She picks up the oval brush, its dirty bristles worn almost flat, and with its grubby, striped cotton strap held tightly over the top of her hand, she buffs and polishes with long sweeps of her arm until the wood is burnished like the sun. My arms are around her neck as I ride on her patient, green-overalled back. Polishing and rubbing, erasing the evidence of our days scuffed and scraped into the surfaces of her labour, she’s happy, and reaches back to pat my bottom.
But sometimes her face is closed and quiet. She clicks her tongue, shakes her head.
‘Eh-eh. No, M’Pho.’
I lean down then and press her covered head against mine, squeezing her tightly to give her comfort and love. But when she’s in a good mood, she polishes the teak floors on her hands and knees until we can see our reflections – the rosy pink of her scarf and the plaits behind my ears – smiling back at us from the glossy squares. Sometimes she lets me pretend I’m a cowboy on her back. I call her ‘Bessie’, shout ‘Giddy-up, girl!’ and we gallop away to the wild corners of unknown places.
‘Au, five years old already, M’Pho! Soon you’ll be too heavy to ride on my back. Next year in the big school – then you won’t want to play with me any more – then it will be your sister’s turn …’
I fold my arms and glare down at her. I don’t want anyone else to ride on Marta’s back. I was there first. It’s our game, Marta’s and mine.
It’s late in the afternoon. Marta’s finished her work for the day. She’s standing in the kitchen at the counter in the sun, drinking water from her blue mug. Behind her, the striped yellow-and-white canisters of flour and sugar, coffee and tea are lined up, soldiers standing to attention. The tap over the sink in the corner hasn’t been turned off properly – slow drops of water are plopping down on the hard surface. Ma doesn’t like to see water being wasted. The yellow strips down the middle of the silvery cupboard handles match the Formica tops. Ma’s Sunbeam Mixmaster squats hooded like a sleeping budgie in the corner. Ma’s visiting her friend, Tannie Viljee, for tea.
I’m kneeling on the gold-speckled counter-top, looking out of the kitchen window at the curly pink nerines bobbing above the purple and red anemones.
Under a small tree near the front gate, the garden tap is dripping slowly. Ma’s going to shout at Isak. The lawns run across to the bright flowerbeds against the split-pole fence. Gnats are hovering in ragged little clouds. Bees are sucking at the roses. In the thoughtful, tick-tocking afternoon, a turtledove coos and hums in a poplar tree near the gate. Sandy pants quietly on the kitchen floor. A long, shining thread of saliva hangs from his tongue and pools on the linoleum.
Marta’s eyes are closed. Her lashes are sparse and curly and the tribal cicatrices on her cheeks and forehead look like the perfect circles on my Ludo board. Leaning across the counter, I’m overwhelmed by my love for her.
‘Oh, Marta, listen! Look outside, see how beautiful the day is!’
Carefully, she places her mug on the counter and, standing on her toes, she leans over to gaze out of the window. She nods her covered head.
‘Eh, M’Pho, it is so.’
I turn around on my knees and hug her hard.
‘Oh wait, Marta! Just wait, okay?’
I jump down from the counter, run through the dining room and passage into Ma and Pa’s bedroom. I grab a tissue from the box next to Ma’s bed and rush back to the kitchen. Marta’s still standing where I left her, her head to one side, smiling at the sweet sound of the dove. In a frenzy of love and excitement I climb back onto the counter and, on my knees in front of her, I hold her face in one hand and shake the tissue’s crumpled creases out with the other. I turn her cheek towards me, place the soft paper carefully on her loved face and against the folds of the pink tissue I kiss her hard.
With grace and humility, she submits to my loving ministrations.
In the poplar tree, the turtledove is silent.
French Cuisine by Proxy
Aunt Rosalind is beautiful, but not as beautiful as Ma, even though I can see she thinks she is when she smiles her secret smile at her reflection in mirrors and shop windows. I watch her pat her smooth brown hair while she preens at her own briefly glimpsed image. She looks like Ma, but Ma’s much prettier than her sister.
When Aunt Rosalind and Uncle Len go Overseas, Aunt Rosalind writes postcards and letters to Ma. Ma says her letters are exciting and exotic.
Our house is on the right side of the bridge in a small town in the northwest of the Free State, bordered by farmlands and mealies growing in dark red ground, right in the middle of the Goldfields near a big town called Welkom.
One day a letter arrives for Ma. We’re sitting in the dining room eating chops and vegetables for lunch. The sun is hot on the iron roof above our heads. Flies drone and bump against the windows. Pa helps himself to Ma’s beetroot and sliced onion salad from a bowl on the stiffly starched, green-and-white-checked tablecloth. From where I’m sitting, the lines in the cloth stretch straight and true. Ma opens her letter, scans its contents and starts reading it out aloud to us.
They’ve arrived in Gay Paree, writes Aunt Rosalind, visited the bright Tuileries Gardens, the opulent opera house, and photographed the view through the heroic Arc de Triomphe. She describes the spacious boulevards lined with clipped trees, patrolled by bejewelled-collared poodles on leashes held by elegantly dressed Parisian women, suave Frenchmen in berets, who sit all day long on tiny wrought-iron chairs in pavement cafés drinking hot chocolate and eating croissants. I hang onto every word, entranced by the images reeling out of the letter in Ma’s hands. A fly lands on the page she’s reading. Irritated, she waves the thin onion-skin sheet and reaches for the flyswatter with her free hand.
Behind Pa’s chair, our dining room wall redefines itself as the left bank of the Seine. The state-of-the-art standing lamp in the lounge is transformed into an ornate, cast-iron street light glowing yellow in the early-evening fog. I’m not sure what ‘fog’ is, but it sounds mysterious and exciting. Under the table, Sandy changes from a cocker spaniel into a curly-haired, primped poodle lifting a dainty leg to wee into the sluggish Seine.
Aunt Rosalind’s letter from the elegant end of another world describes patisseries and boulangeries – white loaves narrow and crisp, longer than Pa’s arm; gendarmes blowing whistles, wearing caps called kepis, directing Citroëns and rushing taxicabs, Renaults and Peugeots and bicycles darting in different directions, all hooting at once. Most exciting of all, she writes, they have dared to sample true French cuisine: they have eaten frogs’ legs! Pa and my sister gag on their chops.
‘Frogs’ legs? Ma, you mean they ate the legs of real, live frogs?’ I can’t believe my ears.
‘So it would appear,’ Ma murmurs. ‘Apparently the French consider them a real delicacy.’
‘Have you ever eaten frogs’ legs, Ma? Have you, Pa?’ I ask.
They shake their heads. Grimace in unison.
‘I wonder what they taste like?’
‘Curiosity killed the cat, my girl! Don’t you dare try anything funny …’
Ma peers at me over the tops of her spectacles. I glower at her across the table. Carefully, I place the old, bone-handled knife and fork side by side in the middle of my plate and, hoping to distract Ma’s attention from my uneaten vegetables, casually drape my napkin over them.
‘Please may I be excused from the table?’
Ma’s eyebrows crease.
‘Just