What Poets Need. Finuala Dowling

the Church as a teenager. Is it true that we all eventually revert to form? I don’t think so. Beth sent Sal to Holy Cross because it is close by and because it is still small and run on principles of kindness, as it was in Beth’s day. Then I suppose it was simply a natural development that Sal, watching the teachers crossing their breasts with holy water, would ask to be part of that secret society of ritual and beauty, the cabbala that had already taught her to recite those deeply patterned prayers that never go away, even if one majors in sociology: Our Father; Hail Mary; The angel of the Lord declared; Hail Holy Queen; I confess to Almighty God; Holy, holy, holy; Through Him, with Him, in Him; Peace be with you; Go in peace.

      Beth is not quite right these days. She’s always been excessively active and efficient (she wears dungarees a lot), but lately there’s been something manic about her domestic and professional pre-occupations. I’ll catch her coming upstairs with a pile of laundry, at the same time talking on her cellphone to a client, while nodding or shaking her head at Sal’s questions about whether cows are born with teeth and has she ever seen a ghost. Beth stands in front of the linen cupboard as if she’s not sure if she should be putting the sheets or herself inside it.

      She’s become obsessive about the dilapidation of the house. It’s true that some of the front windows, the big ones that look over the bay, we no longer dare to open. Sea salt, constant moisture and years without maintenance have rusted the hinges and rotted the wood so that the slightest tug would leave us toothless, in need of boarding up. And it’s not just the windows. “Stand here, John,” Beth said today. “Do you feel this floorboard giving in? If only I could get a really big contract, I could get a man in to repair some of these things before we’re actually condemned.”

      I said I was sorry that poets weren’t really tongue-in-groove men, or only metaphorically. She looked at me distractedly and asked how much the Feinstein Trust would be paying me. I said I’d chip in what I could, but who could we get to do it, and at what price? I mean, the damp is actually infiltrating in the first place not just because of the gutters, but because the rain funnels itself right through the brick, in transverse cracks that are quite visible from the outside. Against one particularly bad interior wall we’ve had to hang a decorative cloth to disguise the impressive crop of fungus we seem to be growing. It’s not so much a question of getting a man in as contracting a firm of engineers.

      Maybe we could just cover the wonky floor with a layer of chipboard, I said. It’s hard for me to face real problems head on. Beth gave me a pained look.

      The house depresses Beth, or perhaps adds to an existing depression. I see her getting tearful at the ironing basket, but her tears are not for the floorboards or the window hinges. It isn’t her work even, though it may be the pressure of being a single parent on top of running a drafting and design business. Beth complains that her life is just drudgery, all work and motherhood. I said she really should take more evenings off; I’m here, I can take care of Sal. Beth said who would she go out with? Hadn’t I heard there were no single straight men in Cape Town? As she’s my sister, I didn’t take offence. Then she felt bad about her sarcasm and thanked me, saying she was so tired in the evening all she could think about was sleep anyway. I reminded her of her teenage popularity.

      “All the boys I kissed in those days,” said Beth, “all those skateboarders and red-eyed pot smokers, they’re all deputy provincial cabinet ministers and pop stars these days.”

      I knew which two she meant.

      While we were talking about the house falling down and Beth’s oscular gift, Sal came in with her language book. Beth said, “Let your uncle help, he’s the linguist.” What she means is that grammar interests me. Sal showed me the list of collective nouns and stock comparisons she has to learn for a test. A fleet of ships, a litter of puppies, a swarm of bees. As green as grass, sick as a dog, weak as a kitten.

      There are two reasons I can’t help you with this, I said. One, I refuse to endorse your school’s interest in perpetuating clichés. Two, I notice that these pages are all photocopied from textbooks, which is a breach of copyright. Publishing houses go under because of this kind of thing.

      Beth grabbed the book away from me. “Why do you have to be so damn clever all the time? Why can’t you do a simple thing and just help her with her homework? All you do is write poetry or think about writing poetry and look after number one!” She swept Sal away from me.

      I felt bad. We’ve never been a fighting family. After twenty minutes I went into Beth’s bedroom where the two of them were revising flocks of geese but probably not coveys of grouse, exultations of larks or watches of nightingales.

      I thought I’d bake some potatoes in the oven for your supper, I said, and fry some onions before I go out. Is that all right?

      “That’ll be lovely,” said Beth, “we’ll be down just now to make a salad.”

      They’re down there eating now. I can hear happy mother and daughter laughter.

      The thing about Beth is that Ron was such a pointless husband. I think she married him in a gesture of defiance against our upbringing, which was academic bordering on the bohemian. Ron is a tall yet strangely babyish notary and conveyancer who orders lime milkshakes when everyone else is drinking Scotch and who thinks the height of wit is to call milk “cow juice”, eggs “bum nuts” and orange juice “OJ”. I never saw him when he wasn’t claiming to be tired or hungry or both. Ma and I used to joke that we were keeping a bottle of champagne behind sealed glass, with a sign saying Break open in case Beth divorces Ron.

      Ron likes to watch. He watches sport and sitcoms and action movies and other people’s lifestyles. His big topic of conversation is a friend of his who is very rich and always buying new things. He slurps on his milkshake and his eyes go wide as he describes his friend’s flat-screen TV or imported digital camera. Ron would like to be rich and always buying new things, but at the end of the day (as he would say) he prefers to put his feet up on his couch and flick through the channels. He expects to win the lottery; that is another real thing in Ron’s life.

      When Beth came back here to Quarterdeck Road after three years of marriage, I feared that Ron would pitch up on our doorstep sobbing. But apparently he met her departure with relief. He remarried almost instantly, a very thin woman – Lilian – who always asks me solicitously whether I’m tired, by which I understand that I look hung-over, dishevelled or unshaven and/or that my private love of butter has taken on a public dimension.

      Since her divorce, Beth’s life has been Sal and her work. Sometimes when we are making supper together, Beth will tell me again that she can’t believe her marriage to Ron; is still stunned by it; can’t fathom why she did it. Then I say, You got Sal.

      Monday 12th August

      6.45 pm

      I am sitting huddled here with a hot-water bottle against the icy cold and a great throbbing bandaged thumb: I nearly sliced the tip right off helping Beth make smoked peppered mackerel sandwiches for her guests, who are still here, I think, including the great Johannesburg mogul whose new house plans she has drawn up. It’s a huge contract and he’s promising her more work, even a retainer, hence the peppered mackerel.

      The mogul talks loudly and incessantly, as if his money has bought him more airspace than the rest of us enjoy. He asked me what I did. I said I was a poet. This set him off reciting some lewd limericks. Then he said, “No, seriously, how do you earn a living?”

      I don’t normally mind admitting to people that I’ve only had one permanent job in my life, when I worked for Karoo Books in Joburg. There is, after all, an art to being freelance. You have to stay calm in the ninety days it takes for your invoice to be paid. You have to trust that the phone will ring with another editing or proofreading or report-writing job before the current one runs out. Since it is likely that two or more contracts will overlap, you have to believe that all deadlines have an afterlife. But I didn’t feel that the mogul deserved my insights into the solemn vows of freelancing. So I said, I’m an editor. This didn’t ring any bells with him, so he continued to talk about himself.

      The problem, I find, with lots of