Come this way,

‘Lots and lots of pleasures

‘I will give to you today…'

The beach is only for white evangelicals because blacks aren't allowed on the beach except to sell popcorn and toffee apples. But there are lots of black breakaway churches that do stuff alongside inland rivers. Sometimes Dinah sees black people go off wearing beautiful blue-and-silver robes, so that suddenly one of the gardeners on the Butcher Estate will pass the bungalow looking like Sorastro. Plus all the black Methodist ladies have a special smart uniform in red and black which they wear with white cotton hats.

Lisa and Dinah don't mind the busybodies all that much.

‘Walk on my Born Arm side,' Lisa will say, when she spots the approach of any potential busybody. ‘Walk on my Born Arm side so that the lady won't ask.'

And Dinah will skip to Lisa's right side to obscure the malformed arm. Lisa calls her left upper limb her Born Arm, because she's forever having to say, ‘I was born like that. No it wasn't a shark. I was born like that.'

Other than the Born Arm, there is never anything wrong with Lisa, except that she has cuts under her ears. She has a sensitive redhead's skin and gets a sort of athlete's foot where her earlobes join her head. Then she won't let anyone wash them. She covers her ears at bathtime and she shakes and screams.

‘No!' she yells. ‘I've got CUTS under my ears!'

So their mum has to swab her ears with Olive Oil BP before anointing them with cream.

‘Lisa is strong as an ox,' their mother says, employing her grasp of English idiom in a manner not designed to improve the self-image of a little girl who is over-large for her age, since Lisa is at least a head taller than all of her classmates except for Tilly Boston and she's quite solidly built.

‘Big bones,' people say.

By eight Lisa is judged too big for the sleigh-ride through Santa's grotto in Greenacre's department store, and has to walk around to
the exit to collect her present from Santa, just as Dinah comes helter-skeltering to conclusion in a cloud of fake snow and piped jingle bells. Lisa likes to eat chocolate sprinkles on bread and she spends all her pocket money on Crunchie bars, while Dinah is a miserly hoarder whose money all goes into a red tin money box whose contents she has to extract with a knife. They are Fattipuffs and Thinifers.

School is unspeakable. Dinah arrives in floods of tears on her first day. Parents are not allowed beyond the gate and, since poor Lisa can't do anything with her, she starts to cry as well. Some older girls come up to them to ask Lisa what's wrong.

‘I'm crying because my sister's crying,' she says.

The big girls take pity on her and relieve Lisa of the burden. They lead Dinah to the assembly hall where her teacher, as luck will have it, is the auburn-haired Maureen O'Hara lookalike, with lipstick and cork wedge-heeled shoes. Her name is Miss McNeil.

‘But you're a big girl now,' she says nicely.

This brings on a crescendo of tears and snot.

‘I want to be a small girl,' Dinah snivels with feeling.

Miss McNeil puts her in the left-hand half of one of those all-in-one double desks with spaces for your things in the lift-up seat and under the writing surface.

The girl next to her is called Delsia Dovey. All the girls have the weirdest names. Shelmadir Sanderson, Damaris Livingstone, Trevlyn Noel Barham, Vinora Salvesen, Hyreath Carrick, Rayleen Fisher. Rayleen explains to interested parties that her dad is called Ray and her mum is called Eileen. Trevlyn's name is the same. Her dad is Trevor and her mum is Lynnette. Phoebe van Jarsveldt has a name that you'd think was pronounced ‘Phobe' when you saw it written down. Moira Davey has a dad who keeps the funeral parlour near the railway station in town, which is next door to an ironmonger's called C. Argo. Dinah always has to blink when she passes the ironmonger's to make the full-stop go away, because she knows that it should really say ‘Cargo'. That's a proper word, whereas ‘C. Argo' doesn't make any sense. There is another shop
that sells furniture nearby called Chicks. It has three lovely cartoon chicken cut-outs on the first-floor balcony with a cut-out speech bubble. The chickens are telling people, ‘It's C-H-E-E-P-E-R at Chicks.' You're meant to understand that the chickens are singing, because the words are arranged on five lines with a treble clef and some semi-quavers.

Miss McNeil gives them all really fat pencils and jotters. When the pencils go blunt, you sharpen them at the teacher's table in a sharpener clamped to the desk that looks like Dinah's mum's mincing machine. Some of the girls like using the pencil sharpener so much that they keep on sharpening their pencils until there's nothing left of them by the end of the day.

Delsia Dovey is a quiet girl, but after an hour she puts a finger to her lips and lifts the lid of her desk just slightly.

‘Shhh!' she says to Dinah, to indicate a secret.

Inside Dinah can see a small white-bread sandwich wrapped in greaseproof paper. She doesn't know why this is a secret, but later on, at home, her mum explains that it's because the post-war food restrictions don't allow the milling of white flour. And, two months later, when the restriction is lifted, her mum buys a honey spoon with a long handle to celebrate and she gives them white bread and honey for their after-school tea.

