Leopold Blue

by Rosie Rowell

  I looked down to hide the blush that spread through my cheeks. ‘You’re OK too,’ I said, but she had vanished into the bustle of girls without a backwards glance.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  My stomach woke me early on Sunday morning. It squeezed and pinched like a coiled-up dishcloth. I stared at the purple curtains above my bed. They made me sick. Six months ago, flicking through one of Mum’s Fair Lady magazines, I had seen the curtains that would change my life. The fabric was a pattern of spring blossom in dusty pink and yellow and green against a cream background. They were airy and sophisticated and if only I were only lying in bed looking at them, I’d have had nothing to worry about.

  I groaned and turned my back on them, to face an aged and curling poster of Munch’s ‘The Scream’.

  The night before, in a fit of nerves, I had torn down the ‘Too cute to care’ kittens poster that had been on my wall so long that large greasy spots marked each corner. The Garfield poster followed that and the breaching Bottlenose dolphins. All that remained was Kirk Cameron smiling down at me from the ceiling. He had to stay – he knew too many secrets to be thrown away.

  Beth had appeared as I stared at the grubby, flecked walls. ‘Do you want to borrow my Bon Jovi posters?’ she’d asked. It was a big offer. ‘But if she likes them you have to say they are mine.’ she added.

  I couldn’t imagine what music Xanthe listened to but I had a feeling it wasn’t Bon Jovi. In the end I had settled on ‘The Scream’ from a box of posters in the attic. Last night it seemed edgy and cool. Today it looked ridiculous alone on the dirty white wall. What was I going to do with Xanthe all day? How would I ever manage to be cool when I didn’t know what cool was?

  Outisde on the stoep I cradled a mug of tea in the milky morning. Mum was bent over her sweet peas in a nearby flowerbed. She muttered as she worked – curses and promises of imminent death. Each spring she waged war against the fat green caterpillars that ravaged her flowers. In sheer persistence, they were perfectly matched.

  Her head appeared, red and blotchy from bending over. Her eyes gleamed from a morning’s killing. She was wearing one of Dad’s blue overalls and had tried unsuccessfully to tie back her hair in what we called her Corgi scarf. She looked around and blinked a few times. ‘Morning, sweetheart!’

  I turned away, because if you have nothing nice to say, it’s better to say nothing at all. Dad was at the bottom of the garden, brandishing the weed-eater. He cut the power when he saw me and performed a little turn to show off his khaki safari suit. ‘All in honour of our lunch guest!’ he shouted.

  I felt like throwing up. The potential for any one of my family to embarrass me today was overwhelming.

  Our family did not keep the Sabbath in the way that the Leopold townsfolk thought correct. Occasionally Mum attended Father Basil’s church in the Camp, to prove a point. Dad said he took his religion him everywhere; he did not need to put it on every Sunday morning. Nonetheless we had our rituals, when Mum wasn’t tearing around the countryside spreading the bad news.

  One such ritual was the Sunday Lunch Braai[*]. When it came to braaing, Dad was a fundamentalist. A real braai was an upturned half oil drum. It was made with wood, not charcoal. The occasion demanded beer and decently marinated meat. It required family assistance but never intervention. Dad lit the fire at noon. At that point Mum’s duties lay in the kitchen. Beth and I were the messengers, and the replenishers of empty beer bottles.

  ‘Beth, tell your mum I’m ready for the meat.’

  ‘Beth, go and check that the mielies[**] are on.’

  ‘Meg, tell Vivienne we’re fifteen minutes away. And another beer, princess.’

  As the meat neared perfection, he’d bypass the reluctant handmaidens. ‘Vivienne, are the potatoes done? Let’s eat!’

  At this point, Mum had to appear with salads, potatoes, bread rolls, beetroot, pickles and more beer. When all that remained was chicken-sticky fingers and a purple, green and red-stained plate, Dad would lean back in his chair, close his eyes and pass the afternoon in deep meditation.

  I opened the front door to find Xanthe looking cross. She wore a white polo T-shirt and a pretty floral skirt and sandals. A canvas bag was slung over her shoulder.

  ‘So, like, firstly they forced me go to church, bunch of religious freaks, and then the matron, what’s her name, the one with the enormous bum, wouldn’t let me leave the boarding house without wearing this, this … ’ She yanked at her skirt in disgust as she stepped inside. As her eyes accustomed to the gloom, she stopped. ‘You live in a museum!’ She looked around. ‘This is like of those funny little houses in Stellenbosch we visited on school outings. You know, the ones with the loo in the kitchen.’

