One afternoon standing at the lagoon mouth in Milnerton, I realised that even if I were to plot a life-size map, on a scale of one to one, I would still have to make a choice. If I chose the point at which the water touched the land to be the coastline, it was only accurate for a moment, for embankments slanted into the water, and depending on the height of the tide the coastline shifted – in some places on earth it could shift by miles within a day. One would have thought no drawing could be more accurate than a map, but I had discovered that even mapmakers made choices.
The world changes too; coastlines crumble into the sea or rise with earthquakes and volcanic flows; continents drift and the march of human history shifts borders. Our family atlas was out of date and still tinted half the world with British pink. Some countries, like Nyasaland and Bechuanaland next door, had already disappeared, so my father informed me, tapping the map where I had drawn a country that no longer existed. Back then of course I had no idea what that had meant for the people who lived there. I was just frustrated. Why was our atlas wrong, so out of date?
I think it is unusual for a young child to concentrate so single-mindedly on such a task for so many hours on end. It would stand me in good stead later in life when I went to university, the first generation of my family to do so. But maybe I was simply copying my mother, for she would sit tirelessly at her desk or stand working at her easel for most of the day. Whether she was finding herself or losing herself in her art, I cannot say. No one could have known at the time that those would be her most productive years as an artist, and I could not have known then that it would be many years before my life would be as safe and as well arranged again.
It sounds fancy having a studio, but it was merely the third bedroom of a hundred-square-metre flat, and it was the reason I had to share a room with my brother. Mom’s work desk was rudimentary. To achieve the slanted drawing surface that she needed, a large piece of hardboard had been propped up at its top end with bricks. An old boyfriend of my exotic UN aunt, who was a draftsman, had given my mom an adjustable architect’s table lamp so she could have strong light to paint. To me the lamp was a terrifying contraption; its unpredictable springs would suddenly send it catapulting out of control, smashing the bulb. It was like many things in our home: unpredictable because they were broken.
When I was exhausted of drawing maps, I would go to the studio to show my mother. But she was often far away, blankly staring into space, I thought fixated on her own creations. I knew watercolours could not be easily interrupted; she had to paint before the paper dried. I knew art required a lot of concentration and the slightest interruption of the process could set the creator back hours. She said she couldn’t work like Picasso. He did most of his painting in the solitude of night, but during the day he had dogs and children chasing each other all around his easel. No, I had to wait for the right moment, which came when she put down her brush and looked about her, slightly surprised.
Once, when I was a toddler, she was jolted out of painting by a gulping sound behind her. In the precarious grip of my two little hands was the jar she used for rinsing her watercolour brushes, and I was quaffing the murky water down.
‘Some paints are highly toxic. I didn’t know what the effect would be,’ she told me when I was five. ‘I watched you closely for hours after that. The water was blue. Maybe you thought it was a cooldrink.’
Or maybe she just hadn’t noticed I was dying of thirst. We laughed about it. I wondered if the colour of my insides had changed. I imagined they now resembled a stormy sea. It is one of my earliest memories.
I have other memories of being an infant and I doubt these were implanted, as my mother had no recollection of them and she couldn’t have told me about them, nor could she even confirm these memories later, because, as you will see, she was forced to forget so much.
I remember I would go to the fridge, take out the milk and stand there. I would wait, holding that cold neck of the bottle, with a patience far beyond my years. My mind was busy imagining all sorts of things and time could pass happily. Eventually, my parents would realise I had disappeared. ‘Where’s Brent?’ I’d hear one of them ask. They soon learned to rush to the kitchen. I would be waiting beside the open fridge door. Some of my milk teeth were missing, making the impish grin on my face look cuter but naughtier. They’d say, ‘Put it down’ or ‘Put it back’ or ‘Brent, give it to Mommy’. But the minute one of them took one step closer, I handed the bottle over to gravity. My parents never learned. It was a game I played for some time.
Children crave attention, but dropping milk bottles?
My mother called it her absentmindedness. She said it ran deep on the Morris side of her family. If she didn’t put things in a dedicated pocket or a specific place, she’d end up spending half her life looking for such nuisances as keys. She had a series of handbags for different purposes: for going to the local shop, for going with my second aunt to the city, and for going to the hospital. Then there were other handbags that never seemed to go anywhere.
Yet things still went astray. Her reading spectacles had a truant life of their own. Once they went missing for two days and she had no choice but to go shopping in town with my aunt without them. She thought maybe it was time to get her eyes tested anyway and to buy a new pair, if she could afford it. But when she went to pay her account at Garlicks department store, where she bought little luxuries she had saved up for, she opened her handbag only to find deep in its intestines a block of smelly, melting cheddar cheese. Now she knew where her glasses were. But the mystery wasn’t entirely solved, for her spectacles were at the far back of the fridge, almost iced up, where the cheese was never kept. Sherlock Holmes would not have been satisfied. Later, other things would be found in the fridge that didn’t belong there, unless you believed otherwise.
Family lore was full of such stories, and when they were related by my father to third parties, the expression on my mother’s face was not one of simple embarrassment.
My father enjoyed recounting another example of my mother’s absentmindedness, the occasion when she salted some frozen peas and couldn’t understand why they kept foaming up in the pot as they boiled. She dished them up none the less. ‘Very strange peas,’ she told everyone as we sat down to mush them. The mistake was discovered at the first bite. She had used a cleaning powder called Vim, which came in a tall white plastic container vaguely resembling that of Cerebos salt.
She’d blush slightly when my father would finish telling such stories, and then she would smile as if to laugh it off – the cheese, the Vim – saying, ‘Oh, we all do silly things.’ But I could see sharing such episodes about her was far from innocent; my father was taunting her, and my mother feared for her mind.
Occasionally, my second aunt or her husband would telephone, saying my mom had called while they were out and left a message with their housekeeper to phone back. But Mom couldn’t remember calling them at all. Then she’d wonder who had phoned them and pretended to be her; honestly, the idiotic jokes people got up to!
One way of conquering her absentmindedness was to make signs. There were handwritten signs all over the flat, some old and stained, to remember this and remember that: ‘CLOSE FRIDGE DOOR’; ‘TAKE KEYS’; ‘FETCH WASHING’; ‘PUT OUT MILK BOTTLES’; ‘TAKE TABLETS!!’
When she was in artistic mode little else mattered and the collateral wreckage of being a living organism – breathing, eating and shitting – paled into insignificance. She hated housework, the unpaid labour women are expected to do without even a thank you, an unjust, patriarchal plot to keep her from her art. She drew herself as the Hindu goddess Chandi with eighteen arms, in each hand a form of drudgery: a pot, a broom, a mop, a dustbin lid, a scrubbing brush, a vacuum cleaner pipe, a ball of knitting wool.
Lettie, our domestic worker, was her saviour, though only one day a week; one woman sacrificing her own children and home for another woman trying not to sacrifice her talent