Never Tell A Lie Read online

  ‘Tell me why you have to look nice again?’ says Django, watching me discard the top I had planned to wear when I realise that it has a small hole near the neckline. We’re at the tail end of summer, so the nights are chilly. I need something warm enough, but I don’t want to get all overheated and sweaty. There’s not a lot of choice in my limited wardrobe.

  ‘Don’t you want to go and help Granpops with making the fire for a braai?’ I suggest, selecting another shirt. My father is cooking the boys chops and boerewors on my small braai, and he’s already started the fire. I hold the new shirt up to my chest. It’s not as good as the other one was, but it will have to do. At least the dark green colour will bring out the flecks of green in my eyes.

  ‘No,’ says Aiden on Django’s behalf, and I flinch. Django is too quick to allow other children to railroad him. ‘We really want to hear again about this looking-good-for-people-you-don’t-care-about-at-all thing again.’

  ‘Exactly,’ says Django. ‘Aiden and I ain’t goin’ nowhere.’

  I glare at him. I hate it when he tries to sound like a cowboy.

  ‘Thank you, my old friend,’ responds Aiden, who, in contrast to Django, often sounds like he fell out of a PG Wodehouse novel. I feel better with that. Friendship does not come to Django easily, and I like hearing him banter with Aiden, even if they are very different and Aiden tends to dominate.

  ‘So explain again,’ says Aiden.

  Stacey answers as she brushes her hair for the hundredth time. ‘We need to look nice so that all the people we went to school with say, “Look how nice they look”, and spend the ten years till the next reunion telling each other how good we looked.’

  ‘Because you won’t see them in between?’ says Django. ‘These are not your friends?’

  ‘That’s it,’ I say. ‘It is vitally important that this group of almost strangers spends the next ten years talking about us.’

  ‘Essential,’ says Stacey, and we both pick up our almost-empty wine glasses and clink them together.

  ‘And just to be clear,’ says Aiden, ‘even though these people will talk about you for ten more years, you will never think of them again after tonight?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Bang on, boys.’

  ‘That’s so lame,’ says Django. ‘Come, Aiden, let’s go to Granpops. He’s ancient but less lame. And he’s got marshmallows. He said we could only toast them after we ate, but maybe he’ll change his mind.’

  The boys get off the bed and head out, and I hear Aiden say, ‘It’s weird how the very old ones are cooler than the kind-of old ones.’

  Once the boys are out of earshot, I share my latest concerns about Django with Stacey. Thanks to Travis’s life insurance, I can send Django to a private school despite my rather dire financial situation. Aiden’s ne’er-do-well father pays no child support, and Stacey doesn’t have the energy to keep fighting for it: ‘Months in court, and he’ll make one payment and default again,’ she says. ‘It’s cheaper to get nothing.’ So Aiden goes to a very good government school. In a way, it’s good that they aren’t together any more. It means I can speak openly to Stacey about Django. And it means that Aiden stays friends with Django, which I am not convinced would be the case if they were at the same school.

  ‘It’s not that he hates it,’ I tell her, repeating something I’ve said a hundred times before. ‘He just seems to turn himself inwards the closer we get to school. By the time we get there, I hardly see the Django I know. And then when he comes home, I watch him unfurl.’

  ‘You need to move him,’ says Stacey, and I can feel she is a bit bored by the conversation. I don’t blame her really; I’m always rehashing my worries about Django, and she’s always rehashing her advice. I wonder, for the first time in the eight years since he died, whether Travis would have been able to talk for hours about our son’s problems. I give my head a little shake. Travis was not that sort of father, although he certainly pretended to be to other people.

  ‘You’re right,’ I tell Stacey, because what else can I say, even though I am not really sure that she is right? ‘I need to look at my options. Explore some alternatives. But enough of that . . . Who d’you think is going to be there tonight?’

