Things I Don't Want to Know by Deborah Levy

Author:Deborah Levy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2018-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

4

I knew that smiling was like the magic charms that some girls wore on bracelets. Little silver pixies and hearts jiggling on their suntanned wrists to bring them luck and ward off the evil eye. Smiling was a way of keeping people out of your head even though you’d opened your head when you parted your lips. This is how I smiled when Godmother Dory told me she was going to send me to the local convent school. While she was saying this she held a little pair of scissors in her hand to trim Billy Boy’s wings.

‘The feathers should be shiny and full.’ Her plump finger prodded Billy Boy’s chest. ‘This is the keel bone. It’s sticking out a little bit more than it should. I think Billy Boy is underweight. I’m going to give him more seed than usual tonight.’

‘What’s a convent school?’

‘It’s a school where the teachers are nuns.’

‘What’s a nun?’

‘A nun is a woman who has married Jesus Christ.’

‘Oh. The hostess on the plane to Durbs was getting married. She showed me her ring.’

‘But she didn’t marry Jesus Christ. She probably married a man called Henk van de Plais or something like that. It’s quite quite different.’

Her face was pale like a zombie.

‘An alert and playful budgie is a sign of a healthy budgie. Billy Boy is not as chirpy as usual.’

When she had finished tidying up Billy Boy’s feathers she locked him up again in his cage. I watched how she wiggled the little lever to shut him in so that I could wiggle it to get him out.

‘The convent is called Saint Anne’s and the nuns are very good teachers. Please take the cat and his tapeworm away from Billy Boy’s cage.’

I picked up the cat and warmed my hands in its ginger fur. I knew he didn’t have a tapeworm. Maybe Godmother Dory had a tapeworm inside her? The clue was that she was hungry all the time, so something was eating her up. The cat had taken to sleeping in my bedroom. Melissa threatened to cut Ginger’s ear off if he didn’t return to her pink satin eiderdown, but he had obviously decided to risk it. Ginger Was Mine. When Melissa had been a pupil at the convent she hated it. Now that she was doing a secretarial course and drank Rock Shandies and met her girl friend from Pietermaritzburg at the Three Monkeys or the Wimpy Burger Bar, she had stopped praying.

‘You don’t want the convent girls to think you’re a freak do you?’

‘No.’

‘Then you must speak loud. Hey I’ll tell you one thing: you’ll be the only girl with a Jewish surname on the register. If you get lost in the cloisters just follow your nose.’ Melissa laughed until her painted-on eyes ran all over her face and I joined in because I was her little chum.

Saint Anne’s was a provincial school for well-heeled, white-skinned Catholic girls. Between the cloisters stood a small bowed statue of the Madonna and child, the sad mother with her baby in her arms.

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