I Heart Beat (7 page)

IT'S AMAZING WHAT you can find out when you email trusting institutions about job references. Dr Simon Fridjohn is sixty-one years old. He went to school at Bishops in Cape Town and did a science degree in the same city at Yoo Cee Tee, where he played tennis and hockey. He then took a veterinary degree and has been running a practice just outside the village for the past twenty years. He's unmarried and reads biographies of famous animals in his free time.

There's a photo of him on his school website with his life creed: “Simple Simon says, if you treat animals like people, they will behave like them.”

He looks a bit young for sixty-one, but I suspect it's his old school photo.

Grummer knocks on my door and says it's nearly time to go. I brush my teeth four times and put the red dress on over a pair of jeans (black) and pull on a long T-shirt (black).

Grummer's done her hair. She put hot rollers in and then sprayed her curls so her hair's like a crash helmet. I tell her she looks lovely. She looks at me and sighs.

Toffie arrives and tells Grummer he likes her hairdo. He looks at me and laughs. “You sure clean up nice, Boss,” he says and winks.

The green light on the robot outside the pubbingrill is on. Not that anyone needs telling that the place is open. People are on the pavement, inside the bar and standing around a fire in the back courtyard. Me and Grummer go outside 'cos she says she can't bear the cigarette smoke. Toffie follows and sticks to me like a leech. The dancing hasn't started and everyone's drinking and eating steaks and boerewors rolls. The smell of the sausage makes me feel sick and I go back inside.

I wonder how we're ever going to find Dr Simon Fridjohn. I check out the photo that Toffie took on his ticket-selling rounds: Dr Fridjohn's standing in his surgery, hugging a big, hairy dog. Or the dog's hugging him; I'm not sure. I can spot a rather freaky smile from under the dog's armpit. It's not a lot to go on.

I feel panicked. If I fail with Dr Simon Fridjohn I have to eat a double steak burger. That's the deal I made with my two and only friends back home. And they want a five-minute video clip of me doing it. The penalty for failure is harsh.

Grummer and Toffie come to find me, and Toffie introduces us to Adore. She's very friendly and says a lot of thank yous for the new stock of DVDs Toffie's been supplying her. They're selling like hot cakes. She says she's going to branch into music CDs next if I can give Toffie a good URL.

“The way things are going I'll be at Yoo Cee Tee next year,” she says.

Grummer hears all this and looks at Adore. Her eyes narrow and the line between her eyebrows deepens into a donga. That furrowed brow signals danger. She puts her hand on Adore's shoulder, to get her complete attention. “My girl. Would you steal a person's cellular telephone? Would you steal a person's handbag?” Grummer sounds like a bad anti-piracy advert.

Adore looks at Grummer's cross face and she figures the answer can't be yes. So she says no.

Grummer nods. “Of course not. What you are doing is piracy. And it's theft.”

Adore says she has a copy of
The Last Temptation of Christ
which she can let Grummer have for cheap. The quality isn't so good and it looks like there's a snowstorm 24/7. But if she makes her eyes squint, Grummer can pretend it's a sandstorm. Which is fine because it's set in the Middle East, which is very sandy.

Grummer's eyes brighten. And then I see her lips move like she's making a prayer. And then she shakes her head. “No, Adore. No. It's not right. And if you carry on like this, the closest you will get to the University of Cape Town is Pollsmoor prison.”

Adore lowers her head and she says Grummer's right. But she was only trying to save for medical school. Grummer gets abnormally interested and tells us a very long story about how Grandpa had wanted Mom to be a doctor.

“But she left school and went overseas and came back with Beatrice,” Grummer says. And she gives me a squeeze. I give her one back just to feel what Dr Simon Fridjohn will be feeling later on tonight. I think he'll be fine if he likes squishy flesh.

“Derek (my late husband) was very cut up about it. He had his heart set on Beatrice's mother becoming a doctor. He was a dentist, you know. He felt she had made the wrong choice. Sad really, because if he could see Beatrice today, he would know that she couldn't have chosen any other way.” Grummer's going great guns for the Most Embarrassing Granny Oscar tonight. She goes on and on and on and we leave Adore having her ear chewed off.

Toffie finds his mom rinsing some glasses with Silas. I check Silas out thoroughly. There's no trace of any albino patches on his hands and face, and Toffie gives me a told-you-so look.

