by Carol Gibbs
“Must you always follow me and spoil my fun?” shouts Desiree, when she is upright again. “Why can’t you find your own game?”
We drink our tea from Grandma’s kitchen cups, not the fancy ones with the tomatoes and the lettuce leaves.
“My grand cups are for the parliamentarians’ wives when they come for their fittings. Now go and play,” she tells us when we’ve drained the last drop.
Outside in the yard we can hear every word Mommy and Grandma are saying in the kitchen.
“How’s the adoption going?”
“I hope Nick makes a good father,” says Grandma in answer. “He knocks on my bedroom door at night to borrow a cup of brandy. Medicinal purposes, my eye! The last time it ended in an argument.”
“Brandy is nothing but a curse,” says Mommy. “On the neck of Jacob’s brandy bottle it says, A comfort in every home. You know what a sore point it is with me. It’s a mockery!”
Finally, when it’s time to go, Mommy shouts at us playing in the yard.
“Say goodbye to Paddy,” calls Mommy.
As we stand on Grandma’s red polished steps it’s just getting dark. We’ll have to wait for next time to visit the museum and the Gardens, because we’re getting a lift home with one of the boarders in his big posh car. Mommy is sitting in the front seat, humming along with the radio.
“We’re almost in Crawford. Where shall I drop you?” the man in the smart hat asks.
Mommy points at a posh house three roads away from our street. “Right there. That’s where we live.”
“But …”
Desiree looks daggers at me and clamps her hand over my mouth.
“You know what Daddy says,” whispers Desiree in my ear. “You can be poor, but you don’t have to show it.”
The Dodge stops and we make for the gate. Mommy turns around and waves and her dangling gypsy earrings catch the light. We wave too, copying her. The man puts his car in gear, presses his foot down and roars off. We turn around, make our way down Third Avenue and head for our Doll’s House in silence.
Every time we go see Grandma, Paddy’s tummy is fatter and her teats are pink and shiny. Finally – eventually – the puppies are born. When we visit, we can hold them for a minute only, then they’re back in Paddy’s basket where they burrow into her soft black fur and suck her pink teats. At last, Mommy says it’s time.
“Find a cardboard box and get the alarm clock.”
“The alarm clock? Why?” Gabriel wants to know.
“To wrap in the puppy’s blanket. The puppy will think the ticking clock is the mother’s heartbeat. That’ll stop it from annoying your father at night.”
“I want the big one,” says Gabriel.
“I don’t.” Desiree is already in a huff.
“What about the little one sucking?”
“He looks too greedy.”
“Don’t you have enough fighting in your house?” Grandma sounds cross. We look at her with big eyes and fall silent. She picks up the suckling puppy and places it in Gabriel’s outstretched arms.
“Is it a girl or a boy?” Desiree wants to know.
We name her Black Bess, Bessie for short, and she is the love of our lives and the darling of the neighbourhood. When we play Cowboys and Crooks she races behind our stagecoach and licks our faces when we’re playing dead. She’s a comfort in the night and we take turns to hold her in bed.
Daddy isn’t always so happy with her though.
“I can’t stand these dogs hanging around,” he says crossly one day. “Now I know where the expression comes from, soos ’n hond agter vrot vleis. Like a dog after bad meat!”
Other dogs, strange dogs, scratch at the door at night and they howl in the yard. If you shoo them away they just come back.
“Why did your mother bring this on my head?”
Tears spring to my eyes because I just know they are going to fight. Mommy uses her soft voice.
“Jacob, remember, you said we could make some money if we could find the right dog to cover her.”
“Then I’d better do something to keep all these dogs away from her. Gabriel, you come with me.”
