And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel/And shining morning face, creeping like snail/Unwillingly to school.
School was a cruel joke. Until I went to school, the enchantment of my early childhood meant that I felt confident that I was loveable and pretty and clever. My siblings and my parents contrived to maintain this illusion.
King David Primary didn’t take to my hair. I often say, ‘I’m not crazy, I just have curly hair.’ But at six years old, I didn’t have any funny things to say about my exuberant curls. Other children did. ‘Chewing-gum hair’ was a favourite. Also, on account of having been a breech birth, I had little ‘horns’ on either side of my head. Because of my slanting eyes, I was called ‘China eyes’. And my two front teeth were brown from cortisone medication for an ear infection I’d had in infancy. I looked like a combination of Nicholas Nickleby and the Little Match Girl.
My parents sensibly believed that what money was available should be spent on good education and medical care. School uniforms, tights included, were darned and handed down to me as the baby of the family. Everything was a little worn and damaged by the time it reached me. Pnina and Gigi were taller than me, so their hand-me-down skirts hung unflatteringly down to my ankles. Altogether I was a peculiar-looking child. King David Primary didn’t take well to peculiar.
In addition to my bizarre appearance, I was dyslexic, hyperactive and generally not well adjusted. The other kids teased me mercilessly, and somehow the teachers never noticed.
When I was about seven, I was sent to Anita, a child psychologist who worked with my father. I adored her. I used to go to Anita after school and we’d talk. She told me that I was depressed. My father had recognised depression in me at an early age, but Livicky said she’d never encountered a depressed child. The mere notion of a depressed child was absurd, almost unnatural, but there I was.
Anita was a down-to-earth person, someone who had cast off the confines of her strict, right-wing family. She was five times the South African archery champion, Daddy’s best friend, and an old-fashioned lesbian who wore calf-length skirts and unflattering shoes. She was precise, loving and funny. I imagine what drew her and Daddy, a child psychiatrist, to one another was their innate, instinctive understanding of children. It was Anita’s tranquillity, her quiet, which got me through the rage of school.
Once a week I went to hang out with Anita. I don’t remember exactly what we did. We’d talk, play, do shows; it felt safe there, even normal, surrounded by her eccentric collection of miniature books and bows and arrows. In her deep, earthy Afrikaans accent she’d tell me stories and explain things to me. It was as if we were two moles, tunnelling way, way under the ground where no one could see us. And yet sometimes it got too dark down there, because on occasion I’d hide, running across to my neighbour Brian’s house, bunking from Anita, hiding from the darkness within.
One Sunday she arrived at the front door holding a grubby shoe-box with holes punctured in the lid. Inside slept a puppy – Lolly, my first dog, the first of my miniature dachshunds.
Lolly would outlive Anita. When I was nineteen, she and Daddy decided medical aid was a waste of money. Within six months he had had his first bad fall and she had cancer. She was dead within a year.
Early one morning, the house still quite silent and peaceful, I heard the clang, clang of my fathers’ crutches coming up the passageway towards my bedroom. Opening the door, he had a look of shock, but said simply, with no adjectives to soften the blow, ‘Anita died.’ I inherited her most precious possession, an Omega De Ville watch.
After I’d been at King David for two years, all of us children, Gigi, Jonty and me, as well as my friend Brian, moved to Rosebank Primary. But I didn’t fare much better there.
In the classroom, in the playground, being shoved out of the tuck-shop queue, on the school bus and in my own nervous, out-of-place skin, I was an outsider. At birthday parties, I was the uninvited. In anything related to ball skills, I had three left feet and a gammy right arm. Athletics left me inert, paralysed in terror. And, being dyslexic, reading aloud had me confusing Bs with Ds and hyperventilating in fear.
I’d have been a dead loss had it not been for my one shining passion – the passion to perform, to step into the light. I knew my mark, and it was centre stage! When I danced, the music inhabited me, lifting my gyrating frame up, up and away from all this, away to a new world under a new sky, in free flight towards the beseeching light. And then I was ‘Up down turn around, please don’t let me hit the ground.’
In acting, I could lose myself. In other people’s words, in characters leading lives entirely unrelated to my own. I was not ‘just this girl’, I was some kind of wonderful. I was the beautiful and the damned, the great and the glorious. I was Scott’s Zelda and Kurt’s Courtney.