  Stacey smiles, and as she starts to speculate about our old schoolmates, I feel a moment of deep loneliness. I have my dad; I have my friends. But really, when it comes to Django, I just have me. And since I found that postcard, I have felt my aloneness more profoundly than ever before. I nod as Stacey speaks, hoping she can’t tell how empty I feel inside. But she gets my attention eventually, because I hadn’t realised before how anxious she really is about the reunion. She had a terrible falling-out with her best friend in Grade 12, or Standard 10 as we called it then, and she’s worrying about whether Marissa will be at the reunion and what it will be like.

  ‘Maybe you and I should just go out for supper?’ she says.

  For a moment, I’m tempted. I have no idea why we ever thought this reunion was a good idea. Stacey and I at a lovely restaurant with a bottle of wine sounds much more my pace. And I can talk to her about Django . . . I stop, remembering her clear boredom at the subject.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘We need to do this. It’ll be good for us. If Marissa is there, I’ll just hang on to you and protect you. And you have to do the same for me if that bloody Dustin is there.’ Dustin was my high school boyfriend. I broke up with him when school ended because I could see the path of drug and alcohol addiction that stretched out before him, and in a rare act of self-preservation, I jumped ship.

  ‘What, are you scared you’ll rekindle your red-hot romance?’

  ‘Oh, shut up, you,’ I laugh, thinking how Dustin was really the first of a pattern of disasters. ‘You stick to worrying about Marissa.’

  ‘Well,’ says Stacey, ‘it’s not like she’s going to sleep with my boyfriend again.’

  ‘True, especially seeing you don’t have one,’ I say.

  Stacey falls back on the bed, holding her hands over her heart. ‘Harsh words, Mary, harsh words.’

  ‘But true,’ I say, giving my mascara a final touch-up. ‘Come on, let’s go. Before we chicken out.’

  Chapter 5

  Our group has taken over the entire small restaurant where the event is being held.

  ‘God,’ says Stacey, as we walk in, ‘why are so many people here? Losers.’

  I raise my eyebrows at her.

  Close to the door is a trestle table with glasses of wine set out, and a peroxide blonde stands behind the table with a list of names and stickers.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ she yells at us. ‘Let me guess.’ She puts her hand to her ample cleavage.

  Stacey and I look at each other and shrug.

  ‘Belinda Delarey and Molly Kruger,’ she yells. ‘I would have known you anywhere.’

  I feel bad shattering her confidence, but I have to. ‘Um, no. I’m Mary Wilson and she’s Stacey Fonteyn.’ We were told in the invitation to use our maiden names for the evening, for easy identification. I went back to my maiden name after Travis died, so it doesn’t feel strange. And Stacey has never been married.

  Peroxide Blonde looks between Stacey and me, perplexed. Then her smile emerges again. ‘Of course,’ she yells, only by now I’ve realised that’s just her regular voice. ‘Stace! Mare! I would have recognised you anywhere.’

  ‘Right,’ says Stacey.

  ‘Now you do me!’ says Peroxide Blonde. ‘See if you recognise me.’

  ‘You’re Bronwyn Lester,’ I say. It’s easy – her sticker is already firmly affixed to her left boob (which seems larger and perkier than it could possibly have been at high school).

  ‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Oh, we would have known you anywhere,’ Stacey says with a perfectly straight face.

  ‘The seating plan is over there,’ says Bronwyn, handing us our name stickers. ‘We decided it was just easier if seats were allocated, know what I mean?’

  My heart sinks.
Seating plan? What fresh hell is this?

  ‘Um, I’m sure we can swap around if we’re not happy, right?’ I say.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ says Bronwyn. Were it not for the Botox, I’m sure she’d look quite fierce. ‘Penny and I spent hours getting it just right, know what I mean? You can’t change it.’ Penny was the head girl in our year. Clearly Bronwyn thinks that she still holds some sort of power.

  Bronwyn’s attention turns to the people behind us, so Stacey and I move on to look at this seating plan.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ we hear Bronwyn yell at the new arrivals. ‘Let me guess.’

  The seating plan is as bad as it could be, because Stacey has been seated at a table with Marissa and six other people.

