The Salute
Mike Pringle walks with his hands on his hips, watching as men push wheelbarrows around the side of the house. ‘Over here, boys,’ he says, pointing to the back of the garden, where other men push machines and smear cement. He is building a tennis-court.
‘Lumka, bhuti! Carefully, hey,’ Mike says when one of the men nearly tips cement onto the lawn. But Mike says it nicely, and he even jokes with them in Xhosa when they take their lunchbreak. He even sits and drinks coffee with them, and even from a tin mug like theirs. He is so nice, and to everyone. It doesn’t matter who he is talking to, he is always a very nice man, Julie thinks, watching him. And she would know. Isn’t he nice enough to build her this tenniscourt?
I’m so lucky! Julie thinks, as the men pick up their shovels and get back to work.
All afternoon she watches them and all afternoon she thinks how lucky she is to have a father like Mike Pringle. How did he even know she wanted a tennis-court? She didn’t even have to ask, she just pictured it in her mind and next thing you know, there are garden boys and builders everywhere, sharing a laugh with her dad while she watches.
A tennis-court. A tennis-court for tennis and also for fairies to play on.
The court takes shape underneath the shade of Table Mountain. Julie listens to the turtle-doves making their lazy afternoon sounds. When the shadows stretch, Mike Pringle hunts for his car keys. It’s time for Julie to go home.
The Promise
‘I promise to do my best. To love God and to serve my country. To help others. And to keep the Brownie Law.’ Julie chants her Promise and when she is finished she is asked to hold hands with her neighbours and start the group friendship squeeze. She is a Brownie now.
This moment has been top of Julie’s list for three months. She has wanted the brown uniform – brown hat, brown skirt, brown shirt, yellow necktie – ever since Tracy-Ann Pringle moved from Port Elizabeth and became her best friend. Tracy-Ann has a full sleeve of badges with little pictures on them – house, fire, ball, rope, music note.
Julie wants the badges because they are beautiful and she wants them because she wants to be the same as Tracy-Ann. Tracy-Ann has a beautiful and busy family and they live in an airy Constantia house with mint-coloured carpets and walls that look like bedspreads, covered with patterns made of fabric. Their lawn arrived in a special truck. Julie saw it get rolled on.
Mrs Pringle has a blond swinging bob that leaves a perfume taste after she hugs you. She is tremendously thin and is a judge in the Bokomo Baking competition, going to all the schools and tasting scones from all the individual ovens. She did not seem to notice that Julie’s scones were flat. ‘Delicious,’ she said to Julie, and winked.
Mr Pringle makes Julie shy because he is too handsome. He has gold cat eyes and exceptionally red lips. He has brown muscular arms, pink shirts with crocodiles on the pockets, legs without hair on them. He says ‘call me Mike.’
Mr Pringle call me Mike owns lots of companies – paper factories, chains of Stirrups steak houses – but he does lots of other things too like driving the Standard Five hockey team to Jonkershoek and directing the flower arranging at Julie and Tracy-Ann’s school for special occasions. Julie has seen him poke pincushion proteas into green sponge Oasis, teaching the mums and the teachers, talking about texture and colour and seeds because he is on the board of Kirstenbosch and he knows all about these things, he is even writing a book and doing the pictures himself. He is, as Julie’s teacher once said, a worthy man, though Julie does not quite understand the meaning of worthy, but it sounds good, strong; it sounds worthy.
The Handshake
‘Lend a hand.’ Julie chants the motto and steps back from the circle with the other Brownies, holding three fingers to her Brownie hat in the special Brownie way.
When she demonstrates this at home and explains how the Brownies’ international handshake is with the left hand, her father frowns and says it’s very strange this left-handed business. Julie says no it’s not and her father argues, saying since the time of Jesus and the time of Allah nobody in the world shakes with the left hand because the left hand is for wiping, the left hand is just plain wrong, left is sinister, it’s even called sinistra in Italy. Julie says rubbish but her father says this is a universal truth, she must ask the Jewish girls, ask the Muslim girls at her school if she doesn’t believe it, ask any of the African girls even, you don’t see them in Brownie uniforms now, do you? But Julie knows her father is just in a bad mood because he didn’t sell the show house today and anyway there is an Indian girl at Brownies who is even a leader.
Julie’s mom tells her father to shh and says who cares about God. Her father says it’s not God we’re talking about, it’s wiping, and her mother says why are we making lavatorial conversation? She asks Julie about the lady who runs the Brownie troop and Julie describes her grey curls and blue uniform, her British accent and the skin wobble under her chin. Sounds like a bit of a missionary scene if you ask me, her dad says, lighting a cigarette, but Julie defends Brown Owl and her deputy, Tawny Owl, because they welcomed her to Brownies and gave her a choice of being a tortoise or a dassie, Brown Owl pronouncing tortoises tor-toyce-es. Julie wanted to be a bush baby like Tracy-Ann, she knew their song by heart before she joined – We’re bush babies keen and bright, serving others day and night – but the bush babies are already six and all full up, so Julie is a tortoise. Here we are the tortoise six, helping others in a fix. ‘That’s a lovely song darling,’ her mother says, yawning. ‘What fun!’
But Brownies is not fun. The tortoise group project is making beaded tea cosies with periwinkle shells on the ends for an old people’s home. This is slow and boring. The whole tortoise group is slow and boring and the girls fight over beads and criticise each other’s cosies. Worse, Julie hardly even sees Tracy-Ann because, apart from being a bush baby and the leader of bush babies, Tracy-Ann is very important in the whole of their Brownie unit. She has jobs that take her out of the hall, and spends time talking one-to-one with Tawny Owl next to the juice trays, writing things on charts.
Julie’s first day is not good. After an hour spent with the tortoises on the cosies, she is supposed to select an activity and work towards earning her first Brownie badge, but she can’t focus. She wanders through the hall watching Brownies practise their skipping, watching them paint and plan projects of one kind or another. She watches a group making reef-knots. She goes over. She tries to make a knot. She makes half a knot but it’s not very good because her mind has already wandered, over to the music group, to the girl holding xylophones and recorders. A recorder! Julie lasts almost the whole morning with the recorder. She learns how to play d and b and a g. The girl in charge is called Izaan Strauss. She has freckles on her eyelids and is very good at recorder, she can even play ‘Sho-Sholoza.’ Izaan Strauss plays ‘Sho-Sholoza’ over and over again. Julie tries ‘Sho-Sholoza’ but she can’t get past the first three notes. She sniffs her recorder. It smells terrible! She wanders away.
