Small Moving Parts

Title Page

SALLY-ANN MURRAY

Small

Moving

Parts

KWELA BOOKS

Rule of three

Wherever she began, numbers were stories. A man was 1. Which meant In the Beginning. It meant The One and Only. And One of a Kind. She was always looking out for Number One, a slight but important figure, scarce as a matchstick in an overgrown field.

A woman was 3. Curved. Curvaceous. But in Halley’s family, their mother became The One, through slow excoriation taking away from her rounded self almost completely to provide for the two little girls. The one raised finger and the only firm footing.

In between were the children, 2. Halley, and Jen.

Daddy was gone, so he was 0. But even nought was something, not nothing. Not a big loser. O 0 ○ was part of a keyhole.

Like escutcheon, which was another part. Her mother said a child was never too young to start learning, so then she explained about the metal shield around the keyhole. For neatness, and niceness, to soften the ugly hole.

Escutcheon, Halley said, fingering the beaten brass on the old kist, the little plate hammered in with the smallest of nails. She added them up, the nails. But the big word only snagged in her throat and exploded against her palate, a poor rabbit caught by its back legs in a terrible trap.

Halley couldn’t believe how many words her mother had. They came out of her mouth and her head and the dictionary and went into the air. Some kinds came out mainly late at night, when she sat at the kitchen table scratching with a pen. She put them into the tiny white squares and they stayed there, balanced with all the others, buffered by the black blocks.

For the crossword puzzle, her mother didn’t like to use a pencil, because that was cheating.

In kindergarten, Halley wrote 1 2 3 4 5 on a fresh page. She shaped each numeral perfectly, because a number was a beautiful shape. Shapely as Aunty Sybille at the flats, with her hourglass figure.

In class, the children were allowed to draw whatever they wanted next to each number. The only rule was to match the numeral and the number of things.

Halley crayons

1 (next to) picture of a diamond ring

2 (next to) picture of an ice-cream cone picture of an ice-cream cone

3 (next to) picture of a mouse picture of a mouse picture of a mouse

In this exacting task, Halley’s work was most exactly done, both correct in number and incredibly detailed, because Halley liked making pictures, and she loved how numbers and pictures formed a series of relationships: 1 *, 2 **, 3 *** , a wonderful linking of lovely and logical.

She was extremely satisfied with what she had discovered. This was a worthwhile thing: I can have the number and the picture! Both together! Two for one, which equals some extra.

That’s how Halley tried to think things through, always wanting more, and weighing up effort in relation to returns and factoring in bonsela.

Already, she’s learnt important things. How every number has its own word, and that a simple letter can do magic, changing ‘cat’ into ‘hat’.

But, really, she’s always known that language is tricky. Like when their mother says to her daughters one dark morning, You don’t have to get up yet, girls, it’s still old and curly.

Jen says What? just with her face, while Halley feels herself floating for a moment, she’s not sure where. And then suddenly she and her mother realise. And the language, this time, is a delicious, shared joke.

From the first, the report cards are carried home as if by angels, a white page shining through a sealed brown envelope . . .

Davaar Kindergarten School

A little work, a little play, a lot of love and that’s the day

Name: Halley Murphy Age: 3 years and 5 months

Halley is a joy to teach. She is eager to learn and applies herself to every task with great enthusiasm. She is an excellent all-rounder who shows an especial aptitude for language, nature study and art. Halley needs to be kept very busy, otherwise she is inclined to fidget and wander off. She is always polite and neatly dressed. (A credit to her mother!) She enjoys her own company and keeps her own counsel. Halley must be encouraged to guard against a tendency towards over-seriousness. Instead of thinking so much, she should play more with little girls her own age, and learn to be a child. However, we have been delighted to discover that she is a natural actress. When she is so inclined, she engagingly entertains both teachers and peers with amusing skits of her own origination.

Miss M Milner

PRINCIPAL

So. From the beginning, the collected sum of herself.

Sometimes, when they have to sit quietly on their small chairs in the prefab classroom and listen, Halley hides her hands under the baby desk and uses the Tommy Thumb of each hand to touch the tips of the fingers on the same hand, repeatedly counting in her head while she listens to the teacher. She goes 1-touch 2-touch 3-touch 4-touch and immediately after that she shifts the power to Peter Pointer so she can leap from Baby Small and include the thumbs as 5-touch. All in secret.