There's a camphor tree in the school playground that Class One girls discover during morning break. They snap off little twigs and give them to each other to sniff. This is a lot of fun, but after the bell goes it's hygiene. Hygiene is a subject on the curriculum and it's very important because, not only is it polio time, but all sorts of germs are everywhere. Mobile X-ray units come to the school to show you photographs of your own chest. Paramedics give you serious talks so that you'll understand all the dangers. Lots of blacks have got TB and it's blacks who are washing your dishes. Blacks will be handling the food in your kitchen and blacks could be spitting into your sink. Vegetables must be soaked in a purply solution of permanganate of potash. This is especially important, because of the market gardeners being Indians. If you look at some of the older Indians you'll sometimes see a person whose face is pitted with smallpox scars. And when Lisa and Dinah go Saturday shopping in Durban's town centre, they will always see those legless black beggars who swing along on their hands. One day the girls
are at the Overport shops when they see a man with no nose. The man is black, but the flesh around where his nostrils should be has gone a horrible, wet-fish white.

At school, as well as hygiene, there are special Health Education films for Africa that show giant flies with evil eyes being sick over giant slices of bread. The girls' bodies are depicted in these films as areas of ongoing civil war. Personified blood corpuscles, red and white, are slogging it out in your innards. There is never a birthday party without at least one child in callipers, and polio has carried off one of the new babies that used to bounce on the green in the university compound. Iron lung is a concept that everyone has grasped and some children at school wear cloves of garlic round their necks to ward off disease. This is long before anyone has thought about cooking with it.

The Health Education films are shown in the Durban Museum in town, which adjoins the City Hall. It's opposite the Royal Hotel and the Playhouse Cinema and, to get to the projection room, Class One has to walk in a grass-green crocodile through the library and through a room full of huge stuffed rhinos and elephants that also has illuminated niches like caves all around the walls showing 3D scenes from native life. The library is great because you can borrow five Bobbsey Twins books all at once and bring them back two weeks later. All the library books in Durban are bound with a special stippled leather and on the flyleaf, under the town crest, there's always a sticker that says, ‘Readers making returns via a native servant must enclose all books in a wrapper.' If you're a black person, then you're not allowed to use the library.

On that first school morning, Dinah finds out, to her horror, that it's not Miss McNeil who takes them for hygiene. It's Miss Cowper, who is a large, ferocious old person with brutally cropped hair. Plus her neck is wider than her head. Her neck is dissected by a narrow gold chain which only serves to emphasise this anatomical oddity. Miss Cowper begins her lesson by extolling the virtues of porridge. She does this so extensively that it nearly uses up all the lesson, but finally she throws the subject open to the floor.

‘Hands up all those girls who had porridge for breakfast,' she says.

Dinah observes a sea of eager hands that wave in the air all around her, including that of Delsia Dovey. In fact everyone's hand
is up except Dinah's. It doesn't cross her mind that perhaps not everyone is being truthful and she trembles with fear when Miss Cowper's stern glance fixes on her.

‘You, girl,' she says. ‘WHAT did you have for breakfast?'

Instead of replying, Dinah starts to cry.

‘WHAT is the matter?' Miss Cowper says.

Dinah's voice is a whisper. ‘I didn't have porridge for breakfast,' she says.

She has to say it three times before Miss Cowper can hear her. By this time there are faintly audible titters behind her.

‘WHAT did you have for breakfast?' the ogre says.

‘Rice Krispies,' Dinah squeaks as she remembers the five grains of puffed rice she lined up on the breakfast table three hours earlier. Two for Snap, two for Crackle and only one for Pop.

Miss Cowper sighs impatiently. It's a sigh that's halfway to being a grunt. ‘GO to the cloakroom and wash your face, you silly little girl,' she says.

Dinah goes off to the room with the row of little low wash-basins and miniature lavatories with no lids and fixed wooden seats. In one of them an unflushed turd is bobbing darkly. She is appalled by this and knows that she couldn't possibly drop a turd in a public lavatory. She and Lisa will even run home from a friend's house if ever they feel the call. Peeing is all right, if you're caught short, but it's difficult in public lavatories, because their mother makes them swathe the seats with ribbons of lav paper that always stick to your bum. Plus she tries to make the girls hover in the air above the bowl, which is difficult when your legs aren't long enough for your feet to touch the ground.

Dinah remembers how once she and Lisa hesitated anxiously in Professor Eileen Krige's lavatory during a tea-time visit to the house, because they'd torn the paper at an angle of forty-five degrees from the lateral perforations. Professor Krige is the head of the anthropology department and she's a widow with two little boys. Lisa and Dinah don't have perforated lav paper at home, because their dad makes them have those interleaved sheets of scratchy Jeyes, like tracing paper, that come in a flat box. He has a theory about soft lavatory paper, but Dinah has never quite worked out what the theory is.