Holding Up the Sky (44 page)

We later heard from friends and family that the film clip was shown broadly across the South African media over the next few days, much to Teboho's delight. He was thrilled to have been a part of it somehow. We also read that he was, in fact, the second black South African to vote; a woman in New Zealand, who was claiming to be a relation of Mandela himself, had voted a few hours before. But it did not matter–Teboho had left his mark on history.

Mello was soon to join Teboho in a brief foray into the media. By now, we were used to being approached in public by people saying how beautiful she was, some even giving her small gifts. As an African child in Sydney, she stood out from her fair-skinned peers but she was also chatty and engaging, and as a child of rural Africa, readily talked to people she did not know. When we were approached by a woman doing PR for a modelling agency as we strolled around the shopping mall in Chatswood, I assumed she wanted to tell me how adorable Mello was. In fact, she wanted to recruit us for the agency. Mello was quickly seduced by promises of being on TV and so I reluctantly agreed to give it a try.

Within a few weeks, Mello had her first assignment. The commercial was for the United Nations, promoting the plight of refugees. We were asked to arrive at 7 am at Kurnell, a remote part of Botany Bay that was mostly windswept sand dunes. As soon as we arrived, Mello was taken to wardrobe and emerged shortly after dressed in muslin cloth wrapped around her small frame. The crew explained that Mello was to play the role of a refugee child in the deserts of Somalia. I was introduced to the woman who was to play her mother, easy to spot as she was by now similarly attired. As we moved across to where the cameras were set up, Mello's film mother was given a cloth bag supposedly full of their worldly possessions and asked to take Mello by the hand and trudge across the sand from one point to another, turning halfway to look back longingly.

While this seemed straightforward enough, the crew had also set up an enormous fan which was blowing across the two of them as they made their way along the sand. After a few takes, the director gathered us together and asked me to instruct Mello not to put her hand across her face. Before I could discuss this possibility with her, she replied, ‘Just stop blowing sand at me', which seemed like a reasonable request to me. After a full day of filming on two locations, I discussed with Mello her impressions of life as an actor. She told me that she liked the food but not the sand.

I saw the footage only years later, over the shoulder of a newsreader as he spoke of a UN program for refugees. There was Mello standing alone in the desert, wrapped in her muslin cloth, looking for all the world like a Sudanese refugee.

Mello did two other commercials before I called an end to her brief career. She had been given each job she was put forward for but it was crushingly boring for both of us, with two minutes of filming every few hours. I also found I couldn't juggle work, study and Mello's career. Before I pulled the plug, Mello did an ad for UNICEF, where they needed children from different countries to say ‘thank you' in different languages. Filming was in Centennial Park, just outside the centre of the city, where we waited for four hours so that she could say thank you fifteen times in Zulu, a language she didn't in fact speak, until the director was happy and let us go home. Her final ad was for the Department of Health. We were filming at a park on the South Head of Sydney Harbour. All the children were dressed in white calico dresses or shorts and shirts and they were to run around playing a game of tag. In post production, as each child placed a hand on the other, they were planning to superimpose a disease spreading from one child to the other. I believe it was an ad for immunisation and, given the requirements, one that Mello actually enjoyed shooting.

At the end of the first semester, Teboho and I had both done well and had enjoyed the stretch of the Masters level work. I was keen to take an extra course in the second semester, as was Teboho, given that his cleaning work wasn't fulltime. Despite our studies, there had also been time to catch up with old friends such as Nat, Pete and Anne, as well as for Teboho to form friendships with those who were yet to make it across to South Africa.