Under the table on the floor inside her socks inside her shoes, both feet fidget out the same time, counting in order to make connection. Yet she is not calculating; only making patterns to stop her mind from wandering.

Sometimes they stand outside in their knickers and vests and do exercises. There’s even PE for the fingers. Stretch and clench. Halley’s fingers are long, and so flexible she can disarticulate from each fingertip, and push her rubber thumbs back to reach her wrists. In her mind she’s Twangy Pearl the Elastic Girl, but Halley can see that Miss finds both these tricks disconcerting, though whether it’s her authority or the limits of human physiology that are being challenged, how would Halley know.

You must be double-jointed, dear, the teacher says, as if that explains everything, but it only serves to keep Halley guessing. What does ‘must’ mean? Is the teacher’s remark based on what she has observed, thus constituting a statement of fact, or is it a guarded injunction, even a warning? Is that what the exercising children are being trained to master, absolute lability?

Halley keeps expecting that she will be asked to perform something impossible, and perhaps it’s this unexpressed anxiety that has her bending over backwards to please those who have the power to dish out or withhold reward. She would prefer to pre-empt imagined punishment, if that were possible.

Though they do not become her single definition, the flats in Durban define her girlhood. She lives in Kenneth Gardens, the corporation flats. If someone asks, Where do you live? Halley hesitates to admit, because all she has to say is Kenneth Gardens and people will know exactly who she is.

Her mother says the flats started out as a place for the Durban Corporation to help white soldiers when they came back from the war that time. Later, though, when the soldiers were finished, if you worked for the corporation – like a clerk or a bus driver or something – then you could put your name down on the waiting list.

Even later, by the early 1960s, the flats have become a popular choice for struggling whites, which means their address is the bane of her mother’s life. For Nora Murphy, the other tenants in Kenneth Gardens bring white poor perilously close to poor white, which is much too close to the bone. It’s a stigma that has been sniffing around her impolitely from the day they moved in, indolently lifting its leg whenever and wherever it will. Though Nora realises, where she’s come from, that she’s brought some odour with her. It’s something she’s been working hard to eliminate. All telltale smells and stains.

Yet despite all Nora’s efforts, here she is, living in Kenneth Gardens. By now, really, she had expected to have come much further.

Nora Patience Murphy (née Hoare) is near the tail end of thirteen children, the last bar one, born in Port Elizabeth and shunted to Durban. When she was five, Nora and all the young ones but Milton, still a new baby, were removed from their parental home and taken into state care. The boys went who knows where; the girls were kept together in a convenient handful, a short while in the Durban Children’s Home, and then shipped off to St Faith’s, an orphanage in Bloemfontein.

Where you had to have it, and keep it, faith, but it was damn hard, that hard home of your childhood. Though Nora is still on the right side of thirty, and has spent her whole life trying to improve on her bad start, things have not really panned out, yet, her plans, and surely she has grounds for complaint. But she doesn’t complain, not often, or at least not outside her head. She just keeps at it. For now, Ixia Court is the best she can do, so she does it.

Faced with her little family, she makes a home. She becomes unbelievably resourceful, industrious to the point that her voluptuous, womanly body pares down. Not to bare bones, at first, but to a lean muscularity.

And even after that she still had a way to go, and off she went.

Mobility

For Halley, these may be flats, with flat roofs, but Kenneth Gardens is never a flat surface. Okay, she thinks, so yes, if they were seen from high above. But for the tenants this is never, though Halley is always trying to figure out how to climb onto the forbidden roof parapet so she can see down, like a bird, and maybe fly. How would you know unless you try?

For now, though, she’s obliged to live from the ground up, which is an altogether more complicated kind of complex.

At Kenneth Gardens each block has its own main entrance, a single doorless opening into a squat, curved tower. Except for Ixia Court, which has a functional, straight-roofed entrance hall. Halley believes that this is the only block with such a mediocre distinction, and it troubles her, because she likes the surprising accomplishment of the other buildings’ curves, the hint of superfluous style and refinement. The beautiful fullness which swells the access to every block except the one in which they live, where the blunt, straight line rules supreme.