Mrs Appel tells Toffie that Dr Simon Fridjohn is in the non-smoking dining room. She's making him a special soya burger 'cos he doesn't eat animals. I like Dr Simon Fridjohn more and more. Mrs Appel says she'll make me one too.

We tell her we'll also eat in the dining room and we grab Grummer away from Adore just as she's doing the closing chapter of “Derek's Big Disappointment”.

“And so Derek and Beatrice's mother never spoke again. When I look back, it seems like such a waste of precious time.”

I think Grummer's wasting precious time and we take her through to the dining room. I spot Dr Simon Fridjohn immediately. He's eating a big plate of salad and feeding scraps of soya burger to three cats under the table. We look around at the full dining room and then Toffie asks Dr Simon Fridjohn if we can join him. I'm so happy I decide to give Toffie a raise.

Dr Simon Fridjohn smells like antiseptic and he has very white hairless hands, like sterile gloves. He eats nice and doesn't talk between mouthfuls.

I'm celebrating victory when I notice Grummer's starting to itch. There are red welts on her arms and her neck looks like a turkey's. Then she starts sneezing all over Dr Simon Fridjohn, which I think is a bit too intimate for a first date. He doesn't seem to mind too much.

“Allergic are you?” he asks.

And Grummer tells him a long story about how she's allergic to animal fur and cigarette smoke and pollen and bees and mosquito bites. And so she goes on.

“Derek (my late husband) loved animals and at the time of his death he had three cats and two dogs. It was agony for me, but he insisted on having them. When he passed away, I had them put down,” Grummer says.

I watch as Dr Simon Fridjohn nearly chokes on his salad and then how he gets up and leaves the dining room, taking the three cats with him.

“Oh dear,” says Grummer, “did I say something?”

You sure did, Grummer.

Grummer leaves us and goes and joins Mr du Plooy at the next table. He's wolfing down a steak and going for broke (double brandy and Coke).

I order a double steak burger and get Toffie to video me with the cellphone. He's telling me how I messed up with my research and saying isn't it funny that Grummer hates animals. And I think it's so not funny. I hate failing, it makes me sick.

Ching-Ching! I check the electronic diary on my cellphone and see that it's been two weeks since I arrived in the dorp. Two weeks have passed and I'm feeling sick.

I need a doctor!

Part Three

GRUMMER'S STANDING BY the side of my bed looking very anxious. “I am not sure whether I should leave you on your own while I go to church, Beatrice,” she says.

I groan and roll around on my bed, getting caught up in the mosquito net.

“Perhaps you ate something?” Grummer says.

Yeah, like a double steak burger. But that's not what's making me sick. Dr Peter Waterford's making me sick. He's back from Jozi and I need him. Grummer needs him.

I tell Grummer she can go off and do her workout with Pastor Aitch; I'll survive.

Grummer says if I'm sure, and I say I'm very sure.

She asks me if I want her to leave the Sunday morning classical music special on and I tell her it's fine, I like it. I like the adverts they play in between the music.

Grummer beams: “I am so glad we share a love for the classics, Beatrice. Your grandfather, you know, was tone deaf and couldn't stand having the music programmes on.”

I didn't know and I don't think I want to hear any more about Grandpa and his mean, bullying ways. When Grummer leaves, I turn off the radio and make myself a peanut butter sandwich.

Then I eat two more and call the doctor's rooms. The message on the answer phone tells me that the surgery is closed. However, in an emergency, I can call a cellphone number. I call it and the lady who answers says that the doctor will make house calls in the afternoon in extreme emergencies. I ask her if suspected appendicitis is an extreme emergency and she takes my medical aid details and gets my address.

I text Toffie and tell him to come round. I need some research material from him.

He texts me back:
Am wsanihg desihs and calenirg lsat nhgtis mses. CU ltear
. I gather he's washing dishes and clearing up the mess from last night. He'll see me later.

Two hours is later and Toffie's around. He says the skop finished at three o'clock in the morning when his mom booted out Tom and Candy, who had dropped in for one for the road after their game of Rummikub.

Toffie asks me if I'm very sick or if I can go swimming. I tell him I'm terminal and get my (Adore's) costume.

After I beat Toffie in three races of freestyle we discuss The Target.

Toffie says he doesn't know much about Dr Peter Waterford. He's new to the dorp and is previously from Bloemfontein, the city halfway between Jozi and Cape Town. I tell Toffie I know where Bloemfontein is. And it doesn't have any sea or wind — but it has lots of roses.

