Читать книгу The Choice Between Us - Edyth Bulbring - Страница 6

Lucy’s got long red fingernails and smokes Texan plain. Sometimes a scrap of tobacco sticks to her lips, which are the same colour as her fingernails. She picks it off, often spits it out. Pffft.

My sister’s honey-blonde hair hangs like open curtains around her face, which is pale as the moon. She wears a black beret on the side of her head and acts like she’s as beautiful as Yvonne Ficker, our Miss South Africa with the perfect 36-24-36 figure. I think Lucy’s prettier because her teeth don’t stick out like Yvonne’s.

“Where is she, Mima? I’m going to wring that brat’s neck.” Lucy’s in a rage. Her words are clipped to an inch, like our privet hedge.

Lucy’s got a hot temper and wears short skirts. She can be wild. Too loud. Too fierce. She likes to argue, especially with my parents.

When things get nasty my mother grabs her head and goes to lie down. My father chips in with: “Really, Lucy, do you have to provoke your mother? She’s not well, as you know.”

This makes Lucy even angrier. She’s quiet as death, and her top lip curls.

I’m sitting as silent as a mouse under the kitchen table, my legs drawn up. Clumps of faded bubblegum are stuck underneath. They look like the brains of dead rats.

“What’s that girl done now?” Gemima says. I spy her black feet, and, as she steps away, a peep of white sole. Her heels have flattened the backs of my mother’s old takkies. She turns to stir the Maltabella, making it thick like mud. When it’s ready, she’ll add milk and brown sugar. It looks better than Jungle Oats, which is like cat sick. Still, I close my eyes as I eat it.

Lucy sucks on her cigarette and breathes out a long sigh of smoke. “She took my fountain pen again. This time she filled it with lemon juice. She’s going to ruin it. Seriously, Mima, I’m going to talk to Daddy about her if she doesn’t stop her nonsense.”

Toughees! My father has already eaten breakfast and gone to his consulting rooms near the Johannesburg General Hospital. He likes an early start. This means Gemima starts early too. Before my father gets up in the morning, she’s already put a pot of water on the stove for porridge.

As soon as she hears the sound of his feet on the floorboards and the bath water running, she comes upstairs and gets me out of bed and dresses me for school. While my father eats his oats she cooks him his two eggs and bacon, which she serves with a slice of white toast. Gemima’s mummy used to make him exactly the same breakfast when he was a boy on the farm in Natal.

Lucy stubs out her cigarette, squashing it into the ashtray with sharp jabs. She clips on her earrings and goes outside to wait for Roger the Dodger. He’s been Lucy’s boyfriend for the past six months. Roger drives a clapped-out Morris Minor which doesn’t have indicators or windscreen wipers. My father calls it the red devil.

Roger is studying to be a lawyer. When he graduates he’ll have to cut his hair, stop shouting his mouth off about the natives, and learn to toe the line, my mother says.

Lucy is nine years older than me. When she’s in a good mood she allows me to sit on her bed and watch her get ready for her dates with Roger. Sometimes she practises the cha-cha-cha on me and lets me paint her toenails. Lately she’s been telling me I’m a big pain in the neck and I must buzz off.

Lucy is studying for a Bachelor of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand but she spends most of her time not studying and raising hell with Roger. My mother says it doesn’t matter if Lucy fails her degree because after university she’ll probably just get married and won’t have to work. Lucy says my mother is stuck in the Dark Ages.

Roger’s car backfires as it drives off, and Gemima peers under the table with a smile. “Oh, there you are.” She makes me stand still as she sponges the grubby marks off my gymslip. She squints at the shine on the serge. “You can’t go to school like that.”

She gets her Special Book out of the kitchen drawer and pages through it. I look over her shoulder. “What does Ann say?” Ann Wise’s advice in the Sunday Times is the only part of the newspaper Gemima reads. When my father is done with the paper, Gemima cuts out Ann Wise’s tips and sticks them in my old school exercise book.

Ann knows a stack about lots of things: how to cure warts, remove perspiration marks and any stain under the sun. She’s brilliant when it comes to making a can of pilchards stretch to a satisfying family meal. One of Gemima’s proudest moments was when Ann published Gemima’s “housewives economise” tip on what to do with old bits of soap.

“Scrubb’s Ammonia,” Gemima says, and unlocks the cupboard door. She chooses a bottle from her collection of household cleaning supplies. Bottles of Ann Wise potions fill her cupboard. She rations my JIK, and it’s never enough to clear the inkblots in my exercise books.

During the day she keeps the cupboard key on a string around her neck and at night she hides it in a secret place. I’ve searched everywhere but I’ve never found it. My father says the contents of Gemima’s cupboard could blow a hole twice the size of Kimberley’s in our back garden.

