Crime Beat

CHAMELEON is a story about trading on the JSE, white collar crime, teenage pregnancy and a career in the circus. Catch up on the connection between them by reading the BLOCK-BLOOK which is published every ten episodes to get both new and regular readers up to date.

INSTALLMENT TEN

I became a stock-broker because of Jerome Cartwright. He didn’t feature in my life for long but he was a major milestone. He’d be up there on the podium with Eric and my father if I had to rate the men who’d made a difference to my life.

Jerome was a year ahead of me at school – he went to Everwood, the brother school to Milton College. Everwood and Milton had bucked the trend towards co-education which was in vogue towards the end of the last millennium. They were apparently ahead of their time. Current research shows clear empirical evidence that gender differences in brain development are more significant than originally suspected. Unisex schools get better results, although results weren’t the primary concern of my anxious parents when I was enrolled at Milton. They wanted my contact with boys to be minimal for as long as possible. Forever would probably have been an ideal length of time in their eyes. They’d been alarmed by the alacrity of my twelve-year-old phone call to the DJ after Suzie Duncan’s infamous disco.

They had plenty of cause to worry. Beth and I talked about boys fairly exclusively – although our discussions were largely confined to fantasy until the advent of Jerome.

Everyone knew Jerome Cartwright. In one of the endless debates I had with Eric about religion, I pointed out that his God hadn’t mastered the principle of a fair deal. Even second-hand car dealers seem to have a better grasp of the concept than God. Some kids get handed the whole package on a silver platter. They have success written all over them from birth. Jerome was like that. I bet he even won musical chairs at play school. Not only was he drop-dead gorgeous, he was also in the rugby team and a likely candidate for a medal in the Maths Olympiad. He was even in the bloody choir. He was good at everything. I wasn’t the only girl in the school who’d set her sights on Jerome Cartwright but I’ve more ingenuity than most when it comes to turning my plans into reality. The downturn in Eric’s fortunes is testimony to that.

‘Here’s our chance!’ I said to Beth, clutching her arm in excitement when I saw the notice, newly pinned to the central notice board at school. I read out the salient points.

‘The JSE/Liberty Life Investment Challenge: Pupils from Everwood High School and Milton College are invited to a presentation by Ms Jozi Modikwe from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. She will introduce an investment game for learners to buy and sell securities on the JSE.’

‘What are securities?’ said Beth blankly.

‘Securities?’ I said. ‘Securities are… God, I don’t know exactly what they are. But the JSE’s the stock exchange. They’ve got to be some sort of shares. This is exactly the kind of thing that Jerome would be interested in. I bet he goes to this meeting. Let’s go and see…’

‘I don’t know if I want to play some investment game,’ said Beth with a marked lack of enthusiasm. ‘I’ve still got to finish my history project and I haven’t even started on the maths…’

‘We’re not committed if we just pitch up for the meeting,’ I argued persuasively. Debating was another of my multiple skills.’ They can’t make us play. If it sounds ghastly, we’ll just leave. We’ll leave anyway if he’s not there. It’s sort of a surveillance mission. Where else am I going to meet this guy?’

‘There probably won’t be many other girls,’ Beth conceded grudgingly. ‘But it says it’s a team thing. He won’t want us in his team. He’ll probably arrive with a bunch of hand-picked boffs from Everwood.’

‘Well, if he does, we’ll leave. We’re just going to size the situation up. Like the mafia. He won’t know why we’re there. We can’t lose. And you never know. We could win. Please come with me. I need you. I don’t want to be the only girl. Please come with me.’

And so she did. That half-hour meeting determined her future too. The gods were with us. Or maybe it was Satan. You could make a case for both sides if you were able to foresee the future.

We got to the meeting early. We nudged and winked and giggled when our quarry took his seat a few rows in front of us. He was with another Edgewood guy. He didn’t look too bad either. ‘You can have him!’ I whispered to Beth. I felt almost psychic as I saw the pieces of my plan slotting neatly into place.

Contrary to our expectations, our attention wandered from Jerome during the lecture. We thought we’d be focused on the back of his head for the entire lecture but we stopped looking at him almost immediately. The lecturer caught our attention from the start. She was a short, stocky woman, stylishly dressed in an ethno-African outfit – they were beginning to replace the tailored linen suits that had been the benchmark of the business woman in the older South Africa.

‘Who’s she?’ I hissed to Beth. I’d been so focused on my Jerome-entrapment plan that I’d paid little attention to the outline of the lecture that we’d been handed on arrival.

‘Some big deal from the JSE’ she whispered. ‘She’s flown down specially for this presentation. I think this bloody game is quite serious. I knew I shouldn’t have come…’
A spotty nerd in the row in front of us turned his head and frightened us into silence with his baleful stare. We rolled our eyes derisively but we thought perhaps we better shut up and pay attention.

‘I can see this is a teenage audience from all the spare seats available,’ she began with a rueful smile, looking around the nearly empty theatre. ‘I don’t want to sound patronizing because one of the most exciting things about teenagers is their sense of invincibility. I’m sure that everything seems possible to all of you in the audience today. That’s what’s great about being young. You feel you can seize the future and mould it any way you want it. But I must warn you. Things don’t always work out the way you plan them.’

This sounded a bit close to the bone. Maybe she was psychic. Perhaps my investment plan for Jerome was more obvious than I imagined.

‘I’ve got statistics which predict where your age group will be thirty years from now,’ she continued, waving a sheaf of papers on the lectern in front of her. She looked down and read out the figures. ‘One percent of you will be rich. Four percent will be financially independent. Twelve percent will be broke. Twenty nine percent will be dead. And forty nine percent of you will have to rely on social services and charity to see you through your increasingly long future. The last lecture I gave was targeted at middle-aged people – probably like most of your parents. They weren’t stock brokers with suits and ties and bulging wallets. They weren’t Business Science graduates, fresh from the lecture halls at UCT. They were ordinary people. One was a teacher. One was a travel agent. There was a construction worker and an entrepreneur who ran a clothing business. The common denominator was the realization that they would all have to supplement their current income if they were to enjoy financial freedom in the years ahead. That’s why they’d come. To learn the basics of how to make money buying and selling shares on the JSE. You will be at an incalculable advantage if you take this opportunity to learn these skills while you are still at school – before you really need to use them.’