  I smiled and felt disappointed. I led her past Dad’s study into the courtyard.

  The rows of overhead vines that ran across the courtyard had trapped in the early morning freshness. The air smelled of old stone and thatch and damp earth. The courtyard was a refuge for Mum’s delicate English plants that would never survive Leopold’s summer. Pots of roses and fuchsias and lavender lined the walls. Honeysuckle covered the family room wall, jasmine competed opposite it. A water feature tucked into the far corner burbled and gurgled all day long. It was supposed to instill a sense of well-being. Outside the kitchen door Mum tended her rosemary and mint and lemon basil. As with everything she did, it was too much. Springtime in the courtyard was an assault on the senses.

  Through the kitchen swing-door came the low murmur of male voices. Every now and then Mum’s voice interrupted them with ‘Not true!’ or ‘Rubbish!’ and ‘Oh, for pity’s sake!’

  Xanthe stepped forward.

  ‘Uh – that’s my mother. It’s her politics programme. We’re better off in the garden.’

  ‘Really?’’ Xanthe looked disappointed.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said and led her through the family room and on to the stoep. The day had ripened into a busy spring blue, the breeze retreated to the shadows and crevices.

  ‘Hello.’ Beth appeared.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’ I asked.

  Beth pointed towards the garden without taking her eyes off Xanthe. ‘He’s lost the matches again. Do you want to help us find the matches?’ she asked Xanthe.

  ‘No,’ I said quickly and made a swift u-turn. The only place left was my bedroom.

  Xanthe flopped down on the bed and looked around. ‘I saw the original of that, in the Louvre,’ she said finally, jutting her chin towards the Munch poster. ‘It’s much smaller than you’d expect.’

  With Xanthe stretched out on my bed, I opted for the floor. Since that first day at school I was wary of being too close to her.

  ‘Kirk Cameron, hey?’ she said, looking up at my ceiling.

  Away from school and Juffrou and Elmarie and Esna, I couldn’t think of anything to say. The day stretched ahead, huge and silent. As I thought it couldn’t get any worse, Beth appeared again.

  ‘Have you ever been overseas, Xanthe?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Xanthe, without looking at Beth. As she picked up an out-of-date copy of Fair Lady magazine, I mouthed ‘Go away!’ at Beth and pulled my finger across my neck.

  ‘How many times?’ Beth persisted.

  Xanthe looked up from her magazine. ‘Twice. To England and Italy and France, before you ask.’

  ‘Wow!’ Beth’s three favourite things in the world were all from ‘overseas’: Princess Di, A-Ha, and anything from the Body Shop. ‘We’ve never been,’ she added.

  ‘I have,’ I said quickly.

  ‘No, you haven’t.’

  ‘I have too, before you were born.’

  ‘But you were a baby – that doesn’t count.’

  ‘The stamp’s in my passport,’ I said.

  Xanthe laughed.

  Somehow Beth had sidled into my room and was sitting at the bottom of my bed. I shot her a death glare, but it bounced off.

  Xanthe reached into her bag and pulled out a magazine.

  ‘Just Seventeen
!’ Beth stroked the glossy cover. ‘Look at the price tag – it was bought in England! And it’s last month’s issue!’

  I watched the two of them and bit the inside of my cheek. Xanthe wasn’t supposed to be laughing at Beth, she was supposed to be laughing at me. Instead, Beth was making her lovely brown eyes grow bigger with excitement, laughing in her stupid half-laugh-half-snort way. Beth in a good mood was like someone switching on the light in a room at dusk.

  Xanthe waited until she had Beth’s full attention before she produced a small bottle of nail polish, the colour of congealed blood with a purple glint.

  Beth dropped the magazine in order to examine the bottle.

  ‘This is the sold-out new colour. My mother says in England it’s the only colour anyone wants to wear,’ said Xanthe.

  Beth wrinkled her nose. ‘It’s not very pretty.’

  ‘It’s not supposed to be pretty. It’s called –’ Xanthe leaned forward and lowered her voice ‘– Vixen.’

  Beth glanced at me, a moment’s hesitation. She took the bottle from Xanthe, and turning it around in her hand, whispered, ‘Vixen.’