So long as someone was watching me, I could twirl around on Shirley Temple’s Good Ship Lollipop, a lovely trip to the candy shop. In a shredded velvet leotard, fishnet tights and with a fake beauty spot, life was a Cabaret, old chum, and I loved a cabareeeet! With a blonde wig and thrift-store red dress I wanted to be loved by you, just you, nobody else but you. I couldn’t aspire to fill the desire to anything higher than to make you my own, boop-boop-a-doop! And of course, with a long, long cigarette and a deep, deep voice, I was just an old-fashioned girl with an old-fashioned mind, not sophisticated, just the plain and simple kind. I liked the old-fashioned flowers, violets were for me, have them made in diamonds by the man at Tiffany.
And that was part of the repertoire I developed before I turned eight. I’m tone-deaf. I can’t sing for toffee. But the lack of any talent didn’t dampen my astonishing, unfounded confidence.
It was the gift God had given me to get through what would have been an otherwise talentless life. It was the moment within the moment, the girl within the girl, the greatest escape since The Thomas Crown Affair.
It was at Rosebank Primary that I met Adam Levin. All the kids in Standard 4 were having a Xanadu party. They were dressing up and going to see the movie, starring Olivia Newton-John, after which they’d have lunch at Steers and go roller skating on the roof of the Hyde Park shopping centre. I was the only one not invited. Adam Levin said that if they didn’t invite me, he wouldn’t go. In Standard 4, you couldn’t have a party without Adam. You still can’t.
For the occasion, I wanted a pastel-coloured pantsuit elasticised at the waist with spaghetti straps, a look that was all the rage. My parents considered this to be out of the question. On the day of the party, I went to Pnina’s place to dress. A well-adjusted student, she was mildly stoned and going through a ‘hippie–ethnic’ phase. She blow-dried my hair straight and dressed me in a deep-purple, embroidered Indian dress with a broad tasselled belt covered in tiny mirrors. I was the only girl at the party wearing a skirt, and that was just another in a long line of misplaced outfits. Still, I enjoyed the party and the movie so much that when I got a kitten, I called it Xanadu.
Even after four years I couldn’t adjust and settle down at Rosebank Primary. The only other choices were for me to attend a remedial school or a convent. My parents wisely decided that if I went to a remedial school, I would consider myself stupid for the rest of my life, so we tried a convent. In the beginning I felt like a character in a fifties musical. Maybe a little like a young Julie Andrews. I loved the uniform and the old Victorian building with its promise of ghosts. The words of The Lord’s Prayer were lovely, and the sight of shrivelled nuns running rosaries through their veined hands struck me as madly exotic and romantic.
Around this time (I guess I must have been about thirteen) I developed a wild crush on a friend of my grandmother’s. Audrey was an Irish rose, ever so pretty and lyrical, with the dainty skip of a cake ballerina. A crystal chandelier dominated her lounge; a picture of me smiling among roses with my hair unusually tidy dominated her bedroom. Best of all, Audrey had Christmas.
Audrey celebrated Christmas in a big way – the angel smiling resplendently out at the world from atop a ten-foot tree. The lights winking on and off, the kisses under the mistletoe, the golden crackers banging and bursting open to reveal trinkets, bonbons and other delights. The turkey, and the dessert that dramatically caught fire. The stuffed stockings on the mantelpiece, the cake and the candy, the mountains of gifts. She even let me taste the yucky French champagne with bubbles that burst forth and tingled on my tongue.
As a nice Jewish girl I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Christmas was paradise! This was love! This was The Nutcracker Suite, and I was poised perfectly in an arabesque on top of a fluffy white world.
I observed Audrey’s every move and hung on her every word. When the time came for me to be schlepped over to the convent, I was ever so cool with that, because Audrey had been a nun. She told me, ‘I joined the convent in the fifties, when the girls wore long, full skirts, and when I came out into the world I was met by girls in minis.’ She was entirely unaware of my tattiness or my tardiness, and I loved her for it.
Then, one morning, after school had broken up, Livicky came into my bedroom, pulled open the pale-blue curtains and sat gently on my bed. ‘Darling, I’ve got some awful news, and I’m just so terribly sorry for you,’ she said. ‘It’s a dreadful fact of life that the only thing we know for certain is that one day we will die. Last night, out of the blue, Audrey got a headache. She was rushed to hospital, and they found she had a tumour. It was all quite sudden. She didn’t suffer. I’m so sorry my baby, your Audrey died.’
Boom. I went off the rails, maybe even barking bloody mad. Continued behaving strangely, getting more ostracised. Bunking, forging my father’s signature and writing fake sick notes. I started smoking and swearing at the Irish nuns. I tried to climb out the window of a maths class and got stuck, halfway inside the tedium of Sister Anthony Joseph’s subtractions and halfway outside, in the plush lawns of freedom. Things rapidly spiralled out of control.