Unfair! And of all places, she thinks, it is the entrance to their block which ought to be rounded, because their family is only females. There’s her mother, and Jen, and Halley. Which altogether makes 3.

Mommy sleeps in the main bedroom, you and your sister in the other one, and there’s a small enclosed porch off the back just for breathing space.

There is no substantial difference, in truth, between the block in which the Murphys live and all the rest. Whether the entrance is curved or straight, any pretence at flourish falls away as soon as you walk into the poky entrance hall, take two steps and come smack bang face to face with three rows of gaping wooden postboxes. Six, triple-stacked: 1 2. 3 4. 5 6.

Whichever block you live in, then, Ixia or Arum, Watsonia or Jasmine, any of the others . . . in all of them your options are limited. You can go up the stairs: on each floor there are two flats, shouldered side by side. Or, if you don’t want to head in, you can turn around and leave, wondering where to go. Or you can forget about what your mother has taught you concerning not messing with people’s private things, and climb into a postbox of your choice. If you could.

Since you can’t, using the matches you’ve stolen from your mother’s bag, or if those are finished the plain old sun forced to an excruciating focus with your pocket magnifying glass, you set alight the bundle of dry leaves and newspaper that you’ve wrapped around your own stinking shit and stuff it into the postbox marked Number 5. And then you scarper, run like crazy and leave people to think it’s the fault of the neighbourhood hooligans. Who of course are boys.

Because you are never naughty. You try not to be naughty. You are good. You try hard to be good. Though you do not yet understand that the existence of love presupposes that damage has been done. People may not know it, but love is a compensation; it must make up for what has been lost.

From the back porch, Ixia Court overlooks Walton Place, which is a short side street. Most of the other flats lie along Queen Mary Avenue, which is very long. If she goes out to the narrow front balcony, shared by all the tenants, Halley imagines she can see everything that’s happening on the avenue.

In the middle of Queen Mary are wide traffic islands, planted with trees. The exotic triumphal march begins way down the bottom in Congella with tall, waving palms, the long trunks thicker than elephants’ legs. Then it’s on to a broad-canopied stand of orange flamboyants, and then delicate pink camel’s foot near the Murphys’ block. After, the pattern almost repeats, but as if it can’t quite remember what it’s supposed to be doing, and then gradually it gives up, disappearing into tall grass and grow what may. But even once the islands end, the avenue continues in an absent-minded way, winding over the hill, up down up, until with some relief it arrives at The University. Here, it is delighted to be reconciled so unexpectedly with King George, and the two, well met, proudly survey the Jubilee Gardens.

Back down the slopes, even the Murphys’ end of Queen Mary would be quite scenic if the men from the flats didn’t use the shady islands as a parking lot and a convenient place to wash and fix their cars. Come weekend, rags, beers, radios and soapy buckets are hauled over from the flats; jumper cables, spanners, the works, are jumbled noisily out of gaping boots. You can’t go barefoot among this tinkering, because the men empty ashtrays and other rubbish on the grass. There’s lots of stompies and crushed papers and spark plugs. Gnarled wire, broken glass. So it’s not at all regal, despite Queen Mary.

And except for Mary, who was obviously a queen, the people after whom the roads have been named are strangers to the tenants of the flats. Nobody can tell Halley about Walton, who is their side street. Or the mysterious Kenneth of Kenneth Gardens, who maybe once owned this whole place when it was really a garden.

Most people don’t seem to care about the anonymity of the names. A road’s a road. The street is just your address, and while it would be nice to live somewhere better, here’s not always so bad.

Nora tells her eldest that whatever it’s called, a road is mainly a way of getting somewhere. From A to B, as people are fond of saying, Nora laughs.

Which Halley doesn’t reckon is really that far, if you look around.

For the children in the flats, what matters most is that you walk half-road down Queen Mary to get to the tearoom, where sometimes you have money for sweets. A sucker. Chappies. Nigger balls. Creamy toffees.

But money aside, for Halley and Jennie there are particular complications, as their mother has decided that her daughters’ singular directional arrow is up.

