The pastel-coloured decor and Vera Lynn singing ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ make Kuki want to turn right back around as soon as she enters. But she steels herself and forces a smile.
‘Good afternoon, Mrs Carmichael,’ a bevy of black beauties, all smiles, say from behind the reception desk.
‘Good afternoon, ladies,’ Kuki says in her gruff, I-used-to-smoke-a-pack-of-Everests-a-day voice.
‘She’s waiting for you,’ the bevy of black beauties say in unison.
‘Thank you!’ Kuki says, her strawberry-red smile still plastered on her face, the strain of it beginning to show. She strongly suspects that there is lipstick on her two front teeth, but she cannot stop smiling. She has to answer every single ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Carmichael’ that will inevitably accompany her down the corridor with the same strained smile and a ‘Good afternoon’ of her own.
Time was the staff at the Princess Margaret were all white. Now they are all black. Time was Kuki would not have cared either way. Now she does. The past ten years have had her talking about ‘them’ more and more. Kuki does not want to be misunderstood. She is not a racist. She does not have a racist bone in her body. She is a liberal; has been ever since she married Todd Whitehead Carmichael in 1981. So no, she is not a racist. She is just a frustrated liberal.
‘Good afternoon, Mrs Carmichael.’
‘Good afternoon.’
They always seem so nice and friendly, but they are really wolves in sheep’s clothing … and if you give them an inch they will run the country into the ground and let it go to the dogs.
‘Here goes,’ she says under her breath as she inhales deeply before opening the door.
The room looks warm and wonderful in the sunlight that streams through the peach curtains. This is why Kuki always comes in the afternoon: for the blushing light. She once came in the evening and the room had been positively depressing.
The room is furnished well. All the furniture belongs to Beatrice. Kuki is sure that this is what the inhabitants appreciate about The Princess Margaret – it allows them to bring their former homes to the Home. This does not stop their furniture from seeming more and more like museum pieces, or their bodies from seeming more and more like relics as time goes by, but it is still a considerate gesture.
‘Kicks?’ a voice says from within the folds of a peach curtain. It’s Beatrice Beit-Beauford. Kuki genuinely smiles at her friend and stretches her arms out for a big, satisfying hug. ‘Yes, B. It’s me.’ They hug. Kuki avoids Beatrice’s eyes as they both sit down on the sofa. She does not want to see the faraway look that will inevitably enter Beatrice’s eyes. It has been six months now and Kuki has yet to reconcile herself to the fact that Beatrice has Alzheimer’s. Today is a good day. Today started with recognition. But Kuki now knows better than to hope that the entire visit will be good.
‘My nails are such a mess,’ Beatrice says, looking at her hands. ‘I’ve been waiting for Genie. But she has not come.’ She smiles apologetically as her hands pat her hair. ‘I must look awful.’
Kuki pats Beatrice’s hand reassuringly. ‘You look lovely, dear. Absolutely lovely.’ Suddenly feeling cold, she unfolds her cardigan and reveals the packets of stowed-away biscuits. ‘Look what I brought you,’ Kuki says, holding up the biscuits like treasures. ‘Highlanders and Tennis Biscuits.’
Beatrice makes a sound of pure delight. ‘Oh Kicks, you’re the bestest friend a girl could ask for.’
‘Let me pop the kettle on,’ Kuki says, as she makes her way to the electric kettle that sits on a table in the corner, surrounded by sachets of teas with exotic names, teacups, saucers, teaspoons and a small bowl full of sugar cubes. Electric kettles are rare at the Princess Margaret. Only the ‘good’ patients are allowed to have them. As Kuki clicks on the kettle, she takes comfort in the fact that her friend is considered a good patient.
‘My nails are positively grotesque. Imagine what Matron Stinkerbockers would say if she saw them,’ Beatrice says, her voice carrying laughter within it.
Stinkerbockers. It has been many years since either of them used the word. Its unexpectedness makes it even funnier. Kuki laughs heartily. Tears sting her eyes. She wipes them away. What do you know? It is going to be a good visit after all.
