Frankie and Stankie Read Online Free Page B

beautiful green eyes.
    Durban is all sweaty heat and banana palms and huge succulent plants. The girls step out into the Victorian Gothic of the railway station to be met by their dad, who steers them through thesurrounding bustle of Indian fruit vendors and Zulu rickshaw men to settle them in a taxi. Both girls are in new kilts for the occasion: Lisa’s is plaid, Dinah’s is pink. Lisa and Dinah have neither of them ever seen a rickshaw man before and so they can’t stop staring at first, even though these are just the plain-Jane rickshaw men in grubby, colourless head rags whose job is to pull sacks of maize. They haven’t yet seen the fancier rickshaw men on the beachfront who wear ten-ton ornamental head-dresses with lots of horns and beads. The headgear fans out, two foot both ways, in a parody of an Aztec priest, and the rickshaw man’s job is to pull around white tourists in their swimwear so that they can have their pictures taken. Holiday Snaps. Everybody Dinah knows calls a photograph a snap, except for her dad who is a serious amateur photographer – which is why he always spends half an hour taking your picture. Dinah’s dad says that the rickshaw men are usually dead by the time they’re forty, because you shouldn’t be pulling four tourists in a cart with a ten-ton thing on your head.
    Their house is a small prefab bungalow, one among many erected hastily for ex-servicemen in the grounds of a vast, exotically landscaped estate. It’s called the Butcher Estate and it’s owned by one of the local sugar plantation aristocracy, but now it’s on loan to the university as a place to house academic staff and students. A jacaranda tree sheds mauve, bell-like flowers just outside their kitchen door.
    There’s an island of giant bamboo inhabited by a colony of grey vervet monkeys with black faces and black doll-sized human hands and feet. They leap and chatter and munch bananas, holding their babies upside-down on their bellies as they fly through the air, and sometimes they swing from their own tails just for fun. From the living-room window, just beyond the undergraduates’ cricket pitch, you can walk through a shady green pergola covered with passion-fruit vines and bougainvillea, because in Durban bougainvillea grows over everything. Most of the trees are umbrella-shaped and have varieties of big red flower. Sometimes they have seed pods as big as dagger sheaths that crack open on the ground, spilling out fat speckled beans. There’s a flower in the garden called chinker-ing-chee and lots of bushes called yesterday-today-and-tomorrow because they have flowers in three colours all on the one bush. Yesterday’s flower is violet, today’s is blue and tomorrow’s is white.
    The war is over and there’s been a mass of emigration from Europe, so lots of the academics are from somewhere else. Most have been busy breeding, so that clusters of children peek out from the other bungalows and young university wives with babies in bouncy carriage prams are visible on the communal green. There’s always somebody to play with and somebody’s baby to mind and somebody to gang up against in the child community of the Butcher Estate. Dinah’s favourite person is Harry Stent and very soon everyone is teasing her about him.
    â€˜He’s your boyfriend,’ the children say.
    Harry is a skinny boy with tight blond curls, but his small sister Margaret is plump and olive-skinned with big black eyes, because she takes after their mother who is Spanish. Margaret is too small to talk properly, but she always stretches out her little dimpled right hand and says, ‘More,’ in the presence of biscuits. All the other children laugh at her and tell her she can’t have more when she hasn’t had any yet, but she just says it again. ‘More.’
    Sometimes, when all ideas for games dry up, the child pack will go and sit on the wall in a