So they are the only children they know from the flats who are enrolled in a school called Convent High, on the prominent hill at the height of Queen Mary, the crown upon her majestic head. It’s a high school and primary school both, so the adjective ‘high’ means elevated, and perhaps refers also to the panoramic vista over Durban. Indeed, given that the institution is run by the Sisters of the Holy Family, it may also be intended as an invocation to raise the eyes upwards in spiritual aspiration, the dutiful desire of clumpy clay to be transformed into heavenly bliss.

This upwards distinction in the lives of the little Murphys continues an earlier precedent, when they were sent to Davaar Kindergarten, a progressive infant establishment run by two Swiss-German sisters, the Misses Zwinckel.

Kinder Garten: Kenneth Gardens. Perhaps Nora found the sounds pleasing, relished a certain balance in the euphony. Certainly, she knew from excellent repute that the school offered a caring home from home and a sound educational grounding. Both of which, of course, she’d already been working on herself.

People had snorted, called her a hard taskmaster for showing and sounding a boxed series of phonic flash cards to her first-born when she was but a speechless infant. But by the age of two, though still a spindling, Halley Murphy was able to read. The proof of the pudding, Nora knew, lay in the eating. Not that she had much taste for it herself.

In order to secure a place for Halley and then later Jennie at Davaar, their mother put her pride in her pocket and requested special fee arrangements, and having heard her account, the refined foreign ladies were happy to accommodate, given the woman’s evident respectability and her selfless efforts to rise above unfortunate circumstances. Thus are the little girls enrolled in their diurnal round.

There they are then, four, and three. Halley and Jennie in their vanilla pinafores buttoned at the shoulder, the scalloped skirts finished in royal blue satin stitch. The girls’ faces are shielded by broad white panamas, and each child clutches a blue cardboard suitcase stencilled in white with her name. Halley Murphy. Jeanné Murphy.

Nora puts the children on the corporation bus every morning, their season tickets looped in clear plastic luggage tags around the suitcase handles. Each time, she arranges with the driver about where to stop, although Halley knows perfectly well since she’s already been doing this for several months by herself. Like her mother, she has a good sense of direction.

When nursery school is over at midday, the sisters know to wait outside until the Umbilo Number 7 bus comes and then they get on and go all all all the way until the driver stops at the tearoom on Queen Mary, and then they get off together and walk home.

The slightly bigger girl, baby blonde hair turning to brown under her hat, she likes to hurry since there is always still so much to do. And she chides her slowpoke sister, who dawdles, swings her hat by its elastic like an Easter-egg basket, tries to twirl it on her finger, the sun glinting upon her dark, shiny curls.

For the rest of the afternoon, they play with their friends until their mother comes back from work. Which could be soon after two, if she can do half-day, or later, if not. All depending.

During which time, the girls shift for themselves, Halley keeping an eye on Jen.

The world just beyond Kenneth Gardens is very familiar. About midway along, for instance, Queen Mary Avenue is punctuated by a traffic circle. Not a full stop, but a poetic navel.

Halley loves the pleasing shape of the circle, and within it the bold black-on-yellow chevron that signals a sharp curve. She takes the circle as a centre from which her life, like that of others, has begun slowly to emerge. Along its axes there radiate a church, an Afrikaans school, a huddle of small, family-owned shops, the corporation flats and the intersecting roads. And don’t forget the bus stops, one opposite each of the circle’s grassy quadrants.

The bus routes are the lines which extend the world, promising ever greater distances. But in fact, buses aside, it is possible to walk miles and miles in any direction. The sky, as it still remains, is up, thinks Halley; the earth is down. Or on, in, under.

And walk they do, this female family. From Umbilo to what seems almost everywhere. Sometimes, the walking is leisurely, and there’s time to find small pleasures – pausing, picking up, pointing out. More often, they walk with determined purpose, because the mother has said they are going somewhere.

If you don’t walk, she says, With your own two feet, you aren’t going anywhere. That’s it. There’s not always money for the bus, so if feet are what you’ve got, feet are what you use.

Even when Nora’s flush, there are hard choices: the bus both ways, or just one trip and an ice cream? Which will it be, girls? You decide. And so their mouths are sticky with the short-lived memory, and their legs are very tired.

So they walk the streets. Pound the pavements. Discovering the city all the way, Halley thinks, from A to Z.