‘I think we should go visit her,’ says Beatrice.
‘Visit who, dear?’ Kuki asks, suddenly apprehensive, but trying to sound nonchalant, as she pours the just-boiled water over the teabags in the teacups. The aroma of jasmine fills the air. Stinkerbockers, or rather Matron Pulvey, has been dead for decades.
‘Genie.’
‘I told you that Valentine Tanaka from The Organisation is coming to talk to you about the farm. We spoke about this over the phone earlier today. You remember?’
‘Of course, I remember. But I refuse to be in this dishevelled and unkempt state any longer. I need grooming. I need Genie.’
‘Perhaps we can visit Genie after we talk to Valentine,’ Kuki says, delicately handing Beatrice a teacup and saucer.
From the moment Beatrice had entered The Princess Margaret, Genie and Kuki had made an agreement with one another. Genie would come to visit Beatrice, Miss B to her, twice a month and take her on a ‘girls’ day out’ to the spa or to the hair salon. They would have manicures, pedicures, massages, incongruous hairstyles, giggles and thick, generous slices of chocolate cake. And once a week, Kuki would come for tea and sympathy. Kuki would have loved to come more often, but it broke her heart to see her friend, her best friend, in here, like this. Genie could spend time with a Beatrice who forgot more than she remembered because Genie had not known Beatrice when … when Beatrice would not have cared a jot about her nails, her hair, or Stinkerbockers.
It seemed to Kuki to be more than a simple twist of fate that Genie was the daughter of Golide Gumede, the very man who had shot down Beatrice’s plane during the war. When Kuki had shared that news with Beatrice, she had had no idea that it would lead to a beautiful friendship between Beatrice Beit-Beauford and Imogen Zula Nyoni. They had too much in common – a love of sunflowers, a childhood lived on the Beauford Farm and Estate, a hero for a father, and a brave, defiant spirit – for their differences in age and race to matter.
There is a hesitant knock on the door before one of the black beauties, apologetically so, lets a man into the room.
‘Valentine,’ Kuki says, automatically pouring him a cup of tea. ‘What is all this business about Beauford all of a sudden?’
‘Kuki … Beatrice,’ Valentine says, accepting the cup of jasmine-scented tea and sitting himself on the chair facing Beatrice.
‘Why the interest in Beauford?’
‘Well … As you know, war veterans have settled on the farm.’
‘Have been settled there for years.’
‘Well … that … that is an illegal act.’
‘We know it is.’
‘We would like to evict them from the land.’
‘Who is “we”?’
‘The Organisation.’
‘You mean your boss?’
‘I mean The Organisation.’
‘Why now?’
‘Well, as they say, there is no time like the present. All we need from Beatrice are the title deeds—’
‘Don’t have them,’ Beatrice says.
‘What do you mean, you don’t have them?’ Kuki asks.
‘I mean just that. I no longer have them. I sold the land.’
‘To whom?’ Kuki and Valentine ask simultaneously.
‘The Survivors.’
‘The Survivors?’
‘The Survivors. They bought the land fair and square for a dollar, not a penny more, not a penny less.’
GENIE
The discovery of the precious and beautiful something lets Genie know what she needs to do next. She needs to send the 1965 world atlas to Marcus. She needs to send a postcard with the image of the Victoria Falls on it to Krystle. She needs to trust in the efficacy of the postal system to get these things safely to Ameri
ca. She needs to send a colourful bird to Minenhle and Mordechai. She needs to take Beatrice for a spa day. But first of all she needs to stop taking her medication without Vida noticing.
PART IV
TELEOLOGY
MARCUS
In 1988, on a crisp and brilliant day in the city, Marcus found himself in an elevator with his mother, father and a lanky man in a maroon uniform, complete with matching cap and socks, who took off his cap whenever he greeted someone and called everyone sir or madam; even eleven-year-old Marcus himself had been called ‘sir’, which had pleased him. The man’s gloves were a brilliant white and Marcus was amazed that they did not have a speck of dust or dirt on them. So impressed was he by the man that he briefly entertained dreams of becoming an elevator operator himself. He whispered this ambition to his mother, who had only frowned in return.