Daddy crosses the yard to fetch his toolbox, with Gabriel at his heels. The toolbox has my daddy’s name on a brass plate screwed to the lid and on our front door there’s a brass plate engraved: J. Le Seuer – Electrician. Only important people like the dentist and the doctor have brass nameplates. The neighbours bring their kettles and my daddy fixes them. He mends their stoves and their lights and he puts new wires in their pipes when they wear thin. His leather box is always with him, dangling from his shoulder like a camera. The hands on the meter swing from left to right and then he can tell if all is well or not. He talks about amps and surge. My daddy never does a half-half job. Sometimes people invite him in for a drink and then he doesn’t charge. Mommy is quick to say, “This isn’t a charity, Jacob! You’ve got mouths to feed.” Then Daddy says, “Shut up, you with your sharp tongue, a bit of charity never hurt anyone. It will come back with bells on.” Mommy knows that that isn’t true, but she also knows better than to say so.
Daddy rigs up wires around the fowl hok. Bessie is lying on her back in the kitchen, her paw out. Daddy picks her up and carries her across the yard.
“Move over, fowls. You’ve got company,” he says to the chickens. “Let’s see if any randy dog can get to her now. The fence is wired with eight hundred volts. If you touch that fence,” he warns and us, “you’ll go up in smoke.”
“Your flesh will singe and you won’t see Christmas,” says Gabriel. “You won’t have any hair left and the smell will be horrible. You’ll die on the spot like people die during the war in the bioscope.”
Desiree and I are terrified. With eyes like owls, we escape to the safety of our beds, worrying about Bessie trapped behind the electric fence.
The next morning, the sun is out peeping from behind early-morning clouds when we’re woken by the high-pitched sound of Gabriel’s voice.
When we get to the kitchen, he’s already there, his face white like a sheet.
“Looks like you’ve seen a ghost,” says Mommy.
“It’s a Maltese poodle. He’s dead as a doornail.”
“He lifted his leg,” says Daddy. “A fatal mistake. Gabriel, get the spade. I’m turning the power off.”
I can see Gabriel would like to say, “I pass,” but he says nothing as he follows Daddy out into the yard.
Mommy stands on the back step with her hand over her mouth, shaking her head. “He didn’t stand a chance.”
Mommy goes inside, trailing the long strings of her big white apron. Gabriel buries the Maltese poodle and comes back with knitted brows and tears in his eyes.
“Don’t even tell your best friend,” warns Daddy, “or you’ll get the hiding of your lives.” He points his finger at each one of us in turn. Then he turns on his heel and Mommy flashes a look at him. Desiree is sobbing. Edna watches with big blue eyes.
Between sobs, Desiree asks, “Wh-y-y-y did Daddy kill the d-o-o-o-g?”
“I think it was an accident.” Mommy shrugs her shoulders.
“After school we’ll sing and say p-prayers.”
“Miriam gave me a cross made from palm leaves. We can put it on his grave.”
We’re all so sad about the dead dog, but we’ll just have to get on with it.
“We won’t ever forget the dead dog,” says Gabriel when we place Miriam’s cross on the grave.
All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small …
It’s early the next morning and I’m about to head for the grave when I see our landlord stepping through the gate.
“Good morning, Mr Abramowitz,” says Mommy.
Mr Abramowitz just nods. “I think this house needs a fresh coat of paint, inside and out,” he says as he paces round and round the house.
Desiree stifles a giggle. “How come he’s called a landlord and he has holes in his jacket? Lords are rich peop
le who have tea with the Queen of England.”
“Daddy always says you can be poor, but you must never show it,” says Gabriel.
“You can’t judge a book by its cover,” says Mommy.
“What does that mean?”
“It means you can’t always tell by the way people look. Some people turn their pennies over six times and that’s the way they get rich.”
Then a few days later the Malay painters move in.
“I wonder what colour he will paint our room.”
Desiree wants pink, but Mr Abramowitz himself has chosen the colour for our room. It’s a reddish brown, the colour Jack Frost paints the leaves in autumn. The painters roll up a towel like a big sausage and dip it in the paint and roll it up and down the wall. It makes wide coloured stripes with beautiful scattered patterns. The day they finish in our room, we lie in bed and turn our heads this way and that to see monsters and angels and bears. The show is never ending. It just depends on our imaginations. We watch as they make the pillars on the stoep look like marble, like the pillars of the temple in the Bible. Gabriel says the pillars look like streaky bacon.