They walk in shine, and in wet, once even allowed to slosh barefoot in the raging gutters, just for fun. Singing in the rain.

What’s a gutter, girls, but the edge of the pavement, laughed their mother, twirling her umbrella.

On the way to Mitchell Park are houses like the town museum, with big grounds, and cars which live in garages. Closer this side, when they go to the Botanic Gardens, is Warwick Avenue, the houses stuck together half and half with people from different walks of life.

Some brown boys have got this kitten. Mushy grey, with blackish stripes. They’ve tied a tin can to its tail. The mewing is pitiful. The frail, gummy face and small jaws. The boys laugh.

You want? Have it!

You do want it. You really, really do.

But your mother says No, and drags you away.

Pets are not allowed in the flats, but you’d do anything to keep that kitten. Instead, the three of you must keep walking home, all three angry. You are full of hatred for your mean, heartless mother. And, for once, your horrible, stubborn sister is cried out with begging.

But your mother just carries on walking. She walks and walks, as though she is struggling to come free of an invisible cord.

Some days the walking is good, and you can feel it strongly, right in your body. Because while your feet are going, covering the ground at what feels like ten to the dozen, whatever that really is, you also set your shoulders straight and keep your head up and your arms stepping out briskly so that the oxygen can do its work, pumped from your lungs to all the far-flung corners of your body.

So you’re exhausted, but also filled with energy. You want to run, just for the hell of it, and sing out loud, even shout!

You do sing, all sorts. And you run, running ahead. Sometimes, your mother and your sister seem so very far behind.

And yes, you know you look ridiculous, perfecting a new run, jumping and knocking your heels together, and that all this racket is disturbing the peace. But you don’t care, you just don’t.

I don’t care! you scream at the passing cars, making faces, So, huh, you want to come stop me? And they don’t. Nobody does anything. Not even your mother, who’s now just a toy figure in the distance.

Which proves your point exactly.

So Halley knows that if the street is a line of civic discipline, sticking to the straight and narrow, it’s also a place of liberating irreverence outside home.

And that when you’re particularly happy there is walking on air, which nobody tells you how to do because it’s believed to be impossible.

Well, let me tell you, it’s not.

Gardens

When they were making plans, the town planners probably imagined Kenneth Gardens as a gesture of green faith in human nature; a garden suburb, the sure, civic-minded sign of change for the better, countering war-weariness.

During construction, to soften the look of brutal housing estate, some mature trees are retained, then the spacious grounds are planted with flowering shrubs, indigenous and exotic, the entire world in this green shade, giving space for families to grow. Numerous frangipanis and jacarandas. Lucky beans. Yesterday-today-and-tomorrow. Poinsettia. Pride of India. Some dense thorny elms, and the sparse, jagged towers of darkly louring Norfolk pines.

More homely are the names of the flats, since each block in Kenneth Gardens is named for an indigenous flower, the letters bevelled into the masonry above the entranceway. Ixia Court. Like everyone else the Murphys say Exia.

Ixia, Watsonia, Iris, Jasmine, Arum . . . At the time when Kenneth Gardens is built, the flowers are intended as a welcome home bouquet for the ex-servicemen, and they represent the whole blooming bunch of beautiful South Africa, paradise on earth.

By the 1960s, when the Murphys move in, the gardens no longer exist; only the tough old trees soldiering on near the wash-lines, and down in the park. So the names of the flowers carved into the plasterwork are merely the mark of a person’s address. Ixia. It’s where you live.

Since the gardens are long gone, it’s the wash-lines which dominate. Every day, there is the burden of daily washing weighing down a woman’s arms, and then pegged onto the plastic-coated wire strung from metal T-bars. Only the dark provides relief, as then the lines become invisible, despite some things being left to hang around all night. A saggy bra. A lone pair of limping trousers, slowly dampening home into another pegged-out day.

Every kitchen door opens onto the shag of grass strung with communal wash-lines. Nora hates it. Hates having to look at other people’s washing, dirty or otherwise. Nora prefers privacy – why should it be a privilege? There are things in life you shouldn’t have to see. But with the wash-lines you’re as good as walking around naked, since the neighbours can see your business out there every day, without even the trouble of having to pry.

