LITMIR.BIZ

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that door that he had dipped his toe into the deepest end. She said she could see it in his eyes. They glistened furiously as he told her about the pipe he had just feasted on. She saw in his eyes his conviction. Saw that he was no longer there, with her. The veins in his eyes were now nothing more than a map to his next visit with the angels. As the months and years went by, Old Lass would look to these eyes of his for confirmation of his condition. ‘All you need to do is look a person in the eye to know if they are high,’ Old Lass would tell me when I was older, more grown up, maybe 10 years old, medium-rare, not yet well done, ‘They’ll have a crazed look in their eye. I’d look your father in the eye. That was how I knew. Look people in the eye, Christy.’

      I am born stargazing on a Sunday evening in September, and come home to a life that has descended into chaos. Old Lass, still trying to wrap her head around the fact that her jewellery is swiftly disappearing, trying to fathom the new friends My Father brings round for dinner, doesn’t utter a word to her family about her husband’s condition. One evening, she receives a call from a friend of My Father, known to everyone as Charlie Brown. She is instructed to pack a bag for herself and her two children as quickly as possible; he is on his way to fetch her. So my mom, my infant self and Protector & Soul are packed into Charlie Brown’s car and are driven to the hotel at which My Father is waiting, hiding from the Nigerian dealers he has wronged. Once at the hotel, Old Lass phones her father, who up until this point has no idea of the turbulent life his daughter and granddaughters are being dragged through. Pappou, in turn, contacts his dear friend, Lieutenant Peach (you truly can’t make this stuff up), who calls in whatever illegal favours are required of him to eradicate the problem that has led my family into hiding. Once resolved, Peach never speaks to my grandfather again. We return to our Sunninghill home the following day.

      The following few months are awash with nappy changes, riddled with arguments over missing jewels, christening crosses, withering, withering, withered. When I am six months old, Old Lass is handed an incredibly large sum of money by My Father, with which she books flights for herself and her children, and takes to the sky to visit her mom in London for two weeks. There are photos from this trip of Protector & Soul and I lounging in a park with our grandmother whose tigerprint tracksuit speaks to the character of a woman who has been ‘54 years old’ for as long as I can remember. Before long, the two-week trip comes to an end and Old Lass finds herself perched atop her suitcase at Johannesburg International Airport, shushing and consoling my sister and me as she waits for her husband to show up.

      ‘I saw a man walking towards me. I didn’t realise it was your father until he was right in front of me. Tiny, skinny. I still can’t wrap my head around what those two weeks had been for him,’ Old Lass tells me when I am 24 years old.

      ‘You think that’s why he gave you so much money, Mom? To get rid of you and us?’ I ask her.

      Old Lass pauses, takes it in. ‘How stupid of me … That never occurred to me then. But, yes, I guess so. He wanted to get rid of us.’

      I have been told – and will continue to be told for the rest of my life – that addiction is a disease. Like cancer, the truth of My Father eventually spreads through the extended family. Like cancer, the disease unites some and tears apart others. Unlike cancer, there is nothing subtle hiding beneath the surface; a sneaky sinister something that acts slowly, wearing you down from the inside out. The addiction, this disease, begins to present itself plainly in the form of tins of teething powder cut with cocaine. In the form of a mother who hides upstairs with her babies, wracking the map of her memory to figure out at what point she had turned right and her husband had turned left. It is a cheeky, brazen, sinister something that wears My Father down from the outside in. And there is nothing subtle about it.

      The first Greek word I’ll come to learn is ‘Nona’. It means godmother. Mine is my mother’s sister, and she is made of smooth edges. Her deep, curly black hair has a life of its own, but other than this she is a perfectly manicured mother to two boys. On a Saturday evening in my life’s first summer, she hosts a dinner party. She and my Nono (my godfather) have invited a doctor husband, a social worker wife. As she busies herself in the kitchen, her landline rings. She knows immediately that something is wrong and that that something is My Father. When my Nona answers, she hears Old Lass breathless with fear on the other end of the line.

      You need to come here now.

      Please god, help me.

      You need to come here now, it’s Their Father.

      My Nona screams – dinner party be damned – for her husband to get to the Sunninghill house right away. She stays with her two young boys.

      When my Nono pulls up at the house, he finds My Father clutching Protector & Soul to his side with one skinny arm and one manic hand, a gun in the other. He is threatening to shoot her. He is high and tiny and in this moment he has the capacity to be the force behind the biggest thing that will ever happen to our family. Old Lass is hysterical and is unable to get close enough him to grab my sister because every time she tries, he threatens to pull the trigger. Nono is calm.

      ‘I’ll give him this, in a crisis there is no one better to have around than your Nono,’ my Nona tells me now, many years after their divorce.

      Give me the child.

      Give me the child.

      You can’t kill your baby.

      Do whatever you need to do, but you can’t kill this child.

      Eventually, he talks My Father down. Once he’s grabbed Protector & Soul, he tells Old Lass to fetch me from my crib. Once again, Old Lass and her two baby girls are packed into a car. Nono takes us home with him where the dinner party has died a premature death and mattresses have been set up on a bedroom floor.

      At 9 am the next morning, the landline rings again. My Nona answers, already knowing who it is.

      ‘Hi, Stasi,’ My Father says. ‘Do you by any chance know where my family is? I woke up this morning and there’s no one at home.’

      ‘The fucker didn’t remember a thing,’ my Nona tells me now.

      My Father and mother last two years in the Sunninghill home before their livelihood is set alight and devoured, snatched away. Old Lass, never fully or even remotely accepted by My Father’s family (the poor woman wasn’t ‘Greek’ enough for them), would stand guard at his door while he lay down, low down, crashing in his office. Face down in his life that was falling to pieces.

      One day she finds the strength to call my Nono.

      ‘I need your help.’

      A shit storm swiftly descends over my parents. My Father is sent to Riverfield Lodge, a rehabilitation centre where Old Lass would bring Protector & Soul to visit him – a decision she would later deeply regret. My infant state protects me from such visits. But before he has been there long enough to let the lodge and its teachings sink in, he absconds. He returns to his children, to a wife who is adamant to make her marriage work. No longer able to afford the two-storey Sunninghill dream house, our family of four bounce between new houses, never settling long enough to grow roots.

      CHAPTER 2

      Attempted Death by Condiment

      Of all the ways you can kill yourself, using a bottle of tomato sauce is, I suspect, uncommon. One day, when my mother returns from grocery shopping to the tiny townhouse into which she has poured herself after having to leave behind her palace, all so white, so clean – everything that her life was not – she must have thought to herself, ‘Here lie grocery bags, the makings of a meal the crack addict will not arrive home to eat.’

      But he does. There he is among the white. There he exists in the white, the white of his rocks, the white of his disgusting nostrils.

      The white of my mother’s pillows.

      The floors.

      The couches.

      All white.

      And

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