  ‘Absolutely no way,’ she says. ‘Bronwyn Big Boobs can shove it. I’m sitting with you.’

  We look at my table list. It’s a group of familiar names. I can attach a face and a memory to most of them, but there’s no one that immediately makes my heart sing. Then again, I always knew that would be the case. The restaurant – or Bronwyn and Penny – seem to have rejected the idea of several very large tables, and instead it’s the usual restaurant style of some people at tables of ten and some at tables of two. At least my table has six – I can’t imagine the awkwardness of those tables for two. I take a quick glance through the rest of the list – to my relief Dustin doesn’t seem to be on it.

  ‘What I’ll do,’ says Stacey, ‘is just swap myself with someone at your table. I’ll cross it out and no one will question.’

  She starts digging in her bag for a pen. Stacey’s bag is a wonder: it produces snacks, wipes, pens, paper, spare underwear, hairbrushes, lipstick . . . You need it, she probably has it.

  ‘Got it,’ she says, pulling out a pink pen. She’s about to do the deed, when—

  ‘Oh my God, Stacey!’

  We both turn around, expecting to have to explain ourselves to Bronwyn, but it’s not her.

  The apparition before us has wild red hair and bright red lipstick. To borrow Bronwyn’s phrase, we would have known her anywhere. It’s Marissa, Stacey’s erstwhile bestie. I feel myself bristle.

  ‘Oh my God, Stacey,’ says Marissa again, flinging her arms around her. ‘Thank God you’re here. I asked Penny to put us at the same table if you came. And here you are. Oh my God, I am so happy.’ Stacey doesn’t even manage to lift her arms.

  Marissa steps back and holds Stacey by the shoulders. Stacey looks like a rabbit in the headlights.

  ‘You and I have so much catching up to do,’ she says. ‘So many memories.’ It looks like she’s going to start crying. ‘Oh, Stacey, you’re the best friend I ever had.’ She hugs Stacey again, and this time Stacey lifts her arms and hugs her back. When they separate, Stacey turns to me.

  ‘I guess maybe I’ll stay at that table,’ she says, not quite meeting my eye. ‘Is that okay? Maybe you can swap and sit with us?’

  I glance from her to Marissa, who is clinging to her arm with a manic grin on her face, like maybe she’s planning on eating Stacey for dinner.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say, my heart sinking a little. ‘I see you all the time. You and Marissa need to catch up.’

  ‘Oh my God, Mary,’ says Marissa, briefly dropping Stacey’s arm to hug me. ‘So good to see you. You look gorge. And you and Stace still friends after all this time!’

  She says it sweetly, but I can hear the arsenic in her words.

  ‘Indeed,’ I say. ‘Isn’t life strange?’

  I turn back to the list of people sitting at my table:

  Linda Henderson

  Michelle Louw

  April Short

  Joshua Botha

  Steve Twala

  I look at the names for the other tables and I see what they’ve done – as far as possible, from what I can remember, they’ve put us with people who were in the same class. Maybe Penny and Bronwyn aren’t as stupid as I thought, because at least I do have actual memories of everyone at this table. Steve Twala, for example, was one of the first black boys at our previously white school. I’ve heard that at some schools, this post-apartheid integration led to the black kids being left out or shunned. Not at ours. People fell over themselves to be nice to Steve. Everybody wanted to be his friend. He was invited to every party and, looking back, it was hideously awkward. Mothers would ask him if he wanted traditional maize porridge – pap – instead of pizza, and even the parents fell over themselves to show that It Was Okay That He Was Black. I’d liked Steve. We’d sat next to each other in Maths, and shared boxes of Smarties under the table. Neither of us had a clue how to prove a theorem, but he often made me laugh. Seeing Steve will be great. I can’t believe I haven’t thought of him for so long.

