In the museum are minerals that glow in the dark under ultraviolet light, feldspar and chrysoprase, some with even longer names. There is fool’s gold too. I know it is called iron pyrite, which fools mistake for real gold. Also cubic zirconia, black and glossy, razor-edged, and a geode cut down the middle, like a melon bearing jagged seeds of amethyst.
He glues the stones to a grinding stick. It allows him to press them against a carborundum wheel and shape them. He works on them for hours. His shoulders hunch up, his fingers cramp. When my mother calls him to the table for lunch or supper, he will not come. He is glued to the stones himself. My mother has to shout at him every time, and threatens to confiscate them.
He allows me to play with his box of raw pebbles. I don’t find them interesting on their own. They are only interesting if Jude is there to work them. He never allows Simon to touch them. Simon doesn’t go near them, and if he did, Jude would crush him. He often crushes Simon, who always ends up feeling sorry for himself. He looks like a clown then, with painted cheeks and sad eyes. Jude never crushes me. He likes to bounce up and down on my bed on his knees, growling out giant sounds, making me bounce up and down on the mattress. I laugh so hard I cannot breathe. When he tickles me it gets worse.
Jude grinds his stones in the playroom. It is a big room we never use for anything else except to play. It has sliding steel windows that are hard to open. Simon and David Goldberg can open them. They climb in and out of those windows all day long, I don’t know why they won’t use the door. David has flaming red hair and wildly freckled skin. It makes him look like an untidy leopard.
There are many strange things in the playroom. There are stilts that David and Simon use, walking about on the lawn. But they dare not go on the stoep with their stilts, because the stilts will slide out, they will fall and hurt themselves. There are also two pogo sticks, one red and one blue. David and Simon bounce around on the pogo sticks on the stoep, but not the lawn. If they tried to bounce on the lawn, they would sink in and get stuck. I don’t like pogo sticks or stilts. They are ridiculous and dangerous.
We have two mulberry trees in the back garden, one on each corner. On the corner nearest the sea there is a tall tree with small mulberries and leaves. On the corner furthest from the sea is a short, squat kind with huge leaves and fruit. It is easy to climb. It is really the Jankelowitzes’ tree, but it spreads over the low wall and much of it is on our side, above the compost heap. Every summer it is filled with boys like koala bears grazing on the mulberries, staring into the Jankelowitzes’ back garden where nothing happens except tall Jill Jankelowitz. She lies in the sun to tan, rubbing her nut-brown skin slowly with Brylcreem, pretending the boys aren’t there. They are too young to scare her, and their fingers turn purple and red, and their lips too. They are my brothers and their friends, and our cousins, and sometimes myself. But I don’t like to climb the tree when Jill is there. They have no swimming pool and she gets really sweaty and licks her lips too much. Do you know that the best way to get the stain of a red mulberry off your shorts is to rub it with a green mulberry?
We also have a guava tree in the back garden, in the middle, between the mulberry trees. This I remember well: its bark looks like smooth brown skin, although it is actually terribly hard, and the tree is thin, and unfriendly to climbers. Around Christmas the guavas are tight green nubs that swell gradually and soften and turn yellow. By autumn the tree is crowded with hundreds of ripe yellow guavas. Many of them are pecked by birds, leaving lesions in the pink meat inside. They fall off the tree when the wind blows, or maybe when they get too heavy, and lie in the grass until they rot, giving off an acid perfume. The long grass around the tree is dangerous to walk on, for fear of overripe fruit exploding under your feet or into the gaps between your toes.
As I write this, I recall that odour so intensely that I actually smell it.
Simon
Simon meets David Goldberg and Ricky Glaser on the field between the synagogue and the Torquay shopping centre. They walk down in the dark to the roadhouse at Pollock Beach. Business is slow tonight, though this is a warm Saturday evening. Only a few cars are in the lot, service trays attached to the windows, piled with hamburger wrappings and greasy bags of chips. “Barbara Ann” crackles out loudly, painting the world California. The air smells of brine, fried meat and onions, stale oil.
“What are you having?” David asks, speaking more to Ricky. He looks edgy tonight. When he looks like that, it makes Simon nervous.
“Probably a hamburger,” replies Ricky. “Maybe chips, but the last time I had chips they were so freaking greasy I couldn’t get it off my fingers for a week.”
“Hamburger and a lime double thick for me,” says Simon. “David, what about you?”
“Same.”
“Okay, can we order?”
“No, wait,” says Ricky. “I’m not sure. Maybe a cheeseburger. But it’s so damn –”
“Greasy,” says David. “We know. Can we order?”
“Jesus, man, what’s the bloody rush?” retorts Ricky, his voice rising in real anger. “You’re always in such a hurry, both of you, trying to pressurise me.”
David flashes an amused glance at Simon, his large eyes knowing. Simon smiles back, equally sly. Ricky observes their complicity, by no means for the first time. He stands isolated and helpless, locked outside an invisible bubble that springs instantly into being but dissolves with painful slowness.
“I’ll have a plain hamburger,” he says at last. “But no onion or pickled cucumber, and no –”
“Barbeque sauce,” says Simon. He chuckles at the rhythm of the interruption joke, at the irritation it produces.
They stand at the counter and place their order, faces made sickly by neon light. The kitchen inside is steel and steam and bubbling oil, manned by sweating staff and their jaundiced master who coughs out his hoarse commands.
The food comes swiftly. They sit at one of the precast concrete tables, wolfing down their hamburgers. Simon doesn’t just eat: he worships the acid sonata of charred meat, pickled cucumber and the crude slice of raw onion that tops it, threatening constantly to slide out under the pressure of his grip. Nothing could ever be so delicious, so tangy and squirting to the bite, except Chinese food. He savours the salt air and the pleasing repetitions of tinny pop music, scored in turn by the surf thundering so peacefully, and the piccolo of plover flying off their nests in the dark, ever distracting predators from their eggs. He sips the lime double thick through its double-thick straw, slowly, for fear of brain freeze. When his food is gone, he emerges from this long tunnel of delight and realises that Ricky and David have finished long before. They are debating what to do next.
“Let’s go to your house and listen to records,” David suggests.
“Whose house, my house?”
“No, his house,” replies David, pointing at Simon.
“I don’t want to go to my house,” replies Simon. “I’m sick of my records. Let’s go to your house.”
“No, my mother’s there. I’m sick of my mother. Let’s rather go to Ricky’s house.”
“We can’t do that,” replies Ricky. “My mother’s sick of both of you.”
“I know that,” says David, staring away moodily.
“She really is, I mean it.”
“I know you mean it.”
“Well, let’s go to my house,” says Simon. “We can listen to some records.”
“Great idea,” says David, as if it were Simon’s idea in the first place. “We’ll do it.”
They get up and saunter across the wide field that separates the beach from Marine Drive. They haven’t gone far when they encounter a group of slightly older boys with as little to do as they have. This group is migrating in the opposite direction, towards the beach. They are Simon’s cousin Paul Abelson, Steven Marcus, his