Outside of spending time with my friends, Teboho also sought to make new friends of his own. On campus he saw an African music night advertised in the inner city and was keen to go along. Through that and other such events, he built up a network of African friends. One of my friends, Gen, whom I had known for many years through St Andrew's, was also eager to join us when we went in search of African entertainment, having a keen interest in Africa herself. She would visit us several times in South Africa in the years to come, exploring much of southern Africa when she did. Before long, Gen and Teboho were also fast friends. In fact, given Gen was much more a night owl than I, the two of them went to some of the clubs without me. On those occasions, I would get a late-night call saying they were just dropping a new Ghanaian or Nigerian friend home before heading back to the northern suburbs where we lived. Given Teboho's experiences on the work front, I was delighted that he was able to make friends and feel socially accepted in Sydney, with few restraints on who he chose to be with and where. There were none of the ‘no go' areas that existed in South Africa, where it wasn't safe to be seen in a mixed group or as a lone black person. For that at least, I was grateful to Australia. Living back in my childhood home was easier than one would imagine. My parents were as involved as we wanted them to be, but happy to give us space when we needed it. Their lives were as busy as ours in many ways. Though they had sold the bookshop and retired, they still did a bit of work in the book trade with Dad's best mate, Abel. They were also avid golfers, playing two or three days a week, and Mum was down at the club an extra day for bridge. Each of them constantly had their noses in a book when they were at home, Dad always non-fiction, reading about politics, business or sport, while Mum loved a good novel or biography.

As the year passed, I continued to keep an eye on Mello's emerging relationship with Dad, which was now clearly based on winning and losing. While Mello won, she was happy to go along with Dad but if she lost, she cut him out. I wondered whether this had anything to do with growing up in a matriarchy, with Reggie having so little visible impact on her world. Teboho did not parent her with an iron fist but was playful and warm. I wondered whether the relationship with Dad was her first with a man who was more traditional in approach. Even at three, she didn't like being corralled.

Whatever the reason, Mello seemed to want a relationship with her grandfather on her terms. She seemed not to need or seek approval from him. To my surprise, Dad was devoted to Mello and in no way withholding, as I felt he had been with me when I was growing up. He adored her despite her fickle attentions and at times rampant disobedience. While I had heard that fathers are often completely different when they become grandfathers, given the passage of time and perhaps a touch of regret, I was genuinely surprised at the behaviour of my father in his new role. He was not at all who I had expected him to be. Though I didn't realise it then, I was also beginning to be jealous of the relationship between Dad and Mello. Had someone told me this at the time, I would have denied it as ridiculous–feeling jealous of my daughter's relationship with her grandfather? I would want them to bond. It was part of the reason we were so glad to be there. But it was true nonetheless, and this little crack began to grow and would one day leave a rift between Dad and me.

My relationship with my father had been a tempestuous one, particularly in my teenage years. We went to war over the smallest issue in order to prove who was right. It always felt as if there was a hazy mist between us, through which emotions and intentions became confused. Intellectually, I knew he loved me–but I never felt it on an emotional level. I never felt like ‘Daddy's little girl', the one for whom he had a soft spot and would do anything. I wanted to feel like his princess–feel that he would go to war for me, not with me.

As it was, whether it was my fault or his, I felt inadequate as I grew up, always just short of what I needed to be for him to love me in the way I wanted. I didn't understand that, given the lack of love Dad experienced as a child, the fact that he loved me as he did was a huge step forward. He demonstrated his love by providing a comfortable and stable home, by loving my mother with a passion and by always being there for his family. While I can see this now through adult eyes, as a child I yearned for more personal demonstrations of affection. Without them, I oscillated between distancing myself from the family when I thought I could go it alone, and chasing after Dad for his approval when I realised I could not.

Tracing back through my childhood, there are numerous instances where I pursued interests that no one else in the family shared. The rest of the family would do something together and I would be elsewhere, casting out alone, making new friends, trying new things. In a way, my first trip to South Africa was part of this same pattern. Yet, in whatever I did, I sought to excel so that Dad would be proud. I won trophies in swimming, athletics, tennis; I excelled in all my studies; I put huge amounts of focus into whatever I did in order to do my best, all in the hope it would make me more acceptable, more like what he wanted. The yearning was never explicit or even conscious but it threaded through my childhood like a poisonous snake.

