The only person I ever want to speak to is Mike.
Julia
Now that I have an arrangement to see my mother, I need to think about what I’m actually going to say to her. In most situations, the mother would know about the boyfriend before there’s an announcement of them having moved in together. Never mind the rest.
But with Daniel it’s complicated, so my mother knows nothing. In fact, as far as she knows, the most exciting thing happening in my life is still pottery class and making friends with Claire.
Claire. I met Claire at a pottery class about a year ago. I started pottery because my day job was boring and I needed to do something fun and artistic.
People often find it hard to reconcile my personality with my job. I have untameable hair, wear loud colours, and every now and again I go off to Iggy Pop in my flat. At home I am chronically disorganised, and I have a history of dead-end relationships. People expect me to be artistic, I think, or else they expect me to be a low achiever. There was a time I didn’t expect much from myself either, to be honest.
But I’m an accountant. And a really good one. And I think it’s because so much of my childhood had no answers, but accounts always have answers. From the moment I took my first high school accountancy lesson and the teacher said, ‘If it doesn’t balance, you know the answer is wrong,’ I knew this was the career for me. With my mum, I never know if my answers are wrong. With my work, I know. Accounting makes life seem fair. Alice says she’s heard of worse reasons to choose a career.
I don’t work in a smart firm where I get to wear power suits, though. I work in an old-fashioned business where my boss wears a cardigan, is freaked out by my wrist tattoo, and regards computers with utmost suspicion. My colleagues are all older than me. Good people, durable people, but cut from the same dull tweed cloth. Our offices are in one of those converted old-Joburg blocks of flats. The other tenants have knocked out walls and put in fancy flooring and cool lighting, and generally made the place quite trendy. But our suite still has faded carpets and that rough plastering that accumulates little wells of dust. You can imagine the sad lives that were conducted in these rooms before it became an office block. Sometimes it feels like the whole place is covered in dandruff.
I really need to get out, to find a more stimulating position. But I don’t seem to be able to move. So last year I decided to do pottery.
Work probably wasn’t the only thing that led me to pottery. I was also lonely. I’ve always had loads of friends; nights out and laughs and get-togethers. But something’s happened in the last year or two. My closest group of friends has just kind of dissolved. My best friend, Mandy, who’s the most talented dressmaker and fashion designer and was always up for a party . . . she had a baby. Her husband is all my fault, because she met him through me. He’s also an accountant – only he’s the stereotypical type. I never, for one moment, thought they’d get together.
I listened to all Mandy’s god-awful pregnancy tales, but it didn’t end when the baby actually arrived. Then it was all breastfeeding and sleep habits and baby nutrition and the relentless trivia of his life. I tried to understand, but it bored me to tears. So I don’t see Mandy much any more, and I don’t know if she’s noticed. And Agnes emigrated to Jamaica of all places, and now just posts enviable selfies on Facebook. Mary-Anne kind of drifted off after she got married on a beach in Zanzibar and didn’t invite anyone, which made things a bit awkward, and Flora decided to study medicine at the age of twenty-seven and is now never available, night or day.
I found out about the pottery class from a notice in a shop.
It wasn’t my usual shopping area, and it wasn’t my usual sort of shop. It was an art-supply shop, and I’d only gone there to get the particular brand of pencil my boss favours. But I saw this notice about a studio nearby and I felt like a person in a movie, tearing off the telephone number and stuffing it into my pocket. It took me a few weeks to actually phone, but eventually I did it and the teacher had a new group just about to start, so it was like it was meant to be. And it was great.
The class was made up of five women, and the teacher had crazy curly grey hair that came to her waist. Amongst her neighbours’ carefully manicured suburban lawns and electric fences, her house was like Sleeping Beauty’s castle – high hedges covered in creepers, and a wooden gate that you simply pushed open. God knows how she wasn’t burgled daily.
It was just as well I wasn’t doing the class to meet men, I remember thinking. Of the five students, only Claire and I were under fifty, so naturally we gravitated towards each other. In normal circumstances she’s not a person I would have chosen across a room – she’s one of those tall, thin, aristocratic blondes who looks like she’s either away with the fairies or thinking she’s a cut above everyone else. But we were the ‘young ones’, so we found ourselves sitting together during the introduction when we had to go around the circle saying why we wanted to do pottery and what we hoped to get out of it. The old ladies were a group of widows who all lived at the same retirement village down the road, and they basically said a different version of what I said – new hobby, something to do, artistic outlet. But Claire announced that she was probably going to be shocking at pottery, she just needed something to get her away from her family once a week and pottery had been the first thing she’d seen that was reasonably close by. I was a bit shocked, but the old ladies nodded and one laughed and said, ‘Been there.’
Claire wasn’t shocking at pottery – she was the best in the class. I didn’t know it then, but Claire is always the best in the class, no matter what class it is. That first day, we learnt how to make snake bowls – those bowls where you roll the clay into a long snake and then coil it into a bowl. My snake looked like it had swallowed a series of small mammals, and my resulting bowl looked like a child had made it.
When I said that to Claire – who’d rolled her snake so thin, her bowl looked like some sort of perfect and magical air creation – she assured me I was wrong. ‘I have a child,’ she said. ‘Hers would be much, much worse.’
‘If she’s anything like you,’ I said. ‘I doubt that.’
‘Oh no, she’s like her dad,’ said Claire. ‘Totally without any imagination.’ Then she laughed. ‘Oh, I don’t really mean that. Mackenzie has lots of imagination. But two left hands.’