His father held his hand and squeezed it when the elevator operator told Marcus that he could press the button for their floor – which, his mother informed him, was six. The building had ten storeys in all and it seemed rather grand. Marcus felt the importance of the occasion as he pressed ‘6’ and the button lit up. Pleased with himself, as if he had just performed magic, he smiled at the elevator operator, who chuckled, reached behind Marcus’ ear and retrieved a sweet, which Marcus only took after his father had nodded his approval.
He had been told by his parents not to take sweets from strangers. Not to talk to strangers. Not to accept lifts from strangers.
All these were new rules. On the Beauford Farm and Estate he had learned to make friends of strangers.
On the sixth floor, his father pressed the button outside a door and moments later the door opened. The man who opened the door was eating a fruit – a marula – with care, which is the only way to eat a marula fruit.
‘I believe you’ve been expecting us,’ his mother said to the marula man.
‘The Masukus, I presume. Yes, please do come in. Mordechai Gatiro,’ the man said, gently spitting the slippery marula pit into the palm of his left hand and offering his right hand for them to shake.
Marcus heard his mother make a sound in the back of her throat before shaking the man’s hand.
‘You’ve found me indulging in a guilty pleasure, I’m afraid,’ the man said with a broad and generous smile.
Marcus had no idea what the words meant, but he liked the way they rolled off the man’s tongue like the beginning of a song. He liked the beginnings of songs. He liked this man.
They entered a small room where the man offered to take his father’s coat before entering a modestly sized living room.
The furniture consisted of a six-piece living room set, three overladen bookshelves and two flowerpots from which two climbers were already making good progress towards meeting halfway along the ceiling. Everything looked squeezed in and cosy.
There were books on the coffee table, covered in cloth, ancient with broken spines and torn pages, in various states of repair. There were papers – yellowed and fragile – a breath away from disintegration. Marcus knew not to reach out and touch them even though the temptation was great.
Marcus sat on a love seat sandwiched rather snugly between his parents.
The man with a song for a voice sat on an armchair opposite them and started the kind of conversation that grown-ups liked to have about the weather, traffic, relatives, and the price of this, that and the other (which seemed to Marcus to always be rising, never falling). These conversations could never hold Marcus’ attention.
Luckily for Marcus, there were some voices coming from another room – feminine voices. These voices held his attention, they made him feel that he was on the threshold of a surprise. He was excited because you never knew … you just never knew what a surprise could hold.
Before he knew it, he had stood up and was opening the door to that other room.
Sitting in front of a mirror having ribbons and flowers put in her hair by a woman leaning on crutches was Genie – as colourful as ever.
He ran to her.
‘Oh, Marcus!’ Genie said, looking at him in the mirror. ‘You’ve spoiled the surprise.’ Smiling brightly, she was far from disappointed. But for some reason her smile was no longer like the Beauford smile that he remembered; it was like his mother’s smile: a smile that did not reach her eyes.
EUNICE
There is a knowing that happens in the bones. As Eunice Masuku got down on her knees, she knew deep in her bones that the girl would be no good.
She remembered the girl as a proprietary slip of a thing that held on to her grandson’s hand a little too tenaciously. She remembered the girl as belonging to a family that had dabbled in politics and rightly suffered the consequences.
The Masukus did not do politics.
Why did the girl have to become a part of her family? She had a crushed and broken aunt, Minenhle, who was very willing to take care of her. Even the woman she had been found living with, Jestina, had been prepared to take care of her. So why did the girl have to become part of her family?
Dingani was adamant. The girl must be welcomed, must be lived with, be a part of their family. Eunice had always been the one to say how things must be, but with the introduction of the girl, power had shifted: Dingani was the one who determined things now. Her son, who had dedicated his entire life to not disappointing her, seemed hell-bent on disappointing her now.