After sponging my uniform, Gemima spoons dollops of Maltabella into a bowl and grabs Anne of Green Gables. “You’ll mess your nice book.” She puts it back on the shelf and watches me eat. “Just one more mouthful.” I open my eyes and make hamster cheeks at her. Porridge spurts out of the sides of my mouth and she clicks her tongue and says, “Wena!” (That means “You!” in Zulu.)

I speak the language like a real African because Gemima talked Zulu to me from the time I was a baby. We sometimes chat in Zulu, but Sister Columbanus says I mustn’t speak native at school.

“Don’t backchat me, young lady. I do not want to hear, ‘My father also speaks Zulu, so there.’ No, don’t dare say that, miss. You are very bold.” Sister Columbanus grips the rosary at her belt, like she’s seeking support from a higher being.

Breakfast finished, I go upstairs to my parents’ bedroom while Gemima makes my school sandwiches. My mother’s bed is farthest from the window and the curtains are closed.

“Good morning, Mummy, how are you feeling today?” I speak in whispers. If I talk in my normal voice she tells me not to shout, it hurts her head. Bottles of pills are lined up on my mother’s dressing table next to a photograph of her and my father on their wedding day. My mother has a huge grin on her face in the photo. It was a time before the disappointments, when she still knew how to smile.

She raises herself from the bed and presents her face for a kiss. “Don’t smother me, Margaret.” Her skin is sticky and I can taste the Pond’s night cream on my lips.

“I think I may get up today.” There’s a frog in her throat. My mother often thinks about getting out of bed to sew. But then she pulls the covers up under her chin and sleeps away the day until supper time.

My mother has nerves. She didn’t always have them. They came a few years after Lucy was born, when my mother suffered her disappointments and had to spend lots of time recovering. There were four disappointments until I came along. I don’t think I made up for them because my mother still spends a lot of time trying to recover.

Gemima laces her walking shoes and takes me to school. I plonk my hat on my head. St Virgilius says it’s a mortal sin to be seen in public without a hat. In winter, it’s the black felt hat, in summer, the white straw boater. Both are crosses I must bear.

Gemima huffs and puffs like the big bad wolf on the way to school. Every few steps she stops and coughs because she says her cold has gone to her chest.

I take a squizz at her head and wonder how much of her brain the tokoloshe has managed to eat these past few nights. The skin on her neck above the collar of her uniform glistens with Vicks VapoRub. Gemima says the Vicks, along with the Stearns Pine-tar and Honey cough mixture should do the trick. But I don’t think so. After tonight, there’ll be nothing left of her brain.

Gemima won’t let me run ahead, and she coughs and snorts when she hands me my suitcase at the school gate where Benny is waiting for me.

“Slow coach, slow coach, slow coach,” he yells.

I grab his wrist and twist, giving him a Chinese bangle to make him stop.

Benny and I are at the same school because the boys’ school down the road burnt down last year and they’ve got nowhere else close by until it’s rebuilt. My school is bearing this annoying cross by seating the boys on the left-hand side of the classrooms and trying to ignore them.

The girls sit on the right-hand side, away from the windows, so we boil in summer. It isn’t any better in winter because St Virgilius doesn’t believe in heaters or spoiling children.

My desk mate is Louise Daincroft. I sit at the front of the class because the teachers say they like to keep an eye on me. Louise sits in the front because she wants to be teacher’s pet. She also can’t see the blackboard and has to wear glasses that are held on with an elastic so her hair bushes up at the back. Mostly she leaves her glasses at home because she doesn’t like me calling her Goggles.

Whenever a teacher needs someone to go outside and beat the blackboard duster with a ruler, Louise flings her hand in the air and shouts, “Me! Me! Me!” She’s a champion schloep. I just wait for a teacher to choose me, but they never do because I’m not one of their favourites. Sister Mary Liguori says I am far too bold, always wanting to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral.

My Afrikaans teacher’s name is Miss van Tonder and she wears skirts and twinsets in summer and slack suits in winter. The jacket covers her bottom because the school doesn’t want us to see the shape of a teacher’s bottom, or even know she has one.

The rest of the teachers are nuns. They cover up so well you can’t even see the colour of their hair. Their faces are squashed like pink marshmallows by a white doek thing they call a coif, and a black veil covers their heads. We call them penguins.

Us girls also have a dress code. Some mornings, Sister Athanasius makes us kneel down to check the length of our dresses. The hem must be exactly four fingers above the knee. Otherwise God will strike us down.

We have to wear huge bloomers that match our uniforms. They make our bottoms feel big. The elastic pinches the tops of our thighs and leaves a pink zigzag on our skin.

When we have inspections, the penguins make us do somersaults in the gym. If we’re wearing the wrong broeks we get a hundred lines. Last year Benny dared me to go without any, so they sent me home. I had to write “I must not behave like a heathen” two hundred times and my parents were called in by Mother Superior and told about my wicked tendencies. And my first Holy Communion was postponed. My mother still gets cross when my father jokes about it.

