Levy Deborah - Things I Don't Want to Know

When we got to the car park, Melissa took off her sandals and asked me to hold them for her while she searched for the car keys. She never drove in shoes, this was her ‘specialty’; her boyfriends always clasped her shoes tightly to their chests while she pressed her bare feet on the gas and sang ‘golden hits’ by The Shangri-Las.

‘Oh maaaan — I think I’ve left them in Victor’s Bunny House!’ While she searched frantically in her bag, I gazed at the car parked next to the spaceship. A girl my age was sitting on the back seat holding something on her lap. Her lips were moving, as if she was speaking to someone but no one was there.

‘Look she’s talking to herself.’

Melissa walked across the oily concrete in her bare feet and peered into the Bentley.

‘You know what?’

‘What?’

‘She’s talking to a rabbit!’

‘A bunny chow?’

‘No. A REAL rabbit.’

It was true. The girl had a white rabbit on her lap. I could just see its ears poking up, tickling the girl’s chin. At the same time a man and a woman walked towards the car, the man flicking his keys against his hip. As soon as he unlocked the door, the girl’s lips stopped moving. The woman saw us and laughed but she didn’t mean it.

‘We just took her rabbit to the vet. He’s got a sticky eye.’

Her husband made a high pitched voice, like his wife, and repeated what she had just said.

‘HE’S GOT A STICKY EYE! HE’S GOT A STICKY EYE.’

When his wife’s cheeks reddened, he said it all over again.

He didn’t sound like her at all. I wondered who he thought he was imitating? The high voice inside him did not sound like my mother or Maria or me or Melissa or even the woman it was supposed to be. Here was the clue. He sounded like himself.

‘HERE THEY ARE!’ Melissa’s car keys had somehow slipped inside the Pitman’s code book she always carried around with her.

‘HOPE YOUR LITTLE BUNNY’S BETTER,’ she yelled at the girl. She put her bare foot down on the gas and eased the spaceship out of the car park.

‘What do you think she was saying to her rabbit?’

‘Ja. Well. That’s her secret.’

‘Why’s it a secret?’

Melissa shrugged, her painted-on eyes fixed on the road as she turned right onto a concrete flyover. It began to thunder.

Naked African children were begging at the traffic lights, hands stretched out, palms turned up.

‘What secret was she saying to her rabbit?’

Warm rain started to lash the car windows.

‘She said, “Why don’t Ma and Pa love each other?”’

4

I knew that smiling was like the magic charms that some girls wore on bracelets. Little silver pixies and hearts jiggling on their suntanned wrists to bring them luck and ward off the evil eye. Smiling was a way of keeping people out of your head even though you’d opened your head when you parted your lips. This is how I smiled when Godmother Dory told me she was going to send me to the local convent school. While she was saying this she held a little pair of scissors in her hand to trim Billy Boy’s wings.

‘The feathers should be shiny and full.’ Her plump finger prodded Billy Boy’s chest. ‘This is the keel bone. It’s sticking out a little bit more than it should. I think Billy Boy is underweight. I’m going to give him more seed than usual tonight.’

‘What’s a convent school?’

‘It’s a school where the teachers are nuns.’

‘What’s a nun?’

‘A nun is a woman who has married Jesus Christ.’

‘Oh. The hostess on the plane to Durbs was getting married. She showed me her ring.’

‘But she didn’t marry Jesus Christ. She probably married a man called Henk van de Plais or something like that. It’s quite quite different.’

Her face was pale like a zombie.

‘An alert and playful budgie is a sign of a healthy budgie. Billy Boy is not as chirpy as usual.’

When she had finished tidying up Billy Boy’s feathers she locked him up again in his cage. I watched how she wiggled the little lever to shut him in so that I could wiggle it to get him out.

‘The convent is called Saint Anne’s and the nuns are very good teachers. Please take the cat and his tapeworm away from Billy Boy’s cage.’

I picked up the cat and warmed my hands in its ginger fur. I knew he didn’t have a tapeworm. Maybe Godmother Dory had a tapeworm inside her? The clue was that she was hungry all the time, so something was eating her up. The cat had taken to sleeping in my bedroom. Melissa threatened to cut Ginger’s ear off if he didn’t return to her pink satin eiderdown, but he had obviously decided to risk it. Ginger Was Mine. When Melissa had been a pupil at the convent she hated it. Now that she was doing a secretarial course and drank Rock Shandy’s and met her girl friend from Pietermaritzburg at the Three Monkeys or the Wimpy Burger Bar, she had stopped praying.

‘You don’t want the Convent girls to think you’re a freak do you?’

‘No.’

‘Then you must speak loud. Hey I’ll tell you one thing: you’ll be the only girl with a Jewish surname on the register. If you get lost in the cloisters just follow your nose.’ Melissa laughed until her painted-on eyes ran all over her face and I joined in because I was her little chum.

Saint Anne’s was a provincial school for well-heeled, white-skinned Catholic girls. Between the cloisters stood a small bowed statue of the Madonna and child, the sad mother with her baby in her arms. On the streets of Durban most African mothers carried their babies strapped to their backs but if they were looking after the white babies they pushed them in a pram. Did the Madonna have a servant to hold her baby for her? I wondered if my own mother was missing me? I hoped so. Perhaps I was a saintly orphan who had been sent by God to be cared for by the nuns? I leaned against a stone pillar and gazed at a plaster statue of Jesus Christ with slashed hands. It made me think all over again about Piet in my Johannesburg school. Had his iodine stigmata faded away yet?

The nuns seemed to have devoted their lives to helping me learn how to read and write. Every day they knelt by my side in the class room, gently rolling plasticine A’s and B’s and C’s in their soft white hands. When they asked me to name the letters, I lowered my head like an orphan saint should do, and whispered ‘Ay, bee, sea,’ while they nodded encouragingly. I thought it might be rude to tell them I had learned to read and write two years ago. In fact I understood all the signs on the golden mile without the help of plasticine.

THIS BATHING AREA IS RESERVED FOR THE SOLE USE

OF MEMBERS OF THE WHITE RACE

Sister Joan told me her rosary was threaded in sections of ten beads and the ten beads were called decades. A decade was ten years. What if my father was away for a decade? What if I was swimming in the bathing area reserved for members of the white race for decades but never saw my father again? I would be alone with the white race who were not normal. I would be totally alone with them and at their mercy like the surfers were at the mercy of the Great White Sharks who managed to get through the gill nets in the subtropical sea.

The oldest nun passed me an M.

‘M for Melissa’, I whispered dutifully.

‘Yes, How is Melissa?’ Sister Joan was now rolling out an N which I knew came after M. I had known this since I was about four.

‘She’s at secretarial college.’

‘And is she doing well at the tech?’

‘She’s learning Pitman’s code.’

I did not tell Sister Joan that Melissa (two S’s in Melissa but we were only on N at the moment) had been banned from driving for a month. This was because she hijacked the spaceship and drove Ajay to see his uncle. Last night when Edward Charles William saw the car was missing at 1.15am he made Godmother Dory wake me up. She dragged me in to the living room and Edward Charles William squeezed his face so close to mine that he squashed my nose.