I don’t have lots of married friends or friends with children – other than Mandy, who makes it sound idyllic. I didn’t know you were allowed to say bad things about your children, or say that you wanted to get away from them. I also didn’t know you could slag off your husband. I figured her husband must be awful and her child particularly disappointing. The old ladies weren’t shocked though – they thought Claire was very funny. When she told us, at the second class, about how her husband was floored by the idea that he had to cook himself dinner on pottery night, the old ladies cackled and agreed that men were hopeless.
When the widows laughed, I didn’t like how it felt as if Claire had more in common with them than with me. She’s a person you find yourself wanting to impress. Like the most popular girl at high school – the one who doesn’t do anything special to be popular, and is nice and kind and interesting, but never quite accessible. After the second class, I asked Claire if she wanted to come for a drink afterwards, though I was sure she would say no.
‘A drink? Now?’ She looked at me as if it was the most scandalous proposal. Then she smiled. ‘You know what, I think I will! What a divine idea. How mad!’
Then she turned and asked the widows and the teacher if they wanted to join us, and I plastered a smile on my face and said, ‘Yes, please do.’
But they all chuckled and said it was past their bedtime, and us young things must go and have some fun, and Claire laughed and said she wasn’t as young as me, and I was corrupting her completely.
When we got to the bar – which was more of a restaurant that served drinks – Claire looked around like she was in a foreign country. ‘Look at all these people ou
t so late in the week,’ she said, though it was just after nine. ‘I forget that life goes on for other people.’
‘Life’s hardly stopped for you,’ I said. ‘You have a husband and a daughter. That’s amazing.’
Claire smiled. ‘Yes, I’m sure it is,’ she said, as if we were talking about an entirely hypothetical scenario that had nothing to do with her. ‘Oh damn,’ she added. ‘I’d better tell him I’m going to be late.’ She fished her phone out of her bag and sent a text. ‘He’s going to be so put out.’
‘Is he terribly possessive?’ I asked.
Claire looked confused. ‘God, no.’
I couldn’t figure out why else her husband would be put out by her having a drink after class, so I started to paint a mental picture of a selfish monster, a towering giant, who kept Claire a virtual captive in their house. Because Claire is so tall and aristocratic-looking, I pictured him as very good-looking, to have captured her heart. And even that seemed glamorous – if Claire was being kept captive in a tower by an evil prince, then that was obviously this season’s trend.
And Claire seemed fascinated by my life. She made me talk about going out and clubbing and dating, which I hardly even did any more, and she laughed at my stories like I was hilarious.
And I was fascinated by her. Her, and her perfect pottery, and her unseen family.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The more books you write and have published, the more people there are to thank. Yet in a strange way, it’s also harder to remember who did what when – because the writing of a book is such a strange process, with ideas arriving like osmosis, and people influencing your thinking in ways that are hard to trace.
This book starts with a school reunion. I have been to two school reunions – like Mary, the first one I went to (quite some years ago) was my twentieth reunion. Because I went to a big school, there were people there that I would have sworn I had never seen in my life before, even though we were in the same year. A small seed was planted – this idea that in a gathering of old friends, one might find a new friend. So, thanks to the Greenside High 1991 matric year for that first story seed!
Move forward a few years, and I went to a much smaller school reunion – a handful of us – organised because one of our number was in town. It is strange that it was at this reunion that I connected with Catherine Allardyce, who later spoke to me honestly and insightfully about her own experience with domestic abuse. Thank you, Cath.
Turning to my publishing teams:
In South Africa, my lovely agent, Aoife Lennon-Richie, and the team at Pan Macmillan SA. Andrea Nattrass and Nicola Rijsdijk are on their fourth and sixth book with me respectively, and the support that they give me is incredible – including fielding the occasional totally unhinged phone call. Nicola did the first edit of Never Tell a Lie at a time of great personal crisis, and I am so grateful. Then the team of publicists and support staff, who I hate naming because I always leave someone out – so I am just going to say that the Pan Mac SA team are legends – every writer deserves a publisher like this.
And then my newer team at Lake Union – an organised engine of a publisher, who hold your hand through every step. Again, thanking everyone is too daunting – so my thanks to the core team that handle my books: Sammia Hamer, who took the chance on me; Ian Pindar, who edits me and tries his best to understand the ways of the people living on the southern tip of Africa; and Victoria Oundjian, who has calmly and efficiently stepped into Sammia’s shoes as Sammia has maternity leave.
My day job is quite hectic, and without my reliable team at work I would probably be too broken to write – so thanks to Stephan Kotze, Phumzile Mhlongo and Didi Bojosi at the Advertising Regulatory Board in South Africa.
And of course, in the last eighteen months family has become more than just family as we spent an unprecedented and intense time together. Like most people in this time, we have faced a number of personal challenges – but throughout it all my husband, Paul van Onselen, retains an almost irrational belief that I can do anything that I decide to do. Because writing books is mostly a completely irrational activity, this belief is what keeps me going.
And thank goodness my children, Thomas and Megan van Onselen, have been old enough and wonderful enough to take on the challenges of Covid and online schooling and returning to school with minimal fuss. I have been spread so thin this year – but they have made it worth everything.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2017 Nicolise Harding
Gail Schimmel is an admitted attorney in South Africa, with four degrees to her name. She is currently the CEO of the Advertising Regulatory Board – the South African self-regulatory body for the content of advertising. She has published five novels in South Africa, with The Aftermath as her international debut. She lives in Johannesburg with her husband, two children, an ancient cat and two very naughty dogs.
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