In spite of the promising chant and uniform, Saturday mornings are a disappointment for Julie. They come and go, each as long and shapeless as the next. Julie wanders because she is bored and she wanders because she has always wandered, wherever she is. She has noticed that most girls her age do not wander. Most know what they are doing. They like where they are. This goes for the Brownies as well as the girls in her class. When the school photographer poses them, they never move, but Julie is always slightly blurred.
The Law
Brown Owl is very strict about badges. She is not like other Brown Owls in other units, that’s what Tracy-Ann says. In other units, it’s easy to get badges. You can get them fast, and before you know it, your sleeve is full. But the Brown Owl of Fernwood pack is tough. You have to take your time. You have to do much more to earn a badge. You have to prove yourself to be worthy.
Julie doesn’t like this information. She is disappointed in Brown Owl’s high standards and she doesn’t like the long lists in her Brownie badge book:
Nature Lover Badge:
Research the Six animals in the Brownie library. Describe their habitats, diets, reproduction habits, and record your findings in a colourful and imaginative way.
Think of five ways we can conserve water. Try them and share your methods with your six by giving a memorised talk.
Make two nature crafts from seeds, sticks, leaves, or other natural materials that you gather on your nature walks. Suggestions: a twig picture frame, a stick and seashell wind chime, a pine cone and peanut butter bird feeder, or seed pod Christmas decorations.
Select a small one foot squared plot of grass on your lawn. Each morning and evening for two weeks, spend twenty minutes examining what insects or other small animals travel across your plot. Record their movements in a chart, referencing appearance, locomotion speed, activities. (Is the ant carrying a crumb? Did the aphid pause to chew on a blade of grass?)
Find a local bird guide. In pencil, trace the pictures of five birds to be found in Southern Africa, taking care to label their defining features appropriately.
Julie still likes and wants the badges themselves. But she cannot choose a list and get through it. Nature Lover is not even the worst. To get the Sick Nurse badge, for instance, you must show how to use your scarf as an arm sling. You must demonstrate the Heimlich manoeuvre on another Brownie, and learn how to take someone’s pulse. That is just the beginning of Sick Nurse. To get the badge with the lovely compass shape there is also a lot to tick off. Julie reads about north and south and west and east. She reads about measuring distances and reading maps, about locating landmarks and giving directions. She thinks she could maybe learn to take a pulse and then draw one map. But that is not enough for a badge and anyway you can’t mix it up. You have to follow what Brown Owl says in the book, all the way to the end.
Calculate the distance between your home and the following: Bloubergstrand, Cape Point, Stellenbosch, Lion’s Head . . .
Julie stops reading when the lists get too long. Her eyes wander off – they just can’t stay on – the page.
Powwow
Though Julie dislikes Brownies, the powwow at the end of each meeting makes up for the meeting itself. She loves Brown Owl and Tawny Owl standing in front of the papier-maché toadstool with the girls around them in a circle. She loves the serious way of the words from Brown Owl’s mouth; praise, scolding, Julie is less concerned with what the Owl is saying and more concerned with how she says it, with an importance that Julie herself feels as she stands next to the others, everyone in their brown uniform, everything the same every time.
Sometimes Julie says ‘powwow’ to herself, out loud. The words give her a little puff, a little powwow.
The circle is fun. But Julie enjoys Brownies most of all when it is over, when Tracy-Ann’s father fetches them in the shiny microbus – the microbus full of the small watchful Pringle girls who have spindly brown legs, gold hair and red plump lips just like Tracy-Ann and her dad – the microbus bound for the minty Pringle rooms, for the blue bean-shaped pool, the lawn and tennis court, the homemade afternoon cakes and watercolour sets for everyone, the doll house. Doll’s house! This is Julie’s best. A doll’s house built by Mr Pringle with tiny knives and forks bought from overseas. Everyone plays with the Pringle doll’s house, even the Pringle mom and dad and when Julie sees Mr – sees Mike – Pringle set the miniature table with his slender beautiful fingers, she hates Tracy-Ann for looking so calm.
As for her own father, Julie has hoped he might learn a thing or two from Mike, but this has not happened. In fact, neither of her parents seems to understand the value of a Pringle life. If anything, they disapprove of the Pringle family. Julie cannot understand her mother, the flickering pale frowns from the bedroom window when Mike pulls up in the driveway to pick Julie up or drop her off. Julie tells her parents that Mr Pringle and Mrs Pringle, that Mike and Charlene are both extremely worthy people, they even have a foster son at home making bird houses in the garage with Mike’s tools, but her mother says nothing, she just rolls her pearl necklace between her fingers and her father stabs his cigarette end into the air and says there is something sinistra going on when a man that pretty knows what to do with a pincushion protea, if you catch my drift.
First-Year Star
‘For charity?’ Julie’s father frowns at the HeavenCent-A-Day piggy bank she has placed on the dinner table. ‘What kind of charity?’
Julie gets defensive. What does he mean, what kind? The poor kind, obviously.
‘You mean the church kind.’ Julie’s father looks at the cross on the pig’s back, next to the slot. ‘That’s not the poor kind if you ask me.’
But Julie fights back. So what if the church is organising the collection? In the end the money is going to go to the poor children of the townships who live in shacks and have nothing, this is what Brown Owl said. Dad says believe it when I see it but Julie doesn’t even bother to argue because it doesn’t matter what anyone believes or even where that money goes, what matters is getting that piggy bank filled up. Julie needs to get a badge, the Home Helper badge, and if she doesn’t collect one hundred one-cent pieces for the poor children of Africa, then she’s going to have some big problems on her hands, like getting dropped from Brownies, which means Tracy-Ann will find a new best friend, someone with badges coming out of her ears, someone with a name like Izaan Strauss, leader of the duiker six, who has finished all her paths, Footpath, Road, and Highway, and who will replace Julie on those after-Brownies visits to the Pringle house! No. Julie defends the piggy bank and the poor children for all they are worth and they are worth a lot. How nice to think of other people, her mother says, with a tired smile, and Julie agrees, thinking of others, thinking of the Pringle family.
‘I’m getting Water Baby,’ Tracy-Ann had announced to Julie as they lay on Tracy-Ann’s lawn the previous Saturday. ‘I learned mouth to mouth on a dummy. By the time we go to camp, I’ll be halfway down my second sleeve!’
Tracy-Ann smiles and Julie smiles back. Camp! Second sleeve! These are powerful words. Julie is very excited about the upcoming Brownie Pack Away camp in Buinskloof. In only three weekends she’ll be going away from home. She’ll be without her parents for the first time. And there will be no tea cosies, no boring Saturday in the cold Brownie hall. There will be tents. They will be outside. And Brown Owl has promised an activity that perks Julie up: each six will put on a special play for the others, performing in front of the campfire!
