Homemaking for the Down-At-Heart. Finuala Dowling

teenager. She hated herself.

      Bella sighed as she brought her aching bones down onto the mat beside the child of the house.

      Curtis found Mr Morland’s used toothpick and took it to the kitchen bin, since it would slip through the weave of the study’s wastepaper basket and irritate Margot. Then he sat down to type an e-mail to his father.

      Hi Dad,

      How are you getting on? I have had some thoughts about the pasture. There is still time, I believe, to disc, lime, seed and fertilise. You could phone around to ask for help with the ploughing. Hell, your neighbours owe you a favour or two. The water problem can also be solved if you can just get Dick’s backside onto that bulldozer to push the earth wall into place.

      I really think you can’t risk losing out on this calf deal just because you haven’t done a simple thing like get the grass to grow! I hope you’ll take this in the right way.

      Your straight-talking son,

      Curtis

      So many things were falling apart on the farm. Curtis would like to be there, repairing fences and chicken hoks, devising systems against jackals, buying dip and putting the Ngunis through the crush before redwater struck, and not afterwards, as his father so often did. He took care not to make the mail sound patronising. It was robust, he thought, but not unkind. There was a limit to what the eighty-four-year-old could achieve.

      The phone rang. It was Leroy, wanting Margot or Pia. Curtis took a message. Then he sat there for a moment, listening to the house. It felt sad. He walked upstairs and called out, “Pia?”

      There was no answer, but a sound from deep within the house like a breath or a shifting sheet. Curtis looked into Pia’s room. She was lying face down on her bed, but in a way that suggested her awareness of his presence. Bella thumped her tail at Curtis’s arrival.

      “What’s the matter, girl? I didn’t hear you come in.”

      “I want to throw everything away,” Pia mumbled into her sheet.

      “What?” asked Curtis. “What is it that you want to throw away?”

      Pia reached her hand out and threw a troll across the room.

      “You don’t like your trolls any more?”

      “They’re babyish.”

      Curtis sat on the edge of the bed and listened to Pia’s story.

      “I think those girls were secretly jealous of you because you were happy. Keep playing for as long as you like. Let childhood end when it wants to end. As for these guys,” he said, picking up a troll, “they’re not toys, they’re collector’s items. Do you know how they came about?”

      Pia turned over and rested her face on her hand as Curtis told the story of the poor Danish woodcutter who could not afford a Christmas gift for his daughter and so carved the world’s first troll, with sheep’s wool for its hair, using his own quaint facial features as a guide. Curtis could see the idea for a play forming in her head.

      Karina could play the daughter, thought Pia, the poor little girl hoping against hope for a Christmas present. She would take the plum role of the troll father herself. His emotions would be anguish at not being able to afford a present, then inspiration as he touched the piece of wood, followed by industry and smaller bursts of inspiration as each problem posed by the project found its solution. Hair? Sheep’s wool!

      “Shall I make us some lunch now?” Curtis’s voice seemed far away.

      “Maybe I should wait for my mom to come back.”

      “She’s probably treating Granny to something in Simon’s Town.”

      Pia sat beside Curtis at the kitchen table and watched him make sandwiches. He wore jeans and sandals and his sleeves were rolled. She didn’t tell her school friends that her mother’s boyfriend was sixty years old because for them sixty was, like, dead. Curtis looked forty-nine, so why should she correct that impression?

      He did not cut the crusts off as her mother did. He did not ask, “What would you like on your sandwich?” He made one cheese-and-tomato sandwich and one avocado sandwich and gave her one half of each. He did not treat the kitchen sloppily, as Mr Morland did. He cut the bread and grated the cheese on a wooden board. When the sandwiches were safely on their plates, he scraped the crumbs off into the bin and everything was tidy again, quick as a conjurer. She could not imagine him making a mistake, which is why his crooked middle finger with its missing nail fascinated her.

      “Tell me again what your dad said after you stopped to help the puff adder out of the road.”

      Curtis swelled his chest as he got into character: “Damn fool boy – don’t you have the sense you were born with? What damn fool plays Good Samaritan to a venomous damn snake?”

      “But then he drove you very fast to hospital.”

      “He had to or I would’ve lost my hand.”

      There were men who fixed things, who made sandwiches, who helped puff adders and drove trucks very fast to hospitals. Then there was her dad.

      “Your father phoned earlier,” said Curtis. “He’s coming around at three to take you riding in Hout Bay. Is that okay?”

      She looked out of the kitchen door. Starlings were fighting on the tin rooftops of the outbuildings, their claws scratchy as scuttling rats, and their voices squawking with warnings to their enemies. She wished her mom were there to bang on the roof with the broom and make them go away.

      Everything felt unstable when she was with her dad. Why did they always have to go somewhere, when she would have preferred to stay somewhere known? She hated meeting new adults – and even more, new children. They visited people who shrieked with delight to see her dad. She’d be sent off to a curtain-darkened TV room strewn with other children’s toys she felt too shy to touch, even though they called to her. It was agony to leave the staring eyes on the floor when she could have given them histories, homes, accents and above all, hope. Some of the children in the room belonged to the house, which only made them more hostile towards newcomers like her. The adults would stand there for a while, talking about them all as if they were animals in a zoo. Then there was the heart-stopping moment when their parents left them alone together, strangers, with instructions to “play”. She never knew when she would be taken home. At these times, she thought intensely about her mother. Perhaps her mother would come to find her, she’d thought when she was much younger. The adults drank and laughed and only started making lunch at three or four in the afternoon. Once she’d been offered stinky cheese to eat. That was bad enough. But then her dad also wore odd clothes. She dreaded summer for his sleeveless vests. Worse still, he wore a Speedo to swim in when everyone knew that grown-up men should wear baggies. Sometimes one of the strange children would be bold enough to ask, “Why does your dad dress like that? He looks weird.” To survive in the mean streets of childhood you needed a pretty mother and a normal father. She only had the one.

      But the riding lessons were okay. Not at first, when Leroy had tried to learn how to ride too. Her wild, jokey father on horseback, joining a class full of twelve- or thirteen-year-olds – she’d felt utterly humiliated. Luckily he’d grown out of that phase, and during the lesson sat on a bench watching her and answering his cellphone. He said riding hurt his balls, “But then maybe that’s because I don’t wear underpants.” She’d looked around to make sure no one heard that. She liked to see him sitting on a shady bench looking ordinary in a long-sleeved shirt. He didn’t always wear a funny hat. In winter he could pass for normal. And the horses themselves – she loved them. When you were on a horse, you shared the horse’s strength and the horse’s stature. There was one called Campari, with a slightly tipsy walk.

      “Can you tell my dad that I have to be back for supper?” she asked.

      “Your mother should really make that call,” Curtis replied. “But if she’s not around, I’ll try to do it diplomatically.” They all treated Leroy’s temper like an unexploded bomb.

      Pia