Beth and I had stopped fidgeting completely by this stage. She was an excellent speaker. Her voice had a quality which made everyone sit up and pay attention. I’d never heard of online trading before that afternoon. My parents didn’t have a share portfolio. As a one-income family, there wasn’t much left in the family coffers by the time the end of the month rolled by. I knew they put aside a fixed deposit every month in anticipation of the cost of a university education for me. Our lecturer pointed out that they could expect a seven and a half percent return on a fixed deposit. My father also had an endowment policy. She said he might get eight percent on that. Had they invested the same capital in shares, they could have realised a capital growth of a hundred and seventeen percent over the same period.

‘An investment of a thousand rand in Liberty Life when the shares first became available could be worth five million rand today.’

Beth and I were certainly listening now. Wealth was always a feature in the futures we plotted over hot chocolate and muffins in the mall. Our stockbroker brought us sharply down to earth.

‘Remember that I didn’t say that those shares would bring a return on that scale. I said could. Could is always the stumbling block if you’re planning a future in investment on the JSE. Returns on shares aren’t guaranteed. It’s safer to put your money in the Post Office. You know exactly what you’ll get back. That’s why many people are cautious about venturing into the share market. You have to be prepared to take a risk. No risk – no growth’ It was starting to sound rather ominous – but then she changed her tone.

‘Through this course, we hope to demystify the stock market for you. By managing a virtual share portfolio, you’ll learn the skills you need to minimize the risks you choose to take. By the time you start earning a salary, you’ll be in a better position to make decisions about when to buy and when to sell. Believe me, this is a very important issue when it’s your hard earned cash you’re playing with. Our investment game is not another version of Monopoly. Your success or failure won’t be determined by a throw of the dice. It’ll depend on you. On your research. On the care you take in following the market. In tracking the progress of your shares. In your ability to identify trends and make decisions which are based on probabilities rather than whims.’

Both Beth and I were hooked. We would have signed on to play the game even without the Jerome incentive. I’d actually forgotten all about him. Beth had to jab me in the ribs to get me back on track. I nearly let him slip through our fingers altogether.

Our lecturer was in the process of describing what the game entailed. Each team would have four members who would manage a simulated trading programme which would be tracked and measured over a period of six months. She suggested that beginners might be most comfortable managing a low volatility income portfolio, investing in ALSI 40 shares – the top forty listed companies on the JSE. Blue chip shares. You couldn’t go far wrong picking from that stable of pedigrees. Jerome put up his hand. He said he and his friend had taken part in the game last year and had become interested in hedge funds and futures. They wanted to give the high risk Speculator Portfolio a try.

‘Is there anyone else who’d like to join this team?’ she asked. That’s when Beth jabbed me in the ribs. I put up my hand without thinking what on earth I was going to say.

‘Do you also have some background in investment?’ she enquired. ‘This is a more demanding portfolio to manage because of the higher risks involved. The trends are less predictable and there’s less control of the funds at your disposal.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said airily. ‘We haven’t actually played the game before,’ I conceded, ‘but my parents follow the stock market closely so we’ve learned quite a bit from them. They’d be in a good position to advise us if we hit some snags.’

It helps to have the face of an angel if you commit yourself to a strategy based on lies. She took my words on face value and entered our names in the competition beside those of the luckless Jerome and his side-kick. ‘It’ll be good to have some gender-mixing’ she smiled approvingly. ‘This lecture hall is far too masculine for an arch feminist like me. There are very few women stock brokers in South Africa. Perhaps the two of you are going to swell our numbers in the future.’

Jerome and his friend Gavin were waiting in the foyer to speak to the new members in the team when the lecture ended. My heart went flitter-flutter as we walked over to join them. I was back on entrapment track after my brief diversion into the world of equities and dividends. I made a tactical decision to abandon all pretence. I admitted straight away that we knew less about shares than we’d suggested. That our understanding of the workings of JSE was actually zero. But, I continued with unmistakable sincerity, we were very interested. We were also intelligent and hard-working. ‘And we’re very interested in risk,’ I added suggestively – though I wasn’t quite certain of what I wanted to imply.

Jerome may have been a maths boff with plans for hitting the big-time on the JSE but he was also seventeen. And I was very pretty. My breasts were even bigger than they’d been at Suzie Duncan’s disco. Jerome accepted these credentials despite their lack of relevance to the task at hand. But he didn’t regret it. Beth and I were intelligent. And very hard-working. We threw ourselves into our Speculator Portfolio with interest and determination. We shelved the pending history project. We read the newspapers. We listened to the market update on Fine Music Radio. We switched onto the finance programme on TV and tracked the progress of our shares as soon as we got home from school. We pored over the trading manuals they sent us from the JSE. We became frequent visitors at their web-site. We read annual reports and company newsletters.

And we listened to Jerome and Gavin who really did know a lot about the JSE. They taught us how to draw trend lines and moving averages. We learned to read what it meant when these lines intersected. It was little wonder that our portfolio flourished. We earned five hundred rand for ourselves and a thousand rand for the school when our portfolio won the one of the monthly awards six months after we started trading.

But I’d also lost something by the time six months had passed. Jerome rode off into the sunset with my virginity notched onto the belt of his designer jeans. It hadn’t taken a lot of persuasion to get me to take mine off in the outside room where my parents thought we were busy with our portfolio. They would never have suspected what their princess might get up to while they were out of sight. My chameleon skills progressed as fast as my sex education. I smoothed my rumpled hair and adjusted my angel face when we went back into the lounge where my father had tea waiting with a batch of the cheese puffs he was so skilled at making. He thought Jerome was a charming boy. He mopped up my tears when Jerome left school and me behind and set off into the shining future that was all lined up and waiting to receive him.

I never saw him again. He was followed by multiple other boyfriends but I don’t think my father ever imagined that I had a physical relationship with any of them. He probably thought I was a still a virgin when he led me down the aisle a decade later to where Eric was waiting at the altar.