Boys and girls swing on the gibbeted T-bars and run through the washing ka-flap ka-flap, their arms outstretched. They carry on even after they’ve been shouted at. Halley too, if there’s no chance of being caught. Because it’s fun. The quick brush and fast pull past of fabric which lets you pretend different things, like you’re hitting people, or trying on their clothes, or you’re putting your spirit into what they’re going to wear. That’s how much power you have. I am in . . . vin . . . ci . . . ble!

But also you can get frightened among those rows. The cloth smothering your face. And the washing can turn on you, especially if it’s a windy day.

Once, they’d gone visiting with friends to a house past Durban North, and bold Halley took all the children exploring in the nearby cane fields. Somehow, she got them lost. Halley was so so lost, but couldn’t let on. What happened? asked the worried adults later, demanding an explanation.

She couldn’t say. All those horrible hours pretending to the kids that you knew where you were; so conscious of the day getting shorter, the night drawing in like hidden cane rats, waiting to attack.

So sometimes, when she looks at everyone’s clothes on the lines – there’s Aunty Beulah, there’s Sheila and Belinda, there’s Uncle Zach, there’s . . . there’s me! – Halley understands the idea of emptiness, of herself as inside out.

Halley has the Weet-Bix flower card collection. A series of 100 cards issued by arrangement with the United Tobacco Companies. There are also mammals, and fish. She has these too.

Nora often gives the girls Weet-Bix cereal for breakfast, since Weet-Bix is very filling. It is an economical food, especially high in fibre, and it keeps a body regular. You can’t be too careful on both these counts.

Halley contemplates the Weet-Bix in her bowl. A single biscuit, doused with warm milk, swells to double its size. The process is good as a biology experiment, digestion just about occurring in front of your eyes. Which makes up for having to eat cardboard.

But Halley wants the flower cards, so she eats Weet-Bix. Lots of. Then she cuts off the end flaps and pastes the pictures into a special album to make her own book. Our South African Flora, it’s called, and it is full of interesting information, selected and arranged for you by actual scientists. You only have to fill in the blanks.

The cards and the album are part of an educational brain system which helps to make your head full of ideas. This suits Halley fine, as she is already consumed by seriously big thoughts. She’s read one book, see, about people trying to live through the Second World War? And there were such terrible things happening that it didn’t seem shocking even when soldiers tore pages from The Bible! for rolling their cigarettes. Man cannot live by bread alone, she knows that. Also, she found that article near next-door’s dustbin. From an old Scope magazine. About a strange girl who refused to eat anything but paper, so that she felt full without getting fat.

The Weet-Bix flower cards are fun. They give you something useful to do with your mind, so that you don’t seem like a cow while you eat. Years later, however, she can’t remember one thing she ever learnt from them. Nothing about flowers. Nothing about Ixia.

She was such a bookworm, Halley Murphy, curled up among her papers and pages, but she didn’t know that she was housed undercover, beneath the sign of an indigenous flower. All those years she’d lived under the cover of Ixia, a secret, flower-fairy greenery which covered itself, along with everything else.

Natural history

At the flats, Nature was almost the same as the ordinary outside, the fresh air where children were expected to play. So nature was what you were willing to make it.

Beneath the elm tree, out back in the dry soil, there were fierce little antlions that carved inverted cones in the sand; tiny, unstable pit wells to trap passing ants. If she got tired of waiting for nature to take its course, Halley dropped in an ant, then watched it struggle up the slope, its frenzy helping to shift the tide of grains towards the jaws of certain death. And all it took was a magnifying glass to work some kids up into a nervous anxiety: See the big pincers? Imagine that coming at you in the dark. You wouldn’t stand a chance.

And if anyone didn’t believe her, the intimations about what was possible, Halley magnified her tales with intimidating pictures from her nature-study picture books. She liked to point out the detailed scientific drawing of the enormous flea, monstrously enlarged. Close-up engravings of a tick and other creepy parasites. She’d even done some sketches of her own, inventing a whole hooked catalogue of cunning creatures with piercing, needle-sharp noses; with whiplash, tickle-tie electric antennae, and legs of brutal bolts and ginormous jaws waiting to bandersnatch. A ferocious collection.

Bugs like this, she’d say to her scabby little audience, They live on your body, yours especially, because you don’t bath so often. Sis. This one, see, soon as you fall asleep, it’s going to suck out your brain. If it can find any!

