LITMIR.BIZ

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      “What? For a midnight feast?”

      Ramsey looks bemused. “I’ve never thought about it like that, but yeah, I suppose it is, in a way – only we don’t do it for fun, you know – like we used to when we were kids – it’s more like we have to, if you know what I mean.”

      “Try and stop me,” I say.

      Behind the closed door of our room, our empty beds are filled with moonlight. Quiet as spiders, we creep by torchlight through the dark corridors. Small shadows detach themselves from walls as we pass by, fluttering and scuttling into the high, gloomy corners. Cockroaches and mice scurry across the dusty floors, and disappear through invisible cracks. Girls bump into one another in the dark, bite their knuckles to muffle their screams.

      In the dining room, the tables have been set for breakfast. Like homing pigeons, or a herd of thirsty cattle with the smell of water in their nostrils, we head for the kitchen’s swing doors, the stale odours of sweat and greasy water, burnt milk. The reek of boiled cabbage and unwashed feet.

      Small eyes shine like black beads in the moonlit kitchen. Shadows coalesce and separate. A finger of light beckons from an open fridge door, and a sigh sweeps across the stainless-steel tables as the refrigerated air touches our cheeks. Someone heaves a heavy slab of cheese onto a table. Loaves of white bread follow, and tubs of margarine, tins of golden syrup, bottles of peanut butter. Girls elbow one another out of the way. Cutlery rattles in drawers. Golden syrup runs down wrists and chins, and tongues work hard against the thick paste of peanut butter spread on rough-cut chunks of bread. Ramsey waves a bread knife at me. She holds up two slabs, thick as doorsteps, plastered together with peanut butter and syrup.

      “Here,” she says, offering her sandwich to me. “Have a bite – it tastes just like toffee!”

      I smile and shake my head, show her my own chunks of bread and cheese. Over her shoulder, I notice the window at the far end of the kitchen. I walk across the crumb-strewn floor and lean over the stainless-steel table against the wall. I look out, and up, and see the dusty glass of our bedroom window high in the wall opposite, the greasy curtains hanging limp in the moonlight.

      Letters from home

      “You must write to us there by our boarding school.” My cousin Wilfred leans back in the wire chair on the farmhouse stoep. He swings his feet up and down, stretches his legs out in front of him. “It’s lekker when you get a letter.”

      “Okay,” I say, “I’ll write to you, but you must promise you’ll write back, hey?”

      “I promise,” he nods. “Benjamin will also write – hey, Benjamin? Jennifer says you must write to her – she says she’ll write first.”

      “But he’s mos sitting right here, Wilfred – he can hear us!”

      Wilfred grunts.

      “If I write to you, Benjamin, will you write back?”

      “Ja, oraait – just don’t write long letters there by your boarding school in Cape Town, okay?”

      “Ja,” Wilfred chimes. “I also don’t want long letters you hear? Just short and sweet, hello and goo’bye!”

      “Okay.” I nod. “Just make sure you guys write back.”

      Dere Jenifir

      How ar yu? I am fin. I alredy ate al my Tuk my Father donerd benjimin he left the gat opin the katl went in th sugirkan wen we went hom for the longe weekend I ran awuy fast hey he kudnt kach me. Are yu alredy ther by yor new skool how is Yor new bodingskool I wil rit agan soun

      From yor kusin

      Wilfred

      Der Jenifer

      How are you? I amfin Wilfred alreddy at al his tuk bekaus he sayd he dint wanto giv me ani my Mothir skreemd at Wilfred he at al hir biskits she was very th moerin wen we went Hoam for th longe weekend howsit ther by Yor nuw skoole isit naais or notso I doant mind long as I can go bak to th farm kwiKly I Am running ina kroscuntrie rais this turm yu must rite sune

      from Benjamin

      Every day, except on weekends, Mrs P tucks letters from home, postcards, and happy-birthday-congratulations, orange-enveloped telegrams and lucky post-office parcel slips between the faded red, crisscrossed ribbons on the cork noticeboard outside her office wall. And every day, after four o’clock tea, the boarders in the Hostel of Perpetual Hunger crowd around it, their faces tense and hopeful – desperate for the sight of their name on an envelope, even a postcard – anything to calm their fears, to reassure them they haven’t been forgotten.

      I’m in Sub A, five years old.

      “Letters are a lovely way for you to stay in touch with Granny and Grandpa and your cousins,” Ma says. “You can tell them all about school, your teacher – all your new friends – why don’t you write a letter to them? They’d love to hear from you, and I’m sure they’d write back.”

      I like writing letters – finding envelopes in the post box with my name on them, and words and letters, wavy black lines stamped across the Queen’s coloured stamps to show me where and when they were posted. I sit on the rocking chair in the lounge next to Ma and read my letters full of stories about cousins, and Uncle Leslie on the farm, Aunty Alice’s perfect scones. Grandpa writes about shearing time and the price of wool, the rain that falls on the veld in mysterious points and inches, the heat and the dust. Granny writes about the cold and the price of coal, little babies being born, and old people dying – letters exciting and happy and sad, that bring news of people and places I know, and love. I feel just like a grown-up.

      9.

      Comparisons are odious

      “Do you guys like boarding school?”

      My cousins look at each other.

      “Ag, it’s not so bad,” Wilfred says. He doesn’t look at me.

      Benjamin shrugs his shoulders. “It’s oraait. At least I can stay dry there.” He stares out at the veld, his face dark and brooding.

      Wilfred sniggers. I frown.

      “What d’you mean?”

      “I mean, at least there I don’t have to walk through the vlei every time it floods like when we still went to school here in the dorp – before we went away to boarding school, you know?”

      “What’re you talking about?” I ask.

      “Yes, man, you know when it rains so hard and the vlei comes down, and it floods the causeway there by the old willow trees?”

      I nod.

      “Ja, well the flood waters mos fill all those muddy puddles, and then – it happens so quick – it’s like one minute there’s nothing, and then the next, there’s this raging torrent – and deep? You can’t believe how deep it gets in places, and all the trees and broken branches, the drowned sheep? You know how they swell up?” He nods his head in the direction of the road.

      “Those banks down there by the vlei are shallow – they get breached easy, and when the water floods over them, then the causeway and the road to the dorp are also under water. When that happens, no one can get across to the other side, so when it used to flood before we went to boarding school, we couldn’t get to school in the dorp.”

      “Ja,” Wilfred grunts. “But my father! It could bladdy snow, man – if it was a school day, then we had to go to school!”

      “Ja, he’s right.” Benjamin nods at his brother. Wilfred kicks the floor. He flexes his feet and smirks.

      “So anyway,” Benjamin continues. “My father never cared how bad the flood was – we had to get to the dorp. We, all of us, we used to cry and moan, ‘But it’s raining, Dad, and the vlei’s running!’ But he didn’t care. And he didn’t want to get stuck with the Land Rover either, you know?

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