Charlotte and I went to the Rosebank Mall today to get our minds out of the toilet. The “change-of-season-and-its-just-so-emotionally-heavy-right-now” vibe had been getting us both down and so we decided to get out of the house. If all else failed – from the perspective of inserting mildly sincere shopping motives, that is - , we resolved to get into some freezochinos at Tashas as this treat could by itself have justified the trip for us. Turns out that we had to fall back on that to a large extent although I did walk away from the expedition with a pair of good-looking khakis from Woolies – not really important but maybe necessary under the circumstances.
So on the way back to the Safehouse I was moaning about truth, reality and other such morbid subjects when Charlotte interrupted me with a story: She said that when she was in grade 2 at Arcadia Primary – her final year before moving to another school – she was friends with a remarkable little girl called Nastasha. She described Nastasha as a petite little girl with long mousy-brown hair that reached down to the small of her back and sporting a harshly-chopped fringe. She also wore a pair of John Lennon-style spectacles that she had fastened around her head with a bright red string – you know those things that children and old people use to stop glasses from falling off their heads? - that was secured at the back with a plastic mouse-face. A visually striking little person by all accounts. But what stood out a lot more was her frighteningly sharp and creative mind. Charlotte recounted how, mostly under Nastasha's direction, the two of them would frequently make witch's brews and play intense games that seemed to belong almost in another place and time. Nastasha seemed way too much for the other children of her age to even vaguely fathom, and maybe Charlotte just didn't take enough notice of that, for she recalls how this powerful entity was often times out of her mind's reach too.
Charlotte says that on one particular morning they were waiting outside their class for their teacher to arrive when it emerged that the teacher was in fact late and it was unclear exactly when she would be making her appearance. My sister immediately decided that she would take charge by organizing the class into two lines of boys and girls, after which she would direct them into the classroom where they would remain quietly seated until the teacher appeared. She duly commenced with carrying out her self-proclaimed mission and had managed to get the lines filing past her in a most orderly fashion. She remembers almost smugly surveying the fruits of her labour when Nastasha walked up to her, stopped, peered up at her over the top of her spectacles with a look of seething anger and betrayal before slapping her so powerfully on the side of the head that it fairly burst Charlotte's hair from its neatly-maintained ponytail trappings. “Pretending hey?! Pretending!”, she hissed, and walked-off in a huff. Charlotte says that this single incident may have impacted more on her as a person than any other that she can recall from her young life, and that she wonders what she would have been like today if this had never taken place. Charlotte lost contact with Nastasha after moving to the new school, but I told her that it would be wonderful if she could somehow track her down to acknowledge the incident's impact.
See below for a grown-up version:
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