*

INSTALLMENT ELEVEN

We had a simple wedding although Eric and I were both earning big bucks by then. We could have splashed out on an extravagant razzmatazz. A banquet served on fine white china. Crystal glasses with a four piece band and all that jazz. But my father didn’t want us to pay for the reception. He was approaching seventy by then. According to his code of ethics, the father of the bride paid for the reception. He’d another fixed deposit earning seven and a half percent in anticipation of the big event.We didn’t mind. We wanted only our parents and our special friends to be there. All we really wanted was to be with each other. Forever and longer.

I also secretly wanted a dress made of Thai silk which was way beyond my father’s budget. I made a deal with the dressmaker. She gave me two bills. One for my father and one for me. I wore a dress made of the material I’d been coveting ever since it slid through my fingers in soft folds at the fabric shop.

My father and I both cried when I came down the stairs to take his arm before we walked into the chapel. You’re allowed to cry in public at your wedding. It’s a chameleon concession. I could feel my father’s pride and pleasure as he led me down the aisle to meet my prince. I’m sure my father pushed aside the sexual implications of my married relationship. I was as pure as the driven snow in his eyes. Untouchable. He looked amazed when I told him I was pregnant. Maybe all fathers feel the same about their little girls.

Eric was just as surprised when it happened to Lisa.

*

Beth saw Eric first.

They were both stockbrokers at Irvine Investments. That’s what made the whole fraud issue even more complicated. It wasn’t just the company he’d betrayed. It felt almost as if he’d defrauded Beth on a personal basis. She trusted him completely. Everyone did. I was the only one with any idea of what he was doing after hours.

Beth had already been with Irvine for some time before Eric made his appearance on the scene. He’d been head-hunted after making a name for himself as an independent broker. Both Irvine and their biggest rivals were after him. He came in as a partner. That’s one of the problems when you start at the top. If you’re going to move anywhere, the only direction available is down.

The problem between Beth and Eric wasn’t fraud related at the outset. It was a social issue. Eric is even more attractive than Jerome had been when he featured in our teenage introduction to terms like hunk and handsome. Beth phoned me on the day he started work at Irvine Investments.

‘I have a new target!’ she told me with enthusiasm. ‘The new partner arrived today. Eric Franklin. He’s absolutely gorgeous! He was introduced to us all at the morning meeting. He’s arrived surrounded with an aura of financial glory. I thought the entire board might have an orgasm when they read out his CV…’

Beth and I were as close as ever. Neither of us was ever diverted from the money-making plans we’d made when we were introduced to the JSE at school. We both did Business Science at UCT. Beth got a trainee job at Irvine and I went into investment banking. We passed the National Stock Broking exams with flying colours. Beth and Eric worked together at Irvine for years. Beth had a short break in service when Felicity was born but they welcomed her back with open arms. Eric’s break in service came twenty years later but it proved terminal for his future prospects. Maternity leave is less disruptive than a spell in Pollsmoor.

Beth didn’t take much time off when Felicity was born. Her own mother had always worked and nobody expected her to stay at home. Beth’s father was more conventional than mine. He didn’t shelve his career plans when she arrived. They were a double income family. She was a latch-key kid who came home to an empty house and concocted lunch from whatever she could find in the fridge. She didn’t grow up with expectations of macaroni cheese or a bowl of steaming home-made soup. She didn’t have an aged father dancing attendance on her every whim or fancy. My father cooked and served the lunch and then cleared away the dishes. He didn’t expect his princess to busy herself with humble domestic issues like these. She needed all her time to forge ahead and fulfill the potential mentioned in her school report.

It’s a pity that these expectations of what a home should be were implanted so firmly in my childhood psyche. I’m a clone of my mother in this respect. She was happier at work than she would have been playing my father’s domestic role. I’m not a natural when it comes to supervising homework and signing up for tuck-shop. I might have been a less invasive mother if I’d had a full-time job. I would have been busier and Lisa wouldn’t have been afflicted with my undivided attention. With hindsight, all three of us would have benefited but we couldn’t have known that at the time. We meant well. A jury would have to consider that as a mitigating factor before they passed a judgment on our domestic set-up.

I was anxious about my embryonic attraction to Eric because Beth saw him first. We’d discussed the ways she could ensnare him with the same enthusiasm as we’d plotted Jerome’s teenage downfall. Beth volunteered to help with every project that involved him. She stayed late at work and they had drinks in the office after everyone else had packed up for the day and headed home to hearth and family. They’ve always had the same wry humour and their interests dovetailed. All the jigsaw pieces were slotting into shape. Except for the magic spark. That was missing. And it’s a critical ingredient if a relationship is ever going to move forward onto a different footing.

‘He’s just not interested!’ wailed Beth after yet another night-cap at the office. ‘I was at my most alluring tonight. I batted my eyelashes with such enthusiasm that one of my lenses came out. We had to crawl around on the floor to find it. He could have kissed me if he’d wanted to. Our hands and heads were as close together as they’ll ever be. I think he sees me as his sister. Unless he’s got a secret hankering for incest, I’m doomed!’

Eric loves Beth. And she loves him. They welded a friendship in those days at the office that has lasted forever. Nothing has fractured their relationship. And nothing has ever happened between them to wind it up to a romantic plane. Part of it’s my fault. My relationship with Eric put him out of Beth’s reach forever.

She’s never complained. Not even in the early days when I was still in denial. Beth’s my dearest friend. I wouldn’t contemplate a relationship with the man she’d set her heart on. I put myself out of bounds when he started phoning. I was never at home. I switched the lights off. I tried to short-circuit the current I’d felt between us from the first time we met.
Beth invited me to a cocktail party at Irvine to show off the man she’d been targeting since the day of his arrival.

‘This is the legendary Leigh you’ve heard so much about,’ smiled Beth when she introduced us. ‘And this is the equally legendary Eric…’

My traitorous heart lurched as I took the hand he stretched towards me. He held my fingers a fraction longer than he needed to. I sternly repressed the flutter of attraction. Eric is sensationally good-looking. And I’m very photogenic. A camera only records what’s on the surface. That’s why the media went mad during the trial. They described us as South Africa’s version of John and Jackie Kennedy as we made our way into the court through a dazzle of flash photography .It was awful

Eric was more used to it than me. He’s always had a high profile. Success and good looks are a winning combination. I don’t think mine was the only heart to lurch and flutter the night I met him. I sneaked a furtive glimpse as he made his charming way around the room, making small talk with the wives and female guests. Beth and I both noticed that he was looking in my direction in a predatory kind of way. I developed a strategic headache and headed for home, determined to put a distance between us. I valued Beth more than some random guy who happened to look like a film star. I resolved to stay at home and watch Brad Pitt on video in the safety of my lounge.