  My parents had pulled themselves together by lunchtime; Mum had even changed into a dress and brushed her hair. Dad cast an eye over us all, seated at the table on the stoep. He picked up the roasting pan of meat.

  ‘Don’t be shy, Xanthe. There’s one hang of a lot of meat here.’

  ‘I’m vegetarian,’ she said.

  ‘Hey?’ Dad looked at her, putting the roasting dish down. ‘That’s not healthy, my girl. Our bodies need meat. We’re hunters, after all. Ask the doctor,’ he said, motioning to Mum. ‘She’ll tell you.’

  Instead Mum passed Xanthe the salad. ‘Tell us about your family,’ she said.

  ‘My father is a businessman and my mother is a busybody.’

  ‘Busybody!’ Beth snorted.

  ‘I’m sure she has a lot on,’ said Mum.

  ‘Not really, if you discount bridge and tennis,’ replied Xanthe. ‘Do you work?’ Xanthe couldn’t have chosen a worse subject. The topic of Mum’s career was avoided in our house.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Mum said in her sarcastic, ‘here’s-an-amusing-little-story-that’s-not’ tone. ‘After my fifth application to the hospital, the superintendent took pity on me and explained that not even a black man would consider it proper to be treated by a woman.’ Mum laughed. ‘So.’

  The only way the townsfolk understood Mum was to treat her as a ‘character’, like Witbooi. Mum was the token English person: predictably outspoken and unfathomably odd. She didn’t seem to mind it, but I did. I wanted her to be normal. I wanted to be proud of her.

  I glanced at Dad. What Mum never noticed was that every time she told that story Dad looked as though she were blaming him, not the town.

  ‘It’s not all bad though,’ I said brightly. ‘It’s freed up your time to harass the workers about your killer disease and hand out condoms at the clinic.’

  Mum was ready with a reply but thought better of it.

  ‘Such a lovely name, Xanthe,’ she said as she passed Xanthe the mealies. ‘Very unusual for this country. Of course, in Greek it means –’

  ‘Golden,’ said Xanthe.

  ‘Yes.’ Mum’s surprise made her voice high.

  ‘My mother chose it because of my blonde hair.’ Xanthe replied nonchalantly. She leaned across the table and helped herself to the salt and pepper.

  ‘When did it turn so dark?’ I asked.

  ‘Every two weeks, when I colour it,’ replied Xanthe, now buttering the bread roll on her side plate.

  ‘Why would you do that?’ exclaimed Beth. She ached to have Barbie-blonde hair.

  ‘To piss my mother off,’ said Xanthe with a grin, looking directly at Mum.

  My hand froze with my fork halfway to my mouth. Beth and I exchanged glances. Mum didn’t tolerate swearing. It showed ‘a lack of imagination’. But Mum laughed and shook her head,

  ‘Honestly, Xanthe, you’re a dreadful child. Margaret comes from Greek too,’ she continued, looking at me. Her face was softer than I’d seen for a long time. ‘It means pearl.’

  After lunch we moved to the lawn. Beth and I sat in our rust-rickety garden chairs; faces tilted up and awkwardly back, carefully positioned to allow our lemon-drenched hair as much sun as possible. Peach yoghurt formed a thin crust on our faces. You were supposed to use unflavoured, but nobody in our house ate plain yoghurt. Covering each eyelid was a damp teabag. We were following Just Seventeen’s ‘Beverly Hills Blitz’; we were metamorphosising into Babes. Xanthe took shelter under the pecanut tree. The sharp, chemical smell of her Vixen nail polish hovered over us, unable to soften into the honeysuckle sky. As she waited for each coat to dry, Xanthe read us articles from the magazine.

  A thwack of a page. ‘Listen up, Beth!’ Xanthe cleared her throat: ‘Jason Priestley in steamy 90210 love triangle.’

  A sigh slipped out of Beth. ‘Jason Priestley is divine, don’t you think, Xanthe? Don’t you want to die when you see a picture of him?’

  Xanthe laughed.

  ‘Who is Jason Priestley?’ Mum’s voice broke our spell. I bristled. Despite the fact that I’d have seen her approach if I hadn’t had teabags covering my eyes, I felt as though she’d snuck up on us.

  ‘He’s like, he’s like so … ’ Beth gave up. ‘You wouldn’t understand, Ma.’