Julie can’t wait for the play. It sounds almost as thrilling as the camp badge ceremony, the court of awards that will be held in Buinskloof. By now, she has seen Brown Owl award many badges during the last powpow of each month when there is a court of awards. Julie has seen Brown Owl shake numerous girls’ left hands while presenting the badge with her right hand. She has watched Tawny show the proud Brownie where the patch must be sewn on the sleeve. Tawny looks closely at the sleeve, at the other badges there, and finds the exact right spot for the new award. In such exhilarating gold-thread-neat-square-left-handshake moments, Julie claps hardest of all the girls. In these moments, she forgets the lists and sees only the badges themselves. Brownies is so exciting! She vows to concentrate, to stop wandering from activity to activity, to stop doing just one bit of a list before switching to another list. She vows to work hard and get those squares for her own sleeve. Next week, Julie thinks, every week.
But lying next to Tracy-Ann this week on the Pringle lawn, Julie gets a shock: she has been a Brownie for ten months! Her First-Year Star is only two months away, meaning she will soon have a badge just for being a Brownie, just for showing up. A badge for nothing. But what happens when Brown Owl shakes her hand but Tawny sees her empty sleeve? What happens then?
‘I’m getting Home Helper,’ Julie lies to Tracy-Ann. She feels instantly bad for the lie but good about the decision. Saying it will make it happen.
Home Helper will be easiest, because you get to do it at home, away from the hall and its mix of choices. With that one you just take your book home with you and tick off a list of tasks you must do – making the beds in the house, washing dishes and clothes, cooking a meal, collecting old clothes and money for the poor. Then your parents sign the list and the badge is yours. ‘I nearly got it last week,’ Julie adds, ‘but I’ll get it at the camp ceremony.’
Saying it makes it real, gives her a quick happy jolt. She sees a Buinskloof mountain river, a sunset powwow circle. The solemn brown faces of mountains make the ceremony more sacred. Julie steps forward to receive her badge. Tracy-Ann claps hardest of all the girls. They are two best friends with badges.
Except that camp is not even a month away, and Julie has done nothing on the Home Helper list. She panics and plots. She regrets being so quick. She plucks out tufts of grass. It is very soft, this Pringle lawn. The blades are bright and tiny, the kind meant for golf. She puts them in her mouth.
‘Home Helper. That’s good,’ Tracy-Ann says, but her look is far away, her eyes gleam with second-sleeve shapes. Boat. Mountain. Telescope.
Julie chews the lawn, watching Tracy-Ann. Tracy seems to have no idea how little Julie has done at Brownies, and this must mean that she is already too far from Julie, she is on a Highway and speeding into the distance. In the beginning, she used to remind and encourage Julie and even sweetly lecture her, but lately she seems to have forgotten that Julie is even a Brownie at all, and who could blame her? Julie thinks, chewing hard.
If I go mad this month, if I make all the beds and do all the dishes and collect all the coins, I can get that badge in three weeks in Buinskloof, and if I get that badge in three weeks in Buinskloof then by the time I get my First-Year Star in two months, by the time the Tawny holds up that badge, points at my sleeve, and Brown Owl says well done Julie of the tor-toyce-es, there will be something on that sleeve and I will not get kicked out.
The Sign
‘I don’t think I remember how to do hospital corners.’ Julie’s mother stands in her dressing gown and pearls, and frowns at the Home Helper list of instructions. ‘Agnes makes beds so beautifully. She could show you.’
Julie’s stares with anger at the knot of sheets on her parents’ bed. How is she supposed to make a whole lot of beds the proper way if her own mother can’t show her how it’s done? And how are you supposed to make your parents’ bed when your mother is always sleeping in it! It’s all so unfair and Julie is itching to pick up the phone and call the Pringles and ask if they might come and fetch her so she might be in a pleasant place on a Sunday, for no way would the Pringles have all those greasy frying-pans in the sink when Agnes is off and mothers yawning and frowning in dressing gowns that they wear all day every day while fathers show houses in their suburb of Plumstead, which he calls Lower Constantia when he’s working. Where is Lower Constantia? Julie wants to know. How low does it go? It’s not real her father says and her mother says yes it is, Lower Constantia absolutely exists as distinct from Plumstead, but Julie’s father just laughs when they have this conversation. And when Julie asks again how low, he says all the way down, my girl, all the way ...
If she were Tracy-Ann, she wouldn’t have to ask such questions of course, because she would live in Constantia-Constantia and live a Pringle kind of life with Charlene and Mike who neither frown nor wander nor oversleep, who help you with everything and answer things before you ask like what is a hospital corner, and this is why all the Pringles are so happy and good-looking and good at everything, this is why Tracy-Ann is a top Brownie, because her parents know what they are doing, they are running a tight ship. That’s what Brown Owl would say. She often talks about ships in the powwows, about everyone being on board and working together to get somewhere. She likes all hands on deck. She likes charting courses. Sometimes they might even play the ship game when the Owl is in an energetic mood. Port! Starboard! The Brownies run from one side of the hall to the other as the Owl calls out the words, but Julie often gets her directions mixed up. She runs to starboard when she should be at port, and this means she must sit out the round and watch.
Julie leaves the bed sheets in a hump and stomps out of the room. She sees an angry sea and a leaky boat, her father smoking and stabbing at the air with the tip of his cigarette. ‘Bit of a storm there if you ask me,’ he says, as the sea washes in.
Lend a Hand
‘Hey, Agnes, can you show me something?’ Julie doesn’t even have her school satchel off her shoulder yet. Agnes is in the kitchen wiping pots with a lappie.
‘Wait,’ Agnes says. ‘I’m busy.’
‘Come on, man,’ Julie begs. She pulls Agnes by the arm. ‘I’ve been waiting for you all weekend. You must come quickly.’
In Julie’s room Agnes does not see an emergency and wants to know why she must come up? The room is neat and clean. Agnes has cleaned it as usual, making the bed, dusting and hanging up the clothes. Julie pulls the bed sheets into a mess and asks Agnes to start again, to do it nicely while she watches, but Agnes gets cross and says ‘Who do you think you are? You are just a little girl, you are not my madam.’
Agnes is so cross she doesn’t even wait for Julie to explain; she has already gone and called Julie’s mom and is telling her that Julie is being very naughty and by the time Julie’s mom gets up from her afternoon snooze and comes into the room, Julie is crying. ‘I am not a naughty girl!’ she shouts at Agnes. She feels slightly scared of Agnes because Agnes hardly ever gets cross, she is a very quiet kind of maid, but now she is shaking her head and has even said some words in Xhosa, which is always a bad sign.
