In my younger years, I wrote poems about the boy I loved, and named him ‘Parasite’.

Of course, we must take into consideration that in my younger years,

I wore shuffle socks and

followed soap operas and

learnt dance routines to Canadian pop songs.

 I’m muddling time now, memory betraying me so that everything up until this point is a custard of Sunday afternoons , my father’s hands, getting a rabbit for my 9th birthday, and my first period.

 As a child,

I believed my sister’s word gospel and hid behind my brother’s door while he rehearsed flirtations with girls from the neighbouring school, and learnt to sing his favourite tracks off our collectively-owned copy of Pop Shop 36.

 I thought my grandfather untouchable,

Before I noticed his bigotry and I battled with the truth of the man versus the obligation to only speak of the dead in golden terms.

 I expected to live with my parents forever,

took glee in spitting on mosquito bites,

obeyed commands from my older-wiser-impressive friend to practice French-kissing on my pillow.

 In my younger years,

I punished you for every moment received and unreturned.

I really did believe I loved you – it felt similar to descriptions in Sweet Valley High novels, snuck in shadow on late afternoons in the school library.

Presumed

Imposed

Coerced

you,

poor little thing, who wanted nothing more than to

laugh and

learn to jive-dance and

achieve a position on the cricket team.

I believed my dead grandmother a ghost, dead pets ghosts, Std 3 teacher…

Now you are ghostly.

 And I’m older now,

with more room in me for ghosts.

And I’m learning that a child raised on indulgence, dangerously called ‘romance’ in music, poems, adolescent pulp fiction

sullies

sulks

debases

her own chances at the entire affair from the start.

And I see that I was a bully.

That it was me doing the damn parasiting,

So that I was as impressed by my proclamations of love as I was by my new LP.

And all you wanted was to be a boy

who played with beetles,

and won at marbles, sometimes.

Honestly, I have no idea what you guys are talking about. I thought we were talking about petroleum.~

I (heart) Huckabees

A Memory of Rabbits

The day my father killed the rabbits was humid. Wet. Uncomfortable.

My parents are ritualistic in their waking. My mother sounds her arrival to the house deliberately, shouting to the animals, making mom-smells in the kitchen. But dad is softer. He paces. Opens doors, then closes them, and opens them again, searching for hypothetical intruders in the garden.

The sound of my parents talking in the early morning makes me feel home.

My father mumbled to my mother, made something clang as he moved, and moved outside. I watched him from my bedroom window, silent in the purple light of dawn. His eyes were tired. I remember turning away, terrified that, for the first time, my protector-dad may be afraid of something.

Mom was smoking in the kitchen. My pyjamas had grown moist in the heat of sleep, and my hair wormed its way across my childchubby cheek. She pursed her lips and clicked her tongue at me, trying to better my appearance. Then she ordered me to carry breakfast cereals through to the table.

We were put to work all morning. My brother, sister and I stole concerned glances to each other, each acknowledging, but misunderstanding the tension in our home.
We wanted to know why all the curtains were drawn. We wanted to play with our rabbits.

Finally, as the last surface had been polished and the sausages put out for eating, my father entered the house. He was carrying a shovel. His brow was sandy, crusted by sweat. He nodded to my mother and left the room.
She said they loved us, but the rabbits were sick. They had to go.

Soul Food with the Famiglia

As host and kitchen head, Chiara Treccani, describes her restaurant as “a destination”, I am beginning to feel that smarm which accompanies confirmation of a suspicion. I do enjoy being right. I’d tasked myself the search for great venues in what I’ve heard described as ‘the frozen North’, wasteland where the hip fear to tread with the artsy scorn of those who will not venture beyond Norwood or Parkhurst.

And the search takes me to Café Del Soul; a disarming venue conceptualised and run by Chiara and brother, Ryan Treccani, under the Italian clout of mother Luciana, (‘Mamma’, if you please).  The family is as integral to the restaurant’s concept as its food and décor; their near-constant presence and anecdotes around passion – a real concept, insists Chiara, as she explains the energy transfer involved in cooking with love – convincing even my cynical self. It is a warm afternoon and we’ve exchanged mall and madness for sidewalk and sipping, starting with an Avocado Ritz and Bruschetta, topped with artichoke and Parma ham, pear and gorgonzola, and pesto, ricotta and cherry tomatoes. The menu does us well into our mains, as we opt for stuffed calamari tubes on vermicelli and vegetables and a sesame chicken stir-fry, with pine-nuts and parmesan truly displaying Mamma’s idea of ‘Italian-fusion’. We’re lastly lured, in the way that women are lured, to the Chocolate Ganache, which is rumoured to have a fairly significant effect on Café Del Soul’s female clientele, and I can not so much explain, but vouch for it. Extreme indulgence.  

Under the banner “eat, drink, be inspired”, the menu joins crisp décor – complimented beautifully by choice quotations across the walls, a treat for word-geeks or awkward-dinner conversation – to offer a space for an uncomplicated, holistic examination of pleasure. As we leave, I notice I’ve been seated next to Julia Child’s words: “Life itself is the proper binge”. That’s what this place is about. Take a time-out in the North – it’s better than most suspect.

Cnr Olive & President Fouche Rds
Shop 17 and 18, Olivedale Corner
Olivedale
Johannesburg
Tel: 011 704 6493

While our mothers were taking tea beneath the oak trees overlooking the cricket pitch, we, that being my gang and I, would wait, pout-faced and aggressive, below the iron grate of Henry’s tuck shop window with our pocket money savings thrust out to stuff our mouths with niggerballs and cold Sparletta. Henry regarded us with disdain. Dressed up in our smocked-gingham-tulle-billowing party outfits, made and forced on us by mothers devoted to the fashions of Your Family magazines, we would glower at him as our mouths blackened around the edges in our sweet-sucking frenzy. His hands moved between sweet rack and cash tin, to the Niknaks and back again, and Henry would deliver his lecture on “the problem with little girls.” Knowing that to endure his preaching meant access to sweets, we tugged on our hemlines to mask our grazed knees and muddied sandals and grimaced through his contempt for our behaviour. Eventually, with the first team matches over, our mothers dragged our older brothers toward home to clean the grass stains off their pants. We followed, scooting our neon BMX bicycles away from Henry as he roared behind us, noticing the Chelsea bun which we had conspired to steal. We spotted Henry on the beachfront once, teaching his son to fish for shad on the shoreline, golf peak pulled low over his eyes so he would not be distracted by the pigeons and joggers and setting day around him. I cried as he spoke with my parents. The day had grown too long for a seven-year-old loaded with ice cream and a real-life meeting with Harry, my oversized dog hero from Harry’s House, the programme that introduced me to traffic rules and respect for my elders. Henry handed me a niggerball and wagged a finger in my face. It was in the years long after trips to the tuck shop, when I understood what it meant for a little white girl to demand a niggerball from an Indian man, that we learnt of Henry’s death. My brother, sister and I were taken to Henry’s home and as my father spoke with his brothers on the lawn, we were silenced by women who smothered us in their reams of sari material and fleshy arms and lashings of lavender oil. They shovelled food into us and fussed over my sister’s natural curl and green eyes. I recall sitting on a car tyre cut into a swing, mouth loaded with breyani and cream soda, as I watched my mother hold onto Henry’s wife while she wept over his coffin in the centre of their sitting room.

“‘It’s so hard to express yourself.’
‘I understand this.’
‘I want to express myself.’
‘The same is true for me.’
‘I’m looking for my voice.’
‘It’s in your mouth.’
‘I want to do something I’m not ashamed of.’
‘Something you are proud of, yes?’
‘Not even. I just don’t want to be ashamed.’”
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)