Chris van Wyk enchanted readers with his memoir, Shirley, Goodness & Mercy (Picador, 2004). He’s back with a follow-up, Eggs to Lay, Chickens to Hatch: A Memoir (Picador Africa), which will be published in April. This is an extract:
Grace
When I went to bed last night, the last person I saw was my ma. Now it’s the next morning. I open my eyes and the first person I see is Grace. Ma has gone to the factory to work. Grace is here to work — scrub the floors, iron clothes, wash dishes, make the beds. And, this afternoon before she leaves, wash me!
Why doesn’t Grace go to the factory and Ma stay here and work, I wonder? Then I could be with Ma in the daytime too. But I also like Grace. She’s black. She wears a yellow doek which she ties in a thick knot at the back of her head. I know this knot well because I fiddle with it when she abbas [piggy-backs] me.
When she wakes me, I don’t see her face or her teeth with the gap in the bottom row, because she has already turned away to make my mother’s and father’s bed.
“D’you want to go to a party?” she says.
“Huh?”
“A party,” she nods. “And eat sweets.”
“Is it my birthday?”
“No!” she laughs.
I had a birthday just the other day. There were four candles on the cake, lit up! I had to blow them out. There was a horse on the cake and a man on the horse and a hat on the man.
“Come.” She pulls my arms and legs out of flannel pyjamas and puts them into cotton shorts and a shirt.
(I must interrupt my story to tell you: when all this happened I didn’t know a lot of the words for the things I saw and felt and saw people do — “pyjamas” I knew, but not “flannel”, “accomplice”, “epaulette”. The words came later, every day, one by one.)
I pee, brush my teeth. I eat mealiemeal porridge with sugar and butter and milk — it’s delicious, but a party’s nicer. I ask about the party.
“Will there be sweets?”
“Ja.” She wipes porridge from my face.
We’re out of the house and she locks the door and we’re in a courtyard. She sees not one, not two, but three of her friends, all housekeepers. Two are hanging up washing and one is sweeping a red stoep. They all stop their work — and my heart sinks. Grace doesn’t understand what happens at parties — there’ll be children and children love sweets. They stuff them in their mouths and their pockets and nobody ever says, “Let’s leave some for Chris.”
Here in the courtyard it’s a four-way conversation, loud, and everything someone says seems to make the other three laugh or go “Awu batho”.
Then Grace puts me on her back and we’re off, out of the courtyard and down the street.
It’s late January and overcast. Still, there are lots of interesting things to look at, sniff at and listen to: women coming out of shops with loaves of bread under their arms, a man on a bicycle ringing his bell — it puts me in the party mood.
Around a corner and there it is. It must be — there’s lots of kids, my age, older. And there’s a big noise, calling and shoving and “that way” and “this way”.
A lady barks out an instruction and we stand in a line.
“Why are we standing like this?” I ask Grace.
“For the sweets.”
It’s unusual but if that’s what they want us to do for a sweet, I’ll do it.
Another instruction: “Left arm!”
All around me, kids’ sleeves are being pushed up. Grace helps me push up mine.
Up there at the start of the line a woman makes her way from arm to arm. I watch her. She works quickly, spending less than a second or two on each arm — what is she doing?
She’s wearing a white dress with epaulettes and toney red shoes — it’s a kind of a uniform but I can’t place it. She stops by me and rubs something onto my arm with cotton wool. It’s cold and has a sharp smell. I don’t know what it is but in the years to come I’ll smell it in hospitals and it will remind me of this day. It’s spirits! And this woman, I suddenly realise, is no ordinary woman, she’s an evil woman. A nurse!
But it’s too late! There’s another one following her — same dress, epaulettes and shoes — and this one has a needle. And before I can withdraw my arm she plunges the needle into my arm — ah!
I feel pain and humiliation. There will be no sweets, no chocolates, no cake. No party. Grace has betrayed me.
By the time Ma comes home from work, the pain has left my arm, together with the smell of spirits. But the humiliation returns, complete with two fresh rows of tears.
“She told me we were going to a party!” I bawl.
But Ma is not sympathetic and Grace is not contrite. Instead they both laugh. And I begin to realise that my own mother was an accomplice.
“If Grace had told you that you were gonna get a vaccination would you have gone?”
“Yes,” I say, but it is such a weak yes that even I am not convinced. And it makes Ma and Grace laugh a little bit more.
We moved to Riverlea soon afterwards.
We left Newclare at night, on a lorry packed with our stuff.
We left the old houses that stood right up against each other in rows and rows, the red stoeps that at age four seemed as high and as dangerous as cliffs, the shops where the sweets were piled behind glass, each kind in its own glass house — and still more in giant glass jars on top of the counter so that a boy could only see sweets no matter where he looked. We left that school where instead of a party there was once a vaccination festival.
We left Grace. She didn’t come with us to Riverlea. I asked Ma why.
“Grace has got other plans,” Ma said.
“Who’s gonna look after me now?”
Ma said, “Don’t worry, I’ll find somebody. That’s the least of our problems.”
Actually, what Ma — and many other mothers — did not realise at the time was that it was far from the least of our problems.
A woman could help shape a boy’s life while she ironed his shirts, buttered his bread and made his bed.