She knows she’s in the way, reading, blocking the passage like an immobile steel truss. Her mother and Jen must continually step over her (forty-five degree angles, lanky leg joists, chunky knuckle joints . . . ) as they pass from one room to another.
She does mean to move, she will – I will! – but somehow always lands up settling where she is, on the floor, because the diagrams haul her in. Her attention is riveted before she’s properly had a chance to think through moving, and soon she’s much too busy to go anywhere.
Every time she slides the tome from among its neighbours, imagining a slight grating as cylindrical friction wheels engage, she means to take the book to her room or maybe out onto the balcony, to get more comfortable . . .
But still she sits in the passage next to the bookshelf, her back contentedly against the wall, the morning sun streaming through the small bathroom window in such a way that it draws a rhombus of light cut by the lines of the wooden planks. She extends her legs up against the adjacent doorframe of the toilet, and reads. Looks, mainly. At. What is left to her. Spends hours in this complex, characterful, masculine company, never bored, absorbed in the personalities of nuts and bolts.
In the big photograph of her father, he’s not really doing his job. He’s not being an artisan but a model, sort of, though that sounds like a girl thing to do. He is demonstrating the accomplished skills of his ship repair firm, making the pretend seem real. He must look away from the photographer and the camera equipment as if he’s not aware of anything except the need to focus intently on his task, very serious-minded.
There may be people who remember this photograph from a brochure for . . . was it James Brown & Hamer? Dorman Long? Dorbyl? Elgin? Mark Murphy has at some point been employed by each of these engineering firms, gone from one to another, and been fouled for some misdemeanour. And sometimes, as luck would have it, has been taken back again during a shortage. Because when he works, Mark works; that nobody can deny.
But the photograph shows none of this. Instead, it extols the collaborative virtues of industrious man and humanised hardware, the picture an implicit slogan: Your valuable marine machines. Safe in our expert hands.
The idea is emphasised by her father’s youth and handsome, swarthy muscularity, though he is more clean-cut than she has ever seen him. Clean as a whistle while you work, which is much too clean to be true. Even the engine oil staining his boiler suit resembles sculptural shadow rather than regular monkey grease.
The clean dirt is clearly an effect of some kind, Halley understands, enhanced by the invisible equipment used to light the scene. This is out of the picture she holds, though if she imagines the fullest possible image, she knows there will be a camera and another person in the missing space.
It is a lovely picture, at once solid and lit with the aerial substantiality of sunlight breaking through cloud. In his mechanic’s benediction, the rays gleam off her father’s cropped black curls, brilliantined with Brylcreem.
The photo is perfectly radiant, which must be why her mother keeps it closed up in the big book, for fear of being blinded. She’s surprised her mother hasn’t thought to offer it to the OMO people, for an advert, as they’re right here in Durban. They’re called Lever Brothers. The same people who make Sunlight, down in Maydon Wharf.
Halley imagines the ad. She would . . . okay, so there would be the beautiful photo with a box of OMO washing powder angled across the corner, this being the only blast of full, powerful colour. Though maybe they should also have the word OMO along the bottom, and dots . . . leading up to Out Machine Oil. Pretty clever, huh?
OMO! Women would know that the single word meant the spots and stains would be magically gone, and no one would have to wrestle for hours with the dirt.
Every weekend at Ixia Court, first thing on Saturday morning when Nora returns from market, the girls must tramp the washing in the bath with grated Sunlight while Nora bends and rubs with the green bar of soap uppppp and downnnn the ridged washboard for the tough stains. Then they do one rinse in clean cold water and after that it’s let’s go do the twist with the sheets, Halley holding one end of the wet, twisted rope and Jen the other until most of the water’s been squeezed out.
If there’s really a lot of heavy washing, Nora pays Mrs Volans next door one rand and they borrow her freestanding mangle, which gets the wringing job done more quickly but you have to be careful about crunching the buttons, and anyway Halley gets queasy when the washing comes out stiff and flattened, the people completely wrung out of the clothes.
At Kenneth Gardens, some of the women pretend Nora doesn’t exist. Others make their bodies very flash when she’s nearby, hoping to provoke. Some look at Nora skeef, only their faces goading.
Bladdy Nora Murphy, who walks around with a ruler up her backside and her nose in the air. Mrs High and Mighty. Lady Muck. The hoity-toity walking dictionary! Who the hell is she to talk? A backvelder from Bloemfontein who dirties her gundies just like everyone else. There’s her washing there by everyone else.
A number of the men have made overtures to this remote, attractive divorcée, but she’s spurned them, every one, so she’s obviously a frigid bitch.
Though that hasn’t stopped them from trying. They agree that Nora Murphy must be getting it somewhere, hey, a woman who looks like that. Lucky bastard playing hide the sausage. Two small kids must be a bit of a handful though, don’t you think? When would she get the time? But she must, surely; no way such a hottie could do without.
Nora’s good friends with Aunty Beulah upstairs, and the woman next door. They admire her, what with Mark, who’s done his damndest to drag her down. Maybe she’s hardly got two brass farthings to rub together, like everyone, but Nora’s got good manners, self-reliance, determination. And she’s so good with children, her own and all the others who hang around at 4 Ixia on weekends because there’s sure to be plenty on the go. To top it all, she’s chic. And my, doesn’t she dress her little ones beautifully?
So in this place where people live hard to make up for hardly living, Nora does everything she can to look after her children like a good mother. She loves them. People say she adores them.
But look, if she wants them to be good, she also wishes for them to be happy. Which means between this and that and here and there, all the do’s and don’ts, they make some friends. Which is what they need, being children. And it comes in handy for their working mother too, because she can’t always be watching over them.
Going places. All of them together, their mother and lots of kids. Sheila, Deon, Marnus, Wendy . . . all the way down Francois and far along through to Bayhead, where they spent the day at the mangroves. At low water, the tidal flats emerged in wind-pecked pockets and patches, sand suddenly more extensive than water. A mass of forested shoots fingering up from a glutinous, tarry silt.
The children’s bare, panicked legs were sucked in and stockinged black. Crab colonies, each crab with a carapace daubed a different shade of blue – turquoise, indigo, jacaranda purple – and many wielding one enormous red pincer, either horrible handicap or helpful come-hither. As the children approached, the crabs were pulled in unison into the thousands of puckered holes. And then, after some immobilised minutes in the dappled mangrove shade, they peeked up one two tens hundreds, and the skittish messaging began again.
So many birds. Spoonbills delicately dibbling and dabbling. A peck of mohawked pelicans chuntering down towards the water.
Halley watched her mother’s patient happiness, and thought of her as a grey heron, poised, but with a yarn of hidden gut tangling its toes. She seemed a woman held by a wary caution come too late, yet still spiked with the longing to gulp things whole.
Once, they even spotted an actual flamingo. Just the one, so extraordinarily solitary, although Nora spent long minutes staring into the sky and scanning the scrubby shore.
Ask your father about them, she said sadly to Halley, All the flamingos in the bay when he was small. This is nothing compared to what they were. You didn’t need to know a hawk from a handsaw to realise that.
Which