Not a Fairytale (8 page)

G
OD
, I
HATE THIS BLOODY WEATHER; IT
’
S NOT NATURAL.
And I’m tired of studying. I’m doing my honours in English through Unisa, and finding it quite a challenge juggling coursework, a new job (even if it is only a part-time teaching position) and a husband!

I can’t believe that I waved goodbye to Ma a mere two years ago, and I’m already a synthetic Salena. Well, not quite. Salena doesn’t have to work or study. And at least we have a cleaner who comes in twice a week. Tilly worked for Jimmy’s parents for ten years before they died, and is a bizarre source of information about the human body, on topics that range from in-grown toenails to premature balding in women. She wanted to be a nurse but dropped out after a term because “our Jenna was in the oven”.

Tilly loves paging through our wedding album. Ma couldn’t come for the wedding: she’d had an operation on her varicose veins. I never knew she had varicose veins – I don’t think I’ve ever seen Ma’s legs. She sent Aunty the money for the ceremony and gave me a set of jewellery that Papa had bought her when they got married. Salena, her two boys and Rukshana came for the wedding, or rather weddings. Aunty arranged the nikah – red sari, orange hands, dripping borrowed-gold, food and people everywhere – and Jimmy organised the legal ceremony.

Jimmy loves the idea that now he belongs to a huge family. The cousins are seduced by his endless chatting and his questions and his interest in learning more about every person he meets. I think he might even talk his way into Ma’s heart if she can forgive him for not being a doctor.

Sometimes I wake up during the night and find Jimmy’s arms and legs wrapped around my body and I’m convinced he’s trying to kill me with his love. I’ve explained to him that while I shared a bed with Salena when I was little, as an adult I’ve only ever slept with a cat, and I like some space to breathe. Still, night after night I wake up clutched to his hairless chest, like I’m a human teddy bear. He’s terribly cheerful every morning, bringing me the bitter coffee he’s taught me to love while I pretend to be asleep, and many an evening he comes home with a gift. A book of love poems, a Russian doll in the shape of a cat, Belgian chocolates. I don’t have the heart to tell him that I hate love poems, the nesting doll makes me think of coffins, and I no longer have a sweet tooth now that I’m on the pill.

But one weekend he goes away on a business trip, and I can hardly wait until bedtime to stretch out luxuriously in the centre of the bed, relishing having it all to myself. Only I cannot sleep, and I find myself longing for his overheated presence.

T
WO YEARS LATER
I
AM STILL WORKING AS A TEACHER
’
S
assistant at a primary school ten minutes’ brisk walk from home. I have to clean up after the kids (seven-year-olds), pack away books, wash paint brushes, straighten chairs and desks. The kids seem to vomit a lot: I believe it has something to do with eating too much chips and eggs fried in lard. I master the art of cleaning up vomit in three swift moves of a cloth while holding my breath to prevent the addition of my own undigested meal to the splodges on the floor.

They have no interest in the fairytales I try to read them. They ask me why Rapunzel didn’t call the coppers. Did Cinderella at least get pocket money for all the work she did? Could I get them the video next time? I make them run around the classroom whenever I am left alone in charge of them. It keeps them quiet for a few minutes. One of the kids has an asthma attack during an indoor jog and the parents complain, so they move me to an older group.

I prefer the eleven-year-olds. They’ve been in school since they were five but some of them have managed to avoid learning to read and write, which is an impressive feat of subterfuge after more than six years. I am assigned to teach two boys and a girl how to decode the mysteries of the alphabet, and at the end of the first week I believe that I would have a better chance of succeeding in this task with a cat.

I can’t teach them, but they teach me a great deal. About sex. Jimmy is impressed with my new knowledge. Education does broaden your horizons. I also learn to swear with true conviction. Jimmy is less impressed by this.

