All Things Bright and Broken

by Carol Gibbs

  We get home with hymns ringing in our heads, feeling holy.

  “Don’t forget to take your dress off after lunch. I don’t want you running around and getting it all ruined. It’s your best one.”

  I watch Mommy cook the rice with yellow sugar, salt, a knob of butter, a handful of raisins and a teaspoon of borrie. The roasting pork smells delicious. The castor oil has given me open bowels and there’s a big hole in my stomach just waiting to be filled. We’re having tapioca – frogs’ eggs – for pudding, and who could ask for more?

  After lunch Mommy and Daddy rest and Lord help us if we make a noise. Desiree is fiddling with her knitting and Gabriel is flying his kite. Later today Daddy will take us to the Sturrock Dry Dock. We are the only ones who haven’t seen it yet.

  I’m excited because I have planned a surprise. The flower sellers in Cape Town sell bunny tails dyed bright colours and today when Mommy and Daddy open their eyes they will see the glass basket vase filled with coloured bunny tails. Bessie follows me into the veld. I hold her tight and I can feel her hot breath on my face. The grass is alive with butterflies, lizards and ladybirds and there’s the lazy hum of bees going about their business. The bunny tails are backlit as they sway in the afternoon sun. I can just picture them in orange and green.

  I pile the bunny tails on the marble-topped washstand and rummage through the Christmas decorations, the silver slipper with the red bow, pine cones smothered in glitter and the bag of tired cotton wool we use for snow. At the bottom of the box there’s a nest of orange crinkle-paper streamers. I put them in a basin of water and plunge the heads of the bunny tails into the bright orange dye.

  It splashes on my precious dress, the dress Grandma made with her own hands, every stitch. She cut each hole in the cloth and sewed around the holes in satin stitch and she won first prize for her efforts. I know I’m in for it, so I fetch Edna’s scrubbing brush from under the sink. That and a splash of bleach should do the trick. Soon I have a hole the size of a shilling in the fine lawn fabric. My bunny tails are drying in the sun and I’m quaking in my boots.

  Before I have time to take off my dress, Mommy and Daddy wake up.

  “What have you done? How am I meant to face your Grandma again!”

  I rush outside, collect my bunny tails and present them with a flourish. Thank heavens they save me from red trails on my bum.

  “We’re going to visit the Parkers in Lansdowne.”

  As we sail past the Kritz Bioscope, we try to catch a glimpse of the new posters, but Daddy’s driving too fast for us to make out who the film stars are. The Parkers live in a small iron house with the paint peeling from the walls and the front gate hanging on one hinge. We hate going there because they are always drunk. The grass and the tangled weeds are so tall it looks as though no one cares.

  Mr Parker is acting funny. His face is red, his chair rocks under him and his fly buttons are all undone. Mrs Parker ignores her two skinny children and they’re both shivering. Mommy finds their jerseys while Mrs Parker drinks with the men. Mr Parker is a bricklayer for the PWD and Daddy says when his head is clear he lays bricks like a demon and the man mixing the dagga can hardly keep up with him. Mommy doesn’t like visiting the Parkers either, but she keeps the peace. Daddy tells her the big problem is you don’t drink enough, and Mommy always answers, imagine if I did. As the evening wears on, Mrs Parker gets floppy legs. Mr Parker laughs a lot and if he isn’t careful his false teeth will fall out.

  The bottles stand in rows on the back stoep. Some of them have pretty labels. We’ve seen them before, when the man from Osrin’s bottle store delivers them to our front door.

  “There are twenty-four booze bottles and lots of big brown beer bottles!”

  “They must have lots of booze bubbling in their veins.” Desiree thinks she’s funny.

  “They pee it out when they’re drunk.”

  “They pee wherever they want.”

  “You lie!”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die! I’ve seen Mrs Parker pull her broeks down and pee in the yard.”

  Gabriel joins us and he lets out a loud whistle when he sees all the bottles.

  “Why do drunk people pee anywhere they want?” I ask him.

  “Because they get lost.”

  “I told you so!”

  “They’ll get a-a-alcohol poisoning. Your arms go l-l-ame and you smell as though you’ve s-swallowed a dead r-at. Then you try and f-fix it with the hairs f-from a dog.”