We are also strictly forbidden to chew bubblegum because it’s common, and if we get caught the penguins stick it in our hair.

At break time I meet Benny in the quad. “What you got?” I say as I unwrap my sandwich. I fold up the wax paper. Gemima says waste not, want not, but I give it a rip because using the wax paper a second time is horrible.

“Hell’s vomit. And you?” Benny says.

“I’ll swap you my Peck’s for your Hellmann’s.”

Benny groans. “Jislaaik, that Gemima’s got it in for me. She knows I hate fish paste worse than sandwich spread.” He offers me half. I take it and hand over my whole sandwich. I snatch his other half. Fair’s fair.

Sister Francesca often does surprise lunch inspections. If we don’t have sandwiches, she sends us across to the convent kitchen where the cook gives us brown-bread doorstops with no butter, only marmalade, as bitter as her mouth.

The meanest penguin is Sister Columbanus. She teaches us English and hates boys, Benny in particular, who struggles to read and can’t spell for toffee. I suppose his Mavis didn’t allow him to crawl either.

I’m the best speller in my class. I learnt to read long before I started school by copying out the names on labels. Gemima taught me how. Dr Mackenzie’s Veinoids. Anadin. De Witt’s. And my mother’s favourite: Dr Williams’ pink pills for the treatment of tiredness, irritability, depression and nerviness.

Sister Columbanus hits Benny with her ruler when he gets his spelling words wrong. She uses the metal edge of the ruler. The backs of Benny’s legs are sometimes covered in cuts, and his mother has to put Mercurochrome on them.

Benny makes the last part of her name sound like a rude word. Columb-Anus. The one time I called her that, Gemima washed my mouth out with Sunlight soap.

After school, I wait for Gemima. Mostly I walk home with Benny, but today she’s taking me to Fairplays Haberdashery in Louis Botha Avenue to buy some gingham and thread for my sewing project. I’m going to make her an apron and embroider Gemima on the front.

I sit on the pavement outside the school gate. The blue sky is ironed flat with no clouds and the sun makes me hot. I pull off my tie and shift about, but my bottom feels cold. Sitting on concrete I run the risk of getting piles, also known as haemorrhoids. Gemima’s going to be in for the high jump when I tell on her.

I’ve almost given up when a Morris Minor pulls up. The back of the red devil’s window is covered in peeling stickers: Charge or Release. Remember Sharpeville. Coke is Life. It’s a real student car, one helluva mess, my father says. Lucy leans out the window. “Get in.”

I climb into the back of the car. “Where’s Mima?”

“Your mother’s at home,” Roger the Dodger says. The car jerks as he drives off.

“No, not her. Ge-Mi-Ma.” I roll my eyes but Roger doesn’t see. In any case, he’s taking skelm peeps at Lucy’s legs.

Lucy turns around, a worry line on her forehead. “Mima couldn’t fetch you today. She’s at home in bed. It’s that cough of hers. It’s got really bad.”

“Why don’t you take her to hospital? To Baragwanath?”

My sister’s top lip curls. “Don’t be dumb, Mags. Daddy will see to her when he gets home. She’ll never get proper treatment at an African hospital.”

Cold cement seems to fill my chest. It’s all my fault. Between the tokoloshe and me, we’ve killed Mima.

Roger sticks a thumb out the window and turns right. When we go left, his fingers stir the air, going round and round in a circle. At last he pulls up outside our house. He comes round to my side of the car and lets me out. It’s not because he’s a gentleman – the door handle is broken and won’t open from inside.

I race up the driveway to Gemima’s room at the back. She’s in bed, propped up on some pillows, and she’s wearing my mother’s old dressing gown. The wireless my father gave her for Christmas is playing one of her music programmes. She opens her eyes when I throw myself on her. She smells of Lifebuoy soap and Vicks VapoRub.

“Go and soak your shirt in some milk and do your homework.” She pats my back. “Those stains won’t come out on their own.”

I glance down at the blue-stained cuffs and the ink on my hands. My school won’t let us use Bics or fountain pens, only the messy old dipping pens. Radiant Blue and I are deadly enemies. Gemima holds a handkerchief to her mouth as she coughs. It’s speckled red.

“Lucy’s been looking after me nicely all day. Like an angel. When the doctor gets home from work he’ll fix me up. Go on, I need to rest.”

I leave Gemima and fetch a book from my father’s study. Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary, his birthday present to me last year. I page through, searching for blood in the mucus – hemoptysis. Gemima either has tuberculosis or pneumonia. Dorland’s can’t decide.