Halley was sometimes sorry when she managed to scare the other kids off, because it was much more satisfying to have them watching. Especially if she had some meths. She’d drip a little of the clear, purple liquid and carefully angle her lens, catching the sun tight and tilting tighter towards the burning point, waiting until exactly the white-hot moment when the antlion and the ant connected . . .

And then she’d zap them both.

Beyond the drip-line of the thorny elm, as the slope rolled sideways, the soil became more crumbly, and a downpour could wet the earth sodden. Puddles burped up and deepened to shallow ponds, belching out earthworms.

Not ordinary wrigglers, but nearly as long as Halley is tall. Examining a giant earthworm as it surfaces, she sees a fat blind tip, single pollex thumbing through drenched soil. It is a tunnel come alive, nudging the red-brown earth aside like a muscular liquid.

When you lie still, at night, waiting and waiting for sleep to come, you can hear the workings. The grunts and explosive squirting. Then it’s easy to believe that something’s in you, working overtime.

What’s got into you? her mother asks then, fed up with the child’s endless worries.

Outside, the tongueless, toothless worms swallow soil and vegetable matter, passing it backwards, over and out. But the castings seem much too neat to be droppings, and the little mounds she disturbs with her fingers look deliberately crafted.

Halley has paid attention in class; she understands that the earthworms help to pocket the soil with precious air, and she knows that the worms are nocturnal. But she never thinks that then she ought not to be seeing them. She completely misunderstands. Imagines that the giant worms, like Halley Murphy, have come out for the pleasure of the wet, to feel the moisture upon their thirsty skin, to shrug off the confines of familiar family and fusty indoors.

The worms cannot tell her how the rain floods their tunnels and cuts off their underground air supply; that unless they leave their homes, they will drown. That there is limited happiness for them in this saturation she loves, forced out into the light from the dark depths of which children, alone, are so fearful.

Though down there, too, the worms would report if they could, in the netherworld that brooks no refusal, are hidden engines working into the lightless earth, pipelines of gas, oil, sewage; barrelling cables with convoluted connection to the life that she’s learning to live on the surface.

It’s common knowledge that if you pick your nose, you get worms. A filthy habit. On that score, nobody seems to disagree. If grown-ups catch you picking, they get sarky. Had any luck there with the gold-digging, hm? Or, Care to share? Basically they make you appreciate how gross you’ve been, forcing other people to watch your revolting excavations.

So Halley is wise enough to pick secretly, though no one would take her for any kind of poekie-picker at all. And bingo, she gets worms. Which seems proof of the prevailing popular truth.

Out of the nose, into the mouth. Something like the predictable life-cycle of the bilharzia parasite.

When Halley gets worms, or worms get her, she has what’s called suffering the consequences, by which time it’s too late to promise, to swear, that on my oath I won’t do it again.

They are fine threadworms that veer and swerve like millesimal cobras on the wadded toilet paper, and she’s petrified, fearing that she’s charmed them out of the darkness. The worms are so insubstantial that in order to see them properly she must bring the paper right up to her eyes, which makes the worms enormous. She stares at them closely, their tortuous writhings. She feels hypnotised. And then suddenly she’s terrified that she’s doing exactly what the wily wrigglers want, which is to get close enough to her face to worm their way inside her nostrils!

When she gets worms, she also gets ashamed, so tells her mother only when she can’t bear her bottom itching any longer, since having worms makes known your secret dirtiness. Worms and dirt go hand in hand.

The other reason she holds back is because the medicine for worms is possibly worse than having worms in the first place. In a mug of Five Roses, her mother dissolves the granular, sandy contents of a tiny metal phial, stirring until the blend resembles a strong brew of ordinary black tea. And then Halley must drink it, even though she knows it’s an awful compotion.

Swallow! her mother instructs. Just drink it!

For Halley, it’s the smell. Like the unflushed public toilets where she and Jen are forbidden to sit on the wooden seat; they must first put a layer of toilet paper, the long strip eased and neatly folded into an almost oval, and even then perch, tinkling quickly. It’s hard, that, letting go while you’re also holding your breath and balancing.