Did he not understand that they were perfect just the way they were: father, mother, son, daughter ... and her, the grandmother, the overseer of their happiness? Four was the perfect number for the modern family, all the magazines said so. Four fitted so beautifully around her yellow Formica table.
The girl would make five …
Eunice had no other choice but to get down on her knees and divide the room in half in preparation for the girl – the girl she knew deep down in her bones would be no good.
KRYSTLE
At first Krystle had thought … no, felt … no, known that she would not like the girl. The girl that her parents insisted she remembered from the day that they had gone to collect Marcus from a place called Beauford Farm and Estate. A place whose name Krystle liked because it sounded like the kind of place from where a prince would come. A place that Krystle did not remember ever having visited and therefore imagined as a grand castle with a gloriously impenetrable fortress. If this girl coming to live with them, the girl she had met but no longer remembered, came from the Beauford Farm and Estate of Krystle’s imaginings, it was very likely that she was some sort of princess whose fortunes, as the fortunes of many princesses did, had suddenly changed. Krystle did not want to live with an unfortunate princess. She wanted to be the princess. She imagined a girl with fair skin, long hair, large eyes and rose-coloured cheeks, and envy filled her heart as she realised that her own light complexion, her thick hair that her mother only seemed proud of on Saturdays after a trip to the hair salon and a painful session with the hot tongs, and her overall prettiness that her grandmother told her of daily, would be nothing compared to the girl’s. She watched as her father and grandmother argued about the girl. She watched as her mother worked herself into a frenzy buying all manner of pink things for the girl and promising Krystle that she and the girl would be the best of friends. She watched as Marcus gave his opinion, with the supercilious air of an expert, of what the girl would and would not like. But Krystle knew she would not like the girl. On the day of the girl’s arrival, Krystle folded her arms, turned her face away and knotted her lips with a determination to show the girl and make her feel that she was not liked … not wanted. But the girl who came to stand in her bedroom, wearing tattered clothes, carrying a battered suitcase and two raggedy toys, was definitely no princess – unfortunate or otherwise. Her dark skin and kinky hair would never have permitted it. Krystle instantly liked the girl for the obvious reason that she would always be her inferior. And so she unfolded her arms, turned to face her and unknotted her lips to say: ‘You and I will be the best of friends.’ And they
were. They shared everything, on Krystle’s terms of course, and were soon like sisters. The only thing that interrupted their happiness was Marcus.
When Marcus came home on holidays from the all-boys boarding school he attended, he was always the hero. Bounding up the stairs, two at a time, making his short legs do impossible things; throwing his purple cap in the air; tearing his purple blazer off his chest, unable to get it off fast enough; struggling to loosen his purple-and-grey striped tie while kicking off his shoes; the maid and the gardener smiling up at him indulgently as they struggled to carry his oversized black school trunk, stencilled with his name in big white letters, MARCUS MALCOLM MARTIN MASUKU, up the stairs, picking up the clothes that lay strewn in his wake; Marcus would scream at the top of his lungs: ‘I am the cop and you are the robbers!’
Or, ‘I am the cowboy and you are the Indians!’
Or, ‘I am Knight Rider and KITT and you are the bad guys!’
Or, ‘I am Six Million Dollar Man and you are the bad guys!’
Or, ‘I am He-Man—’
‘Then I am She-Ra,’ Krystle would offer.
‘No. No She-Ra! Just bad guys. You girls are the bad guys.’
Krystle did not like this, but Genie did not seem to mind.
‘You let him bully us, Genie!’ Krystle complained to Genie one night in the darkness of the pink bedroom they shared.
Bully. Krystle had liked the word as soon as she heard it, even though the girl who had used it had meant it as an insult aimed at her.
‘He does not bully us,’ was Genie’s patient reply. ‘He spends so much time away from home that when he is here he likes to feel important.’
The Theory of Flight Page 8