  And Linda Henderson. I played netball with Linda. Before matches, she used to plait my hair for me, because I didn’t have a mom, so I never had fancy plaits. When she finished the French plait, or fishtail, or Dutch plait, or whatever wonder she had chosen for me, she would pat my shoulder and say, ‘There now, don’t you look beautiful’, and I just knew that this must be what her mom said to her, and it became a symbol of the sort of thing that moms said to their children. I realise that I often say to Django, ‘There now, don’t you look handsome.’ Oh, I can’t wait to see what has happened to Linda.

  Joshua Botha was a rugby player. Once, when I fell and sprained my ankle on the field, Joshua had carried me to the sickroom. For weeks afterwards, I had doodled his name in my notebooks and fantasised about what we would name our children. Until Dustin James asked me to be his girlfriend, and I reckoned a bird in hand was worth two in the bush. That’s possibly always been my mistake with men. I smile at the memory.

  Michelle Louw was paired with me in Home Economics in Grade 8 and 9. God, we both hated it and we were terrible. We sewed the skewest aprons, knitted dolls that looked like leprosy sufferers and baked cakes that conked down in the middle. ‘What will I do with you two?’ Mrs Joubert, our Home-Ec teacher, used to say, observing a burnt loaf of bread or unravelling knitting. ‘And worse than that, what will your husbands do?’ At that, her voice would rise and she would sound almost frantic, envisioning perhaps our furious future husbands tracking her down and demanding to know why she had failed to teach us anything. ‘Dear Jesus,’ she would say, ‘but this is beyond me.’

  April Short is the only one that I can’t summon any clear memories about. I know who she is; I can picture a shadowy presence around the edges of our class. I vaguely remember she was involved in something that happened on a camp once. But I can’t remember if I knew the details – whether the thing was done to her, or by her, or near her. I know there was a lot of talk – but I can’t remember if everyone knew and I’ve forgotten, or if it was one of those things swept under the rug, leaving the pupils guessing. Like when Mr Behr left the school.

  I’ve been standing contemplating the list, oblivious to the people around me, for a few minutes, when a voice at my elbow says tentatively, ‘Um, could I have a look?’ Filled with a new feeling of excitement about seeing people, I turn to see who it is, but the woman standing next to me isn’t ringing any bells. We stare at each other for a moment, and then she says, ‘Oh my God, Mary Wilson, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ I look at her carefully, trying desperately to see who she is. And then I remember: the name tags! So I glance down, quickly, I hope.

  ‘April Short,’ I say, and am able to truthfully add, ‘I was just this minute thinking about you.’

  ‘Really?’ She looks pleased.

  ‘Look,’ I say, pointing. ‘We’re at the same table.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so pleased,’ she says, clapping her hands together, which is something I’ve never seen a person do in real life; it makes her seem so vulnerable. ‘I’ve been dreading this,’ she says. ‘I almost didn’t come. But if I’m sitting with you, well, then maybe it won’t be so bad, will it?’

  ‘April,’ I say, suddenly feeling happy and confident and warm, ‘we are going to have the best time.’<
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  I look at April. She’s shorter than me, and thin. Almost transparent; like a fairy. She’s chosen the same basic dress style that Stacey and I went with – black pants and a nice top. Her top is almost Victorian, buttoned to the neck with little frills down the sides. Ruffles, I think they’re called. She has a few long gold necklaces of various lengths. On her feet, where Stacey and I have opted for high heels, she’s wearing ballet-like flatties. Her clothes look expensive and utterly fashionable, despite being slightly old-fashioned. Her hair is shoulder length and she wears an Alice band, so her face is exposed. Like us all, there are the signs of time passing – but if she’s wearing make-up it’s the expensive sort that looks natural. She’s as fresh-faced as a teenager. Her appearance gives a strange combined message of ‘Take me as you find me because I know who I am’ and complete vulnerability.

  She looks around and then says, ‘I don’t remember half these people. I’d swear they didn’t go to our school.’

  ‘I was feeling that too,’ I say. ‘Then I looked at the table list and all these memories came rushing back.’ I pause, and then panic that she might ask me what I remembered about her, so I add, ‘Have a look yourself.’

  She looks and smiles. ‘Steve was the best,’ she says. ‘And Linda was nice.’