So as she raises the cup, in the worm mixture she smells the lavatories across from the main post office in town. Not even the Ladies Dames, but the men’s urinals. You can smell them coming a mile off.

Halley tastes the sourness in the reservoir of her nose and sobs, her shoulders hunched at the thought of what she must do. She tries to do it. Sips a little in slow motion while Nora looks on, increasingly testy.

The messy texture of the granules, the suggestion of dank soilings . . . Halley thinks of the medication as a nauseating kind of sympathetic magic. Could it be that the worms originate in the phial, meaning that it’s the medicine she gets the worms from? Kooky logic, perhaps, but there it is.

Defiantly, she bangs the mug on the table.

Which is when Nora loses her rag and grabs her daughter’s head and finally forces her. As she tries to crush the girl’s squirming, grim-lipped refusal – Yorrkilllllingmemommmmy! – Nora is conscious of this as one of the rare moments when she could swear it’s Jennie she’s dealing with, not Halley. But right now there’s No Damn Difference and the child is provoking her to violence! Aahgod for a capsule that could just be shoved between locked teeth, stuck wherever, and it would be done!

Halley will not easily open her mouth, and even then closes her throat, so that the brew rinses grittily against her teeth, puddling in the pockets of her cheeks. She gags and retches. Her mother squeezes her face, pinching her mouth shut. And eventually Halley can do nothing except swallow, because if she has to hold the taste any longer then she’ll kotch, and have to do it all over.

Both Halley and Nora hate it when the girl gets worms. So does Jen, because although she’s never seen a worm near her body, which maybe is because she’s not looking, she’s obliged to endure the same sick treatment.

With the first bout of Halley’s affliction, Nora consulted Mr Cordial, The Chemist, who maintained you could not do one, it had to be both. So both of them it was. And that was over and done with, till the next time. Which there always was, because Halley played in the sand and didn’t wash her hands and, secretly, picked her nose.

But then, oh Holy Mary Mother of God, broeks asunder over the toilet, Halley discovered she had another kind of worm, much much more terrible than the others.

Big. An awful monster which stuck there, even though she’d bent herself double trying to see, and when she saw, straightened up smartly, gasping. It seemed impossible.

Halley pushed and strained, which only sent the worm into a clenched paroxysm, flickering against her cheeks. She was trapped. She felt it licking her. She screamed for help.

Halley could see that while her mother came at once to offer comfort, she really wanted to get the hell out of there, she was that revolted. But Nora overcame her squeamishness because she had no choice, really. The girl couldn’t deal with this by herself. She needed her mother.

Pulling, looping the long worm into a few sheets of loo paper, Nora wrapped it loosely into several thicknesses and concealed the unpleasant little parcel in her purse, taking it with her when she went to the orifice. Office.

After work, she walked home via the pharmacy, where Mr Cordial informed her that this, clearly, was no mere threadworm or pinworm. An adult roundworm, he said. In italics for emphasis, Ascaris lumbricoides.

And where there was one . . .

So both Halley and Jen should take double the quantities of the usual mix, and maybe, he advised, hands raised to entertain the possibility, could be Mrs Murphy ought to do herself too?

Nora takes her own measure in private, which is a good thing because my godfathers, she grimaces, it’s terrible. Why make such a foul medicine, she asks herself, and for children? You’d think the plan was to punish a child for falling sick.

To placate Halley, Nora said Well, at least it was only two measures. If it was one dose for the little worms, it could reasonably be ten for a worm big as hers.

Which freaked Halley out. Was her mother mad? What did her mother think? That she wanted to be a monster, some crazy female who squeezed worms like mutant babies from her bum?

But that’s what she did, after the treatment. All arsy-versy. A substantial bolus. They had to come out.

All the Kenneth Gardens children gravitate towards the park, which is what’s left of the gardens from once upon a time. Patches of worn grass tangled with clover and dubbeltjies, though even this green gives up near the seesaw and the swings, where it’s only red sand.

It’s shabby, all right, the park in Kenneth Gardens, but there’s no concrete, and nothing to mess up, so perfect for all the kids who run rough, rude and rowdy, who climb and corner and camp out; hordes of dirty savages who shriek through Kissing Catches and aggressive, thumping bouts of Red Rover Red Rover we