Beth phoned me when she got home that night.

‘He likes you,’ she said. She was never one to beat around the bush.

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ I protested. ‘For God’s sake, he doesn’t even know me. He likes you. He’s warming up. I can tell.’

I had an ominous feeling that this wasn’t really true. I’d had plenty of men in my life by then. I never looked back once Jerome had got me started. I knew the signs. I had a dreadful suspicion of what Eric might do next. I was afraid he’d ask Beth for my contact details. The prospect freaked me out completely. I wished I could phone him and pre-empt his enquiry. I wanted to tell him that he was wasting his time. I would never go out with him.

‘I know what’s going to happen tomorrow,’ she said.

‘Nothing’s going to happen,’ I insisted.

‘Only if you don’t let it,’ Beth said wryly. ‘I know you think he’s out of bounds because I like him. But I can see you liked him too. I always knew you would. And I knew he’d like you. I also know he’ll never look at me. A guy like Eric can literally have anyone he chooses. And it’ll never be me. That’s just a fact of life.’

‘You’re so bloody negative!’ I protested. ‘No wonder you haven’t made any progress with that frame of mind. You’ve got to make more effort. Stop behaving like his sister, for God’s sake. That’s why he doesn’t touch you. He thinks you’re only interested in him as a friend.’

‘You know that’s rubbish,’ she sighed. ‘Everyone at the office can see I’m stalking him like a pride of starving lions. They’re all leering and asking surreptitious questions about how it’s going. The only one who hasn’t noticed how I feel is Eric. And that’s because I never cross his mind.’

Beth stopped trying after that – even though I refused to go out with Eric when he phoned me. He asked for my number over morning coffee, just as I feared. I told him I was involved with someone else. I kept refusing and he soon stopped phoning. He wasn’t short of alternatives. There were lots of glamorous fish in Eric’s sea. It would all have come to nothing if Keith hadn’t arrived on the scene. Keith’s a hot-shot lawyer. He won the contract to handle Irvine’s legal work. He was the head of the team that handled Eric’s defence when the case came up. We’re lucky that the judge didn’t perceive it as a conflict of interest, seeing that the four of us are such close, long-term friends. Beth and I are exceptionally lucky. It’s not often that friends as close as us fall in love with guys who have as much in common as Eric and Keith. They’re not friends only because of Beth and me. They’d be friends even without us.

The elusive spark flared between Beth and Keith from the outset. Keith isn’t as obviously good-looking as Eric but I’ve always understood why she finds him attractive. He’s tall and thin and his eyes are very blue behind his glasses. He’s as witty and intelligent as Beth. An evening in their company is never boring. We’ve drunk a lot of wine and laughed and talked and bonded over all the years we’ve known them. They’re still our dearest friends. Eric and I are probably closer to Keith and Beth than we are to each other after everything that’s happened. Once they fell in love, I was free to fall in love with Eric.

I was lucky he was still available. He said he knew that the current that had flowed between us was of an exceptionally high voltage. He’d thought that I was worth waiting for. It’s amazing how people as happy as we were can still contrive to stuff things up completely.

*

Eric’s nearly eight years older than me. I’ve always been attracted to older men. Perhaps my father’s been a prototype for everything a man should aspire to be. It never worried me that he was older than the fathers of my friends. Just as Eric’s older than their husbands. It’s been fortunate in retrospect. Because Eric’s so much older than me, his parents were in the same age bracket as mine. All our collective parents were safely dead and buried before our train went off the rails. They never had to readjust their opinions of their offspring.

Eric and I decided that my birthday was a good day for a marriage ceremony. I pointed out that it’d be one less date for him to remember. He’d only have to buy red roses once a year. The conjunction of my birthday and my wedding was the first point my father made when he stood up to make his speech as father of the bride. He was very nervous. He’d spent an inordinate number of hours preparing his speech. I surprised him standing in front of the bedroom mirror, practicing out loud with the cue cards he’d written out for the occasion. He shooed me away at once. Neither my mother nor I was allowed to have any inkling of what he planned to say on this most auspicious of occasions.

My heart turned over with love for him as he stood up and put on his glasses. I could see his hands were shaking. I wanted to get out of my bridal chair and put my arms around him and hold him warm and tight against me. I knew his speech would be perfect. Even if he forgot all his words. I could feel my eyes misting over when I heard the tremor in his voice as he started speaking.

‘I was delighted to hear that Eric and Leigh had chosen to get married on her birthday,’ he began. ‘The 9th of August will always be the most important day of the year for Margaret and me – the day our little girl was born. An aging couple like us hadn’t expected to be blessed with a daughter – especially one as beautiful and talented as Leigh. She is our personal fairy tale. I could show you the first photograph I ever took of Leigh at the maternity home twenty seven years ago. You probably wouldn’t believe that that little red and wrinkled baby would grow into the beautiful bride you see today. When I look at her this afternoon, I remember all the joy she’s brought us through the years. I realize that we probably shouldn’t have called her Leigh. Heaven-Leigh would have been a better description!’

Everyone laughed at my father’s gentle joking. Everyone but me. I cried. There was no-one in the world quite like my father. Eric had a hard act to follow – but he rose to the occasion, both at the wedding and in the years that we’ve been together. He’s always been equal to the occasion although he’s different from my father. No-one would ever compare them. They aren’t rivals. They complement each other. I love them both. Eric followed my father’s speech at the wedding with his usual style and confidence.

He smiled as he stood up in front of our assembly of special people. ‘I hope that Barry will take my word when I tell him that I love his daughter as much as he does. I don’t have his facility with words. I can’t come up with words like Heaven-Leigh – although I can see that it sums up my lovely wife. I’m a financial man. I deal in options, shares and futures. The best effort I can think of on the spur of the moment is that I know with Leigh that I’ve picked the right option – she’s the only one I want to have a share in my future!’ More laughter from the crowd. More tears from me. I loved my wedding day and the honeymoon that followed.