“But Ma says he's a bit of a dish. And he drives a beemer,” Toffie says, peeling bits of skin off my back.

I'm thinking that the BMW driving Dr Peter Waterford's going to have to treat me for skin cancer soon and I put on some more sunscreen (factor 50
⁺
). I fill Toffie in on my strategy. After the house call and follow-up check-up, I'm going to take a turn for the worse. Three contact visits between the good doctor and Grummer should clinch it.

Toffie says this has to be it; otherwise we're down to Mr David Davis-Davis and the uglies. I think it's got to be it too. There's less than two weeks of the holiday to go.

When I get home Grummer's pacing. “Where
have
you been?” she asks and feels my forehead.

I tell her I've been swimming to try and work off some of the pain. And I groan and rush to the toilet and fake the kind of noises that Mom always makes the morning after the night before.

Grummer puts me to bed and then we wait for Dr Peter Waterford.

He roars up in his beemer and sweeps into my bedroom. I hide the hot cloth I've been holding on my forehead and make feeble whines and give him pathetic looks through my shades.

Dr Peter Waterford says I must call him Dr Pete and tries to give me a high five. I wipe his palm listlessly. He has a gentle and professional bedside manner. I make mental notes so I can add to my Target snapshot later. He asks me what I've eaten in the past three days and when I tell him he raises his eyebrows at Grummer.

“Seven peanut butter sandwiches and a double steak burger. Hmm,” he says.

Grummer looks appalled and he looks appalled at Grummer. Good thing I didn't tell him about the ones I had for breakfast. When I was too ill to eat!

He feels my pulse, takes my temperature and measures my waist and wrists. He pokes my stomach and I groan even louder. But he says the pain's not on the appendix side.

I put a jinx on my biology teacher. Useless old bag.

“It isn't that time of the month, is it dear?” Grummer asks and I grimace and give her a negative.

“I can't imagine this child ever getting her period,” Dr Pete says. “She is grossly undernourished and terribly thin.” I think this child he's talking about is me.

He's mumbling to Grummer about chronic eating disorders and I'm not listening any more 'cos I'm counting the number of stripes on his tie and the number of hairs on the back of his right hand, and there are forty-two stripes on his tie and he has 145 hairs on his hand, which I think is respectable.

Grummer and Dr Pete leave my bedroom to go and talk confidentially about “family history”.

They come back into the bedroom and Grummer's looking very weepy and worried. Dr Pete sits on my bed and tells me that I'm a very sick little girl and that I'm going on diet. It's a strict diet, which will be monitored for the rest of the holiday.

Tomorrow I'll be weighed at his surgery and then a special diet will be designed which I will follow religiously. If I don't do this, I'll never grow and I'll be a very sick adult. I will have check-ups every four days. He asks me for my “buy-in”.

“You can trust me, Beatrice,” he says with sincere eyes. I tell him I trust him (not).

Grummer's standing by the door and she's mopping her face with loo roll. “Please, Beatrice. I need you to get better. Dr Pete's asking for a commitment to this process. We need your buy-in,” she says.

I do a quick calculation. We're looking at four contact visits with Dr Pete in the next eleven days. I buy in just short of selling out.

I'm so bought in that when they leave I text my two and only friends back home with the bad news:

I win. U lose. I've pulled a doctor for Grummer. I'm a very sick little girl and u guys R going 2B even sicker when U eat that sheep's head. Send me the video of U eating Smiley by end of week. Your 1 and only friend, Beatrice Wellbeloved.

GRUMMER'S KNITTING ME a blanket. She asks me what colours I want and I say black. Duh!

She sighs and starts knitting black squares. She says she will have made good progress by the end of the holiday, in two weeks' time. Correction: eleven days.

“Every stitch I knit I am praying for you to get better, Beatrice,” she says.

Grummer's knitting in Dr Pete's surgery on Monday morning. I've been weighed and prodded and given my diet sheet. I've been set a weight-gain target of point five of a kilogram every four days.

Then me and Dr Pete “talk”. He asks if I want Grummer to leave and I ask him if
he
wants Grummer to leave. He looks at Grummer, who's counting stitches, and he says she can stay. I say she can stay too.

Dr Pete says every time we see each other we're going to “talk” about “things”. It'll help me get better. “You can trust me, Beatrice. You can tell me anything,” he says with those sincere eyes. I tell him I trust him (not).