  “Poor Bessie would be bald!”

  Later that afternoon the grown-ups pile us kids into the car. The Parkers follow us in their battered old Ford. We haven’t gone far when Mr Parker stops outside the Lansdowne Hotel. We know it well because we have waited here many times before. He comes over to our van. “Let’s have a quick one.”

  I’m a bundle of nerves because his false teeth could fall out at any minute and land in the gutter with a clatter. With his fly buttons still undone, he flings his arm around Daddy’s shoulder and together they disappear through the swing doors. The sun slips behind the mountain and it’s getting dark. Our beds are calling, but Mommy can’t go in to get Daddy, because ladies aren’t allowed into the men’s bar. It’s a place where men swear and swill their beer and tell rude jokes.

  Mr Parker should have stayed in the bar, because Mrs Parker is waiting for him just outside the swing door. She holds her high-heel shoe above her head and swears under her breath. He comes out of the bar laughing, the light behind him. Mrs Parker rushes at him, screeching and swearing, and her children cling to her skirts and scream with her. Mr Parker tries to duck, but she hits him on the forehead. I wonder if Mr Parker will have to go to the Lansdowne police station with a bandage on his head. People spill out of the bar and crowd around them.

  “Get him, lady! Klap him! Moer him!”

  “Voetsek! Go make your fokken’ noise elsewhere!”

  “Leave the blerrie man alone.”

  My daddy tries to break up the fight. “Enough!”

  Wide-eyed, we watch the drunken brawl. Mommy tells us to get back in the van and not to look, but we take turns watching through the porthole windows. As we drive away I can see Mrs Parker’s shoe lying in the gutter. She walks like a cripple, one foot up and one foot down, with her children trailing behind her, and I’m very glad I’m not one of them.

  “So gemaak en so gelaat staan,” mutters Daddy, as we weave our way home. “They’ll never change, those two.”

  “You’ve got room to talk!” mutters Mommy softly.

  We never see the Parkers or the shivering children again. Mr and Mrs Parker will probably die from alcohol poisoning, because they don’t have a dog to save them.

  Ask your mother for sixpence to see the new giraffe

  with spots on his neck and a pimple on his …

  ask your mother for sixpence …

  I’m on my way to Miriam’s house, but I linger at the gate when a furniture van stops outside our house. The man asks Edna where he must put the desk.

  “The house is so small,” laughs Edna. “Master said put it in the lounge.”

  The man slides his palm over the smooth shiny top. “Imbuia, solid as a rock. Best you can get.”

  On the pavement I’m taking big steps, stretching so my feet don’t touch the cracks.

  Step on the crack,

  Break your mother’s back.

  On the way to Miriam’s house in Second Avenue, I stop to pick the beautiful pink blooms of the hibiscus that hang over the fence of Major Fitzgerald’s garden. But I have to make sure the Major doesn’t see me – if he does, his stick will come down over my back and he will chase me down the street. When I’m safely out of sight, I do the naughty thing: I pull the petals off the hibiscus flower, one by one, and then the dress is gone. Then I remove the broeks and squeeze the hairy thing in the middle and the number two pops out.

  I don’t dare tell Miriam what I do, because she is holy. Her mother is also holy and her father is holier than both
of them put together. Miriam is pale, tall and thin and she’s always neat as a pin. You can’t miss their house because there’s a big pale blue van parked in the driveway. It says Jesus Saves on the sides and there’s a picture of a big black man breaking the chains on his arms, with broken links flying all over the place. In big red letters it says: Repent. The end is nigh.

  Whenever the Lord calls him, Mr Morris will be ready. His tank is filled with petrol and the front wheels face the street so he doesn’t even have to reverse. Miriam calls him The Chosen One. He potters around in his garden, just waiting for direction from above, planting rows and rows of hubbard squash and pumpkins for the starving millions. Always having to be at the ready for a sign from the Lord above puts a big strain on Mrs Morris down here on earth. She presses his suit with a hot iron and a cloth so the bum doesn’t shine and she uses a jar with little holes punched in the lid to sprinkle water on the cloth. It’s a wonder she uses water from the tap and not holy water from the Lord Himself.