We went to Spain. Eric and I avoid five-star hotels when we go on holiday because we associate them with financial conferences. They’re all much the same. To us, eating at top class restaurants is linked to small talk with the other delegates. When we were on our own, we wanted something completely different. We hired a car and made our way up mountain passes in the south of Spain. We tracked down white-washed villages, clinging precariously to the hillsides. Grazelema. Rhonda. Zahara and Bubion. Each had its individual charm and views that took our breath away. We got up late and basked in shady boulevards adjoining courtyards ablaze with potted plants. We sipped cold beer from tall glasses with condensation beaded on the side. It soon seemed perfectly normal to set out for supper at midnight when the streets in Spain are more crowded than they are at mid-day. We’d stroll down to the inevitable central square, stopping at pavement cafes for a taste of tapas or paella.

One night we got caught up in a family party and learned the rudiments of flamenco dancing. We were busy downing a carafe of vino tinto in a crowded smoky restaurant. The long tables next us were filled by what look like several generations of an extended Spanish family. The women were wearing traditional flamenco dresses, from the lined, grey-streaked matriarchs to little girls of several age groups. They looked like an existential canvas daubed with bright flamboyant colours. Scarlet. Peacock blue. Polka dots in black and white, their hair caught up with flowers or matching combs.

All age groups were still there in the early hours of the morning when the guitars started to pick out a haunting flamenco heartbeat that had everyone up and dancing in a moment. Dancing seems to be a genetic trait in Spain. Every age group seemed at home in their bodies as they twirled and stamped and gestured. We’d had a lot of wine by then so we pushed back our chairs and joined them on the floor. The Spanish, noted for their hospitality and southern warmth, opened up their ranks and absorbed us into their party. They laughed and showed us how to follow their steps and hand movements. Eric and I are both natural dancers so we caught on pretty quickly. The sun was already coming over the horizon as we waved goodbye to our new friends and staggered home to bed.

Lisa wasn’t conceived that night so I can’t hold Spain responsible for our exotic daughter. Perhaps I absorbed a Spanish vibe and stored it intravenously for several years. It lurked dormant in the lining of my womb until it took root and grew into Lisa. She looked foreign, even as a baby. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find castanets hidden in her cradle. I bet the doctor could have detected traces of flamenco in her bloodstream. She once did a Spanish dance in a school concert. I remember the way her graceful arms punctuated the sensual movements of her lithe young body. She was more drawn to Spanish rhythms than she ever was to Swan Lake and Tchaikovsky.

And Angela now has a Spanish connection too.

Sometimes it seems as if destiny is written in advance.

*

INSTALLMENT TWELVE

Perhaps cross-pollination also occurs in humans. I’ve never studied biology so my understanding of the subject has no scientific basis. I imagine two different plants growing side by side. A dust of pollen caught up in a wayward breeze. A foreign seed. Hybrid offspring. I wonder if that happened to Beth and me. Her daughter Felicity is almost a clone of me while Lisa is as off-beat and original as Beth.

It’s quite a complicated jigsaw when you think about it carefully. The components don’t slot in as you might expect. My father and Eric are such different shapes and colours but they fuse completely when you try to fit them into the space reserved for fathers. They both turned into mothers the minute they became fathers. And I tried to be a mother exactly like my father. No wonder Lisa’s muddled.

Beth and I were pregnant at the same time. We didn’t go as far as producing our daughters on the same day. Their births are separated by weeks rather than minutes. There’s no chance of some third-world confusion of name-tags in the nursery. We would never have exchanged the daughters we were allotted. Beth and I were delighted to find a small edition of each other in the cots beside our beds.

Beth’s the closest I’ll get to a sister although I don’t think my parents would have been the first in the queue had her name ever come up for adoption. I was clearly influenced a great deal by her opinions which didn’t always dovetail with my parents’. I think they were afraid that she might lead their golden girl along a path other than the one they’d mapped for me to follow. They were deceived by my angel face. Especially my father. I don’t think he would have been surprised if I’d sprouted wings and a nine carat halo. My mother was more cynical about my saintliness but I think they both suspected that Beth was the ringleader whenever we sinned in public – an opinion frequently without foundation.

I remember the first time I got drunk. Really drunk. Not cute and tipsy. This was in the fall-over-and-hurl-in-the-toilet category. Beth was blameless. It happened at a party shortly after Jerome rode off into the sunset with someone older and more sophisticated than me. I decided he’d left because he was tired of coca-cola and schoolgirl giggling. I was determined not to make the same mistakes again. I bought a sexy new outfit and cut off my pony-tail. I was on the hunt. I looked like a hooker when my anxious father dropped us off at the party.

‘I’ll be here at twelve,’ he told us. He knew he had to loiter in the car-park. He wasn’t allowed to appear in person on the threshold. Teenagers imagine that they vanish into thin air when they leave a party. None of them is prepared to concede that they’re being collected by their parents. Beth didn’t have that problem. Her parents never did late-night pick-ups. They just assumed that Beth would find her own way home. And they were right. She always did. Maybe I should have followed their example.

By some stroke of vast good fortune, Beth was scheduled to sleep over at my place on the night that I discovered wine. It was equally fortunate that she didn’t like wine and there was nothing else sophisticated available. Beth has a sweet tooth. I’ve seen her reduced to my condition on rum and coke. She slugs it down like cool drink. But she never drinks wine so she was able to slot in as a back-up plan when it became obvious to everyone in the vicinity that I’d exceeded every limit in the constitution. She led me discreetly to the most distant toilet in the house so I could honk in private.

The next hurdle was to get me past my parents.

‘I felt real despair,’ she told me the next morning as I lay bleakly under the duvet regretting my sins. ‘You were draped around the toilet. You refused to get up.’ Beth’s much smaller than me but she somehow found the strength to haul me to my feet and hide me in a bedroom. She locked the door and scuttled furtively through to the kitchen, mindful of our midnight dead-line. No-one stopped her as she rifled through the cupboards until she found the coffee. She must have piled in about half a kilo. She made the strongest brew on the planet. It would have revived me even if I’d been dead for hours. She coaxed me off the bed and we were waiting in the car-park at the appointed hour. My father was naturally concerned to see me only semi-standing but Beth opened the back door and pushed me in before he could get out and examine me more closely.

