The morning is cloud breathing cold. We are kicking legs bored on my bed, watching the dust collect in the winter sun, lips puckered from too much salt on the popcorn. The beginning of the school holidays. The television exhausted its two hours of cartoons and Nils Holgerson. Now we are left to use our minds, play, read our prescribed library books, Mum says.
They left early after vitamins and showers, we pretended to be asleep. We switched off the heater, after dressing in front of it, hanging our shirts over it for a minute so that they become comfortable. We opened the curtains of the playroom with the smell of wooden floor and Barbie hair, and played “the first day of school”. After a while my sister says, “Stop being the boss all the time, stop telling me what to do.” I wanted her to have the older Barbie house; I like mine to be perfectly shiny. We call my sister’s family The Anchovies because they are different. They don’t have a car; they drive the tractor we got from the farm co-operative one Saturday. Eventually my sister is fed-up. She wants popcorn, which I am allowed to make in the microwave.
We put on jerseys and go out into the garden. I like the winter garden, the yellow prickly grass – the sun seems older and not as threatening. Far away is the smell of wood smoke. We sit by the broken tennis court wall, under the lemon tree. My sister likes picking up the smaller lemons on the ground, she smells them and closes her eyes.
“What are you going to do when you grow up? When we live in our little flat?” she says.
We play this game a lot. When we grow up we will make the rules, and have our little flat, where the walls are safe and breathe light and laughter, not the empty dark passages and stifled fight scenes we remember here. Home will be a good place in our little flat. I already know how to make toast, and how to clean up my room, because messy places make my eyes blurred and I get shaky hands, nothing is right. Things have to be tidy in my world. My sister doesn’t get so shaken up by mess. She just wants to be alone with me, without having to feel everyone else’s mood shifts, and the guilt when she can’t make them smile.
My sister usually says she wants to be a clown one day. I like that; I taught her to want to be a clown. It wasn’t her choice. I want to be a teacher, with neat clothes and perfect cornered plastic-covered books. But she has been different lately, curling deeper into herself, forming conversations with her dolls, without me.
Now she shuffles, beats the pins and needles out of her foot. “I want to be a toymaker.”
“What?”
“Don’t say what, say pardon.” Mum likes us to say pardon like properly educated children.
“Excuse me, pardon? Who made you queen of the world? Anyway, you can’t be a toymaker. That’s impossible. Only shop people can make toys, and they have to go to school for a really really really long time.”
She looks at me, erupting under the skin. “Stop telling me what to do.” Tears spill like poison. She walks to the other side of the tennis court, next to the side path where no one goes and where, specifically, we are not allowed. Her shoulders are furious. I follow her, a small guilt eating at my stomach. I am bossy. She is my best friend, I am supposed to not be bossy.
“Hey, sorry. Maybe you can be a toymaker. You’ve got a good brain. Everyone says so.” It’s true, they do.
She disappears into the side path; I hear nothing. I look into the path. A sign. “Athorised Personel Only.” The wrong spelling, in her slowly emerging handwriting. The leaves crunch under my feet, I walk through the path, fear prickling me, but I can’t just leave her here. How often does she come here, without me?
It feels like no clocks are ticking, time moves slowly, I keep walking, cautious, looking around and behind me for strangers, stray dogs, rats, cats. It feels like a long time passes until I come to the end of the path. She is crouched with her back to me. I quietly look over her.
Like a toy shop. So many lemons, with arms and legs, hats, scarves, faces. Sitting in groups, some are lying on little leaf beds. Some dressed in pieces of cloth, making skirts, dresses. I swallow. She is making small incisions in the bitter lemon skin, like a surgeon, with the rusty pieces of wire we collect from the falling-down tennis court fence. She puts pieces into the lemons, biting her lip with concentration, two more to make the legs. Consumed by her work.
She turns around, and we are face to face. Middle-of-the-night-monster-under-the-bed silence. Her eyes unreadable; usually they can tell me how she feels.
“Did you make all this?” Finally I say something.
She nods.
I crouch next to her. It smells like moss and lemon verbena. I run my finger over the lemon man. He has freckles from the dust.
“This is amazing. When do you make these?”
She draws lines with one of the wires on the ground. “I come out here to get out of the house. It’s quiet out here. No one telling me what to do.” She sighs.
I think of all the times I sit doing homework, talking to Mum about my day at school, tidying my room until everything is spotless. I never wondered where my sister was playing.
“I’m going to be a toy designer one day. Not a clown. I don’t want to be a stupid smiling clown.” She places the latest lemon toy on the ground. “I am good at making lemon people.”
I stand up, cramped-shouldered. “Sorry. You are already a great toymaker. They don’t even seem like toys. They seem like real lemon people. Here.” I pull a crumpled five rand note from my pocket, hidden in the unlikely possibility of the ice cream man coming this afternoon. “Can I buy one from you?” I hand her the note. “Take it. Your first customer.”
She hesitates. She stands up, brushing the dust from her pants. She takes the money. A small sheepish smile under her bent head. She lets me choose one.
“Thanks. Tell your friends about the lemon people. Tell them about the toymaker. I need customers.”