  “Mr Morris is mad to try to save the savages of Africa,” says Daddy. “Those people can’t even think straight, let alone repent. Why doesn’t he save his petrol and his energy and get a proper job? And stay at home with his wife and children, where he belongs?”

  “Leave the man alone,” says Mommy. “To each his own.” When Miriam comes to my house she pulls faces and wrinkles her nose when Daddy smokes his pipe.

  “Your body is your temple and smoking is evil. You should tell your father to stop.”

  Is she mad? He would knock my block off. If she only knew what goes on in our house, she would never put her foot over the threshold ever again. Smoking a pipe is nothing. I could keep her busy for a week with swear words like shithouse mechanic, and things she’s never heard of. Uncle Nick says the words that fall from my daddy’s lips defy description. Miriam’s blonde hair would stand up straight and her nose would stay wrinkled forever. She would run straight home and bury her face in her mother’s apron and sob. They would have to give her lots of sugar water.

  Sometimes Miriam and her mother go with Mr Morris into the Dark Interior. Miriam tells me how her father takes stacks of Bibles with him and how he baptises thousands of heathens in the river. I wish I could go too, but I don’t stand a chance of passing the holy test, especially with my visions of number two popping out of hibiscus flowers. Miriam quotes from the Bible all the time and says, Honour thy father and mother. She doesn’t understand what it’s like when your father hurts your mother and you’re too little to do anything about it.

  Mommy screams and we leap out of bed and run. We watch as he brings his fist down and slams it into her temple. As he leans over Mommy, we hit him with the patent leather bags we got for Christmas. Our bags are just a blur of red and white as they flash back and forth, but he doesn’t even turn around. Desiree and I are hysterical. Gabriel is long gone. Daddy badgers Mommy, swearing, pulling at the blankets and Mommy’s nightie, egging her on to get up and fight back, to stand up for herself.

  Desiree and I have hatred in our eyes and murder in our little black hearts. We don’t see Gabriel for dust – not until all the fighting is over.

  Then, just before Daddy comes home from work, we dig a hole in the back yard, just Desiree and me. I squat down and do a number two. It’s soft and brown and smelly and the steam rises into the twilight sky.

  “Watch where you put your feet!”

  Desiree squats over my pile. Her face goes red as she tries and tries, but nothing comes out.

  “Push! Harder! If it’s only mine, I’ll get into trouble.”

  Gabriel is cleaning his fowl hok.

  “Please help,” we beg.

  “I c-can only g-give you a p-p-pee.”

  He arches his back and thrusts his skinny hips forward. The stream of pee makes a silver arc in the fading light. He does up the fly buttons on his khaki shorts and then he pats his fly. “There, don’t ask me to do any m-m-more. I don’t want to be here when he s-steps into that hole.”

  We cover the hole with branches and bits of grass.

  Later, when we hear the car door slam, we rush out.

  “We’ve got a surprise for you.”

  Desiree ties the dishcloth around Daddy’s eyes. I glance at his feet. He is wearing his best shoes, the ones with little holes punched in the sides and swirling patterns on the toes. We take his hands, one on either side, and lead him past the mealies and the sunflowers. He smells a rat, but then he smells more than that and does a quick side step. He can’t see the blackness of our hearts, but surely he can see the hatred in our eyes.

  “It’s your fault! Your number two smells!”

  We don’t have the pleasure of watching him struggle to get the number two off his two-tone shoes and he didn’t break a leg, but he’d better watch out. We will get him next time. Our hearts will stay black forever, for as long as he hurts our mother.

  We try not to cry and to be brave. “Leave me alone. Leave me alone.” We’re all going round the bend. Drunken laughter, children shivering, adults dithering. Days come and days go. The sun comes up and the sun goes down. And the screaming, the pleading, the sobbing continue. Can’t anyone wave a magic wand?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “The snoek horn!”

  We run to meet the cart, Bessie at our heels.

  “Fres fis!”

  People spill out of their houses. Children skip in the street. Dogs with wet noses sniff at the men’s ankles and for once they don’t say voetsek. My daddy lifts the silvery, slippery snoek to feel the weight.

  “You sure it’s fresh?”