‘It’s a bilious attack,’ she told him, slipping into the seat beside him. ‘I think it was the snacks. Chicken kebabs. She’s been lying down all night. I don’t think she’s really up to conversation.’ I was comatose by the time we pulled into our drive-way. My father and Beth hauled me past my mother who was sitting in the lounge in her pyjamas. She never went to bed before I was safely tucked up between the sheets.

‘Bilious attack,’ explained my loyal father over his shoulder as he shoved his drunken angel into the bedroom.

I thought I might be dying when I opened my eyes in the morning. I didn’t open them very far. It felt as if I was applying sandpaper to my cornea. My mouth felt like some kind of cesspool – chain smoking had also featured in the launch of my new sophisticated image. It was a considerable challenge to lift my pounding head from the pillow. It was pure terror that gave me the strength to do so. I had absolutely no recollection of leaving the party. How the hell did I get here? How on earth did I get past my parents?

Beth sprang into action the moment I shook her awake.

‘My God!’ she whispered. ‘Look at the time! Your bloody mother will be here with the morning tea any moment now! Get out of your clothes! Remember, it was the kebabs! You’ve got a bilious attack!’ She pulled off my shoes and shoved me and my nightshirt unceremoniously under the duvet. Right on schedule we heard my mother knock with her tea-tray. She’d probably been lurking outside my door for hours.

‘So how’s the patient?’ she enquired coolly. She didn’t sound wracked with anxiety. She wasn’t oozing sympathy and concern.

‘I think those kebabs were poisoned,’ I whispered bravely. ‘I’ve never felt so awful.’

‘Really?’ she said, cynical as always. ‘I’ve never heard of kebabs that render you totally incoherent.’

‘It must have been the marinade,’ I suggested weakly. One can’t be too creative when so close to death.

‘Maybe the marinade contained red wine,’ she suggested coolly. ‘You seem to have had a lot of marinade. Did you lap it up from a bowl?’ I knew it was pointless to protest when she told me to get up and get ready for hockey.

Beth lay back in bed and watched as I forced myself into my kit. Beth never complicated Saturday mornings with anything as demanding as a hockey match. She wasn’t very sympathetic either. I can see why she became a stock broker rather than a nurse. She was more interested in my parents’ reaction than the way I was feeling. She said she’d expected my mother to be more shocked than she seemed to be. But neither of us could imagine my parents being young. We’d only known them since I became the focus of everything that happened in their lives. They’d been alive for forty years before I arrived on the scene. Perhaps they used to go to parties and get drunk like ordinary people.

They were probably convinced that it couldn’t really have been my fault. They blamed the luckless Beth who deserved a knighthood for her rescue mission. It was as if they held her responsible for the shortcomings of her parents. They were completely different from mine. Beth was an also an only child but she wasn’t on a pedestal like me. No-one would have lifted an eyebrow if Beth had spent her entire youth lying on a bean bag. This didn’t suit my mother. I think she dreamed of joint family outings but Beth didn’t go on family outings, even without us in tow. Her parents didn’t even take her to the movies.

You can see the influence of both sets of parents if you look at the way we brought up our daughters. We both created a replica of the family set-up we’d grown up with. Felicity’s free to do whatever she wants – but ironically, she seems to want what I did as a girl. She’s the captain of the hockey team and she always hands in her work on schedule. Lisa’s the trouble-maker. She’d never hand in a project at all if I didn’t do them for her. I’ve done some amazing work for Lisa. I’ve laboured over the Egyptians and the Amazon Indians and all the kings of England. Her teachers must be suspicious. They’re such a contrast to everything she does in class.

Felicity and Lisa aren’t as friendly as we hoped they’d be when they grew up together in the sandpit and play school. Our husbands are kindred spirits but I suppose it was too much to hope that our daughters would be too. Lisa thinks Felicity’s from another planet but she’s always used Beth as a confidant.

I also used to tell Beth all my secrets in the days before I had too much to hide.

*
INSTALLMENT THIRTEEN

Eric’s changed both his job and his focus since his release from Pollsmoor.

I don’t question his new commitment. His eyes were glazed and damaged from the first time that I visited him in Pollsmoor. There was something more than the glass barrier between us. Even when we progressed to contact visits, he never looked at me directly. He seemed diminished. He’d seen a side of life we’d never imagined in the cushioned luxury of Bishopscourt. I’d grown up in respectable Pinelands. Even that seems a long way from our current social circle with their BMWs and jet-skis and holiday homes in Plett. But neither Bishopscourt nor Pinelands is anything at all like Pollsmoor. They’re not even in the same solar system. It’s a different universe entirely. Only God could help him once he got there.

I found a carefully folded piece of paper in his bedside drawer one morning when I was looking for some domestic item that had gone missing. I opened it out and smoothed out the creases so that I could read it. It was a single sentence written in unfamiliar writing. It had the Correctional Services logo on the top so maybe it was from his prison pastor. Or a warden. Even a fellow inmate. Support doesn’t always come from the likeliest source when you’re in prison. It said ‘When God is all you’ve got, you’ll learn that God is all you need.’ I read it slowly and folded it up just the way I’d found it. It seemed important somehow. I replaced it carefully in the drawer so it’d be there if he needed to read it again.

Lisa’s also become very religious since Eric was released but I’m not entirely sure whether her commitment is to our father who art in heaven or to her father who has been in jail. She missed Eric so much while he was in Pollsmoor that she didn’t want to leave his side once he was released. He spends a lot of time working on projects for his church so she joined in with characteristic fevour. I tried to get involved myself but religion is unfamiliar territory to me. I’m more at home with economic jargon than Christian fellowship. I’d rather sit through a seminar with the board than a prayer-meeting with the elders of the church. I don’t want to turn around and hug a stranger at the end of the Sunday service.