Finally we have a breakthrough when I walk into the girls’ toilets and come across several variations of the word “fuck” written on the back of a cubicle door, all bizarrely misspelt. When I return to my pupils, I ask them to brainstorm all the swear words they can think of and all the sex positions they can name. I write these down on three pieces of paper, one for each child, in big block letters. We begin to learn the alphabet based on words that would make Jimmy cringe.

Before long, my little group can read and write their favourite words. I am delirious with pride; it’s as satisfying as teaching
Macbeth
. We move on to words in their syllabus. Soon they can read at the level of eight-year-olds. The class teacher, Mrs Rutherford, an ancient thirty-five-year old with a permanent tic in her left cheek, is impressed with the improvement and asks me about my methods. I am vague and dismissive. They give me another group and a small increase.

The following December they offer to send me on a crash course in teaching, but by then I have had enough of teaching, forever. Besides which, Jimmy has sold the family business for a huge profit and has embarked on a new computer venture involving the Internet. He’s suggested we move to the
US
for a while, says it’s better for his business, and I say, “Let’s go to Florida,” because I’m reading a novel set in Miami and the characters are always sweating, even in winter. Jimmy says Florida’s not the ideal American city for the business, but I tell him he can travel. I’m beginning to think that a long-distance relationship can only enhance one’s marriage – all those delectable reunions.

We had to leave; she wouldn’t stop teaching us things. First it was potty-training, then bathing daily, then table manners. She made us chew a hundred times before swallowing; my middle sister couldn’t even count past seven. Next we had to ask for the slop politely instead of grunting or swearing, as my littlest sister was fond of doing. She forced forks into our trotters and we were only allowed to eat what we could get on to the fork. We began to lose weight: we were starving!

She told us we should keep ourselves as clean and pretty as Cinderella. I know my limitations: I’m a pig, and I will never be beautiful. She told us we should be like Beauty with her head in a book all the time. She forced us to learn to read and write. I studied, and I coped, but it was difficult for my siblings, and I knew I had to take charge before things got worse for them. What was wrong with our mother? Why did she so care about what the other creatures thought of us?

I packed up our possessions, mostly hand-me-downs, and my sisters trotted off after me. She’d left us no choice. We travelled far and wide, foraging for food in the forest or begging at castle doors. At night we slept in fields, my sisters piling their bodies on top of mine, making it impossible for me to breathe freely. There were men with straw and sticks who agreed to build us houses for free, but we were reluctant to accept their offers: they seemed too good to be true.

Then one day we saw a sign in the window of a brick building.
HELP WANTED. ENQUIRE WITHIN
. He had heavy dark fur, and yellow eyes as hard as pebbles.

My baby sister asked, “Don’t you eat pigs?”

“No,” he said, “I’m Muslim.”

He said that provided we could cook and keep the business clean, he would be happy to employ us all. We could live in one of the storerooms out back. We said we’d accept on a trial basis, and he agreed.

He was often away (he never told us what he did), but the business flourished under our care. My middle sister cooked, my baby sister served the customers, and I looked after the books. Whenever he returned, he would praise our management skills. After a few years he gave us one of the restaurants in his new franchise and helped us to buy a home, where we lived happily ever after. Which goes to show: you can’t believe all the gossip you hear.

W
E
’
VE BEEN IN
S
OUTH
F
LORIDA FOR A MONTH
and I’m delighted with the weather and the place so far. Except when it comes to driving on the right-hand side of the road.

Stay right.
I can’t get the hang of this, dear God. The car seats nine people, designed for a huge family, but Jimmy thought it was the safest vehicle on the road. At least it’s automatic. And the windows are tinted for protection against the sun, so people can’t see me muttering to myself to
stay right
.

Why did I decide to come out this early? I’m stuck in the early-morning high-school traffic, wondering why the hell these people give their sixteen-year-old children cars. Are they mad? No, just American.

There’s a cop car ahead. I must try to look like I know what I’m doing. I
do
know what I’m doing; I just don’t know how to drive on the wrong side of the road. The air conditioner is on high, but I am drenched in sweat. Why am I afraid? This is simply a drive around the area, a practice run.