  “Nee, Master, I won’t lie mos. I caught it met ’n handline daar by Kalkbaai se harbour.”

  His toothless friend with the wine breath laughs. “The fis is so fres, in his dreams he still swims in the sea!”

  Daddy rolls his eyes, but reaches into his pocket and pays the man in coins.

  Back in the yard, Daddy washes the fish under the big brass tap, sharpens his knife on the back step, and then he sets to work. Silver scales fly as he scrapes away at the fleshy body. In Ouma’s lounge, there are pictures made from overlapping fish scales on rich velvet backgrounds. Daddy’s sharp knife slices off the shiny silver head and I jump when Gabriel pokes his finger into the glassy eye.

  “Don’t be such a bangbroek! Look, man, the fish is dead.”

  Daddy lays the fillets on the oval white enamel plate with the blue line around the edge. I’m scared of eating fish, because I once choked on a bone and turned blue and Daddy had to hold me upside down by my feet.

  On the special blue-and-white pickling jars there are pictures of Dutch windmills and ships on the Zuider Zee, sails straining against the stiff breeze. Daddy’s hands fly back and forth, curry powder, vinegar, borrie, onions, lemon leaves and salt and pepper. When the last bit of fish is packed into the jar, he smiles a big satisfied smile and washes the smell of fish off his hands. The fish must stand for two days, so that the delicious pickle juices can sink in. Even Aunty Beryl says he makes the best pickled fish in the world.

  For a while, Daddy is happy. He is studying hard “to educate himself”, to make things right, to earn a decent living, to buy some new chairs to sit on and “maybe some bikes for the kids”. He wants a sounder way of living, but Mommy is getting dressed in her good clothes.

  “Mavis, don’t go. I’m on the wagon. The least you can do is stand by me.”

  “After what you did to me!”

  The specialist says Mommy will never be able to see properly out of the eye that Daddy hurt.

  All things bright and broken

  ‘Blue Moon’ is playing on the radio. Mommy steams down the road, head up, gypsy earrings swaying to the rhythm, peep-toe sandals slapping the tarmac.

  “Go your own sweet way then, but you’ll be back!”

  We wave sadly at her disappearing back. Daddy goes to his desk and sits down heavily.

  “Why has Mommy gone?”

  He doesn’t answer.

&
nbsp; Mommy comes home. She gets up and goes to work as she always does. She only went as far as Grandma’s house. Mommy never lets us down. She’s a saint. Without her we wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Aunty Dolly knows things are bad in our house and she looks out for us and tries to give us hope and dignity. She teaches us to be grateful for small mercies. When we shiver and shake, she forces the brandy and milk between our lips. Daddy also cheers himself up with brandy, but Aunty Dolly says that’s different.

  “Can I go to Woodstock?”

  Monica is Desiree’s friend and we can hardly believe she’s the daughter of a professor. Daddy jokes about Professor Sherwell’s car, a Studebaker. When it won’t start, he calls it a Stootdiebogger, Push the Bugger. Daddy says Professor Sherwell is not a real professor, but Mommy says Daddy is envious. He has been blessed with a good brain, but he will have to study forever if he wants to become a professor.

  “You can go if Colleen goes too. Take it or leave it.”

  Desiree pulls faces behind Mommy’s back as we pack our pyjamas and our toothbrushes. We wait on the front stoep, wild with excitement. At last Monica and her daddy arrive in his Studebaker. We wave to the neighbours, feeling like film stars as we drive down Third Avenue in the silver Studebaker with whitewall tyres.

  Professor Sherwell is sometimes short and sometimes tall. It depends which leg he’s standing on because one leg is shorter than the other. He’s balding, but the hair on the sides of his head sticks out like a clown’s around his fleshy face and pale piggy eyes. He has fingers like pork sausages. Monica and her brother Gregory live behind the Sherwells’ shop in Woodstock. There’s a drawing of a man’s head on the window facing the street. The bald head is painted white and divided up like a map. Inside each piece there’s a funny name. In the front room there are maroon velvet chairs. Monica says it’s their own waiting room, like the one on the railway station. We watch from behind the curtain as people arrive. Professor Sherwell beckons them into his office one by one, and they disappear into his clutches.