SAM RANGES ON THE OUTSKIRTS of our lives, flirting with Simone shamelessly at every opportunity. He is the only young male I’ve ever seen Simone tolerate. Meanwhile she seems to be seeing less of her girl friends and spending most of her free time indoors.
‘Why don’t you invite Roxy this weekend,’ I say brightly, going for the tangential approach. ‘That way I can work while you two go surfing, and in the evening we can go for sushi, or wherever …’ My voice tails off. She has taken a huge glob of peanut butter out the jar with her finger and is licking it off because she knows I hate this game. Her mouth sucks, slowly, provocatively, licking off the last bits with the tip of her tongue. If I were a man I’d be on my knees. She gives me the big blue-eyed innocent look, her eyebrows ever so slightly raised while she pretends to give my idea serious consideration.
‘I don’t think so,’ she says with languid guile. ‘Tamara’s invited me to her house. They’ve got an indoor pool and a sauna.’
‘Simone, you and Roxy used to be best friends. What’s this Tamara thing all about?’
‘I’ve outgrown Roxy. All she does is prance around on that silly board the whole time.’
‘I see. And what about Josh, does he understand that?’
‘He’ll have to, won’t he,’ she says in that soft dangerous voice that scares me, as she walks over to the fridge casually and pours herself a glass of milk, not spilling a drop. But as she turns around to put the milk bottle in the fridge she lets it slip from her fingers. I see them open and the bottle crashes to the floor, splintering into a thousand pieces of glass. She stands there with bare feet, surrounded by a lake of milk and shards of glass. Her expression is half-dazed, half-exhilarated.
‘Don’t move,’ I command. When I get back with her flip-flops, she is watching her blood drip onto the floor from a deep cut she’s made into her palm with a sharp sliver of glass. I’ve been here before; it is always different but the same; I don’t overreact. I manage to get the flip-flops on, walk her out the lake of milk and glass, clean her up with hot water and Dettol, and put a bandage on. As pliable as a lamb throughout, she volunteers the information that she wanted to know if she could cut herself if she had to.
Why would you have to?
In the days when Roxy came to us often, I’d picked her up a few times from the big old house at Muizenberg where her family lived companionably with several other families. There were always well-used surfboards and skateboards leaning against the rickety fence and children in various hues of sunburnt brown running around like little feral animals. Once, when I arrived to fetch Roxy and rang the old brass doorbell, a tall burnished man in leather sandals and an African kikoi, his bare chest sprouting a mass of dark wiry hair, yanked open the front door and looked me over before he grabbed a passing kid and ordered him to fetch Roxy. He retreated back into a room with a whirring fan on the ceiling. I caught a glimpse of rails of T-shirts before he shut the door. In the car Roxy informed me Ben was in a bad mood because it was month-end and he had to pay bills.
‘He’s my father,’ Roxy said a little apologetically, as if it was something important she herself struggled to remember.
Another time a young woman with freckles sat in the sun on a wooden bench, breastfeeding a plump toddler in shorts on one breast and a baby half-hidden under a knitted blanket with brightly coloured baubles on the other breast. She reminded me of Cissy Spacek in Coalminer’s Daughter in her thin cotton button-down dress open to the waist. ‘Hey Belinda,’ Roxy greeted as we walked past.
In the car she started talking about her little brother Joshua being breastfed. She said her mother George had breastfed her older brother and herself until they were two years old, but Georgie’s milk dried up with Joshua and everyone said that was why Joshua was ‘different’. Roxy was a truly sweet kid.
I’d see Georgie and occasionally Ben at the school parents’ meetings but we stuck to small talk about school matters. Then one night Ben wasn’t there and I sat next to Georgie, who had her waist-length brown hair untied for the occasion. I made an idle comment about business travel messing with trying to keep a relationship together. Georgie just shrugged and said, ‘We’re all in an open relationship.’ I realised she must be talking about the people at the house; practising free love must be part of their communal existence. Her grey eyes held mine for a moment before looking away. ‘It suits me fine. He does what he likes and I do what I like. He’s away in China getting fabric for onesies. All the kids are wearing them … one-piece suits, you know?’ She gave me a crooked-toothed grin; a hippie lifestyle didn’t allow for much dental work.
After that, we used to sit together at school meetings and I could see where her daughter’s openness came from. When everyone else was insisting on hats being made mandatory on hot days, she put up her hand and suggested an organic fragrance-free sunscreen that came from America and lasted for eight hours and could be used on very young babies. Or dogs. It worked really well on dogs, Georgie explained. Of course they ignored her, but she’d always put her hand up politely and have her say, which was more than I did. Between opinionated parents and domineering teachers, school meetings were a battleground. I was just there to listen, since I preferred to be a step ahead of my daughter and always went fully expecting to hear about something terrible that had gone down at the school which potentially involved her.
