A woman with bird's nest hair and a beak nose struts up to the table next to us. Neo Freedom is staring at her breasts that snuggle like a pair of ostrich eggs under a sweater the colour of winter grass. I am staring at the spiders, grey and shimmery, that crawl all over her chest. I am wondering why she does not scream, but she hasn't noticed them.
"Stop gawping, will you?" says my mother.
I try not to stare. It is my first time in a restaurant and I have practised eating with a knife and fork all week. My hands are slow and they shake, but I had a glass of milk before I came, so that I wouldn't be too hungry. It won't matter if I eat slowly. While the woman orders her food, a spider climbs off her sleeve and onto the tablecloth and then edges onto the waiter's trousers while he writes her order in his notebook. I can't help looking at the spider that creeps up and down the waiter's leg, following its progress.
Neo Freedom elbows me, saying, "Knock it off. That staring thing you do is rude, okay?"
I put my hands over my eyes, but watch the waiter through my fingers, wait for him to flick the spider off his pants. The waiter has breasts – like my brother who is fat, but the waiter is not fat. He is skinny. The spider does not bother the waiter, but I am afraid that if he walks past me, it will jump on me. I pull away when the waiter comes to take our order.
"Ease up," says Mom.
"Chill, chill, Chickiepop," says Neo Freedom.
He pats my hand, while removing my knife and fork from my grip. To Mom he says, "Didn't she take her meds again?"
I wonder why it's rude to stare at strangers but not rude to talk about your sister in the third person in front of a waiter when she is eating for the first time in a fancy restaurant.
"What can I offer my lady today?" says the waiter to my mother. She points to the roast chicken pie on the menu and he writes 43 on his pad, mouthing the numbers as he does so. The spider watches me from his elbow. It wears velvet feathers on its abdomen.
"And what would the young master like best of all?" he says to my brother. Neo Freedom wants the woman at the next table, but she is not on the menu. He looks at the spider lady and licks his lips. The waiter nods and winks.
"A burger and fries and double thick chocolate milkshake," says Neo Freedom.
"Good choice," says the waiter, scribbling in his notebook and licking his lips. Then he looks at me and asks, "And what will it be for the young missie?"
I want to ask for an egg salad, but the only word that comes out is, Spider, spider, spider.
Anita's baby sister wears a lime green fleecy tracksuit with a cross-eyed hedgehog on the front. It is too big for her, a hand-me-down Anita refused to wear.
It is the only item their mother ever made on the sewing machine – a 'Sprinter' with 63 decorative stitches. There were even more fancy stitches you got if your bought the computer disks that slotted in behind the thread spool. The stitches worked perfectly on the television, but as soon as Anita's mother tried it at home, the threads tangled in the bobbin case and the needle broke.
She tried again. The fabric crinkled under the presser foot. When she unpicked it, the fabric was punctured with holes, so she appliquéd the hedgehog over the whole irksome fiasco. She sewed on buttons for eyes instead of satin stitch embroidery and glued on a patch of felt for the muzzle.
The sewing machine migrated like a pterodactyl to the basement where it roosted beside the bread baker that had worked only once, the ice-cream maker that made frozen slush tasting of raw egg, the knitting machine that made scarves of knots and the step walker that was supposed to make your buttocks firm and give you thin thighs.
Anita dreams of a dinosaur that watches television in a clearing where round-bellied women wear loincloths and bake bread on flat rocks beside an open fire. Under layers of ancient earth they discover fossilised remains of inkjet refill kits and hand held vacuum cleaners.
Next morning her mother is on the phone, ordering a silicone bra to enhance her bosom so she can wear evening gowns without plucking at the straps. Anita's mother doesn't have any evening gowns.
Andrew is studying metalwork at school. Last weekend he persuaded my dad that the old geyser propped up in the corner of the garage should be cut in half to make a first-rate braai grill. Barbeque, said my mother. She refuses to use the Afrikaans word.
We drove over to Slang's place, my brother and father and I, to borrow an oxy-fuel cutter. Slang owns the Magalies Panel Beaters. His name means 'snake'. It is a good name for him. Andrew needed the cutter to make the discarded pipes he'd found in the rubble of the old police station into equal lengths. The next stop was Oom Piet where they fetched a brazing torch to weld the pipe legs onto the casing.
He stared at his reflection in the car mirror and squeezed a pimple. It will look good on the stoep, said my brother when they got home. Verandah, said my mother. It better not be ugly said my mother.
We'll braai lamb chops and sosaties and Boerewors, said my brother. We must buy charcoal, said my father. You better invite Slang, said my mother, who owes him because he fiddled her insurance claim last month when he fixed up her car. She had driven into a pole after her mid-morning G&T at the Ladies Bar.
We invited the neighbours whose African bluebells grow taller than ours. They are not really bluebells, but my mother won't call them Agapanthus. The other neighbours with the twins were invited too. Michael and Ronald are six and stupid. I call them the Micron Intelligentsia. Their noses always run. My mother says they have faecal alcohol syndrome. Andrew reckons they were dropped on their heads.
I said they're sick again, they won't come. What ails them, asked my father. Cowpox, I said. That's not possible, he said, backwashing into his fourth beer. He leaned too close to the flame. His hair was singed, creating a bad smell that mixed with the gas from the brazing torch and odours of molten metal. It must be chicken pox, said my father. Andrew said they had already had chicken pox. You can see the scars and you can't get it twice. Probably AIDS, says my father, they've got that funny head shape.
I know the scars on Mike's arms and Ron's legs aren't chicken pox scars. They get them when their mother stubs out her cigarettes if they've been naughty. I'm seven and smart. But not so smart that I contradict my father wielding a blowtorch.
If you knew their mother, you'd know it was cowpox.
Liesl Jobson's writing appears in South African journals Chimurenga, Botsotso, New Coin, Fidelities, Kotaz, Laugh It Off, Carapace, New Contrast, Fidelities, and Green Dragon. She was a finalist for the PEN/HSBC 2005 Literary Award and won the 2005 POWA Women's Writing Competition – Poetry. Her poems appear at Southern Rain Poetry and she edits poetry at Mad Hatters' Review.