LITMIR.BIZ

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a glass bottle of tomato sauce, ripping it from the plastic bag that has just been set on the floor.

      Not white.

      Red.

      All gold.

      And he promptly proceeds to smash the glass to his head.

      Red.

      Red.

      Red.

      Sweet.

      Salty.

      Iron.

      Fucked pillows.

      Fucked floors.

      Fucked couches.

      ‘Here lies Mr Chilimigras. Attempted death by condiment.’

      My Father rushes, dripping blood and tomato sauce, through the small townhouse to the bathroom and, on his way, he grabs his gun. He stands in the white shower and touches the muzzle of the gun to his temple.

      Old Lass watches, calmly. She knows it is her turn to talk him down now. And so she does.

      I am a teenager when I hear this story for the first time. I have begun digging through my mother’s soil to recover my own roots.

      ‘I suppose it’s the polite thing to do, to do it in a shower, if you’re going to shoot yourself in the head,’ she tells me when I have successfully nagged her into telling me the full story. ‘Although I was irritated that he hadn’t taken the tomato sauce bottle into the shower with him in the first place.’

      Old Lass and I laugh. The world is a Greek stage, and we are comedians in our pain.

      ‘I should have let him shoot himself in the head that day.’ The world is a Greek stage, and I nod in agreement.

      Before Old Lass does finally leave him, My Father is always leaving. Either of his own volition or because Old Lass insists upon it. And then he returns. My parents continue to live in their elastic world: they break, go their own way. They return. They break. They return. When this process finally becomes too tiresome for Old Lass, she leaves My Father once and for all, a two-year-old and four-year-old hanging on to her linen shirt hems and tanned calf muscles.

      In a panic I suspect is altogether too familiar for single mothers, Old Lass knows she has to start making money asap. With this in mind, she throws herself into a gloriously beautiful store called the Splodge Shop. Catering to the rich and manicured mothers of Johannesburg, she creates children’s furniture and other home goods that are so gorgeous and unique they more than justify their steep price.

      Protector & Soul and I spend hours with her in her shop. We trace our fingers along fabric swatches and lounge on the small armchairs that will soon be sent off to children far fancier than we are. With this shop, Old Lass becomes our hero.

      I devote a child’s eternity to sniffing the handmade flower-shaped soaps. Greedily inhaling the red ones – they smell the best – a smooth, long wooden stick piercing their lovely flower bottoms. I remember with absolute clarity, and heartbreak, one particular day spent sniffing. Like spritzing yourself with your most beloved perfume only to become immune to your own, expensive scent, so the sodomised flower soaps would lose their scent as I sniff them. Of course, at this age I have not yet worn perfume, not yet had the opportunity to learn the lesson of fleeting scent that has never left in the first place. The usual routine consists of saving, of course, the best red for last. Three sniffs of the green flower soap, divine and then scentless. Four sniffs of the orange flower soap, satisfying and then a bore. Two sniffs of the blue, four of the yellow, and then on to the last, the red, the favourite. As my nostrils collapse in on themselves, furiously inhaling, it occurs to me that each and every time I smell one of my mother’s flower soaps dry, I am stealing the quality that prompts people to purchase them. Who will buy soaps that have had the smell smelled out of them? I’ve damaged an entire batch of soap. I’ve robbed it of its soapy essence, stolen from it its purpose. Dear God, I’ve put my mom out of business. From that day on, I never sniff those soaps again, and am never consoled into doing so because I am too nervous to tell Old Lass what I’ve done. Spiral, spiral, spiral. I mourn now for those childlike spirals. I’d give anything to smell the smell out of something beautiful again.

      CHAPTER 3

      Channelling Elton

      After bouncing from house to home during my parents’ separation, off we flit, the three Chilimigras girls, and settle in a two-bedroom flat in Wendywood. This is the first home I clearly remember living in. What turns our minds into sponges between the ages of four and five, I don’t quite know, but a sponge my mind was. As I sit writing now, I’m able to recall every corner, every Christmas beetle of that home.

      My Pappou lives in a flat above us, just to the left. I have always thought he is a rather beautiful man. He has a round face that my mother and I have both inherited, more becoming on him than I believe it to be on either of us. He has dark marks on his face that grow year by year, and a crown of thinning grey hair that remains unaltered in my eyes until the day he dies. He wears thick glasses and carries his jersey in a plastic shopping bag, and if you stare at him for long enough he looks almost Asian.

      Days spent playing in our small, sloped garden beneath his flat are forever accompanied by the aromas of his homemade chilli sauce. When my sister and I make the adventure up the black stairwell to his flat, the smells would greet us from behind even a closed door. The scent of peppercorn clung to his knitted waistcoat, TCP antiseptic lingering on his breath as he whispers that that is his secret to good health. His tiny balcony is home to the chillies he has birthed from seed gathered from Mozambique and Cyprus. Grow to harvest to keep to feed. His chilli sauce, an unending opportunity to devour sentimentality. I feel saddened now as an adult that I didn’t spend more time in his home as a child. That I didn’t pore over his collection of black-and-white photos and take him up on his offers of spaghetti bolognaise. But his bolognaise always contained entirely intact and softened peppercorns, which I couldn’t wrap my young, whimsical head around. Besides, there was an entire flat packed with my sticker books, Barbies and pets downstairs begging for my attention. With our childhood beckoning, Protector & Soul and I would flit away from his flat as quickly as we had arrived there.

      When he would occasionally make the great trek downstairs to visit his daughter and granddaughters, he would sit at the table and pick at the tuna salad or the leftover pizza, or whatever it was my mom has set in front of him. I would always greet him with ‘Hello, Pappouli,’ and he in turn would say, ‘Hello, my girl.’ We’d hug and his long palm would pat my back to the rhythm of his greeting. Hello. My. Girl. This man had no idea how strong he was and I’d always walk away from these hugs smiling at a man who believed he had little life left in him, but could potentially still pound the life out of another.

      My Pappou could tell stories. Long stories that were crafted with care and patience, with such intricate detailing that they could have been born from experiences of just yesterday. He’d tell stories that the family had heard countless times, that provoked sighs and slight smiles. Most of his tales would begin with ‘Thirty years ago’ and his pronunciation of the word ‘thirty’ was always one of my favourite things. The i of the ‘thirty’ would escape his lips in a high note, in a singsong manner that was drawn out and raised, and completely charming only because of the old mouth it came from. At an oval glass table that would go on to provide the frame for many a blanket fort in the years to come, the three generations would sit and eat and talk and sigh before he’d disappear once again up the dark stairwell, leaving his three girls rubbing his kind words, greetings and goodbyes, from our still-ringing backs.

      In this, our new two-bedroomed home, Protector & Soul and I, along with our two best friends Brandon and Savannah, would put on Backstreet Boys concerts for our mothers. Five rand got you in. The four of us, a merry and mischievous gang dubbed ‘The Dragons’ would steal matches and set alight dry twigs under the washing line. We’d spend our hard-earned savings on BB guns from the flea market. We’d run through the black halls of the flats, at war with each other, at war with the

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