‘I think she just needs your help, Agnes,’ Julie’s mom says. ‘Don’t you, lovey? Tell Agnes nicely what you would like her to show you.’
But for some reason Julie can’t ask Agnes to show her how to make the bed. She is frightened by the way Agnes became so angry with her so fast. Julie’s dad has said Agnes can be cheeky when she’s not getting things her way, but Julie does not understand why Agnes is so extremely angry about the bed even now while Julie’s mom has explained the story behind what Julie wants. Except that even her mother doesn’t know what Julie really wants, that she needs to get this badge so she will not lose her seat on the Pringle microbus and can continue to speed away after Brownies with her very best friend, up and away to Constantia-Constantia forever. But how do you explain this to your mother? At this rate, Julie thinks, I will never learn hospital corners.
The Brownie Smile
‘We could use some help in defeating these Boers,’ Julie says. ‘Let’s round up all the young boys and use them as messengers in this war so that we may triumph in this Siege of Mafeking. Yes!’ Julie claps her hands together. ‘Let boys join the effort. We should not shelter our children. We should teach them to be brave. For the sake of England and her Queen. For her African land!’
Julie finished her lines in the deep booming voice she has chosen and looks around at her fellow tortoises for approval. Everyone seems to think she is very convincing as Lord Baden-Powell, the inventor of the Cub Scouts. Julie folds her script, puts it down on the bare wood floor of the Brownie hall. For the first time as a Brownie, Julie is enjoying herself.
When she speaks her lines, she feels as if there is a smile inside her stomach, twisting and settling. The Pack Away play night is going to be a hit, especially the tortoise part. The Brownies are to perform the history of Brownies; each six has been given a summary of a section of the story. It is up to them to research their piece of the story and find ways to present their bit well, so that on performance night, the other Brownies will all be entertained and the full history of the Cub Scouts, Girl Guides, and Brownies will reveal itself in front of the campfire.
Julie looks at the rest of her tortoise six with new eyes, with the sort of fondness she feels for real tortoises. The tortoises are not clever or interesting, but they chose her to be Lord Baden-Powell and Julie is grateful. Something about pretending to be the man makes her calm and excited at the same time. When she is Baden-Powell she can forget about the problems of Home Helper, forget about unmade beds and all those dishes she could never hope to do in time for the awards ceremony. Dishes and beds and homes are not important to Baden-Powell. He is focused on trenches and tents and striding up and down in the bush with binoculars looking for the Afrikaner enemy.
Julie loves thinking about this play, about the way in which Brownies came to be, inspired by the great Baden-Powell, a brave and good man who made children important. She has seen pictures of Baden-Powell. He has a wide beige moustache, and a big head with a hard white hat like a shell. She has only seen a picture of him from the chest up, but Julie feels she has seen the whole of him. He has hairless Mike Pringly shiny legs in khaki shorts and a large African walking-stick. He has goldy skin, brown muscular arms, and very red, Pringly lips. Julie cannot wait to be Baden-Powell in Buinskloof – just two weekends away – waving his stick at all the Brownies and telling them what is what. And though she doesn’t know quite how yet, she knows that on the night of the performance she is going to do something extra, something to make her Baden-Powell stand out and be a crowd-pleaser so those Brownies and Owls see her with new eyes.
And who knows, maybe Brown Owl will be so moved she might even slap on an extra badge, the Drama Bug, with its cute little happy and sad masks their upturned and down-turned mouths stitching tears and laughter in gold embroidery down Julie’s arm ...
Julie wanders off for a drink of water, or at least that’s what she says. Mostly she wants to eavesdrop on the bush babies, on Tracy-Ann and her group to see how their acting is going. She passes by and hears Tracy-Ann, her voice high and whiny. Tracy-Ann is meant to be Juliette ‘Daisy’ Gordon-Low, the lady who invented Girl Scouts and Brownies after meeting Baden-Powell, Daisy who went deaf because she got a grain of rice stuck in her ear on her wedding day.
Passing Tracy, Julie hears a feeble Daisy voice. It’s a little bit shocking to hear Tracy-Ann being bad at something, but Julie figures it’s because Tracy-Ann is so good and successful at being herself she can’t be good at being someone else.
Home Helper. First-Year Star. And Baden-Powell. Pack Away camp is going to make Julie into a successful Brownie! And as Tracy-Ann shakes her head to get the imaginary rice grain out of her ear, Julie is happy. Sometimes even a tortoise is better than a bush baby.
The Friendship Squeeze
‘Not this weekend,’ Tracy-Ann says at school. ‘Sorry.’
Julie is dumbfounded. The metal taste of her Marmite sandwich rises at the back of her throat. What? No Saturday after-Brownies playing at the Pringle house? No lolling on the golf grass, no making doll’s house dustbins from thimbles? Why?
Tracy-Ann’s not telling. She doesn’t seem cross, but there is a tight and pinchy look in her face, a sad secret hidden in her skin. It takes a moment, but when Tracy-Ann turns away and glides up to the classroom, Julie knows.
She knows that Tracy-Ann knows.
Tracy-Ann knows Julie isn’t truly earning her Home Helper badge, she knows Julie has been lying through her teeth from the beginning and that no amount of bed-making since her lie is enough, because a whole month of beds, dishes, laundry, one-cent pieces and cooking an entire family meal is too much, so Julie’s parents are helping her fib, fudging numbers of beds and plates, adding their signatures to lists of things that never got folded or cleaned up, at least not by Julie. Tracy-Ann is not stupid. Julie has broken her Promise. She is not doing her best. And it makes Tracy-Ann sad.
Julie gets sweaty. She is amazed at herself. All that wasted time, all that wandering around as if your own best friend doesn’t have choices of her own she could make, and why shouldn’t she when she’s on a Highway and you are way behind on a Footpath lying to keep up, why shouldn’t she give you up? And something much worse occurs to Julie. Didn’t Mike and Charlene seem slightly sad too, last Saturday? Wasn’t there something a little bit funny in the air when Julie went over to play?
She sees Mike and Charlene looking sorrowful but firm as they sit with Tracy-Ann in the kitchen, having a heart-to-heart. Maybe they are saying the kind of things Brown Owl says to the circle – that the road of life is about choosing right from wrong and staying on your path. Maybe once they encouraged Tracy-Ann to take pity on those less fortunate than ourselves in Plumstead. But maybe now they are saying that other Brown Owl thing, that one about helping those who help themselves, not helping those who cheat.