At the end of my Masters degree, in which I had received distinctions across all my subjects, I was still seeking his approval. I was twenty-nine years old, yet I waited for Dad to say he was proud of me. When he didn't, I asked him one night as we were putting out the garbage in the dark passageway beside the house.

‘Can you say it now, Dad?' I said rather fatly.

‘Say what?' he asked, genuinely at a loss.

‘That you are proud of me, for getting my Masters with Distinction', I replied, exasperated, perhaps a little unfairly.

‘You know I am.'

‘I don't. Not unless you tell me', I said, before disappearing back into the house.

It was in Dad's last twelve months, as he neared the end of his race, that the mist between us finally lifted. Though dementia and frailty had overtaken him, I saw his eyes light up when I arrived in his room in the nursing home. He watched my face with delight as I told him stories from our past, hoping to give his sporadic memories some thread and substance. Then, as I told him it was time to leave and that I loved him, I saw tears in his eyes as he smiled and nodded, ‘OK, I'll see you tomorrow'. Mum says that he told her stories about me after I had left, stories that had no roots in reality: a phone call from Adelaide, him protecting me from the police, me coming to fetch him on the train. But I know it meant I lived in his mind when I was not with him. I waited my whole life to feel that way, to have some tangible evidence of it. So strange that it should take the loss of his mental resilience to allow me to see and feel what has always lain beneath.

At the end of our first year in Australia, we hadn't seen any more of the country than Sydney itself, what with our busy lives. My mother's family all lived down in Tasmania and had invited us to visit for a few weeks before Christmas, an invitation we couldn't resist. We began our holiday in Burnie, a small town on the northern coast of the island, where Mum's sister Beb and her husband Jim lived. Two of my three cousins still lived in Tasmania–one in Burnie, one in Launceston–while the third lived in an ashram in India. We had a week in Burnie, enjoying my aunt and uncle's hospitality. They were also retired, my uncle having been somewhat of a media mogul in Tasmania during his career. One of Uncle Jim's hobbies was photography and during our stay, he gave Teboho the bug. It was wonderful to watch them deep in conversation, bent over a camera or a photography book. Teboho's love of cameras had begun when he took photos on the streets of Mohlakeng as a way of surviving. Now, he was able to return to that early love for the mere pleasure of it. Uncle Jim, recognising this passion, gave him one of his cameras when we left, an amazingly generous gift that Teboho always treasured.

While we were in Burnie, we travelled up to Cradle Mountain, still under snow in December, where Mello saw her first wallabies in the wild. She listened carefully to Auntie Beb as she named them for her, but ever after referred to them as ‘wobbilies'. I was struck by the fact that Auntie Beb quickly developed a relationship with Mello that had a similar favour to Mum's. They were soon thick as thieves, giggling and laughing at their own stories and jokes. I was so grateful to my family for making us feel at home, the cultural and racial differences never making interactions stilted or condescending.

After almost a week in Burnie and the surrounds, Auntie Beb offered us her car to see more of the island. We agreed that we would take a tour of the west coast and meet them in Launceston three days later at Carolyn and Phil's house. We struck out from Burnie, heading southwest to Queenstown, driving through some of the oldest forests in the world. The winding road allowed for breathtaking viewing, but also made Mello car sick all over Auntie Beb's car.

Queenstown is a memorial to greed and poor environmental management. It began to flourish in the 1880s after the discovery of minerals and gold, which led eventually to the area's ancient forest being demolished. The river is now stained an ugly copper colour and dead trees and tree stumps line its banks, giving it an eerie feel, as if their spirits still haunt the river, seeking revenge.

From Queenstown, we drove to Strahan, a picture perfect flshing village on the edge of Macquarie Harbour. We stayed at the Hampers Hotel, Mello loving the bunk beds that the rooms contained. With Strahan as a base, we were able to explore parts of the majestic Gordon-Franklin heritage areas.

When we arrived in Launceston, I realised that this short trip had been our first family holiday where the drama lay in the places we were visiting, rather than in people's reaction to our being together. It was a window of normality and wonder that has stayed crisp and fresh in my mind's eye all these years.