I never argue with Eric and Lisa about their beliefs. I can see that their lives have a whole dimension more than mine. The short-comings lie with me and not with them but there’s no denying that there are two camps in our family now. There’s me and there’s them. That’s really the problem. I went to see that cultish movie “What the bleep do we understand?’ It was all about quantum physics and God and the universe and other daunting topics. I’ve forgotten all the points they made – except for a single scene. It was a shot of an American Indian, all togged out in war paint, gazing out at an empty sea. It was about Columbus arriving in the Bahamas or where ever it was that he arrived. I remember a school jingle about Columbus. In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. That’s a long time ago. The movie claimed that because Columbus was sailing in a ship that was completely different from anything the Indians had seen before, they couldn’t see it. Even though it was there.

Maybe that’s my problem with God. Maybe he’s as concrete as Columbus but I just can’t see him. It’s as if Eric and I are the ones from different continents. We don’t speak the same language any more. God’s caused a bigger rift between us than Pollsmoor ever did.

High walls and razor wire were nowhere near as effective.

*

I went to the service when Eric and Lisa were baptized in St. Michael’s Church in Long Street one drizzling Sunday morning in July. The streets were virtually deserted at that hour. We drove past the street cafes and the theatre and the night clubs painted red and blue and orange, all closed up and shuttered after the revels of the night before. Long Street was Lisa’s territory. The buzz and the midnight heartbeat had been a draw-card since her early teenage days when she’d been busy raising eyebrows in the school hierarchy with her shaven head and tongue ring. Eric thought this was funny. He told me to calm down when I wailed and beat my futile head against the wall. I thought she’d probably be expelled.

‘They can’t expel her for being bald,’ Eric assured me. “There’s bound to be something in the constitution about discrimination against the hairless. And it’s only hair,’ he pointed out. ‘It’ll grow back again. It never did Naomi Campbell any harm.’

No-one but her father would have compared my bald daughter to Naomi Campbell. Most people were anxiously sympathetic because they thought she had cancer. Lisa found it hilarious. Her teenage dress sense was as suspect as her hairstyle. She would have fitted into the Pollsmoor crowd far better than her father with his designer shoes and t-shirts. He was targeted by the gangs before he’d had time to change into his prison overalls. The congregation at St Michael’s accepted anyone, regardless of their past and present circumstances. I can see why they felt at ease there.

A service at St Michael’s was nothing like the ones at Pinelands Anglican church that I’d attended with increasing reluctance as I grew out of Sunday school and into sleeping late on Sunday mornings. Church for me comes in a package. Mellow brick walls with stained glass windows. Vestments and choir boys. Fine paper wafers. Red wine poured from a silver chalice. Organ chords and hymns that become part of your bloodstream. I’ll never forget the words, no matter how seldom I sing them. I remember Blake with his feet in ancient times. Jerusalem. Bethlehem. England’s green and pleasant land. There was nothing African in the church that I grew up in.

St. Michael’s is completely different. I can see why there’s seating for what seemed like a thousand people. It’s too alive and rooted in reality for me. I prefer to slide into a silent pew beside a kneeling stranger praying for forgiveness and redemption. Probably in Latin. I know exactly what to expect from the service. The words never change in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. I remember the service off by heart. I have absolutely no idea what it’s about. I like it only because it’s familiar. Like my father’s stories. I always knew what was coming next. I felt the same about the Anglicans.

I suppose I’d get used to the informality of St. Michael’s if I went on a regular basis. It’s impossible not to enjoy the service. It’s held in some old government building that’s been abandoned due to urban sprawl. It’s huge. There’s a TV monitor and two big screens and excellent acoustics for the band. No altar. No cross. No bleeding figurines. The walls are draped with woven tapestries dyed in the earthy colours of Africa. The music is loud and infectious and the multilingual lyrics on the screen are sing-along material. Imbila Jehovah. Sing to the Lord .Lumbanye Jehovah. The crowd’s a melting pot of age and differing skin tones. Black and white and coloured. Old and young. Rows of dancing people – they lift their hands and sing out loudly. A chain of bodies forms a line and weaves its way between the aisles. It feels like a twenty first birthday party! The room is filled with song as people sway to the words of hope and purpose on the screen. It’s impossible not to be caught up in it, even someone with tastes as traditional as mine.

Baptism at St Michael’s is also different. The Anglicans haul their clients in when they’re too young to protest or concur. I’ve photos of myself with lacy bootees peeking out beneath the family heirloom robe, hauled out of mothballs to mark the occasion. At Jubilee, you get to grow up before you make your choice. You make a public commitment with a full underwater dunking. The ceremony for Eric and Lisa was performed by a smiling Nigerian named John Tegwane or something equally Nigerian. ‘I’m John the Baptist!’ he joked to laughter and applause. They’re big on crowd response at St.Michael’s. John and his fellow baptist held Eric and Lisa in their arms and dipped them backwards. They emerged looking wet and startled, laughing and shaking off the water like dogs who’ve just enjoyed a dip in the local dam. The congregation was also laughing and clapping. It was certainly a joyous occasion.

I wish I’d felt part of it. I didn’t like it now that it was me and them. Ironically, it was me who introduced St Michael’s into our family ethos. I started attending the services while Eric was in jail. I had so much time on my hands. I couldn’t be alone with my thoughts so I rang the number mentioned in an article I read in the Cape Times. It was about a rehabilitation programme for women who’d been released from Pollsmoor and were struggling to become re-absorbed into their community.

It was beside a photograph of a woman with an interesting face. Emma Poland. She looked about the same age as me but considerably wiser. My skin was smooth and unlined but I looked bland and shallow in comparison to her. Her hair reached her shoulders in an unruly tangle. She looked like an aging flower-child from the sixties with a coloured kaftan and beaded bracelets. Her face seemed etched with compassion and understanding. I thought I could relate to a woman with a face like that. I somehow knew that she wouldn’t judge me or question my motives when I said I wanted to help her with her project.

She was studying for a PhD in theology. I liked her as much in the flesh as I did in the photograph. She wore long skirts and open sandals and her study was piled high with books and papers. She was running a house in Long Street just around the corner from the church where these women could stay until they worked out a way to make the future better than the past had been. There were five women there when I started. There was Molly Kloppers, out on parole for shoplifting. Katrina Wessels who had a missing tooth and tattoos on her upper arm. Katrina looked street-wise to the very core of her being. I wouldn’t like to cross Katrina. Jennifer and Patience and Susan made up the team. They all worked in the sewing group at the church and took part in the rehabilitation programmes that Emma had devised as part of her thesis.