The bell rings. Is it too late, Julie wonders, to find a way out? This is the last weekend before the Buinskloof camp and badge ceremony. What would be the right path to choose now? Let the lie stand and hope that with the new neat square on her sleeve she will look better and the Pringles can forget how the badge got there and just admire the sleeve instead, its gold house-shaped stitching? Or would it be better to confess right there in the circle, tell everyone what happened, fall down in front of the toadstool and ask for forgiveness and a second chance? I promise to do my best. To . . .
Julie is getting carried away. Tracy-Ann couldn’t know about the lie, she decides. Tracy-Ann’s pinchy hiding look and the cancelled weekend playing can’t have anything to do with Home Helper. The secret must be simpler than that: Mike and Charlene sadly sitting at the kitchen table talking about goals and thinking of Julie’s parents in their badly paved Plumstead driveway, their Plumstead faces as blank and unfriendly as walls. Tracy, the road of life requires good paving. Wouldn’t it be nice for Tracy-Ann to widen her friendship circle, invite a new Brownie home for a change?
A Good Turn
Now that Julie knows whose fault it is she has a sudden, new focus. She no longer has the wandering feeling. Her plan is complicated, but she is going to get really organised and do it all. She is going to fix things up.
She assesses the Home Helper list. She has enough signatures next to the drawings of beds and dishes, but there are other things besides signatures that she needs, things she must give to Brown Owl. And there are only six days left.
Julie shakes the HeavenCent-A-Day piggy bank at the dining room table. Its nearly hollow belly gives off a pathetic rattle, as if someone had already emptied it and accidentally left coins in. With a pang for the Pringles Julie realises she has neglected the poor. The truth is that neither Julie nor anyone else in the family has made their contribution more than a couple of times. It all went wrong very fast. Julie’s dad had said a few coppers are meaningless and on day three he tried to put in a shiny fifty cents, but it was too big for the slot, and Julie got cross when he slid in some smaller silver coins. The cents are supposed to show a daily thought, she explained, and putting other coins in goes against the rules – it is not on the list and anyway, Brown Owl says it all adds up in the end, and most important, it’s the thought that counts. The thought that counts? Julie’s dad laughed. Tell that to the guy in the shack! And that was the end of that.
So the pig is empty. But never mind, Julie thinks. She is clear and sharp.
She is clear on the business of Izaan, that while Tracy-Ann got into the microbus on her own yesterday after Brownies, Izaan Strauss surely got driven to Tracy-Ann’s house. Mike Pringle must have told Tracy-Ann it would be horrible to hurt Julie’s feelings by giving Izaan Strauss a lift, but Julie isn’t stupid, and that’s why she must now work extra hard. This knowledge pushes her each night at bedtime as she reads and rereads the Baden-Powell speech that she has written and researched herself. This is also a part of the plan. She knows that a perfectly memorised part on Pack Away performance night will show Tracy-Ann and everyone else. That plus Home Helper will seal the deal.
‘Loose change.’ She bears down on her father in passages and doorways, in the lounge and in the car on her way to school. She demands money and her father says what’s this, highway robbery in my own house? But there’s never enough loose change, never enough one cents.
‘Bank,’ Julie barks at her father. He pretends to be annoyed, but he laughs and promises anyway, and she knows at the end of the week he will produce rolls of one-cent pieces and wave them around on Friday, saying okay little missionary, here’s your gift from God.
The final chore in her notebook – clothing collection – is easy. Julie slinks around bathrooms and bedrooms after supper and before school, snatching from dark cupboards – old holey tracksuit trousers, Woolworths jerseys, it doesn’t matter what, only how much. Late Friday night she pauses in her parents’ doorway waiting to hear their regular sleep breaths before she can steal in and pick up what she wants most of all. And when she darts out, thrusting it into the black plastic bag in her hands, she feels the pleasure of accomplishment. She is finally—as the tortoise song says she must –helping others in a fix. And she’s also helping herself. Which feels at least two steps up from the usual tortoise tea-cosy work.
The Path
Sun streams through the house in yellow blocks, so much sun that Julie feels sick. She has been up since the deep blue of early morning, packing her camp kitbag, making and re-making her bed, and cleaning cleaning cleaning because today, Saturday, she cannot leave anything for Agnes. Today she is leaving home for camp and bringing the Home Helper proof to Brown Owl. But Home Helper has nothing to do with why she is cleaning. Julie is cleaning because the Pringle microbus is arriving in thirty minutes. Once again, it’s coming to pick Julie up, and even if the Pringles do not approve of Julie anymore, they would not leave her behind, not today of all days, when the Buinskloof camp begins and Mr – and Mike – Pringle is one of the camp drivers.
Julie has swept the kitchen floor of crumbs and dried peas. She has mopped the dark entrance hall and pushed coats into cupboards. Everything looks good. Her father will look good because he has a show house and will be in a suit. And her mother will have no choice but to put something on, some proper clothes, and come downstairs. Julie has made sure of that and she knows that her mother is getting the message, thudding around in her room saying ‘It’s always hanging on the door, I just don’t understand where it has gone.’
But she will understand, Julie thinks as she makes coffee for the first time in her life, turning on the kettle. Her mother will understand soon enough and she will also have to come down to say goodbye, she will have to come down in clothes and have coffee with Mike, who himself will understand over coffee with Julie’s nicely dressed parents in their clean kitchen, that Julie is okay, that she is not a Pringle but she is doing her best and the house isn’t so bad on the inside, not so bad after all. And while Mike is finding this out, Julie will make sure that Tracy-Ann has seen her neatly made bed and spotless room and then Tracy-Ann will look at Julie with the look of a Brownie and a best friend and everything will be the way it used to be with Julie back on that Pringle lawn by next week.
But Mike is late and he looks like he has just woken up himself. His hair is shooting off in different directions, he has bits of white dry spit in the corners of his mouth, and Julie is slightly embarrassed to see him this way, with his hair all spiky and a crusty morning mouth. With her own father this sort of thing is to be expected. But with Mike Pringle it feels somehow rude, something you shouldn’t see. Like watching him on the loo. Julie looks away. Mike apologises: there is not time for coffee, there is not even time even for Tracy-Ann to get out of the car. Julie shouts to her mother to come down, but her mother says I’m not dressed and would you come up to say goodbye, darling.
Mike heaves Julie’s kitbag and into the microbus boot. Julie stands in front of her front door. Mike comes back to the door get her black plastic bag of Home Helper donation clothes. ‘Have you said your goodbyes?’ he asks her.
She stands and blinks. They haven’t even left, but already everything has gone wrong.
