3
Godmother Dory presided like a gaoler over Billy Boy’s existence.
He couldn’t get back to his bird world because he was locked up in his cage. When he played on his ladder and swing he lifted his wings while he whizzed in the air but it wasn’t the same as flying.
‘Shut that window otherwise Billy Boy will fly away. You can hold him in your hands. Do you want to?’
I nodded.
‘He makes more noise than you do.’
When I cupped Billy Boy in my hands and buried my nose in his soft feathers, the pilot’s rugby song came in to my head.
He had no feathers on at all
at all at all at all
he had no feathers on at all
Poor Billy Boy. He was so sad under his feathers. His small organs and little bones. Godmother Dory told me to count his toes every month. Apparently if a budgie had some of its toes missing this was because of mites. And I had to listen to him breathe. If there was a ‘click’ when he took a breath that meant he had air sac mites. Godmother Dory knew everything there was to know about budgies. She told me that it was very important not to take pity on a sick budgie for sale in a pet shop.
‘Pity will not bring a sick budgie back to life. It will die of respiratory problems whatever you do.’
I tried to slap down the pity I felt for Billy Boy in case it killed him but it kept coming back. I stared at the sawdust at the bottom of his cage and told myself he was happy and well but I didn’t believe myself. As far as I was concerned all the crops had failed to grow in Billy Boy’s life and any hope he possessed had been eaten by ants and his parents had been crushed by a train.
I had forgotten how huge my Godmother was. When she hugged me, I disappeared in to the folds of her stomach. Everything went dark and muffled and I could hear the water dripping inside her pipes. A rumbling noise that was like the sea which was five miles away from the house. The Indian ocean. A sea full of sharks. The life guards on the Golden Mile, which was what the beach was called, had to check the shark nets every morning and make announcements on tannoys when it was not safe to swim. I’d already had to run out of the water and wait on the sand until the shark had been caught. While they were catching the shark I read the signs on the beach:
CITY OF DURBAN
THIS BATHING AREA IS RESERVED FOR THE SOLE USE
OF MEMBERS OF THE WHITE RACE
The only black people allowed onto the beach were the ice cream sellers who walked barefoot across the hot sand, ringing a bell, shouting, ‘Eskimo pie, choc-ice, eskimo pie.’ Sometimes the white boys who went surfing had a leg chewed off if they went too far out on their boards and my Godmother would show me their picture in the newspaper the next day. She said she was more scared of tapeworms than sharks. When the ginger cat was sick on the carpet she flung up her arms and screamed because she said there might be a tapeworm in the vomit. The maid called Caroline cleaned it up while Madam shut her eyes and squealed, her soft white hand clamped over her lips. It seemed then that a tapeworm could swallow a shark; fear did not have a logical size and what’s more, fear was a hermaphrodite. My Godmother told me that tapeworms have both male and female organs in their long long bodies: ‘They have ovaries and testes all mixed in together,’ they are ‘hermaphrodites’, and if that wasn’t terrifying enough, ‘Any human being who likes to eat raw meat should know that a tapeworm would like to eat them.’
Outside the house in Durban, wired onto the gate, was a big sign:
ARMED RESPONSE
When I asked what it meant my Godmother who knew everything was happy to explain: ‘If The Blacks break into the house and rob us, my husband, the venerable Edward Charles William, will shoot them, but don’t tell your mother. So while you stay with us you needn’t worry about a thing!’ So far I’d been introduced to sharks, tapeworms and guns. And hermaphrodites. And orchids. ‘Come and look at the flowers in my garden. My orchids have small blooms but smell stronger than the bigger ones.’
It was in Godmother Dory’s garden in subtropical Durban that a miracle lay in wait for me, a hallucination, a mirage, a sort of cartoon. Leaning against the palm tree under Natal’s blue sky, smacking flies off her long tanned legs, was a living Barbie doll. Something was shining in the sunshine. It was a gold letter in the shape of an M and the M was attached to a gold chain she wore around her neck. I was dazzled. Somehow, Godmother Dory had managed to produce a slim, blonde daughter who looked like plastic.
‘Hello. I’m Melissa. I’ve just got back from a shorthand course in Pretoria. Aren’t you going to say hello to me? You’re not in church, you can speak loud you know.’
Just as tiny Barbie was losing her aura and becoming a mere toy with nylon hair, a living Barbie wearing a pastel blue mini-skirt had appeared on the scene.
‘C’mon baby. Sit in my bedroom and talk to me.’
Melissa was seventeen, wore her hair in a beehive and painted her eyelashes with a little brush which she dipped in a pot of black mascara.
‘Hey don’t you speak? Aaaah. You don’t have to. But listen I’m doing my secretarial exams. I got to do shorthand, so if you talk fast I can practise writing what you say. It’s a code called Pitman’s.’ Melissa took out a pen and wrote some squiggles on the back of my hand. ‘It says, Welcome to Durbs my little chum.’
It was an honour to be allowed to sit on Melissa’s bed and witness the way she teased her hair with a plastic comb until it stood on end all over her head. A special crystal ashtray lay under the bed. I could just see it under the white pom-poms that shivered on the edge of the pink satin eiderdown. Melissa was a secret smoker and kept the ashtray under her bed to hide the butts from her mother. The best moment was when I got to spray the slim can of gold lacquer all over her beehive while she peeped through her half-closed eyes, lashes stiff with mascara. The sweet chemical vapour from the lacquer was like a painkiller. I watched Melissa make herself up in awed, humble silence. The idea that plastic people were the most interesting people was born first of all in Barbie’s painted-on blue eyes, then in Maria’s painted on brown eyes every time I asked about Thandiwe, and finally in Melissa’s teenage laboratory. Melissa was quite literally making herself up. The fact that lipstick and mascara and eye shadow were called ‘Make Up’ thrilled me. Everywhere in the world there were made up people and most of them were women.
‘Hey dumb girl, let me do your hair for you. Sit on my lap and I’ll make you a lekker style.’
With Melissa’s help my sad, sensible pony tail soon changed into an exotic coil of golden plaits pinned on top of my head. Melissa said I looked like a movie star and all I needed were some diamonds and rubies to put in my ears and drape round my neck and weave round my wrists. Emeralds would suit me best because of my green eyes. When I had daughters of my own, I would give them my emeralds because they would have ‘served their purpose’. What was their purpose?
She said I was a ‘beauty’ and one day, if I remembered to scrub my fingernails clean, a dashing man would take my hand and he would kiss it with his lips for a long time. Then he would kneel at my feet while I looked down at his hair parting and he would beg me to be his wife. I hoped that I would be like Melissa when I grew up. I too would smoke cigarettes and be able to make squiggles on paper in Pitman’s code and drive barefoot in fast cars with my stilettos chucked on the back seat for later.
‘Never wear shoes when you drive my little chum, that’s the best way.’
But first of all I had to tiptoe past her one-eyed father and make myself invisible to him. Edward Charles William had one glass eye and one real eye. Melissa told me that when he was a boy someone poked out his left eye in a rugby game and now his eyes did not match. The glass eye had purple flames in it. It was practically a fire burning in his socket. I made up a rule: only look at his glass eye. Never ever catch sight of his real eye. A glass eye was an unseeing eye and I did not want him to see that I was frightened of him. Edward Charles William was like a king. When he sat at the head of the table with his wife and only daughter, I could see us all reflected in his glass eye, I could even see the grey dog called Rory wagging his tail and panting in Edward Charles William’s eye.