Barbies: tangled-haired then patchy then bald. Ever-smiling Doll, denied a more original name by her fastidious owner, sat with her legs extended, one knee bent at an obtuse and alluring angle, a tiny plastic pink stiletto dangling from an arched foot. Her perforated rubber head tilted to one side. She seemed interested and pleasant.
Bird, also on its way to bald, cowered as far away from Doll as possible, looking defeated. Isa bent down and poked at it with her finger. Bird skittered lopsidedly around the box until, cornered, it uttered a vague chirp. Alex and Stephie, prompted by Isa, applauded this effort. But Emma, the littlest, thinking that Doll rather than Bird had made the sound, burst into startled tears. She had to be soothed (by Stephie) and corrected (by Isa). Isa felt annoyed.
So she sat the other children down in a row on her bed and taught them things that she knew. About fractions and about why Athena was better than Aphrodite. About the sun and how it wasn’t moving, we were. But soon, Emma’s knotted forehead and Alex’s fidgeting began to drive Isa to distraction. Then came the inevitable tantrum, followed by a dark sullen lull. The other three children hastened from the room in a kind of daze. Isa sat next to the cardboard box and cried a little, alternately stroking Doll’s smiling head and Bird’s wary one.
When she’d tired of self-pity, Isa went to the bathroom and locked the door. She took off her shoes and climbed onto the edge of the bathtub, which ran parallel to a wall about two feet away. Only by standing on the edge of the tub could she see herself in the mirror on the wall, which hung at adult height. She examined her grey eyes, closing each of them in turn to see how she looked when blinking. She checked her face for hair (an endless, inevitable paranoia given her mother’s condition) and with a cruel finger pushed the tip of her nose up – she felt it hung too close to her upper lip. Then she let herself fall into the mirror, her own face rushing towards her, her eyes expanding with fear and perspective until, at the last second, she reached out her hands and stopped herself. She stayed in this position for a moment, angled across the room, arms rigid, hands pressed against the mirror, nose centimetres from it.
Finally, bored of her own face, Isa jumped down and explored the floor. She unravelled the last few squares of toilet paper from the roll and wrapped the chain around her neck like a scarf. She opened the cardboard cylinder of the empty roll into a loose brown curlicue – a bracelet. In the musty dust behind the toilet, she discovered some of her mother’s old plastic o.b. wrappers, which were twisted at each end like sweets wrappers. She stood them on their twists to make goblets. They were about the right size for a cocktail party Doll might host. Ignoring the knock at the door, Isa pretended to offer drinks to her bare toes, which wriggled with pleasure. The tentative knuckles against the door became a flat palm, then a clenched fist.
‘OY!’ came a muffled shout.
Isa flushed the toilet as though she’d been using it, then unlocked the door and emerged. Head high, bejewelled in white and brown, her tampon-wrapper goblets balanced on an outstretched palm like a tray, she strolled imperiously past the line of drunken guests waiting for the loo. Back in her bedroom, she made Doll sip from a goblet and modelled her jewellery for weary Bird. But it was too cold and dark to play in here alone. Reluctantly, Isa removed her makeshift jewellery – too childish for her mother to see – and made her way back to the party.
* * *
She stood in the doorway of the veranda, blinking the sunlight from her eyes. The other children were running around making meaningless noises in the garden. She decided to avoid them, choosing instead to be pointedly polite to their parents, who were sitting in a messy semicircle on the veranda, happily insulting each other. Isa picked up snack platters and shoved them under the noses of perfectly satiated guests. She refilled their mostly full beer glasses, tilting both bottle and glass to minimise the foam, just like her father had taught her.
Finally, Isa’s mother told her to go and sit down over by Ba Simon, the gardener. He was standing at