STATIC
I drag the wooden chair until it stands in front of the basin in my parents’ bathroom and climb onto the seat so I can see my face. I stare into the mirror on the cabinet door with horror. My big best sister has gone away, leaving me to the scissors of my mother. I hate my pudding-bowl haircut, I hate my skew fringe. My big best sister would never have done this. I take my mother’s brush and pull it through, trying to make it right, but my fine brown hair crackles and sparks in the Rhodesian heat, lifting and clinging to the brush as it leaves my head. The harder I brush my hair to make it stay down, the more it rises. Dandelion puff. Clown.
I shriek and cry, my mother comes into the bathroom, clucking and frowning. My best sister has gone far away to a place called Varsity, which has something to do with books. I love books, how they open, hinged on one side like lifting a lid, how they spill with stories about how I might be when I’m older and don’t have to live on the dry land of my parents’ wishes and my hair is my own.
My mother pulls her mouth tight. She tells me I’m difficult, and she can’t stand the racket. She orders me to go to the bottom of the garden where no-one can hear. I wail all the way along the passage with its runner carpet and stippled walls, through the kitchen where Fred, our cook, looks up from peeling potatoes, the black tassel on his red fez swinging, all the way down the long garden of the croquet lawn where I can already get the ball through the hoop, past the washing lines with their white sheet tents, past the forest of mielie plants, to the hedge that grows between our house and our neighbour’s. I cry as hard as I can, but there is only the compost heap that once caught alight, bringing the fire engine with its siren, and the mulberry tree with its fallen fruit making purple smudges on my bare feet. I am only allowed back in the house when I have shut up, which is to say, learnt to control myself.
My mother goes to town once a week where her hair is rolled into curls and frozen stiff with spray. My mother never yells, although her mouth is often a line closed around something unhappy. Maybe she was also sent to the bottom of the garden when she was a little girl, or maybe it’s because of me. Once she slapped my arm hard, leaving red finger marks. Mixed in with my shock was the feeling of winning. My mother had lost her temper, and I made her do it.
Boys didn’t need to worry about hair because they hardly had any. It was mostly shaved off. They could climb and get dirty and scraped and yell and have fun. David was my friend, and we showed each other the parts of our bodies that were different. We took it in turns. One of us sat on my bed while the other crouched next to the bed and pulled their pants down, then stood for a moment. David said I didn’t stand for long enough, he couldn’t see. But there wasn’t a lot to see on me, not unless you were in the bath and could open the fold that hid the secret that not even I was supposed to know.
David was my friend, but Christopher was my boyfriend because his father read the news on TV. One day we were playing shipwreck in David’s garden because he had a rowing boat lying in one corner, and Christopher pushed me down so he could look at my panties. He stood above me laughing and pointing, but David didn’t laugh. He held out his hand and pulled me up.
After that, I didn’t want to wear dresses when I came home from school. My mother called me difficult, because I always wore shorts.
David came to play and we made up a game called Orphans. We were living with mean strangers who didn’t let us do what we wanted, so we made plans to run away at midnight. We crept to the pantry where we stole handfuls of monkey nuts still in their shells. We wrapped them up in one of my father’s large hankies but couldn’t work out how to tie it onto the end of a stick so that it would stay there. It was too long to wait until midnight, and David never slept over, so we stuffed the peanuts into our pockets and pretended. I was the first to climb out of my bedroom window and into my mother’s hydrangeas. Then I showed David my secret hidey-hole in the side hedge. We were free for a while, sitting in the hedge and cracking open the shells of the red-skinned monkey nuts until we were called in for lunch.
My father sat at the head of the table, fiddling with the knob on the radio that pushed a red needle past the crackles and whines called static until he found the news. The news always came on at lunchtime, and we had to be quiet. Important things were happening in the world, and my father needed to know. After the news there was the sport, and after sport was the weather report. When all that was finished, we were allowed to talk, only by then I had eaten everything on my plate and I wanted to be excused to go play or read. I had a toy piano that plinked when you tapped the small white and black keys with your finger, and a yellow truck that could carry stones and the back could tip up when you wound a windy handle at the side, and a doll called Yvonne who came from France that only I was allowed to play with in case her blue dress with lace got crumpled or her long curly brown hair got messed up. I also had a rag doll that my big best sister made for me when I was still in my mother’s tummy that I loved so much that she was coming apart. Raggedy Doll was allowed to get dirty and to say rude things like ‘bum’, and ‘damn bloody’. She had long hair made of brown string and sewn on blue eyes and brown eyelashes, and a red smile stitched onto her face but Yvonne never smiled.