  ‘Careful with that lemon juice, Meg. Too much and your hair will go green.’

  Beth and I laughed.

  ‘You think you invented hair bleaching?’ she said.

  A short humph and a creak of her knee as she sat down. ‘There is nothing in this world more lovely than Leopold in spring,’ she said. ‘It teases and beguiles you with its colours and warmth. But it never lasts.’

  Shut up! I shouted at her in my head. Beth was bad enough. I imagined Mum sitting on the rug next to Xanthe – surely it was too small for both of them? The teabags were making me panicky. It was as though I wasn’t there.

  ‘Which poor woodland animal’s blood are you smearing over your toes, Xanthe?’ she continued.

  ‘It’s called “Vixen”,’ I said in a strangled voice.

  ‘It’s the only colour to be wearing right now,’ Beth added.

  My mother laughed. ‘Says who?’

  Beth snorted. ‘Everybody.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Mum. ‘Walk around this town wearing that colour and you’ll have the Dominee[*] knocking on the door.’

  ‘This town is intolerable,’ I said. Even as the words came out, I cringed at the sound of my tone. It was the teabags still covering my eyes that was intolerable, but I couldn’t take them off. Not before Beth had.

  Mum spoke again, in what Dad called her ‘Oxbridge’ voice, with her vowels round and long, as though she were reading a BBC audiotape. She put on this voice whenever she quoted ‘great literature’, as though the literature would cease to be impressive in a normal voice.

  ‘”The town was a little one, worse than a village, and it was inhabited by scarcely any but old people who died with an infrequency that was really annoying.”’

  ‘Stop!’ I pleaded.

  ‘She likes to quote Shakespeare from time to time,’ Beth said, addressing Xanthe. ‘It’s an English thing.’

  ‘It’s Chekhov,’ said Xanthe. ‘It’s a Russian thing.’

  The teabags plopped down into my lap as I sat up. Mum claimed you hadn’t read literature until you’d read the Russians. It had made me determined to avoid them.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Mum admitted with a little laugh.

  ‘I like Chekhov,’ Xanthe said. She stretched out her legs in front of her and examined her finished toes.

  I sat back in the chair and looked up at the sky. It was late afternoon, the birds were beginning to chatter. I was filled with an unusual feeling – a mixture of laziness and contentment. I smiled as I realised what it was. Perhaps this was how it felt to be normal.

  Only one thing ruined the day and it wasn’t
Xanthe’s fault, I decided later, it was Beth’s. She never knew when to stop. The afternoon heat had leaked away and we returned to my room. Beth hung in the doorway, midway through a story about netball trials.

  ‘Beth,’ said Xanthe.

  ‘Ja?’

  ‘Scram. Go play with your Barbies.’

  I looked up. Xanthe had returned to the Fair Lady magazine. If it weren’t for the look on Beth’s face, I would have been sure I had dreamt up her words, her cutting tone.

  ‘I’m standing on my side of the doorway,’ Beth replied, pointing to her feet. ‘I can stay here all day if I want.’

  Xanthe rolled her eyes and flicked over the page.

  I looked at Beth beseechingly, but there was no hope. Beth was the baby, she was used to being adored. A horrible silence followed, in which I should have come to Beth’s defence, or said something funny. But I didn’t.

  ‘If I give you this, will you go?’ Xanthe reached for her bag and pulled out a Bar One.

  Beth looked at me.

  ‘Go on,’ I said.

  She took the chocolate bar and slammed the door.

  Mum was right about the lemon juice. The strands of hair I’d so carefully smothered in lemon juice had turned snot-green.

  ‘Look!’ I wailed, running into the kitchen, where Beth and my parents were eating supper.

  ‘The lady of the lake,’ said Dad.

  Mum smacked his hand. ‘Luckily, I know a trick.’

  She returned from the pantry cupboard with a bottle of violently red tomato sauce. ‘Wash your hair with this,’ she said.

  ‘I will not!’

  ‘Fine. Don’t,’ she said, sitting back down, as if it didn’t matter whether I had green hair or not.

  When I returned, Mum was in the study, phoning her friend Bibi in England. It was her once-a-month Sunday night call.

  ‘You smell like a hotdog,’ said Beth. She had not forgiven me for Xanthe’s behaviour. Then, with a mouth full of toast, she said, ‘Dad, did Meg tell you that Xanthe was expelled?’