Our Doll’s House is so small they are done in no time at all. When Mommy comes home from work she’s happy with the results, except for the kitchen.
“Dark green!” she mutters. “Isn’t my life gloomy enough? It’s not as though we live in a palace with a million windows and light bouncing off hundreds of mirrors. But I suppose beggars can’t be choosers,” she sighs and switches on the stove.
Our house has never looked so grand. Posh, my mommy calls it. Now people can drop us right outside our door and gawp at our streaky-bacon marble pillars. I sit on the grass and look back at the house with the zinnias growing up the path and the walls all clean and neat. I love to sweep the path and the stoep with the yard broom until there isn’t a bit of dirt or a leaf in sight.
The painters have left an empty bottle standing beside the back step. I think up a plan. I’ll show Spencer and Maureen, in their bay-windowed house, with the queen stove and the moonflowers. I pick up the bottle and fill it under the tap. I climb the front gate, cramming my feet into the diamond mesh.
“We-lah-ke-pelah! I’ve got lemonade!”
I tip back my head and take a big mouthful, peering over the bottle at Spencer to see what he will do. He goes inside and comes back with a full bottle of cream soda. I’m in tears when I tell Gabriel.
“I hope you had enough sense to swallow your pride and keep drinking your lemonade,” he says.
“Never pretend,” says Mommy, “because you’ll only hurt yourself in the end.”
“But Daddy says you can be poor, but you don’t have to show it.”
“That’s different.”
I don’t understand the grown-up world. As I’m walking away with my tail between my legs, there’s a knock on the front door. A man is standing on our freshly painted stoep with a briefcase clutched in his fist and a pile of books under his arm.
“Oh no, not the Jehovah’s Witnesses again! I’m sick and tired of the lions lying with the lambs.”
Mommy nearly jerks the door off its hinges.
“I belong to the Gospel Hall,” she blurts out, “and I’m born again!”
“I’m selling Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories.” Bright blue eyes twinkle behind tortoiseshell spectacles that make him look wise, like an owl. Mommy blushes and invites him in.
“Your book looks tired, as though it’s travelled a million miles,” says Gabriel.
“Don’t be rude,” says Mommy.
The man’s voice fills our small lounge as he reads about a Collie dog like Lassie saving his master’s life. Before the day is out we all want a dog like that. In all the stories the man reads, Jesus always answers children’s prayers.
“The stories have Christian themes and they all teach high morals. Uncle Arthur, as he is fondly known to children across the globe, is a highly regarded American.”
“I really should ask my husband,” Mommy mutters.
“This is an alternative to the comics they’re reading,” says the man. “What can Superman teach them? Rubbish is dished out to these innocents every day of their lives and they don’t know the difference. Let me fill in the form. All that’s left is for you to sign on the dotted line.”
Before Mommy can move her lips, his fountain pen is out. She has no sooner signed than he shoves his hat on his head and he’s gone, leaving Mommy with flushed cheeks and us with bated breath, waiting for our first copy of Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories to arrive in the post.
We stride through the Nettletons’ squeaking gate to the sound of budgies squawking. The back door is wide open and Aunty Beryl is sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea and smoking a cigarette.
“Guten morgen, good morning,” she says, blowing smoke through her nose and coughing.
When she puts her cigarette down her nicotine-stained fingers stray to her hair and she twirls a lock round and round her finger. She always does that when she’s nervous, but we will never know why because grown-ups don’t tell children their business. Because Aunty Beryl was born in South West Africa, she uses German words. Gabriel says anything German is bad, like Hitler, but it doesn’t seem to bother Aunty Beryl at all.
“I lost my diamond ring,” says Aunty Beryl. “Eddie told me to have it insured and I’m kicking myself.”
We are all ears.
Mommy says, “Beryl, vee grow shmart too late and oldt too soon.”
We know those words are not real German, only play-play, and we laugh with her and Mommy.
