Читать книгу How to Make a Heart Sick - Heather Mac - Страница 9

I felt heavenly, seated high on a red plastic stool too high for my feet to touch the floor, wearing my going-out dress, and leaning on a shiny yellow counter-top peering through clear plastic windows that revealed rows of flavored ice-creams I’d never dreamed existed. Simon and Steven were bargaining with Dad: ‘Why can’t we have a cone and a shake? They’re not the same thing! Mom, tell him they’re not the same thing!’ I could understand the dilemma; what to choose was on my mind, too.

‘That’s it: chocolate milkshakes for everyone. That’s five chocolate milkshakes. No, wait, four chocolate milkshakes and a pineapple milkshake, please.’ Mom chose a pineapple milkshake because ‘pineapples are slimming’.

We were a happy family, out for a Saturday treat, sucking up every last drop of the deliciously cooling drink. Even Dad.

‘Stop slurping! That’s such a “common” thing to do,’—from Mom. This was the worst sort of crime, according to Mom, who’d rather have died than be considered ‘common’. Walking barefoot in public, open displays of affection between couples, and men in sleeveless tops—these were examples of common behavior to be avoided at all costs. Basically, anything that let the world know someone was relaxed, at ease and without a care was ‘common’. ‘Decent’ folk walked with their backs straight, sat with their backs straight, and never relaxed for a second in public. That was why we were always so dressed up.

‘It’s just Welkom, for God’s sake!’ Dad had said, countering Mom’s instructions that we wear our best outfits, put aside for special occasions.

‘You may care nothing about first impressions, Ian, but anyone with an iota of class knows how important they are.’

‘Who the hell is going to give a damn who we are? Do you think you’re royalty or something?’

But we’d all dressed up anyway, even Dad.

Mom’s comment left us all staring at our glasses, wishing for more, or at least access to the very last drop we still had in the bottom of the glass. Simon broke the silence with another slurp followed by a burp, wiping his mouth with the seam of his shirt. My shoulders automatically hunched inward as I waited for the explosion. It wouldn’t come from Mom—Simon could have farted too, for all she cared; he was always her little angel. It was Dad I was worried about.

Silence. Over the top of my glass I saw Dad look at Simon as though he wanted to swat him like a fly, but he sucked his teeth and held his peace. If it had been Steven, he would have exploded right then and frightened everyone in the shop with his rage, but either Dad didn’t dare to attack Mom’s angel, or he just couldn’t be mad at Simon for long either. The air around us may have been palpably tense, but we were still well-dressed, drinking milkshakes and then heading off to buy a television set. We were okay so long as everyone else thought we were okay.

The walk from the ice-cream parlor to the electronics shop had Dad marching ahead of us as usual, Mom holding Simon’s hand and Steven preening in shop windows. I walked just behind, feeling less amazing than I had in the ice-cream parlor, a bit ridiculous in my going-out dress among all the casually dressed shoppers.

I was just hoping we wouldn’t bump into anyone from school when Nicola—the most popular girl in my class—and some of her friends turned the corner into our path. They looked us up and down, snickering behind their hands as they passed. ‘Weird!’

Weird, weird, weird—the echoes of the word seemed to follow me.

Mr DeBeer, the owner of DeBeer’s Electrics, greeted us warmly as we entered his store, no doubt sensing money to be spent by the way we were dressed.

Coming out from behind the counter, he had eyes for Mom only, though he addressed Dad with a blustery, ‘So what can I do for you on this fine day, Meneer?’ His eyes lit up at the opportunity to sell a high-end product, boasting that he had the largest range of television sets in the Free State. ‘And for a fine-looking family such as yourselves I can only recommend the very best!’

Dad cut him short. ‘No, no, no, none of that; they don’t pay us enough at the mines to feed a family and buy the best of everything, you know.’ And so the men got to talking about mining, because Mr DeBeer’s son was an apprentice on the mines, and he was going to be working under a ‘new guy, should be arriving any day now, a geologist’.

‘That’d be me, then!’ And the two shook hands as if re-meeting each other on a different footing.

‘I expect my boy will be improving his English-speaking skills, then, hey? But I’m warning you, man, the guys down here, they’re not too impressed with Britishers who come here without any Afrikaans. This is the Free State, man; you’ll have to learn to praat die taal!’—this with a wink in our direction.

Dad laughed. ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, you know.’

Smoothing her hands down the sides of her dress, and slightly clearing her throat, Mom flashed Mr DeBeer a wide toothy smile, laying her fingers ever so lightly on his shoulder. ‘Come on, Ian. Stop your jabbering; the man has a business to run, after all.’