The Mother Superior sent me home with a bad report card, documenting not only my floundering academics, but my aggressive approach to the system. My parents were disappointed – again. A born drama queen, and wanting them to stop being cross with me, I did the most dramatic thing a thirteen-year-old could do in 1982. I swallowed a box of Ritalin.
This was the first of my unsuccessful suicide attempts. I don’t know if I was actually thinking ‘death’ so much as ‘out, out, help, get me out of here’, desperate to escape a situation that felt overwhelming, unbearable.
I remember the gloom of the Johannesburg hospital very well. I remember the guilt as I watched Daddy, usually so much larger than life, getting smaller and smaller as he walked away dejectedly down the corridor. I remember being terribly embarrassed as the handsome medical students arrived to stare into my eyes, fully dilated from the Ritalin.
And then, oddly, I remember being concerned about a baby lizard I’d caught the afternoon of the incident. It had lost its tail, and I assumed that without my nurturing presence it would die. So I’d trapped the poor thing in a matchbox, punched in holes so that it could breathe, and given it a blade of grass for company. As I lay in hospital, my guilt intensified, and I was convinced that the lizard would surely die.
I couldn’t sleep all night. The following morning a state psychiatrist came to sit next to me and told me that everything would be fine. He explained that I hadn’t really wanted to die; the overdose had just been a cry for help. Content with that theory, I agreed with him. I liked the ring of the phrase ‘cry for help’. I felt horribly embarrassed and just wanted to go home. Livicky and Pnina came to collect me and took me to the Rosebank Hotel for breakfast, a big treat. When I got home, the lizard was gone.
By this time I knew that I would never excel at school. I wasn’t fitting in and I couldn’t slip out of the system unnoticed. I started to realise how glamorous rebellion would be. Most children risk an awful lot when they rebel. I had nothing to lose. Already, it seemed, the adults disapproved of me.
At fourteen, my convent career in tatters behind me, I moved to Woodmead, a particularly socially aware and politicised school. It was one of few multiracial schools in apartheid South Africa, attended by the children of many left-wing political leaders.
My parents had always been politically conscious and kept us informed about what was happening around us. Apartheid affected even those of us who were cushioned from the injustice. There were kids who went missing from school. A policeman raped a friend of mine. The police raided our school parties. They arrived regularly looking to arrest our geography teacher, a conscientious objector who refused to do army service for the apartheid government. It was comical watching Mr van Zyl, with his long hippie beard and corduroy pants, running through the classrooms to escape the police. School was radical, it was wild. On principle I refused to concentrate during the few classes I attended and did not do any homework.
I felt pent-up anger and developed ingeniously inappropriate ways of expressing it. Never underestimate the power of not caring. One day a girl came and sat next to me on the bus. She said, ‘I want to sit next to you, because the boys come and sit with you.’ That day, she introduced a whole new world to me. I realised to my delight that, while the teachers would always loathe me, my days of being ‘the unpopular girl’ were over. The days of being belittled and bullied were behind me, because now I had boys. In her early teens, nothing gets a girl as far as boys do – not good grades, not fancy clothes, not even extra pocket money.
Although I floundered academically, I excelled at boys, drama and original schemes for bunking school. And at getting motherlessly stoned. Class was dull, but there was a river at the bottom of the school property where a bunch of teenagers used to roll and smoke joints. Nothing dull about that. Boy, did we laugh. Something as innocuous as the sight of a friend’s face or a pencil was enough to have us in fits. We got into deep debates about politics and human rights, and we danced and sang a lot too.
We didn’t get stoned only at school. We got stoned in super-markets, at the movies, at parties and at one another’s houses, but dagga was it. I never met anyone who tried anything stronger. Nowadays the drug scene is more sinister.
Not surprisingly, I failed twice, so by the time I should have been matriculating and ready to leave school, I still had another two years to go. I had no intention of doing those two years and fluctuated between ambitions of becoming a hairdresser and a famous actress. Legally, I wasn’t allowed to leave school till I’d completed Standard 8. By the time I was allowed to leave, I wanted to leave the country, too. And, with barely a Standard 8, university wasn’t opening its loving academic arms to me.
The most accessible place for a nice Jewish girl like me was Israel. My parents dreamt that the family would follow me there. It was decided: I was to spend six months in a kibbutz learning Hebrew in a sheltered environment, after which I could venture out into the cities. As it transpired, I think the Cape Flats would have provided me with a more sheltered environment.
Before leaving South Africa, I set about the task of losing my virginity. I marked my target, waited for the night of my eighteenth birthday and got done with the deed. Mission accomplished, I set off on my awfully big adventure.