“You remember the Greek from the corner shop?” Aunty Beryl asks Mommy. “Well, he dropped down dead. You know, Mavis, life is a quick walk around a short block and before you know what’s happening you’re practising for your finals, kicking the bucket.” She pauses and then adds, “I saw You-Know-Who the other day. He asked after you. I’d tell you more, but …” Aunty Beryl tosses her head at us. “Moenie hier rondstaan and tande tel nie.”
We’re standing behind Mommy’s chair, quiet as mice.
“Who is You-Know-Who, Mommy?”
“Go and play.”
“This means man trouble,” says Gabriel. “They’re going to drink lots of tea, smoke Cavallas and talk their heads off.”
We hear Aunty Beryl say kerfuffle and they giggle. Gabriel says that’s not proper German either, but he thinks it has something to do with man trouble.
Aunty Beryl lives with her mother, her brother Reggie, her sister Eileen, two tame budgies and a dog with only three legs. The budgies are named after a game we play with bits of paper stuck to our fingers with spit:
Two little dicky birds sitting on the wall,
One named Peter, one named Paul …
The budgies live in the palm tree in the back yard and the dog lives mostly in Aunty Beryl’s handbag. Daddy says, besides the dog being ugly as sin, Pixie is like an extension of Beryl’s arm. He thinks it’s silly to take a dog everywhere with you and says it comes from being sterile, not having any babies to cuddle.
Aunty Beryl’s sister Eileen treats me like a grown-up. She teaches me that blue and red make purple, yellow and red make orange, and so forth. I never know what grown-ups mean when they say and so forth. It’s one of those never-ending question marks. The grown-ups all smoke like chimneys, the ladies sucking Sen-Sens and the men XXX mints.
Double chins fill the bottom half of Uncle Reggie’s face and his big belly wobbles like Trotters jelly. Mommy says he’s digging his own grave with his knife and fork. But, despite Uncle Reggie’s war wounds and his bouncing belly, he can still walk on his hands all the way to the back gate. His mother is strict and she tells him that he will live by her rules.
“The poor man,” says Daddy. “He has electric light in his room, a beautiful garden and a nice inside lavatory with a lift-up lid, but no wife and no laughs.”
Because the Nettletons live right on the main train line to Cape Town they hardly ever use the front doo
r. Everyone uses the gate at the back and goes through Uncle Reggie’s garden. You can’t help but admire the cabbages with their big heads and firm leaves.
“My cabbages are full of goodness, powerful enough to split your foefie valve.”
Uncle Reggie is a man of few words, but sometimes he says things that make your hair stand on end.
The hokkie in the yard is out of bounds, but we peep through the grimy windows. There are buckets, rakes and spades, and colourful packets of seeds lying on the windowsill. Rows and rows of bottles glint in the sun waiting to be filled with Uncle Reggie’s homemade wine. A hand plough hangs from the ceiling and plaited bunches of onions are tied to the beams. Uncle Reggie’s old army coat hangs on a bent nail and his Wellington boots stand to attention beside the door. Mrs Nettleton says Reggie can’t take chances with his weak chest. If pneumonia strikes, he may never rise from his bed to reap his crop or weed his patch.
“Or to brew his cursed wine,” she adds.
There’s a church opposite and, as we stand among the strange plants in the back yard, we can clearly hear people singing hymns.
Rock of ages cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee …
One of the plants is Egyptian cotton balls, or that’s what Uncle Reggie calls them; round, hairy things, pale green with white milk oozing from long stems. The balls make soft exploding sounds as we pop them against our ears. André, our Afrikaans friend at home, calls them ‘Ou mans balle’. When we look at the soft, round, hairy things we giggle because we know André’s being rude. A yellow Christ hangs on petals that look like a cross on the holy plant. It’s called the Christ Thorn and we dare not pick the flowers because it’s a sin.
“The Christ will wither and die before our very eyes,” says Uncle Reggie, “never to rise again.”
Far at the back of the yard is the thing we love most about the Nettletons’ garden. It says Cadillac on the front. It’s just an old hulk, but Uncle Reggie has been fixing it for years. The heavy door closes with a thick clunk and the rich leather smell is all around us.
