Frankie and Stankie, page 25
So this is the toxic atmosphere into which Dinah walks one Friday afternoon when she finally goes home after school with her best bosom friend. Lilian is playing the role of Mrs Joe Gargery, bullying and biffing to left and right. She’s abusing the cocker spaniel in a querulous parrot voice and staring daggers at her half-sister’s friend.
‘And look what the cat dragged in,’ she says. ‘Who’s she?’ – but nobody dares to risk a reply.
The poor old coal miner, with his toast-rack chest and ravelled lungs, is sitting in the corner, his knees under a green plaid rug. He’s flicking through back numbers of the Daily Mirror – the first English tabloid newspapers Dinah’s ever seen.
Maud’s slip of a mouse-quiet mother doesn’t look like a person to make a conquest at the races. She looks like everybody’s favourite dinner lady; the one who’ll always sneak you an extra helping of treacle tart and never make you finish up your greens. She makes tea and sandwiches for everyone, puffing end-to-end on ciggies and talking in a voice that’s almost a whisper. Her job is to practise appeasement within her household’s warring walls. Her mouth is fixed into a sweet, conciliatory smile that gives her face a pleasant, somewhat pussy-cat appearance.
With Lilian’s return to the little house, the Sugar Baron has finally, and very decisively, cut his losses. He’s backed off and quickly made a marriage to somebody else. Then, almost at once, he’s produced two daughters, legitimate daughters, Maud’s younger half-sisters, but there’s a stipulation that the girls should never meet. All contact with the Sugar Baron must cease. All patronage is understood to be at an end. It’s as if he never was. Maud’s the coal miner’s daughter and that’s that. From the time she enters Dinah’s class at GHS, Maud is never in her father’s company again, though she can’t help coming upon his picture from time to time, because he’s often in the newspapers initiating worthy civic projects. Nor can she stop herself from speculating about the two half-sisters who – kitted out in their bottle-green uniforms and regulation Quality Street straw bonnets – will be pupils by now at Durban’s prestigious girls’ private school. The College on Marriott Road. All that’s left is Maud’s half-yearly divvy which her mother allows her to spend.
None of the girls at GHS knows anything about Maud’s family life. Only Dinah. Because Maud confides in her that same afternoon as they escape the house and walk down the hill till they reach the corner by the Marist Brothers’ Roman Catholic Boys’ School.
‘He’s not my real father,’ she says. ‘And I don’t mind. I’m glad.’
She’s been embarrassed by the coal miner’s racism in front of Dinah, whose family’s wider, more sophisticated take on ethnic matters has had an instant conversion effect upon Maud’s own racial preconceptions. She resorts there and then to a mode of reference for the coal miner which sees her through in their conversations from then on. ‘Me mam’s ‘usband,’ she says.
‘Me mam’s ‘usband was once had up in court,’ Maud says. ‘He rammed a black man into a brick wall, because the black man was trying to have a pee.’ The black man was permanently maimed, Maud says, but the coal miner got off with a smallish fine. ‘A man like that,’ Maud says.
She’s shredding grass blades between her fingers as she speaks, picking them one by one from the Marist Brothers’ verge.
There aren’t any public conveniences for blacks. Not in the white urban areas. Public toilets are always labelled ‘Europeans Only/Slegs Blankes’.
Two months after Dinah’s visit and Maud, her mother and the coal miner have given up on the little house. They’ve ceded it to Lilian, along with the cocker spaniel. They’ve moved into a tied flat on the top floor of a factory in Umbilo Road because the coal miner has got himself a little part-time job as the factory’s night-time caretaker. Maud misses her dog and she hates her new address in the smoky industrial end of town. She embarks on a charade of always getting off the bus two stops early and walking up the hill first before doubling back. Dinah colludes with her in this, but Catherine Cleary, nose to the ground as always, has managed to root it out. And Catherine sees it as her duty to spread the fact as widely as possible.
‘It’s a sin to be ashamed of your family,’ she tells Dinah. ‘Maud needs to be taught a lesson.’