Mr DeBeer blushed a furious red at the contact—an effect Mom had on most men, except Dad. ‘Yes, so, um, back to business.’

The boys were already picking out TV sets they liked, having no time for boring adult conversation, but I remained close to Mom, as I usually did, because that was a rule: she ‘had to keep an eye on me’. Yet sometimes she’d turn from a conversation with someone to find me waiting patiently, and she’d act startled. ‘What on earth are you doing? Eavesdropping on adult conversation? I can see your ears flapping! Off with you, behave like a normal child for once. God, what I have to deal with.’

Back home, we changed out of our smart clothes and rushed to watch Dad set up the TV, which now took center stage in our ‘snug’. With our backs turned to the thirty books of the New Encyclopedia Britannica and Dad’s collection of fossils and minerals, our eyes were trained on Dad as he set up the ‘magic box’, brown and square, with its black knobs and bulging glass eye. Evelyn and Grace peered in from the doorway, chattering quietly to each other in Xhosa.

‘Vorster believes television is going to ruin South Africa by making us dissatisfied with our lot,’ said Dad. ‘He calls this “the devil’s box” and says it’ll make us all become communists and heathens before the year is out!’ We smiled encouragingly as Dad spoke; it was a given that anything Vorster, our President, said was going to be on the churlish side. We had great expectations of what ‘the box’ would bring into our world and didn’t care about Vorster’s opinion or concerns; we just had to have one!

Encouraged by the general positivism of our responses, Dad kept speaking. ‘Bloody Afrikaners spend every Sunday in suits and hats in churches across the country, living in a fantasy where they’re the chosen bloody race or something, terrified of the rest of the world. They’re so bloody controlling and uptight.’

‘You’ve forgotten that my mother is Afrikaans, Ian! You’ve no right to pass judgment—who do you think you are? Just another foreigner thinking he knows something about this country.’ Mom tossed one leg over the other, smoothing down her tights with a flick of the wrist. ‘This would still be a savage wasteland if it wasn’t for our forefathers’ strength, perseverance and high morals.’

I noticed Grace and Evelyn give each other a look. They clucked and shook their heads, leaving to return to the servants’ quarters.

‘Forgive me; I’ve gone and stood on your long toes again, June!’

While the grown-ups were starting to snap and bite at each other, my body involuntarily hunched over itself on the hard, grey, knobbly, carpet-burn-inducing floor. Caught between the excited expectation of what the television would ‘ping’ into our lives—when Dad finally got it working—and the brewing discord between Mom and Dad, which was likely to escalate in a flash and result in any kind of devastation, my chest forgot how to breathe properly. Dad chose to turn his back on Mom, on us, and focus on the technicalities at hand. My chest managed to exhale finally, and then to breathe in again.

It was unusual to have Dad in the snug with us, where we usually listened to radio programs like The Adventures of Tracy Dark or Squad Cars, and on Friday nights to the sounds of David Gresham counting down the South African Top Twenty hit singles for the week. Mom did love the radio. She was passionate about radio dramas, the characters as real to her as anyone she knew. Our lives were lived out to the background music of Neil Diamond, The Bee Gees, Barbara Streisand, Olivia Newton-John and Cliff Richard, the presenters of Springbok Radio a constant presence in our house. Dad never listened to music; if he was around, he listened to the news, alone.

The bulbous glass eye, blank just moments before, suddenly burst into colors, all organised, patterned and dated. We cheered as though Dad had performed a miracle, and sat staring at the wonder of the thing, the magic of it. Dad even looked proud of himself, happy for a moment, an awkward moment when we were just a family. But none of us knew what to do with a moment like that, nor where it should go. ‘Well, no use staring at the thing like a bunch of apes.’ Dad turned a knob—click, hiss, blank. ‘You’ll need to buy a magazine with a guide to the television programs; not that there’ll be much to it, I’d wager. I’m going to the office; got some work to finish.’ And with that Dad turned, left the room, and left the house.

‘For God’s sake, can’t you sit with any kind of modesty? No matter how hard I try, you have the class of a tramp.’

‘Sorry, Mommy.’

‘Fetch my purse, Stinky; you can go to Shortie’s and buy that magazine. And I need more cigarettes.’

I loved the freedom that running errands for her gave. Relief from the tension at home lasted for as long as I was gone. That afternoon I was smarting on behalf of Dad, that he’d been so generous all day and yet had still left the house in a poor mood. ‘Mom’s a horrible cow!’ I muttered, removing my flip-flops to walk the rest of the way barefoot. Neither the too-hot sand, nor the prickly grass stubble on the sidewalks nor the meltingly hot tar between them, could stop me from committing the awful act of being common. ‘So there, Mom!’