I get my rope from my bedroom and skip up and down the street until the sweat makes me itchy under my pigtails. I toss my rope on the crazy paving and go next door to Benny. We don’t have a wall between our two houses, and I’ll sneak in the front door. Maybe I’ll surprise Benny. Scare the pants off him. But he’s already lying on the front lawn.

“First touch, Scumbucket.” I punch him on the shoulder. He’s got a pair of binoculars around his neck and he’s sucking something.

“Gimmee!” I snap my fingers at him and he passes me the paper bag. I take a black ball out of the bag. “So what colour’s your nigger ball?”

“Ag man, Mags. I’ve told you not to say that word.”

“Ball. Ball. Ball. Ball.” I chant and leap over him. Jump back. Over again.

Benny catches my foot as I jump and I topple onto the grass. “Not that word. Jislaaik, Mags, why do you always have to be so aggravating?”

We lie on the grass, sucking in silence, trying not to bite. Our tongues change colour, from green to pink, then white.

Waiting.

I’m waiting for my father to come home and fix Gemima. Benny’s waiting for his father to come back from his architect office in town. He waits for him most evenings, checking the pavement with his binoculars. The 15b Sandringham drops Mr Schaumbacher off in Louis Botha Avenue, and it’s a five-minute walk home. When Benny sees him, briefcase in hand, he runs to meet him.

If Benny doesn’t get sight of him by five-thirty, he gets fidgety. It’s already long past that. His freckles are smeared across his white face like he’s been splashing in a mud puddle.

“Any sign of your dad? I wonder if he missed the bus.” Mrs Schaumbacher switches on the stoep lights, settles a tray with two glasses of Fortris on the grass, and glances at her wrist. “It’s nearly ten past six. He’s not leaving much length for a hem.”

Like my mother, Mrs Schaumbacher is a keen seamstress. So she often talks like this. Benny and I work out what she means, then try to copy it. “His bobbin is running short of thread,” I say. But Benny’s not in the mood.

Mrs Schaumbacher chews the colour off her lips and peers across the low privet at a lime-green Beetle parked under a street lamp across the road. “There’s three of them today. Not just the usual two.” She gives a jerky wave. “Yes, I know you’re there.”

“You got visitors?” I look at the car.

She doesn’t reply, just shakes her head and sighs.

At the sound of an engine I leap up. My father’s black Chevy is pulling into the driveway. “See you later, alligator.” I punch Benny on the shoulder. “Last touch.” I run off home.

My father gets out of the car and reaches onto the back seat for his hat, his jacket and bag. He’s not alone.

“You better get home fast, Mr Schaumbacher. Benny’s having an absolute conniption.”

“A conniption indeed.” Mr Schaumbacher gives a faint smile, tugs at his beard, and checks his watch. “No, I just made it.” He stares up the road at the green car outside his house and watches as it goes off. “Thanks Doc, I would have been late if you hadn’t picked me up in the main road. You saved my hide.”

I drag my father round the back of the house. He must come and fix Gemima.

In the evening, after supper, I slip outside to the back room. The light bulb hanging from the ceiling is on, and it swings when I open the door. The shadows make my father’s face look old. He’s sitting on a chair next to the bed, a newspaper on his knees. He lifts a finger to his lips.

“Go to bed, she’ll be fine.”

Gemima is lying as still as someone playing a game of statues.

“Are you sure? Is it the tuberculosis?”

“It’s the same thing she had last year, Mags. Pneumonia,” he says. “I’ll make her better. I promise.”

I shift the newspaper and plonk myself on my father’s lap. I breathe in his lovely smell: English Leather, Ransom Select cigarettes and Brylcreem. He lets me read the comic strips. Blondie and Donald Duck are my favourites, but my father is mad for Doctor Kildare. I suppose it’s because he’s also a doctor, although my father doesn’t work in the criminal underworld.

I rest my head on my father’s shoulder as he reads the news stories out loud to me, his voice low and steady. The dominees are up in arms about the length of ladies’ dresses. The short skirts from overseas are the cause of the drought in the Northern Transvaal. My father gives a funny laugh, the one he makes when he’s annoyed. He says the dominees are a bunch of verkrampte old fools. He reads more stories, until I don’t hear his voice any more.

When I wake up, the winter sun streaming through my window, I’m lying under my bedspread. If Gemima finds me like this she’ll hit the roof. She always makes me fold the candlewick bedcover and put it on the chair before I get into bed.

Mima! I leap out of bed and slide down the wooden bannister because Gemima isn’t there to shout at me. I rush outside without my slippers on.

My father is still sitting on the chair, the newspaper at his feet. I stand at his side for a while and watch Gemima sleep. Later, I cook the Jungle Oats. While my father eats, I fry him some bacon and eggs sunny side up, the way Gemima does it. After breakfast he checks on Gemima. It makes him late for work.

He comes home early and sits with Gemima through another long night. Until he chases that tokoloshe back to hell.