Dinah finds this position repellent as well as incomprehensible, because she takes it as normal by now for people to be ashamed of their families. Isn’t that why everyone would rather die than have their mum or their dad turn up at school? Wrong hair; wrong shoes; wrong bag; wrong accent; wrong body language; wrong laugh. Wouldn’t all the girls in her class rather starve all day than have their mum appear at the classroom door, eagerly waving their packed lunch?
And Dinah knows that she isn’t unique in having discovered adolescence as a time when you can hardly bear being in the same room as your parents for more than five short seconds. For herself she has to look away these days, rather than watch the angle of her mother’s hand as she lifts a cup of tea. She must block her ears rather than bear witness to her mother’s every little sigh or sniff – a cruel but necessary revulsion if one is ever to sever from one’s parents and learn to live on one’s own – especially, that is, if one’s mum has been as close as Dinah’s has been to her.
‘It’s for her own good,’ Catherine is saying, who is these days wearing a small gold crucifix on a neck chain and alternating her routine smut with a range of pious convent homilies derived from her mentor, Sister Catherine. But her outing of Maud is a parting shot, a final arrow from the bow, because Catherine, who has screwed up on her Matric, has now left school and is about to head out for England and a nurse’s training in Hove. As Mrs Cleary has put it, Catherine is to have a spell ‘at home’.
When the coal miner is carted off for long-term hospital care in a ward for the dying near to his old mine in northern Natal, Maud and her mother have to move out of the tied flat. Her mum gets a job looking after the linen in a small residential hotel which comes with a room on the premises that mother and daughter share. Maud’s territory is more comfortable to Dinah once the poor raddled invalid is gone, so that Dinah will now stay over in the hotel, just as Maud often stays over with her. In both venues the girls always manage the soundest sleep while sharing a two-foot-six-inch single bed. And tidy long-suffering Lisa now puts up with two muddly little sisters throwing their knickers around in her space.
Dinah enjoys the novelty of the hotel where, in the dining room, there’s always a typed menu, even at breakfast time. Tinned grapefruit and stewed prunes; All Bran and oatmeal porridge; eggs, poached, scrambled or fried. At lunch on Saturdays there’ll be a starter choice of mulligatawny or cock-a-leekie, followed by macaroni cheese, or the cod mornay option, both served with marrowfat peas. One weekend there’s a Sunday dinner of roast pork and Yorkshire pudding, but the typewriter’s ‘r’ has gone peculiar, so it’s ‘Roast ponk and Yonkshire pudding’. Dinah and Maud are delighted. Yonxie-ponxie-pudding-and-pie.
Maud’s mum, as well as checking the linen, has to see that the tables in the dining room are properly set because the native servants don’t always appreciate the vital importance of nickel-plated fish forks. Sometimes, when Maud and Dinah are helping, she’ll tick them off as well.
‘Side plates, Maud,’ she says.
‘Dinah’s family don’t have side plates,’ Maud says. ‘Dinah’s dad just puts his bread on the tablecloth.’
Maud’s mum pauses to polish the diplomacy of her reply. ‘That’s because they’re foreign, dear,’ she says.
Once the coal miner is into the last phase of his dying, Maud’s mum is summoned in haste and she leaves her daughter behind in the hotel. But the coal miner’s dying extends to a period of four months during which time Maud’s extraordinary lack of parental constraint strikes Dinah as the enviable height of sophistication. Maud’s unsupervised night life is expanding in adventurous directions and she’s going off on mid-week dates with senior students from the architectural school – students who habitually stay awake all night. Then, in between, there are the short-term liaisons with birds of passage in the hotel.
Maud sometimes arranges dates for Dinah but Dinah finds that these occasions, though they provide an excuse for running up a range of boned and strapless brocade evening dresses, fall wholly outside her range of management skills and leave her feeling all thumbs. It’s like being expected to dance in public when no one has taught you the steps. She’s aware that a modicum of touching and groping is part of the etiquette of the venture but, because she’s unschooled in the know-how of courtship and feels her skills to be roughly equivalent to those she’s displayed for Miss Chase on the netball field, she always sits, off-puttingly ramrod straight, giving off unintended ice-maiden messages and throwing her partners into confusion. She sits, waiting for the elegant mating dance of literary-verbal interplay, where her partner’s intent will merely be to deposit saliva inside her mouth. Or to get his hand in her bra. The verbal dimension, such as it is, will exist in her partner’s crooning Pat Boone lyrics into her ear and there’s one particular favourite here that comes up all the time. Pat Boone has crooned it as follows, but it’s always being locally amended:
The less you caress them,
The more they like your technique
‘It isn’t “the more you caress them”,’ Dinah says. ‘It’s “less”,’ but the dates will never believe her.