It was on one of those occasions, as we were having a cup of coffee in the break, that Georgie mentioned how good Simone was with Josh. I must have looked puzzled because she explained he was her baby, the youngest of the three, and no one really knew what the problem was, not really, but he’d been diagnosed as autistic. She’d known something was wrong right from the beginning – her other two had been happy noisy babies, always smiling or crying, letting you know how they felt. Josh was so quiet and his expression was so blank, it made her blood go cold. These days the colour blue made him go into a rage and he banged his head against the wall a lot. Some days she thought she couldn’t handle it one minute more, and then she had to get out of there and go catch a wave. But he was calm around Simone; it was the oddest thing to see, the puppy-like way he followed her around.
The other day at a school soccer match final they all went along − she took Roxy and Simone with her after school − to go and cheer Wally on. Wally was her middle boy and he was the goalkeeper. All of a sudden she realised Josh had wandered off. Simone offered to go and look for him. Georgie was torn between Wally and his match, and Josh off somewhere he shouldn’t be, but the swimming pool was fenced in and Simone was being so grown up and matter-of-fact that she was grateful. Roxy had enough of Josh every day; she didn’t even go along.
‘Joshua doesn’t listen to any of us.’
Georgie said Simone told her she found him by the disused netball field, sitting under a netball pole with a wasp’s nest in it. She took a practice soccer ball with her and managed to get him away by dribbling the ball to the opposite end of the field and coaxing him with Jelly Tots. Then she sat under the other pole with him and shared the rest of the Jelly Tots.
Georgie took a sip of coffee at that point, avoiding my eyes. Eventually they came back together, Josh holding Simone’s hand normally, like any other kid.
‘That’s the first time he’s ever allowed anyone to hold his hand,’ Georgie said, in a wondering tone. ‘Simone said she thought Josh was sitting there listening to the wasps. She said he liked the sound because it was regular. They were flying all around him.’ Then he fell asleep with his head on Simone’s shoulder in the car. Georgie couldn’t get over it: his small body melting into my girl’s thin angry one, hungry for something Simone could give him that she, his mother, couldn’t.
The next day the school brought exterminators in to get rid of the nest.
When I ask Simone about Josh, her fork clatters to the floor but just before it does I see her eyes dilate with panic. Why on earth would the subject of Josh make her anxious? I tell her to get a clean fork from the drawer and say how grateful Georgie is for her help with Josh.
‘At least Josh doesn’t irritate me by talking all the time,’ she says meaningfully, and I know she’s recovered.
‘His mother says he’s scared of anything blue.’
‘So what? Grown-ups are so obtuse. It’s like he can hear blue screaming at him. She knitted him a blue jersey and then she cried buckets because he went crazy in her kitchen. I told her she should give it away. She’s the weird one. All she does is knit. Green is his favourite colour. He always chooses the green jelly tots and he puts his face into the grass. Josh likes listening to things. He was listening to the wasps. I just put a song he likes on my phone next to his ear and he falls asleep.’ She eyes me. ‘Jeez, at least you’ve never knitted me a jersey. That would be so embarrassing.’
I raise an eyebrow at her. I recognise a challenge when it comes my way, just as I know we are playing the game ‘everything is okay again’.
‘You think that would be embarrassing?’ I say. ‘The year of the knitting machine, Gina decided to knit jerseys for the whole family. They were all striped and in the colours of whatever football club Max was supporting at that moment, because that way she could use up the wool. I’d refuse to go outside the house in the things so I froze to death that winter.’
Gina is her grandmother by adoption. We have dispensed with the usual formalities. My mother loves being called Gina; it makes her feel young. The two of them are fonder of each other than I would have thought possible. Calling my mother Gina makes her seem like a different person.
A giggle turns into a prolonged peal of laughter as Simone imagines me in my striped splendour.
‘What was the worst one?’
‘Bands of red, yellow and black. I looked like a bumblebee with Nazi inclinations.’
When she has recovered from this hilarious vision of my humiliation, she demands, ‘But can you knit?’
‘We had to at school. Why?’
‘Georgie makes it look necessary. It’s like she cares more about knitting than anything else. Sometimes she forgets to make food for Josh.’ Her brow is furrowed.
‘Maybe that’s where Roxy gets her obsessive streak from. You know she doesn’t just prance around, she’s won every women’s surf event in her age group this year.’
She ignores me and tries to change the subject, shifting gear back to Gina and my brother Max. It nearly works, but I know my daughter better by now.
‘Come on Simone. What’s going on with you and Roxy? You two used to be best friends. It’s embarrassing. I think that’s why Georgie started telling me about Josh. She can’t understand it either. Is her father into drugs or something? Has he bothered you?’
‘OMG, here we go again. Drugs isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you, mom-person.’ She sounds almost sad when she says it. ‘Can we talk about something else? I want to go and see Igor.’