The Vow
Things are worse at the Brownie hall. Julie hands Brown Owl the clothes for the poor and the signed Home Helper book, so that Brown Owl can lock everything away and know to take a Home Helper badge to Buinskloof for Julie during the badge ceremony. But where is the money for Julie’s HeavenCent-A-Day contribution? An egg grows in Julie’s throat. A large hard egg. She has forgotten! She has forgotten to get the money from her father, and in forgetting, she has paid for not saying goodbye to her parents and for lying to Mr Pringle about it. Julie stares at Brown Owl’s chin flap. She knows the only right path now is the wrong one.
‘I have it,’ she lies to Brown Owl. ‘Right next to my bed. It’s full. I just forgot it. Please Brown Owl,’ she begs. ‘Can I get the badge anyway?’ But Brown Owl tells her that she has a lesson to learn, one cannot simply have the badge on one’s sleeve without completing one’s tasks. And so one cannot remain a privileged visitor at a particular Brownie’s home. Julie hears this beneath Brown Owl’s words – that a Brownie must always Be Prepared, for that is the motto and if one is not properly ready in one’s life one cannot expect to be rewarded by a Pringle kind of life. There has to be a forfeit.
Julie begs Brown Owl. She swears on her Brownie Honour she will fetch the money immediately on return from camp. Tracy-Ann is across the room. Julie looks past Brown Owl at Tracy-Ann’s remote eyes and she sees a sign of the future: Julie’s one-year Brownie anniversary will mark the end of everything. She can see it quite clearly, the way the world tumbles and slips away at the Owls’ first sighting of her empty sleeve. ‘What kind of Brownie are you?’ they will want to know. ‘What have you ever done for anyone?’
Pack Away
‘Girls, be sure you are ready to perform at seven tonight,’ Brown Owl says. They are having an outside powwow. Julie’s bottom is chilly, as though she has something extra growing on it. The ground is damp and the air is a bleary grey at Buinskloof, the river noisy and dark with early winter. But Julie doesn’t mind. She smiles at Brown Owl, for Brown Owl has agreed to give her the Home Helper badge after all, she is letting Julie stay on her path provided the piggy bank be given back to Brown Owl within one week. Julie is fine with promising this, and she is fine with most anything, she was even fine with the fact that there was no room for her in the Pringle microbus on the way to Buinskloof because the bus was full up with bush babies so Julie and the rest of the tortoises had to go in the Brownie bus with the duikers, with Izaan Strauss in the front seat and Tawny Owl driving, Izaan playing her recorder the whole way there.
But Julie feels very good about everything, even the fact that she can’t share the dorm with Tracy-Ann – that the bush babies have to room with the dassies. She doesn’t mind because this time tomorrow the badge will be hers and Tracy-Ann will stop being sad and complicated and quiet, she will stop being those things even sooner when she sees Julie’s Baden-Powell performance in only a few hours.
Baden-Powell at the campfire!
Marshmallows after!
Julie gets a powwow at the thought. She has her costume ready, the khaki shorts and socks, the walking-stick, the false moustache. She has memorised the lines she wrote and thrown in a few extra. Because of this night Julie doesn’t even mind the food they have to eat, the egg sandwiches for lunch. She doesn’t even mind the spaghetti that will be made in the main hut this evening. She has seen the giant metal pot filled with red slosh tomato and it was bad, but not bad enough to make her feel bad.
‘And we will have a guest audience tonight,’ Brown Owl continued her announcements. ‘Brownie Troop 122 of Parow North will be joining us around the campfire for the play.’ Julie’s throat is tight and coated with hardness as though she swallowed a straw and it got stuck on the way. The rest of the day, its meals and songs, its leadership games and mountain walk, all merge together and flow past like a river until the end actually gets there. The fire. The visiting Brownie pack arriving from their bungalows further down the camp. There is tea. There are marshmallows, their scented paleness strange, the taste so particular and heavy that Julie feels almost revolted even as she reached to stuff more into her mouth. Marshmallows are hardly ever around. At least not at Julie’s house.
And the play arrives, after all these weeks and this whole long day, the play is here.
Tawny Owl announces the first pack on, in order of historical events. The dassies begin and pretend to be Boers and English, pretend to fight each other and they do it badly and boringly, and now it’s Julie up there and everyone is looking at her and clapping, the visiting Brownies too, dark faces with flickers of red from the fire. There is a little fire in Julie’s own tummy as her voice fills the fierce air and the wind smacks her kneecaps, exposed and red in the pale shorts of Baden-Powell. When she walks around the circle twirling her big moustache, even Brown Owl laughs.
‘We could use some help defeating these Boers.’ Julie says her words as if each is a round ripe peach that she has plucked off a tree. Her voice is a command and the audience, after the soft whispery stage mewls of dassies, sits and listens. And now Julie fully understands what it means to do something for others. She wants to give them more than just her scripted words. She wants to give them everything she’s got, make them laugh, make them remember her forever, not just Tracy-Ann but all of them, all the Brownies in the world.
‘We’ve got to nail those Afrikaners.’ Julie improvises to make her words more powerful. ‘Get the Dutchmen out of here!’ she adds. From the circle around her, she hears some laughter and it pushes her on. ‘Let’s blast those crunchies to high heaven!’ She shouts in a posh, hot-potato Brown Owl sort of accent and now there’s a lot of laughter because she used that silly funny word, and she is sure she can hear Tracy-Ann hysterical, even the Owls are smiling at the rudeness of it.
‘Let’s get our boys involved!’ Baden-Powell continues, striding back and forth around the campfire, his long socks perfectly pulled up around his nut-brown hairless legs as he shakes his finger at the tortoise troops gathered to listen to his command. ‘Let’s push those Boers out of the bush!’ He stands, rooted to history, to the earth below his feet, God watching from above. Everyone loves him, loves his ideas. He now knows that when he was born nobody noticed, but when he dies the world won’t forget.
There is clapping when Julie finishes her speech, but when she bows and looks up, when she is Julie again, she worries that maybe some of the Parow North visiting troop are Afrikaans and that their feelings are hurt. They don’t seem to be clapping as hard. Most of them look black to Julie, but maybe they’re coloured. If they are black, they would speak Xhosa, she concludes and they would hate the crunchies just as much as Baden-Powell, maybe more. They would be clapping like mad if they were. But didn’t her father say there’s no such thing as a black Brownie? And if they are coloured they would probably speak Afrikaans, Julie knows that. Except don’t coloureds hate the Afrikaners?
She is confused. In this light, it’s too hard to see what those Brownies are and even in the day sometimes coloureds can be so dark you can’t tell. Or so light you can’t tell. And even when they speak you can’t always tell either what they are, they might be Englishy sort of coloureds with klonkie accents because they live in grakkie lower-class places like Parow, which is so much lower than even Lower Constantia. Why is it all so unclear?