Dinah and Maud, who talk about nearly everything, but most especially about clothes, will never talk about sexual practices so Dinah has no idea what it is that Maud gets up to when she’s not watching. And Dinah’s sole snippet of sexual guidance is a one-line utterance offered months earlier by her mother, who then, immediately afterwards, clams up in sudden embarrassment, refusing further elaboration or even a moment’s eye contact. Dinah must not allow men to ‘fumble’ with her, she says – especially not with dirty fingers. For Dinah this advice, with its maternal emphasis on hygiene, has more the tone of the Home Doctor than any entrée into the secret world of sex, so that by the time one of the dates has accomplished a fumble inside Dinah’s swimsuit on one of Durban’s more deserted beaches, it’s no surprise when the upshot is a vaginal itch brought on by sand grains up her crotch. And, though she’s haunted by the idea that she’ll have to take her itch to Dr Schaeffer at the surgery, she manages to cure it herself, with an all-purpose cream that her mother always keeps in the bathroom cabinet. The cream is made by May & Baker whose initials are M and B. These, her mother asserts, stand in for the words Much Better. Dinah’s mum has gone on from here to evolve the phrase ‘Much MB’. ‘Tächenherz is much MB,’ she’ll say, when one of Dinah’s dad’s three-day migraines has at last begun to abate. ‘Ach, today he is much MB. Much, much MB.’
Because Maud is such a glamorous figure for Dinah, it doesn’t dawn on her that life at fifteen alone in a hotel isn’t altogether satisfactory. But it’s more or less from this time on that Maud becomes devoted to Dinah’s parents. And Dinah’s parents love her back, allowing her all sorts of liberties that they wouldn’t allow Lisa and Dinah. There’s no disapproval, for example, when Maud, rising at midday in nylon shorty pyjamas, sidles mock-sexily on to Dinah’s dad’s knee and puts on her Marlene Dietrich voice. She does this as a way of helping him to eject a party of Jehovah’s Witnesses who have managed to effect an entry.
‘Vhy don’t ve show ze gentlemen out und have some vine, my darlink, huh?’ she says and she runs her fingers through his hair.
Then – just as she’s got the Jehovahs on retreat at the front door, and Dinah’s dad is pulling out his wallet to pay them off with a compensating purchase of The Watchtower magazine – Maud embarrasses him deliberately by changing tack. Transforming herself into an infant spoilt brat, she grabs his wallet and hugs it to her person. She’s stamping her foot and yelling loudly.
‘DON’T give them our ice-cream money, Daddy! I SAID, don’t you DARE give them our ice-cream money!’
It’s fun to watch Dinah’s dad’s ears going pink as the Jehovahs are making a hurried getaway. And Dinah, who never really minds about it, is perfectly aware of the relish with which her dad always likes to point out that Maud’s drawing homework is so much better than her own. Maud’s drawing is that much faster and more deft, so that while Dinah is still laboriously cross-hatching their assigned arrangement of watering can, pot plant and trowel, Maud will have already accomplished hers and is adding spoofy speech bubbles for the amusement of Dinah’s dad. ‘I am a watering can,’ the speech bubbles say. ‘I am a trowel.’
Thanks to Maud’s increasingly hectic night life, she’s now as close to falling asleep in class as Dinah is from the hay-fever pills. For this reason it makes a lot of sense for the girls to spend more of their school-time socialising from inside the medical room. The problem here is that, while Dinah’s chronic allergies mean that the teachers will always believe her, Maud’s professions of illness often fall on sceptical ears. The girls have already devised a system whereby they stagger their requests for sick leave, in order to ensure that Maud will always plead incapacity, either in Miss Bardsey’s or Mrs Keithley’s lessons. Then Dinah will follow her in the next, by gaining permission from a different teacher. But even then it isn’t always easy.