Our first talk about things is about Mom's many husbands. Correction: Husband Number Four. The one she pulled when I turned six. Dr Pete asks me to tell him what happened five years ago when Guido left. Guido? Who's Guido? My tummy feels like it's speaking in tongues. I start counting stitches. Grummer has cast on thirty stitches. No, twenty-nine, she's just dropped one.

I tell Grummer she's dropped a stitch and Dr Pete asks me again to tell him about the time Guido left.

So I tell him that Mom chucked Guido out of the house 'cos he was cheating on her. It's quite a funny story really, so I give him the low-down: Guido was a walker. He probably still is. Every morning he'd go out walking before work. He'd come back after an hour all red-faced and sweaty and take a shower. Then one day he didn't come back.

He didn't come back for four days and, when he did, he left again and missed my ninth birthday. And the reason he was gone so long was because he was trapped in the house down the road from ours and couldn't leave. (There was a power failure for four days in the western suburbs of Jozi and the security doors were all paralysed.) A lot of people were stuck in their homes at that time and a lot of restaurants had to throw out rotten food.

“And so that's how Mom bust him,” I say. “It had been going on with the lady down the road for yonks and Mom never knew about his affair until the power failure. What a loser.” And I laugh 'cos it's one of my top-ten funny stories.

Dr Pete doesn't laugh. He says he wants to know how it made me feel. I tell him it made me feel that people in Jozi needed to invest in manual overrides on their security gates. And that they should never keep too much stuff in the freezer.

Dr Pete says we can move on now. He wants me to tell him about Mom.

I tell him that Mom likes to drink vodka (Stolichnaya) and soda with a slice of lemon in the summer. And she likes whiskey (Jack Daniel's) on the rocks in winter. But when she has more than six whiskeys she doesn't bother with the ice any more. And when the booze runs out, she sends me down the road to the Dunkeld West Drankwinkel where she has an account with Mr Kay the bottlestore owner.

Dr Pete says we'll talk more about things next time. And I leave the two lovebirds to coo for a bit and I read the posters on the surgery wall.

There's this one poster that gives the average heights and weights for children. I'm one point fifty-eight metres tall and weigh thirty-nine kilograms. The poster tells me that I fall way out of the obese kid category.

When we leave, Dr Pete gives me a high five and says we're making progress.

Grummer's very quiet on the way home. Two blocks before we reach the house she stops the car by the side of the road.

“Beatrice, look at me,” she says. I peer at her through my shades and she reaches over and removes them. “That's better, now I can see your eyes,” she says.

“Beatrice, why did you lie to Dr Pete?” she asks.

I look at the steering wheel and count thirty-two lines running all around the circumference and I look outside and I count seventeen figs on the fourth branch of a fig tree.

“Guido wasn't caught with the lady down the road when the power failed; it was your mother who left you alone in the house for four days while she partied with her fancy man. Guido was out of town and only got back later in the week. Don't you remember, Beatrice?”

I tell Grummer I've just remembered … I've just remembered that Toffie's waiting for me at the house 'cos we're going swimming.

Toffie wants to know all about Dr Pete. We're lying by the jetty and I tell him that Dr Pete is a Colin Firth lookalike from the Nanny McPhee movie but with more grey hair. He's tall and built like a runner and he's got 145 hairs on his right hand.

Toffie offers me a peanut butter sandwich. I say I can't; I'm on a special diet regimen and can only eat six meals a day. And a protein supplement drink before I go to bed.

Toffie shrugs and the pig finishes off the sandwiches while I starve.

We finalise the strategy: I'll stick to the diet and see Dr Pete every four days. Then I'll talk about things to Dr Pete and I'll get Grummer to talk about things too, so that they'll get to know each other better.

Toffie raises a problem, the problem being that I can't get fat too quickly; otherwise the consultations will stop. I have a counter-problem: if I don't get fat fast enough, Dr Pete says he'll send me to a special hospital forty kilometers away in Somerset West. I tell Toffie I couldn't bear this. We'd have to start all over again and hospital doctors aren't as eligible as the ones in private practice. We need to FOCUS!

I tell Toffie I'll put on enough weight and when it looks like I'm heading for the obese kid category I'll do a bulimia thing to lose it all again. Toffie thinks it's a good plan. He says when the time comes he'll hold my hair back so I don't vomit all over it. I tell him he's just escaped retrenchment.