Dad grabbed the box of plums with a Fuck! and hurled them to the dusty ground with such force that the ripe ones splattered, so it really did look as though I’d vomited up a volcano. Orange, purple, red. ‘Gross, that touched my foot! I’ve got Stinky’s vomit on my foot! Get it off, get it off!’—this from Steven, saying he’d never share the car with me again.
‘Fantastic—so you’re walking home, then, are you? Wonderful! I won’t have to put up with your shit, then, will I?’ from Dad. ‘Bastard!’ from Mom. ‘Come over here, sweeties; let those two sort it out. We’re just in the way, as usual.’
I stayed where I was, grateful that the nausea had gone, thinking: It’s not my fault, it’s not my fault, it’s not my fault.
‘Get out of the goddamn car and help clean up this mess, Kate.’
‘Yes, Daddy; I’m sorry, Daddy.’ We tried to clean it, but, as anyone who’s ever vomited in a car will know, no matter how much of the evidence you get rid of, the smell is permanent.
Dad said we’d ‘just have to suffer’. Simon and Steven blocked their noses and scrambled over to the back seats with cries of, ‘Gross! Disgusting! Smelly-Nelly!’
Dad ignored them, plainly furious with all of us—‘drink-breaks-at-petrol-stops-only’ and ‘no-food-in-the-car’ kind of furious. I supposed he wanted to punish us, but it was all my fault, of course.
That was when Mom made me sit on her big red vanity bag between the two front seats, so the boys wouldn’t have to deal with the ‘stench’ of me. Every so often she’d bend her head to my ear and whisper-hiss, ‘Psycho,’ or, ‘You know where you’ll end up? Tara!’ She pinched and hissed no matter how still I sat in order not to attract her attention. I knew better than to cry, or flinch, or react to her behavior, because there’d be even greater hell to pay later, when Dad wasn’t around. I knew from experience that it was always best to let her do whatever she wanted. What I never learned was to stop hoping that Dad would notice, react, stop her, but he just stared at the road ahead as though he could drag the Kombi along faster with his eyes and make us all disappear behind him.
When we pulled into the drive of our new home on Doring Street, I wanted to cling to Dad with all my strength; I wanted him to protect me from the yuck I could predict. But the grown-ups exited the car from their opposite doors, into their opposite worlds, leaving us kids stuck in the middle for a moment, as if we, too, had a choice. The reality was that there was no option but to leave the bubble of blue and white and stumble into Mom’s world.
Mom commanded everything to do with our lives. Dad’s world was work, safari suits, long socks, hair combed back and a tidy car. Any time he spent at home was taken up arguing with Mom about money, among many other things, then finding places and ways to disappear. I adored him from a distance, feeling a passionate kinship with him in terms of how little Mom could ‘tolerate the sight of’ us. I admired him for slamming doors on her, storming out of the house and not coming back all day. He stood up to her in ways I never could. I felt deeply ashamed of how often I betrayed him by being Mom’s confidante, by agreeing with all the nasty things she said about him and never ever standing up for him.
That night the bedraggled evidence of our beach holiday was left in the Kombi for our maid, Evelyn, to sort out. She clucked and clicked in Xhosa, in no way disguising her disgust despite using a foreign language. She was to be leaving us soon, and her sister Grace was to take her place as our servant.
Grace was already on hand to ‘learn the ropes’. She looked as though she’d just been roused from a deep sleep, a kapalana roughly knotted about her waist, hair standing up everywhere, arms folded across her chest in a gesture of defiant rebellion. ‘Thank God we made it, Evelyn! I missed you! Been no kind of holiday for me at all, taking care of this lot on my own.’
‘Eish! Madam.’ An inclination of the head from Evelyn: I sympathize with you—but not really!
‘Make sure the car is emptied properly.' Mom’s long fingers enveloped the back of my neck. ‘She vomited everywhere again, so make sure to wash it out and get rid of that revolting stench. And do it tonight, hey! By tomorrow it’ll be ten times worse, in this heat.’ Mom released her grip on me, but my freedom was short-lived, as Evelyn restrained me by the arm.
‘You! Go fetch a bucket and hot water!’ She stuck her head in the Kombi. ‘Siess!’—one word that conveyed a multitude of accusations.
Grace cast her eyes over me as though inspecting me through the same lens of general distaste. She sniffed, turning away as though I wasn’t worth noticing.
I was grateful for a definite course of action, for something to do that would keep me out of Mom’s firing line. She hated it when I didn’t anticipate what she expected, which was most of the time; it felt much better to have a specific job. I always helped Evelyn anyway, because it got me into Mom’s ‘good books’ by proving to her that I knew my ‘place’. Evelyn knew my place too, and in the age-old order of picking on those lower in the pecking order than yourself, she enjoyed bossing me around, having someone to take her frustrations out on. The boys went off to their rooms, to do whatever they liked.
The chores done, it was bath-time, wash-hair time, cut-and-clean-your-nails time. It was important to be presentable for school, especially for a new school, the Convent School that Mom claimed to be the only one in Welkom that would take me because I was so ‘bad’. Mom anticipated that I’d get ‘proper discipline’ there, which worried me. I’d been on the end of a lot of discipline at my old school in the Transvaal, and none of it had been pleasant. Could things be even worse at the Convent School? Standing on my tippy-toes on the edge of the toilet bowl, I could see the sky full of stars through a blurry, slit-eyed bathroom window that was otherwise too high for anything other than ventilation. I sent silent wishes up to the stars, wishing for a kind teacher, friendly classmates, and, most of all, a friend.
I’d started wishing on the stars when I was eight, wanting my Dad to come home from wherever he’d gone for business trips that seemed to last weeks upon endless weeks. I’d had a spot in our old house, a large window that overlooked the veld from the landing at the top of the stairs. Sitting there, I used to watch the stars break their way through an orange-brown sunset, usually around dinner time. The boys would be downstairs, eager for food, and Mom would be chasing Evelyn along with cries of, ‘The boys are starving, Evelyn! Didn’t I tell you to put dinner on at four? You people, you can’t follow the simplest instructions!’
I’d turned to wishing on the stars for the things I hoped magic could bring my way because reality was something I just couldn’t change—I was too weak, too little, just a girl.
One evening at the old house, engrossed as I was in begging the stars to send Dad home, I made a double mistake: I whispered my wishes out loud. I didn’t hear Simon before he’d bounded up the stairs two at a time. ‘Who’re you talking to, Stinky? Yourself again? God, you’re weird! Mom, Kate’s talking to herself again.’
‘I’m just making a wish, that’s all.’
‘Who’re you wishing to, Stinky? The goddamn veld? You’re mad! Mom, she’s making wishes to the veld, now!’
‘No, I’m not. I’m wishing to the stars. It’s just a wish; I’m not mad.’
‘What stars, idiot? That over there? That’s a streetlamp. Oh, my God, you’re wishing on a street lamp!’
By then Mom had arrived. ‘Didn’t I tell you to wash your hands for dinner? Didn’t I? Then what the hell are you doing, talking to street lamps like a lunatic? What were you wishing for, a brain?’ They were standing so close, pushing me by their presence into the glass of the window, looming over me with sneering looks; if they’d been dogs they would have bitten me.
‘I was just wishing for Daddy,’ I whisper-blurted, with no idea how to defend myself.
‘Wishing