MY MOTHER DIED BEFORE I COULD MURDER HER

CHAPTER 4

Ths kite and the bike.

I spent more time in the back yard with Alice and Morris than I did in the house. It was so great to hang out with Morris as he went about his chores, and listen to his stories of animals: lions, zebras, and meerkats. He taught me things. He taught me how to brush my teeth with a little water and cigarette ash to keep them as white and sparkling as his. Mostly I had to use toothpaste, unless I salvaged ash from the ashtrays dotted around the house. My dad and mom and all their friends seemed to smoke a lot, but I couldn’t stand the smell of the ashtrays so unless Morris gave me some ash, I’d give it a miss.

     He also showed me how to roll a smoke in brown paper. He was the master at this and rolled with one hand.

     The stove in our kitchen was a small two-plate, coal-burning stove and it was one of Morris’ many jobs to make sure that there was always coal in the stove and in the coal cellar. Morris loved to draw and if he didn’t have any blank writing paper, he’d draw across the newspaper or on brown paper. He had an endless supply of charcoal that he made himself and I felt as if I were sharing in the artists’ trade secrets when I watched him burn wooden sticks almost to a crisp on the small coal fire he’d make in the yard, and salvage the fine sticks of charcoal.

     They hadn’t invented ballpoint pens yet, so everyone either wrote with pencils or ink pens. At school we had just begun to use pens that we’d dip into small porcelain ink wells, which meant that kids always had ink on their fingers. Thank God I wasn’t left-handed like Dave Cohen, who sat in the desk to the side of me.

     Ms. Thomas, our teacher whose main job was to give us a firm grounding in the 3R’s—reading, (w)riting, and (a)rithmetic—was for the most part a warm, friendly person; and in my school life, I suppose she was one of my favorites. However, it was as if some monster hidden deep inside her surfaced when she was confronted by a lefty. The frustration of having to constantly try to get Dave to hold his hand in an unnatural way, arched over so as not to constantly smear across the still-wet ink, made her crazy.

     Dave told us that his nanny knew someone who would flip out for no rhyme or reason, just like Ms. Thomas, and that that person had a tape worm of nearly a hundred feet curled up and spread through his insides. Years later when the then Prime Minister, Hendrik Verwoerd, was assassinated in Parliament by a guy called Tsafendas, word went around that the killer had been inhabited by a massive, lengthy tapeworm.

     Dave explained how his nanny had told him of the tapeworm, while she was ironing his dad’s shirts. “The tapeworm man in my village was a sweet guy,” Agnes said. “But every now and then he’d scream at someone, just for nothing, out of the blue. The local sangoma tried everything, even trying to grab the head of the tapeworm when the guy made a number two. Urghh, imagine that! Eventually the guy was driven out of her village, because the sangoma couldn’t rid him of the tapeworm. “Also,” Dave started to giggle and put his hand across his mouth as he whispered, “he farted a lot. Loud, stinky farts.”

     I couldn’t stop laughing. “Loud, stinky farts.” No wonder they chucked him out of the village. My dad made loud farts. It sounded as if he was giving a one-, two-, or sometimes three-gun salute, but he saved them for when he was in the toilet. It was always first thing in the morning and everyone knew to stay out of there for at least twenty minutes after he’d left.

     Maybe Ms. Thomas had a tapeworm. It would explain her behavior when she was near Dave, but I couldn’t for the life of me accept that it was a hundred feet long. Once, during break, I used my 12-inch wooden ruler and measured one hundred feet along the wall in the classroom. It was all the way along a side wall, across the front wall under the blackboard, and a little way down the other side wall. A hundred-foot tapeworm inside that skinny Ms. Thomas, impossible!