I had no useful skills to offer – they were a bit short of savings to invest on the JSE. But Emma said that all they needed was someone who had time to listen to what they had to say. So that’s what I did. I heard about lives very different from my own as we talked our way into some kind of friendship. I hope they liked me as I listened to how they’d ended up in jail. What it was like to be in. What it was like to be out. Their home language was Afrikaans which was a bit of a stumbling block. I had to dredge up the Afrikaans I’d learned at school. I don’t think I was a very proficient counselor. I just used to nod and say something profound like ‘Dis reg, ‘or ‘Seker,’ whenever there was a pause in the conversation. Emma said it didn’t matter. Listening was the only skill I had to cultivate. It didn’t seem as if anyone had listened much to Molly or Katrina. Or Jennifer or Patience or Susan. Anyway, I was in no position to offer advice, even if I’d been able to speak in English. I had a sorry record of my own when it came to advising my daughter and her father.

I grew really fond of Emma and our little community. I didn’t feel like a volunteer involved in a charity exercise. I learned more from them than they did from me. It was the first time I’d seen apartheid translated into human terms. The only detrimental effect apartheid had on me was when the rand weakened and our overseas trips became expensive. Prison was a concept that never crossed my mind as I grew up safe and sound in my citadel in Pinelands. Eric’s jail sentence was difficult to come to terms with because it seemed impossible that it had really happened. But jail wasn’t as foreign a concept to Molly and Katrina who’d grown up on the Cape Flats. People often went to jail in their world. Drugs and gangs and poverty were reality for them. Molly had no money to pay for what her children needed for school. Shop-lifting must have seemed like a viable solution. Katrina had an alcoholic mother and an absent father and no money for school fees. She was on the streets as early as fourteen. Jennifer and Susan both knew Pollsmoor from the days when they sat in patient queues to visit their fathers. It must have seemed almost like coming home when they were sent there themselves.

None of the women in our group went to Pollsmoor because of a miscarriage of justice. They were guilty. And I was guiltier than all of them, despite the fact that I’ve never been to jail. Molly stole because she was poor. I had access to millions but I wanted more. I still had to learn that money can’t buy you everything you want.

It’s not that Angela wasn’t worth it. I had to face up to the fact that she wasn’t for sale.

*

INSTALLMENT FOURTEEN

Beth and Eric both worked for Irvine Investments but they were at opposite ends of the spectrum when it came to the skills they offered their clients. As a partner, Eric headed up Proprietary Trading and was consequently shrouded in the awe and respect that such a position commanded. Proprietary Trading required a high degree of trust by both board and shareholders because it operates as an independent entity. Eric handled a large allocation of company funds and was left alone to do entirely as he pleased with them. At year-end, he raked in a healthy percentage of the profit generated by the funds he handled.

It was a job entirely suited to Eric’s skills. The board could sleep easy with him at the helm. He was like a safe port in the stormy volatile seas of the trading environment. There’s a notoriously high mortality rate in trading but Eric seemed invincible. He was a conservative trader. He had good years and he had less than good years – but he had virtually no bad years and that does wonders for investment confidence. Client numbers grew steadily and we got richer and richer.

Eric valued his job, not only because it was so lucrative. He loved trading because it was the opposite of boring. He couldn’t abide a routine where every day held exactly the same prospects as the day before. That’s why I feared for his sanity in jail. Eric found boredom almost as terrifying a concept as blow-up. In trading lingo, blow-up has a precise meaning. It doesn’t merely refer to losing money on a bad investment. To blow-up is to lose more money than you could ever imagine, even in your wildest nightmares. Once you’ve blown up, the chances of rehabilitation are pretty slim in the trading world.

I wonder if anyone’s ever done a statistical comparison on rehabilitation after a trading blow-up and rehabilitation after a couple years in a South African prison. I can’t predict where the odds would be higher.

Irvine’s clients weren’t likely to experience blow-up if they followed Eric’s advice. As a trader, he was essentially risk aversive. He believed that of all the speculative blunders you could make, the worst one was trying to average a losing game. Sell what shows you a loss and keep the stock that shows a profit – that was his mantra.

It’s a pity I didn’t brand it on my forehead for future reference. I paid too little attention to his cautious words. I went into asset management as soon as I left varsity. My job involved day trading in forex and hedge funds. We hedged our bets between selling short and buying long. It was largely unregulated at that stage so no-one knew exactly what we were up to. I got used to the leverage you get from hedge funds. We could borrow much more money than our shareholders had actually put into the fund. I liked the liquidity and the heady feeling of quick returns on a substantial scale.

I learned some dangerous lessons while I was in asset management. I should have forgotten all about them when I gave up work to become a full-time mother. Blow-up shouldn’t be part of your vocabulary when the grocery funds are all you’re authorised to handle.

*

Blow-up was always a possibility for the Irvine clients who made an excursion down the corridor from Eric’s office to Beth’s. The furniture was marginally less imposing there and the atmosphere was smokier than in Eric’s clear-air environment. There was no chance of risk pollution in his office. Beth was a high yield trader – a short term specialist with a flair for making fortunes overnight.

People always look surprised when they hear that she’s a stock broker. She looked out of place even in Business Science at UCT. With her wild hair and her way-out dress sense, she had the aura of the archetypal fine arts student. You’d expect her to be deep into a study of eastern philosophy or alternative medicine. I think her tutorial group in Business Science suspected she was high on cocaine or ecstasy at the very least. I felt very smug as I stood eavesdropping on a conversation as we clustered round the notice board on the day our final results were posted.

‘My God!’ exclaimed one conventionally clad student. ‘I don’t believe it! That weird bird’s got firsts in just about everything!’ Beth’s brain wasn’t as divergent as her dress sense. She’s an interesting woman. There are two sides to her. She can hold her own in the world of hard-nosed traders but she’s also a published poet. We have an unspoken agreement. She automatically gives me the first copy of every poem she writes. I have them filed in chronological order in the same cupboard as my photo albums. They’re almost like a diary, dating back to our days at Milton College. Beth’s file of poems is one of my most valued possessions. If our house went up in flames, I’d head for my photo albums and my file of poems. I’d risk third degree burns to save t