Carole yearned for these porcelain cats. Hillela generously presented her with the undamaged one. Pauline was amused to see the pair parted, one with a space carefully cleared for it on Carole’s bedside table, the other among shells and mascots and packets of chewing gum on the window-sill above Hillela’s bed. — Now you’ve reduced their value still further. Don’t tell Olga, for god’s sake. You’ll never make an art collector.—
When the two girls were alone Carole made an offer. — I don’t mind swapping for the mended one.—
— No. I’d give them both to you, if I could.—
The Ndebele necklace fastened with a loop over a button, and the thread broke the second or third time Hillela wore it; the beads frayed off and in time rolled away into cracks in a drawer. The wink of their glint under dust and fluff caught her eye: she had missed many Saturdays at the classes in the old church; without making any decision, it was understood that Carole alone would be accompanying her mother each week. Hillela and her new friend Mandy von Herz lied about where they were going or had been, even if the destination were innocent as a walk to the corner shop. They disappeared, even in company, into a privacy of glances, whispers, gazes past adults to whom they were either talking or appeared to be listening; an impatience sparked silently from them. Perhaps Mandy knew about Sasha; such secrets are binding as vows, affirm a buried solidarity even among crowds. Without mixing much with other girls, the pair were immensely popular at school, admired by those who could not keep up with their nerve. Hillela, an old lag, introduced to selected boarders the technique learned in Rhodesia for getting in and out of school at night. When discovered, they were too grateful for the freedom they had had, to mention her name.
GO-GO DANCERS LIVEN SATURDAY STREETS: a Sunday paper publishes a photograph of two young girls, flying legs and hair, dancing in a shop window. So this is what Hillela is doing with her Saturday mornings, now.
But Pauline must have decided, with the wise counsel of Joe, to take it tolerantly, carefully, considering the girl’s background. — What on earth is go-go dancing, darling? And whose idea was the shop window?—
— It’s a boutique run by some friends of Mandy. They’re paying us ten rands each.—
There would be no second time for the proud young wage-earners of the new currency just introduced; as Pauline said, how lucky they were to get off even once without trouble at the school; and this issue wasn’t really one on which she could have tackled the headmistress as she had over the waiter. (The headmistress must have been grateful that the girls’ names were not published; there was no summons to her study.) Carole was the only member of the family who allowed herself to be openly upset by the incident. — You should see Hillela and Mandy dancing! You don’t know! They’re wonderful! You should just see them! — But one thing Pauline and Joe never feared was that Carole would be influenced by her cousin; like her brother Sasha, Carole was too well-adjusted for that.
Pauline was frank with Hillela, always frank: one of the problems with Hillela was that she never seemed able to explain what made her do what she did? Having got away with dancing in a shop window in a bikini with a bit of fringe bobbing on her backside, one Friday she did not come home from school and had not appeared by eleven o’clock at night. Carole confided later that she herself had ‘got hell’ from her parents for not reporting earlier she had no idea where Hillela was. Pauline thought Hillela, as the elder of the two, must be allowed the self-respect of more freedom than Carole. The girls had heard it many times: I don’t want to behave towards you the way Olga and Ruthie and I were treated when we were young, I’d rather take risks with you than do what our parents did to Ruthie.
But now a kind of dread came into the house; Carole could not explain what it was: —As if we’d done something awful — to you, or more that you were telling something awful to us … I don’t know … — Pauline telephoned the von Herz girl’s home. Her parents had been to the police and hospitals, already assuming disaster. They were not surprised to hear that Mandy’s new best friend was also missing. — I have never liked this friendship. — The mother was frank, too.
— Anti-semitic cow. I could hear it. — A moment’s distraction flared in Pauline. But the convention of action set by the other family provided an acceptable channel for the dread. The feeling it was something about which nothing could be done was contained. Carole went along with Pauline and Joe to a police station. All the time Hillela’s particulars were being given to a young Afrikaner policeman Carole was watching a white girl, a girl Hillela’s age, with Hillela’s little face, and big breasts shaking as she cried, a girl with blood dried dark like sap from a cut next to a swollen eye, being pawed helplessly, to comfort her, by restless and wary friends in the motorbike set. The light in that place where neither Carole nor her cousin had ever been was so strong that the shadows at midnight were the shadows of day. Boot-falls and clangings echoed from somewhere; shouts in languages Carole and Hillela heard spoken by the black waiters and cleaners at school, Bettie, Alpheus, Alpheus’s mother, and did not understand. — The policeman asked all sorts of mad things. Did you take drugs. Did you go to discos in Hillbrow. Did you have any ‘previous convictions’—and all in the most terrible japie English, just repeating what he’s been taught to say, like a little kid who can’t even read yet.—
Two other policemen were swinging their legs where they sat on a table and a third flirted in Afrikaans, over the phone. How tall was Hillela Capran? What did she weigh? Any distinguishing marks? Pauline, her hair bristling with the static of anxiety, would not give Joe a chance to answer any questions, but had to turn to Carole for these bodily statistics that obsess adolescent girls, always weighing and measuring themselves. Pauline had brought an identifying photograph, yes; one of the three of them — her children and their cousin — with Carole and Sasha cut away.
Did Hillela ever realize that no door was locked in the house that night? The front and back doors, the sliding glass ones that led to the verandah where Pauline had refused what was asked of her by the woman with red hair — all were open, the way a window is left wide in the hope of enticing back a strayed cat.
In the morning the whole house was swept full of night air, the leaf-smell of dawn. Carole explained how she had tried to stay awake that night but must have slept: she opened her eyes and saw the second bed still neat and empty. Bettie was crying, the flanges of her black nose lined with rosy wet. While drinking coffee standing up in the kitchen, Pauline and Joe, with Carole listening, discussed whether or not to telephone Olga. — Oh my god — Olga … What suggestions could she have. She didn’t have enough understanding to take her after that Rhodesian business, so how could she have any idea at all of how to deal with this? — Yet Pauline came back from the duty call somehow relieved, though scornful. — I told you. D’you know what she said? First she didn’t know what to say … then she came up with the bright idea Hillela might have gone to Mozambique. — Joe seemed actually to be considering the supposition, so Pauline exposed it in all its uselessness. — She hasn’t had a word from her mother since she was old enough to read, we haven’t even an address any more, so the notion she would run away to Ruthie … really. Olga reads too many romantic novels from her ladies’ book club.—
— Olga’d like to go and look for Ruthie, herself, maybe … so it’s a perfectly reasonable idea for her to have.—
— Well, I happen to love Ruthie, too, but I’m capable of being a bit more intelligently objective than my sister Olga—