But one thing is, at least, very clear: Izaan Strauss is offended, her arms folded across her chest. Julie definitely couldn’t care less if she has offended Izaan. That would be a bonus prize, because if Izaan knows that Brownies were born to get rid of Afrikaners in the first place, maybe she wouldn’t strut around quite so much and instead feel grateful that people like Julie and Tracy-Ann even let her in the Fernwood pack at all!
Yes, Julie thinks, bowing again and returning to sit in the audience. Afrikaners should be grateful they are even allowed to play the recorder in a Brownie pack. But Julie has a sour taste in her mouth, a feeling worse than lying, a feeling she has done something really wrong, forgotten something really important because Tracy-Ann is up on stage and suddenly she doesn’t want to act, says she doesn’t feel well, is walking off stage and Tawny has her arm around Tracy’s shoulders and now it all makes sense, what Julie has forgotten.
Tracy’s mother! Her name, Charlene. And all the other clues: a judge in the Bokomo Baking competition, that dark-skin-green-eyed-certain-sort-of-look. These are small things but things Julie should know, did once even know – these are signs of being Afrikaans. Even though her voice is soft and not very crunchie at all, Julie can’t believe that Charlene’s Charleneness slipped her mind. Her own mother has even said it when commenting on her when Tracy-Ann first came to Julie’s school. Anglo-Afrikaner. The ones who do not live in Durbanville. The ones who know to avoid face-brick on their houses. Whose husbands or wives are English. But they can never truly pass, Julie’s mother explained. You can always tell. The kind of haircuts they give their sons. And even if they speak nicely most of the time, they still say sies and come with. Charlene Pringle. Why can’t Julie ever focus?
As the bush babies fumble around trying to tell Daisy Low’s bit of history without Tracy-Ann, Julie sits in the dark. She can’t understand how it is she can know things and yet not know them at the same time. But everything gets so muddy, so complicated, with Afrikaans people in Constantia speaking English ... could she not say that to Tracy-Ann by way of excusing herself ? Won’t Tracy forgive her?
Bad luck. Julie blames bad luck. Why couldn’t she have got to be Daisy Low instead, the Girl Guide American lady? If she had been deaf Daisy she could have amused Tracy, which is all she really wanted to do, which was the main point in the first place. Daisy Low, with the rice grain in her ear, that could have been so fun to act. And Tracy-Ann with her two good ears would have laughed and laughed and cheered but now she is gone from the ring and Julie is alone and later, in her bunk, after Tracy-Ann has refused to speak to her, Julie will lie there and for the first time she is away from her parents, and she should be happy, this should be exactly where she wants to be, where she has wanted to be for a long time. But instead she thinks of bad luck Baden-Powell and wishes he had never been born. She is glad he’s dead, but it doesn’t help her now. He was right: the whole world would remember him forever, especially Julie of the Fernwood tortoise six.
Road and Highway
‘Let’s have a song, Izaan,’ Mike suggests. He is behind the wheel of his microbus and they are speeding away down the N2 home to Cape Town from the camp. For once, Julie wishes she wasn’t put in this Pringle microbus with Tracy-Ann; however, Tawny had rearranged the home lifts and put Julie in with Tracy-Ann and Izaan.
Izaan plays ‘I Zigga Zoomba’ on her recorder and the girls in the bus start to sing, but Tracy-Ann in the front seat keeps her mouth shut and her eyes on the road ahead. Tracy-Ann has barely spoken to Julie since the play, and she wasn’t even at the court of awards when Julie received her Home Helper – she was sick in her dorm or at least that’s what she told everyone, that she had a headache and didn’t feel like doing anything. The Owls fussed around her for this was so unlike Tracy-Ann, but Julie avoided her. She didn’t want to hear Tracy say that she didn’t like seeing Julie make fun of her mother. She didn’t want Tracy to look at her and say ‘What kind of friend are you?’
I-zigga-zoomba-zoomba-zoomba, I-zigga-zoomba-zoomba zay. The sky is the colour of hot metal. In the distance Table Mountain is as blue as a summer plum and its famous tabletop shape isn’t there, not yet at least because the road has to curve first before the mountain turns and angles itself into its line, the flat long top with Devil’s Peak on its left hand side, Devil’s Peak always a bit scary to Julie, always a bit not right. She hears her father’s word. Not right, but left. Sinistra.
She stuffs her mouth full of pink marshmallows. She has eaten ten already today, plus three cream soda fizzers and three strawberry, but she can’t stop. She won a whole bag of sweets with the tortoises during a stepping-stone exercise next to the river, but Helen Curtain, another tortoise, didn’t want her marshmallows so Julie got double. She stuffs them in. Her stomach tightens and she sees the mountain turn and change, the richness coating her insides with a clammy pink, like a sticky hand gripping her from the inside out. And she sees her mother’s face in Lower Constantia, waiting for her, and the uneven paving of her driveway. The other girls sing, in rounds, and the alternating lines mix and tumble and make Julie dizzy. Hold them down, you Zulu warrior. Hold them – hold them down. Down.
Julie wants to say she is sorry to Tracy-Ann, and she is sorry, but she can only stare into the white light of the sun shining off bits of broken glass near the airport. Shacks flick by, reflecting the sun back at itself and at Julie, a million bright roofs that hurt her head. There is another deep sorry feeling in her stomach somewhere next to all the bubbling pink. She tries to name the feeling but she doesn’t know what it is, she has never felt it before. And now it is rising, thick in her throat.
‘Can you stop the car?’ she mumbles to Mike. Hold them down, you Zulu warrior. ‘Stop the car,’ she repeats. Hold them down, you Zulu chief chief chief, but Julie doesn’t think she can hold it down a second longer and before Mike has even properly pulled off the road, Julie runs from the car and into the bushes beside the airport road.
Into the bush, she vomits a stream of bright spongey spit, its haunting sweet sickness will live beneath her lips for days to come, the pink pool at her feet a surprise, something she never knew was in her but now is clear and shocking. She is sick. She is homesick.
There is a rustle. Julie pulls herself up. Someone is watching her. He steps out from the bushes, white clay paint on his face. An amaKwetha. They stare at each other. Julie has seen them often, the amaKwethas on the airport road, teenage Xhosa boys doing their rite of passage, living in huts alone away from their families to show they are grown-ups. Julie wipes her mouth, steps back over torn thorn bushes, snagged rubbish bags, watching the amaKwetha. He is half naked and has white clay on his body and old takkies on his feet. She has always liked spotting these boy-men from the car, like they were a lucky charm, like they were a good I-Spy sighting, a blinking second of white face as the car whipped past. Up close it is not the same. Up close they watch you back.
