Out of the nose, into the mouth. Something like the predictable life-cycle of the bilharzia parasite.
When Halley gets worms, or worms get her, she has what’s called suffering the consequences, by which time it’s too late to promise, to swear, that on my oath I won’t do it again.
They are fine threadworms that veer and swerve like millesimal cobras on the wadded toilet paper, and she’s petrified, fearing that she’s charmed them out of the darkness. The worms are so insubstantial that in order to see them properly she must bring the paper right up to her eyes, which makes the worms enormous. She stares at them closely, their tortuous writhings. She feels hypnotised. And then suddenly she’s terrified that she’s doing exactly what the wily wrigglers want, which is to get close enough to her face to worm their way inside her nostrils!
When she gets worms, she also gets ashamed, so tells her mother only when she can’t bear her bottom itching any longer, since having worms makes known your secret dirtiness. Worms and dirt go hand in hand.
The other reason she holds back is because the medicine for worms is possibly worse than having worms in the first place. In a mug of Five Roses, her mother dissolves the granular, sandy contents of a tiny metal phial, stirring until the blend resembles a strong brew of ordinary black tea. And then Halley must drink it, even though she knows it’s an awful compotion.
Swallow! her mother instructs. Just drink it!
For Halley, it’s the smell. Like the unflushed public toilets where she and Jen are forbidden to sit on the wooden seat; they must first put a layer of toilet paper, the long strip eased and neatly folded into an almost oval, and even then perch, tinkling quickly. It’s hard, that, letting go while you’re also holding your breath and balancing.
So as she raises the cup, in the worm mixture she smells the lavatories across from the main post office in town. Not even the Ladies Dames, but the men’s urinals. You can smell them coming a mile off.
Halley tastes the sourness in the reservoir of her nose and sobs, her shoulders hunched at the thought of what she must do. She tries to do it. Sips a little in slow motion while Nora looks on, increasingly testy.
The messy texture of the granules, the suggestion of dank soilings . . . Halley thinks of the medication as a nauseating kind of sympathetic magic. Could it be that the worms originate in the phial, meaning that it’s the medicine she gets the worms from? Kooky logic, perhaps, but there it is.
Defiantly, she bangs the mug on the table.
Which is when Nora loses her rag and grabs her daughter’s head and finally forces her. As she tries to crush the girl’s squirming, grim-lipped refusal – Yorrkilllllingmemommmmy! – Nora is conscious of this as one of the rare moments when she could swear it’s Jennie she’s dealing with, not Halley. But right now there’s No Damn Difference and the child is provoking her to violence! Aahgod for a capsule that could just be shoved between locked teeth, stuck wherever, and it would be done!
Halley will not easily open her mouth, and even then closes her throat, so that the brew rinses grittily against her teeth, puddling in the pockets of her cheeks. She gags and retches. Her mother squeezes her face, pinching her mouth shut. And eventually Halley can do nothing except swallow, because if she has to hold the taste any longer then she’ll kotch, and have to do it all over.
Both Halley and Nora hate it when the girl gets worms. So does Jen, because although she’s never seen a worm near her body, which maybe is because she’s not looking, she’s obliged to endure the same sick treatment.
With the first bout of Halley’s affliction, Nora consulted Mr Cordial, The Chemist, who maintained you could not do one, it had to be both. So both of them it was. And that was over and done with, till the next time. Which there always was, because Halley played in the sand and didn’t wash her hands and, secretly, picked her nose.
But then, oh Holy Mary Mother of God, broeks asunder over the toilet, Halley discovered she had another kind of worm, much much more terrible than the others.
Big. An awful monster which stuck there, even though she’d bent herself double trying to see, and when she saw, straightened up smartly, gasping. It seemed impossible.
Halley pushed and strained, which only sent the worm into a clenched paroxysm, flickering against her cheeks. She was trapped. She felt it licking her. She screamed for help.
Halley could see that while her mother came at once to offer comfort, she really wanted to get the hell out of there, she was that revolted. But Nora overcame her squeamishness because she had no choice, really. The girl couldn’t deal with this by herself. She needed her mother.
Pulling, looping the long worm into a few sheets of loo paper, Nora wrapped it loosely into several thicknesses and concealed the unpleasant little parcel in her purse, taking it with her when she went to the orifice. Office.
After work, she walked home via the pharmacy, where Mr Cordial informed her that this, clearly, was no mere threadworm or pinworm. An adult roundworm, he said. In italics for emphasis, Ascaris lumbricoides.
And where there was one . . .
So both Halley and Jen should take double the quantities of the usual mix, and maybe, he advised, hands raised to entertain the possibility, could be Mrs Murphy ought to do herself too?
Nora takes her own measure in private, which is a good thing because my godfathers, she grimaces, it’s terrible. Why make such a foul medicine, she asks herself, and for children? You’d think the plan was to punish a child for falling sick.
To placate Halley, Nora said Well, at least it was only two measures. If it was one dose for the little worms, it could reasonably be ten for a worm big as hers.
Which freaked Halley out. Was her mother mad? What did her mother think? That she wanted to be a monster, some crazy female who squeezed worms like mutant babies from her bum?
But that’s what she did, after the treatment. All arsy-versy. A substantial bolus. They had to come out.
All the Kenneth Gardens children gravitate towards the park, which is what’s left of the gardens from once upon a time. Patches of worn grass tangled with clover and dubbeltjies, though even this green gives up near the seesaw and the swings, where it’s only red sand.
It’s shabby, all right, the park in Kenneth Gardens, but there’s no concrete, and nothing to mess up, so perfect for all the kids who run rough, rude and rowdy, who climb and corner and camp out; hordes of dirty savages who shriek through Kissing Catches and aggressive, thumping bouts of Red Rover Red Rover we call Marnus over!
Here, the children can happily play out the hierarchies they’ve learnt from their parents, though this place, this time, race isn’t the issue. It’s Europeans only, no question, but still there’re many lines along which to marshal cultural distinction.
The English-speaking kids curse all the time about Afrikaner vrot banana koeliesnot, and they know to avoid the dirty Dutchmen, damn rockspiders even if they’ve never seen the Transvaal. The Afrikaners steer clear of the rooinekke, because the Engels give themselves airs and graces, and seem to love everything about the Queen even if they’ve never set foot in England. Yirrah, don’t they know what country they living in?
With feelings like this, it’s necessary to have different schools for English and Afrikaans, which is a big help in the ongoing battle, though the same convenience does not apply to male and female.
Boys are expected to be loud and dirty; girls to be quiet, gentle and pretty.
Pole! graunches the woman in her nylon shortie nightie across the wash-lines. Pole! (And all those years, all that shouting, the boy growing from small to finished school, what Halley couldn’t believe most was why a mother would give her son such a stupid name.) But it’s long ten o’clock on Saturday morning already, and Paul’s got tired of waiting for his mother to sleep it off, so he’s ducked into