Boys and girls swing on the gibbeted T-bars and run through the washing ka-flap ka-flap, their arms outstretched. They carry on even after they’ve been shouted at. Halley too, if there’s no chance of being caught. Because it’s fun. The quick brush and fast pull past of fabric which lets you pretend different things, like you’re hitting people, or trying on their clothes, or you’re putting your spirit into what they’re going to wear. That’s how much power you have. I am in . . . vin . . . ci . . . ble!
But also you can get frightened among those rows. The cloth smothering your face. And the washing can turn on you, especially if it’s a windy day.
Once, they’d gone visiting with friends to a house past Durban North, and bold Halley took all the children exploring in the nearby cane fields. Somehow, she got them lost. Halley was so so lost, but couldn’t let on. What happened? asked the worried adults later, demanding an explanation.
She couldn’t say. All those horrible hours pretending to the kids that you knew where you were; so conscious of the day getting shorter, the night drawing in like hidden cane rats, waiting to attack.
So sometimes, when she looks at everyone’s clothes on the lines – there’s Aunty Beulah, there’s Sheila and Belinda, there’s Uncle Zach, there’s . . . there’s me! – Halley understands the idea of emptiness, of herself as inside out.
Halley has the Weet-Bix flower card collection. A series of 100 cards issued by arrangement with the United Tobacco Companies. There are also mammals, and fish. She has these too.
Nora often gives the girls Weet-Bix cereal for breakfast, since Weet-Bix is very filling. It is an economical food, especially high in fibre, and it keeps a body regular. You can’t be too careful on both these counts.
Halley contemplates the Weet-Bix in her bowl. A single biscuit, doused with warm milk, swells to double its size. The process is good as a biology experiment, digestion just about occurring in front of your eyes. Which makes up for having to eat cardboard.
But Halley wants the flower cards, so she eats Weet-Bix. Lots of. Then she cuts off the end flaps and pastes the pictures into a special album to make her own book. Our South African Flora, it’s called, and it is full of interesting information, selected and arranged for you by actual scientists. You only have to fill in the blanks.
The cards and the album are part of an educational brain system which helps to make your head full of ideas. This suits Halley fine, as she is already consumed by seriously big thoughts. She’s read one book, see, about people trying to live through the Second World War? And there were such terrible things happening that it didn’t seem shocking even when soldiers tore pages from The Bible! for rolling their cigarettes. Man cannot live by bread alone, she knows that. Also, she found that article near next-door’s dustbin. From an old Scope magazine. About a strange girl who refused to eat anything but paper, so that she felt full without getting fat.
The Weet-Bix flower cards are fun. They give you something useful to do with your mind, so that you don’t seem like a cow while you eat. Years later, however, she can’t remember one thing she ever learnt from them. Nothing about flowers. Nothing about Ixia.
She was such a bookworm, Halley Murphy, curled up among her papers and pages, but she didn’t know that she was housed undercover, beneath the sign of an indigenous flower. All those years she’d lived under the cover of Ixia, a secret, flower-fairy greenery which covered itself, along with everything else.
Natural history
At the flats, Nature was almost the same as the ordinary outside, the fresh air where children were expected to play. So nature was what you were willing to make it.
Beneath the elm tree, out back in the dry soil, there were fierce little antlions that carved inverted cones in the sand; tiny, unstable pit wells to trap passing ants. If she got tired of waiting for nature to take its course, Halley dropped in an ant, then watched it struggle up the slope, its frenzy helping to shift the tide of grains towards the jaws of certain death. And all it took was a magnifying glass to work some kids up into a nervous anxiety: See the big pincers? Imagine that coming at you in the dark. You wouldn’t stand a chance.
And if anyone didn’t believe her, the intimations about what was possible, Halley magnified her tales with intimidating pictures from her nature-study picture books. She liked to point out the detailed scientific drawing of the enormous flea, monstrously enlarged. Close-up engravings of a tick and other creepy parasites. She’d even done some sketches of her own, inventing a whole hooked catalogue of cunning creatures with piercing, needle-sharp noses; with whiplash, tickle-tie electric antennae, and legs of brutal bolts and ginormous jaws waiting to bandersnatch. A ferocious collection.
Bugs like this, she’d say to her scabby little audience, They live on your body, yours especially, because you don’t bath so often. Sis. This one, see, soon as you fall asleep, it’s going to suck out your brain. If it can find any!
Halley was sometimes sorry when she managed to scare the other kids off, because it was much more satisfying to have them watching. Especially if she had some meths. She’d drip a little of the clear, purple liquid and carefully angle her lens, catching the sun tight and tilting tighter towards the burning point, waiting until exactly the white-hot moment when the antlion and the ant connected . . .
And then she’d zap them both.
Beyond the drip-line of the thorny elm, as the slope rolled sideways, the soil became more crumbly, and a downpour could wet the earth sodden. Puddles burped up and deepened to shallow ponds, belching out earthworms.
Not ordinary wrigglers, but nearly as long as Halley is tall. Examining a giant earthworm as it surfaces, she sees a fat blind tip, single pollex thumbing through drenched soil. It is a tunnel come alive, nudging the red-brown earth aside like a muscular liquid.
When you lie still, at night, waiting and waiting for sleep to come, you can hear the workings. The grunts and explosive squirting. Then it’s easy to believe that something’s in you, working overtime.
What’s got into you? her mother asks then, fed up with the child’s endless worries.
Outside, the tongueless, toothless worms swallow soil and vegetable matter, passing it backwards, over and out. But the castings seem much too neat to be droppings, and the little mounds she disturbs with her fingers look deliberately crafted.
Halley has paid attention in class; she understands that the earthworms help to pocket the soil with precious air, and she knows that the worms are nocturnal. But she never thinks that then she ought not to be seeing them. She completely misunderstands. Imagines that the giant worms, like Halley Murphy, have come out for the pleasure of the wet, to feel the moisture upon their thirsty skin, to shrug off the confines of familiar family and fusty indoors.
The worms cannot tell her how the rain floods their tunnels and cuts off their underground air supply; that unless they leave their homes, they will drown. That there is limited happiness for them in this saturation she loves, forced out into the light from the dark depths of which children, alone, are so fearful.
Though down there, too, the worms would report if they could, in the netherworld that brooks no refusal, are hidden engines working into the lightless earth, pipelines of gas, oil, sewage; barrelling cables with convoluted connection to the life that she’s learning to live on the surface.
It’s common knowledge that if you pick your nose, you get worms. A filthy habit. On that score, nobody seems to disagree. If grown-ups catch you picking, they get sarky. Had any luck there with the gold-digging, hm? Or, Care to share? Basically they make you appreciate how gross you’ve been, forcing other people to watch your revolting excavations.