‘You look very well to me, my girlie,’ Mrs Keithley says one day. ‘You must go right back to your place and get on with your work.’
Maud is filled with such righteous indignation at having her word placed in doubt that she’s at once bent on proving Mrs Keithley wrong. If she takes a swig from the ink well, she says, it will make her lips turn blue and that will prove her case.
The effect of drinking the school ink is, unfortunately, rather more dramatic. One small swig and Maud’s teeth have begun to chatter. Within minutes she’s turned a ghastly white.
‘M-my eyeb-balls f-feel like b-b-b-boiled eggs,’ she whispers. ‘D-d-d-dinah, I’m n-n-not j-joking.’
Both of them are transfixed. When the bell goes for break, they eventually manage to stagger outside, both convinced that Maud is fading out. Yet neither will dream of summoning a teacher. They sit in the shade of a jacaranda tree, half paralysed with fear. Then, thank goodness, after several swigs of water, the fit begins to pass. And by halfway through the next lesson Maud is still sufficiently pale and shaky, not only to earn herself an open-ended place in the medical room for the day, but also to have company, because Dinah is allowed to go along with her to check that she’s all right.
In the medical room you have to write in the record book what’s the matter with you that day, so Dinah always writes ‘hay fever’. Maud usually writes ‘sinus trouble’, but now she writes ‘chattering teeth’. Quite often in the medical room they’ll meet Carmen Shapiro who is older than they are and wilder. Carmen is very beautiful: a dark, glossy beauty who lives up to her name. She intermittently intersects with the North Beach airhead set but in truth she’s far too eccentric and far too original for the herd. Carmen always writes whatever she likes in the medical-record book. She writes ‘hypochondrial diffusions’ and ‘period pains’. She writes ‘septicaemia’ and ‘gangrene’ and ‘scurvy’. One day she writes ‘sweaty feet’ and another day she writes ‘labour pains’. Thanks to Carmen it becomes perfectly obvious to Maud and Dinah that the staff never consult the medical-record book and that you don’t really need to fill it in at all. Carmen is brilliantly gymnastical and she does handstands, or she turns cartwheels round and round the medical room. She and her friends are expert truants and she has funny stories about their various close escapes. They hide in the lavatories during assemblies and during lesson cross-over times.
‘Always stand on the lavatory seat,’ Carmen advises the younger girls. ‘Then the prefects can’t see your feet under the door.’
Carmen is in Lisa’s class and Lisa has now become a prefect. Once Carmen’s caught red-handed in the medical room while Maud and Dinah are watching from neighbouring beds. She’s doing a headstand against the opposite wall when the head of maths pays an unexpected visit.
‘I’m anaemic, Miss Unwin,’ Carmen says, having hastily turned the right way up. ‘My doctor’s told me it’s vital to get blood to the brain every hour.’
It’s a mystery to Maud and Dinah why Carmen hasn’t been expelled, especially as they’ve repeatedly teetered on the brink of it themselves for several much more innocuous and minor transgressions. Most recently it’s been because of what they’ve done while sitting out the swimming lesson on the tiered stands one morning. Maud believes that she and Dinah can rescue the class from an impending follow-on maths test. They can do this, she says, by prolonging the class’s changing time at the end.
‘We’ll muddle up all the bras,’ she says. ‘That’ll take for ever to sort out.’
So the two girls leave the sunny stands while Miss Chase is busy in the pool. They spend a few brief, happy minutes in the changing room, transferring Fern Levy’s size 36D to the cubicle of Pat Mayer’s 32AA. They switch Adele’s 34C with Lynette’s 34A and Bet’s 34B with Marjorie’s 36C. Then they return unnoticed to the stands and wait for the shrieks and confusion. The scheme is highly successful since the class takes for ever to sort out its undies and the maths test is well and truly missed.
And Miss Maidment, subtle creature that she is, then takes three days to summon them to her office. Plus, because she does this one by one, both girls are caught off guard. Maud is summoned first and Dinah has no idea that she’s to follow. They don’t even know what it’s about.
‘Godalmighty, but look at me,’ Maud says. She casts an eye over her routinely desecrated uniform. ‘Swap me your blazer, Dee,’ she says. ‘Swap me your tie. Swap me your shoes.’