We live in a neighbourhood of forty houses, all curved around a man-made lake so that the back yard of each opens up onto the water. Ours is a single-storey; Ma would be unimpressed. She thinks you’ve only arrived if you live in a house with stairs. Our houses are perfect and clean, with only slight variations in the colour schemes. We have identical mail boxes, at a cost of $350 each. In our front gardens there are pretty mini-palm trees. They arrive fully grown, automatic additions like the grass and the garage doors. We subscribe to the same gardening service and the same pool-cleaning service.

Our neighbours are all white; I’m the only brown-skinned person around who isn’t an employee. I’m thinking of learning Spanish, because it’s becoming more and more embarrassing for me not to know it. Everyone thinks I’m playing white when I say, “No Spanish, just English. Inglés.” I’ve learnt to nod knowingly as the woman at the bakery chats to me in Spanish. I just point out the cookies I want and smile. She could be discussing her last operation – the blood, the gallstones in a jar – or her indulgence in bestiality, and all I do is smile and point and nod.

Sometimes I walk around the neighbourhood, wave to the black security guard at the entrance to the neighbourhood. No one can get in or out without signing in, without going past him, but I can’t remember his name. There are security cameras lining the roads, for our protection. In the summer mornings, everything is still, quiet. It feels like I am on the set of a movie, without any dialogue.

V
ISITING THE
M
AGIC
K
INGDOM
, I
BECOME A CHILD AGAIN
, stepping into the life-size covers of my fairytale books. But something is missing. I find myself wishing I could share these Disney visits with a child.
My
child.

I try to ignore the cliché of the ticking biological clock and redirect my energies into a postgraduate degree (the working title for my dissertation is “Gold is the Fairest of All: Colour and Materialism in Fairytales”), but nothing will curb my yearning for a baby. The problem is that I can’t get pregnant. The white-coated doctors in my adopted land of sour milk and stolen honey are still trying to figure out what’s wrong.

Jimmy says we could always adopt, and tells me, “Don’t worry babe, I’ll be your baby forever.” Are all men idiots? I don’t want Jimmy to be my baby, I don’t want to call him my precious pumpkin pie, my snoopy, my cookie or, worse, Daddy, like those creepy middle-aged women with stiff hair who talk to their child-substitute poodles in little-girl voices and ask them to bring Daddy’s slippers.

My life has become a battle, an internal struggle. I’m helping Jimmy with his tax – I have a flair for numbers; I think it’s got to do with having grown up in a babbie shop. (In fact, I strongly recommend that school-going children should be sent to work in a babbie shop: they’d never have problems with their multiplication timetables or general arithmetic, especially if they had a father like mine, who, if you messed up the change, would give you a fast klap to the head.) But all I can think about while I’m calculating Jimmy’s returns is being pregnant. Wearing multicoloured tents and gaining a hundred kilos. I want a baby!

Jimmy does his best. He indulges in solitary pleasure in the bathroom, fantasising about me, he says, and I keep his tadpoles warm between my thighs while we drive to the hospital. They count his offerings and tell us Jimmy’s boys are too damned slow, and that there are too few of them.

This starts us off on a round of endless hospital visits, with Jimmy squirting his
DNA
into test tube after test tube, and me, legs in stirrups, the undignified recipient of his lab-cleansed sperm. The romance of it all makes me want to weep.

What a twist of fate. We’d always been so keen on not getting pregnant, arming ourselves with pills and rubber and implants, and now, sans contraception, nothing is happening! Always, regular as clockwork, blood on the toilet seat, every full moon for a year. Jimmy says it’s time to move on, it’s time to adopt, but it doesn’t feel right yet.

One night Jimmy’s up watching American football, surely the most mind-numbing of all the dull sports men have developed, and I’m reading a book on spells – research – when it hits me.

Six weeks later, I’m pregnant. Jimmy says there’s no way it was some flaky spell; it’s the trips to the hospital that have paid off. But I know better.