Her arm is raised protectively over her head, the hand flattened on her hair.
‘No point in holding your head now,’ he teases. ‘I’ve got it, going to try it on myself.’
Her voice spun thin on threads of tears, abject as she begs. So that her friend consoles, ‘It doesn’t matter, you’ve got plenty of those. Show them you don’t care.’ A reproachful look but the friend continues, ‘Really, it doesn’t matter, your hair looks nice enough. I’ve told you before. Let him do what he wants with it, stuff it up his arse.’
But the girl screams, ‘Leave me alone,’ and beats away the hand reaching out to console. Another taller boy takes the scarf and twirls it in the air. ‘You want your doekie? What do you want it for hey, come on tell us, what do you want it for? What do you want to cover up?’
His tone silences the others and his face tightens as he swings the scarf slowly, deliberately. She claws at his arm with rage while her face is buried in the other crooked arm. A little gust of wind settles the matter, whips it out of his hand and leaves it spreadeagled against the eucalyptus tree where its red pattern licks the bark like flames.
I cannot hear their words. But far from being penitent, the tall boy silences the bareheaded girl with angry shaking of the head and wagging of the finger. He runs his hand through an exuberant bush of fuzzy hair and my hand involuntarily flies to my own. I check my preparations: the wet hair wrapped over large rollers to separate the strands, dried then swirled around my head, secured overnight with a nylon stocking, dressed with vaseline to keep the strands smooth and straight and then pulled back tightly to stem any remaining tendency to curl. Father likes it pulled back. He says it is a mark of honesty to have the forehead and ears exposed. He must be thinking of Mother, whose hair was straight and trouble-free. I would not allow some unkempt youth to comment on my hair.
The tall boy with wild hair turns to look at us. I think that they are talking about me. I feel my body swelling out of the dress rent into vertical strips that fall to my feet. The wind will surely lift off my hair like a wig and flatten it, a sheet of glossy dead bird, on the eucalyptus tree.
The bareheaded girl seems to have recovered; she holds her head reasonably high.
I break the silence. ‘Why should that boy look at us so insolently?’ Pa looks surprised and hurt. ‘Don’t be silly. You couldn’t possibly tell from this distance.’ But his mouth puckers and he starts an irritating tuneless whistle.
On the white platform the policeman is still pacing. He is there because of the Blacks who congregate at the station twice a week to see the Springbok train on its way to Cape Town. I wonder whether he knows our news. Perhaps their servants, bending over washtubs, ease their shoulders to give the gossip from Wesblok to madams limp with heat and boredom. But I dismiss the idea and turn to the boys who certainly know that I am going to St Mary’s today. All week the grown-ups have leaned over the fence and sighed, Ja, ja, in admiration, and winked at Pa: a clever chap, old Shenton, keeps up with the Boers all right. And to me, ‘You show them, Frieda, what we can do.’ I nodded shyly. Now I look at my hands, at the irrepressible cuticles, the stubby splayed fingernails that will never taper. This is all I have to show, betraying generations of servants.
I am tired and I move back a few steps to sit on the suitcases. But Father leaps to their defence. ‘Not on the cases, Frieda. They’ll never take your weight.’ I hate the shiny suitcases. As if we had not gone to enough expense, he insisted on new imitation leather bags and claimed that people judge by appearances. I miss my old scuffed bag and slowly, as if the notion has to travel through folds of fat, I realise that I miss Sarie and the lump in my throat hardens.
Sarie and I have travelled all these journeys together. Grief gave way to excitement as soon as we boarded the train. Huddled together on the cracked green seat, we argued about who would sleep on the top bunk. And in winter when the nights grew cold we folded into a single S on the lower bunk. As we tossed through the night in our magic coupé, our fathers faded and we were free. Now Sarie stands in the starched white uniform of a student nurse, the Junior Certificate framed in her father’s room. She will not come to wave me goodbye.
Sarie and I swore our friendship on the very first day at school. We twiddled our stiff plaits in boredom; the First Sunnyside Reader had been read to us at home. And Jos. Within a week Jos had mastered the reader and joined us. The three of us hand in hand, a formidable string of laughing girls tugging this way and that, sneering at the Sunnyside adventures of Rover, Jane and John. I had no idea that I was fat. Jos looped my braids over her beautiful hands and said that I was pretty, that my braids were a string of sausages.
Jos was bold and clever. Like a whirlwind she spirited away the tedium of exhausted games and invented new rules. We waited for her to take command. Then she slipped her hand under a doekie of dyed flourbags and scratched her head. Her ear peeped out, a faded yellow-brown yearning for the sun. Under a star-crammed sky Jos had boldly stood for hours, peering through a crack in the shutter to watch their fifth baby being born. Only once had she looked away in agony and then the Three Kings in the eastern sky swiftly swopped places in the manner of musical chairs. She told us all, and with an oath invented by Jos we swore that we would never have babies. Jos knew everything that grown-ups thought should be kept from us. Father said, ‘A cheeky child, too big for her boots, she’ll land in a madam’s kitchen all right.’ But there was no need to separate us. Jos left school when she turned nine and her family moved to the village where her father had found a job at the garage. He had injured his back at the mine. Jos said they were going to have a car; that she would win one of those competitions, easy they were, you only had to make up a slogan.
Then there was our move. Pa wrote letters for the whole community, bit his nails when he thought I was not looking and wandered the veld for hours. When the official letter came the cooped-up words tumbled out helter-skelter in his longest monologue.
‘In rows in the village, that’s where we’ll have to go, all boxed in with no room to stretch the legs. All my life I’ve lived in the open with only God to keep an eye on me, what do I want with the eyes of neighbours nudging and jostling in cramped streets? How will the wind get into those back yards to sweep away the smell of too many people? Where will I grow things? A watermelon, a pumpkin need room to spread, and a turkey wants a swept yard, the markings of a grass broom on which to boast the pattern of his wingmarks. What shall we do, Frieda? What will become of us?’ And then, calmly, ‘Well, there’s nothing to be done. We’ll go to Wesblok, we’ll put up our curtains and play with the electric lights and find a corner for the cat, but it won’t be our home. I’m not clever old Shenton for nothing, not a wasted drop of Scots blood in me. Within five years we’ll have enough to buy a little place. Just a little raw brick house and somewhere to tether a goat and keep a few chickens. Who needs a water lavatory in the veld?’
The voice brightened into fantasy. ‘If it were near a river we could have a pond for ducks or geese. In the Swarteberg my pa always had geese. Couldn’t get to sleep for months here in Namaqualand without the squawking of geese. And ostriches. There’s nothing like ostrich biltong studded with coriander seeds.’ Then he slowed down. ‘Ag man, we won’t be allowed land by the river but nevermind hey. We’ll show them, Frieda, we will. You’ll go to high school next year and board with Aunt Nettie. We’ve saved enough for that. Brains are for making money and when you come home with your Senior Certificate, you won’t come back to a pack of Hottentots crouching in straight lines on the edge of the village. Oh no, my girl, you won’t.’ And he whipped out a stick of beef biltong and with the knife shaved off wafer-thin slices that curled with pleasure in our palms.
We packed our things humming. I did not really understand what he was fussing about. The Coloured location did not seem so terrible. Electric lights meant no more oil lamps to clean and there was water from a tap at the end of each street. And there would be boys. But the children ran after me calling, ‘Fatty fatty vetkoek.’ Young children too. Sarie took me firmly by the arm and said that it wasn’t true, that they were jealous of my long hair. I believed her and swung my stiff pigtails haughtily. Until I grew breasts and found that the children