The amaKwetha looks at the pink vomit on the dust and walks away.
Quiet Sign
Tracy-Ann is not at Brownies the following week, nor the one after. She seems to avoid Julie at school too. She doesn’t say much and Julie bides her time too, avoiding Tracy-Ann. She is afraid saying sorry won’t be enough, but if she doesn’t say it, it still holds the promise of being enough. If she doesn’t say it, it might still work when she does.
‘I’m busy,’ Tracy-Ann says when Julie asks her during small break why she hasn’t been coming to Brownies.
At home, Julie wonders out loud to her parents even though she knows they won’t have anything helpful to say. Her father never has anything helpful to say, like when Julie told him about the coloured Brownies from Parow and didn’t most coloureds speak Afrikaans? Her father laughed and said if they speak Xhosa then they’re blackies not brownies, man, and I don’t care what costume they’re wearing.
And when Tracy-Ann goes on not arriving at Brownies Julie thinks maybe now she has ruined Brownies for Tracy-Ann too. She writes a proper apology, puts it on Tracy’s desk on Thursday at school. Except Tracy doesn’t come to school that day.
‘Their house is on the market,’ her father tells her that night. ‘A low price. A price more fit for Lower Constantia.’ Julie puts her fork and knife neatly together on her plate although she has not finished her food. Even though she is about to get her First-Year Star, even though the little gold star shape is waiting to go onto her sleeve in a matter of days, she knows the good part of Brownies is gone.
‘I miss my old dressing-gown,’ her mother says. ‘I still don’t know where it went.’
The Grand Salute
After Tracy-Ann moved away, she sent Julie a postcard from Port Elizabeth. She couldn’t explain properly because it was private, but they had to move, she said. Back to the Eastern Cape where they were from. She was sorry she didn’t say goodbye. She said she thought Julie was a good Baden-Powell. That she was sorry she felt too sick to say so at the time.
Other children talked at school. Mr Pringle had lost all his money. Someone’s mother was on the board at Kirstenbosch and someone else’s mother did flowers with Mr Pringle for school events. They all knew things that Julie had never heard of. Odd words floated around. Embezzling. Things to do with Mr Pringle and getting too rich from the chain of Stirrups steak houses he owned. Things to do with the government and breaking the law. Julie was shocked and confused about Mike, but even more than that she felt a deep relief she wasn’t in trouble for talking about crunchies as Baden-Powell. Embezzling, whatever that was, could not be as bad as if Tracy-Ann really hated her for being mean.
Still, embezzling was a bad-sounding word and it sounded so completely out of place in a Pringle life, as wrong and out of place as if some amaKwetha just showed up and decided to set up his ritual hut on the Pringle tennis court.
Julie asks her parents about embezzling. They are in the car on the way to Brownies where Julie will get her First-Year Star. ‘And why did Mike put his money in the laundry anyway?’ Julie asks. Victoria Clarke’s mother had said something about this laundry business, making Julie worry for Mike and all the Pringles. She knows the government is bad and cruel, her parents always say so, but she didn’t know they could really punish you for laundering your own rand in the machine!
‘It refers to stealing. Stealing and lying,’ her mother says in a high, queenly voice. ‘Mr Pringle evidently stole and lied.’
Julie’s father takes a different road, up into the high wide curves of Constantia, winding shady loops lined with oaks. He slows down near the Pringle house.
Julie watches as the tennis court peeps from the back of the house, a new green concrete rectangle fresh and unused. She heard that the government came for everything, cleared the Pringles out. Repossession. Took even the forks and knives from their kitchen. She wonders whether they took the doll’s house too, carried off its miniature forks and knives. Without its minty curtains and covered pelmets visible in the big windows the house looks empty, its windows nude. But at least the lawn is still there, as green as a golf course and grown in now; you could no longer see its roll-on lines.
Julie stares into the grass as her parents argue about the Pringles, her dad saying Ag, it means nothing, and come on, since when did cooking the books become such a crime in this place? He points his cigarette at the house. Yes the man was a bit dodgy and definitely a bit precious but poor bugger, now he’s probably living in some storrosh. Shame! Even my heart is bleeding a bit of lumpy custard.
Stealing and lying. Julie still can’t believe this of Mike. A worthy man. That’s what her teacher had called him. She says it out loud in the car, but now that word sounds as hollow as the house looks and her father says I don’t know about that and I always knew there was something sinistra going on. Still, poor oke, man.
Julie’s mother sighs, touching the pearls at her neck. The Pringles’ dark roof flashes with sun. Julie thinks of Charlene and her perfume smell, and the way she had winked at Julie during the baking competition and pronounced her scones to be very nice even though they were as flat as pancakes. She looks at the house and then at the HeavenCent-A-Day piggy bank on the seat next to her, which she still has not given to Brown Owl, the piggy bank hollow until this morning when her dad unloaded the bankrolls of one-cent-pieces into its slot. This is absolutely your last chance, Julie, says Brown Owl, chin jiggling. If it’s not here next week you will forfeit your star.
Julie thinks of her own lies and of whether she actually stole her Home Helper badge. She also feels confused about the piggy bank. Would it have made her a better person to cheat with rolls of coins to help the poor or give the piggy bank back to Brown Owl and tell the truth, tell her that they don’t much care about any of this business, that Julie is a Brownie for other reasons?
She wonders if all of this makes her as bad as a Mike Pringle because she is just a child and surely if she starts now she will only get worse. She broke her Promise. She didn’t choose right from wrong. She never kept the Brownie law, not even for her first year. Considering all the wrong things she did, she should be extra happy to think of the one badge she actually did earn, the First-Year Star. It is the only badge she deserves because she may have broken all the laws but she has been a Brownie for a year. She has shown up and no one can say any different, even if Brown Owl didn’t give it, it would still be hers.
Except getting badges is not the same without Tracy-Ann there, without Tracy getting more badges to add to her sleeve of badges, a new picture to add to all the other pictures. House, fire, ball, rope, music note. The gold-thread mermaid for Water Baby. Without Tracy-Ann, without Mike, really everything is gone.
The house swims in Julie’s eyes and she has that wandering feeling again, that feeling of never being in one place, of never being able to stay somewhere long enough. Nothing is still, not even houses.
Almost a First-Year Star. Almost a year of showing up, but this time she knows she can’t.
Julie cries. Her father pats her leg and says it’s a nice house, a gracious Constantia home. She keeps crying, and her mom is speaking too, saying a lovely, worthy house. And the Pringles had a super time in it, didn’t they?