When my father saw David playing with Raggedy Doll, his body got all uncomfortable and he hurrumphed something to my mother.
My big best sister took a photo of me the first time I wore a school uniform. I am smiling in it, only you can see it’s not a real smile. I hadn’t learnt to pretend properly yet.
My sister didn’t pretend. I stand in front of the mirror and close my eyes and try to remember her before she went far away to Varsity. She wore shorts and laughed loudly and wore pink lipstick and danced to The Monkeys on our green lounge carpet and took photographs with her new camera, of me walking along the edge of the gutter and sitting in a camping chair holding my cat. She also bought a scooter. I was outside the kitchen door with its three red steps, watching her work out how to press the button pedals and drive forward without falling over. The scooter had a huge round light in front and a special floor in the middle to put both your feet neatly together when you sat on the seat. She held onto the handlebars and twisted a key. The scooter roared forward as though an elastic band let go, and then it disappeared around the corner with my sister holding tight. Fred and I looked at each other. Next thing she came round on other side of the house, whizzing through the little open gate, not even crashing into the gate post, going faster and faster. I was proud of how she knew how to ride already, and how big she looked with her shiny white helmet on with a black strap under her chin. It was exciting, seeing my sister doing something so daring, going somewhere. That was before I found out that she would be going somewhere, somewhere far away without me. So I was surprised when next thing she drove full speed down the croquet lawn and into the mielie patch, making a tunnel of broken stalks down the middle.
I just knew, I would never be allowed to do things like that.
But I did want to be daring, like climb a tree. I could climb our mango tree, but that was easy. I wanted to climb a difficult tree, like the huge Jacaranda growing near the wendy house. David and Christopher were up it in a flash, but I was scared. My arms and tummy muscles weren’t strong enough to pull me up and swing my legs to grip the lowest branch, then flip up somehow like they did. I sat on the ground underneath the tree, fitting the fallen purple flowers onto my fingers, pretending I didn’t care. David and Christopher were shouting and leaping above me, playing Tarzan. They had forgotten all about me, even though it was my garden and my tree. I didn’t want to sit still and be good. My body was full of something that sparked, that needed to go somewhere. So I organised a battle.
One break time, I called all the girls in my class together in a huddle, and explained that we were going to fight the boys. We were as good as they were, and we could show them. The girls agreed, to my surprise. The plan was simple: run shouting onto the playground and attack the boys. I called the countdown, and we ran. The boys were busy with boy games; they turned when they heard us coming, their faces wide with surprise. I went straight for Christopher, but as soon as I was in front of him, I didn’t know what to do. So I smacked his arm. He laughed, and pushed me over. I leapt up, furious, ready to punch him with my fists, when suddenly all around me the girls had started crying and running away. The boys were laughing, and my army of sissy girls were fleeing towards the classroom.
A teacher strode up and told me to go to the office of the primary school head. I had only been there for good things, but this time I was in trouble. Mrs Willoughby rose up sternly as I entered, her eyebrows working behind her glasses. I was shocked to discover that my girlfriends had called me a ringleader, had turned and pointed their fingers at me.
For a while nobody liked me; then I won a spelling contest with the word Rhododendron, and suddenly everyone wanted to be my friend again.
But now, with my hair cut skew and silly and sticking up, nobody will like me, not the boys nor the girls. I go into the sewing room when my mother isn’t looking. She is very strict about her scissors. She won’t let me use them for anything in case they get blunt, but she won’t know. Anyway, this is an emergency.
I climb back onto the seat of the wooden chair in my parents’ bathroom. I am going to fix this. It can’t be that difficult.
Dawn Garisch